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... orts that while very few of even the most devoted gay and lesbian couples questioned believe that marriage will empower their personal relationships, nearly half of the experimental partners who actually scorn traditional marriage (and even gay commitment ceremonies) will nonetheless get married. Why? For the financial and legal benefits of marriage. And Stiers's study implies that many militant gays and lesbians who desire to see marriage forbidden (and multiple sexual unions justified) plan to marry, not only as a way of safeguarding benefits but as part of a self-conscious effort to weaken the institution of marriage.
Stiers's study suggests that the subversive intentions of the radical theorists are shared by a prominent slice of the gay community itself. So, concerns about the effects of gay marriage on the social standard of conjugal monogamy seem justified. A contemporary survey of gay couples in civil unions by University of Vermont psychologists Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solomon authenticates what Stiers's study suggests that married gay male couples will be far less likely than married heterosexual couples to identify marriage with monogamy. Rothblum and Solomon contacted all 2, 300 couples who entered civil unions in Vermont between June 1, 2000, and June 30, 2001. More than 300 civil union couples residing in and out of the state responded.
Rothblum and Solomon then compared the gay couples in civil unions with heterosexual couples and gay couples outside of civil unions. Among married heterosexual men, 79 percent felt that marriage demanded monogamy, 50 percent of men in gay civil unions insisted on monogamy, while only 34 percent of gay men outside of civil unions affirmed monogamy. Married gay couples will begin to redefine the meaning of marriage for the culture as a whole, in part by removing monogamy as a vital factor of marriage (Kurtz). Lesbians, for their part, do value monogamy.
Over 82 percent of the women in the Rothblum-Solomon study, for example, insisted on monogamy, despite sexual orientation or marital status. Yet lesbian marriage will threaten the connection between marriage and monogamy in a different way. Lesbians who bear children with sperm donors sometimes set up effective three-parent families. Typically, these families include a sexually constrained lesbian couple, and a male biological father who is close to the couple but not sexually implicated (Kurtz). What about domestic partnerships? If you won't go along with same-sex "marriage, " why not at least allow committed same-sex couples to get some benefits?
The state should never be in the business of encouraging unhealthy behavior by granting special benefits for it. A homosexual life does not offer the richness of the complementary relationship that men and women find in marriage and family life (Knight). People should not be written off as if they can do no better than be caught up in an unhealthy, unnatural behavior. The more that homosexuality is encouraged, the more damage will be caused among individuals, families and society. This is not sympathy but its opposite: a callous social survival of the fittest that devalues people as impulse-driven incorrigible's (Knight). Each human soul is of tremendous importance, and homosexuals are no different from anyone else.
They deserve the truth, not an officially authoritative lie. Although the choice to marry someone is private, marriage itself is not a private act. Marriage is the most essential social act, one that implicates more than just the married couple. Comprehensive families are fused and improved through a wedding. It is also through marriage that the public and the nation are renewed (Maher).
A new home is formed when a couple marries, one open to the formation of new life. These children are the future. Marriage also has advantageous social and health effects for both adults and children, and these contributions benefit the community and the whole society. On the other hand, it is through the interruption of marriage that society is austerely harmed (Maher). The future of the nation depends on the construction of good marriages and good homes for children.
Married couples ensure the progression of generations and are therefore highly within the public concern, civil law grants them institutional recognition. Homosexual unions, on the other hand, do not need explicit attention from the legal stance since they do not wield this function for the common good. Nor is the argument legitimate according to which legal recognition of homosexual unions is required to steer clear of situations in which cohabiting homosexual persons, simply because they live together, might be rundown of real recognition of their rights as persons and citizens (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith). Conclusion In due course, it may be that what lies behind the petition for gay marriage, whether inherent in conservative or in civil-rights terms, is a bid to erase the disgrace of homosexuality (Kurtz). That bid is utopian; as radical gays acknowledge, the stigma arises from the basic division between homosexuality and procreation, which is to say from the fundamental reality that the world is, for the irresistible part, heterosexual. Even so, in search of this utopian end, we are being asked to change, at unfamiliar expenditure to ourselves and to future generations, the predominant institution of our society (Kurtz).
And we are being reproached that to decline this demand is to renounce our common humanity with those who are advancing it: that is, to renounce them as persons. That is simply not so. There is not the slightest evidence that either the civil status of homosexuals or the increased sympathy and respect they now enjoy in America will in the least suffer from a unrelenting knock back to redefine marriage so as to contain homosexual unions (Kurtz). The real danger, rather, lies in the opposite directions the emptying out of every last remnant of meaning from an institution already under siege by the disintegrative sexual and social forces of the last decades.
If ever there was a place to draw a line, this is it. Finally, once we say that gay couples have a right to have their commitments recognized by the state, it becomes next to impossible to deny that same right to polygamists, poly amorists, or even cohabiting relatives and friends. And once everyone's relationship is recognized, marriage is gone, and only a system of compliant relationship contracts is left (Kurtz). The only way to stop gay marriage from launching a slide down this slope is if there is a convincing state interest in blocking gay marriage. Many would agree that the state has a compelling interest in averting polygamy and polyamory from threatening the ethos of monogamy at the heart of marriage.
The trouble is, gay marriage itself threatens the ethos of monogamy (Kurtz).
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Research essay sample on Heterosexual Couples Civil Unions
