In the comment field of my last post on marriage, this was added:

hey it’s me again. your second post on this subject was an improvement. you obliterated the first 1/2 of my reply. but the following has yet to be responded to:

(1)”first of all, you wouldn’t want your kids walking innocently in the park and seeing something immoral taking place (i.e., drugging, drug-dealing, boozing, violence, bestiality, vandalism, foul language, etc.). obviously we can’t shelter them, but we work to keep our societies free of such actions taking place without consequences. your child suffers much less harm from witnessing any of the above if a cop screams into the scene and shows discipline, than if they are done and not challenged, if they are considered normal. if we allow homosexuality to be okay, same-sex couples cuddling and kissing on a park bench will not be challenged authoritatively. it will be seen as normal. THAT is harmful to your child.

(2)”secondly, don’t forget the children these same-sex couples will be adopting. how will they grow up?

(3)”we need to keep in mind the practical outcomes of such allowances.”

In answer to point (1), yes. You’re right. Children must be guarded, from your perspective. My whole point is that you have no right, in an a-moral, religiously free country, to impose your own system of morality on others, whether they be gay or straight. You can only impose on them what laws the country has, and only then by force of those entrusted to guard and make sure others are upholding those laws. If you’re telling me that an amoral state is wrong, then so be it. There are great evils in both secular and religious authority. If you’re saying a (supposedly) amoral state should be making moral judgements about behavior in its constituents bedrooms, than no. That’s just wrong. The government should only be able to make rules that it can enforce, and rules that can quantifiable be deemed societally helpful.

Now, you mention the park. This is government property, and it has the right to make up whatever restrictions it wants on that land. It can ban kissing, handholding, and baking of cakes if it really wants to. It can put blindfolds on small children who walk through. That’s the government’s business. However, their business is not to punish the behaviors of men and woman in their own houses, except in extreme cases, aberant and unnatural as those behaviors may be. Let me ask you a question: in the state’s eyes, what is worse, spaking or homosexuality? Two homosexuals perhaps love eachother and are expressing their love. On the other hand, the father is beating his child! Of course this is only a surface evaluation — you and I both know that spanking is beneficial, because history bears that out, and that homosexuality is a punishment on a country, because scripture says that. But the state has neither the means nor the option to make a judgement scrictly along scripural lines, unless it is a scripturally-based state, which lead to it’s own set of thumbs and strawberry tarts.

(2) is answered in the logic of (1). Obviously I can’t prevent a gay couple from “having” kids. Obviously a secular state, hamstrung as it is, cannot as well.

The whole point is that governments do not make and enforce moral reality. We all know this. The government could throw all gays in jail and electroshock them until they renounced their lifestyle, sure, but that would be stepping outside its purvue. Remember, the US and Canada are nations under God — but from what the framers of the Constitution and our national anthem said about it, they really meant nations under god, small “g”. That’s the sort of all-inclusive everyone’s-god’s-a-God bullshit (to quote Luther) that the Enlightenment *cough,cough* brought us. And they’ve taken it and ran with it. And in that setting, in the setting we’re in, the public morality determines the government’s morality, not the other way around.

So, who’s fault does that make it, the moral cesspool our culture is playing around in? Well it can’t be Johnny Government’s, because he’s just the mast of the ship if you know what I mean. He’s the compass that points toward the closest magnet. It’s not Bill Populace, he doesn’t know any better. He’s a Bhuddist and a Mormon and a Muslim and does transcendental meditation in the park when his toaster stops working. The fault is ours. Yours and mind. The world needs a moral revolution in the form of revival — again, not in the form of legislation — a sweeping world-changing sort of thing. Christianity is the only solution to present-day moral chaos, not Christians insinuating their moral code on the unwilling who happen to live in the same country. That creates resentment, and worse, opression.

(3) The practical implications are much more immense that I even thought at the beginning. Literally thousands of laws would need to be re-written, and concepts of spousal benefits rethought. Of course, as it is, marriage is a tax disaster. That’s one problem this idea would solve.

Thoughts?

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