The secular case against same-sex marriage

I just found this great article titled “The Secular CaseAgainst Same-Sex Marriage”. Of course I don’t agree with the author with a few points, him being an atheist and I being a theist and all. But I fully agree with the general argument that he outlines.

Here are a few choice quotes:

“At the most basic level, our survival as a species requires the coming together of male and female gametes.

“In human societies the way this essential union is symbolised is in the institution of marriage. This is how the centrality of the male-female partnership is celebrated in our culture and, in a non-religious sense, it is sacred; that is to say, heterosexuality is so important to our survival, so fundamental to the continuation of the species, that we have an ingrained sense that marriage as a heterosexual union should not be tampered with.”

“In a just society, no-one should withhold such privileges from a person or a couple simply on the grounds of their sexual orientation. But to solve this problem by introducing same-sex marriage is to strip marriage of its deep meaning as a symbol of the male-female union that it is quintessentially a part of nearly all animal life, including human life, on this planet, and to pare it down to the status of a civil union, a merely legal arrangement. This is why I feel queasy about the idea of same-sex marriage. It is achieving equality for some by taking something important away from many others, and that, I think, is not just. The just way to give equality to homosexuals is to acknowledge their relationships in civil, unions which give them the recognition and legal rights they want and deserve”

“But we must also recognise that there is a sense in which homosexual partnerships are not the same as heterosexual ones and this difference should also be celebrated.

“I sometimes think that some members of the homosexual community are playing a game of “Let’s Pretend” – “Let’s pretend we’re heterosexual”: Heterosexual couples have children, so let’s get ourselves a baby. Heterosexual couples get married, so let’s get ourselves married. This seems to me to be at one level a denial of one’s homosexuality, of what makes homosexuality unique. Freedom is not the ability to become like other people, freedom is the ability to become more fully yourself! Isn’t this what “Gay Pride” means. There is no pride in making believe you are just like everyone else.”

Monogamy vs Sexual Liberty

Sexual liberty is the most obvious vice today. It is assumed through apathy alone that no harm can come, and only pleasure will be obtained, from liberal sexual activity.



Yet in contrast to this, no one would argue against the intuitive fact that the human spirit only finds peace in monogamous habitation. One finds the most satisfaction and fulfilment is in giving oneself to only one other. We naturally pine for subservience of another, and in turn to be subservient to them. Monogamous sexuality is the greatest expression of this. Why else would such pain and grief be felt in the wake infidelity?







To give oneself in sex to only one person is the greatest expression of love. Therefore to give oneself to many is to diminish the love one has to give, even in a future monogamous relationship. Sexual liberty degrades the power and effect of monogamy. Monogamy is never as strong as when lovers have only given themselves to each other.



The ideal of sexual liberty, even through indirect social influence from the media, degrades the potency of monogamy, which in turn engenders the idea of sexual liberty, which then further degrades the potency of monogamy, and on and on in a vicious circle. In the end, the mind of the sexual libertarian, monogamy becomes worthless and untenable.







Instead if one believes the truth that monogamy is sexually sufficient, as our spirit tells us, then both the spirit and the body will be fulfilled. As opposed to sexual liberty, where only the body is sexually fulfilled, and only temporarily anyway.



It seems to me that the spiritual desire for sexual monogamy should take precedence over the bodily lust for unrestrained sexuality. One should fight against the body’s extra-monogamous impulses because of the knowledge that monogamy does suffice, and is actually the more fulfilling when more perfectly practiced.





http://www.crosswalk.com/family/marriage/marriage-and-the-virtue-of-loyalty-1414150.html



http://www.forgottenvirtue.com/

Men, Women and Equality in the Household

There is a common misconception in the wider community that there is an inherent inequality between males and females in the traditional roles of women being at home raising the children and doing the housework, and the males as the breadwinners.

While I certainly take exception to certain minor parts of this model, on a whole it is the most viable and accurate mode of conjugal living.



I certainly abhor the extreme end of this model of the still-common practice in lower socio-economic households of the female doing all the cooking, cleaning, maintenance of the children and general running of the house for all the hours that she isn’t sleeping, while the man simply parks his obese arse on the couch drinking himself into a stupor after a mere 8 hour shift at work.

While there is no doubt that these conjugal roles are egregiously wrong, I personally believe that the traditional role of the 'stay at home mum' is basically right, and despite common thought, it is by no means an inferior lifestyle.





The current trend in Western society is for women to strive for a career as the most important goal in life, ahead, and sometimes instead of, child bearing. This ostensibly labelled 'emancipatory' vision of woman in modern society often manifests in significant peer pressure on women who genuinely want to devote their energy and time to their children rather than a superficial career.

The role of the stay at home mum is often vociferously frowned upon as a vastly inferior and antiquated mode of existence.



But is this really so? While it is certainly beneficial for women to participate in the work-place to various degrees, I challenge anybody to explain how the 24hr attentive role of carefully raising and instructing your delicate and intellectually burgeoning children in the moral code and beliefs that you value is in any way less important than the perfunctory and mundane duties of a run-of-the-mill job.



In fact, I would go as far as saying that the traditional role of the woman running the household is actually more important than the mere 8hr shift at work of so many males. While this may even sound a touch patronising to women, you really have to look past the petty and superficial cultural aspersions that are cast upon the traditional roles of men and woman in the household. Surely getting the conjugal mix right is far more important than just thoughtlessly adhering to popular social conjugal trends.





I contend that the roles of both the breadwinning and head-of-the-household male, and the pedagogy and house running of the female are certainly different- in fact they are just as different and polarized as males and females themselves- but these differences are complementary, but most important are EQUAL!

Gay Marriage

The issue of gay marriage has recently been given significant attention in the parliament and media by the radical Green party in Australia.



The most common word that is heard alongside the term ‘gay ‘marriage’, is ‘progressive’, a term which is also used to justify it. But what is never defined is what ‘progressive’ actually is. The word is just crudely swung around in an attempt to cudgel those ‘backward’ traditionalists who dare to hold tight to old fashioned religious values.



But the real question is if gay marriage is progressive, then what about polygamy? What about incestuous relationships? Why would these not be progressive ideals too?

The only criteria that these self-proclaimed ‘progressives’ are advocating for defining ‘marriage’, is ‘love’, that’s it! So if reciprocal love is the only defining criteria, then on what basis do they reject brothers and sisters from demanding the same rights to marriage? What basis do they then have for rejecting the claims of discrimination against those who want to wed into polygamous marriage? None.



As soon as you redefine marriage away from the obviously harmonious match between one man and one woman into a cohabitation of only ‘love’, then you open the flood gates to any and all variations of cohabitation. If rejecting gay marriage is discrimination, then so isn’t rejecting all other forms such as polygamy, incest, bigamy, bestiality, objectophilia? What is stopping a landslide of subsequent marriage redefinitions to encompass all these different forms of cohabitations? Nothing, in fact according to the logic of the gay marriage advocates, discriminating against all the above forms of relationships who wish to marry is just as bad as discriminating against gay marriage.





Even if marriage is only redefined to include gay unions, then this has a significant impact on those people who don’t want their own marriage vows to be diluted to include gay unions. There are many people who don’t want the marriage bond that holds them together to be some motley hotchpotch union that lacks any form of coherent meaning or significance. They certainly don’t want to be married under a form of union that they find offensive!



This raises the obvious solution of having a totally separate form of union distinct from heterosexual ‘marriage’. It is certainly feasible to have a separate form of union that the ostensibly named ‘progressives’ find comfortable. This would seem to me to be a win-win scenario. It would keep the traditionalists happy as well as those advocating gay marriage.



But what I really don’t get is why those advocating gay marriage, who would almost exclusively be secular atheists, would want to adopt the Christian tradition of marriage anyway? The institution of marriage in the West has always been a Christian tradition, one deeply rooted in Christian ethics, morality and tradition.

Why would those advocates of gay marriage want to hijack this explicitly Christian institution when they openly ridicule every aspect of Christianity? They routinely mock the conservative values of Christianity and even more severely mock the people who hold them. It is for this reason that I simply do not see any sense in them adopting marriage in the first place.



The most diplomatic and practical solution seems to me to create another distinctly separate form of union that encompasses gay unions, heterosexual unions if they wish and every other form of union that they deem progressive.

They would obviously have the same rights as traditional religious marriage, but would have a legal union that they find far more appropriate to their ideas of ‘social progression’. This would certainly keep the vast majority of the religious population happy, giving them the important distinction between hetero and homosexual unions.