LA Times Still Favors Marriage Neutering

The editorial board of the Los Angeles Times expresses unease about the nature and effects of homosexual behavior being discussed during a challenge of the California Marriage Amendment, taking the opportunity once again to let us know that they are homosexuality and marriage neutering advocates. Just in case we forgot.

The issue before a federal judge in January will be same-sex marriage in California and whether the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, with its guarantees of equal protection and due process of law, prohibits Proposition 8 and other bans on the right to marry.

The editorial board, as we know, confuses the freedom of people to participate in a ceremony involving consenting participants with a right to a state-issued license against the consent of the governed.

But if we take their language in this opening sentence at face value, we must wonder if there is a right to a marriage license for, say, one man and three women, or a brother and a sister. After all, historically, both of those situations have been recognized as marriage while the pairing of two people of the same sex was not. The marriage neutering advocates howl in protest at such comparison, but they invite them with the very language they use.

[Much more after the jump.]

As a constitutional case, it will involve its share of arguments about meeting legal tests for various levels of judicial scrutiny and whether homosexuals constitute a "discrete" group.

Why not whether not people who enjoy sticking bananas in their ears constitue a discrete group? What if it really turns them on, while they have no desire whatsoever to eat bananas? Shall we create a legally protected designation for that, and say that cotton swabs are also fruit?

Is sexual orientation inborn or a choice?

I don't see how that is relevant to marriage licensing. Not everyone is going to want to get every license offered by a state. Marriage is optional in this country. It is not as if a homosexual person is being forced to marry, doomed to be legally and socially bound to someone of the opposite sex.

Can it be changed?

Yes. There have been people who have done just that. I've met some. Is it easy? Apparently not. Regardless, the California Marriage Amendment does not compel someone to change their sexual orientation. Also, unless we're talking rape, someone can choose whether or not to engage in sexual activity, whether or not to live with someone else, so on and so forth.

If so, should it be changed?

I personally think one ought not engage in homosexual behavior. I don't support recriminalizing private, consensual homosexual behavior, however, nor coercing someone into some sort of treatment program. The CMA does neither, so this is a red herring.

Do gay and lesbian partners make good parents?

What makes someone a good parent? A lesbian can't be a father, and a gay man can't be a mother. It takes both a mother and a father to naturally create a child. Maybe there's a reason?

Do homosexuals contribute as much to society as heterosexuals?

Homosexual behavior, while enjoyable for the participants and some of the people watching (if we take them at their word), contributes nothing positive to society. In contrast, heterosexual behavior is how all of us got here. Homosexual individuals, alone or with a partner, have made positive contributions to society, but independently of homosexual behavior. Have smokers contributed as much to society as nonsmokers?

Would their marriages harm the unions of heterosexual couples and the institution of marriage?

Yes. Counterfeits devalue the authentic.

In legal filings this month, attorneys seeking to overturn Proposition 8 indicated that they would bring in expert witnesses to testify that sexual orientation is inborn and immutable, that homosexuality is not considered a disorder by the psychological or medical establishments (the American Psychiatric Assn. took it off the diagnostic list 36 years ago) and so forth.

Yes, but why did the APA do that? Either the APA was wrong before, or it is wrong now. So the APA can be wrong. Regardless, one need not have any objection to the morality or healthfulness of homosexual behavior to support the bride+groom requirement in state marriage licensing.

The testimony is intended to show that homosexuality deserves the same high-level constitutional protections as, for example, race.

Homosexual individuals have that in California.

But homosexuality need not be innate or unchangeable for gays and lesbians to deserve equal treatment under the Constitution.

Bride+groom marriage licensing does not violate equal treatment. Everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, can participate - or not. Actually, dropping sex integration promotes a separation – would two women really be treated the same as two men? The sex integration core of marriage promotes equality of the sexes.

Religious minorities, for instance, enjoy full constitutional protections, even though they are free to convert to other faiths.

Many people claim an irresistible, perhaps inborn draw to their religion.

As Californians well remember, the political and legal debates over gay marriage already have exposed raw emotions and featured willful, hateful distortions.

There was nothing on the ballot about "gay marriage". There was something on the ballot about man+woman marriage.

During last year's campaign, there were assertions that only married heterosexual couples could raise truly well-adjusted children -- a claim that ignored nontraditional families, including same-sex parents and single parents, who were successfully raising fine offspring.

I can't be responsible for everything said by everyone who happened to agree with my vote. However, my argument is that only a bride+groom pairing gives children a mother and a father – a role model from each of the two sexes – to bond with in a legal, social, and spiritual framework. Plenty of people of all political and religious backgrounds also note that children raised by single parents are more likely (notice, this is a generalization) to engage in various behaviors destructive to themselves and society.

The editorial goes to deny claims of the Proposition 8 ads – which we've already dealt with extensively here.

The campaign against the initiative never responded effectively to these deceptive claims;

Because they weren't deceptive. Of course homosexuality advocates will use an official state policy that a brideless or groomless paring is the same thing as a tool to further their social engineering in places like public schools. We know this based on past behavior by the activist groups. You don't consider that to be a problem, but most people do.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled that the Constitution protects the right of same-sex couples to marry, and given the present composition of the bench, it may well decline to do so if it ever has occasion to review the constitutionality of Proposition 8.

Read that over and over again, if you have to. SCOTUS hasn't ordered that marriage be neutered. The Constitution doesn't say it should be. The people haven’t voted for it. It is an imaginary right.

They finish off with the wishful thinking we’ve heard so many times before, as if saying it over and over again will make it so:

One day, society will look back with shock at how gay and lesbian couples were forced to justify their sexual identity and defend their family lives in order to gain the right to marriage, just as we now deplore how long and hard interracial couples had to fight for that same right.

Sorry, this isn’t Loving v. Virginia. A decision to impose neutered marriage licensing across the union against the will of the people would have more in common with Roe v. Wade in that 35 years later, people will still be debating the matter and fighting about it. The paper is counting on the constant pandering by the media and the dominance of marriage neutering advocates in public schools to counter the natural understanding that even the smallest children have – that boys and girls are different; and the understanding that most adults have – marriage unites the sexes.