{"id":130,"date":"2010-12-07T16:13:23","date_gmt":"2010-12-07T16:13:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/arguments-for-same-sex-marriage.html"},"modified":"2010-12-07T16:13:23","modified_gmt":"2010-12-07T16:13:23","slug":"arguments-for-same-sex-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/arguments-for-same-sex-marriage.html","title":{"rendered":"Arguments for same-sex marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"

My pro-family argument for accelerating same-sex marriage has run into some flak<\/a> from Touchstone<\/i>‘s Jordan Ballor, who thinks I’ve committed a non sequitur<\/i>. The burden of his argument:<\/p>\n

It’s true that we need to connect the natural telos<\/em> of marriage
\nto child-rearing rather than some ephemeral or hormonal understanding
\nof pseudo-romantic love. But that would seem to lead us toward the
\nnormativity of the institution of heterosexual<\/em> marriage, wherein the same couple that join to beget the children stay together to raise them.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I get that it should lead us to support the institution of heterosexual marriage, but why as normative<\/i>? It should lead us to support the institution of marriage wherever children are involved. <\/p>\n

It seems incontestable that being gay or lesbian does not entail being
\ndeprived of the natural parental instinct. Why else should gays and
\nlesbians want to adopt and\/or procreate? Society should, therefore, take
\npains to make it possible for them to be married.<\/p>\n

Here’s the justification<\/a> given in court yesterday by Proposition 8 defense lawyer Charles Cooper:<\/p>\n

The key reason that marriage has existed at all in any society and at
\nany time is that sexual relationships between men and women naturally
\nproduce children. Society has no particular interest in a platonic
\nrelationship between a man and a woman no matter how close, no matter
\nhow committed it may be, or emotional relationships between other people
\nas well. But, when a relationship between a man and woman becomes a
\nsexual one society immediately has a vital interest in that for two
\nreasons – one, society needs the creation of new life for the next
\ngeneration. But secondly, [society’s vital] interests are actually
\nthreatened by the possibility that unintentional and unwanted pregnancy
\nwill mean that the child is born out of wedlock and raised by, in all
\nlikelihood, its mother alone and that directly implicates society’s
\nvital interests.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So far as I can see, this too amounts to an argument for SSM.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My pro-family argument for accelerating same-sex marriage has run into some flak from Touchstone‘s Jordan Ballor, who thinks I’ve committed a non sequitur. The burden of his argument: It’s true that we need to connect the natural telos of marriage to child-rearing rather than some ephemeral or hormonal understanding of pseudo-romantic love. But that would seem to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nArguments for same-sex marriage - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/arguments-for-same-sex-marriage.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Arguments for same-sex marriage - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"My pro-family argument for accelerating same-sex marriage has run into some flak from Touchstone‘s Jordan Ballor, who thinks I’ve committed a non sequitur. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}