{"id":1382,"date":"2008-06-25T09:25:43","date_gmt":"2008-06-25T14:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1382"},"modified":"2008-06-25T09:42:05","modified_gmt":"2008-06-25T14:42:05","slug":"destroying-marriage-in-order-to-save-itcontinued","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1382","title":{"rendered":"Destroying Marriage In Order To Save It&#8230;(continued)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Shorter Michael Medved:&nbsp; Heterosexuals don&#8217;t need marriage, therefore homosexuals can&#8217;t have it.<\/p>\n<p>No&#8230;seriously&#8230;that&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.townhall.com\/Columnists\/MichaelMedved\/2008\/06\/25\/missing_ingredient_for_gay_marriage_women,_not_weddings\">his argument<\/a>  in response to <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB121400362307993399.html?mod=googlenews_wsj\">Jonathan Rauch&#8217;s column in the Wall Street Journal<\/a>  the other day&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>It&rsquo;s not &ldquo;marriage&rdquo; &ndash; some magical status granted by the government &ndash; that serves to make people &ldquo;healthier, happier and wealthier.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s the behavior associated with the marital ideal that brings benefits to couples and their children. That behavior doesn&rsquo;t require official sanction &ndash; any more than official sanction guarantees such behavior.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Medved goes on to make the standard anti-gay case that only opposite sex couples have that magic combination of male and female attributes that make a marriage both stable, and beneficial for children.&nbsp; But then he goes on to take that to its logical conclusion&#8230;\n<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Consider some of the high profile heterosexual couples who have refused to get married. I don&rsquo;t endorse the politics of Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, but given their long-standing and apparently stable commitment, I don&rsquo;t think their kids have suffered because they never legalized their relationship.<\/p>\n<p>By the same token, I don&rsquo;t believe that the children of Rosie O&rsquo;Donnell and her partner will be able to make up for the lack of a father&rsquo;s love through a change of bureaucratic policy in California or any other state.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Medved&#8217;s column is pretty much a simple rehashing of hoary anti-gay and more specifically, anti-male stereotypes.&nbsp; Gay men can&#8217;t control their sex drives because they are men.&nbsp; Well&#8230;yes&#8230;Lesbian couples are more stable because they&#8217;re both female, but children need both a mother and a father, so their unions are bad for children too.&nbsp; Never mind that there is not one iota of science behind any of this, let alone tradition.&nbsp; Consider for a moment, how big the straight jacket is that female sexuality is bound inside in male dominated societies.&nbsp; It isn&#8217;t male sexuality that&#8217;s being kept under a tight lid in a culture where boys can sew their wild oats, but girls are sluts if they do the same.&nbsp; Never mind all that.&nbsp; Just look at where this delivers Medved.&nbsp; He is now arguing, in all seriousness, that it is heterosexuality, not marriage, that provides for both stability and a better environment for children.&nbsp; Heterosexuals are actually so good at it, that marriage is completely unnecessary for them.&nbsp; This is seriously his argument.\n<\/p>\n<p>We have been told, over and over again, that allowing homosexual couples to marry will make marriage itself worthless.&nbsp; And now along comes Michael Medved to argue that it is in fact heterosexuality, by its very nature, that renders marriage worthless.&nbsp; Sweet.&nbsp; Can we stop blaming gay people for the horrible state of marriage in this country now?&nbsp; Please?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shorter Michael Medved:&nbsp; Heterosexuals don&#8217;t need marriage, therefore homosexuals can&#8217;t have it. No&#8230;seriously&#8230;that&#8217;s his argument in response to Jonathan Rauch&#8217;s column in the Wall Street Journal the other day&#8230; It&rsquo;s not &ldquo;marriage&rdquo; &ndash; some magical status granted by the government &ndash; that serves to make people &ldquo;healthier, happier and wealthier.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s the behavior associated with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[16,19,60,6],"class_list":["post-1382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-marriage","tag-the-jackass-chronicles","tag-the-noise-machine","tag-the-right-wing-mindset"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}