Procreate Or Thine Marriage Will Be Null And Void!
In a splintered decision, Justice Barbara Madsen wrote that the state's marriage law was enacted to "promote procreation and to encourage stable families."Recently a citizen's initiative was put forth, with the hope of stemming discussion on this absurd statement:
Initiative 957 was filed by the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance, which was formed last summer after the state Supreme Court upheld Washington's ban on same-sex marriage. In that 5-4 ruling, the court found that state lawmakers were justified in passing the 1998 Defense of Marriage Act, which restricts marriage to unions between a man and woman.Here is the complete ballot measure.
Under I-957, marriage would be limited to men and women who are able to have children. Couples would be required to prove they can have children to get a marriage license, and if they did not have children within three years, their marriages would be subject to annulment.
All other marriages would be defined as "unrecognized" and people in them would be ineligible to receive any marriage benefits.
"Absurd? Very," the group says on its Web site, which adds it is planning two more initiatives involving marriage and procreation. "But there is a rational basis for this absurdity. By floating the initiatives, we hope to prompt discussion about the many misguided assumptions" underlying the Supreme Court's ruling.
My hope is that it makes it on the ballot, although that will be a long shot. Trying to explain the initiative to people will take a lot of effort, and most will not want to risk such a measure becoming law by signing a petition, even though it is not likely that it would ever pass.
However, the initiative would surely help raise awareness of the absurdity of the Supreme Court's decision and Madsen's argument, and we’d get a chance to talk about the stupidity of it all.
You can read more about the initiative at the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance Web site.
Posted at 2/05/2007 10:16:00 PM PT
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7 Comment(s):
I think practicing should count so long as both parties agree to do so every Sunday morning. Also a tax credit just for those who practice at least three times a week would cyt down on road rage.
Oh and same sex couples should be allowd to practice and get the tax credit just like the hetero folks.
What a clever attempt to raise people's consciousness about gay marriage! It's too bad that it won't work. The homophobes don't object to gay marriage on procreation-oriented grounds, that's just a convenient excuse. The reality is, they're grossed out by the idea of gay sex and care more about their "eww" factor than they do about other people's happiness and legal rights.
It's the same thing with the anti-choice crowd. The sanctity of human life is -- for many -- a convenient excuse. But the real underlying desire is to punish women for having sex and enjoying it.
I won't be signing....I am a Washington resident, and a married (but infertile) career woman in her thirties. My Grandmother remarried later in life for companionship. A friend had a hysterectomy when she was 18 due to illness. I feel this initiative was made to mock hundreds of people like us, and use our unfortunate situations to their benefit. Twisting the government to make a point at the expense of others is cruel, and at the expense of my hard earned tax dollars, is just plain wasteful. They don't really want this passed, they want to make a point. Well, make your point the old fashioned way and leave us out of it.
You bring up a good point, that many women are infertile due to illness, surgery or some other problem.
But then again, if the purpose of marriage is to go forth and procreate, then what is the purpose of marriage for someone who is infertile?
And what is the purpose of marriage for heterosexual couples who could have children, but for one reason or another have chosen not to?
And then furthermore, why is that same purpose not valid for same sex couples who also cannot have children?
This initiative doesn't mock people who cannot have children, it mocks the Supreme Court decision against gay marriage that claimed that the state's marriage law was enacted to "promote procreation and to encourage stable families."
If anything, what this initiative is saying is that you can have your hang-ups but leave gay couples out of it and let them get married just like anyone else can.
I think this whole marriage debate, as well as others like it including abortion, evolution, etc. are all just attempts to distract the electorate away from debating the war(s) and their corollary issues such as the Plame Affair, the Tillman Affair, energy policy, domestic surveillance, etc.
Not that liberals should refrain from defending citizen's rights to choice, accurate education fro their children, etc....but somehow these debates often seem to heat up most exactly when the Admininstration appears to be on the ropes.
To impute to those who oppose same-sex marriage the argument that “gays can’t reproduce” as a reason that they should not be able to marry (i.e., the purpose, or one of the primary purposes, of marriage is to produce children, and since gays can’t reproduce they don’t qualify) is merely a distortion of their arguments. That is, it is a classic strawman argument. The only people making this “absurd and flawed” argument are the SUPPORTERS of same-sex marriage, such as The Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance. I’ve never seen those who oppose same-sex marriage make this argument.
Marriage relates courtship and spousal selection to reproduction precisely because the FACT of human reproduction implicates the political necessity that is the ORDERLY perpetuation of the nation and society.
Because reproduction is a FACT and will have important and inevitable consequences on society both good and bad, the mechanisms of marriage and family law seek to regulate the selection of spouses and stabilize the relationship once the selection is made because of the POTENTIAL OF MEN AND WOMEN TOGETHER TO CREATE SOCIAL DISORDER when they do reproduce.
From experience, it is taken as given that stable mother/father relationships are the most beneficial arrangement for raising children, and marriage seeks in an important way to assure children the support from the father responsible for their existence, which rationalizes the conferring of rights and benefits as an inducement for heterosexual couples to achieve this objective.
Same-sex relationships have NOTHING AT ALL to do with either the natural, biological purpose of spouse selection or the political purpose of it as well. Sexual relations between members of the same sex and the relationships that might derive from these have at best a NEUTRAL EFFECT on society in the best of times, and a negative effect when population declines menace a nation. Therefore, it would be IRRATIONAL to confer the status of marriage upon a relationship that is forever separated from the purpose for which it is intended.
The state purpose of marriage is to bring ORDER to the particular human activity that is procreation. It is not an obligation to reproduce.
The Washington DOMA initiative is meant to undermine the “procreation argument”, of course. It means to suggest that marriage exists for other purposes than procreation.
But supposing that marriage is not concerned primarily with reproduction, then what really would be its concern? The most plausible possibilities are that:
1) marriage concerns the emotional and affective relationships that people may have for others
or
2) there is none. It exists merely as a legislative whim.
One problem for the first is that if marriage does concern the emotional and affective relationships people might have, then why must this be limited only to one person and another? Why should it not be extended to all emotional and affective relationships, whether this be towards one other person, several persons, animals or objects? Who can judge the worthiness of one’s love? Is not all love equal?
Secondly, what would be the state’s interest in sanctioning and promoting these affective relationships? Why should it care if a man loves a woman, if another man loves a man, or if a man loves his goldfish?
That leaves number two. Civil marriage is simply a legislative whim.
The whole issue of same-sex marriage belongs clearly in Lewis Carroll’s world of Wonderland. If gay rights activists can be reproached for only one thing, it is for injecting irrationality and craziness into the politics and world-view of societies.
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