NOM Lies; News At 11

h/t Dispatches

This is like the Funny Right-wing Martyr Complexes; this shouldn't even be news anymore. Liars lie, false truths are told, shit-eating grins are given and nothing gets done. NOM is really good at this; especially the shit-eating part.

So at the end of the day does it really surprise anyone when lairs rehash the same tried "argument" - I wouldn't even dignify it with that term but I can't think of another word, and this sure as hell isn't a debate - that praying on young children is identical too two adults who love one another giving their consent to engage in sexual activities? And this is the best argument they have.

Why the don't these people just go away? They've lost. Repeatedly. Their ideology and agenda is gum in the machine, and you can only tolerate gum in the machine for so long before you have to remove it and throw it away. They don't have a true word amongst their claims except for one verse from Leviticus, and it's not even the verse that supports abortion (that'd be 27:6, for those keeping score at home - "If it is a person between one month and five years, set the value of a male at five shekels of silver and that of a female at three shekels of silver" and if it's a thing under one month, because anything under one month aren't people by Leviticus, not a single fuck one is given. Except, of course, a fine determined by the husband in accordance with Exodus 21:22-23.)

So not only are they dishonest about gays, they're dishonest about how they treat their own holy book. Gasp. Shock. Awe. I would never have suspected. You'd think that they never even read it before, but we know that can't be true. After all, that'd make them hypocrites too.

Why fight same-sex marriage? Even in America, where the outcome is not yet decided, there appear to be good reasons not to. The optics are poor and the mandate seems uncertain. Prospects for victory appear slim. Resources that might be reserved for more important fronts—abortion, for example—are squandered in defense of an institution to which our modern urban society is no longer committed. Industrial economies, reprogenetic technologies, and new ideas of autonomy—not to speak of new moralities—have called into question many of the assumptions on which that institution has always been based.

I get frustrated at sites that autopost a URL whenever you copy text directly from them. FOX does that, Cracked does that, and this webpage, Touchstone Archives, does that too. But we persist, knowing that it's for a good cause. That extra step of highlighting the link and deleting it gets tedious, though.

Why fight marriage equality indeed? You lost. You don't have a substantial point one, you've based your entire position around fear-mongering, lying, and a couple of verses from a book that's more concerned with poverty and how wealth is distributed in the greater society. A book, I might add, that if you actually read you'd know didn't support you.

Abortion is not an important front. Your god even agrees with me (c.f. the verses I mentioned above). You lost there, too. Maybe you should actually open your eyes to your own religion rather than playing a game of follow the leader, huh?

"New Moralities" - ooOooOooOooh skurry. Be afraid, be very afraid. There are different ways of viewing the world than yours, and there's even the prospect that *gasp* yours might be wrong. And don't knock repogenetics; I'm all for them. These are technologies that fix genetic disabilities in utero. They have some potential misuses - for instance, sex selection has some serious potential abuses in a societies that blatantly value one sex over the other and dealing with that will require a view of females and males as being equal in quality, which means ditching the old ways of looking at things (trust me, society won't miss 'em. Once gender essentialism is thrown in history's garbage dump of stupid ideas, we'll look back and wonder why it took so long to get there). Overall, I think it's for the better that we eliminate certain diseases, and engineer certain traits into our children to make them better, healthier, and smarter that we were. No child should have to suffer through life with Downs. I take it from the tone of this opening argument that the author is in favor of Downs syndrome, likely as a "test of faith", because God being the sadistic bastard he is would test the parent's faith by ruining the life of their child.

"New ideas of autonomy" - like? The radical notion women are people, too? That humans are capable of making their own decisions, regardless whether or not they're informed, without having a giant projected sky nanny commanding their every action, right down to how many times a day they masturbate?

Hey, if this a new idea of autonomy, count me in. The old one was getting on my nerves.

[...]Now, some think that this larger project can be left to market forces. But others think that heterosexual monogamy, as the source of widespread discrimination against alternative sexualities and lifestyles, must be repudiated as a social standard. Same-sex marriage is the tool of choice for doing that. By redefining marriage as a union of two (or more) persons, rather than as the union of one man and one woman, the offending norm is removed from the body politic with a single incision. Afterwards, a wider assault on homophobia and heterosexism can follow.

I'm saddened I don't have Comic Sans, otherwise I'd be using it.

"A wider assault on homophobia and heterosexism can follow" - this is said like it's a bad thing. Let me put this a different way:

By redefining marriage as the union of two (or more persons) of any race, rather than the union of one man and one woman of the same race, the offending norm is removed from the body politic with a single incision. Afterwards, a wider assault on xenophobia and racism can follow.

Racism was an offending norm. So is homophobia and heterosexism, but heterosexuality is not an "offending norm." It's not even a norm. I don't care who you're fucking, so long as consent was involved. Heterosexuality is to heterosexism as being White is to racism.

[...] Same-sex marriage proponents, for their part, are forced to set aside this concern. On their view, the parent-child bond lies beyond the immediate purview of marriage, as does the particular sexual act that produces children. Marriage is simply the formalization of an intimate relationship between adults. If those adults happen to produce or obtain children, well, that is another matter. Moreover, their bond with those children does not require any particular family structure to support it; good outcomes can be had from diverse family structures.

The debate about what constitutes a family, and about outcomes for children, is an increasingly lively one. It is largely driven, however, by the normalization/de-normalization agenda that underlies same-sex marriage. The irony of this can hardly be missed. For same-sex marriage, as courts in North America have made clear, is predicated on a denial of procreation or child-rearing as a definitive interest. Marriage is about adult bonding, and adult bonding is all there is to marriage.

Soon, gays and lesbians will both be able to have children made with the genetic information of both parents (this "soon" is a nebulous "soon" that could be anywhere from 10 years to 50 years from now. But mark my words - it will happen.) Until then, there's always adoption. Which, hey, is just as good, if not better, because that's one more person not putting a strain on vital Earth resources. And you don't think adopted children can bond with their adopted parents like biological children do? A family isn't who you're born with, it's who takes care of you and loves you. So long as you have good friends, you've always got a family, regardless what your biological family is like.

They are always totally ignoring the fact that there are more than a few biological families that are not families at all. What about children who are raised by their grandparents? Their aunts and uncles? Is that not a family? A family is more than a license to procreate, and it transcends biology.

So what if adult bonding is all there is to marriage? Adults don't have the right to bond? They have to spit out children in favor of your god (read: their opinion)? Really, marriage is about tax laws and regulations, and that's all it boils down two. It's about two people having visiting rights when their loved one goes to the hospital. It's about two people who care about each other deeply being able to care for each other because they both get the same benefits from one's job. This is what marriage truly is - all the love in the world is fine, but at the end of the day, marriage is not needed to formalize that love. Marriage is a state-sanctioned action dressed up with a religious clown-mask that grants couples the right to be treated like fucking couples by the greater society.

There's nothing sacred about the institution of getting cheaper taxes because you're filing for two people. There's nothing religious about that, either.

[...]But marriage for some time has been under feminist attack for its putative institutionalization, in the name of divine rights, of oppressive patriarchal tendencies. This attack—coordinated, as it now is, with a Rawlsian assault on religious or comprehensive doctrines in the public sphere—has helped create a very different set of conditions, the conditions necessary for the advent of same-sex marriage. And same-sex marriage, by eliminating the first good (proles), has begun to unravel the whole fabric of marriage, setting up something else in its place: an institution not intrinsically connected to the family, or at all events not connected to the natural family. The divine and human rights belonging to marriage are thus beginning to disappear, as I want now to make clear.

Your god doesn't exist. There is no such thing as a "divine right" because nothing is divine, expect maybe a cross-dressing actor who stared in a bunch of John Waters' films who also happens to eat dog shit at the end of Pink Flamingos. Although I don't think that's the kind of "divine right" you're talking about.

Divine? Did someone call for Divine?

The tendencies of marriage itself are not oppressive and patriarchal. As I outlined above, Marriage is a state-sanctioned action that grants couples the rights granted to be treated like couples - hospital visits, riding in the back of the ambulance, getting the same benefits from one's job, and being able to file taxes for two rather than one. All of the benefits of Marriage are social. There's no reason for this to even be dressed up in the clown suit of religion, but it is, because it's what people want. More power to them. But marriage is not a religious institution because no religious institution grants anyone special social benefits for being married. No, it's the self-proclaimed enforcers of the religious side of marriage - that is, the defenders of the clown-suit it gets dressed up in - who are oppressive and patriarchal. And hoo boy are they ever.

Feminism is the radical notion women are people too - I remember seeing that on a button one of my professors wore, and it stuck with me. It's stuck with me to this day, some 6 years later. It will likely be with me my entire life. The Patriarchy opposes this notion, believing that women can't make their own decisions, shouldn't be trusted with their own bodies, and damn determined to enforce the "norms" of both homophobia and heterosexuality. Once upon a time, those "norms" included racism - in fact, they still do. The Patriarchy's gotten better about that, though. Racism is only discussed behind closed doors, in back rooms when POC's aren't watching or listening. Given all the degrading that happens within the Patriarchy - on everyone, including men and boys - it's small wonder that the Patriarchy needs to go. Marriage is not symbolic of the Patriarchy, and the Patriarchy is not symbolic of marriage; they wish they were, but they're not.

One can't help but read through this and sense the subtext here - the "Waah! Nobody gives a fuck what we think anymore! But because we're so desperate to martyr ourselves, we're going to fight this loosing battle anyway!"

(proles) - how are proles the first good? Only animals and proles are free.

Marriage is not an institution intrinsically connected to the family. It helps facility the family greatly, but because both are social constructs defined by the government in terms of collective benefits and rights, neither is absolutely necessary, and neither has a solid definition. This notion of "one man + one woman" is a recent invention, as of the 1970s. Before that, it was "one man + one woman of the same color/religion/race)".

Being a societal construct, marriage is as flexible and fluid as the society is. As society changes, so does marriage. The only people who are hurt by the change are these poor fools under the delusion that society is somehow immutable and with it, all the aspects of that society including marriage.

The only thing the author's made clear is that he doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about, but that's never stopped these kinds of people from running off at the mouth and spewing their bias anyway.

Same-sex marriage dispenses with all of that, however. By excising sexual difference, with its generative power, it deprives itself of any direct connection to nature. The unit it creates rests on human choice, as does that created by marriage. But whether monogamous, polygamous, or polyamorous, it is a closed unit that reduces to human choice, rather than engaging choice with nature; and its lack of a generative dimension means that it cannot be construed as a fundamental building block.

Institutionally, then, it is nothing more than a legal construct. Its roots run no deeper than positive law. It therefore cannot present itself to the state as the bearer of independent rights and responsibilities, as older or more basic than the state itself. Indeed, it is a creature of the state, generated by the state’s assumption of the power of invention or re-definition. Which changes everything.
[...]
Six years ago, when same-sex marriage became law in Canada, the new legislation quietly acknowledged this. In its consequential amendments section, Bill C-38 struck out the language of “natural parent,” “blood relationship,” etc., from all Canadian laws. Wherever they were found, these expressions were replaced with “legal parent,” “legal relationship,” and so forth.

That was strictly necessary. “Marriage” was now a legal fiction, a tool of the state, not a natural and pre-political institution recognized and in certain respects (age, consanguinity, consent, exclusivity) regulated by the state. And the state’s goal, as directed by its courts, was to assure absolute equality for same-sex couples. The problem? Same-sex couples could be parents, but not parents of common children. Granting them adoption rights could not fully address the difference. Where natural equality was impossible, however, formal or legal equality was required. To achieve it, “heterosexual marriages” had to be conformed in law to “homosexual marriages.” The latter produced non-reproductive units, constituted not by nature but by law; the former had therefore to be put on the same footing, and were.

I'm not in the business of telling anyone what to do with their life, nor am I in the business of telling anyone who they can and can't love. Marriage was always nothing more than a legal construct. The Torah, the first several books of the Holy Bible from which these Christians derive their legalistic definitions of marriage, has been described by a Jewish person I know as a "book of holy tort law." It's always been a legal thing, it's always been granted by the state and acknowledged by the state or whatever the ruling body at the time was as conferring privileges upon the party in question as set of uniform social privileges. It's always been that way. The fact that Canada acknowledged marriage equality six years ago has nothing to do with the fact that marriage is nothing more than a legal phrase, granted by the state. I feel like I'm repeating myself. I likely am. And I've likely done so several times now. In short, marriage was always "legal fiction". Although it serves an arguably more positive function in society compared to other cases of legal fiction like slavery or corporate personhood (slavery is the legal fiction a human being can be a piece of property; corporate personhood is the legal fiction a piece of property can be a human being).

So what if they can't be parents of common children? Parents of common children are not necessarily superior - horror stories of domestic abuse prove that. So long as the child is loved, it doesn't matter whether it's a man and woman, man and man, or man and martian. And not every heterosexual marriage is reproductive units - does marriage automatically get annulled after the woman goes through menopause? What about women who've had hysterectomies, or men who were born sterile or suffered some injury that prevents them from even having children? Are these marriages annulled simply because they can't spawn younglings of their own?

Nature has plenty to say about homosexuality, and this is not a path you want to take this argument.

And, after slogging through all that, we come to this:

To be sure, there are weapons in the arsenal of the Yogyakartans that are prone to misfire. Take, for example, the term “orientation.” The main task of that term has been to mediate the transition from the male–female binary to the heterosexual–homosexual binary. For that strategic purpose, it has maintained the aura of a hated naturalism: Orientation, like sex, is something fixed by nature, and can therefore compete with sex as a fundamental consideration in law and public policy.

But in the present phase, the term has new work to do. It is to be understood (so Yogyakarta tells us) as referring “to each person’s capacity for profound emotional, affectional and sexual attraction to, and intimate and sexual relations with, individuals of a different gender or the same gender or more than one gender.” Which is to say, it is to become a more malleable term, capable of taking as an adjective “each” or “all,” not merely “both.”

But “each” and “all” are dangerous adjectives. Pedophilia, for example, is an orientation, or so the psychologists tell us. And orientations are now constitutionally protected, not to say politically celebrated. How then can we continue discriminating against pedophiles, which clearly we do?

Pedophiles naturally, hence in some sense appropriately, desire sex with children. Children, on the other hand, being vulnerable in various ways, need to be protected from sexual advances by adults. So we tell pedophiles that they must restrain themselves, or find other outlets for their sexual urges. Which is discriminatory. A parliamentary committee in Canada recently found itself being backed into this very corner, and the panic was palpable.

We can try to justify the discrimination by proceeding to a balance of harm argument, of course, but we cannot then avoid the implication that there exists no inviolable right to sexual self-expression or indeed to public approval of a so-called orientation. And if that is true for pedophiles—perhaps for consistency we should call them pedosexuals—it is true also for homosexuals and heterosexuals. There may be, or arise, real and present dangers to society that justify repression of one or both of the latter, as of the former; and the same is true for any other tendency or orientation.

*Ahem.* I can answer all of this with one word:


CONSENT, STUPID, CONSENT. DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS?!


Okay, so that was nine words, two commons, a period, exclamation point and a question mark. So sue me.

This has been done to death. Really, this is one of the most ridiculously stupid arguments that can ever be trotted out in favor of marriage inequality. It's not even worth anymore of my time - you can look up the definition of consent on your fucking own, Douglas Farrow, since you obvious don't understand what it means. Maybe doing some critical thinking will keep you from dragging out this tired old strawman, appeal to fear, red herring and false dichotomy - in short, an argument that's been done to death.

I can't even be bothered with the rest, since it's basically a rehashing of every tried argument made above that I've already addressed, with a lot of watch words thrown in for the apparent hell of it. It'd really be wasting my time, when I don't have a lot of time to waste.

Anyway, this is more of the same tripe, but it has a refreshing twist I acknowledged in the very beginning - they can sense that they're loosing. They know they are, and with each passing day, the chance of their success becomes dimmer and dimmer. They're scrambling. It's because they're loosing. And if they know they're losing, then that means there's nothing but better days ahead on this front.

Soon, methinks, the gum will remove itself from the machine. And it took long enough.