<p>mini,
I think all people should be able to have whomever they wish visit them or not visit them when they’re in the hospital. They should also be able to specify who they want to make decisions regarding their care and to receive information. Changes may need to be made in the laws to make these choices available to all people, but we don’t need to change the definition of marriage to accomplish that.</p>
<p>Go for the link, HH. Good luck!</p>
<p>I’ll rephrase…there is quite a lot of hypocrisy from conservatives, touting that gay marriage will ruin the “family”, when the hetero divorce rate is already 50%.</p>
<p>I think that even a study which may find that 20 % approve of gay marriage- does not find that 80% are against it</p>
<p>As in this study for example[Pew</a> has since done another study in March 2006 and found that only 51% oppose gay marriage, with 39% supporting it, and the level of “strongly opposing” gay marriage has fallen from 42% to 28%](<a href=“Less Opposition to Gay Marriage, Adoption and Military Service | Pew Research Center”>Less Opposition to Gay Marriage, Adoption and Military Service | Pew Research Center)</p>
<p>You will see a percentage of people against same sex marriages having the same rights and benefits of heterosexual marriages,
and a percentage of people for same sex marriages to be equal,
but then there are also a percentage of people who are undecided or ,
who may approve of civil unions for same sex couples ,
even if they aren’t in favor of gay couples having the same benefits of other married couples.
Saying that everyone who didn’t make a commitment to saying they are * for * gay marriage, is * against * it , clouds the issue</p>
<p>Thank you for the link, EK.</p>
<p>" … if the Dems want to go ahead and encourage abortion. …" SJMom–This is utterly ridiculous. You might just as well say that Republicans encourage starting wars and killing thousands of innocent civilians abroad. Or that Republicans encourage tax breaks for the rich and don’t care about the poor. … Nobody “encourages” abortion, as you put it. Some people believe it should be a legal option, and NOT all of those people are Democrats.</p>
<p>“The breakdown of the family has had devastating effects on our society and to weaken it any further would make it even worse.”</p>
<p>Why would it breakdown families? Civil unions still have to be officially annulled. Most people will probably still get married in a church setting and have to get divorced according to the rules of their church.</p>
<p>And for your information, this is essentially the way marriage works in France and their families seem to be doing just fine. Their divorce rate is lower than ours.</p>
<p>mini,
I think all people should be able to have whomever they wish visit them or not visit them when they’re in the hospital. They should also be able to specify who they want to make decisions regarding their care and to receive information. Changes may need to be made in the laws to make these choices available to all people, but we don’t need to change the definition of marriage to accomplish that."</p>
<p>And the marriage tax give-away to my mom? The Social Security give-away? Money that is taken away from HETEROSEXUAL children of gay couples and given to my mom (and on her death, to me?) </p>
<p>“Changes may need to be made in the laws to make these choices available to all people, but we don’t need to change the definition of marriage to accomplish that.”</p>
<p>I have yet to see folks opposed to gay marriage seriously advocate for it. Be happy to, of course, but haven’t seen it.</p>
<p>I don’t know why Hereshoping uses 80% either. Here’s what the Pew Research Center says: </p>
<p>35% for gay marriage, 56% against, 9% don’t know
54% for civil unions, 42% against, 4% don’t know</p>
<p><a href=“Pragmatic Americans Liberal and Conservative on Social Issues | Pew Research Center”>Pragmatic Americans Liberal and Conservative on Social Issues | Pew Research Center;
<p><a href=“http://www.iglss.org%5B/url%5D”>http://www.iglss.org</a></p>
<p>M.V. Lee Badgett of the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies (author of the review of Kurtz’ work linked to by kluge at Slate, above):</p>
<p>Now THERE’S a nonbiased critique of Kurtz, I’m sure. ;)</p>
<p>mathmom: Do you people even READ what I post??
I have explained the 80% figure I used ONCE two times now.
I just said above it has not dipped much below 70%. All polls are different.
Even the left liberal Pew Research Center found 35% FOR gay marriage.
We are not talking about civil unions here. Jeepers.</p>
<p>Obviously there are a finite number of marriages and if gays and lesbians start using them up, there will not be enough to go around to straights who need a third or fourth marriage.</p>
<p>I read your every word, HH. ;)</p>
<p>Don’t bother, AM, you already have your mind made up - don’t we all? ;)</p>
<p>“We are not talking about civil unions here. Jeepers.”</p>
<p>I am, because I think it solves the “problem”. Churches do marriage, the state does civil unions. The majority of Americans support civil unions.</p>
<p>Anyway I quoted both civil union and marriage numbers. </p>
<p>Sorry I didn’t read right to the end of the thread to see that you had since backtracked on your 80% number.</p>
<p>My spiritual ancestors - Quakers - were said to be adulterers and fornicators. The reason is - their marriages were not conducted by the Church of England, and not recognized as such, and so all their liaisons were said to be illicit, unhealthy, the work of Satan and his minions. None of their children - godless children and the Devil’s spawn - could inherit. The fornicators were thrown into prison cells, their children taken away from them, the goods destrained.</p>
<p>The Church and State were protecting the sanctity of marriage. I’m sure 90% of the population - if polled - would have supported this “sanctity of marriage”.</p>
<p>To this day, many Quakers (myself included) do not register our marriages with the state.</p>
<p>Hereshoping: Are you suggesting that Kurtz is unbiased? Maybe we should take the effort to look at the actual content of their articles instead of limiting ourselves to ad hominem attacks, eh? Because I probably would consider Kurtz’s sponsor publication to be just as ideologically biased as you consider the Slate author’s. Kurtz in fact has no significant following in legitimate scientific circles. Arguing that “your guy” is less biased than “my guy” is kind of pointless, don’t you think? </p>
<p>I found the debunking in the Slate article to address my own concerns regarding Kurtz’s less-than-scientific “analysis”. You keep urging people to read Kurtz - I actually did. Maybe you should take the effort to read a critique of Kurtz, and see if your confidence in his premise is misplaced, based on the failure of pesky “facts” to support his theory. If you’re not willing to do that, your continue exhortation to people to “read Kurtz” deserves no further attention.</p>
<p>For those of you not interested in going to the source material: Kurtz argues that the institution of gay marriage and close equivalents in Scandinavia and the Netherlands has caused marriage rates to decline and increased out-of-wedlock births. Badgett’s study shows that marriage rates have remained stable or increased since those countries adopted those laws, and that while out-of wedlock births have been on the rise throughout the western world, the increase in Scandinavia and the Netherlands has been on a par with the rest of Europe and America. In short, there’s no objective evidence that endorsing gay marriage (or civil uinions) has any negative effect on heterosexual marriage.</p>
<p>“We are not talking about civil unions here.”</p>
<p>How not? What is the difference between “marriage” and “civil union”? (I’ll tell you: “Marriage” is a concept in religious law. Many legal systems formerly (but few currently) treated marriage as exclusively governed by religious law, but with certain civil consequences. However, it is now almost universal in developed countries for the state to provide the option of allowing people to marry without religious sanction, and without compliance with the religious rules. One might just as well call that “civil union”: that’s what it is. The difference between civil marriage and civil union is one of semantics only, unless the state starts passing laws giving them different consequences.) When I see polls saying that 28% of the people favor same-sex marriage and 55% favor civil unions, I conclude that lots of people are confused.</p>
<p>Kurtz – I read some of his stuff. He is incoherent. I just don’t understand how having gay people fighting tooth and nail for the right to marry, and travelling all over the world to marry each other, and promoting the benefits of marriage, somehow communicates to young, straight people that marriage isn’t important and valuable. Young, straight people seem to be concluding that in lots of places (although none where I spend any time), but it can’t have anything to do with gay people quite movingly clamoring to be married.</p>
<p>Hereshoping, my fight is with you, because you are intelligent and tolerant.</p>
<p>My position on gay marriage is simple categorical imperative: I like marriage, I think it is valuable and important, if I were gay I would want to be married, why not? Denying marriage to gay people doesn’t eliminate any homosexuality (even if that were a valid goal, which it isn’t), it just makes the gay community a little less stable, a little less happy, and a little more socially costly. Letting gay people marry will not convert any heterosexual person to homosexuality. It will show social tolerance of homosexuality – which I think would be a good thing and make the world a better place – without showing social tolerance of some destructive aspects of traditional gay culture which reflected its historical marginality (as represented by the marriage ban).</p>
<p>The embrace of homosexual marriage both by civil and religious (Christian) society is not a new idea, and has been well (even relentlessly) documented by the late Yale historian John Boswell.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Social-Tolerance-Homosexuality-Fourteenth/dp/0226067114/sr=8-10/qid=1160429405/ref=sr_1_10/102-0207768-5411361?ie=UTF8&s=books[/url]”>http://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Social-Tolerance-Homosexuality-Fourteenth/dp/0226067114/sr=8-10/qid=1160429405/ref=sr_1_10/102-0207768-5411361?ie=UTF8&s=books</a></p>
<p>There were married gay saints, MANY homosexual popes, homosexual kings, queens, princes, and princesses, married gay priests, the list just goes on and on.</p>
<p>I did read the critique of Kurtz.
JHS, I think you are mistaken that the majority of gays are fighting tooth and nail for the right to marry.
I will consider your opinions; at least in the last four posts I was not called a hateful bigot.
I believe that’s an improvement from where this discussion started. ;)</p>
<p>so… you read it and the best you could come up with was:
I’ll take that as an admission that you couldn’t find any actual basis for disputing the facts assembled by Prof. Badgett (an associate professor of economics at UMAss Amherst) who prepared the study for the Council on Contemporary Families and the IGLSS, because if you had any coherent criticism of the paper, I assume you would have offered it up.</p>