Sanctity

Jeff Jacoby is unhappy with the prospect of gay marriage. In fact, it goes beyond unhappy.

[T]he heterosexuality of marriage helps shield women and children from exploitation, cements the union between fathers and mothers, and bolsters the ethos of monogamy on which the dignity of marriage depends.

Huh?

Reading carefully — very carefully — the only basis he gives for this is that every change in society that has made it possible to have sex and not deal with the natal consequences (he mentions contraception as one, and presumably divorce would count, too) has led to a weakening of the responsibility of fathers to take care of their mates and offspring, leading to mass hysteria and dogs and cats living in sin.

Well, I’m not sure on the latter part, and Jacoby seems willing to live with the consequences of reliable birth control (but why?), but it seems that his premise is same-sex marriages will want kids, but, obviously, can’t have them within the marriage, and therefore the marital safety net that protects kids (and woman) will be weakend beyond all redemption.

Uh … right.

Actually, that’s already happening with gay couples. If we had state-sanctioned gay marriage, then the kids that are adopted or inseminated into such relationships would be protected, by all the laws we already have on the books regarding child support and custody and parental obligations. Jacoby’s argument makes no sense, either for the protection of children or for the “dignity” of marriage.

And what is the threat, exactly, that gay marriages hold for straight unions? Here’s Jacoby’s trump card, his argument that sweeps all others off to the side:

Gay marriage will allow gays that are married to straights to divorce them and marry gay partners.

Never mind that plenty of gays divorce straight partners, today, when they realize or come to grips with their orientation. Heck, never mind that straights divorce their straight partners, in far greater numbers, for far flimsier reasons. Jacoby is willing to ignore all that.

He uses, instead, as a numeric basis for his claim the statistic that of those 5,700 gay couples who have married under Vermont’s civil union law, 40%, about 2,000, of the couples had at least one member who had previously been married.

Never mind that Vermont has over 2,000 divorces, regardless of the reason, annually (and folks uniting in Vermont come from all over the nation). Never mind that there’s no foundation for believing that any (let alone all) of those 3,000-odd folks left their (presumably) straight partner for someone in particular, let alone the person they ended up uniting with. And never mind that the statistic doesn’t indicate who left whom in those divorces, or whether homosexuality was even the explicit cause of them. No, never mind that — just remember that gay marriage will mean a rise in the straight divorce rate, because Jacoby has the statistics to prove it. Right.

I do believe that our society too easily accepts divorce as an answer to marital difficulties, with little cognizance of the actual trauma that divorce has on the partners (especially any children involved). I do believe the divorce rate is too high. And I believe that as someone who was once divorced.

But first off, divorcing someone because you are, well, sexually incompatible with them, is a sight better than a lot of the reasons divorces occur today. And perhaps, if gay marriage were available and acceptible in the first place, a lot of those straight marriages wouldn’t have occured — or won’t occur in the future (Jacoby recognizes that, but, oddly, mourns it).

At any rate, it’s a silly reason to argue against gay marriage, and a silly argument altogether.

(via JillMatrix)