The Real Meaning of Gay Marriage

From the Gay Patriot.
posted by Imapp Staff at 5:11 PM | link

Do Kids Make You Happy Part 2

Arthur C. Brooks in the Weekly Standard:

A new trend among some of the world's most eco-conscious is to forgo children for the sake of the planet. In a recent interview with Britain's Daily Mail, one woman who works for an environmental charity told of aborting her baby because she felt it was "immoral to give birth to a child that . . . would only be a burden to the world." She also had herself permanently sterilized at age 27 for good measure. According to another woman, who works for Ethical Consumer magazine, sterilization was the most ethical decision because " . . . a baby would pollute the planet--and that never having a child was the most environmentally friendly thing I could do."

Whether you view these women as courageous or completely unbalanced, they certainly are self-sacrificing in relinquishing the personal joys of parenthood for the good of the earth, right? Wrong. The truth about children is that they don't make most parents happier, and they don't create a net drain on the world. According to the evidence, forgoing kids is hardly a selfless act.

Read it all here.
posted by Imapp Staff at 5:07 PM | link

Do Kids Make You Happy?

Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert says no:

Marriage, money and children were conventionally considered to be the cornerstone of happiness but such thinking did not stand up to scientific scrutiny, Harvard University psychology professor Daniel Gilbert told the Happiness and its Causes conference in Sydney today.

According to scientific and economic research, only marriage proved to be a constant source of joy...

...despite the belief that children were the apples of our eyes, they actually had a negative impact on happiness.

The more kids you had, the sadder you were likely to be, Prof Gilbert said.

US and European studies had shown that people's happiness did spike while they were expecting a baby but sharply plummeted after the child was born.

From the AAP. Read the rest here.
posted by Imapp Staff at 5:01 PM | link

Islamic Divorce Ruled Not Valid in Maryland

The Washington Post reports:

After his wife of more than two decades filed for divorce in Montgomery County Circuit Court, Irfan Aleem responded in writing in 2003, and not just in court.

Aleem went to the Pakistani Embassy in the District, where he executed a written document that asserted he was divorcing Farah Aleem. He performed "talaq," exercising a provision of Islamic religious and Pakistani secular law that allows husbands to divorce their wives by declaring "I divorce thee" three times. In Muslim countries, men have used talaq to leave their wives for centuries.

But they can't use it in Maryland, the state's highest court decided this week.

The state Court of Appeals issued a unanimous 21-page opinion Tuesday declaring that talaq is contrary to Maryland's constitutional provisions providing equal rights to men and women.

"Talaq lacks any significant 'due process' for the wife, its use, moreover, directly deprives the wife of the 'due process' she is entitled to when she initiates divorce litigation in this state. The lack and deprivation of due process is itself contrary to this state's public policy," the court wrote.

Whole story here.
posted by Imapp Staff at 4:57 PM | link

Surrogate mothers fulfilling gay men's parenthood dreams

From AFP:

An ever-growing number of gay couples are paying tens of thousands of dollars to have surrogate mothers carry their babies, turning America's concept of traditional family on its head.

It took two women and two men for two-year-old twins Katherine and Connor to come to life.

Their fathers, Michael Eidelman and A.J. Vincent, who have lived together for years, invested love, time and all their savings to build their family in New York's Chelsea neighborhood.

The eggs were donated by a woman in Washington state and fertilized in vitro with sperm from both men. The fertilized egg was then inserted in the uterus of a woman from Ohio.

Each man is the biological father of one of the twins, who were born in Los Angeles, where the laws are less stringent for same-sex couples.

More here.
posted by Imapp Staff at 4:45 PM | link

NY High Court Refuses Gay Marriage Case

The Court of Appeals, the highest court in New York State, Tuesday declined to hear a case challenging an appeals court ruling that found the marriages of same-sex couples married in jurisdictions where they are legal must be recognized in New York.

The decision not to accept the case means the lower court ruling will stand.

On February 1 the Appellate Division of state Supreme Court reversed a judge's ruling in 2006 that Monroe Community College did not have to extend health benefits to an employee's lesbian partner.

Patricia Martinez, a word processing supervisor, sued the school in 2005, arguing that it granted benefits to heterosexual married couples but denied them to Martinez and her partner, Lisa Ann Golden.

From 365Gay.com
posted by Imapp Staff at 4:42 PM | link

Head of "Polyamory" Group Discusses Multiple Partners

An interesting interview from the Hartford Courant

Most of what we hear about polygamy has to do with stomach-turning situations like the recently raided West Texas ranch where it is believed that members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a breakaway Mormon sect — abused children.

But Robyn Trask, executive director of Loving More, a Boulder, Colo.-based group, believes it is unfortunate that the public often doesn't hear about what she believes are the positive aspects to having more than one partner.

While polygamy involves having more than one spouse, Trask's group, which has 1,500 active members, including some in Connecticut, supports polyamory: having multiple loves of either sex with or without marriage.

Full story here.
posted by Imapp Staff at 4:21 PM | link

What are Minnesota lesbians afraid of?

By David Benkof
DavidBenkof@aol.com

I sent the Minnesota gay lobby OutFront Minnesota four reasonable questions about the effects of "marriage equality" on more traditional people, and I was refused because they said ours is an "antigay" blog - which it's not, or I wouldn't be allowed to post here, and there wouldn't be dozens of redefine-marriage posts in our archive. Then I said fine, have my lesbian editor at the Dallas Voice screen the way I use your answers before I post them. Nope. Finally she said she won't answer me and do not contact her again because I'm not "above-board," whatever that means.

It is incredible chutzpah to propose a radical change in society's laws while refusing to answer exactly what that change will entail for people who disagree with you. I think fair-minded people in Minnesota of whatever opinion on marriage should insist that Jo Marsicano tell the truth about what OutFront Minnesota means when it says redefining marriage "would be nothing more than the recognition of reality." Is it nothing more? Is OutFront Minnesota willing to commit to fight any actions that would force those Minnesotans who have what it calls "biased opinions" to espouse the gay community's definition of marriage?

Even if the Minnesota gay lobby is intent on persecuting religious people (which I have no idea if they are), they have a responsibility to speak up now, so Americans of all political affiliations, sexual orientations, and opinions on same-sex marriage will know exactly what they're up to.

You can contact Jo Marsicano at:

Jo Marsicano
Communications Director
OutFront Minnesota
(phone) 612-822-0127 ext. 106
jmarsicano@outfront.org

If she changes her mind and comes clean on what her group is planning, I promise to report back here on the blog.

UPDATE; I just got an E-mail from a MarriageDebate.com reader named Danny. He said when he called Jo Marsicano she said that OutFront Minnesota doesn't answer "right-wing questions." I looked at her Web site and it says OutFront Minnesota is a "non-partisan organization." I wonder what the Minnesota Log Cabin Republicans and other "right-wing" donors, members, and supporters of her group would feel about her refusing to answer an openly LGBT Republican's questions because he's not sufficiently liberal for her. I also wonder how she thinks she's going to get legislation passed in a state with a Republican governor if she opposes right-wing questions.

Labels: Marriage

posted by David Benkof at 3:15 PM | link

Family Issues are Fiscal Issues

Ever since I wrote Love and Economics, I have been trying to explain to economists, libertarians and fiscal conservatives that the family is a fiscal issue. Now, the Institute for American Values comes along and documents this point by point, state by state. Here are a few highlights.

family fragmentation costs U.S. taxpayers at least $112 billion each and every year, or more than $1 trillion each decade.

Me: This is the equivalent of the entire Gross Domestic Product of New Zealand.

Of these taxpayer costs, $70.1 billion are at the federal level, $33.3 billion are at the state level, and $8.5 billion are at the local level. Taxpayers in
California incur the highest state and local costs at $4.8 billion.

Me: CA now faces a state budget deficit of around $12 billion. This means that family fragmentation accounts for over a third of CA's deficit.
Just today, the San Diego Union Tribune published a story
here on education budget cuts in California. Way down in the bottom of the story is magnitude of the overall expected reduction:

Statewide, 14,000 teachers received pink slips in response to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed $4.4 billion reduction in education spending.

Very nearly the amount that IAV estimates as the cost of family fragmentation. Read it and weep.
By the way, Love and Economics is up on Amazon. Both editions: the Collegiate Edition and the Streetfighter Edition.
Cross posted at my personal blog.
posted by Jennifer Roback Morse at 7:30 PM | link

Marriage equality for incest-lite?

By David Benkof
DavidBenkof@aol.com

The people who want to redefine marriage insist they share our values and aren't trying to change the nature of what marriage means in America. So it is clearly fair game to look carefully at the full range of how gay and lesbian relationships over the last decade or more have worked.

Though most straight people have never heard of it, there's a small but not insignificant subculture among gay and bisexual men known as the "Daddy-boy" scene. (Google it for some examples.) These are typically two adult men with a large age difference - which is the erotic point of the relationship. The older man is referred to as "Daddy" by his "boy," sometimes called his "son." While virtually none of these men desires an actual incestuous liaison, gay "sexperts" acknowledge that some of the excitement of these relationships comes from role-playing incest fantasies.

I am certainly not suggesting this behavior should be illegal - any more than that of two consenting adults who act out a child molestation "scene." But this form of relationship has no clear counterpart among couples married using the longstanding definition of the word. To my knowledge, there has never been an adult age-diverse "Mommy-boy" couple looking for applause as they march in a mostly straight parade. But the equivalent absolutely happens in the gay community by members of the Daddy-boy subculture.

Daddy-boy couples are not stigmatized at all by the gay community, or criticized in editorials in the gay press. It represents an unusual (though not the most unusual) but completely accepted way for two gay men who love each other to arrange their relationship.

Now, we're constantly told that adding same-sex couples to the marriage rolls will make very little difference in what marriage means and won't harm any presently married couple. But I think starting to call couples who model their love after incestuous realtionships "married" would would do incredible damage to the institution.

I know many decent, basically moral people who disagree with me on same-sex marriage. I would invite them to show good faith in their claim that same-sex marriage won't change the basic nature of what marriage means by agreeing that if and when the definition of marriage ever changes, they will work with me to make sure couples who base their relationship dynamic on incest will not be included.

To be clear: I am not saying that "Daddy-boy couples" are a legitimate reason to deny people in more conventional same-sex relationships inclusion in some future definition of marriage. I am saying, however, that because everyone can agree that the subset of the gay community that eroticizes incest would materially hurt the hallowed institution of marriage, we should all make sure that if a redefinition of marriage does occur, it won't include this legal but troubling way of letting people experience the taboo thrill of incest without actually doing it.

Labels: homosexuality, incest, Marriage

posted by David Benkof at 3:21 AM | link

How SSM leads to "special rights"

I've been corresponding with some people who complained to me that people like myself who want to keep the present definition of marriage are abridging their rights. I've been responding that same-sex marriage advocates are actually the ones limiting people's rights. In Boston, if your church has a deeply held moral belief that children need both a mother and a father, and you want to help parents adopt, you are required to either violate your principles or to stop helping children find loving families. That's what gay "marriage" has wrought in the first state to fall victim to tyrannical judges and selfish gay activists. Virtually everyone agrees that the real victims of the shut-down of the highly praised Catholic adoption service in Boston are poor orphans of color. But as far as I can gather from the gay press and the Web, the gay community literally doesn't care. Being treated as "equal" appears far more important to them than the welfare of abandoned children.

If LGBT people want to help gay parents adopt, I'm all for it. Let them set up their own adoption agencies and match kids to parents based on their value system. They could even reject Ozzie and Harriet for all I care. Each group should be allowed to behave consistently with its values as long as they're not hurting anybody. But no - the gay advocates convinced the government to demand that Catholics either embrace gay and lesbian values they think are wrong, or face civil and criminal penalties if they employ Catholic values in their important, heroic work.

And gays tend to squeal when people say they want "special rights." But they do. What's more special than being able to arrange for a child's adoption based on your value system - one that happens to be at most one or two generations old, whereas the Catholic Church with its centuries of tradition is forced to violate its principles if it wants to rescue abandoned children. Sounds pretty special to me.

Labels: Marriage

posted by David Benkof at 9:48 AM | link

It's, um, about democracy, stupid

By David Benkof
DavidBenkof@aol.com

I've been having an interesting conversation at the Independent Gay Forum with some advocates of changing the definition of marriage. It quickly became apparent that what they want is to be the only people whose opinions count in deciding the definition of marriage. At first they alleged that I was trying to force them to adopt my beliefs that the Torah comes from G-d and gay sex is immoral and marriage is by definition a man-woman institution. But I explained that they could have any beliefs they wanted, but what I was looking for was simply the ability to express and defend my beliefs and advocate for public policies in line with those beliefs.

Here are some of the things people said:

"I am however human and don’t appreciate the arrogance of people that use those same stories and other texts in the Torah and Bible to oppress me because I am gay. Use the teachings in your own life but don’t insinuate them into mine."

"I have a problem when anyone wants to impose this personal belief on others. So if you don't believe that you should marry a man, or not even have a romantic relationship with a man any more, I fully respect that right. I have trouble understanding why you believe that this belief must be dictated to others."

"You may or may not be right regarding same sex marriage. However, using justification from a source thousands of years ago, doesn't and shouldn't fly."

I can think of no way to interpret these statements, which are consistent with other things same-sex marriage advocates have said, other than that only pro-same-sex-marriage voices should be heard and counted in this debate. If my religion teaches me that it is unacceptable for a society to allow two men of any religion to try to marry (which it does), the first speaker apparently believes I must not speak out or vote based on my deeply held beliefs, because that would be "insinuating them" into his life.

The second speaker objects to my "dictating" my belief that same-sex marriage is wrong to others. And if the speaker is a libertarian and won't dictate his beliefs about whether it's OK to own guns or use heroin or ride a motorcycle without a helmet, then I can have a modicum of respect for him (although I'll bet he does try to dictate his beliefs about at least one of those three subjects). But even so, I'm not a libertarian. I believe it is not only legitimate but vital to work for a society that maintains a man-woman definition of marriage. So why can't I speak out about it and lobby and vote based on my beliefs? Are his beliefs the only ones that should be taken into consideration by the society? Does he think this is Stalinist Russia?

Then there's the third speaker, who believes he has the right to decide what kinds of justification a person can legitimately use to defend his political beliefs, and what kinds are illegitimate. Let's leave aside the fact that many causes the third speaker probably believes in, such as abolition of slavery, conscientious objection to the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement were led by people motivated by religious beliefs based on sources from thousands of years ago. This person appears to believe that one can pick a political position based on a Michael Moore movie, or a Doonesbury comic strip, or a Jon Stewart fake news clip, or a Maureen Dowd column. And those people should speak out and lobby and vote based on what they learned in that movie or strip or news clip or column. But people whose beliefs are based on the Torah, for example, should step out of the way and vote against their conscience because speaker #3 feels that particular justification "shouldn't fly."

There's a pattern here. Same-sex marriage advocates for the most part act like they don't really believe in democracy. They believe in getting their way by any means necessary, including demanding that people who disagree with them shut up. In Massachusetts, these non-democratic Democrats and gay advocates used all kinds of sneaky maneuvers to prevent a statewide vote on the definition of marriage - because they knew they would lose.

The "redefine marriage" crowd kept saying, "Don't put my rights to a vote!" Given that gays in Massachusetts have always had the equal right to marry (under the pre-2004 definition), but did not have the right to redefine marriage until the state Supreme Court did it for them in Goodridge, what they were really saying is "The votes of the people are irrelevant to my basic right to redefine marriage in a way consistent with my minority viewpoint on what marriage is." Well, If that's true, shouldn't I have the right to re-redefine marriage in a way consistent with my majority viewpoint on what marriage is?

I would have a lot of respect for a gay activist who said, "Let's debate the definition of marriage openly and fairly. I believe that the more we talk about it, the more people will agree with my opinion that we need a more flexible definition of marriage. And then, let's have a statewide vote next year and let the people decide."

Then, if in my state the people voted for a new definition of marriage, I would immediately redirect my energies into seeing that unlike in Massachusetts, my state would never force someone who prefers the "old" definition of marriage to behave as if he accepted the government's new definition. But if the election was fair, I would feel I had to live with the will of the voters.

But that's not what's been happening, and in a democratic nation, it's frankly outrageous.

Labels: Marriage

posted by David Benkof at 1:33 AM | link