Dennis Prager Defeats Kamala Harris on Marriage Neutering

Larry King ended his show last night with a discussion with four people – Dennis Prager, Stephanie Miller (little-heard radio talk show host), Kamala Harris (San Francisco District Attorney and candidate for California Attorney General), and Bishop Harry Jackson. They were discussing Proposition 8 and marriage neutering.

KING: Dennis, why are you opposed to two people who want to share a life together being together?

DENNIS PRAGER, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: I'm not. I'm opposed to one thing and only one thing. That is the redefinition of marriage. I don't think that every society in history, including ours, every religion, every secular society was evil and hate filled and had it wrong when they defined marriage as a man and a woman. That's all that any of us are opposed to.

We want gays to be happy. We don't want them ever harassed. They are created in God's image just like a heterosexual is. However, redefining marriage means that from now on, gender doesn't matter. It does -- man, woman, who ever you marry, it doesn't matter. That has never been the case. No one ever advocated it prior to now. And all we ask is to keep marriage as it is, male/female.

KING: Camilla, what's wrong with that argument?

KAMALA HARRIS, SAN FRANCISCO DISTRICT ATTORNEY: Because it just belies the very fundamental basis of the founding of this country, which we said in 1776; we are going to assume and treat all people as equals. It's a fundamental American value.

People are treated equally with the bride+groom requirement.

And it its about fairness. It's about fairness under the law and under the Constitution of the United States.

Notice she didn’t address Prager’s argument.

[Much, much more after the jump, including Kathy Griffin.]

King asks Jackson about why the government is involved in marriage at all, then asks Miller about Jackson’s statement. Miller ignores Jackson’s statement.

Prager responds to King’s question about whether or not this is like “interracial” marriage.

I will tell you why they're not similar. There is nothing in common between race and gender. This is a massive confusion of all advocates of same sex marriage. I respect them. Some of them I actually love personally. I know they're in my family. But it is dishonest to compare race and gender. No one of different races is different. I am identical to a black to a yellow to a red. I am not identical to a woman. There is no comparison. We have men's rooms and women's rooms. We do not have black rooms and white rooms. We once did. And that was evil. It is not evil to separate sexes. It is evil to separate races. This is a massive act of confusion that is sown, not deliberately -- I think people believe it, but it is wrong. Race and gender have nothing in common.

KING: Kamala, how do you answer that?

Harris goes into other talking points before she finally says:

The Constitution of the United States says explicitly that we are entitled to equal protection. Let all people be free to marry. It does not -- it does not have anything to do with the differences in the sexes. Of course, there are many books that have been written about that. Of course there are differences between the sexes.

(CROSSTALK)

HARRIS: The point is that people should not be deprived of their basic constitutional rights because of their sexual orientation. It's a very simple point. Don't take rights from people.

That doesn’t counter Prager’s argument. Miller doesn't counter Prager either.

PRAGER: Are you saying then that since the inception of the United States or the Constitution we have done something evil by having marriages man/woman.

MILLER: This is like any other civil rights battle. We did not used to let women vote. We didn't used to let black people marry white people. There are a lot of things we didn't use to do.

But when women did get their right to vote – an existing right, it wasn’t to vote for Supreme Court Justice – which would be a new right.

PRAGER: But we have always recognized racism is wrong.

MILLER: If you look at a poll out here in California, if you want to go to polling, people in California are for gay marriage now. You are going to be on the wrong side of history, Dennis.

Fauxmentum.

PRAGER: Let people vote. Why have a judge do it?

MILLER: We don't use mob rule. We don't put people's rights to mob rule.

We vote on many things. Why not this? Why should a judge get to set the requirements for licenses issued on our behalf?

KING: Bishop Jackson, how would society be harmed? Is society harmed in Massachusetts because gay people can marry there?

JACKSON: I think so. First of all, the right to vote is an essential civil rights. My father was threatened at gun point by an out-of-control state trooper because he weighed in on this issue of voting. So we're trumping one group's civil rights in the name of civil rights. There is something backwards there.

Number two, I think it is about the kids. You are not just changing marriage; you are changing everything that relates to marriage.

Jackson then get sidetracked by the idea of legalizing prostitution.

HARRIS: It is a mistake to suggest that when you give rights to one group, you are taking rights from another. It is not a zero sum game.

She’s right in theory (except for the word "give" - government doesn't create rights, it recgonizes them). But there isn’t a right to a state marriage license on new, different terms. There is a right to vote. And when you can only create the former by tossing out the latter, then that is taking away rights.

She then falls back on “fairness”.

PRAGER: I ask the women a question. Do you believe that there is any difference in having a father, or not having a mother, or not having a mother? Is it identical to you, two mothers as a mother and a father, or two men and a mother and a father? Is it identical? You have to say it's identical or you agree with me.

(CROSSTALK)

MILLER: Most kids end up in foster care because some straight couple screwed up somewhere, Dennis.

PRAGER: It doesn't answer my question.

(CROSSTALK) HARRIS: I'll answer the question. I'm happy to answer the question.

PRAGER: I want an answer to my question. Is Catholic Charities -- Catholic Charities was kicked out of Massachusetts in the adoption industry because they prefer a man and a woman as parents. Do the two women --

HARRIS: The call of your question --

KING: Kamala, go ahead.

HARRIS: There's a point that has to be made here. And I am a career prosecutor. I specialized for a long time in child sexual assault and child abuse cases. I created the first child abuse unit of my office in the history of the office.

I'm going to tell you something. What's most important -- what is fundamentally most important for a child to become a healthy and productive adult is that they are raised by loving parents. And whatever --

PRAGER: So it doesn't matter?

HARRIS: Whatever role they take on, I'm supporting that. I'm supporting that.

PRAGER: So it doesn't matter, having no father or --

HARRIS: In the foster care system, in the juvenile delinquency system, who had a heterosexual parent and a couple -- married couple who were heterosexual who could not take care of their child.

(CROSSTALK)

Notice Harris didn’t answer Prager’s question about whether there is a difference between what a both-sexes couple can offer a child and what same-sex couple can. Instead, she points out that some both-sexes couple have been bad parents. This is like asking someone if there is a difference between a pickup truck and a bicycle, and a sailboat, and they say that they’ve seen a smashed up pickup trucks.

Miller, avoiding the question, goes off on a talking point tangent.

MILLER: One of the other main reasons I did this, a dear friend of mine was the homecoming queen in high school, came out, lost all her friends. She works on the Trevor Project now, on the suicide hotline for gay kids. There is a gay kid somewhere tonight watching in Iowa that thinks -- that's going to kill himself because he thinks there's no one else is like him. There's a teacher somewhere who takes Pepto-Bismol because she's afraid someone is going to ask her what she did that weekend. There are kids at risk. There are kids killing themselves in this country. And it's important, you know, to step forward and tell them that they're not alone.

What’s the connection? If getting a state marriage license would solve those problems, then there wouldn’t be heterosexual teens committing suicide, or heterosexual teachers with anxiety.

KING: Kamala Harris, what was your question, again, for Dennis?

HARRIS: Whether he believes that it is -- that the issue for a child is more important whether the parents are a heterosexual or homosexual couple versus whether the child is being raised in a loving home, where they are being supported and nurtured, so they can become the productive human being and adult we want them to become? If you have to take it on balance, I think most reasonable people would agree what is most important is that that child -- if the focus is truly on the child, that that child is raised in a family where they are loved.

The law knows sex – male and female. It’s on official state documents. The law has no idea if someone is going to be a loving parent, but can step in if someone has demonstrated neglectful or abusive behavior towards children.

PRAGER: I fully agree. Now I'll ask you a question.

HARRIS: OK.

PRAGER: You have a loving male/female and you have a loving male/male or female/female, you have a child to give for adoption. Would you flip a coin or would you prefer the male/female? All of them are loving, kind and good.

HARRIS: I would never engage in that simplistic an assessment when you're talking about if --

PRAGER: You asked me a question and I answered. Why is that simplistic?

HARRIS: Because I would need to know more. I would need to know more. Any person who deals with children -- I would want to know if there are other siblings in the home, I would want to know whether --

(CROSSTALK)

So she dodged the question. It’s not a fair fight, because neither of those women can hold a candle to Dennis Prager when it comes to making logical arguements.

Earlier in the show, King interviewed Kathy Griffin.

Larry asks Kathy Griffin why she’s so strong on neutering marriage. She says it is a civil rights issue, but doesn’t explain how.

KING: How about those who say marriage is a sacred thing for man and woman, about procreation?

GRIFFIN: Well, it's not because, first of all, the divorce rate is high.

What does that have to do with it?.

GRIFFIN: But the point is, we've learned that, you know, when it became legal in Massachusetts, the sky didn't fall down, everybody is fine, everyone is fine in Iowa.

Everybody is fine in the vast majority of states, where marriage licensing hasn’t been neutered.

And so, I think, you know, just like Brown versus Board of Education, people were scared about the ruling.

Brown was about using the force of law to force people, based on their skin color, to go to inferior schools. A black child could not go to a better school like a whie child based on something irrelevant to education - skin color. That is different, because nobody has told a homosexual person that they can’t get married, but the core of what makes marriage what it is is the uniting of the sexes. Sex is the question, not a meaningless characteristic.

About having duct tape over her mouth in a picture, tied to Proposition 8:

That means that gay people should not be silenced.

Where and how are gay people being silenced? Certainly not by Proposition 8.

But more importantly, the symbolism is: lots of people are doing them, it's the duct tape which is that, obviously, a ruling like yesterday's ruling is a way to silence the gay community, put them on hold, well, we have to think about this more, let's decide in December. And so, the duct tape just simply represents the gay community and not really having a voice.

Oh right. There’s no voice for the gay community. None. Not most of Hollywood, not the APA, not much of academia, not major newspapers and magazines, not liberal temples, synagogues, and churches (including those pretty much organized around homosexuality), not HRC or the rest of the alphabet soup. And a court doing the ROUTINE step of putting a hold on a ruling is silencing people... how?

Is Prop 8 is about gay marriage being equal for everyone as opposed to civil unions? Or, well, we're going to give you some rights and the 14th Amendment isn't about some rights or some equality. We don't get to pick and choose. We have to be equal.

Yes, we do get to pick and choose about relationships and behavior. Laws treat different kinds of relationships and different kinds of behaviors differently.

KING: What is the essential difference between a civil union and marriage?

GRIFFIN: Well, what I didn't understand is that civil unions and marriage, there's 1,100 different rights that you don't get under a civil union, and that if you cross state lines, that's what makes me nervous. So, let's say that it's legal in Massachusetts, but then you cross state lines and then you're not recognized and then your partner -- God forbid -- goes to the hospital and then you can't visit them because they say, well, in this state, we don't recognize you as being married.

The difference is: The federal government doesn’t yet recognize domestic partnerships for most purposes. Pass federal legislation to change that. If I get a gun license, business license, hunting license, or any number of other licenses in one state, another state may not recognize it.

They then cited fauxmentum.