These come from a Facebook group I just joined and -- although some of them are a little dated -- I couldn't resist sharing here. Read and learn:1. Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, birth control and air conditioning.
2. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
3. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
4. Marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all: women are property, matches are arranged in childhood, blacks can't marry whites, Catholics can't marry Jews, divorce is illegal, and adultery is punishable by death
5. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britany Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.
6. Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.
7. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
8. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.
9. If we look to the word of God, His punishment for sexual immorality is equal to that of murder. Therefore, teaching kids to tolerate homosexuality is equal to teaching them to tolerate murder.
10. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.
11. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy (insurance, government, tourism, banking, retail, education, and social services), suburban malls, or longer life spans.
12. Gay marriage should be decided by people not the courts, because the majority-elected legislatures, not courts, have historically protected the rights of the minorities.
13. Civil unions, providing most of the same benefits as marriage with a different name are better, because a “seperate but equal” institution is always constitutional. Seperate schools for African-Americans worked just as well as seperate marriages for gays and lesbians will.
14. There is no separation between religious marriage and legal marriage, because there is no separation of church and state.
15. Devout, faithful Anglicans should never accept same-sex marriage, because it is an affront to the traditional family values upheld by Henry VIII and his wife, Catherine of Aragon, and his wife, Anne Boleyn, and his wife, Jane Seymour, and his wife, Anne of Cleves, and his wife, Catherine Howard, and his wife, Catherine Parr. They all knew the meaning of marriage and none of them lost their heads over the matter.
16. Married gay people will encourage others to be gay, in a way that unmarried gay people do not.
17. Legalizing gay marriage will lead to legalizing dog marriage. This can be inferred from the history of other political initiatives for gender equality. For example, when American women got the right to vote in 1920, it led to terriers voting in 1925, and when Title IX was passed in 1972 to prevent sex discrimination in any federally-funded school, resulting in the creation of athletic opportunities for girls, it led to Bichon Frises on the basketball court during the Reagan administration.
18. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to legislative change in general, which could possibly include the legalization of polygamy, incest, medical marijuana, and unmuzzled pit bulls. Because we don’t know what might come down the next slippery slope, we should never change any law.
19. Legal marriage will inspire gays to mimic straight traditions, such as spiritual commitment ceremonies and celebratory parties, which is currently impermissible for them to do and which they have never done before.
20. Marriage is designed to protect the well-being of children. Gay people do not need marriage because they never have children from prior relationships, artificial insemination, surrogacy, or adoption.
21. Civil unions are a good option because "separate but equal" institutions are always constitutional. In fact, compared with marriage, civil unions are so attractive that straight people are calling dibs on them.
22. A man should not be able to marry whomever a woman can marry, and a woman should not be able to marry whomever a man can marry, because in this country we do not believe in gender equality.
23. If gays marry, some of straight people's tax dollars would end up supporting families whose structure they may find morally objectionable. Clearly, it is more just to continue taking gay people's tax dollars to support straight families, who are going to heaven regardless of what anyone else thinks of them.
24. Gays should hold off on the marriage question until society is more accepting of them, because they are not part of society.
25. The people's voice must be heard on this issue. Therefore, we must have a vote on a federal constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, because we can't think of any other way to discuss the issue.
26. Each state should decide for itself whether gay marriage will be recognized, because there is no "full faith and credit" clause that requires states to recognize each other's institutions.
27. Gay marriage attempts to replace natural heterosexual instinct with a cultural institution. Morality demands that we subordinate institutionalized commitment to raw, unfettered, biological impulse.
28. Gay marriages could very well suffer maladies like domestic violence and substance abuse. That's why we invented the Quality Control department to pre-approve the righteousness of all marriage applicants.
29. Those who support gay marriage aim to overthrow the dominant culture, as evidenced by their enthusiasm to participate in it.
30. If the state performs gay marriages, Christians might become more liberal and divide into more mutually opposed parties. Since the government is an arm of the church and is responsible for keeping the peace in Christian leadership councils, it should not get involved with gay marriage.
31. After gay marriage was legalized in Scandinavian countries in 2004, more heterosexual couples realized they wanted to live together and bear children without marrying first. Banning gay marriage is a good way to prevent this practice, as is banning independent thought and mandating straight marriage by age 21.
32. Heterosexual marriage was invented in the Biblical book of Genesis. Written somewhere between 1500 and 500 BCE, Genesis came as a great relief to people in many cultures, such as China, who, prior to 1500 BCE, sat around waiting for the Mesopotamians to invent the family unit.
33. Gay marriage would allow more partners and children to sign onto the family breadwinner's healthcare plan. Given that 44 million Americans do not have health insurance, it is safe to say that health insurance is not an American value.
34. The possibility of getting a gay marriage might encourage some married heterosexuals to divorce and seek a gay union instead. These marriages were obviously happy and successful, and the justices who provide gay second marriages should be charged with alienation of affection.
35. Gay marriage may hurl the populace into existential crisis and cause spontaneous divorces. Divorce triggers our moral hemorrhaging, but we will keep it legal. It is easier to seek the criminalization of gay marriage than the criminalization of divorce, particularly because most of us have had a few divorces.
36. Gay marriage is tainted because some of the applicants might be divorcees marrying for the second time. We oppose remarriage, and would like to ensure that no one marries more than once; therefore we will oppose the entire institution of marriage, to ensure that no one ever marries at all. That casts the net wide enough to catch all the would-be second-timers.
37. The people have the right to demand to vote on a Massachusetts constitutional amendment against gay marriage. There is no reason for proposed amendments to go through the state Legislature first, as is constitutionally required, because the Legislature doesn't spend all that many paid hours sitting around discussing the legal ramifications on behalf of ordinary citizens who are too busy with their own jobs to figure out everything at stake.
38. The arguments for gay marriage are flawed because Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry made inconsistent statements about gay marriage, and he is known for his consistency on other issues.
39. Married gay couples will find it easier to adopt children, who might then be bullied and teased by other children for who their parents are. This reflects poorly on the judgment of gays who adopt children with the risk that their child could possibly be teased. It does not, of course, imply anything about the responsibilities of heterosexual parents, whose children only pick up rocks for geological interest and couldn't have been listening when their parents made those comments about their neighbors.
40. Children of married gay couples might suffer bullying and teasing more often than children of unmarried gay couples, because playground bullies are sensitive to the nuances of contract law.
41. It is reasonable and fair to institute "civil unions" that provide all the rights and responsibilities of marriage, but we cannot apply the holy, mystical word "marriage" to this contract. Deriving from the Latin maritare, "marriage" evokes the dignity of the typical Roman man who engaged in licentious sex with both sexes until he reached middle age, at which time he maritared a teenage girl to bear his children.
42. According to the three proposed "compromise" Massachusetts constitutional amendments defeated by the Legislature on Feb. 11 and 12, 2004, the best way to "protect the unique relationship of [heterosexual] marriage" is to institute civil unions that are in every way identical to it.
43. God created the institution of marriage, just after he created 2.9% APR automobile financing, student loans, HMOs, and divorce.
44. We must defer to the President's opinion on gay marriage, since the Republican party was given its authority by God. As it is written: "Republican and Democrat created He them." Paul elaborated: "Democrats, submit to the Republican."
45. In San Francisco, where renegade officials have married same-sex couples for the past several weeks, experts suggest that the city may suffer an earthquake in about ten years. Geological experts, that is. But good Christians don't recognize the opinion of Earth scientists, who falsely claim the Earth is 4.5 billion years old; they get their seismic information from their preachers, who say the earthquake's coming next week.
46. Gay marriage is wrong because children might be led to think that it is right and that would clearly be wrong.
47. Making civil marriage available to same-sex couples could spur the wedding industry, and businesses would sure hate to pay taxes on all that profit.
48. Straight men are opposed to gay marriage because they would prefer that gay men try to be straight and compete with them for access to women, trimming down the pool of eligible dates to make courtship more challenging and exciting.
49. The country can't afford to provide benefits for any more married couples. That's why President Bush never considered spending $150 million on programs that encourage more straight people to get married.
50. Allowing same-sex marriage could increase gay public displays of affection, because marriage has historically been proven to stimulate couples' interest in sex.
8 comments:
Ha! I like those.
Unfortunately some people really believe no. 9.
Bill Ghrist
TMI-- too much information.
....But thanks for posting our many concerns... good job.
...please keep in mind, we're talking a minuscule portion of society here -- no worries mate.
These "50 reasons" are caricatures of the real arguments against same-sex sexual activity as morally good.
There is a grain of truth in most all of them, but that bit of truth is used like a gateway to insert a lot of nonsense, and so imply that the truth expressed is not true at all.
One of the most commons statements like this I have heard is, "You say that same-sex marriage will destroy marriage. Well, I do not know about your marriage, but my marriage will not be affected in the least."
Either the person saying this does not understand the real objection, or does understand it and wants to undermine it by subtly shifting the argument from the conceptual to the personal: MY marriage will not be affected." However, the objection is that same-sex marriage will destroy the concept of marriage. The historic concept of marriage has had an objective as well as a subjective element: male and female, with the aim of not only companionship and encouragement, but of having and rearing children from that union. In this fallen world, that concept has not been followed perfectly ( to say the least!), but the core concept has been of a father and a mother forming a family together. That has been expressed in the introductory paragraphs of the marriage ceremony in the BCP since it was first compiled. This concept has been the basis of marriage in virtually every culture in the world, not just those formed around the Judeo-Christian tradition.
In order to justify same-sex marriage, that object element - a man and a woman - has to be jettisoned. The basis of marriage then become purely subjective - affection. One of the purposes of marriage also vanishes, the rearing of children to take their place in the next generation. Same-sex couples are inherently unable to have children of their own, apart from the intervention of at least one other party. Removal of the objective basis of marriage and removal of rearing children as a purpose changes the core of what marriage is, and makes the subjective basis the core reason.
That subjective basis is, however, unstable. Our emotions can and often do change markedly. In with addition, with only a subjective basis - "affectional preference" - for a reason for marriage, which preferences are acceptable and which are not? There is already a move afoot to make multi-partnered relationship part of the "normal" range of acceptable relationships.
When a river has no banks, it is no longer a river but a swamp. The broadening of the definition of marriage in effect removes the "banks" so that the result, over time, will be social and emotional chaos.
That is the real objection to same-sex marriage. These arguments seek to make it look laughable, but they can only do so by diverting attention from the historic definition (which I and many, many others to be God-given) of marriage and substituting for it a far more vague and unreliable definition.
The trouble is, I think that you all will "win" from a legal standpoint, as our culture is well along the path of abandoning the idea of bedrock truth and of thinking that we human beings can engineer human society into any shape we deem. But I pity my great-grandchildren, for they will inherit chaos, apart from some radical change in our culture as a whole.
Hiram, thanks for posting the George Rekers position on marriage. And, LG, I'm not sure I understand your "miniscule portion" comment. Are you saying that since the LGBT community is miniscule, God doesn't object to the bigotry perpetrated against them?
Uffda51, who is George Rekers?
Well, I googled George Rekers and discovered that he is a leader in at least one group of those who oppose the normalization of same-sex sexual activity, and indeed has been a therapist to help those struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction to avoid acting on that attraction. However, he has apparently been found out to engage in - or get very close to - same-sex sexual activity.
So, I guess that Uffda51's comment can be summarized in one of two ways:
I
1) Rekers has argued against same-sex marriage.
2) Rekers is a hypocrite
3) Therefore his argument is wrong.
II
1) REkers has argued against same-sex marriage.
2) Rekers is a hypocrite
3) Therefore anyone who uses his argument is a hypocrite.
Neither of the conclusions follows from the premises. Uffda51's comment is another example of the use of things being twisted out of a logical sequence, just like the "50 Reasons" is a mixture of some truth and a lot of twisting.
If you think I am wrong, tell me where. For a group of people who proclaim, "Scripture, tradition, and reason," logic is seldom used, and when it is, it often assumes what it wants to prove. I am not a trained logician, but I can tell the difference between argument and insinuation.
No. 7....I have but only 1 thing to say. Its not 100% true. My mom and dad are straight yet me and my brother are gay/lesbian. So straight parents cant raise straight kids. The parents can think their kids are straight yet 7/10 people are gay people. And i proud to be 1 of those 7/10 people.
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