RSS
Facebook
Twitter
E-PrinceThe National Organization for Marriage (NOM), co-founded in 2007 by politics professor Robert George and based on Nassau Street, has launched a $1.5 million ad campaign in several states to energize opponents of same-sex marriage.
The centerpiece of the ...
(back to the article)
The opinions expressed here are those of the individual commenters and do not necessarily represent the views of The Daily Princetonian Publishing Company, Inc. We do not take responsibility for the opinions, facts, or claims presented by individual commenters, and reserve the right to moderate or delete inappropriate comments.
Make no mistake: the reason that YouTube video is getting so many hits is because it honestly looks like a spoof. If you can make it through it without laughing, kudos.
Couldn't they come up with a better ad with $1.5M dollars behind it? I wonder if the reason they couldn't is because many people in film production industry turned up their noses.
But seriously, what a blight to Princeton. As much as NOM will claim that they accept gay people and are simply defending an institution, they are only as effective as their electorate, which is overwhelmingly homophobic and could not articulate the "reasoned" arguments against gay marriage.
We have to face the truth about marriage: it has metastasized into a beast that frequently consumes men’s lives and rewards women for grievous sins, doing great, usually irreparable, damage to families and society. Furthermore, in today’s wold it has become largely meaningless: illegitimacy no longer carries any stigma, gay marriage has extinguished its biological basis, and instead of the implicit assurance of steadfastness and fidelity, it now carries the explicit threat of divorce. Because of divorce, marriage constitutes an existential threat to many men, and for women it is loaded with so much temptation to do wrong that their risk of permanently destroying their reputation and family is unacceptably high.
It is time to cast these notions of saving marriage aside. The damage has already been done, and the systemic corruption of its corpus is too catastrophic to repair. The contemporary incarnation of marriage should be viewed and handled like high-level radioactive waste; highly toxic material to be sealed and entombed in vaults deep underground.
Western Christianity clearly borrowed a great deal from the civilization it replaced, and monogamous marriage is a good example of cultural continuity. However, the Christian marriage contract differed significantly from the pagan Roman. The most crucial difference was the irrevocable nature of marriage in Christian theology. The New Testament set the bar very high for separation from one’s spouse, whereas divorce was a relatively easy matter in Roman law. Today, we have an impossible amalgamation of the two systems, where culturally and ideally we still carry a vestigial Christian concept of matrimony, but legally and practically we are closer to the Roman norm. Therefore we still view the marital union as “one flesh,” and so apply Solomon’s solution to its dissolution, i.e. cut that baby in two.
http://www.welmer.org/2008/09/27/abolition-of-m...
We should ask whether there is anything redeeming about the institution, and weigh its benefits against its drawbacks. Obviously, many men are doing so, and many have come to the conclusion that marriage has little to offer them. Some still have an optimistic attitude about marriage because, I can only surmise, hope springs eternal, and others defend it as a bastion of decency and the foundation of monogamy. However, I’d like to emphasize that I am not advocating the abolition of monogamous relationships - far from it - but instead the contemporary legal incarnation of marriage, which has become the bane of the monogamous relationship.
Today, monogamous relationships survive in spite of marriage — not because of it. For women, the act of getting married is the prize; for men the only remaining benefit is social approval and a few tax breaks. No fault divorce has eliminated any guarantee of fidelity while presenting a serious financial (not to mention psychological) threat. Where children are concerned, legitimacy is meaningless, and both child custody and support are determined without regard to marital status. Homosexuals can now convincingly argue that their civil rights are being violated by not having access to the legal privileges of an institution that has been reduced to a lifestyle choice (which, unlike homosexuality, can be discarded at will) and serves no definite purpose other than to manufacture drama.
Over the years (actually, probably over the millennia), it has been said many times that marriage is about procreation, but illegitimacy rates in the US show that to be false. For example, if the black population of the United States lacked out of wedlock births, there would be far fewer young black Americans today. This is coming to be true for American whites as well. People are perfectly capable of replacing themselves without rings and white dresses. In fact, as primitive tribes demonstrate, all they really need is food, and the rest can be taken care of in a manner little different from wild animals.
If marriage has never been necessary for the maintenance of our species, what was its original purpose? First, in all likelihood, to keep the peace. In the animal kingdom, ritualized violence is often an important aspect of sexual competition. Humans, however, are equipped with a far more deadly weapon — reason. Even the most primitive tribesmen must have known that when a man is deprived of female companionship, he becomes inclined to take a female by any practical means. Men with female sexual partners must have felt rather nervous about this, and so developed pacts with other men to protect their status with their women. The easiest tribes to raid were certainly those that had no concept of marriage, because the males would not be inclined to defend other men who had no respect for their own status with women. Repeated over time, this guaranteed the eclipse of tribes without a clear concept of marriage by those that did.
As civilization began to take hold and economic and cultural specialization grew increasingly sophisticated, the family took on more importance as a source of training for children, thereby adding another practical benefit to marriage. Economic specialization in particular made training of children beneficial not only to children, but to their family as a whole. Thus, in addition to maintaining political stability, marriage also began to contribute to economic progress and prosperity. It has only been a few decades since absolute individualism became the governing philosophy of the West, and the effects can be seen most strongly in the disruption to the traditional idea of the family. Although the government still preserves some legal relics of the previous norm, including the recognition of marriage and certain tax categories, it is an undeniable fact that the family has taken a subordinate role in regards to the desires - however transient - of the individual. No fault divorce, decriminalization of adultery and skyrocketing illegitimacy rates bear this out. The law has changed to reflect the new state of affairs, treating marriage and its dissolution as economic transactions while ignoring the effects they have on social stability.
Whether the West’s extreme individualism is good or bad on the balance is of little concern in an effort to revive an institution that is on life support and in danger of catastrophic failure — there simply isn’t enough time to reevalute our civilization’s shibboleths to revive marriage as it was. Rather, we must work with what we have, which is a strong focus on civil rights and freedoms. From that perspective, it can be argued that the traditional concept of marriage is a fundamentally unjust institution that privileges some people at the expense of others, and in fact unreasonably restricts the rights of those who enter into it. Therefore, the abolition of marriage must be considered to achieve a greater degree of freedom and justice in society. States may retain civil partnerships entered into under contractual agreements, but these must be little different from corporations or partnerships entered into for business purposes.
If marriage were done away with, what would be left of the family? Legally, nothing, which may turn out to be for the better. And what of the children, then? It may appear that this would leave children with little or no support in a great number of cases, and this is where a radical implementation of our concepts of civil rights is required: rather than casting childrearing as a duty incumbent on parents, a child’s right to his or her parents must be recognized by the law. Essentially, parenting should be considered a child’s civil right. Parents who shirk childrearing could be considered violators of their children’s civil rights, as could parents who deprive their child of the other parent. A parent who refuses to raise his or her child should be held civilly liable for support of the child, but only if that parent voluntarily shuns childrearing responsibility. Viewing parenting as a child’s right could reframe the debates going on in family law courts across the country, and give parents an incentive to cooperate rather than throw the dice with an adversarial legal system.
http://www.welmer.org/2008/12/22/reframing-marr...
Kudos to NOM. These people are brave to stand up to the irrational wrath of some of the more extreme gay marriage advocates. It's an important fight, and they deserve support.
Marriage is a truly great institution. As Professor George rightly indicates, it promotes health, education, and general well being. These sustained committed relationships recognized by the state are so beneficial for society, in fact, that we should welcome more people to participate in the institution of marriage and allow all Americans -- regardless of sexual orientation -- to marry the person whom they love.
GS, you're begging the question, and avoiding the main issues at stake in the SSM debate. Most Americans don't think two parents of the same sex can constitute a family and respect the rights of children to have a mother and a father.
Debbie Bazarsky's charge of "homophobia" and "offense" is ludicrous and well-worn in the gay-marriage debate. It is intellectually dishonorable to dub your opponents bigots unless, of course, they actually are. But if anti-gay marriage people like those at NOM are largely bigots, then why would Bazarsky be so interested in acknowledging the "numerous different perspectives" on gay marriage or promoting any kind of dialogue? You don't dialog with bigots. So pro-gay marriage people need to decide on this matter or risk hypocrisy...either they think anti-gay marriage people are bigots and are not to be engaged in debate, or they are not bigots and ought to be debated. They can't have it both ways--debating with their opponents AND calling them bigots.
if every child has a "right to a mother and father," then why do we allow single parents?
@09er:
Some anti-gay marriage people are bigots.
I support children's rights, too.
I support their right to grow up and marry the person they love, no matter the gender or sex.
NOM's mission to "protect the children" (from what?) is a poorly disguised mask for their own feelings towards the unfamiliar. Worse, NOM fears that today's youth are becoming so openminded as to set NOM's anachronistic ideals firmly in the past.
I, for one, endorse the children.