Part Second-point-five
Feb. 27th, 2004 03:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sff_corgi_ljAmerica's Anti-Family Experiment
In this delicate balance, it is safe to say that beginning with a trickle in the 1950s, but becoming an overwhelming flood in the 1960s and 1970s, we took a pretty good system, and in order to solve problems that needed tweaking, we made massive, fundamental changes that have had devastating consequences.
Now huge numbers of Americans know that the schools are places where their children are indoctrinated in anti-family values. Trust is not just going -- for them it's gone.
Documentation on 'huge numbers' and 'anti-family' needed.
Huge numbers of children are deprived of two-parent homes, because society has decided to give legal status and social acceptance to out-of-wedlock parenting and couples who break up their marriages with little regard for what is good for the children.
Cf: Scandanavia, where marriage and reproduction are not tied. Are their children in such a wretched state?
The result is a generation of children with no trust in marriage who are mating in, at best, merely "marriage-like" patterns, and bearing children with no sense of responsibility to society at large; while society is trying to take on an ever greater role in caring for the children who are suffering -- while doing an increasingly bad job of it.
Overextension of resources due to lack of sufficient support or understanding of needs.
Parents in a stable marriage are much better than schools at civilizing children. You have to be a fanatical ideologue not to recognize this as an obvious truth -- in other words, you have to dumb down or radically twist the definition of "civilizing children" in order to claim that parents are not, on the whole, better at it.
Schools are designed to teach large numbers; families are designed to teach small numbers. 'Better at it' is not a fair assessment.
We are so far gone down this road that it would take a wrenching, almost revolutionary social change to reverse it. And with the forces of P.C. orthodoxy insisting that the solutions to the problems they have caused is ever-larger doses of the disease, it is certain that any such revolution would be hotly contested.
Continues to make vague statements like 'disease' without clear definition of terms.
Now, in the midst of this tragic collapse of marriage, along comes the Massachusetts Supreme Court, attempting to redefine marriage in a way that is absurdly irrelevant to any purpose for which society needs marriage in the first place.
I'm sorry, where did 'collapse of marriage' come from all of a sudden? It was previously stated that a two-parent monogamous family was the most stable and civilisation-building. Making many more of these legal and acceptable would make things more civilised, no? As long as the children had appropriate role models?
Humpty Has Struck Before.
We've already seen similar attempts at redefinition. The ideologues have demanded that we stop defining "families" as Dad, Mom, and the kids. Now any grouping of people might be called a "family."
Because other cultures outside of the U.S. Anglo-European culture define a family as 'Mom, Dad, Grandmother, Grandfather, Uncle Al and all the kids', for instance. This includes, incidentally, Afro-American culture where grandparents are not only frequently more respected and integrated, but perform irreplaceable childrearing functions while the parents are at work, since two-income families are almost a necessity for everyone except the very rich getting Republican tax cuts.
But this doesn't turn them into families, or even make rational people believe they're families. It just makes it politically unacceptable to use the word family in any meaningful way.
Who is qualified to judge whether group X is a family or not? Isn't this throwing stones at Mary Magdalen again? Who made Orson Scott Card the arbitrator of All Things Family?
The same thing will happen to the word marriage if the Massachusetts decision is allowed to stand, and is then enforced nationwide because of the "full faith and credit" clause in the Constitution.
Just because you give legal sanction to a homosexual couple and call their contract a "marriage" does not make it a marriage. It simply removes marriage as a legitimate word for the real thing.
Lack of definition for 'real thing'.
If you declare that there is no longer any legal difference between low tide and high tide, it might stop people from publishing tide charts, but it won't change the fact that sometimes the water is lower and sometimes it's higher.
Specious. Apples and oranges.
Calling a homosexual contract "marriage" does not make it reproductively relevant and will not make it contribute in any meaningful way to the propagation of civilization.
Reproduction is irrelevant when there's too many damaged children needing loving adoptive homes. Homosexual contributions to Western civilisation are documentable and invaluable. Cf. Alexander the Great, Leonardo da Vinci, Sappho.... Therefore 'not make... any meaningful [contribution] to the propagation of civilization' is an argument based on extremely faulty logic.
In fact, it will do harm. Nowhere near as much harm as we have already done through divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing. But it's another nail in the coffin. Maybe the last nail, precisely because it is the most obvious and outrageous attack on what is left of marriage in America.
Supporters of homosexual "marriage" dismiss warnings like mine as the predictable ranting of people who hate progress. But the Massachusetts Supreme Court has made its decision without even a cursory attempt to ascertain the social costs. The judges have taken it on faith that it will do no harm.
You can't add a runway to an airport in America without years of carefully researched environmental impact statements. But you can radically reorder the fundamental social unit of society without political process or serious research.
Let me put it another way. The sex life of the people around me is none of my business; the homosexuality of some of my friends and associates has made no barrier between us, and as far as I know, my heterosexuality hasn't bothered them. That's what tolerance looks like.
This article does not appear tolerant in the least. At least he recognises it's none of his business, despite the fact he seems here to be now making it his business, arbitrating peoples' lives.
But homosexual "marriage" is an act of intolerance. It is an attempt to eliminate any special preference for marriage in society -- to erase the protected status of marriage in the constant balancing act between civilization and individual reproduction.
'Protected status'? No documentation for legal state of 'protection'. Define 'protected status'.
The government is not licensing human reproduction. Almost wish they would, sometimes, but that has too much potential to turn really, really ugly.
So if my friends insist on calling what they do "marriage," they are not turning their relationship into what my wife and I have created, because no court has the power to change what their relationship actually is.
Instead they are attempting to strike a death blow against the well-earned protected status of our, and every other, real marriage.
Again, 'protected'?
They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won't be married. They'll just be playing dress-up in their parents' clothes.
No clear explanation how, for example, a pair of people who have been living in a monogamous, stable relationship for half-a-century getting legal rights protecting their mutal property and residing nowhere near Mr. and Mrs. Card's property will 'steal' anything from Mr. Card and/or his wife. Also, how since they have a document from the City from San Francisco and the previously-stated relationship status, they won't 'really' be married when they believe they are. Reality is flexible.
The Propaganda Mill
What happens now if children grow up in a society that overtly teaches that homosexual partnering is not "just as good as" but actually is marriage?
Once this is regarded as settled law, anyone who tries to teach children to aspire to create a child-centered family with a father and a mother will be labeled as a bigot and accused of hate speech.
False conclusion. It might be true if the children are taught this is the only 'good' way to create a family. Exclusionism leads to prejudice and bigotry.
Can you doubt that the textbooks will be far behind? Any depictions of "families" in schoolbooks will have to include a certain proportion of homosexual "marriages" as positive role models.
Just as they are required now to depict Afro-American, Hispanic and Asian families as well as Anglo-Europeans. They are supposed to be showing American citizens in general, not specific socioethnic groups unless that group is the focus.
Television programs will start to show homosexual "marriages" as wonderful and happy (even as they continue to show heterosexual marriages as oppressive and conflict-ridden).
Specious -- television programs depend on drama to be interesting. Happy is, frankly, boring to watch. Conflict is more engaging because either the audience can empathise with the depicted problem or gets catharsis out of seeing the problem worked through.
Homosexual relationships have, for decades, been depicted as perverse, depraved, unnatural and doomed to tragedy. Any current 'happy' depictions are an attempt to present a more balanced view. Homosexual dramas like 'Queer Like Folk' are not composed entirely of happy relationships because that is dramatically invalid as entertainment.
The propaganda mill will pound our children with homosexual marriage as a role model. We know this will happen because we have seen the fanatical Left do it many times before.
Again -- the 50-year monogamous and loving relationship is a bad role model? How?
So when our children go through the normal adolescent period of sexual confusion and perplexity, which is precisely the time when parents have the least influence over their children and most depend on the rest of society to help their children grow through the last steps before adulthood, what will happen?
Already any child with any kind of sexual attraction to the same sex is told that this is an irresistible destiny, despite the large number of heterosexuals who move through this adolescent phase and never look back.
Proof?
Already any child with androgynous appearance or mannerisms -- effeminite boys and masculine girls -- are being nurtured and guided (or taunted and abused) into "accepting" what many of them never suspected they had -- a desire to permanently move into homosexual society.
As opposed to the straight gay-bashers abusing them into the hospital?
In other words, society will bend all its efforts to seize upon any hint of homosexuality in our young people and encourage it.
Proof?
Now, there is a myth that homosexuals are "born that way," and we are pounded with this idea so thoroughly that many people think that somebody, somewhere, must have proved it.
'Myth' -- specious label. Opinion, not fact. It has not been proven 100% either way.
In fact what evidence there is suggests that if there is a genetic component to homosexuality, an entire range of environmental influences are also involved. While there is no scientific research whatsoever that indicates that there is no such thing as a borderline child who could go either way.
There is, however, many studies which indicate gender is a bell curve, biologically as well as psychologically.
Those who claim that there is "no danger" and that homosexuals are born, not made, are simply stating their faith.
The dark secret of homosexual society -- the one that dares not speak its name -- is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.
No documentation!
It's that desire for normality, that discontent with perpetual adolescent sexuality, that is at least partly behind this hunger for homosexual "marriage."
They are unhappy, but they think it's because the rest of us "don't fully accept them."
President Bush is proof of 'don't fully accept them'. I'm unhappy with him and I'm straight.
Homosexual "marriage" won't accomplish what they hope. They will still be just as far outside the reproductive cycle of life. And they will have inflicted real damage on those of us who are inside it.
Marriage =/= reproduction, still. Women have been freed of that by science.
They will make it harder for us to raise children with any confidence that they, in turn, will take their place in the reproductive cycle. They will use all the forces of our society to try to encourage our children that it is desirable to be like them.
Implies homosexuals actually have some reason to evangelise.
Most kids won't be swayed, because the message of the hormones is clear for them. But for those parents who have kids who hover in confusion, their lives complicated by painful experiences, conflicting desires, and many fears, the P.C. elite will now demand that the full machinery of the state be employed to draw them away from the cycle of life.
Cue Disney (which provides domestic-partner insurance), Tim Rice and Elton John (who is bisexual/gay) for the soundtrack here [puts Lion King in CD player]
Children from broken and wounded families, with missing parents, may be the ones most confused and most susceptible. Instead of society helping these children overcome the handicaps that come from a missing or dysfunctional father or mother, it may well be exacerbating the damage.
All the while, the P.C. elite will be shouting at dismayed parents that it is somehow evil and bigoted of them not to rejoice when their children commit themselves to a reproductive dead end.
See again: overpopulation, reproductive technology, gifts of loving friends
But there is nothing irrational about parents grieving at the abduction-in-advance of their grandchildren.
Don't you see the absurd contradiction? A postulated but unproven genetic disposition toward homosexuality is supposed to be embraced and accepted by everyone as "perfectly natural" -- but the far stronger and almost universal genetic disposition toward having children and grandchildren is to be suppressed, kept to yourself, treated as a mental illness.
I'm not seeing this.
You're unhappy that your son wants to marry a boy? Then you're sick, dangerous, a homophobe, filled with hate. Control your natural desires or be branded as evil by every movie and TV show coming out of P.C. Hollywood!
Compassion and tolerance flow only one way in the "Wonderland" of the politically correct.
Unable to counter except for rolling of eyes.
Loss of Trust
The proponents of this anti-family revolution are counting on most Americans to do what they have done through every stage of the monstrous social revolution that we are still suffering through -- nothing at all.
But that "nothing" is deceptive. In fact, the pro-family forces are already taking their most decisive action. It looks like "nothing" to the anti-family, politically correct elite, because it isn't using their ranting methodology.
The pro-family response consists of quietly withdrawing allegiance from the society that is attacking the family.
Counter-civilisation move -- promoting civil disobedience.
Would-be parents take part in civilization only when they trust society to enhance their chances of raising children who will, in turn, reproduce. Societies that create that trust survive; societies that lose it, disappear, one way or another.
Parents reproduce because they want children, not because they want grandchildren. They want extension into the future by proxy.
But the most common way is for the people who have the most at stake -- parents and would-be parents -- to simply make the untrusted society disappear by ceasing to lift a finger to sustain it.
It is parents who have the greatest ability to transmit a culture from one generation to the next.
If parents stop transmitting the culture of the American elite to their children, and actively resist letting the schools and media do it in their place, then that culture will disappear.
If America becomes a place where the laws of the nation declare that marriage no longer exists -- which is what the Massachusetts decision actually does -- then our allegiance to America will become zero. We will transfer our allegiance to a society that does protect marriage.
Incorrect. The Massachusetts decision declares marriage exists for all citizens, not just the heterosexual or pretend-heterosexual ones.
We will teach our children to have no loyalty to the culture of the American elite, and will instead teach them to be loyal to a competing culture that upholds the family. Whether we home school our kids or not, we will withdraw them at an early age from any sense of belonging to contemporary American culture.
Again, promoting separatism and internal revolution in response to a legal decision about equality of legal status. Cf: American civil rights movement, 1960s; American women's rights movement, 1970s.
We're already far down that road. Already most parents regard schools -- an institution of the state that most directly touches our children -- as the enemy, even though we like and trust the individual teachers -- because we perceive, correctly, that schools are being legally obligated to brainwash our children to despise the values that keep civilization alive.
See the Texas School Board textbook flap. Schools are being forced to be bland by protesting parents.
And if marriage itself ceases to exist as a legally distinct social union with protection from the government, then why in the world should we trust that government enough to let it have authority over our children?
They Think They Have the Power.
The politically correct elite think they have the power to make these changes, because they control the courts.
I'm not politically elite; my vote might not even have been counted in the last presidential election. I think I just want people to be treated fairly.
They don't have to consult the people, because the courts nowadays have usurped the power to make new law.
Define 'people'. Are people 'everybody except homosexual citizens'? Are people 'everybody except homosexual citizens and their friends and family'?
Democracy? What a joke. These people hate putting questions like this to a vote. Like any good totalitarians, they know what's best for the people, and they'll force it down our throats any way they can.
We don't live in a democracy. We live in a democratic republic. Junior high school civics.
That's what the Democratic filibuster in the Senate to block Bush's judicial appointments is all about -- to keep the anti-family values of the Massachusetts Supreme Court in control of our government.
Opinion, and glossing over details on top of that.
And when you add this insult onto the already deep injuries to marriage caused by the widespread acceptance of nonmonogamous behavior, will there be anything left at all?
Where is his dividing line between personal choice and privacy versus government or societal interference?
Sure. In my church and many other churches, people still cling fiercely to civilized values and struggle to raise civilized children despite the barbarians who now rule us through the courts.
The barbarians think that if they grab hold of the trunk of the tree, they've caught the birds in the branches. But the birds can fly to another tree.
And I don't mean that civilized Americans will move. I mean that they'll simply stop regarding the authority of the government as having any legitimacy.
Starting another civil war, Mr. Card?
It is the most morally conservative portion of society that is most successful in raising children who believe in loyalty and oath-keeping and self-control and self-sacrifice.
It was the conservative portion of society who wanted to keep Afro-Americans from getting the vote or normal American legal and civil rights, too.
And we're tired of being subject to barbarian rules and laws that fight against our civilized values. We're not interested in risking our children's lives to defend a nation that does not defend us.
Define 'we'.
Who do you think is volunteering for the military to defend America against our enemies? Those who believe in the teachings of politically correct college professors? Or those who believe in the traditional values that the politically correct elite has been so successful in destroying?
Let's take a poll of our volunteer military -- especially those who specialize in combat areas -- and see what civilization it is that they actually volunteered to defend.
Since the politically correct are loudly unwilling to fight or die for their version of America, and they are actively trying to destroy the version of America that traditional Americans are willing to fight or die to defend, just how long will "America" last, once they've driven out the traditional culture?
Documentation lacking for 'the politically correct are loudly unwilling to fight or die'. Last time I looked, there were plenty of people turning out to vote and filling the Mall with protest rallies for what they believe in. Last time I looked, the draft did not check one's political or social position before sending one to Iraq. Last time I looked, citizenship consisted not of merely rubberstamping a point of view but making conscious and intelligent choices and providing feedback to one's representatives.
Oh, it will still be called America.
But out of the old American mantras of "democracy" and "freedom" and "home" and "family," of "motherhood" and "apple pie," only the pie will be left.
'Freedom' in the United States is defined by people being encouraged to express their opinions and live their ways of life; but not by restricting the freedoms of other citizens in order to get their way.
And even if few people care enough to defend the old family values against the screaming hate speech of the Left -- which is what they're counting on, of course -- the end will be the same. Because with marriage finally killed, America will no longer be able to raise up children with any trust in or loyalty to or willingness to sacrifice for that society.
So either civilized people will succeed in establishing a government that protects the family; or civilized people will withdraw their allegiance from the government that won't protect it; or the politically correct barbarians will have complete victory over the family -- and, lacking the strong family structure on which civilization depends, our civilization will collapse or fade away.
Remember how long Iraq's powerful military lasted against a determined enemy, when the Iraqi soldiers no longer had any loyalty to the Iraqi leadership. That wasn't an aberration. It's how great nations and empires fall.
'Iraq's powerful military' was outmatched by spending, not by heart; we have lost more soldiers to guerilla fighting since the original 'shock and awe' concluded. The American military is not being picked off by people who are having handgun accidents but by a determined enemy fighting back in the only way they still can. They're obviously motivated by something, and they're doing a good job of degrading American morale.
America learned something important from Viet Nam -- don't hate the soldiers for doing their jobs; eliminate the reason they have to do those jobs instead. 'We support our troops' is not a blanket approval of any war activity.
Depriving us of any democratic voice in these sweeping changes may not lead to revolution or even resistance. But it will be just as deadly if it leads to despair. For in the crisis, few citizens will lift a finger to protect or sustain the elite that treated the things we valued -- our marriages, our children, and our right to self-government -- with such contempt.
I find this article treats me with impersonal contempt. It implies that my family was not just inappropriate, but doomed from the beginning (my mother was my father's second wife). It implies that my gay friends are gay only because they were sexually abused, when I know that to be untruth. It says my friends will be bad parents no matter how loving and supportive they are to their son and new daughter just because they're both women. It implies that I, myself, am some sort of decadent and worthless because I am not interested in committing reproduction myself nor in marrying.
In this delicate balance, it is safe to say that beginning with a trickle in the 1950s, but becoming an overwhelming flood in the 1960s and 1970s, we took a pretty good system, and in order to solve problems that needed tweaking, we made massive, fundamental changes that have had devastating consequences.
Now huge numbers of Americans know that the schools are places where their children are indoctrinated in anti-family values. Trust is not just going -- for them it's gone.
Documentation on 'huge numbers' and 'anti-family' needed.
Huge numbers of children are deprived of two-parent homes, because society has decided to give legal status and social acceptance to out-of-wedlock parenting and couples who break up their marriages with little regard for what is good for the children.
Cf: Scandanavia, where marriage and reproduction are not tied. Are their children in such a wretched state?
The result is a generation of children with no trust in marriage who are mating in, at best, merely "marriage-like" patterns, and bearing children with no sense of responsibility to society at large; while society is trying to take on an ever greater role in caring for the children who are suffering -- while doing an increasingly bad job of it.
Overextension of resources due to lack of sufficient support or understanding of needs.
Parents in a stable marriage are much better than schools at civilizing children. You have to be a fanatical ideologue not to recognize this as an obvious truth -- in other words, you have to dumb down or radically twist the definition of "civilizing children" in order to claim that parents are not, on the whole, better at it.
Schools are designed to teach large numbers; families are designed to teach small numbers. 'Better at it' is not a fair assessment.
We are so far gone down this road that it would take a wrenching, almost revolutionary social change to reverse it. And with the forces of P.C. orthodoxy insisting that the solutions to the problems they have caused is ever-larger doses of the disease, it is certain that any such revolution would be hotly contested.
Continues to make vague statements like 'disease' without clear definition of terms.
Now, in the midst of this tragic collapse of marriage, along comes the Massachusetts Supreme Court, attempting to redefine marriage in a way that is absurdly irrelevant to any purpose for which society needs marriage in the first place.
I'm sorry, where did 'collapse of marriage' come from all of a sudden? It was previously stated that a two-parent monogamous family was the most stable and civilisation-building. Making many more of these legal and acceptable would make things more civilised, no? As long as the children had appropriate role models?
Humpty Has Struck Before.
We've already seen similar attempts at redefinition. The ideologues have demanded that we stop defining "families" as Dad, Mom, and the kids. Now any grouping of people might be called a "family."
Because other cultures outside of the U.S. Anglo-European culture define a family as 'Mom, Dad, Grandmother, Grandfather, Uncle Al and all the kids', for instance. This includes, incidentally, Afro-American culture where grandparents are not only frequently more respected and integrated, but perform irreplaceable childrearing functions while the parents are at work, since two-income families are almost a necessity for everyone except the very rich getting Republican tax cuts.
But this doesn't turn them into families, or even make rational people believe they're families. It just makes it politically unacceptable to use the word family in any meaningful way.
Who is qualified to judge whether group X is a family or not? Isn't this throwing stones at Mary Magdalen again? Who made Orson Scott Card the arbitrator of All Things Family?
The same thing will happen to the word marriage if the Massachusetts decision is allowed to stand, and is then enforced nationwide because of the "full faith and credit" clause in the Constitution.
Just because you give legal sanction to a homosexual couple and call their contract a "marriage" does not make it a marriage. It simply removes marriage as a legitimate word for the real thing.
Lack of definition for 'real thing'.
If you declare that there is no longer any legal difference between low tide and high tide, it might stop people from publishing tide charts, but it won't change the fact that sometimes the water is lower and sometimes it's higher.
Specious. Apples and oranges.
Calling a homosexual contract "marriage" does not make it reproductively relevant and will not make it contribute in any meaningful way to the propagation of civilization.
Reproduction is irrelevant when there's too many damaged children needing loving adoptive homes. Homosexual contributions to Western civilisation are documentable and invaluable. Cf. Alexander the Great, Leonardo da Vinci, Sappho.... Therefore 'not make... any meaningful [contribution] to the propagation of civilization' is an argument based on extremely faulty logic.
In fact, it will do harm. Nowhere near as much harm as we have already done through divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing. But it's another nail in the coffin. Maybe the last nail, precisely because it is the most obvious and outrageous attack on what is left of marriage in America.
Supporters of homosexual "marriage" dismiss warnings like mine as the predictable ranting of people who hate progress. But the Massachusetts Supreme Court has made its decision without even a cursory attempt to ascertain the social costs. The judges have taken it on faith that it will do no harm.
You can't add a runway to an airport in America without years of carefully researched environmental impact statements. But you can radically reorder the fundamental social unit of society without political process or serious research.
Let me put it another way. The sex life of the people around me is none of my business; the homosexuality of some of my friends and associates has made no barrier between us, and as far as I know, my heterosexuality hasn't bothered them. That's what tolerance looks like.
This article does not appear tolerant in the least. At least he recognises it's none of his business, despite the fact he seems here to be now making it his business, arbitrating peoples' lives.
But homosexual "marriage" is an act of intolerance. It is an attempt to eliminate any special preference for marriage in society -- to erase the protected status of marriage in the constant balancing act between civilization and individual reproduction.
'Protected status'? No documentation for legal state of 'protection'. Define 'protected status'.
The government is not licensing human reproduction. Almost wish they would, sometimes, but that has too much potential to turn really, really ugly.
So if my friends insist on calling what they do "marriage," they are not turning their relationship into what my wife and I have created, because no court has the power to change what their relationship actually is.
Instead they are attempting to strike a death blow against the well-earned protected status of our, and every other, real marriage.
Again, 'protected'?
They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won't be married. They'll just be playing dress-up in their parents' clothes.
No clear explanation how, for example, a pair of people who have been living in a monogamous, stable relationship for half-a-century getting legal rights protecting their mutal property and residing nowhere near Mr. and Mrs. Card's property will 'steal' anything from Mr. Card and/or his wife. Also, how since they have a document from the City from San Francisco and the previously-stated relationship status, they won't 'really' be married when they believe they are. Reality is flexible.
The Propaganda Mill
What happens now if children grow up in a society that overtly teaches that homosexual partnering is not "just as good as" but actually is marriage?
Once this is regarded as settled law, anyone who tries to teach children to aspire to create a child-centered family with a father and a mother will be labeled as a bigot and accused of hate speech.
False conclusion. It might be true if the children are taught this is the only 'good' way to create a family. Exclusionism leads to prejudice and bigotry.
Can you doubt that the textbooks will be far behind? Any depictions of "families" in schoolbooks will have to include a certain proportion of homosexual "marriages" as positive role models.
Just as they are required now to depict Afro-American, Hispanic and Asian families as well as Anglo-Europeans. They are supposed to be showing American citizens in general, not specific socioethnic groups unless that group is the focus.
Television programs will start to show homosexual "marriages" as wonderful and happy (even as they continue to show heterosexual marriages as oppressive and conflict-ridden).
Specious -- television programs depend on drama to be interesting. Happy is, frankly, boring to watch. Conflict is more engaging because either the audience can empathise with the depicted problem or gets catharsis out of seeing the problem worked through.
Homosexual relationships have, for decades, been depicted as perverse, depraved, unnatural and doomed to tragedy. Any current 'happy' depictions are an attempt to present a more balanced view. Homosexual dramas like 'Queer Like Folk' are not composed entirely of happy relationships because that is dramatically invalid as entertainment.
The propaganda mill will pound our children with homosexual marriage as a role model. We know this will happen because we have seen the fanatical Left do it many times before.
Again -- the 50-year monogamous and loving relationship is a bad role model? How?
So when our children go through the normal adolescent period of sexual confusion and perplexity, which is precisely the time when parents have the least influence over their children and most depend on the rest of society to help their children grow through the last steps before adulthood, what will happen?
Already any child with any kind of sexual attraction to the same sex is told that this is an irresistible destiny, despite the large number of heterosexuals who move through this adolescent phase and never look back.
Proof?
Already any child with androgynous appearance or mannerisms -- effeminite boys and masculine girls -- are being nurtured and guided (or taunted and abused) into "accepting" what many of them never suspected they had -- a desire to permanently move into homosexual society.
As opposed to the straight gay-bashers abusing them into the hospital?
In other words, society will bend all its efforts to seize upon any hint of homosexuality in our young people and encourage it.
Proof?
Now, there is a myth that homosexuals are "born that way," and we are pounded with this idea so thoroughly that many people think that somebody, somewhere, must have proved it.
'Myth' -- specious label. Opinion, not fact. It has not been proven 100% either way.
In fact what evidence there is suggests that if there is a genetic component to homosexuality, an entire range of environmental influences are also involved. While there is no scientific research whatsoever that indicates that there is no such thing as a borderline child who could go either way.
There is, however, many studies which indicate gender is a bell curve, biologically as well as psychologically.
Those who claim that there is "no danger" and that homosexuals are born, not made, are simply stating their faith.
The dark secret of homosexual society -- the one that dares not speak its name -- is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.
No documentation!
It's that desire for normality, that discontent with perpetual adolescent sexuality, that is at least partly behind this hunger for homosexual "marriage."
They are unhappy, but they think it's because the rest of us "don't fully accept them."
President Bush is proof of 'don't fully accept them'. I'm unhappy with him and I'm straight.
Homosexual "marriage" won't accomplish what they hope. They will still be just as far outside the reproductive cycle of life. And they will have inflicted real damage on those of us who are inside it.
Marriage =/= reproduction, still. Women have been freed of that by science.
They will make it harder for us to raise children with any confidence that they, in turn, will take their place in the reproductive cycle. They will use all the forces of our society to try to encourage our children that it is desirable to be like them.
Implies homosexuals actually have some reason to evangelise.
Most kids won't be swayed, because the message of the hormones is clear for them. But for those parents who have kids who hover in confusion, their lives complicated by painful experiences, conflicting desires, and many fears, the P.C. elite will now demand that the full machinery of the state be employed to draw them away from the cycle of life.
Cue Disney (which provides domestic-partner insurance), Tim Rice and Elton John (who is bisexual/gay) for the soundtrack here [puts Lion King in CD player]
Children from broken and wounded families, with missing parents, may be the ones most confused and most susceptible. Instead of society helping these children overcome the handicaps that come from a missing or dysfunctional father or mother, it may well be exacerbating the damage.
All the while, the P.C. elite will be shouting at dismayed parents that it is somehow evil and bigoted of them not to rejoice when their children commit themselves to a reproductive dead end.
See again: overpopulation, reproductive technology, gifts of loving friends
But there is nothing irrational about parents grieving at the abduction-in-advance of their grandchildren.
Don't you see the absurd contradiction? A postulated but unproven genetic disposition toward homosexuality is supposed to be embraced and accepted by everyone as "perfectly natural" -- but the far stronger and almost universal genetic disposition toward having children and grandchildren is to be suppressed, kept to yourself, treated as a mental illness.
I'm not seeing this.
You're unhappy that your son wants to marry a boy? Then you're sick, dangerous, a homophobe, filled with hate. Control your natural desires or be branded as evil by every movie and TV show coming out of P.C. Hollywood!
Compassion and tolerance flow only one way in the "Wonderland" of the politically correct.
Unable to counter except for rolling of eyes.
Loss of Trust
The proponents of this anti-family revolution are counting on most Americans to do what they have done through every stage of the monstrous social revolution that we are still suffering through -- nothing at all.
But that "nothing" is deceptive. In fact, the pro-family forces are already taking their most decisive action. It looks like "nothing" to the anti-family, politically correct elite, because it isn't using their ranting methodology.
The pro-family response consists of quietly withdrawing allegiance from the society that is attacking the family.
Counter-civilisation move -- promoting civil disobedience.
Would-be parents take part in civilization only when they trust society to enhance their chances of raising children who will, in turn, reproduce. Societies that create that trust survive; societies that lose it, disappear, one way or another.
Parents reproduce because they want children, not because they want grandchildren. They want extension into the future by proxy.
But the most common way is for the people who have the most at stake -- parents and would-be parents -- to simply make the untrusted society disappear by ceasing to lift a finger to sustain it.
It is parents who have the greatest ability to transmit a culture from one generation to the next.
If parents stop transmitting the culture of the American elite to their children, and actively resist letting the schools and media do it in their place, then that culture will disappear.
If America becomes a place where the laws of the nation declare that marriage no longer exists -- which is what the Massachusetts decision actually does -- then our allegiance to America will become zero. We will transfer our allegiance to a society that does protect marriage.
Incorrect. The Massachusetts decision declares marriage exists for all citizens, not just the heterosexual or pretend-heterosexual ones.
We will teach our children to have no loyalty to the culture of the American elite, and will instead teach them to be loyal to a competing culture that upholds the family. Whether we home school our kids or not, we will withdraw them at an early age from any sense of belonging to contemporary American culture.
Again, promoting separatism and internal revolution in response to a legal decision about equality of legal status. Cf: American civil rights movement, 1960s; American women's rights movement, 1970s.
We're already far down that road. Already most parents regard schools -- an institution of the state that most directly touches our children -- as the enemy, even though we like and trust the individual teachers -- because we perceive, correctly, that schools are being legally obligated to brainwash our children to despise the values that keep civilization alive.
See the Texas School Board textbook flap. Schools are being forced to be bland by protesting parents.
And if marriage itself ceases to exist as a legally distinct social union with protection from the government, then why in the world should we trust that government enough to let it have authority over our children?
They Think They Have the Power.
The politically correct elite think they have the power to make these changes, because they control the courts.
I'm not politically elite; my vote might not even have been counted in the last presidential election. I think I just want people to be treated fairly.
They don't have to consult the people, because the courts nowadays have usurped the power to make new law.
Define 'people'. Are people 'everybody except homosexual citizens'? Are people 'everybody except homosexual citizens and their friends and family'?
Democracy? What a joke. These people hate putting questions like this to a vote. Like any good totalitarians, they know what's best for the people, and they'll force it down our throats any way they can.
We don't live in a democracy. We live in a democratic republic. Junior high school civics.
That's what the Democratic filibuster in the Senate to block Bush's judicial appointments is all about -- to keep the anti-family values of the Massachusetts Supreme Court in control of our government.
Opinion, and glossing over details on top of that.
And when you add this insult onto the already deep injuries to marriage caused by the widespread acceptance of nonmonogamous behavior, will there be anything left at all?
Where is his dividing line between personal choice and privacy versus government or societal interference?
Sure. In my church and many other churches, people still cling fiercely to civilized values and struggle to raise civilized children despite the barbarians who now rule us through the courts.
The barbarians think that if they grab hold of the trunk of the tree, they've caught the birds in the branches. But the birds can fly to another tree.
And I don't mean that civilized Americans will move. I mean that they'll simply stop regarding the authority of the government as having any legitimacy.
Starting another civil war, Mr. Card?
It is the most morally conservative portion of society that is most successful in raising children who believe in loyalty and oath-keeping and self-control and self-sacrifice.
It was the conservative portion of society who wanted to keep Afro-Americans from getting the vote or normal American legal and civil rights, too.
And we're tired of being subject to barbarian rules and laws that fight against our civilized values. We're not interested in risking our children's lives to defend a nation that does not defend us.
Define 'we'.
Who do you think is volunteering for the military to defend America against our enemies? Those who believe in the teachings of politically correct college professors? Or those who believe in the traditional values that the politically correct elite has been so successful in destroying?
Let's take a poll of our volunteer military -- especially those who specialize in combat areas -- and see what civilization it is that they actually volunteered to defend.
Since the politically correct are loudly unwilling to fight or die for their version of America, and they are actively trying to destroy the version of America that traditional Americans are willing to fight or die to defend, just how long will "America" last, once they've driven out the traditional culture?
Documentation lacking for 'the politically correct are loudly unwilling to fight or die'. Last time I looked, there were plenty of people turning out to vote and filling the Mall with protest rallies for what they believe in. Last time I looked, the draft did not check one's political or social position before sending one to Iraq. Last time I looked, citizenship consisted not of merely rubberstamping a point of view but making conscious and intelligent choices and providing feedback to one's representatives.
Oh, it will still be called America.
But out of the old American mantras of "democracy" and "freedom" and "home" and "family," of "motherhood" and "apple pie," only the pie will be left.
'Freedom' in the United States is defined by people being encouraged to express their opinions and live their ways of life; but not by restricting the freedoms of other citizens in order to get their way.
And even if few people care enough to defend the old family values against the screaming hate speech of the Left -- which is what they're counting on, of course -- the end will be the same. Because with marriage finally killed, America will no longer be able to raise up children with any trust in or loyalty to or willingness to sacrifice for that society.
So either civilized people will succeed in establishing a government that protects the family; or civilized people will withdraw their allegiance from the government that won't protect it; or the politically correct barbarians will have complete victory over the family -- and, lacking the strong family structure on which civilization depends, our civilization will collapse or fade away.
Remember how long Iraq's powerful military lasted against a determined enemy, when the Iraqi soldiers no longer had any loyalty to the Iraqi leadership. That wasn't an aberration. It's how great nations and empires fall.
'Iraq's powerful military' was outmatched by spending, not by heart; we have lost more soldiers to guerilla fighting since the original 'shock and awe' concluded. The American military is not being picked off by people who are having handgun accidents but by a determined enemy fighting back in the only way they still can. They're obviously motivated by something, and they're doing a good job of degrading American morale.
America learned something important from Viet Nam -- don't hate the soldiers for doing their jobs; eliminate the reason they have to do those jobs instead. 'We support our troops' is not a blanket approval of any war activity.
Depriving us of any democratic voice in these sweeping changes may not lead to revolution or even resistance. But it will be just as deadly if it leads to despair. For in the crisis, few citizens will lift a finger to protect or sustain the elite that treated the things we valued -- our marriages, our children, and our right to self-government -- with such contempt.
I find this article treats me with impersonal contempt. It implies that my family was not just inappropriate, but doomed from the beginning (my mother was my father's second wife). It implies that my gay friends are gay only because they were sexually abused, when I know that to be untruth. It says my friends will be bad parents no matter how loving and supportive they are to their son and new daughter just because they're both women. It implies that I, myself, am some sort of decadent and worthless because I am not interested in committing reproduction myself nor in marrying.
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Date: 2004-02-27 10:33 am (UTC)This, in particular, jumped out at me too: 'We support our troops' is not a blanket approval of any war activity. Because it's pretty much in direct contradiction to what he was talking about in his other article about Good or Bad War. This pliable nature of his arguments as a device to place himself in the position of moral-high-ground no matter what he's arguing is very typical of this type of ideological aggressiveness. I find it immensely ironic that he consistently refers to the "Left" as fanatical. Perhaps he ought to invest in some mirrors. Heheh.
I recently read over the response I made to his previous article, and after reading yours (and very smart and effective it was, too) here now, I'm starting to think that this is actually a very effective way of posing arguments to the Neo-Con rhetoric. Maybe we need to take more of Mr. Card's compassionate op/ed pieces and annotate them like this? Might be fun. Aggravating and depressing, but also perversely fun. ;)
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Date: 2004-02-27 02:01 pm (UTC)(
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Date: 2004-02-27 12:58 pm (UTC)The whole arguement is full of holes and personal prejudices. I simply don't see how the partnership of a couple who is loving and faithful is any business of anyone else. If the importance of marriage is at all compromised and trivialized, I'd think it's more by people like Britney Spears. Just my two cents....
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Date: 2004-02-27 03:26 pm (UTC)"Steven Lofton, 41, of Oregon. Lofton and his partner of 15 years, Roger Croteau, 43, are both registered nurses with a combined 20 years of experience in pediatrics...." "...created a family when they began foster parenting Frank and Tracy, both age 14, and 10-year-old Bert, all of whom were born with HIV, as infants. They also parented another HIV positive child, Ginger, from infancy until her death at age six. After relocating with the children to Portland, Ore., in the late 1990s, they took home Wayne, now 8 and Ernie, now 5, who are also living with HIV. Under Oregon law they were able to adopt the pair. However, because Florida does not allow gays and lesbians to adopt, they are now in danger of losing Bert, who has been deemed adoptable by the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) because he no longer has HIV."
I'd like to see some of these neo-cons be willing to foster HIV-positive or other health-challenged children. There's a lot of families of faith out there who are doing this without any fanfare, of course; but they're also not spending all their time and energy trying to prevent other people from taking care of these ...children being left behind -- to borrow the phrase the Bush Administration stole from a group whose name won't even Google up in association to their former motto anymore.
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Date: 2004-02-27 06:01 pm (UTC)