The Case Against Homosexual Wedlock, Part 2

What Is Marriage?

I have been married to the same woman for twenty-nine years. We shared an exclusive relationship for the seven years before our marriage. Until the challenge of gay marriage abruptly raised its head, I did not give a thought to the nature of marriage or to the relationship of my marriage to our greater society. My marriage was simply the local context of my life, the bounded space in which my wife and I have nurtured our children. I never sought to define my marriage or any marriage; without a thought to the matter, I simply “knew” what marriage was. All that has changed. The provocation of males desiring to marry other males, and females clamoring to marry other females has moved me to look at marriage anew. So what is marriage?

In their bid to capture a marriage privilege for themselves, gays are promoting the falsehood that marriage is just another lifestyle choice, a strictly personal matter created by the couple for themselves alone. This falsehood has a cozy romantic feel, but it paints an untrue portrait of marriage as a private affair between two people in which no one else, not even children of the couple have, or should have, an interest. This same tunnel vision has been extended to include divorce, which is imagined to be nobody’s business but the two wedded spouses.

The common perception of marriage has already been cheapened by feminists who, since the 1970s, have denounced marriage as “slavery,” and “legalized rape” in their headlong rush for personal autonomy and individual self-fulfillment. In 1962, 51 percent of women queried in a public opinion poll believed it was all right to dissolve a troubled marriage; by 1985 that number had leaped to 82 percent. To hell with the children, the fate of marriage now hung on a woman’s perception of her personal happiness, a perception that feminists labored mightily to shape.

Once this false notion of marriage as a strictly private matter got a toehold on the public imagination, marriage ceased to be thought of as an intensely important matter to children, and single motherhood took a giant leap upward in social status. In a 1993 Los Angeles Times article titled “Single Parent Issue Touches Sensitive Nerve,” author Barbara Defoe Whitehead quotes an L.A. pastor as saying, “If a woman can’t find Prince Charming and wants a baby and is ready, society should not dictate what is acceptable.” What does he mean by “ready”? Does he mean rich like Rosie O’Donnell, or does he mean simply desirous of a baby? The trite and dismissive words “Prince Charming” to describe a mature man, a loyal husband and a loving father reveal the pastor’s faint grasp of the importance of husbands, fathers and marriage. By the phrase “society should not dictate what is acceptable” this post-modern pastor is proclaiming his belief that society has no interest in the destruction of the institution of marriage, the elevation of single motherhood and the legion of fatherless future parents who have never witnessed a healthy, sheltering and community-supported marriage of two mature adults, a husband and a wife. Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to this pastor that the neighborhoods of South Central L.A. (ie, Compton) are now terrorized by twenty-five-year-old warlords and the armies of fatherless boys who look to them for the guidance and male role modeling that their out-of-wedlock moms were incapable of providing. Rogue males are the undoing of any civilized order and single motherhood is an incubator of rogue males. America’s high crime rate is fueled by silly women making selfish reproductive decisions.

As more people come to imagine marriage to be merely an emotional relationship between two people, the bond of marriage comes to be seen as just one of many lifestyle choices, all of them equally honored and of equal value. Following the lead of the radical feminists, homosexuals also pursued the demotion of marriage. As Gay Liberation became a movement for “gay rights” and homosexuals became more organized, gays became political constituents whose votes were eagerly sought by pandering politicians. Thereafter cities and corporations, with the help of activist judges, began to extend the benefits of marriage to sundry couplings now deemed the “functional equivalent” of marriage. Soon the homosexuals were describing all special considerations to protect the institution of traditional marriage as “discrimination.” One of the most shameless panderers to the homosexual counterculture was Democratic Mayor David Dinkins who established a domestic-partnership policy in New York City and hailed this monstrosity as a “major step” in granting everyone the same rights as those given to “individuals bonded through the traditional concept of the family.” It was, in fact, a government-sanctioned demotion of the institution of marriage; it disparaged the importance of the profound commitment that marriage vows represent. The government had proclaimed that our civilization had no more interest is supporting committed fathers and mothers than it had in supporting erstwhile sex partners, sleep-over whores, and kept cabana boys.

As if to prove that pandering is not confined to Democrats, Mayor Rudy Giuliani promoted the further expansion of domestic partner benefits. When John Cardinal O’Connor deplored the extension of marital benefits to shack-up couples because “Marriage matters supremely to every person and every institution in our society,” the married mayor, who was fond of squiring his mistress to public events, responded that restricting benefits to married couples violates a “healthy” division between church and state. Huh?

The state had lost its moral bearings and was undermining a vital institution of American civilization. The cardinal was only arguing for a “healthy” restoration of the special status of marriage. The mayor, who was personally sensitive to other people’s moral judgments, lamely responded that “We’re all here because people left other places because someone wanted to enforce their religious viewpoint as the viewpoint of the state.” But Giuliani was the state and he was enforcing a moral decision that was destructive to an institution that was vital to a healthy society. Was he inviting traditional people to emigrate to other lands?

It all played into the hands of the gay activists who, even as they coveted the legitimizing aspects of marriage, kept referring to marriage as “a piece of paper” in the hope that diminishing the status of marriage would make the idea of gay marriage seem less jolting.

Another stratagem used by gay polemicists is to spin out long histories of marriage through the ages, a sort of Museum of Marriage, wherein your gay guide directs your attention to every odd, alien and loveless permutation of marriage that ever was: child brides, arranged marriages, women as chattel, “bride capture” by jungle tribesmen, you name it. The purpose of this horror tour is to convince you that contemporary heterosexual marriage is just the latest of a long line of possible marriage models. Just as liberals believe our Constitution to be an “evolving document”, so too do gays argue that marriage is an evolving institution. So why not just stretch things a bit and let homosexuals enjoy a marriage privilege? What would be the harm?

The harm would be that a newly legitimized homosexual counterculture would quickly infiltrate and colonize every social institution that now nurtures and protects traditional marriage and the healthy objectives of traditional marriage. Homosexuals are a mere 2% of the population, but imagine for a moment a world in which every church, every school, every scout troop, every adoption agency, and every branch of government was contorting itself to accommodate the sensibilities of people with splinter-group sexual appetites. The only reason that the male and female homosexual subcultures exist is that these people sense the world differently. Theirs is an alien way of sensing humanity. The “queer eye” sensibility now being touted on television doesn’t end at fashion, interior design, and that oh-so fabulous moisturizer. Gays have a psychological interior design all their own. To grant them a marriage privilege would be nothing less than the establishment of a radically new marriage paradigm, a mutant model of marriage, a redefinition of marriage so extreme as to define traditional marriage out of existence. In short, gay marriage, were it allowed to establish itself, would alter forever, and for the worse, the entire social context in which marriages now struggle to survive. The new gay utopia would be a place of ever expanding “gay pride,” a sort of gay theme park that neither you nor your children could escape. Was Jesus gay? You’ll be told at the next Sunday sermon. Is your daughter unlovable? She’ll have her fears confirmed when teacher hands out gay-friendly picture books, such as King and King, in which Prince Bertie dismisses several princesses in favor of another prince (they marry and share a kiss). Will your son receive the best benefits of scouting from a gay guy who spends his off hours cruising gay bars for hot pumpin’ anonymous gay sex?

The first impulse of nice people is to want to be nice. They want to be friendly; they want to be inclusive. To these nice people I would say, “Your Mama was right: Be cautious of strangers.” And the gay subculture is stranger than any “nice” person can imagine. To research this essay I have waded through thousands of pages of “gay studies,” gay perspectives, gay imagery and gay pornography. Exploring the gay subculture can best be likened to touring a subterranean sewer system in a glass-bottom boat. It is an alien planet, a world of no redeeming value. This subculture is rapidly becoming a threat to the enterprise of raising healthy children because gay marriage means gay legitimization, which means the endless bombardment of everyone with self-serving gay public service announcements about how sweet, fashionable and normal the queer folk are. Just don’t ask them for any intimate details.

Marriage as we know it today has evolved to meet the material and emotional needs of husbands and wives, fathers and mothers and their dependent children. The marriage vow transforms a man and a woman into a husband and a wife. Their vows are a contract and that contract is solemnized within the protective embrace of a broader social contract between the larger community and the married couple: the understanding that the community will recognize and honor and support the couple’s special commitment to one another. The relationship between the couple and the community is symbiotic: each supports and enriches the other.

It is the responsibility of every father and mother to model, as best they can, masculine and feminine virtue, the finest attributes of each gender, arrived at by the different paths each gender has traveled to reach adulthood. Men and women are acculturated differently, and in marriage each must accept and admire the different essence of the other. The peculiar alchemy of this relationship and the intimate-stranger mystery that lies at its core is a daily presence in the life of every child who dwells in a traditional home. The tonality, the inflections of the daily dad/mom dialog will form the background music of the next generation’s intimate-stranger encounters. In short, parents model marriage for the next generation of parents.

Homosexuality, by contrast, is a hall of mirrors, a life’s maturation interrupted by an infatuation with the reflection of one’s self in others. The entwined pair is so alike in their essentials that all hope is lost of their ever modeling the psychodynamics of normal heterosexual relationships. Any child confined to a gay household has had the window of normal perception slammed shut in his face. Two homosexuals are incapable of modeling a heterosexual social dynamic. The straight children of gay couples are gender expatriates raised in a foreign land of gay sensibility, surrounded by their parents’ gay friends and awash in their parents’ one-gender-only perspectives. These genders are not the natural genders of man and woman, but the quasi-genders of gay and lesbian. Homosexuals are rather like the inhabitants of two-dimensional Flatland who struggle in vain to imagine a world of three dimensions: our world. To put it bluntly, as showcases of romantic attachment and useful role modeling and normal gender interaction, gay households are worst than useless; they are a confusing parody.

Imagine a person reared in a normal two-parent home who for eighteen years was witness to countless subtle, comical, endearing, angry and perplexing Men Are From Mars/Women Are From Venus interactions between Mom and Dad. This collection of memories would be a rich resource of accumulated social wisdom which this young person could use for future guidance. Now imagine how diminished this young person would be if all those memories were erased. He or she would have taken a giant step backwards in social intelligence. Having a head full of memories of your two gay dads being pals is a pretty useless guide for young adults trying to navigate the foggy straits and coastline of the other gender’s psyche. You can’t learn much about heterosexual interpersonal relations by observing homosexuals.

An Experiment in Gay Marriage Goes Haywire

The gay plan to re-imagine marriage as a private relationship would diminish marriage for everyone because it would deprive everyone of what marriage should be: something larger than the feelings of two individuals, a unique institution rooted in custom, supported by law and respected by society. The gay vision of marriage as the next gay lifestyle choice would diminish marriage as a powerful civilizing social institution. The latest gay spin is that marriage is an emotional relationship created for the private satisfaction of two people, in which the larger society plays no role, except to pony up those 1,049 federal benefits the gays keep chattering about. Well,….marriage is more than this shrunken gay perspective.

For most of the twentieth century marriage was so nearly universal as to be almost invisible. Couples married and raised families. Husbands supported their families, women specialized in the array of skills necessary to sustain a household in a time of few conveniences. Having children outside of wedlock was rare and disreputable.

Within a scant two generations all of this changed. The traditional order was done in by feminists, playboy philosophers, feel-good pop psychologists, welfare advocates and an ever-increasing tax burden that made one-wage-earner families a nostalgic memory. Hedonism, greed and the personal fulfillment movement have all taken turns wounding the vital social institution of marriage. Marriage was demoted. The one clear distinction between holy wedlock and casual cohabitation became blurred. What was once understood to be a fundamental social institution came to be re-imagined as a private intimate relationship created by and for only two people for their own satisfaction. This vision is a sad mummified remnant of what marriage should be and it’s the common way in which homosexuals have spoken of marriage throughout the gay-marriage debate. Sadly, this demotion, this re-imagination of a fundamental institution, threatens the stability of American civilization. We can predict the future consequences of the stupid privatization of marriage because others have already stupidly traveled this road to ruin.

Much to their detriment, Scandinavia went the gay-marriage route. In liberal Sweden and Denmark the citizens themselves embraced gay marriage; in more conservative Norway gay marriage was forced on an unwilling population be free-thinking judges and lawmakers. In each case the result was a catastrophe for children and the nurturing institution of marriage.

Because almost all gay marriages are childless, the very existence of gay marriage in Scandinavia enlarged the popular perception that marriage need not have anything to do with child rearing. In Norway, the overwhelmingly liberal media followed the gay-marriage debate closely and missed no opportunity to mock traditional Christian beliefs about the purposes of marriage and the responsibilities of mothers and fathers to their children. The Lutheran church had decried the growing trend of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock child bearing. The church traditionalists were derided by gays and pro-gay clergy. When the dust had settled, the New Age theologians were in the saddle, extolling the virtues of the dawning Scandinavian gay utopia.

And what was the consequence? Today fully sixty percent of the children in Scandinavia are born out of wedlock. When the children are grown, most couples separate. A study by Yale University’s William Eskridge in 2000 revealed that a mere 2,373 homosexual couples had chosen to marry in Denmark after a full nine years of acquiring the opportunity. After a full four years, only 749 gay couples had married in Sweden and a tiny 674 in Norway. When questioned about why so few homosexuals had actually married after creating such social turmoil to acquire the privilege, the gays smugly replied that their argument that gay marriage would promote gay monogamy was just a cynical political tactic: their real goal “was not marriage but social approval for homosexuality.”

We have every reason to believe that the American campaign for gay marriage is just as fraudulent, as mendacious, as lacking in intellectual honesty as the three Scandinavian debates. The gays won in Scandinavia and the place is now a moral vacant lot with wall-to-wall out-of-wedlock children and a bloated socialist daycare system playing the role of absentee spouses. Why would America want to fling its best life-sustaining institution into the gutter and follow Scandinavia down the ruinous gay-marriage rabbit hole?

For the damage that the cynical, self-serving gay community has done to the children of Scandinavia, the gay community deserves everyone’s undying indignation. Likewise, by making a shambles of the greater social context that once supported marriage in Scandinavia, the gay community has once again demonstrated the destructive potential of its social perspectives. Thanks to their self-serving assault on tradition, marriage in Scandinavia is now virtually extinct. The disastrous large-scale Scandinavian experiment demonstrates exactly what will become of marriage in America if the gay social agenda gets any traction, and that includes the creation of any marriage-lite, commitment-lite, domestic-partnership-type civil unions.

The gay vision of marriage is a shrunken caricature of real marriage. Marriage is not a private affair; marriage transforms the human environment. Marriage creates a complex fabric of interwoven human obligations between the spouses and also between the larger society and every married person. For example, it is always morally wrong to participate in the breaking of a marriage vow, which is why all married people are always off limits to sexual opportunists and the emotionally needy.

Marriage is special because most marriages, predictably, produce offspring. The married couple is thereafter obligated to mold their offspring into healthy and responsible citizens. This two-decade-long obligation deserves the support of other social institutions for the long-term benefit of our civilization. Those unmarried people who see this consideration as an injustice against the unmarried are short sighted; they fail to see that the support of marriage for what it is: one of society’s long-term investments in its own preservation.

Even childless couples support the institution of marriage by the traditional form of their marriages and the support they give to other married couples. That form is important, because it maintains the social fabric of the traditional marriage culture. Wildly differing forms of marriage could only disrupt the marriage culture. Freakishly novel hybrid versions of marriage would enjoy little support from other marriages. If we are to judge from the Scandinavian disaster and the weak attraction to marriage by Canadian gays, there will never be enough gay marriages in America to form a mutually supporting network of gay marriages. At best, the collective of gay marriages will form an impoverished system of mutant marriages shunned by the traditional marriage culture because the anomalous role modeling of same-sex marriages makes the complicated enterprise of modeling marriage for the next generation even more complicated. Normal parents simply don’t want to be burdened with the daily task of explaining away the strange deviations of the gay marriage microcosm. The legitimization of deviant models of marriage would be a big distraction for normal parents who are struggling to raise the 98% of normal children who are the future parents of America.

No better example of the self-serving gay-marriage agenda can be found than the essay “Privatize Marriage: A Simple Solution to the Gay-Marriage Debate” by David Boaz, which first appeared in Slate on April 24, 1998 and has since been circulating as a collection of gay agenda talking points for the gay-marriage advocates in the liberal media. In his opening paragraph Boaz asks “…why should anyone have – or need to have – state sanction for a private relationship? As governments around the world contemplate the privatization of everything from electricity to Social Security, why not privatize that most personal and intimate of institutions, marriage?” It’s a very gay perspective. It’s another attempt by a gay activist to narrow our attention down to just those two idiosyncratic individuals in a single relationship, thereby distracting us from the fact that marriage is a fundamental institution upon which entire civilizations depend. In America, the state governments act as gatekeepers to ensure that persons applying for a license to marry are people who, in fact, meet minimal qualifications to enter into a marriage contract. For instance, the ability to understand the obligations of a marriage contract and to consent to those obligations is a minimal requirement to receive a license to marry. If the vital gatekeeper function were left to private persons (ie, the New Age clergy), then all sorts of quirky unions would crop up. The government declares that humans beneath the legal age of consent cannot enter into a marriage contract, no matter how much sadness this imposes on the hopeful homosexual boy-lovers at NAMBLA. So government oversight and licensing is a good thing; the government is upholding the will of the people.

In paragraph two Mr. Boaz tells us that privatization could mean removing the state completely from all matters relating to marriage. In other words, he doesn’t want society, through the agency of society’s elected representatives, to have any say in what constitutes a marriage in our society. Got that? Gays should be allowed to invent whatever sort of marriage arrangements give them pleasure, the rest of society should close its eyes and mind its own business and disregard any negative ripple effects that may emanate from these strange “marriages.” The author generously adds that “Religious institutions are free to sanction such relationships under any rules they choose.” Really? Our current immigration laws invite the Muslims of the world to join us here in America. Their holy book approves of polygamy. It’s one of the “rules they choose.” Will polygamy be allowed? Or will society, through the agency of society’s elected representatives, have a say in the matter?

Next, David Boaz suggests that the privatization of marriage could also mean that marriage is treated “like any other contract: The state may be called upon to enforce it, but the parties define the terms…the existence and details of such an agreement should be up to the parties.” So…, if the contract calls for one of the marriage partners to be the leather-bound cabana-boy sex toy of the other partner, then the state should enforce the contract even as delicate Ramon pleads pitifully that he is worn out and only wants to flee the relationship and open a small antiques shop on Cape Cod? Not a chance.

Here’s paragraph three: “And privatizing marriage would, incidentally, solve the gay marriage problem. It would put gay relationships on the same footing as straight ones, without implying official governmental sanction. No one’s private life would have official government sanction – which is how it should be.” This is the heart of the matter for homosexuals. They don’t care at all about the long-term vitality of the institution of marriage; their first concern is to “put gay relationships on the same footing as straight ones.” They hunger for respectability. Mr. Boaz’s fretfulness about “government sanction” is misplaced. The government is only a gatekeeper granting licenses to the qualified. It is society at large that will decide whether novel gay unions are nurtured or shunned.

Boaz ends with the snippy line, “…let’s get the government out of marriage and allow individuals to make their own marriage contracts, as befits a secular, individualistic republic at the dawn of the information age.” It’s a very gay male take on marriage. Mr. Boaz needs to be reminded that in our “secular” republic almost every marriage ceremony takes place in a religious context. In our “individualistic” republic marriage still represents the renunciation of the self-centered ethos of the individual in favor of a shared life for the greater good of both spouses and their children. The notion that this ancient and beneficial institution should undergo some sudden reevaluation “at the dawn of the information age” is a notion too gay for me to grasp. We have transistors, therefore we must also have gay marriage? I don’t get it.

The gay tactic here is to fragment the coherent community of mutually supporting heterosexual families. If marriage can be re-imagined as a cosmos of unique contractual agreements in which no human relationship is more life-enhancing or socially useful than any other, then even the most socially useless and degrading of human entanglements will be elevated to the honored status of a traditional husband-and-wife marriage.

Every culture has its unique ethos, its distinguishing mores, its fundamental values and spirit. The institution of marriage is an organic expression of the complementary nature of the heterosexual relationship. Each complementary couple, bonded in marriage, becomes a living organ of the much larger organism of the marriage culture, the culture of bonded couples. Each couple, in principle, becomes the nucleus of a possible family. The community of families forms the nursery of the nation. It is here that the young learn life-sustaining lessons about normal human bonding and normal gender deportment. Those couples who do not form families still strengthen the marriage culture, so long as they model normal pair-bonding behavior.

Couples from subcultures that do not model normal pair bonding are the organs of an alien organism. The most outstanding contribution of homosexuals to the marriage culture would be confusion. Everyone knows this. It’s the reason why proponents of gay marriage try to shape the issue as a matter of individual liberty, as a matter of “gay rights.” By narrowly focusing attention on gay individuals, they distract us from the negative consequences a homosexual ethos would have on any host culture. Gay men are notoriously promiscuous. With an average personal history of hundreds of different, mostly anonymous, sexual encounters their only heterosexual rivals are professional sex-trade workers and a few celebrities. Does anyone believe that married gay males will suddenly forget the way to Fire Island or the nearest bathhouse? To quote Andrew Sullivan, “Many gay men value this sexual freedom more than the stresses and strains of monogamous marriage (and I don’t blame them).” I will have more to say about Andrew Sullivan later.

The Gay Marriage Trojan Horse

The most frequent defense of gay marriage is presented in the form of a question. It usually goes something like this, “What possible harm would result if dear old Bert and Ernie got married?” A variation of this argument is, “What harm would come to your traditional marriage if homosexuals were free to marry one another?” These are not really arguments at all; they are a challenge to heterosexuals to produce arguments in defense of traditional wedlock. This is backwards, the burden is on the gay challengers to convince society that gay marriage would do no harm to existing institutions.

Take note that gay arguments are usually atomistic. Questions about Bert & Ernie or “your marriage” are meant to focus your attention on the microcosm of one gay couple or just your marriage, and to turn your attention away from the bigger question: Would the creation of a gay marriage privilege weaken America’s social fabric and diminish the utility of its sustaining institutions?

Asking you what possible harm one gay marriage would cause is like asking a pathologist what possible harm one bacterium would cause. The answer is, probably no harm at all. The host would cope with one bacterium. But what about two bacteria? Or a million? Using this analogy we are moved to wonder, “Would commonplace gay marriages produce social pathologies?” And, “Would gay marriage weaken vital social institutions?” Is gay marriage a Trojan Horse best left outside the fortress of our traditional marriage culture? There are reasons to believe that it is.

When asked how gay marriage would harm your marriage, the best answer may be that it would harm your marriage by screwing up and rendering untrustworthy a network of social institutions that now support and protect the traditional marriage culture. By granting gays a marriage privilege our traditional culture would, in effect, be entering into a marriage with the homosexual counterculture. Allowing gays to marry one another, solemnizing their anomalous unions, is nothing less than legitimizing homosexuality and homosexual perspectives. The gay community is well aware of this subtext to the gay marriage debate; that’s why gays who personally shun monogamy are still eager to realize a gay marriage privilege. The legitimacy that a marriage privilege would confer upon gays is their passport into the most intimate inner sanctums of our social institutions. To grasp the implications of what this would mean we should examine a few social institutions where pockets of gay culture have gained a toehold.

A Cancer On the Catholic Church

The Catholic Church is presently undergoing a gut wrenching self-appraisal. The tragedy of widespread sexual molestations and rapes by Catholic priests, spanning decades, has its roots in one tragic oversight: the Church allowed a homosexual culture to establish itself within the Catholic seminary schools. By the latest accounting, about 4% of American Catholic priests have been implicated in sexual improprieties. This is probably an undercount. The molestation of boys and young men is wildly underreported. Those homosexual priests who have done no wrong, nonetheless, by their very presence, enlarged the gay comfort zone within the Church. Any gay enclave is a self-reinforcing engine of promiscuous gay permissiveness.

There has been much loose talk about “pedophile priests”, probably because this alliteration trips off the tongue so nicely. But an examination of the Church’s report on the sex scandals shows scant signs of pedophilia. Pedophilia is a sexual attraction to prepubescent humans. Puberty in our era usually starts at age eleven years; it’s all over by age thirteen. Gay sex with post-pubescent boys is called pederasty, not pedophilia, and it is just another form of homosexuality. Pederasts are just plain homosexuals. So, in truth, the Catholic Church has a problem caused by indwelling pockets of homosexual culture that are inimical to the Church’s Christian mission.

On February 28, 2004 the Newark Star Ledger published the results of a national survey commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to determine the extent and nature of sexual abuse by its clergy, based on an analysis of abuse reports from 1950 to 2002. According to this report 81 percent of the victims were male. Only 22%, about one-fifth, could be classified as pedophilia. Fully 78% of the reported sexual indecencies were victimizations of youths between the ages of 11 and 17 years. The report illustrated how the percentage of homosexual victimizations steadily increased over time from 64% in the 1950s to 76% in the 1960s, to 86% in the 1970s. It remained at the 86% level through the 1980s, there is no information included for later years. Especially telling is the single line under the heading “Accused priests who also have been abused, by type of abuse,” which reads “Sexual abuse – 65%. This tells us that homosexual contact is especially damaging to the normal development of a healthy male psyche. According to the report 28% of the abuses involved clothing being stripped from the victim; 27% involved homosexual sucking on the victim’s penis, and a in quarter of the cases the abuser attempted or achieved full penile penetration of the victim.

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, echoed the view of several sociologists when she observed that the number of abuse claims, 10,669, under represents the size of the victim population. Some experts estimate that the victim population might be as large as 100,000. Quoting the Newark Star Ledger: “Though the study did not blame celibacy or homosexuality for the abuse, it said better understanding of each, and acknowledgment of ‘significant changes in sexual behavior in the culture at large’ in the 1960s and 1970s, were to required properly understand the crisis.” This is nothing but coy “clergy-speak.” The significant changes in sexual behavior” alluded to were the collapse of traditional societal restraints on sexual promiscuity and the Jack-in-the-Box eruption of its dark companion, Gay Liberation, with all its half-baked rationalizations for why homosexuals deserve entrée to the deepest recesses of our social institutions: our churches, our schools, our youth organizations, our military barracks, and the very cornerstone institution of our culture, marriage.

Quoting the Conference report: “In some instances, according to one bishop, the culture of, ‘If it feels good, it’s all right’ infiltrated seminaries…As a result, a homoerotic culture took root at some seminaries” and a “gay subculture” developed.” And further, “The Board was told that some seminarians were propositioned (or worse) by older seminarians or faculty, and little was done when complaints were made about this misconduct.”

Seminary candidates were not even asked their sexual orientation until the 1990s. Today, a sadder-but-wiser Church asks this question routinely. The researchers approve, saying that “a more searching inquiry is necessary for a homosexually oriented man by those who decide whether he is suitable for the seminary and for ministry.” It’s amazing to watch “smart people” using research committees to acquire common sense. Any normal twelve-year-old boy could tell any social service institution to “hold back the homosexuals.” A kid’s life is tough enough without the gay male’s toxic touch.

The Suffering That Gays Cause

On March 8th, 2004, the Newark Star Ledger featured an article titled “Support builds for abuse victims” and subtitled “More males seeking help in group sessions.” The first line of staff writer Ana Alaya’s inquiry reads: “Mark Goebel says he was twelve the first time the ‘monster’ raped him.” Ms. Alaya goes on to detail Mark’s two-year ordeal at the hands of a homosexual teacher at a boarding school in Princeton, NJ. Said Mr. Goebel, “I didn’t even know how to share an experience like that with someone, how to get beyond the fear, the flashbacks, especially when I was hoping to put myself in a living sexual relationship with another person.”

The tragic consequences of the colonization of Catholic Church institutions by homosexuals have brought the subject of toxic gay contact into the spotlight. “The recent exposure has begun to break the isolation,” says Mark Crawford, a board member of the national group Male-Survivor, a support group for male victims of sexual abuse. In Bergen County, NJ, inquires from male victims to the YMCA’s Rape Crisis Center have doubled in the past two years. A new support group for male victims has attracted more than thirty men. The Essex County Rape Crisis Center is also inaugurating a program for male victims of homosexuals. Said the director, Ursula Liebowitz, “I firmly believe male victims are forgotten victims. They feel the rape crisis centers are a women’s world.”

The Saint Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital in New York has added a second group therapy session to its Crime Victim’s Treatment Center. Louise Kindley, a social worker at the Victim’s Center said that more male victims have been encouraged to come forward because of the clergy scandal, though none of her referrals were abused by clergy. “A lot of men I see are coming from AA, Debtors Anonymous and other groups. I think more people are talking about the abuse in the 12-step rooms. It’s a very big change, and a good change,” observed Kindley.

The Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests (SNAP) has grown dramatically from two chapters in 2002 to 57 chapters today. This group has 5000 members, some of whom were abused by homosexuals other than clergy.

At a SNAP meeting in Mendham, NJ, Bob Deacon revealed how his life was “disrupted” for 40 years by suicide attempts and ruined relationships because a homosexual abused him when he was young. Said Deacon, “I’m shedding the guilt and the shame.” Mark Goebel said his abuse at the hands of a homosexual teacher at the American Boychoir School nearly ruined his life. He drank heavily throughout college and military service and was constantly on guard to contain his “combustible anger.” The teacher was dismissed after two other students reported the teacher’s sexual advances toward them. The teacher has since been sued by another alumnus.

According to a widely quoted study by David Finkelhor, a sociology professor at the University of New Hampshire, one of every six boys is the victim of sexual abuse before they reach the age of eighteen years. Both male and female victims of sexual exploitation experience shame and guilt, but experts point out that male victims carry additional burdens. Richard Gartner is the author of Betrayed as Boys: Psychodynamic Treatment of Sexually Abused Men.” Observed Mr. Gartner, “To acknowledge yourself as a victim means to many boys that they are not male and that stops them from talking to other men about it. Intertwined with that can be confusion about sexuality, if the boy is abused by a man.”

Exactly! Sexual contact with homosexuals is especially damaging to the healthy emotional development of young males: it creates self-doubt, it diminishes self-worth, it deepens confusion in an already confused young person. It can also foster rage and embitterment, even, in some cases, a pathological desire to reverse roles with the victimizer by becoming a victimizer. Remember: 65% of the accused Catholic priests said that they themselves had been the victims of early sexual abuse. So the toxic touch of the homosexual predator can reach out across generations. All the men whose bright futures were derailed by contact with homosexuals were supposed to become emotionally healthy husbands and have fulfilling marriages and model healthy manhood for their children. For many of them this is a shattered dream. So to those who wonder aloud how gay marriage would harm the marriages of heterosexuals, we may answer that any homosexual influence in any institution that is intended to be an incubator of healthy manhood is a menace to future straight marriages. America needs healthy husbands, and healthy fathers and healthy marriages rooted in healthy heterosexual relationships. Why encourage the encroachment of gay-subculture values on these institutions?

Answering Andrew Sullivan

The sum of all arguments in favor of gay marriage is aptly likened to a vast but peculiar sea: many miles wide, but only an inch deep. Collectively these arguments present a program of homosexual self-interest, tarted up with unsubstantiated speculations about how the radical gay social agenda will be good for American civilization. In the arena of ideas, certain gay gladiators have gained a reputation as the ones to beat in the gay marriage debate. I have read their best stuff; it’s not that impressive. The most frequently mentioned advocate of gay marriage is Andrew Sullivan; gays seem to think that he’s the “go-to” guy for a snappy defense of homosexual wedlock. As a self-proclaimed gay conservative, Mr. Sullivan has won acclaim as the gay Left’s favorite torpedo in the current assault on traditional social values.

On February 16, 2004, Time magazine published Mr. Sullivan’s plea for gay marriage “Why the ‘M’ Word Matters to Me.” It’s an embarrassing revelation written in the earnest “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” style so dear to fifth graders, with the opening line, “As a child, I had no idea what homosexuality was.” For little Andy, it was all downhill from there.

He says he “grew up in a traditional home.” That’s where he learned that “The most important day of your life was when you got married,” which is so gay. I too grew up in a traditional home and neither I, nor any of my normal buddies ever gave a moment’s thought to the day when we might escort a bride to the altar. We were guys, not gays. Fretting about that “most important day” never entered our heads. Marriage was for parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and other remnants of the Age of Dinosaurs.

Andrew tells us that as he grew older “I didn’t feel the things for girls that my peers did. All the emotions and special rituals and bonding of teenage heterosexual life eluded me.” Andrew was becoming aware of his indwelling quasi-autistic lack of response to the half of humanity who are normal men’s sexual complements. Andy grew confused: “My emotional bonds to other boys were one-sided; each time I felt myself falling in love, they sensed it, pushed it away.” Of course they pushed it away! Ninety-eight percent of boys have a biological destiny distinct from that of any stray homosexual. The budding oddness of gayness will only elicit discomfort from normal boys.

Andy immersed himself in schoolwork, “anything to give an excuse not to confront reality.” He frets, “Would I ever have the most important day of my life?” He imagines that if only he can manage a marriage he will, at last, become a “full part” of his family, as if marriage, like a new garment, will make him more appealing. The thought that his homosexual marriage might shock and revolt his “Catholic, conservative, middle class” family never enters his gay head.

He reveals that “like many teens, I withdrew, became neurotic, depressed, at times close to suicidal.” This gay intellectual wants us to believe that his teenage angst is typical of gay teens and that his gayness was the sole cause of his malaise. To put this in perspective, fully 15% of humanity is afflicted with a genetically-based predisposition to shyness. These people feel ill at ease in social situations – always. So there are seven times as many shy people as there are gays. So shyness causes seven times more social isolation as gayness, but we are asked to feel some special sympathy for gays. Why?

Mr. Sullivan’s real purpose here is to exploit his unhappy adolescence for political advantage. He has suffered the pangs of unrequited love from his male friends, therefore society owes him the institution of gay marriage. It’s a sad old song: Nobody knows the trouble he’s seen. But would any parent want young Andy putting the moves on their son? Not a chance. Andy was born with strange proclivities, therefore he is destined to live the life of a biologically marginal person. He longs to be celebrated on his “most special day,” but most people find the celebration of any relationship rooted in a biological curiosity to be a bit creepy, at best.

Nonetheless, Mr. Sullivan wants nothing to do with marriage-lite: “Putting gay relationships in some other category – civil unions, domestic partnerships, whatever -- …by their euphemism, by their very separateness, they actually build a wall between gay people and their families. They put back the barrier many of us have spent a lifetime trying to erase.” But gay relationships are in some other category; they are a striking deviation from normal behavior; they are a flagrant repudiation of the complementary “other”, of the central dynamic of traditional marriage. Any barrier that exists between Mr. Sullivan and his family is one created by Mr. Sullivan’s own exceptional sexual appetites. Were Andy’s mom and dad hoping to have a warm relationship with Andy’s future wife? Would they be just as thrilled sharing the holidays with Andy’s husband, or male bride, or whatever? Andy might think so because Andy is lost in Gay Fantasy Land, a theme park of the mind, where gays imagine that acquiring the external trappings of heterosexual courtship will magically win them acceptance as social equals.

On October 8th, 2003, the Great Gay Hope, Andrew Sullivan, went public with an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “If It’s Not a Crime to be Gay, Why Can’t We Get Married?” Even the title was a distortion. It was never a crime to be gay, only certain specific forms of conduct were deemed unlawful. Sullivan tells us that we are now in a “post-Lawrence world” where “gay Americans are no longer criminals.” This is a reference to Texas where, until recently, homosexual anal intercourse was deemed a tiny Class C misdemeanor that was seldom enforced. Only a gay drama queen could make it sound like the lifting of a death sentence.

By paragraph two, Sullivan is fully nonsensical: “…if homosexuals are no longer criminals for having consensual private relations, then they cannot be dismissed as somehow alien or peripheral to society.” Let’s deconstruct this sentence. First of all, what Mr. Sullivan demurely refers to as “private relations” is best understood after an hour spent scrutinizing gay pornography. If you don’t find these graphic depictions of gay lust “alien and peripheral”, to use Mr. Sullivan’s own words, then you are not emotionally mainstream. Cruising for anonymous gay sex with strangers is virtually universal among gay males; a majority of gay males seek sex in commercial settings, such as gay bathhouses. All of this is “alien and peripheral” to mainstream heterosexual sensibilities. It may no longer be legal to arrest gays for having their preferred type of sex behind closed doors, but countless gays will still be arrested each year for performing creepy, lewd and disgusting sex acts in public places. Decriminalizing out-of-sight gay sex didn’t make its habitués any less “alien and peripheral.”

Mr. Sullivan goes on to cite a poll of young people, most of whom are said to believe “that gay marriage would benefit society.” Well, when you have to look for support from the least mature and most inexperienced segment of society, then you are in real trouble. Andy then tries to dazzle us with the brilliance of this gay argument: “When the daughter of the vice president is openly gay, it’s hard to treat homosexual citizens as some permanent kind of Other, as a threat to civil order and society.” What!!!? If I tried to float this silly innocence-by-association argument at the monthly Mensa dinner, I’d be hooted out into the parking lot.

Let’s examine this: Once, long ago, some guy who one day would become vice-president, had a daughter who was exposed to testosterone while she was still in her mother’s womb, and because this daughter’s daddy one day became vice-president, all of us should now, somehow, find it difficult to imagine that Dick Cheney’s dyke daughter is different from other, normal, females. Gay logic doesn’t get any more cogent than this.

Mr. Sullivan summarizes the third paragraph of his argument in the line: “But when all illegality is removed from gay people, as it has been, that social policy [prohibitionism] has to change.” He means to suggest that just because consensual gay sex acts between adults in private are no longer illegal in the United States, we should all embrace gays as people who are “just like us.” It’s a sly argument that attempts to gloss over the meaningful distinction between what is merely legal and what is legitimate, proper, and in the best interest of a healthy, robust social order. Is there any part of the gay counterculture that can be described as the cornerstone of a robust future society? Gay society is a self-indulgent biological dead end, punctuated here and there by a few relationships that include children, most of them from previous relationships that were ruined by the homosexual’s dishonesty about his or her true capacity to love someone of the other sex. Declaring the strange behaviors of homosexuals to be legal does not render them any less strange. Legality is the bare behavioral minimum that society demands of its members. The decriminalization of what gays do in private is a measure of society’s tolerance, it is not a measure of society’s acceptance of gay behavior.

Mr. Sullivan goes on to suggest that the quest for gay marriage is a campaign for greater familial responsibility by gays. Never mind that the number of gay couples with children is a microscopic atoll in the vast sea of heterosexual civilization and that almost all gay “families” are just two childless homosexuals eager to cash in on a benefits package that was intended to uplift the next generation by assisting traditional families which are the engines of America’s future. Does anyone honestly believe that a child who grew up in the Castro district of San Francisco, who was dragged to every gay pride parade, who summered with gays on Fire Island, who was forever surrounded by mom’s lesbian pals or daddy’s effeminate boy friends will ever witness enough normal adult heterosexual interaction to ever become the sort of person whom our culture would define as a healthy man or woman? For a child, life in the gay subculture is a life of cultural malnutrition.

Homosexuals may be male or female, but their indwelling values place them outside the circle of our culture’s definition of man and woman. Since they are neither men nor women, they are incapable of modeling masculine or feminine virtue for the young. Gays are simply gays. They can only model gayness, which is their essence. They are, to use Andrew Sullivan’s own phrase, “some permanent kind of Other.”

Andrew pouts that “if a group of African-Americans were to set themselves up and campaign for greater familial responsibility among black couples, do you think conservatives would be greeting them with dismay and discouragement or even a constitutional amendment to stop them?” Well,…no. That’s because conservatives understand that well after slavery, in the 1920s for instance, fully 80% of black children were being raised in a home by two married parents. Utopian leftists, with their vote-buying welfare schemes that offered tax dollars to black women who didn’t have a man in the home, shattered poor but stable black households. Thereafter, black out-of-wedlock births skyrocketed to 70% of all black births. Conservatives believe in their hearts that this tragic trend can be reversed and that traditional black families can once again be nurtured and healed and strengthened. But what has any of this to do with a gay model of abnormal cohabitation trying to fob itself off on the rest of us as something worthy of the name marriage? It is in the interest of society to strengthen all heterosexual unions and to encourage marriage as the best context for childrearing. Society has no similar interest in encouraging gay relationships. The fact of gay male un-manliness and gay female un-womanliness guarantees that they will make a muddle of childrearing. Everything about gay childrearing is questionable. Not a single study attests to the robust mental health of children who have been deprived of the attention of two complementary gender models. A child must be exposed to both gender models, interacting over a span of years, before he can understand how these two complementary models coexist. This is how children pick up the beat, the happy rhythm, of normal male/female interaction. Deviant models can only model deviance. Since heterosexuals outnumber gays by 50 to one, a gay parent will almost certainly have a heterosexual child, for whom the gay parent can only model odd social behavior. Bringing an occasional friend or relation into the child’s life to “model” the missing gender simply makes a mockery of the true importance of the missing mother or father. As far as children are concerned, gay marriage is a cruel hoax.

Mr. Sullivan rounds out his polemic by asserting that it is wrong “to oppose any arrangement that might give greater security, responsibility and opportunity to gay couples.” The reason it would be wrong, presumably, is that it would hurt their feelings, for it would do no other harm. Gays are of little use to the future of society, they raise few children, the future owes them no debt. Their urgent pleadings distract our attention and distort our politics. For example: is AIDS in America really such a big deal? Influenza kills more people than AIDS in America. A study concluded that if every HIV infected person were to drop dead today, their passing would have no noticeable effect on the economy. That’s because everyone with AIDS belongs to a social group that, to use Mr. Sullivan’s word, is “peripheral.” If we really loved humanity, then we would launch an all-out war against the common cold. But gays are now a political constituency of the Democratic Party and so taxpayers must bankroll lavish drug programs to assist gays with their self-inflicted AIDS and we must support gay marriage because gays want it and will stamp their feet and threaten to withhold donations from Democrat politicians until the Democrat politicians deliver the goodies. Pandering to gays will prove harmful to traditional life-sustaining institutions, but it will keep compliant liberals in positions of influence.

With that said, we should note that enthusiasm for gay marriage is far from unanimous among gays themselves. Many gays would be pleased to see the whole gay marriage parade float go up in flames. In the September 1996 issue of Details, gay writer John Weir disapproved of gay marriage, insisting that gayness was a critical posture against bourgeois convention: “I thought the whole point of being homosexual was to poke fun at heterosexual convention. When you commit yourself to being gay you’re supposed to take a lifelong vow of otherness. You’re supposed to live on the outside, to glory in being different.” But Andy Sullivan doesn’t want to be the “permanent Other” no matter how deeply the gay counterculture has taken a “lifelong vow of otherness.” The gay community, it seems, has a split personality on matters such as monogamy, fidelity and other stuff that makes a marriage more than a mockery.

Answering Other Gay Wishful Thinkers

On December 11, 2003 the Bay Area Reporter published “Bad Arguments for Gay Marriage” by gay author Dale Carpenter. In his preamble Carpenter says that there are several good arguments for gay marriage, including “the stability and commitment it would encourage in gay relationships and in gay life generally. That would benefit everybody, gay and straight.” This is hokum. The stability and commitment of gay relationships has no implications for straight society. Nothing about the gay subculture is of any vital interest to mainstream America. If every gay relationship in America dissolved today, few people outside the gay enclaves would take notice.

Carpenter goes on to debunk the notion that gays would be better at marriage than straights. “There will be instances of gay spousal abuse and infidelity, just as there are for straight couples.” Instances? Mr. Carpenter is much too modest.

If you enter the words “gay” and “domestic violence” in the Google search engine you will instantly get 219,000 website descriptions, most of them public-service sites created by gays themselves. It’s convincing evidence that partner abuse and violence are epidemic among gays and lesbians. At the www.lambda.org website the title reads “Domestic Violence Prevalent in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Relationships.” We are told that “Between 25% and 33% of relationships between lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender partners include abuse…” Statistics compiled by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs documented 3,327 cases in 1997, which was a 41% increase (975) over the previous year. The number of abuse reports by gays (52%) and lesbians (48%) were essentially equal. They concluded that gay-community violence “appears to be vastly under-reported.”

The truth blows a big hole in the myth that gay, and especially lesbian, relationships exist on some higher moral plane than man/woman relationships. An article in the Calgary Sun (3/19/04), titled “Gay Abuse in Shadows” gives the view from Canada: ”The happy-go-lucky gay lifestyle often portrayed by the media often comes with a dark side of mental, physical, and sexual abuse, said a crisis counsellor. Jane Oxenbury, a psychologist with Edan Counselling Associates in Calgary, said research shows close to 33% of people in homosexual relationships are in fact being abused.”

A National Institutes of Health study appeared in the December 2002 issue of the American Journal of Public Health. It revealed that HIV-positive males were more likely to be the targets of gay violence: “Perhaps the most startling and disturbing finding that was that being HIV-positive increases the likelihood of being physically battered,” said Reif. “Many men in the study were subjected to physical and emotional violence after telling their partners they had been diagnosed with HIV. Tragically, men who rely on abusive partners for financial support often are forced to make the impossible choice between violence and homelessness.” How’s that for sensitivity?

From England, Dr. Stephen Eccles, a clinical psychologist at the Manchester Mental Health Partnership, tells us: “Additional forms of abuse may occur which are unique to same-sex partnerships, such as threatening to out a partner to family and friends.” Other examples include coercing partners by threatening to reveal their HIV status. Dee Shelly of the educational charity Gay and Lesbian Arts and Media (GLAM) in Brighton says there is a conspiracy of silence in the gay community: “It’s like washing our dirty linen in public. We don’t want straight people thinking we’re just as bad as they are. With lesbians, the idea is that we’re all feminist, loving women who don’t do that ‘male stuff’”. But it’s bullshit – a woman is as likely to thump her partner as a man. And gay men don’t want to be seen as victims.” So the lesbians are in deep denial that their ranks include lots of hard-knuckled control freaks and the gays don’t want to be seen as effeminate pushovers, and all of them want to deceive the normal world into believing that gay relationships are the last best hope for reviving the sick-and-dying institution of marriage. Fat chance. Burdening the institution of marriage with the indwelling pathologies of the gay community would be like tossing a drowning friend an anchor instead of a life preserver.

The big gay cover-up is confirmed by the lambda website:
Telling heterosexuals about battering in the lesbian, bi or gay relationship can reinforce the myth many believe that lesbian , bi and gay relationships are “abnormal”. This can further cause the victim to feel isolated and unsupported.
The lesbian, bi and gay community is often not supportive of victims of battering because many want to maintain the myth that there are no problems (such as child abuse, alcoholism, domestic violence, etc.) in lesbian, bi and gay relationships. So gay and lesbian violence goes unattended because the “gay community” doesn’t want the true facts to derail their heavily spin-doctored political and social agendas.

Mr. Carpenter’s assertion that “instances” of infidelity will occur in gay marriages is too laughable to countenance. The only heterosexuals who even approach the average gay for promiscuity are professional sex workers. To suggest that gay marriages would suddenly become models of monogamous probity is ridiculous. Gay marriages will be a reflection of the gay culture; they will be queer parodies of traditional marriage. These parodies can only diminish public esteem for the institution of marriage. The infiltration and colonization of the institution of marriage by homosexuals will prove every bit a damaging as their colonization of Catholic institutions.

The March 12th, 1998 issue of the Windy City Times included “Gay Marriage: Ready, Set…” by gay author Paul Varnell, in which he cautions the many gays who eagerly anticipate that a gay marriage privilege will magically stabilize their shaky gay relationships. He says that gay “couples may choose to marry hoping that legal structure will solidify an unstable and uncertain relationship. But many of those will find, as heterosexual couples have found for centuries, that marriage is not a panacea, that it does not improve the other person, (in fact often the opposite)…”

The very existence of a gay marriage privilege will put new pressure on all gay relationships. As Paul Varnell observes, “…couples may feel that their relationship is fine the way it is and decide not to marry. But that in itself will look like a statement about the relationship since they are not taking the next available step. That is, relationships that previously looked and felt fully ‘committed’, now if not legalized may seem ‘not fully committed’, even ‘keeping our options open’ without any inherent change in the relationship. Family and friends will wonder if the couple really is committed – even if the couple really is [a couple].”

As Paul Varnell says, all gays would be subject to “encouragement by friends, relatives and other gay couples to ‘settle down’, ‘tie the knot’, and so forth, when marriage becomes available…Every culture or society, after all, tends to develop favored forms of behavior, certain ways they expect people to behave, forms that are believed to conduce to the social benefit.” Well, yes. That’s why gays are considered queer rogues, but Varnell’s point is that gays would be expected to marry if gay marriage were legal. If gay marriage were legal, then the noisy campaign to legalize gay marriage would also have legitimized efforts by the straight majority to pressure gays to marry and quit the gay counterculture’s favorite bastions of anonymous gay sex: the bathhouses, the “tea rooms”, the public parks, the summer rentals on Fire Island, etc.

Says Varnell, “…the fact that you will be able to marry will now linger in the back of your mind when you go home with someone for sex, when you go on a date, when you start ‘seeing’ someone. The fact that you could actually marry this person means you will be asking yourself if you really would want to, and that may subtly encourage many of us to take our casual relationships with other gays a little more seriously…”

A little more seriously? The fact is that if gays manage to commandeer a mainstream institution such as marriage, then mainstream society has a legitimate stake in demanding that gays behave more like the normal majority in order to preserve marriage itself. Because gay marriage would have serious consequences for mainstream society, it will also have serious consequences for the gay counterculture. The first consequence is that the gay world must cease to be a counterculture. Otherwise, gay marriage will have nothing but toxic consequences for marriage itself. In short, a gay marriage privilege is a license for mainstream heterosexual society to radically remodel the gay subculture. It would be a stunning makeover for the queer folk, a sort of Clear Eye for the Queer Guy, with a vengeance. The next port of call for the gay Love Boat will be radical domestication.

Paul Varnell says that “If the law stipulates that our relationships are the legal equivalent of theirs, that will be considerable encouragement for them to begin thinking of us and our lives as equal to them and their lives.” Not exactly, Paul. Before straights could even “begin thinking” of gays as equal to themselves, the gays would have to begin behaving like straight people. The depravity of gay promiscuity must be long buried in the Boot Hill of bad behaviors before straights can “begin thinking” of gays as their moral equals.

Then Paul Varnell serves up this amazing gay confection: “Many heterosexuals have in the back of their minds, and some are still brought up to believe, the notion that a marriage certificate basically says, ‘Sex is OK now.’ So when gay men start getting marriage certificates, people are going to see the law as asserting not only the equality of our relationships, but an equal status and dignity for our sexual behavior. And that, for many people will be a remarkable and startling thought.”

Yes, indeed, it will. What Paul is suggesting is that the legalization of gay marriage will also bring with it the dearly sought legitimization of homosexual behaviors, “an equal status and dignity for our [gay] behavior.” Paul is much too clever a gay propagandist to ever specify the exact behaviors that would attain “equal status and dignity.” So Paul won’t be extolling the dignity of full blown anal intercourse, complete with anal lacerations, or the dignity of cramming his fist up another guy’s rectum, or the elevated stature of licking some guy’s anus (analingus), or the proud tradition of urinating in your partner’s face and mouth (golden showers), not to mention the catalog of time-honored sexual behaviors bequeathed to the gay community by the Marquis de Sade.

Almost every expression of gay sexuality strikes normal folks as an affront to human dignity. Only by using bland expressions such as “gay sex” can homosexuals hope to advance their social agenda. Only by cloaking in euphemism the behaviors that gay marriage would enshrine can gays hope to promote homosexual wedlock.

Paul Varnell understands that “religious conservatives” will “loathe” the legitimization of popular homosexual behaviors. Says Varnell, “They feel that if you cannot maintain that homosexual acts are wrong, then you cannot claim that anything at all is wrong, ‘everything is permitted’, and moral chaos will reign…” Well,…sort of. The reason conservatives believe that these homosexual acts are “wrong” is because they are so degrading. Would a loving husband urinate in his wife’s face? Would he piss in her mouth? Even the homosexuals of ancient Greece refused to be the recipients of anal intercourse; they would have considered modern gays debased and deplorably effeminate, the pathetic torchbearers of a slave ethos. What sane person wants to contaminate his expressions of love with excrement? What makes gays so profoundly queer in the estimation of others is the fact that gays are so habituated to their deviant appetites that they can no longer see how weird these behaviors are, how lacking in simple human dignity. Proper toilet training should have closed the door on most gay sexual behavior. Nonetheless, gays from coast to coast now want us to grant them the respect usually reserved for a bride in white.

A Few Words About Polygamy

Paul Varnell’s essay “Gay Marriage, then Polygamy?” was published in the Chicago Free Press on February 25, 2004. It’s a goldmine of gay nonsense. The author opens by saying that “When some opponents of gay marriage try to argue for their view, after they ritually condemn homosexuality they claim that gay marriage ‘damages society’ and ‘undermines marriage’ in some unspecified way and end by postulating deplorable consequences of gay marriage: ‘If we allow gay marriage, then people will want to practice polygamy and marry their pets’.”

Well, there is nothing ritualistic or unspecific about the arguments against gay marriage that you are now reading. Varnell really wants to convey the notion that opponents of gay marriage have no reasoned arguments to present, which is untrue. The line about pets is a nonstarter. Pets can’t marry because pets can’t consent to a marriage contract. People toss that line into the debate simply to illustrate that mutual affection is insufficient to support a claim to a right to marry. The issue of polygamy can’t be dismissed so lightly.

There are thousands of practicing polygamists in North America and vastly more in the larger world. Had polygamists been the first to petition for a right to legalize polygamy, the first argument against them would have been that if polygamy were legalized there would soon be a movement to legalize gay marriage. The fact that gays are presenting their petition first is just an accident of history. If American society were compelled to choose between the legalization of polygamy or gay marriage, then polygamy, with its familiar central male/female dynamic, would probably be preferred. Far and away, polygamy would be understood to be the more socially useful of the two social arrangements. At the very least, polygamists can claim to have met society’s definitions of what it means to be a woman and to be a man, while gays and lesbians leave us quizzical.

There are millions of Muslims in America. Their holy book approves of responsible polygamy. American law, which is rooted in Western Christian culture, prohibits polygamy because it offends our cultural sensibilities. By contrast, no holy book approves of homosexuality; it is roundly condemned with every mention. The laws prohibiting consensual gay sex are rooted in our time-honored customs. These laws were voided by the Lawrence vs. Texas decision even though the particulars of gay sex continue to offend the public’s moral sensibility. The implications of this were not lost on Justice Antonin Scalia. Referring to the case of Bowers vs. Hardwick which had upheld Georgia laws against homosexual sodomy, Justice Scalia wrote in his dissenting opinion in Lawrence vs Texas that “State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding. The impossibility of distinguishing homosexuality from other traditional ‘morals’ offenses is precisely why Bowers rejected the rational-basis challenge. ‘The law,’ it said, ‘is constantly based on notions of morality and if all laws representing essentially moral choices are to be invalidated under the Due Process Clause, the courts will be very busy indeed.’

“What a massive disruption of the current social order, therefore, the overturning of Bowers entails…”

But overturn Bowers they did; by judicial fiat they discarded the moral wisdom of thousands of years of human experience. If the moral sensibilities of the people of a culture are no longer the foundation of their laws, then any offensive behavior that does not cause physical injury can be defended as someone’s “right.” So how can American society now defend itself against polygamy, which is an accepted practice under Islamic law? How many Mormons are biding their time as the gay-marriage debate grinds on? In the towns of Colorado City and Hildale, Arizona, there are about 7,500 residents who comprise one large polygamous enclave, where nearly every man has more than one wife and sometimes dozens of children. The Mormon Church officially renounced polygamy in 1890 and the practice is forbidden by a Utah state law, which is only sporadically enforced.

On what grounds could the courts now grant “sodomites” a marriage privilege while denying an expanded marriage privilege to righteous Mormons and Muslims and immigrants from those African nations where polygamy is a time-honored tradition? What about the “dignity” of their relationships, to use the language of Justice William Renquist in the Lawrence decision.

Once Americans have acquired the newfangled “right” to homosexual wedlock and polygamy, can gay polygamy be far behind? Imagine it: twenty lesbians all married to a twenty-first lesbian. Would they all troop to the sperm bank together? Would there be schoolbooks with titles such as “Heather Has Twenty Mommies”? Would sex within the family be restricted to lovemaking between Lesbian Number One and her satellite dykes or would they all have romps with each other? In heterosexual polygamy, sex between the wives is not a part of the normal dynamic. In gay polygamy the usual gay longings would undermine all restraint. So, would family sex without Lesbian Number One be considered marital infidelity, since the satellite dykes aren’t married to each other? Tradition couldn’t guide us here; we’d be lost in the confusion of Gay Utopia and all because we allowed our culture to be colonized by homosexuals with alien moral perspectives.

For extra credit, try to imagine a polygamous family of gay males. Viagra, everyone? While you’re at it, imagine a criminal gang of straight males who intermarry to obtain a spousal protection against compelled testimony. Law enforcement would be frustrated because the thugs were married to their gang leader. There’s no end to how weird our republic could become.

Paul Varnell asserts that “Gays are not arguing that people should be able to have whatever marital arrangement they want. They argue only that everyone should have access to marriage as it is now commonly understood. Nor are gays arguing for any legal rights other people do not have. They argue that they are uniquely denied a right everyone else already has – the right to marry someone they love.” The truth is that the Lawrence decision, which gays celebrate, has undermined the foundation of all morals legislation, including the laws against bigamy, polygamy and incest. Varnell’s statement that gays are only arguing that everyone should have access to marriage as it is now commonly understood is nonsense. Everyone does have access to marriage as it is commonly understood. Any male can now enter into a consensual marriage with a female; any female can enter a consensual marriage with a male, therefore everyone has access to marriage as it is commonly understood. Most gays (not all) choose not to exercise their right to marry. As years of accumulated evidence attest, gays in Canada, Europe and Scandinavia overwhelmingly choose not to exercise their privilege to gay marriage when it is offered to them. What gay activists in America are really arguing for is a new social institution to which they want to attach the name marriage, even though it would only ape traditional marriage in its rough outline; the essential male/female dynamic would be forever absent.

Paul Varnell believes that “It is hard to imagine many women in the contemporary U.S. cheerfully welcoming competing wives or voluntarily becoming a second, third, or fourth wife.” He should get out of his urban gay bubble more often; not all of America is like Manhattan or San Francisco. The wives in a wisely composed polygamous family do not compete, they cooperate harmoniously; they share the burden of maintaining a well-run household; they are companions and helpmates. Existing wives have a controlling say in who may become an additional wife. (Disclaimer: I have never actually tried this at home.)

Varnell takes a poke at polygamy by telling us that “women in third world nations – and southern Utah – who have left polygamous households describe them as rife with favoritism, rivalries, domestic abuse, and the like,” which could pass for a fair description of gay relationships as well, with one in every three gays and lesbians experiencing domestic violence. In any case, an exit poll of unhappy people fleeing relationships is hardly a balanced and dispassionate analysis. The sight of a homosexual trying to sell us homosexual wedlock by bad-mouthing polygamy is hypnotically weird.

Thomas Clough
Copyright 2004
April 29, 2004