Fraggle: I'm missing something here. First, what's with the obsession against people from West Virginia?
I'm stereotyping. Pretty ugly, isn't it? It's not nice to paint every single person in a demographic group with the same brush just because a few high-profile members attract attention to themselves and media, humorists, religious and political groups, and insecure louts happily highlight them to make themselves feel superior. Most Americans use Mississippi or Arkansas as examples of the USA's pockets of pre-Enlightenment thinking. I prefer to clarify that it's not limited to Confederate states, which merely reinforces yet another stereotype.
My point is that you can't have spent much time in a big city in order to be so ignorant of the actual lives of actual gay people in communities where they are not discriminated against and don't have to hide. Even in Red State big cities like Houston and Atlanta, gay people live openly and are loved by their families.
Second, I'm not really sure if you're disagreeing or agreeing with the quoted post?
I'm disagreeing with the assumptions and attitudes that underlie all of your posts on this thread. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. For such a large majority (heterosexuals) to treat a minority so badly, to call them "unnatural," "deviant," "incapable of real love," "unfit to be parents," "promiscuous," "embarrassments to their families," "sinful," (not all quotes from you and I don't mean to imply that you personally have descended to this level of stupidity and ugliness because you have not, but these are typical remarks from the anti-gay marriage contingent)
marginalizes them. They become the outcasts they are depicted as.
Third, I think gay couples tend to distant two families rather than "bring them together and have in-laws," because of the inherent deviance of it. Many - maybe most? - of the relatives might tend to distance themselves from the source, else just talk gossip behind their backs, which further causes social problems and concerns.
This is precisely that marginalization to which I refer. In-laws and blood relatives alike distance themselves from people who try to live in the daylight with their partners and participate in normal activities, because they are
ashamed of them. Shame is not a natural emotion that springs from the heart, mind or spirit, it is entirely imposed by the opinions of others.
Fourth, in what way do "gay couples provide more resources, more manpower, more everything, at least outside West Virginia"? If they weren't with their gay partner, would they then be unproductive and not be able to work? How does this in any way provide for more resources, manpower - and "everything"? Everything???
Hey, these are your words so don't ask me to explain them to you. (Unless this is someone else's quote, this thread has gotten long and confusing.) You're the one who postulated that all of these wondrous advantages accrue to participants in heterosexual marriage. In big cities where gay couples are allowed to mainstream, they get whatever it is that straight couples get. The love of their in-laws, twice as many Christmas presents, cacophonous Thanksgiving dinners, division of labor for housecleaning, gardening, bookkeeping, cooking, etc., two sets of potential grandparents pressuring them for grandchildren. Familiarity breeds "content," and as straight people become accustomed to the presence of gay people they stop viewing them as outsiders. The only serious remaining hurdle, in my experience, is that many of us straight people are a little squeamish about open expressions of physical affection between gay people. Most gay people are delighted to make that compromise and defer it to private moments in return for being accepted by us. The "in your face" behavior acted out in parades and protests is simply the angry release of millennia of suppressed resentment over discrimination.
If we were all gay, the human race would cease to exist.
We are not all gay and we never will be so that argument is deceptive and alarmist. We already know that it is not a learned or chosen preference and research now indicates that it is not hereditary either, but most probably the result of uncommon combinations of developmental influences
in utero such as hormones in the mother's blood. For example the physiology of women who have borne several sons and no daughters sends signals to please try to have a daughter this time, and sometimes it is only partially successful and produces a son who at least won't make the species's mating competition even more unbalanced.
It is a socially deviant form of Nature and is counterproductive to the fundamental primacy of the value of the family - a coherent normal family.
It is not "socially deviant." It is biologically deviant. Loaded words like that make it seem like a threat to civilization and it simply is not. Gay people make their fair share of contributions to the economy and the culture. If the stereotypes are to be believed and gay men (at least) really are more caring and artistic and less bellicose than we are, then in an era when there is way too much war and way too many breeders we could use a whole lot more of them. We do not live in the Stone Age any more and there are many noble ways for people to promote the health, prosperity and advancement of the human race besides raising a "coherent normal family," whatever that is. I certainly don't come from one and my parents were straight and lifelong-monogamous. I have no children yet I'm not in the least worried that I haven't done more than my share to make this world a better place for those of you who have.
The children of a gay marriage would not only grow up being embarassed and mocked through school...
This embarrassment and mocking is something that
you people bring down upon gays and their families. You don't get to make a free choice to be cruel to someone and then criticize him because his children (and his parents and his employer and his pastor and his friends) are the objects of cruelty! Just frelling grow up and
stop it! You have this power. Use it.
they would also grow up being confused about the instincts that Nature gave them to folow, i.e., the natural attraction to the opposite sex.
And you wonder why I think you've spent your entire life in a cabin in West Virginia eating boiled possum and reading the bible? There is absolutely zero credible evidence that heterosexual children are induced into any serious confusion over their sexual identity by having gay parents. No one
decides to be gay or straight. They are born that way. There has always been a small number of precocious prepubescent boys who don't quite understand sexuality and aggressively experiment with it with other aggressively experimental precocious little boys because the little girls run the other way, but that's no indicator of sexual orientation. As sex education filters down to the lower grades and as little girls become less demure and more precocious themselves, the indicence of this behavior is on the wane.
Children are surrounded by the models that the other 92 percent of us provide non-stop, in entertainment, advertising, literature, and daily life. The pressure on them to be straight is so strong that no heterosexual kid is going to be "confused" into acting gay just because his parents are. Indeed, until now it has worked the opposite way and many gay children have been pressured into pretending to be heterosexual, living lives of deceit (sometimes self-deceit) and anguish. Hopefully we can put a stop to that.
If you had ever gotten to know some openly gay people with children and had a conversation with them, you would know that the vast majority of them rather hope that their children will be straight. Not that they're ashamed of themselves, but it was such a hard life that they wish their kids could have it a bit easier. No matter how enlightened we become, the fact that we straight people are an overwhelming majority, and that there is a perhaps a certain inevitable level of biologically induced tension between gay and straight people, I doubt that any significant number of gay parents will
ever create a home atmosphere that encourages their children to be gay if they're in doubt.
