06-22-2003, 12:07 AM
The only answer I can ever come up with is the social conservative one; it's tradition.
I take it you are not a social conservative, and don't really understand the mindset involved in being one. Either that or you are being extremely concise ;)
To be opposed to the ideas you are presenting, one needs to have two beliefs.
The first is that there is something virtuous about the life bond between a man and woman, or something virtuous about having one mother and one father and being strongly tied together into a family unit. The person may or may not believe that there is something distasteful about homosexual relationships, but it is sufficient for them to simply believe that a "traditional" marriage offers something positive for society that other various relationships do not. I don't want to write pages in explaining these contributions, but if you have a mother and a father who contributed to your life in ways that could be tied to their gender you can understand this belief and realize that it cannot be dismissed without scrutiny.
The second belief is that government should be allowed to restrict individual liberty to some extent to promote a better society. The vast majority of people believe this to one degree or another. The ideal that "government should not restrict someone from doing something as long as it does not directly harm someone else" is common enough, but very few people believe this in a pure sense. There are almost always some exceptions that people are willing to make, or some difference in interpretation of how something might or might not affect other people.
So a person needs to feel that this specific type of family bond is important enough to be encouraged by law, and that the legal hardship inflict against the liberties of those who don't take this path is a reasonable sacrifice. At that point, the issue of equality is a non-issue. After all, any person can choose any "life partner". If the best thing for society is for that partner to be of the opposite sex, then society can reward that choice. But perhaps in some cases, it might actually be a bad thing for society to prod people into this direction.
Therein lies the catch. Society often doesn't know what is good and bad for itself. Such things get determined by a mix of gut feelings, crackpot theories, and trial and error. The role of the social conservative is to make sure the crackpot theories don't get tried too rapidly, at the risk of making too great of an error :)
Someone in this thread asked rhetorically whether we would restrict the ability of a homosexual couple to adopt children. If the assumption is that everyone would answer "no", it is very much a false assumption. Many people feel that an important factor in a child's environment is to have a mother and a father, and that the gender roles are specifically significant (and to take it a step further, that these parents will remain together for the long haul). If such a person ran an adoption agency, they would "discriminate" between traditionally married couples and everyone else. Most who do not feel this way would probably not be opposed to gay marriages either. Clear evidence on way or the other is a hard thing to come by on such complex issues though.
I take it you are not a social conservative, and don't really understand the mindset involved in being one. Either that or you are being extremely concise ;)
To be opposed to the ideas you are presenting, one needs to have two beliefs.
The first is that there is something virtuous about the life bond between a man and woman, or something virtuous about having one mother and one father and being strongly tied together into a family unit. The person may or may not believe that there is something distasteful about homosexual relationships, but it is sufficient for them to simply believe that a "traditional" marriage offers something positive for society that other various relationships do not. I don't want to write pages in explaining these contributions, but if you have a mother and a father who contributed to your life in ways that could be tied to their gender you can understand this belief and realize that it cannot be dismissed without scrutiny.
The second belief is that government should be allowed to restrict individual liberty to some extent to promote a better society. The vast majority of people believe this to one degree or another. The ideal that "government should not restrict someone from doing something as long as it does not directly harm someone else" is common enough, but very few people believe this in a pure sense. There are almost always some exceptions that people are willing to make, or some difference in interpretation of how something might or might not affect other people.
So a person needs to feel that this specific type of family bond is important enough to be encouraged by law, and that the legal hardship inflict against the liberties of those who don't take this path is a reasonable sacrifice. At that point, the issue of equality is a non-issue. After all, any person can choose any "life partner". If the best thing for society is for that partner to be of the opposite sex, then society can reward that choice. But perhaps in some cases, it might actually be a bad thing for society to prod people into this direction.
Therein lies the catch. Society often doesn't know what is good and bad for itself. Such things get determined by a mix of gut feelings, crackpot theories, and trial and error. The role of the social conservative is to make sure the crackpot theories don't get tried too rapidly, at the risk of making too great of an error :)
Someone in this thread asked rhetorically whether we would restrict the ability of a homosexual couple to adopt children. If the assumption is that everyone would answer "no", it is very much a false assumption. Many people feel that an important factor in a child's environment is to have a mother and a father, and that the gender roles are specifically significant (and to take it a step further, that these parents will remain together for the long haul). If such a person ran an adoption agency, they would "discriminate" between traditionally married couples and everyone else. Most who do not feel this way would probably not be opposed to gay marriages either. Clear evidence on way or the other is a hard thing to come by on such complex issues though.