Taking same-sex marriage step by step

Whether you call it polygamy, or polyamory, or consensual nonmonogamy, multiple partners in a single relationship is just over the horizon.

Australian activists for same-sex marriage have always insisted, that it will not lead to polygamy or polyamory. Never, ever, ever. Gay marriage is just like traditional marriage, except for the sex of the spouse. Activist Rodney Croome wrote last year that “studies show most LGBTI people want to be part of a two-person marriage, while partners in polyamorist relationships (most of which begin as heterosexual unions) say they don’t want their relationships recognised as marriages.” Former Greens leader Bob Brown described a push for polyamory as “nonsense”.

This is a crucial point for supporters. If they were to concede that same-sex marriage would ultimately lead to polygamy and more imaginative forms of marriage, they would prove that there is a slippery slope. So they are forced into vehement denials.

How odd, then, that a Polyamory Action Lobby (PAL) has been founded in Australia “to combat the image of poly people as relationship bogeymen”.

PAL is testing the waters by spruiking a public petition on Change.org, an internet site for activists. “For too long has Australia denied people the right to marry the ones they care about. We find this abhorrent. We believe that everyone should be allowed to marry their partners, and that the law should never be a barrier to love. And that's why we demand nothing less than the full recognition of polyamorous families.”

PAL contends there is no rational reason adults should not be able to form committed relationships with more than one person. “Polyamory often isn’t a choice; if people love more than one person, they can’t help it,” says its manifesto. The argument for same-sex relationships runs in the same groove: it can’t be helped; it can’t be denied; it is wholesome and loving.

“We’re sick of being treated like the bottom of a slippery slope, the fat end of the wedge and the scary inevitable consequence of legalizing same-sex marriage,” it continues.

As far as the law is concerned, PAL says that the government must not restrict relationships for consenting adults based on love and respect. “The legal, health and financial protections enjoyed by a spouse in a monogamous relationship must be extended to all partners in a family.” And in a sentence which has been repeated endlessly in arguments for “marriage equality”, the document adds, “A family should be about security, stability and love; not about its structure.”

Are these activists serious? Is this an elaborate hoax?

Read More at Mercator.Net.

A Review of What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense

Looking for marriage in all the wrong places By Spengler Two mutually incompatible arguments are advanced to defend gay marriage. The first states that marriage is a good thing provided by the state, such that gay people have the same right to it as anyone else. The second states that marriage is a bad thing, and that bringing gay people into the institution of marriage will destroy it from the inside. Michelangelo Signorile, a prominent gay activist, urges people in same-sex relationships to "demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society's moral codes but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution". They should "fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely, because the most subversive action lesbians and gay men can undertake ... is to transform the notion of 'family' entirely". Signorile is quoted in a new book by the distinguished legal philosopher Robert P George and two of his students. They contend that marriage is an institution quite different from the domestic arrangement that advocates of gay marriage have in mind. Gay marriage as such isn't the issue, argue the authors: it an attempt to do away with the traditional view of marriage as a comprehensive union, and replace it with a view marriage as an especially intense sort of emotional bond. Signorile might be tardy in his plan to "redefine the institution of marriage". Hedonistic heterosexuals have been hacking away at the traditional concept of marriage for years. Whether gay marriage becomes law or not, the institution of marriage in the United States may erode so quickly that it will cease to perform its social function, that is, rearing a new generation of Americans. Read More at Asia Times.

Homosexuals were once branded as mentally disordered. Now homophobes are treated the same way

In the past, moralists and psychologists conspired to depict homosexuality as a mental disorder. Today, in a flip reversal so profound it could give you a headache, gay rights activists and their cheerleaders depict homophobia as a mental disorder. The sinned against have become the sinners; those who were once outrageously branded as mentally deranged now gleefully accuse their critics of being mad, repressed or disordered.

Consider the discussion about Cardinal Keith O'Brien. It's getting ugly. Not only because it is pretty clear that commentators of an anti-Catholic persuasion are exploiting Cardinal O'Brien's hypocritical misdeeds to have a pop at Catholic theology (hello, Observer), but also because there is an insinuation in the coverage that O'Brien, like all "homophobes", has a kind of brain sickness. His homophobia is driven by self-loathing, we're told, hatred for his inner gay self; it's a kind of"neurosis", commentators claim.

Increasingly these days, homophobia – or what I prefer to call anti-gay prejudice – is depicted as a sickness rather than simply a (wrongheaded) moral stance. Even the word homophobia itself, which I think is as daft and offensive as the word "Islamophobia", speaks to the idea that criticising gays or the their lifestyle or the notion that they should be granted access to the institution of marriage is a sign of mental malaise. A phobia, after all, is an irrational fear, defined in psychiatry circles as an "abnormal" terror felt towards pretty mundane situations, objects or organisms.

Read more at Telegraph Blogs.

Popular Facebook page helps UC Berkeley students find drunken sex partners

By Katherine Timpf, on Feb 28, 2013

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following article contains sexually explicit content.

Students at University of California - Berkeley now have a Facebook page dedicated to helping them reconnect with the strangers they had sex with when they were drunk.

UC Berkeley Hook-Ups has scored 1,784 likes since its Feb. 19 launch.

The highly organized page, entitled “UC Berkeley Hook-Ups,” has already proven to be a hit among Berkeley's famously free-spirited student population. Since its launch on Feb 19, it has already scored 1,784 likes and nearly daily usage.

“This page is specifically designed to help the fellow drunk locate his/her Berk town hookup,” the about section of the page says. “If you recognize you or your story post message me with your number.

“We will keep everything anonymous until we find a match,” it continues.

“To the Norwegian chick i met at FIJI, doing blow off each other was great....especially when you did it off my dick,” one student writes.

Another student describes bringing a man back to her room “only to find” that her roommates were already having an orgy there — leading them to “join in on all the fun.”

The moderator of the page takes an active role, urging “Girls we need more of your stories!”

Read more at Campus Reform.

Sky Fall: Gender Ideology Comes to the Schoolhouse

by  Adam J. MacLeod and Andrew Beckwith

within Education, Marriage

March 1st, 2013

Since redefining marriage requires us to deny sexual differences, even school children now have to conform to that principle at the risk of punishment.

In our discussions with advocates of redefining marriage, we often hear that defenders of marriage and sexual difference are overreacting to cultural and legal changes. “You run around yelling that the sky is falling,” we’re told. “We’ve had same-sex marriage for a decade now in Massachusetts, and guess what: The sky is not falling.”

This is not an argument, of course, but an attempt to end any discussion of what it would mean to remove sexual distinctions from the law. As it did to James Bond’s psychiatric evaluation in the recent hit movie, the mention of the phrase “sky fall” is supposed to terminate the proceedings.

No serious participants in the current marriage discussion are running around like Chicken Little. Defenders of marriage are concerned primarily about the long-term implications of redefining the institution. We might not expect the redefinition of marriage to alter cultural practices dramatically right away. After all, it took nearly two generations to realize the full effects of the divorce revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. But strange things are nevertheless happening in Massachusetts, where sexual difference was eliminated from marriage laws in 2003.

Read More at Public Discourse.

Questioning Economic Necessity

By The Radical One

“It has been estimated that by 1960 a family wage was paid by 65 percent of all employers in the United States, and by over 80 percent of the major industrial companies. Although feminist historians today call the family-wage ideal a “myth” designed to keep married women oppressed, few myths have come closer to becoming a reality.”[1]

The feminist conviction is that the “good ole life” where married women did not work is a myth. In their view of history, married women staying home is somehow a new thing in human history that was invented in the 1950s. They also stress that it is the economy that flushed women out of the home and into the workforce during the revolution years.Today they say it is just too bad and even if married women wanted to go back home it is impossible because of the economy. Their views and assertions are, however, pretty far removed from reality. In fact, in the grand old 1950s there were even more married women in the workforce than in previous times in American history. All the way up until the year 1900, only 5.6% of married women were in the workforce. By the year 1910 that number had climbed to 10.7%. In the 1950s, 23% of married women were in the workforce. [2]

Feminists also like to chime in and tell us all about how it was only middle class white women that were able to fulfill the role of housewife. But unless 90% of married couples were middle class and white this remains to be seen. Generally, feminists like to plead economic necessity so as to ensure that married women with dependent children do not feel guilty about going off to work and leaving their children in the care of someone else. Mainstream feminists propaganda says that it “takes two incomes” just to make ends meet. Yet, in the vast majority of cases this is not, nor has it ever, been true.

Read more at What's Wrong with Equal Rights.

Ethicists in Australia Call for “After-Birth Abortions”

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Ethicists in Australia Call for “After-Birth Abortions”

by Steven Ertelt | Melbourne, Australia | LifeNews.com | 2/28/12 2:39 PM
Two “ethicists” who are college professors in Australia are furthering the pro-infanticide arguments of American professor Peter Singer by calling for so-called “after-birth abortions.”
As The Blaze reports:

Alberto Giubilini with Monash University in Melbourne and Francesca Minerva at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne write that in “circumstances occur[ing] after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.” 

The two are quick to note that they prefer the term “after-birth abortion“ as opposed to ”infanticide.” Why? Because it “[emphasizes] that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child.” The authors also do not agree with the term euthanasia for this practice as the best interest of the person who would be killed is not necessarily the primary reason his or her life is being terminated. In other words, it may be in the parents’ best interest to terminate the life, not the newborns. 

The circumstances, the authors state, where after-birth abortion should be considered acceptable include instances where the newborn would be putting the well-being of the family at risk, even if it had the potential for an “acceptable” life. The authors cite Downs Syndrome as an example, stating that while the quality of life of individuals with Downs is often reported as happy, “such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”

This means a newborn whose family (or society) that could be socially, economically or psychologically burdened or damaged by the newborn should have the ability to seek out an after-birth abortion. They state that after-birth abortions are not preferable over early-term abortions of fetuses but should circumstances change with the family or the fetus in the womb, then they advocate that this option should be made available.

Read more at Kresta in the Afternoon.