Blog von fugaL

On Gay Rights and Gay Marriage

The blogosphere is rife with discussion on gay marriage and the LDS Church’s involvement in California. I would like to do my part in the battle for family. I pray this post will have positive effect in that battle, however modest it might be.

First of all, I’ve already said how I feel about group rights. Gays don’t have rights. Human beings have rights. Gays happen to be human beings. Good, we’re on the same page.

That said, this isn’t really about gay rights as much as it is about gay marriage, but it brings me to my first point.

Marriage is not a right.

For all the talk about gay rights you can mostly chalk it up to human rights that need to transcend prejudice. In other words, instead of clamoring for “gay rights” they should instead be insisting that they be afforded the already existing human rights. Gay marriage, on the other hand, is a prime example of a group inventing new rights so they can feel the same as everyone else regardless of their decisions. It’s like a people with dreadlocks inventing a right to lay their heads on your table simply because you don’t mind another person without dreadlocks doing it.

Marriage is fundamental to society.

This is entirely incident to marriage not being a right, but is yet a powerful argument against the thought that marriage should be a right. Marriage is the very institution by which children have parents, both mother and father. It is the core of the fundamental unit of society—family.

Marriage involves more than the couple.

Intimate relations are not just about consenting adults having a good time. There is ever present the possibility of new life. This new life has rights just the same. It has needs, physical, emotional, spiritual.

Husband and wife have a solemn responsibility to love and care for each other and for their children. “Children are an heritage of the Lord” (Psalms 127:3). Parents have a sacred duty to rear their children in love and righteousness, to provide for their physical and spiritual needs, to teach them to love and serve one another, to observe the commandments of God [etc.]

Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity.

—The Family: A Proclamation to the World

It is because of this sticky situation that marriage is instituted. The very purpose of marriage is to give children stable homes, to assure where possible that when children are created they have a mother and a father. Once you realize this, you realize that gay marriage isn’t the only thing you ought to be worried about. Fornication, adultery and divorce come to mind. Alas, this post is about gay marriage. Indeed, homosexual relations cannot result in offspring, so the very reasons for instituting marriage don’t even apply to the deviants. Yet they insist they have a right to marry. Again I propose it’s merely about them feeling the same as everyone else, regardless of their personal choices. It’s validation, nothing more.

Government should be involved in marriage.

Many of my libertarian friends throw around the idea that government should step out of marriage completely, leaving it a private and religious matter concerning only those involved. This is one of few places where I diverge from the libertarian camp (though not necessarily libertarian ideals). As stated previously, marriage inherently involves more than the parties involved. It involves family and new life; it involves society as a whole. It is in the interests of everyone involved (and everyone is involved, who among us was not born of a mother and a father?) and we should take every opportunity to encourage marriage over promiscuity and counseling over divorce. We should take every opportunity to afford children the privilege of being born into the marriage relation, and where that’s not possible to be adopted into such (no, I’m not saying single parents should give up their children, though they shouldn’t be discouraged to do so). The government is the vehicle by which the people are governed. Whereas the people deem it in society’s interest to afford children the opportunity to develop under the guidance of bonded mother and father, encouraged to stay together, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, thus is born the state sanctioned institution of marriage.

Discrimination

Connor, kudos to you for standing up for liberty. I find it sad that there are those who would so vehemently oppose liberty in any form. As for anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action laws, they are indeed different, and yet the same.

“Redistribution of wealth” is a hot topic these days, perhaps we should coin the term “redistribution of liberty.” It’s an erroneous and an insidious ideal that a group should be made equal, for you can’t make anything equal but the individual. Where a shop owner may refuse credit to a man based entirely on individual merits, how is he to prove his state of mind to the law if that individual happens to be in group $minority protected by the ill-conceived law?

I will reiterate for for clarity’s sake… “Rights can ONLY be protected on an INDIVIDUAL basis.” Note that rights cannot be “granted” except by God, or derived as necessary from those God given rights. To find such words as “minority” or especially enumerated groups in legislation is to find legal and even mandated discrimination. From merriam-webster.com:

3 a: the act, practice, or an instance of discriminating categorically rather than individually

This discrimination may be spelled out such that it is discrimination in favor of a group, but as all things must be balanced, this discrimination is necessarily in hindrance of another group, specifically anyone not belonging to the favored group. I doubt anyone would be all gung-ho for anti-discrimination legislation in favor of caucasian white males. Such legislation would be immediately labeled as bigotry, so why the double standard?

In fact, to be truly anti-discrimanatory, you must allow everyone the discretion to make decisions on an individual basis on any characteristic he deems relevant. And thus it follows that to be anti group discrimination, you must be pro individual discrimination. Unfortunately, such things as skin color and other traits shared by groups are also perfectly valid as individual traits. Such is life, and we must live with the bad judgments of individuals if we are to value liberty over entitlement.

Federalism

I just finished reading an article on how we have strayed in a very fundamental way. It’s called Federalism: The Great Lost Concept. Here’s an excerpt.

A return to federalism, which is what Dr. Paul offers, is a return to the great experiment our Founders started. As a supporter recently said, we can choose between Candidate A and Candidate B’s plans for our lives, or we can choose Ron Paul’s plan to give us back our lives.

And for those of you who think Ron Paul would recklessly take us to anarchy, another excerpt.

It is possible to streamline operations and return to the states the powers they once held. Dr. Paul is not in favor of immediately abolishing programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security because, while these programs are unconstitutional and ultimately harmful, too many Americans have been made dependent on them for those programs to be immediately ended.

And here’s the link.