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The Australian “We hate the Gays” Christian Lobby has re-published a whole article on the question of whether same-sex marriage is harmless. They got the article from News Weekly. You can’t access the article on News Weekly unless you sign up for an account and they want money for that. News Weekly is run by the National Civic Council who among their aims have this:
- Rigorous education which
- Values the acquisition of knowledge as well as the processes of learning and promotes intellectual excellence and disciplines (such as history and philosophy) abandoned by influential educational theorists; and
- Provides the base of knowledge necessary for every person to participate fully as a member of society.
They also have these rather silly statements:
- The integrity of the individual, including full legal protection of the right to life for all human beings from fertilisation to natural death.
- Judeo-Christian values which provide the cement to hold our society together in opposition to the prevailing view which rejects the concept of the common good and makes the difference between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, a matter of personal preference only rather than objective reality.
- Divorce. Opposition to easy divorce laws.
- The family. Support for policies which enhance intact families, rejection of lifestyles which undermine family values.
So it’s not hard to write them off as another bunch of christians fundamentalists.
Any way, on to the question of the day…
SAME-SEX MARRIAGE: IS IT HARMLESS?
Good questions, lets see what
by Patrick J. Byrne (re-published with the permission of the author)
has to say on the subject.
Same-sex marriage fundamentally changes not only the legal definition of marriage, but all the social, educational, economic, legal and religious institutions that service and support marriage, family and children.
Really? How do you figure that? I’m pretty sure that couples wanting to get married and who are of the opposite sex will still be able to do that. A fundamental change would mean that everyone would have to get married to something different, like a goat, or an alpaca. Marriage Equality simply allows same-sex couples the right to marry. You should really consider it a tweak. I look forward to your reasoning as to how this ‘fundamental’ redefinition changes social, educational, economic, legal and religious institutions that ‘service’ and support marriage as it is.
Schools: If marriage is redefined in law, it would be legal to teach same-sex marriage, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual issues in schools. In fact, the courts may invoke anti-discrimination law to force these issues into schools.
I’m not at all sure what ‘legal to teach same-sex marriage’ is all about. Just explain to me what teaching about same-sex marriage actually means, and why it would be a bad thing. And believe it or not lots of places already have curriculums that include issues on sexuality and the sky is still in the sky. Your claim that the courts may invoke a way to force the issues into schools is a bit of a furphy really. I guess you really just mean into good christian schools. And so what if schools do teach it? Those schools no doubt have a gay population and their rights should surely be included and not excluded, after all your NCC actually wants rigorous education.
The Australian Education Union’s policy declares that “homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism and intersex need to be normalised” in education.
You do know that being GLBTI is normal, right? It’s not a surprise. Refer to the rigorous eduction statement above.
In 2006, the NSW Attorney-General’s Department produced a Learn to Include: Teachers Manual for primary schools. It provides a range of resources for teaching about same-sex parents in primary schools.
Oh, I wonder if that’s legal. I bet the AG knows a thing or two about the law. There’s a certainly reality to the manual. Whether you like it or not, same-sex couples have children and guess what, they send them to school. So rather than have the teacher freeze in shock when discovering that one of his students has two mums, a manual will show them the correct response. You could always use the christian manual when dealing with gay parents and ask the child brings them into the playground during playtime so that they can be stoned to death.
Children: Same-sex marriage will greatly affect future children, denying many their birth right to their true biological identity.
Already many people go out of their way to discover who the donors are. It’s utmost in the minds of many eager parents to actually keep track of the biological parents, and that’s just the straight people. Sure, some parents like to hide this sort of facts, but they’re pretty rare. I think most of us these days understand the need to know the history of our beginnings. As to the notion that some right is being denied, I’m not sure what right this is that you refer to or what it even means.
Not only will it result in more children being born of donor conception and surrogacy, but the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual (GLBT) lobby is campaigning to have the birth certificates of children adopted by same-sex couples to be changed to record the same-sex couple in place of the biological parents.
It won’t result in more children being born. Gay people are already doing the children thing, they really are. They achieve it in many ways, its true that it will make it easier, but I don’t expect to see a sudden burst of millions of children being born into same-sex families let alone somehow being denied something.
There’s no issue with a birth certificate reflecting the names of the parents, it prevents all sorts of misunderstandings. There’s other ways to address the record keeping of the donors. And seriously, names on a birth certificate is a reason to stop gay people from getting married?
The Australian Human Rights Commission has recommended — in the interest of same-sex parents — that birth certificates should be open to recording any of the “birth mother, birth father, lesbian co-mother or gay co-father”
There you go, a way to record the relevant information on the birth certificate. Unless you really have no ability to change your thinking and think that somehow a birth certificate with more than a few lines of text on it is really too hard to handle what exactly is the issue here?
This stands in contrast to Article 7 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), which says: “The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and, as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.”
No it doesn’t contrast Article 7 at all, in fact it goes further to make sure that all the relevant information is recorded. It’s also interesting to note that the word ‘parents’ doesn’t exclude same-sex couples.
While the GLBT lobby wants to replace biological parents’ names on birth certificates with the names of same-sex partners (“psychological” parents), there have been three inquiries into the rights of donor-conceived children to know their “biological” origins. These inquires were by: the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs inquiry (2011), the Victorian Law Reform Commission (2012) and the NSW Legislative Assembly (2012). 9, 10, 11.
All three inquiries recommended that donor-conceived children should have a right to access their biological mother/father.
Yes, that’s right. It’s why we have inquiries. You seem to be of the mistaken belief that somehow same-sex couples willingly want to hide the biological details of their children’s parentage. I think you’re probably out of touch there. In fact, lots of couples I know go to extraordinary lengths to include the biological parents in the lives of their children. Sometimes the donor doesn’t want any involvement, sometimes they do.
Businesses will also be affected by same-sex marriage, particularly those associated with wedding services — photographers, caterers, function hire places — and bed-and-breakfast accommodation. Same-sex marriage law greatly increases the reach of anti-discrimination law.
In the U.S. state of New Mexico, where same-sex marriage is legal, the state’s supreme court last month found photographer Elaine Huguenin guilty under the New Mexico Human Rights Act of refusing to provide her services to a lesbian couple’s wedding.
Two weeks after legislators in the U.S. state of Oregon passed a same-sex marriage law, a local maker of old-fashioned wedding trolleys was forced to shut down his business after being hounded by the GLBT lobby for refusing to supply a lesbian wedding function, according to the Baltimore Sun (December 25, 2012).
The paper noted, “Wedding vendors elsewhere who refused to accommodate same-sex couples have faced discrimination lawsuits — and lost.”
In Europe, a draft piece of European Union law known as the Equal Treatment Directive will, if passed, drastically increase pressure on business, particularly in countries recognising same-sex marriage. It will force businesses to provide goods or services that contravene their consciences on threat of being hauled before the courts if they don’t.
So basically you’d be pleased if a business that thought black people should use the rear door to get into their shop is ok? You would be happy for a business that believes a child with a disability is the result of the sins of her parents and therefore shouldn’t be served in a café? It’s really easy, if businesses want to thrive they serve everyone. It’s actually what they already do. They don’t ask their customers if they’re divorced, a muslim, a jew, a christian or any other arbitrary system of discrimination, so why is it OK for a business to discriminate based on the sexuality of the customer? Short answer, it isn’t.
Churches will gain only temporary exemptions from involvement in same-sex marriages, at best.
Churches already have a raft of ways of only marrying the people they want. That won’t change. The real question is how will a church refuse to marry a couple of their loyal members who are gay? That will be interesting. In any case, marriage is a civil right, not a religious right. Maybe it’s time to take the act of marriage out of the churches.
The whole article is based on nothing at all. It doesn’t stand up to any sort of scrutiny. Doesn’t matter how many footnotes you can stick in, a bit of common sense shows your article to be nothing more than more christian clap-trap that is still driven by the fear that the whole world will turn gay if you even consider that people like me are normal.
So after all that, to answer your question, is it harmless? The answer is yes, you homophobic bigoted fuckwit.