By David
R. Usher
August 12, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
Gay Judge Vaughn R. Walker went far beyond forcing same-sex marriage on California. Walker’s ruling erased one of the most important aspects of heterosexual marriage: it naturally creates full equality before the law between men and women.
Heterosexual marriage naturally establishes fully equal parental, social, privacy, and economic rights impossible to simulate by any other means. The place of men in society and politics does not exist outside of heterosexual marriage.
Heterosexual marriage is the only institution establishing one collaborative human race out of two immutably different sexes. Any other form of marriage or substitute thereto is by definition discriminatory, antisocial, and misanthropic.
Keep in mind that the central issue of the Proposition 8 case is equal rights. The primary reason why Walker could risk issuing his sweeping ruling is because no valid argument or evidence was presented demonstrating that same-sex marriage (SSM) maximizes inequalities between the sexes, while heterosexual marriage guarantees equality between men and women before the law.
Margaret Mead reminded us that “Motherhood is a biological fact, while fatherhood is a social invention”. Heterosexual marriage is the one legal instrument effecting all the benefits we desire as a nation: safe cities, a strong economy, low taxes, low poverty rates for women and children, and a strong sense of common “community’ spanning all demographic strata. These benefits are presently compromised by the prevalence of marriage-absence, and would be fully maximized under SSM.
Dr. Stephen Baskerville writes about statist sexual politics “politicizing and bureaucratizing feminine” roles to the detriment of America. SSM is a far more volatile trajectory: privatizing bureaucratized feminine roles and the sexualized welfare State within the legal institution of marriage.
The transmogrification of equality
SSM is a structurally unequal construct because it immediately establishes three different and vastly disparate classes of marriage, female-female, heterosexual, and male-male. At law, each arrangement implicitly has different reproductive abilities, economic rights and responsibilities according to settled law, different political and social rights, and taxes or entitlements.
In each arrangement, the State has already established who wins, who loses, who is entitled, and who pays depending on the sex of the marital participants – whose choices are stimulated, constrained, or discouraged by established policies of the massive welfare state.
Marriages between two women can “naturally” have children simply by tricking a male paramour to acquire children, large sums child support (nee welfare), and other government entitlements via lawful force of the State. These marriages would feature at least four income sources: the incomes of the two women, two or more child support orders, and other entitlements that follow the children. From an economic perspective, double-mother marriages are vastly superior to heterosexual ones, and doubly advantageous over double-male marriages.
For heterosexual women, SSM detaches sex from marriage entirely, turning it into an institution of recreational predation. Women are free be as promiscuous as they want, with whomever they want, while collecting serial child support orders when the man’s looks and financial resources trigger a choice to feign use of an invisible method of birth control.
Like real-estate red-line laws that once firewalled blacks into substandard, politically-powerless neighborhoods -- and like segregated schools -- marriages between women will have the effect of walling men out of heterosexual marriage, the fabric of society, and the political process.
Marriages between two men cannot naturally have children. These marriages could only procreate and enjoy parental rights only by costly, unnatural means: renting a womb, adopting, or paying large sums in child support while pursuing parental rights litigation. Women will control the choices of men preemptively, while men and the taxpayer will invariably end up with the problems. Costs of the SSM state will be taxed against traditional married couples in affirmation of more SSMs and further expansion of state power within marriage.
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Heterosexual marriage will fall by the wayside over time because it is far less attractive to women than living the newest feminist cougar dream of having a four-income entitled family while enjoying 100% sexual liberation with the blessings of a dangerously mangled constitution.
We are all born equal under the constitution and are afforded equal protections on the basis of sex. No court can rationally uphold a fundamental change to the institution of marriage which, in light of settled welfare, family law, and other related case law, procedurally and structurally removes these protections after birth on the basis of sex.
Would large numbers of marriages be between women?
Fifty years ago, no one imagined that the combination of no-fault divorce and the welfare state could culminate in a 51% divorce rate, declining marriage rates, record cohabitation (or marriage-avoidance) rates, and record illegitimacy rates. Nobody thought that the welfare state would abort marriage to the extent that 40% of children would be born illegitimate -- most living in poverty -- despite massive government entitlements destroying state and federal budgets today.
Now contemplate the real likelihood that half of marriages will be between doubly-entitled women in the year 2060. Economics alone is enough to cause SSM to become a major, if not the most common elective marital arrangement for women over time, without factoring in the third-wave sexual liberation movement that will accompany it by structural design.
The fifty-year-old gender war has broken America and the national piggybank. Our common bonds of nation, community, and politics are today centrifugally chaotic due to today’s high rates of marriage-absence. Expanding this war -- positioning radical feminism to own the institution of marriage -- predicts grave consequences for the future of American Experiment.
Consider an America struggling with millions of de-socialized men procedurally shut out of love, marriage, parenting, and the political process. China is wrangling with looming violence problems stemming from the “one child” policy – where there are 123 marriageable men for every 100 women. Consider the scope of violence in 2060 when we could easily see 200 marriageable men for every 100 women classy enough to even consider heterosexual marriage.
The impact of SSM on children will be profound. Every major peer-reviewed study demonstrates that children do far better with concurrent cooperative maternal and paternal parenting. Despite claims of same-sex advocates, there are no credible peer-reviewed studies indicating that children raised by same-sex partners do as well or better than their counterparts raised in heterosexual marriages.
As a matter of national security, we must assess the impact SSM will have on religious radicalism and national security. Given the surprising numbers of children raised outside marriage already joining the ranks of terrorists, it is reasonable to predict even large numbers of fully-disenfranchised men taking up Muslim radicalism.
Ensuring we never lose another case
The body of evidence presented in the Proposition 8 case is indicative of the decision. The case is loaded with a large volume of emotional “evidence” portraying Proposition 8 proponents as bible-thumping, intolerant bigots. Corollary arguments about the importance of having a father and well-being of children were whittled away by unscientific advocacy studies suggesting equivalency. The child’s right to be raised by both natural parents was ignored as irrelevant where it was imagined that any two adults can do the job as well.
The most useful evidentiary item in the case was an extract from David Blankenhorn’s excellent book, “The Future of Marriage.” If Walker’s ruling can be reversed, it will probably be over Walker’s ignorance of this document. While persuasive in a number of areas -- clearly asserting children’s natural rights and easily nullifies comparisons between racial civil rights and same-sex marriage rights -- the citation does not touch on core equal rights issues central to the Proposition 8 case.
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Undoubtedly, Walker’s ruling will spawn challenges in other states, particularly the eight other states covered by the Ninth District having constitutional bans on same-sex marriage. Going forward, we must have a body of strong equal-rights victories in future federal court cases to ensure victory when the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the issue.
It is vastly important that conservative litigators focus pleadings in future cases on the fundamental equal-rights argument I have outlined. I encourage leading litigators to contact me via Facebook for discussion and addition argument points.
� 2010 David Usher - All Rights Reserved
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David R. Usher is President of the Center for Marriage Policy, and a co-founder and past Secretary of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children.
E-Mail: drusher@swbell.net
