(via
Tbogg):
"Protection of marriage" is now the watchword for many activists fighting to prevent gays and lesbians from marrying. Some conservatives, however, say marriage in America began unraveling long before the latest gay-rights push and are pleading for a fresh, soul-searching look at the institution.
"When you talk about protecting marriage, you need to talk about divorce," said Bryce Christensen, a Southern Utah University professor who writes frequently about family issues.
While Christensen doesn't oppose the campaign to enact state and federal bans on gay marriage, he worries it's distracting from immediate threats to marriage's place in society.
"If those initiatives are part of a broader effort to reaffirm lifetime fidelity in marriage, they're worthwhile," he said. "If they're isolated - if we don't address cohabitation and casual divorce and deliberate childlessness - then I think they're futile and will be brushed aside."
Deliberate childlessness?
So now we're going to have to reproduce within a reasonable period of time as set forth by the government?
If you thought that the Republican focus on hetero marriage was about anything but eliminating all non-procreative sex, here's their real agenda.
For years I've been saying that next time they make abortion illegal, they'll be sure to give a zygote the status of a full human being. Since they regard a fertilized egg as the same as a person, women will be required to submit their used tampons to the government to make sure there are no un-implanted fertilized eggs in there, and if there are, the woman will be charged with murder. People have branded me a hysteric on this subject. And yet here's one of THEM deciding that adults don't even have the right to marry and decide not to have children.
You know what? Not all of us are cut out to be parents. I knew very early on that I did not want children, I was not cut out to be a mother, and I was not going to have children. And now people like this are trying to equate that kind of sparing the world from the ravages of yet more fucked-up kids with divorce.
Since when is it the government's business whether we have children or not, and how many we should have? How on earth can any so-called "conservative" buy into this crap? These people voted for Bush thinking he'd keep them safe from Islamic fundamentalists. But who will keep us safe from Christian fundamentalists?
I defy any conservative to tell me why government intervention in MY bedroom, or anyone else's, is consistent with "smaller government." We liberals have long been saying that the Republican mantra is "Keep the government out of Big Business and in the bedroom where it belongs." It looks like we were right.
You no longer have to be gay to know that the government frowns on your private life. It looks like we know now why they wanted Senate committee chairmen to be able to look at our tax returns. They want to be sure we're claiming dependents.