For the convenience of anyone confused about what's wrong with anti-homosexual and anti-same-sex marriage thinking, there's repository of the worst here. The Mike Heath speech at Maine's Family Policy Council has it all...shamelessly.There's the worthlessness of childless marriages. He couples that with the immorality of homosexuals, married or otherwise. He adds that something terrible will happen if the wrong type of couples get marriage rights.
Read through it to see by the former Christian Civic League brays into the desert nowadays. Even with a bill in the works to swap Maine's domestic partnerships for marriages, Heath's mini-horde can't get a crowd, much less part them from their money.
I have to wonder just how many folk who might be sympathetic otherwise are driven away from the sanctimonious foolishness he presents. Consider:
A very good family was needed to bring God into the world. Families are the basic building block of society. Families bring right thinking and happiness into the world. Society must not privilege the wrong type of families.He clearly intends to differentiate SS couples, but really slanders couple who cannot or chooses not to have children. Loving different-sex couples apparently have no right to wed at all. He seems to be targeting only SS couples, but says, "Why should a practice which lacks the elements of marriage -- procreation and child-rearing -- be called marriage?"
The family exists for procreation, and for the rearing and education of children. Our opponents want the public to believe that same sex marriage is only about law and civil rights. At the heart of the issue, however, is an ethical question which concerns the proper definition of marriage. The reality of procreation, and of child-rearing by man and woman cannot be set aside. They exist in the real world. Marriage reflects an existing reality. To put it very simply, Marriage is what it is, and nothing else.
Plus, he avoids any mention of gay or straight couples who raise artificially inseminated or adopted children. The mechanics of conception it seems are far more important in this version of the world than the reality of a couple — woman/man, man/man, woman/woman — raising happy, loved, well-adjusted kids.
His claims of societal damage from SSM are without basis. In fact in Massachusetts, Canada and elsewhere the evidence is very strongly to the contrary. However, immerse yourself in the whole speech and you can see how many baseless assertions he makes. They all lead to the central point — "Society must not privilege the wrong type of families."
Heath calls SSM advocates immoral, but also selfish. It is amusingly like the 1960s Civil Rights movement when befuddled Southerners asked plaintively, "They already got the right to vote and go to school with my children. What else could they want?" In this case, he asked, "There is an element of selfishness in the gay rights movement, in that homosexuals already have the right to form domestic partnerships."
How dare they want respect and equality, he seems to wonder.
The speech is a recap of the failed and illogical positions against SSM. Here's to a quick success to Equality Maine's legislative drive.
Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, same-sex marriage, CCL, Maine Marriage Alliance, Maine
1 comment:
Your assessment here is quite correct of course but Mike Heath does hit upon something that I believe is of some importance in the same-sex marriage issue.
He says -
"At the heart of the issue, however, is an ethical question which concerns the proper definition of marriage."
He may have his own questionable ideas about what the proper definition of the word "marriage" is but, as I have pointed out elsewhere but have yet to receive a response to, the word "marriage" has traditionally been defined as the union of a male husband with a female wife.
The Merriam-Webster defines marriage thus -
1 a (1): the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law (2): the state of being united to a person of the same sex in a relationship like that of a traditional marriage
The first definition preserves that traditional definition of the word "marriage" whereas the second, and no doubt quite recent, additional definition acknowledges the redefinition of the word "marriage" within the context of same-sex relationships. I honestly believe that a good number of people who would be open to same sex couples having a relationship *like* that of a traditional marriage are none-the-less "less than comfortable" with the word "marriage" being used to define that relationship. Sometimes I think that much of the argument over gay marriage is about semantics and that it would help the pro "gay marriage" cause if it could find or create a word other than "marriage" to define same sex relationships which are *like* that of a traditional marriage. Why fight over changing people's minds about the traditional definition of the word "marriage" if it is possible to come up with another word that means the pretty much the same thing for same sex couples?
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