February 17, 2004 Valentine's Day has come and gone for the year 2004. And, in what some might call a fitting circumstance, San Francisco's officials opened up the registers for homosexual marriage licenses. This was not the first time this has occurred. In 1975, homosexuals in Arizona were licensed for marriage, but their license was later revoked.
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Since then, but more recently in the late 90s and early part of the twenty-first century, homosexual marriage has been caught up in the fervor of the civil rights movement. This movement has now peaked in San Francisco and will likely be one of the main issues when voting for the president come this next election. But should homosexuals marry? Currently the argument stands that if two people love each other dearly and want to commit their lives together, who should stand between them. Certainly not someone else's morals. Now, I agree with this point along the lines that someone else's morals should not stand in the way of someone's marriage; however, permitting homosexual marriage along these lines causes a problem due to the fact that love is not the basis for marriage. If love were the basis for marriage, than any two people who say they love each other can get married. A person can say that he and his cat love each other deeply enough that they must get married until death do they part so that they can show the community their deep attachment for each other. I don't know about you, but I think that would definitely put a cramp in the cat's licentious lifestyle. The purpose of marriage is, therefore, not a showing of one's love for each other, but rather a social contract between two members of the community and the community itself. The social contract is not in place in order to specify with whom one is sleeping; instead, it is of utmost importance in indicating that the couple will take full responsibilities for their actions and the possible resulting children from that union and, thus, fulfill their duty to the community. Marriage is a social institute designed to protect the children that result from the sexual union between a couple and, ultimately, to prevent the burdens imposed upon the community by a neglected child. Children in single parent homes--homes where either the social contract of marriage was violated by divorce for reasons of lack of love or happiness shared between the partners or homes where the parents were not wed in the first place--impose a burden upon society to raise the child up correctly. Children who come from such homes typically lack basic health care, live in poverty, and end up with a lower level of education than their counterparts who grew up in a two-parent home. These children do grow up and cause society to have to pay for their lack of productivity caused by the children's lack of education and bad health. Today, in America, society is often called upon to pay for their health care and their education. Several government-sponsored programs teach adults who lack adequate knowledge needed for a job in the workforce. However, when these children grow up in a two-parent home, they are more likely to get an adequate education, more than likely to afford some form of health insurance, and are less likely to grow up in poverty. So, marriage serves as a contract between the community and the couple who will be engaging in sexual activity; it is an agreement that the couple will take responsibility for its actions if a child results from their union. This contract is only available to two people who can produce a child. As such, this agreement can only be between a man and a woman and their state. Only a man and a woman can produce children together as a result of their sexual union. Two men cannot produce children and neither can two women. Because homosexual couples cannot create children of their own through their sexual activity with their partner, a contract between a homosexual couple and the community seems to be a moot point--a marriage license for a homosexual couple is wholly unworthy of the paper on which it was printed and the trees that were killed to record their "union." But in the last thirty years or so, sex has been continually disassociated with children, partly due to the increase in usage of contraceptives and birth control as well as abortion. Divorce has also played a big role in separating children from sex; however, abortion, in particular, has become the capstone of the disassociation between sex and children. Many people involved in the pro-abortion movement are also involved in the homosexual "civil rights" movement. By supporting abortion "rights," these people continually drive the wedge between the link of sex and children. As soon as the divide has been made complete, homosexual marriage can very well be accepted by society since the very foundation of the social contract of marriage has become violated and destroyed. Homosexual marriage is not the end result, though; rather, homosexual marriage serves as a vehicle to wide scale acceptance of homosexuality and its being put on par with most other behaviors. As such, homosexuals can then be entitled to extra privileges not afforded to heterosexuals--like hate crime protection. Although homosexuals already enjoy a sort of immunity from hate crime legislation, extra privilege, and "civil rights" protection, these privileges will be further codified by the marriage license into American society. It will give homosexuals ability to collect extra funding from government programs designed to help minorities that others, non-homosexuals, will not be able to receive. The moral decay of society, in the form of increased divorces and abortion rates, has lead the way for acceptance of homosexual marriage, because it has destroyed the foundation of the social contract between a man and his wife and society as a whole. |