Wheat and Chaff

I did some writing on a comments link over at SKBubba's site, and I see no reason not to repost it here. If I wrote it, my blog should benefit from it, right?

This goes to the argument about why a homosexual couple ought to be treated differently under the law than a straight couple who doesn't want to have children:

This isn’t about one person’s or one couple’s situation. This is about society and government.
In order to differentiate legally between married people who intend to have children and married people who do not intend to have children, it would be necessary for the state to interview people who are getting married and ask them what their family plans are. You could then deny benefits to people who weren’t going to have children except the problem is, unless they were provably sterile there’s a chance they could have children. Therefore, it’s still in the best interest of the state and society to make sure that all, or as many as possible, heterosexual couples having sex are in fact married, because it greatly increases the odds that any children are born into a stable environment. It’s quite obvious that any gays having sex have exactly zero chance of accidentally procreating. There is therefore no state interest at all in subsidizing their love. Again, we don’t subsidize love. We subsidize childrearing, and we subsidize even situations where childrearing is a possibility, but we don’t subsidize love, at least not until very recently.

Whether or not gays should be allowed to adopt is an entirely different question. Single people can adopt, and gain benefits by doing so. They have to prove stability, though, which is harder for a single person than a married person in many situations, and is also harder for someone living a homosexual lifestyle, as their promiscuity is in most cases much higher than heterosexuals, which leads to instability. But the fact that gays sometimes want to adopt is no reason to redefine a millennia-old institution just to satisfy the whims of a few cultural elites.

For those who point to the disastrous state of marriage and family in America today as some kind of evidence against my argument, it is in fact evidence _for_ my argument. The state of marriage today is a result, among other things, of breaking the link between marriage and childrearing. As I said in the original article that sparked all of this, all of the social indicators have tracked very closely to all of the laws that made it easier for people to get divorced and to have and raise children outside of marriage. Illegitimacy has skyrocketed as those laws have been passed, and the result of illegitimacy is well-documented. Illegitimacy causes poverty, illiteracy, drug abuse, criminal behavior, increased promiscuity, child abuse, and a host of other ills. Look up the statistics if you doubt me. Breaking the bond between marriage and childrearing has already been disastrous, and we haven’t seen the end of it yet.

I can keep on making this argument, and you can keep on calling me a bigot if it makes you feel better. But I didn’t refer to religion once in the above argument or in the original article, so at the very least don’t say you haven’t seen any reason not to redefine marriage to include homosexuals. You’ve seen an argument, you just disagree with it. That’s different than saying nobody’s made an argument.