Obscanity: You'll know it when you see it

Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church condones domestic violence.

U.S. divorce rates: for various faith groups, age groups and geographical areas.

Guess what, folks? Not only do the “liberal, family hating” west and northeast have LOWER divorce rates than the marriage-protecting south and midwest (which, to be fair, probably has something to do with wealth and education as well as religion), but those who fight the MOST to prevent gay people from marrying – fundamentalist, evangelical Christians – actually have HIGHER divorce rates than atheists and agnostics! Jews are the highest in proportion by a slight margin, but hey, guess what? Judaism doesn’t prohibit divorce, and in fact the marriage contract itself usually includes protections for the woman in case of divorce.

But do the religious fundamentalists accept that they might ACTUALLY be hypocrites? Of course not. I love that the conservative Christian response is essentially to say, “But we know that can’t possibly be true, because these people are Christian, so of course they wouldn’t get divorced, because they’re living a Christian lifestyle, which doesn’t include divorce,” or “Well, they weren’t really Christian if they got divorced, so that doesn’t count.” But hey – these are the same people who say “These facts are true. We know they are true, because the Bible says they’re true. And we know the Bible is right, because the Bible says it’s right You see? There’s your proof. You can’t ignore the facts.”

The Stranger | Slog | Today in Traditional Marriage.

Drew Peterson, the former Chicago police sergeant who is a suspect in the disappearance of his fourth wife, Stacy, and the homicide of his third wife, Kathleen Savio, is engaged again.

Drew Peterson, 54, recently proposed to his 23-year-old girlfriend of four months, his publicist confirmed to ABCNews.com, but he will not reveal her identity in an attempt to shield her from the media.

Well, on the bright side, this girl is pretty young, so she’s probably got a few good years before she disappears too.

Miller v. Jenkins: One Gay Couple’s Custody Battle | Newsweek Culture | Newsweek.com.

This is absolutely disgusting. This is no different from those old Lifetime movies where the father would kidnap the child and remove her to some foreign country where women (and therefore mothers) have no custodial (or any) rights. It’s absolute bullshit. When you and another person bring a child into this world, you are both parents to that child, and it is absolutely abhorrent to cut one parent out of the child’s life like that, and then try to brainwash her into hating her other mother, which you KNOW this lady is doing. Family values, my ASS. It makes me want to scream.

Well, that is just skeezy. One of the ads that comes up in my Google ad feed reads, “Support Marriage Rights / Get Involved in Discussions on Gay Marriage. Learn More Today.” You click on it, and it takes you to a YES on Prop 8 page! What the fuck? Prop 8 protects no marriages; if it passes, marriages will be destroyed, and thousands of future marriages will be barred. I don’t see how this protects anybody’s marriage rights, or protects anybody’s children, as the website loudly proclaims.

It does take away my marriage rights, though. This is not a political issue – it is about people’s lives. Real people. When you vote, think about the fact that there are actual, real people facing real and tangible harm if this proposition passes. And yes – those real people include the thousands of children being raised by same-gender couples in California. Marriage discrimination hurts them, too. If we really believe children are better off when their parents are married, shouldn’t we seek to encourage this healthy environment by letting their parents get married?

If CA’s Proposition 8 passes, it will amend the CA constitution to define marriage as only existing between a man and a woman, and will overturn the historic CA Supreme Court decision that recognized the unconstitutionality of marriage discrimination.

Even if you don’t live in California, I hope you will consider contributing a small amount to the No on Prop 8 campaign. The people supporting Prop 8 have had money pouring in all over the country lately because everybody knows that whichever way this proposition goes, it will have long-term ramifications for the rest of the country. Their commercials are running NONSTOP around California, and they are full of lies and fear-mongering – and they are working, as recent polls show.

The proponents of Prop 8 are scaring people into believing that churches will lose their tax-exempt status if they refuse to perform same-sex marriages (NOT TRUE), and they are claiming that school children will now be forced to learn about Prince Charming marrying a prince – also not true! The claims they are making are outrageous lies – but they are desperate at this point. They’ve even claimed that Christians will be put in jail if same-sex marriage is legal! Many people are looking for any excuse possible to justify voting yes on 8 – please help EQCA fight these lies so there are no excuses left!

Please, if you care about marriage equality, please consider making a small donation – every dollar helps fight this horrible amendment!

‘Bride’ and ‘groom’ being restored to California marriage forms – San Jose Mercury News.

Wow, I’m sure all those people out there who were worried about losing the right to heterosexual marriage will be so relieved that they don’t have to vote yes on Prop 8 anymore!

Seriously, though. There were a lot of people who were put off by the Party A and Party B forms, so hopefully this will assuage their concerns.

Rock Me Sexy Jesus | Slog | The Stranger | Seattle’s Only Newspaper:
A columnist whose work I’ve never read before, Gwen Daniels, at a student newspaper I’ve never heard of, The Maneater, at a university I’ve never visited, the University of Missouri, introduced me to a trend with which I wasn’t familiar: Saving your first kiss for your wedding night. Basically it’s like saving your virginity for your wedding night only, um, a whole hell of a lot crazier. (Read more)

Oh… that’ll DEFINITELY help the climbing divorce rate. Oh yeah.

I felt compelled to re-link to this blog entry after the recent comment on my entry about Google’s taking an official stance against Proposition 8, the constitutional amendment which would literally dissolve thousands of legal marriages across the state of California (and they say LGBT Californians are trying to destroy marriage?).

In my article, Five Myths About Same-Sex Marriage, I discuss some of the common arguments folks will make against same-gender marriage in California. One of the key arguments put forth by most Prop 8 supporters is the “overwhelming” passage of Prop 22 in March of 2000. Do not believe them. Prop 22 did pass, and at first glance it passed with a hefty majority – but once you look at the numbers more closely, you’ll see that it definitely didn’t pass with the level of support claimed by proponents of Proposition 8.

This shouldn’t surprise you, though – these are the same people who brought you Proposition 22 in the first place, and if they were willing to lie about the motives and goals of Prop 22 in order to confuse voters into supporting it (it was supposed to be about marriages from other states), then they’re certainly not going to balk at lying about its outcome and its passage rates.

If people start throwing Prop 22 in your face, I encourage you to either direct them to the article or show them the numbers so they see the truth about Prop 22. Odds are they will refuse to see the truth, but if even one mind is changed, then that is better than nothing.

As for the “bride and groom” issue raised by the commenter in the Google entry, here is the response I sent:

It’s not “illegal” for you to marry as bride and groom. You are still a bride and groom regardless of what title the form gives you. If you are a woman, you are a bride. If you are a man, you are a groom. That doesn’t change. It wouldn’t make sense for a same-gender couple to have to decide which is the bride and which is the groom – contrary to popular jokes and beliefs, there isn’t that kind of gender dichotomy in a same-gender relationship.

It’s the same as with parents; a child’s parents are still mother and father (or mother and mother, or father and father), even if the birth certificate says parent 1 and parent 2. Listing them as the first and second parent of the child doesn’t change the fact that they are a mother or a father. It’s not like the child is going to run around saying, “Hey Parent 1, Parent 2 said to ask you if I can go outside and play with my friends!” It’s not like Hallmark is going to start putting out “Parent 1’s Day” cards. A man is a father, and a woman is a mother. Reality is reality, and a form is just a form, for bureaucratic purposes and nothing else.

If you have a church wedding, I am quite certain your clergyman will be more than happy to refer to you as bride and groom. As for me, my rabbi referred to us as kallah v’kallah (bride and bride), and that’s exactly how we wanted it. We didn’t need to strong-arm the government into giving us a special form that says “bride and bride.” We wouldn’t want it. The state license simply does not discriminate, and that is the whole point. There is no reason for a state form to impose or mandate specific gender permutations, because the gendered titles are pretty self-explanatory by themselves. If you need a form to tell you whether you are a bride or a groom, or a mother or a father, then you have bigger problems than I am trained to address.

For all of you out there, including Barack Obama, who allege that Sarah Palin’s family life is private and off limits: Can I just remind you that it was SARAH PALIN who fed this piece of information to the public in the first place? Nobody spied on her; nobody got hold of secret medical records or hacked into her computer. Sarah Palin CHOSE to release this information to the American people, and now it is our inalienable right to talk about it, react to it, and decide how we feel about a woman who supports abstinence-only education when it’s clear from her own family situation that abstinence-only education DOES NOT WORK.

Can we call her a hypocrite? Absolutely. She doesn’t support same-sex marriage (or domestic partnership rights, even) because marriage is soooo sacred, but she’s willing to let a CHILD enter into this sacred union as punishment for having premarital sex. So is marriage a sacrament, or a punishment? Make up your mind!

She comes from a party that cracks down on access to birth control and yet doesn’t want abortions to be legal – but STILL doesn’t support education about how not to get pregnant in the first place. This is the woman we want thisclose to inheriting the presidency from ancient, ailing John McCain?

So is her daughter’s pregnancy private? It was, until she made it public. And is it relevant? HELL. YES.

I know that many people will claim that the Palins were forced to make this announcement in order to quell rumors going around that Palin’s youngest “son” Trig is actually her grandson. There are a few points to address here. I think the people who made these speculations in the first place were just having a hard time reconciling Palin’s uber-family-values stances with the fact that she endangered her child’s life multiple times the evening she gave birth by flying even after her water broke, the fact that she simply did not look pregnant and her staff was shocked to find out she was seven months along, the fact that no picture exists that demonstrates the woman was ever pregnant in 2008, and the fact that she returned to work three days after giving birth to a baby with Down’s Syndrome. It just doesn’t add up to the Family Woman that Palin claims to be.

Much more likely (and logical, for that matter) is that she found out her daughter was in labor and THAT is why she rushed back to Alaska. Much more likely is that she thought her daughter’s pregnancy might undermine her image as uber-family-lady, while her own pregnancy might garner her some sympathy. Much more likely is that if she didn’t look pregnant, she WASN’T pregnant, especially given the photos circulating of her when she actually WAS pregnant – because let me tell you, when Sarah Palin is pregnant, she LOOKS it.

So now we’re left with this situation where the Palin family has announced their daughter’s pregnancy in order to cover their own asses as far as Trig’s parentage. This announcement proves nothing. Palin could have protected her daughter AND her image by simply providing a dated photograph of herself visibly pregnant at the time she was supposed to be pregnant (although I suppose once you’ve decided you’re going to lie to millions of people, you might as well go all the way and stuff something under your shirt). She could have provided hospital records showing that she was admitted and in labor – after all, John McCain had to provide the media with his own medical records, so why shouldn’t Palin? She could have done a lot of things that didn’t involve exposing her family and her children to further controversy and ridicule.

Instead, Palin “outed” her own daughter, thrusting her into the limelight of her OWN accord. But again, the news itself proves nothing except that the rumor-mongers weren’t so far off – the teenage daughter of this abstinence-only-education proponent IS having sex, and she IS being irresponsible about it. It actually makes the case stronger, not weaker, that Trig is her son.

But of course the real brilliance of Palin’s feeding Bristol to the lions instead of stepping up to the plate herself is that by the time the truth comes out, it will be too late. It’s entirely possible that Bristol Palin is more like three months pregnant, which means she could easily be Trig’s mother as well; we all know that teen mothers frequently make the same mistake twice (or three times, or four times…). But by the time we know for sure, either Obama will have won and nobody will care, or Palin will already be VP and it will just be another “White House Scandal”: Vice President Palin’s daughter is miraculously eleven months pregnant. Gee. Who saw that coming?

There IS a way to settle all of this without throwing your pregnant teenage daughter under the train. But I guess Palin’s choice pretty much shows us what kind of parent she is, and what kind of candidate she is, and what kind of VP she will be – a person willing to sell out those who depend on her in order to cover up her own dishonesty.

From EQCA:

August 27, 2008

It is with great sadness that I share with you that today, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community lost an iconic leader and a beloved friend.

Del Martin, 87, passed away in San Francisco with Phyllis Lyon, her lifelong partner and spouse, by her side. Martin was one of the nation’s first and most visible lesbian rights activists who dedicated her life to combating homophobia, sexism, violence and racism. Martin’s many contributions to the LGBT movement will resonate for decades to come.

We are saddened to lose such a wonderful friend to our community and our love goes out to Phyllis and her family during this most difficult time. We would not be at this incredible moment in history, where all couples have equal rights under California law, if it had not been for Del’s lifetime of courage and leadership.

Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were married in California on June 16, 2008 after 55 years together. EQCA honored Del and Phyllis with the Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon Marriage Equality Award in 2003, an award the organization gives every year in their honor.

Read more about Del Martin.

Gifts in lieu of flowers can be made to honor Del’s life and commitment and to defeat the California marriage ban through the National Center for Lesbian Rights NO on 8 committee at www.nclrights.org/NoOn8.

Our community will forever honor Del’s life and legacy.

Respectfully,

Geoff Kors
Executive Director
Equality California

Equality California is dedicated to achieving equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Californians.

Our work depends on individual financial contributions. Donate now using our secure website or download a donation form to send via fax or mail.

Donations to EQCA support our political work and are therefore not tax-deductible as charitable contributions.

Great article on CNN.com right now about “gifted” children vs. gifted children: Is your kid really gifted? Probably not. As one who was “diagnosed” as intellectually highly gifted when I was about six, I can tell you that if you’re hoping for a kid who will excel in school, follow directions, and never challenge you or cause any problems, you do NOT want a gifted kid. Trust me. I think the people over at tagfam.org put it best when they posted this chart comparing “bright” children to “gifted” children:

Comparison of Bright vs. Gifted
Bright Child	Gifted Child
Knows the answers.	Asks the questions.
Interested.	Extremely curious.
Pays attention.	Gets involved physically and mentally.
Works hard.	Plays around, still gets good test scores.
Answers questions.	Questions the answers.
Enjoys same-age peers.	Prefers adults or older children.
Good at memorization.	Good at guessing.
Learns easily.	Bored. Already knew the answers.
Listens well.	Shows strong feelings and opinions.
Self-satisfied.	Highly critical of self (perfectionistic).

Yep. Sounds about right.

Massachusetts legislative leaders, along with Governor Deval Patrick, are supporting an effort to lift the ban on same-sex marriage for non-Massachusetts residents. Currently, couples cannot marry in MA if the marriage would be illegal in their home state (you can imagine why that 1913 law probably originated, considering that MA allowed interracial marriages more than 100 years before Loving v. Virginia came down).

The repeal would allow MA to cash in on some of the tourist market generated from the legalization of same-sex marriage in California, which does not have the same restriction on out-of-state couples. Without the repeal, only couples from MA, RI, NY and CA can marry in Massachusetts.

I’m all for repealing the residency requirement, but I still think it’s a shame that so few states are allowing the marriages in the first place. Aside from the obvious arguments, which I’ve already discussed in depth, there’s also the whole problem of the right wing shooting itself in the foot. Marriage, fidelity and monogamy are supposed to be huge conservative values, right? Children fare better when their parents are married, right? You would think encouraging these things would be a numero uno priority, regardless of who the partners are. (Not to mention that “Not Having Sex, Never Ever,” seems also to be a conservative value, and we all know married people have less sex, right? *wink* Juuuust kidding.) So I really don’t get the conservative opposition to same-sex marriage. Or rather, I do, but I just think it’s totally illogical given their general platform.

p.s. This is a joke, right? FAUX News reports that MA will be the first state to legalize human/robot marriage, because it allows same-sex marriage? With no sign of satirical intent? Seriously? They still call themselves a news network???

What on earth? Are we still in the 1960’s, pre-Loving v. Virginia? If this same-sex couple travels to CA to be married, they could face JAIL time if they return to Wisconsin. Sounds to me like a good case for the Supreme Court – if it hadn’t been stacked by the rightist White House.

I published this article over at Hubpages, and thought you might like to read it. I’ve included the text for archive posterity.

Five Myths About Same-Sex Marriage

Over the past several weeks I have seen a huge number of articles spring up in protest of last month’s CA Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriages. I want to address some of the arguments and claims that I’ve seen in those articles.

Myth #1: Four liberal activist judges overruled the will of the people.

What You Should Know: The California Supreme Court, a conservative court, struggled with the issue, looked to the CA Constitution, and concluded that equality means equality for ALL – and that includes those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

Many have argued that legislatures, not judges, should be responsible for making marriage law. The CA legislature has twice passed the Religious Freedom and Marriage Equality Act, which equalized civil marriage rights among couples but explicitly stated that no religious institution shall be compelled to preside over a same-sex marriage. The bill was passed by two different assemblies of the legislature, since one passage was prior to a major election and once occurred after. The bill was twice vetoed by the Governor specifically because he believed it WAS an issue for the courts, not for the legislature.

Of the seven CA Supreme Court Justices, six were appointed by Republicans. The CA Supreme Court is traditionally known for being fairly conservative. If you think “CA” and think “liberal judges,” you might be mistaking the CA Supreme Court for the United States Court of Appeals for the Circuit. They are two very different courts. Incidentally, one of the dissenters is personally in favor of allowing same-sex marriage. Judges can and do go against their own personally-held beliefs in favor of upholding the CA Constitution.

The Supreme Court decision did not create a “new right” – rather, it acknowledged prior decisions stating that every person has a right to choose his or her life partner, and determined that this right cannot be abridged based solely on sexual orientation, which the Court views as akin to race and religion as far as discrimination practices are concerned. The judges did not come to their decision easily; they struggled with it, and that struggle is documented in the extremely lengthy opinion released last month (most court decisions are NOT this long – the Massachusetts marriage decision was less than a third of this length). If you think all it took was a stroke of a pen, I challenge you to read the 172-page opinion. I did.

Myth #2: The people of CA already spoke on the issue of gay marriage by passing Proposition 22

What You Should Know: Only 29% of registered California voters (21.5% of eligible voters) voted in favor of Prop 22. Is that an overwhelming majority?

While Proposition 22 was a statewide ballot initiative, it was not an accurate reflection of all of CA, for two major reasons:

First, contrary to popular belief, Prop 22 was not approved by an overwhelming majority of CA voters. Prop 22 was passed by an overwhelming majority of the voters who came out in March of 2000 to pick between John McCain and George Bush, since there was no true competition in the Democratic race, with Vice President Al Gore being the assumed winner. True, more Democrats than Republicans voted in the election, but if you count by who they voted for instead of their party identification, you get 2,654,114 voting Democratic and 3,702,487 voting Republican. In a consistently blue state, these statistics are not representative of the true population (about 30 million people). Overall, the election had a pretty low turnout rate. That primary election had around 7 million voters out of about 15 million registered voters. This past February primary (2008) had about the same number of registered voters, but more than 9 million actually turned out – and THAT was with closed primaries, which we didn’t have before, and no real contest in the Republican race.

In a state of more than 30 million people, only 4,618,673 voted in favor of Prop 22, and 2,909,370 voted against it. With only about a third of eligible voters, and barely half of registered voters, having voted on Prop 22 (that’s overall, not just in favor), it’s hard to use the word “overwhelming” to describe the outcome. Basically, 29% of registered voters (21.5% of eligible voters) voted in favor of Prop 22 – and that was eight years ago. The world has changed since then. People have changed since then. I know a LOT of people who voted for Prop 22 and are, in retrospect, utterly ashamed of themselves for it.

Second, Proposition 22, while appearing simple, was actually quite misleading. It came as a response to DOMA, which allowed states to refuse to recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages, and the entire campaign was centered around the notion that CA should not be forced to recognize other states’ marriages. The argument was framed in such a way that many people who had no particular opinion on same-sex marriage voted for Prop 22 because they believed CA should be allowed to make the decision for itself and not be forced into it by another state. While this same Supreme Court ruling ultimately determined that Prop 22 did apply to all marriages and not just those performed out of state, the “yes” campaign intimated otherwise, and countless voters were duped in the process.

Even if Proposition 22 HAD passed with the approval of most Californians (which it didn’t), the CA Supreme Court had the responsibility to ensure that it complied with the CA Constitution (which it didn’t). The Court here didn’t ignore Proposition 22; it attacked it head on and found it to violate the spirit of the California Constitution. Courts have declared other initiatives unconstitutional as well, and in the 1960’s the US Supreme Court even invalidated a voter-approved CA constitutional amendment which sought to overturn a recently-passed legislative act banning housing discrimination based on ethnicity, religion, sex, marital status, physical handicap, or familial status. Propositions don’t just glide into law just because the voters approved them. They still have to meet the rigorous standards of our great state and federal constitutions, and Proposition 22 violated what both the CA and US Supreme Courts have called a basic human right, the right to marry and create a family with your chosen spouse.

Myth #3: Marriage is a sacrament and has always been between one man and one woman.

What You Should Know: Read Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, by Stephanie Coontz. You’ll learn things you didn’t even know you didn’t know.

I could go on for pages about the ways in which marriage has changed over the years. One man can no longer have eight wives. Women are no longer subsumed by their husband’s identity and viewed as property. Couples are no longer barred from marriage based on their racial makeup. Most importantly, however, couples do not have to have their marriage blessed or sanctified by a religious institution, and they do not have to be married by a member of the clergy. This is the key to the constitutionality argument for same-sex marriage. The court cannot, and must not, and WILL not force religious institutions to officiate marriage for same-gender couples. Religions have the right to dictate their requirements for marriage, and the government may not interfere.

However, the state does not “recognize” religious institutions’ marriages; it creates the official status itself, and it officiates marriages outside the religious sphere. We call this civil marriage. It is an entirely different institution from religious marriage; it just happens that the state grants clergymen the status to officiate civil marriages at the same time as religious ones, for convenience’s purpose, so that a couple can be married in a single ceremony. A couple that goes to church and exchanges vows before witnesses is NOT married unless they fill out the necessary paperwork for a civil marriage. Likewise, a couple can obtain a civil marriage license and be married by a judge, a marriage deputy, or other civil servants acting as agents for the state, and never even interact with a religious institution.

Religious institutions can discriminate against certain couples; for example, most rabbis will not officiate at a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew, because Jewish law only recognizes as valid a marriage between two Jews. However, the STATE cannot discriminate in the same way and purport to be upholding the Constitution, state OR federal. If the STATE offers civil marriage, it must allow it to all adult couples, not just those who fit religious descriptions of propriety. After all, can you imagine the chaos if the state refused to issue a marriage license to a couple because one of them was Jewish and one was not? It is not the state’s business to uphold or enforce religious restrictions on marriage. (In fact, considering the VAST number of religious institutions and clergy who submitted amicus briefs to the Supreme Court in support of same-gender marriage, I would argue that the state would have been in violation of the Establishment Clause had it NOT allowed the marriages to take place, since barring same-gender couples would have been equivalent to expressing a preference for some religions over others, at the expense of individual civil rights.)

If you want Biblical proof that it hasn’t always been about men and women, read I Samuel, not just the lines I have provided below, but the entire story – and read a translation that is as close to the original Hebrew as possible, as modern versions have diluted the story, often explicitly changing words entirely to tone down the relationship. Think about what it means to make a “covenant.” In nearly every other case in the Bible, the word “covenant” refers to the relationship between God and people, or to people promising to serve God. A covenant is an eternal promise – why else would some states institute “covenant marriages,” which are not as easy to dissolve?

1 Samuel 18

1. And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.

3. Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul.

1 Samuel 23

18. And they two made a covenant before the LORD: and David abode in the wood, and Jonathan went to his house.

Myth #4: Allowing same-sex marriage will lead to legalization of incest, pedophilia, and polygamy! Next thing you know, people will be marrying their dogs!

What You Need To Know: It’s far too late for that.

Let’s get this one over with: A dog is not and will never be a consenting adult. Nor will a goat. In addition to being morally and utterly repugnant, sex with animals is always rape, because an animal cannot consent. Likewise, a paw print does not suffice as a signature on a marriage license – and no matter how sure you are that your dog is trying to tell you something, absent a licensed dog-to-human translator, “Arf arf” cannot be properly construed to mean “I do.” Get your mind out of the gutter and stick to the issue at hand.

Incest is already legal in the 26 states where individuals can marry their first cousins. Cousins are the next degree of siblings; they are the children of your parents’ siblings. The great irony of today’s marriage laws is that I can marry my black cousin, the son of my aunt, but I can’t marry my wife. Or rather… I couldn’t. Now I can.

Pedophilia is already legal in the 1/3 of states that allow children under age 16 to marry, with some allowing marriage as early as age 13 with permission from the court. I’d be willing to bet that in most cases the men marrying adolescent girls are not also in their teens. If you want to protect children, you can start by lobbying states to prohibit children from getting married before they are old enough to see R-rated movies.

Polygamy is a separate issue because it doesn’t involve marital prohibition so much as it involves individuals trying to “double-dip” on the marital property and tax systems, among other things. A marriage is a union of two individuals into one economic unit. You can’t “become one” with one person if you’re already “one” with another person. There’s an argument to be made for allowing “threesomes” of people to marry, but I highly doubt anybody would take the economic risk, considering that one individual could wind up paying alimony to everybody else in the group if s/he decided to leave. I think the specter of alimony would be enough to prevent anybody from seriously raising this concern – not to mention that it’s an extremely rare arrangement in the first place.

Myth #5: Gay couples don’t need marriage in order to get their legal matters in order. Calling it “marriage” does nothing but devalue the sanctity of marriage.

What You Need To Know: Allowing committed couples to marry encourages and promotes monogamy and family responsibility, two crucial family values. As a result, federal and state governments have instituted a system of rights and responsibilities that have become necessary and irreplaceable for two people sharing their lives together. These rights are not replicable in private legal arrangements since most of them have to do with third-party or government recognition.

First, I have to point out that same-gender couples can’t possibly do more harm to the institution of marriage than that already inflicted by the heterosexuals who have held a monopoly on it for so long. (Hello Britney; hello “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?”) With more than half of all marriages ending in divorce, marriage needs all the good role models it can get. Many of the couples that are getting married in California this week have been together longer than most heterosexual marriages ever last. In fact, some social scientists believe that studying the way same-sex couples communicate and deal with conflict may actually help decrease the divorce rate among heterosexual couples by helping them overcome conflict.

Whether you like it or not, same-sex couples will have children. Children fare better in life when their parents are married. Why would you deny these children the right to be raised by married parents? Studies show that there is no substantial difference between children raised by gay parents and those raised by straight parents. They do, however, show that two parents are better than one. Marriage encourages two-parent childrearing, and provides economic safety-nets for situations where one parent abandons the family. Without marriage, the protections are substantially reduced. Marriage also encourages personal responsibility and shifts economic support responsibilities from the government to the individual and the private sector; with gay marriage legalized, many people will no longer have a need for state-provided benefits because they will be eligible for benefits through their spouse.

Children tend to thrive when they have one parent at home and one parent working to support the family; in an ideal world, families could afford to live on the salary of only one working parent (this is becoming less common as the cost of living skyrockets). Federal marriage recognition encourages parents to stay home with their children; spouses are entitled to their deceased spouses’ Social Security benefits if their own are insufficient. Gay couples do not receive this benefit, effectively removing this incentive to keep one parent at home. Additionally, federal marriage recognition keeps families from being uprooted in case of the death of a spouse; the property passes from one spouse to the other without tax repercussions, which means that in the tragic event of one spouse’s death, the other spouse and their children will not be forced to sell their home to pay estate taxes. Gay partners are taxed on bequests as though they were granted by any acquaintance; a partner of 55 years could be forced to sell her home to pay the taxes on property inherited from the deceased partner. Finally, the federal tax system actually penalizes gay couples who choose to have one partner remain at home to care for the children; the wage-earning partner is taxed on her income as a single person even though her salary is supporting both partners and their children. Stay-at-home moms should relate to this – imagine if your husband had to pay taxes as a single person!

I could go on forever, but I think it’s time to wrap up this article. However, I am happy to answer any questions you might have. As for me, my wife and I got married this past Tuesday, on the one-year anniversary of our religious wedding. We were already married in the eyes of God – it was time for the state to catch up.

Lesbian pioneers wed at San Francisco City Hall

Gay Unions Shed Light on Gender in Marriage

For insights into healthy marriages, social scientists are looking in an unexpected place.

A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships. Most studies show surprisingly few differences between committed gay couples and committed straight couples, but the differences that do emerge have shed light on the kinds of conflicts that can endanger heterosexual relationships.