And the irony is, there has no renewed support for same-sex "marriage". All that has happened is that its proponents have been shouting more loudly in the wake of the Irish referendum and the decision of five of the nine people who really make the law in the US. But although a lot of people may be prepared to accept it, the only groups who really want it are (a) about half the homosexual community, equating to about 1% of the community, and (b) the extreme left, who will never vote Coalition anyway. However, the Coalition would lose a lot of their natural supporters if they supported this unnatural policy. So what on earth were the rogue Coalition MPs thinking? And why don't the rank and file come out in force argue against it? Well, since they don't appear to want to do so, here are the reasons. And - guess what? - they have nothing to do with religion.
1. It's a legal fiction.
Homosexuals already have the right to marry. Their tragedy is that they suffer from a mental disorder which makes them unattracted to potential marriage partners. No, this is not some smart aleck sophistry. It is to point out that the proposition is not about the right to marry, but about redefining marriage. No, it is even more than that. It is a legal fiction - like passing a law that two screws or two nuts can make a bolt.
Fundamental to the proponents' position is the assumption that marriage is somehow a creation of the law, and owes its existence wholly to the law, which can define it anyway it likes. On the contrary, it is the fundamental human institution, which predates the law and, in fact, the human race. As I explained elsewhere, the human race could not have evolved without it. The only function of the law is to recognize and regulate it for the benefit of society. And the reason is obvious: it is nature's way of producing the next generation. Yes, we know that not every marriage is fruitful. But we also know that if marriage never produced children, there would be no reason at all for the law to get involved. After all, the law doesn't want to know who your best friend is. Marriage is a lot more than love and commitment, and the homosexual lobby knows it - which is why they are constantly trying to get hold of children - by adoption, surrogacy, and IVF - to pretend that their unions are real marriages.
Please note that you do not need to have anything against homosexuals to recognize this obvious truism. If they really want to live that way, you can even give them your blessing. But why would the law want to know? It is not as if they are unable to make private legal arrangements with respect to, for instance, wills, power of attorney, joint possessions etc. Sex need not even come into it. The medical brothers, Drs William and Charles Mayo of the Mayo Clinic were both married, but they kept a joint bank account and a very big joint home all their lives.
And at this point, we ought to dispose of a couple of legal red herrings. One is the suggestion that the law should get out of the marriage business, and leave it to the churches and private secular organisations. The trouble is, marriage is a real institution, with genuine duties and responsibilities. The law has to get involved. That means that they have to know who is married, and who is not, and have some rules about when a marriage ceases to exist. It also means they must have some rules about who can get married. Otherwise, there is nothing to stop (say) a brother and two sisters claiming to be married if they see some advantage in it, and the slippery slope the proponents always claim to be non-existent will become very apparent.
Secondly, any claimed legal discrepancies which same sex unions suffer are also present for all non-married people, and to the extent that reform is necessary, that is how it should be approached. I need provide only a single example. Under certain circumstances, your next to kin can make decisions on your behalf. If you are single, widowed, or divorced, your brother may be your NOK. But what if your brother is estranged from you, or lives on the other side of the world, or is non compos mentis? There is no reason why the law should not allow you to appoint a third party to act in such circumstances, and it is no business of the law to know whether that person is your cousin, your neighbour, or your same sex lover.
2. It's Deconstructing Marriage
It should be obvious to everybody by now that the largest contribution to modern social problems is the breakdown of the natural family. And much of that has been facilitated by government policies and legislation which have been deconstructing marriage for decades. First they introduced no-fault, divorce-or-demand, thereby deleting "till death do us part", and making marriage the one contract where the partner breaking the contract is not only not penalised, but is actually rewarded. Then they gave de facto couples the same status as married couples, so that the vows and commitment were removed from the equation. Now they are trying to remove husband and wife. It is incredible that some people use the previous bad practices as an argument that marriage should be deconstructed still further, rather than that the current policies be reversed.
They are essentially claiming that marriage can mean anything. The logical conclusion is that marriage means nothing. It is not surprising that, wherever same sex "marriage" has been enacted, the incidence of real marriage has dramatically declined. (See also this study.)
3. They're after the children.
Although the homosexual lobby constantly reiterates that marriage is not about children, they belie themselves. It should be obvious that many of them are seeking children as an accessory, to allow them to appear to have "arrived".
Once upon a time, adoption aimed as providing children with the parents they needed, not providing parents with the children they wanted. To adopt you had to be in a stable marriage, not too old, not too sick, and not too poor. Preference was given to couples who had already proved their childrearing credentials by having children of their own, because the best interests of the child was the primary concern, not the self-fulfillment of the couple. You would think, therefore, that with the number of children available for adoption drying up, it would be time to tighten the criteria even further, not farm out the kids to two people who, not matter what other qualities they might possess, can never form a natural family.
Divorce: all too often these days, when a person deserts his or her spouse for a same sex lover, the courts award custody to the adulterer rather than the victim, as a reward, apparently, for just being homosexual, even when the innocent party of the divorce would be quite capable of taking care of the child.
IVF: originally it was intended for infertile couples: the husband's sperm and the wife's ovum brought together artificially and implanted in the wife's womb, to grow in the normal fashion. If strict criteria are required for the care of an abandoned child coming up for adoption, you would expect they would be even tighter for bringing an innocent child into the world. Yet we have allowed the practice of IVF to become wide open, with money changing hands to produce children for people who can never offer them a normal family life, such as single women and same sex couples. (One commentator called it "high tech child abandonment", and when people who have been conceived in this way get to tell their stories, it turns out they are not exactly thrilled about it. See also here and here.)
As for surrogacy, the less said about it the better. It is an exploitation of another woman's body, akin to prostitution. (In Italy even homosexuals are against it.)
Nature designed children to be raised by their biological parents. And, of course, mothers and fathers are complementary; they are not interchangeable. Therefore, we should demand very strong evidence before we accept that same sex unions are just as effective at parenting as natural families. Nevertheless, since a myth has gone around that this is the case, we might make a digression for the sake of illustration.
Suppose we wanted to find out about childrearing by Evangelical Christians. Well, we could first go to where Evangelical Christians can be easily found - say the Hillsong or Saddleback mega-churches. We could then ask for volunteers from among the mostly middle class congregations, and question them about their children's education, relationship to peers, and other experiences. Then we could compare them with the overall status of children in the community, including those from poor families, broken homes, and single mothers. My guess is they would score pretty well.
At this point you would probably wail: this is a biased study! What about taking a random sample, using objective evaluations of the children's experiences, and comparing like with like ie controlling for such factors as social class and family structure? Yet most of the studies claiming positive results for same sex parenting suffer from one or more of these defects. They are based on convenience samples of mostly white, middle class couples who volunteered for the study, and who understood the political ramifications, they themselves mostly rated their children's experiences, and the results were compared to the whole range of parents, without controlling for other social circumstances.
It therefore set the cat among the pigeons when Mark Regnerus made the first attempt to obtain a random sample of families and, equally important, collected the data from the (young adult) children rather than the parents. The children of same sex households suffered many more negative effects than those of natural families. (See another summary here, or go to the original article.) Although the critics came out in force against him, his study was only the first. A random study of 20% of the Canadian census revealed that children of same sex couples were less than two thirds as likely to graduate from high school as their peers from natural families. The evidence is mounting up. Another large scale study in 2015 revealed twice as many emotional problems. The same results came from a sample of more than 200,000 children (here and here). The effects last into adulthood. Furthermore, a detailed re-examination of the data presented by the supporters of same-sex parenting have revealed many negativities they conveniently overlooked.
Of course, the mechanism is still in dispute. Many commentators have noted the similarity to the children of divorce, and same sex parenting usually means the breakdown of a natural family. Since same sex unions are themselves more likely to break up, the children are hit with a double whammy. The fact that many of them struggle with their sexuality and gender identity, however, is almost certainly the result of the sexuality of their "parents". It also appears that those who have lived 10 years with "married" same-sex partners fare worse than those who have lived only 4 years under such circumstances.
Even when the same sex parents are otherwise "good", the scars are there. That was why six such children wrote an amicus curiae brief to the US Supreme Court explaining that, although they loved their "parents", and were under extreme social pressure to support their lifestyle, the loss of the complementary parent has left a void which cannot be filled. Similarly, a man raised by two lesbians has explained how this deprived him of the ability to understand social cues.
I need say nothing, of course, of the way governments seek to indoctrinate and corrupt the young once this corner has been turned. Just read this article about what same-sex "marriage" has done to Massachusetts, and ask yourself if that if what you want for your children. Also ask yourself if you want a professor recommending a course to help kids "turn out queer".
4. It is encouraging an abnormal lifestyle.
You don't need to have any ill feelings towards homosexuals to recognize that they are left with the dirty end of the stick. Not only can they not have children, they cannot even have sex! That is something everyone forgets. Male and female genitals are designed to be complementary; almost any healthy man and woman can copulate with each other. But same sex attraction cannot be consummated. Attempts to do so inevitably lead to makeshift activities as imaginative as they are unhygienic. Two screws or two nuts can never make a bolt.
The homosexual lifestyle is highly promiscuous, and this is as soul destroying for the homosexual as for the heterosexual, and it is even more body destroying. Statistics show that it reduces one's lifespan by more than 20 years. Calling their unions marriage does not appear to have much of a stabilising effect. In jurisdictions which permit it, only a small proportion of those eligible take up the offer. Of those who do, their divorce rate is higher than for real marriages, while their "marriages" are much less likely to be monogamous. At the same time, their rate of mental disorders is out of all proportion to societal disapproval. In 2011 a Dutch government investigation found that only 9% of the population still had serious objections to homosexuality, only one in five objected to gay adoption, and only one in ten thought that same-sex "marriage" should be abolished. The Netherlands must thus be the most gay friendly country in the world. Yet the same survey showed that 12% of gay teenagers had attempted suicide. Other research revealed that even those who got "married" had a suicide rate three times that of real married couples. (The original paper is here. See also this study.)
In light of these facts, it would be quite irresponsible to encourage anybody to enter that lifestyle by pretending its highest point is equivalent to the fundamental institution of society. The trouble is, homosexuality is neither cut and dried, nor set in stone. At least half of those attracted to the same sex are also attracted to the opposite sex ie they are bisexual, and therefore capable of a normal sex life if they so chose. There is also the tragedy of the seduction of the innocent. Sexual molestation as a child is a well known risk factor for the development of homosexuality, and many homosexuals date their same sex attraction to such an event. Furthermore, research in several nations has consistently found that same sex attraction is a passing phase for many teenagers. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of those who are wholly or predominately homo at age 16 will be wholly or predominantly hetero at age 26 - provided he/she in not initiated into the homosexual lifestyle. A friend of mine who has been married - to a woman! - for nearly 40 years had a crush on me at high school. If you had been his parents, would you have wanted him to receive this booklet at school?
And what if a person is 100% dyed-in-the-wool homosexual? The downside of the lifestyle is still there. If you cannot live a normal life, it is a bad idea to adopt an abnormal one. It is a reminder that the reason we reject such activities is not due to "hatred", but out of compassion for those at risk.
5. It is repressive.
Virtuous people are comfortable in themselves, and don't get upset if some narrow minded fool thinks poorly of them. But disapproval and criticism rankle with those who know in their hearts that their behaviour is wrong. For this reason, homosexual activists are constantly trying to force everyone else to validate their lifestyle. Added to this are the instincts of their allies, the extreme left, which always run to authoritarianism and totalitarianism. The result is that the whole same-sex "marriage" campaign - indeed, the whole campaign to normalise homosexuality - has been marred by wholesale bullying and intimidation on the part of the proponents.
Where to start? You could go back to the Massachusetts experience, and scroll down to the section on "Churches being harassed". Or you could look at California, which permits citizen initiated referendums. One of these was Proposition 8 defining marriage as a man and a woman (which ultimately passed, but was then overturned by a homosexual judge. Who said America was a democracy?) Suddenly, anyone who campaigned for the proposition, or even donated money to the cause, became a target of a well orchestrated campaign of harassment, vandalism, vilification, violence, boycotts, and intimidation by the gay gestapo. Read it all; there are 112 references for anyone who thinks these were isolated incidents.
There has been constant attempts, all too often successful, to drive people from their jobs and close down businesses. Last year Brendan Eich was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla because he had donated $1,000 to the Proposition 8 campaign. Just a month or two ago, Dr Paul Church was sacked from his position in a Boston hospital where he had served for 30 years when he tried to discourage staff from joining a Gay Pride event because of the known medical hazards of the lifestyle.
In Canada free speech does not exist on the subject. As one woman, who was brought up by a homosexual father in Toronto explained:
In Canada, it is considered discriminatory to say that marriage is between a man and a woman or that every child should know and be raised by his or her biological married parents. It is not just politically incorrect in Canada to say so; you can be saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, fined, and forced to take sensitivity training. Anyone who is offended by something you have said or written can make a complaint to the Human Rights Commissions and Tribunals. In Canada, these organizations police speech, penalizing citizens for any expression deemed in opposition to particular sexual behaviors or protected groups identified under “sexual orientation.” It takes only one complaint against a person to be brought before the tribunal, costing the defendant tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. The commissions have the power to enter private residences and remove all items pertinent to their investigations, checking for hate speech. The plaintiff making the complaint has his legal fees completely paid for by the government. Not so the defendant. Even if the defendant is found innocent, he cannot recover his legal costs. If he is found guilty, he must pay fines to the person(s) who brought forth the complaint.Do not be deceived, similar "anti-vilification" laws exist in Australia. Because the Roman Catholic bishops have circulated a booklet entitled, Don't Mess With Marriage, (download it here; among other things, it lists other acts of repression overseas) Rodney Crome of Australian Marriage Equality urged people to complain to his crony, Robin Banks of the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Tribunal. Even if such an action didn't stand up in the first instance (but it did), it shows the way the mindset of these people work, and the ultimate aim is to harass opponents, for "the process is the punishment".
And silencing their opponents is never enough; they must come out and actively support them. Using various "anti-discrimination" laws they have sued and prosecuted people for such things as refusing to provide venues, cakes, photographs or flowers for same-sex "weddings". In a notorious case in Northern Island, a baker was punished for refusing to bake a cake with the words, "Support Gay Marriage". Now, you must agree it is a pretty serious violation of freedom of speech to compel a person to say something he disbelieves in. Please note that these businesses didn't mind selling other products to homosexuals. In fact, they couldn't care less about their customers' private lives. They merely objected to taking part in their nuptials. And the fact that plenty of other, less scrupulous businesses would have been happy to do the work leads to the conclusion that they were being specifically targeted in order to compel orthodoxy. (Also, have a look at the UK now.)
One could write a whole book about these tyrannies. Have a look at this compendium of 300 outrages, which is just the tip of the iceberg.
Remember: the people responsible for these anti-discrimination laws are the same ones pushing same-sex "marriage". Perhaps you might like to ask Bill Shorten or Tanya Plibersek whether their proposed law includes any protection against this tyranny and, if so, how they can prevent state legislators from introducing them. But don't expect anything more than glib platitudes and evasions.
And if you wonder why Russia and many African countries are now cracking down on homosexual behaviour, it might be because they have looked over here and seen where the road ends.
6. It doesn't end there.
Of course, it doesn't! If marriage can mean anything - and therefore mean nothing - every deviant group will want to climb on board. You'll have heard references to relaxing the rules on age of marriage and consanguinity, and no doubt it will eventually come to that. But the first cab off the rank is obviously polygamy and - what is worse - polyamory, or group marriage. It has already been proposed. (See also here.) Unthinkable? Same-sex "marriage" was unthinkable thirty years ago. The push for polygamy is at the same stage now. The reason the homosexual lobby keeps trying to avoid talking about the slippery slope is that they have no valid argument against it. All the arguments in favour of same-sex "marriage" are valid for polygamy - indeed, more so. Polygamy has a more venerable tradition; it has been recognized in most societies for most of history. Rejecting it means penalising Muslims, who are the favourite minority of the Christian hating left. (Have a look at what this Australian Muslim says.) In fact, thousands of undercover polygamous marriages already exist among Muslims in Europe, and are financed by social security. And at least these are real marriages; the spouses really can have sex, and they really can have children.
7. It's immoral
Of course, it is! It is a violation of chastity, a word commentators try to avoid these days. But it is important to understand that the whole push for homosexuality is merely a part of a greater program: complete sexual licence. If you don't believe me, ask the proponents if they agree that sex is meant for marriage (as usually defined), and that outside of marriage it is wrong. Of course, they can't agree to that. So then ask them whether there is any sexual act between consenting adults they believe is wrong. For the sake of appearances at least, they will probably have to nominate something. And then they will be forced to explain what they think sex is all about. (We have already dealt with that.)
So don't be afraid to call them out for what they are. They have no compunction about abusing us, but they themselves are guilty of either moral cowardice or moral turpitude. Don't let them control the debate with weasel words like "marriage equality", "moderates", or "allow to marry". Tell it like it is. And let the politicians know they will lose your vote if they don't support natural marriage.
I see that another writer has explained it in almost exactly the same way.
Feel free to print and publish this article if it will help, provided you cite the author's name and website.
