I actually believe firmly that God grants us individually agency, which allows us to choose what we want to do. That absolutely includes the right to live together and engage in a lifestyle of ones choosing. The underlying supposition, therefore, is adequate agency development to be able to make an accountable choice.
Gay marriage, no big deal. Children thrust into gay marriage: A very big deal.
Debating gay marriage, by which I mean both homosexual men and women relationships, strictly from a moralistic perspective guarantees all sides fighting without any clarity. So I have spent the last couple of months looking for statistical analysis from studies, and evaluating the quality of studies.
There is one particular website which has done nothing short of an amazing job assembling studies and statistics on this subject, and that is the Family Research Council,
here. Now they are of course committed to heterosexual marriage, so their editorial bent is that way. But the list of studies they include is spectacular, and so worth discussing.
So let's start with Gay Marriage.
In a word, it will be a nearly totally unused institution. "What?", you say. Yes, Gays will almost never marry. Like less than 5% of all Gay couples, at very most, will ever marry, and 90%+ will eventually be terminated.
Last week I was in New York, and as it happens July 24 was the one year anniversary of legalization of gay marriage in New York. On TV they recounted how 860 or so couple got married that day.
Wait, in a city of 8.2 million people, only 860 wanted to celebrate the right to finally marry? And in the year since then, about 8,000 marriage licenses were issued for gay marriage (though not all will be used of course). So approximately 4.5% of the adult NYC population is said to be gay, or 272,000 people, at most 16,000 people are now participating in gay marriage. Let's see, that means 5.9% of the adult population has opted to marry now that they have the right. This is about 1/10 the rate of heterosexual adults. Even more starkly, out of 6.2 million adults in NYC, only 16,000 are married gays, or .26% of the population. Said another way, you would need to meet roughly 800 New York City residents to find a gay couple.
Why? In a word, Gay sexual promiscuity is so huge that there is no basis for a trusting, socially contracted relationship. So when you take the fact that homosexuals make up only about 2% of the USA population (though gay advocacy groups claim more like 3.5%), and only about 5% of that 2% will marry, then you are looking at somewhere around 0.1% of the US population would take advantage of Gay marry, or only 2 people in 2,000. And only 2 people in 14,000 will be in a Gay marriage for longer than 7 years.
Even so, you will wind up with tons of books and media talking about how "normal" Gay relationships are compared to heterosexual marriages. So let's briefly compare.
Roughly 98% of the population is NOT Gay. Out of those 98%, by age 50 about 91% will be or have been married. After 20 years of marriage, about 62% are still married. Compare this to 5% of gay relationships.
62% vs 5%. Why?
As mentioned above, fidelity in gay marriage is, practically speaking, an unknown virtue.
Traditional marriages on multiple studies show that approximately 80% of participants are exclusively loyal to their current spouse.
Gay couples report 4.5%
80% vs. 4.5%
Said another way, there is a better than 95% chance your spouse is going to cheat on you in a Gay marriage. And the statistic is that the average "partnered" gay couple had EIGHT partners EACH YEAR they were together.
This is consistent with the fact that an astounding 43% of gay men reported 500 or more sexual partners in their lifetime, and a staggering 28% have 1,000 or more partners!
Which of course leads to both violence and/ or dissolution of the relationship.
Violence, by the way, is twice as likely in Gay marriages.
So is the suicide rate. Gay men are 6-times as likely to attempt suicide as heterosexual males, and Lesbians are twice as likely as straight females.
Being gay is just not a happy way to live. If ever a group of people bore a name which is the exact opposite of reality, it is this group.
So I personally would not be against gay marriage simply because I think it is so easy to show it is useless and a largely unused "right". In the Netherlands, which has had legalized gay marriage for many years, only 12% of gays reported being married. So that represents the extreme high-end of where it could land. That would be 12% of (at most) 3.5%, or a maximum of .42% of the adult population. So go for it.
With one major exception. What gay marriage does or is likely to do to children of gay relationships cannot be allowed without objection. Anyone who thinks a child raised in a gay relationship is likely to have an equal experience of positive, affirmative development is simply delusional. This is not to say that it is not possible for some gay relationships to produce healthy children, for some clearly do. Or that some gay marriage relationships are not more nurturing than some heterosexual relationships. Again, clearly, some are.
But this is not what is likely.
And for the record, single parenting by any sexual orientation produces children who are also significantly more likely to have more difficult childhoods or lives in general than children from heterosexually married couples.
By definition, a child reared in a gay relationship is deprived of its natural relationship to one of its genetic parents, if not both. Sometimes this is a better alternative than the standard family, to be certain. But again, that is the exception.
A recent study showed that children of gay relationships are 3-times as likely as a teen to be confused about sexual preference identification. Basically 90% of teens identify themselves as strongly heterosexual. Among gay couple parents, only 70% of such teens identify themselves as strongly heterosexual.
Finally, let's talk basic civil rights of heterosexually-oriented couples in a "gay rights" world. As has already been demonstrated in California and elsewhere, if a parent teaches their children that heterosexual marriage is the only appropriate way to marry, and their children repeat such "bigotry", they can and will be disciplined at school. Free speech and freedom of religion are taken away from those who feel children should not be ripped away from their natural parents and raised in an unnatural environment.
It is not hard to understand why Abortion and gay rights work so hard together. They both desensitize the public to caring about children.
So my vote is unequivocally to allow gay marriage. And equally unequivocally to oppose any "right" to adopt or preferentially raise children in such marriages without a court determining in every instance that such a home is a better alternative to a single parent heterosexual parent of that child, the primary basis being the physical well being of the child being threatened if they remain with a heterosexual parent.
Children of gay relationships are six times more likely to wind up on welfare support of some kind because the likelihood of the relationship dissolving is so much greater.
Likewise, children being raffled off by sperm donors or surrogate mothers should in every instance be offered up to adoption to healthy heterosexual homes and not gay couples in marriages or unmarried relationships.
Frankly, I don't have a good answer to how to deal with children of parents who suddenly "discover" or come out as gay. In such instances, the non-gay parent is really in the best position to determine what the best treatment of children should be. The problem is that misguided individuals sympathetic to the gay individual or couples may enter into sham relationships to provide a child. People are strange, and as shown by the rate of abortion acceptance, many don't care what is done to the life they create.
The lives of children matter, and though it may make a gay person feel bad to not be able to have the chance to be a parent, their life-styles and the long term impact of those choices on children raised in those environments trumps those feelings. Children have a right to a life with both genetic parents, and barring that, to a life with two parents of both genders to grow up with the best possible life. I think we stop being empathetic of the gay couples to the detriment of children forced into those conditions.
This is a case where the doctrine of marriage for family is so obviously inspired and divine, and supported by the natural consequences of not living this principle make the choice fairly obvious. Let people live as they will, but protect the innocent as much as possible.
