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"forcing marriage to mean all things"
red herring, You Lie
Family and Marriage
Changing the definition of marriage would undermine the very nature that gives marriage its unique status in society. Ultimately, forcing marriage to mean all things will force marriage to mean nothing at all. If marriage becomes just one form of commitment in a spectrum of sexual relationships rather than a preferred monogamous relationship for the sake of children, the line separating sexual relations within and outside of marriage becomes blurred, and so does the public policy argument against out-of-wedlock births or in favor of abstinence.
Decisions about sex, marriage, and childbearing are not merely personal. They have deep social consequences, particularly for children.
Social Costs
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, Luxembourg, Hungary, and Iceland have all granted some form of legal recognition to same-sex couples. Same-sex "marriage" has been legal in the Netherlands since 2001, in Belgium since 2003, and in Canada and Spain since 2005.
The most extensive research we have about the effect of same-sex "marriage" on society comes from the Netherlands.
The Netherlands has seen significant changes since the 1980s in its unwed birth rate. Dutch social scientists have observed a correlation between the campagin for same-sex "marriage" and the increasing disconnect between parenting and marriage.
In an interview published in a Dutch newspaper on July 8, 2004, Dr. J.van Loon, a leading sociologist of Nottingham Trent University said, “It’s no coincidence both [the introduction of same-sex marriage and the devaluation of marriage] take place at the same time. Supporters of gay marriage often based their argument…on the separation of marriage and the raising of children. It’s difficult to imagine that an intensive media campaign based on the claim that marriage and parenthood are unrelated and that marriage is just one among a number of morally equivalent cohabiting relationships did not have any serious social consequences.”
Dutch Social Scientists on the Deterioration of Marriage in the Netherlands
The family is the building block of society. When marriages and families are healthy, communities thrive; when marriages break down, communities break down.
A Portrait of Family and Religion in America - Study illustrating the intact family that worships weekly is the greatest generator of human and social goods and least generator of social ills, and that the broken family that does not worship is the greatest generator of social ills and the least generator of social goods. (http://www.heritage.org/Research/Fam...f_Religion.pdf)
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Fam...equencesMD.cfm
Last edited by spursncowboys; 12-09-2009 at 05:11 PM.
"forcing marriage to mean all things"
red herring, You Lie
It already is to many people.If marriage becomes just one form of commitment
the word "campaign" being spelled wrong aside, I'd like to see the studies on how Dutch kids from unwed parents are doing in school and other social settings.....
from an unbiased website.
So if I wish to marry my girlfriend, but we have no intention of having kids (either because we choose not to or can't for some reason) should we be "married," or would that cheapen marriage?
Marrying anyway outside of god cheapens marriage.
Our divorce rate has been at 66% decades.
Increasingly, heterosexuals are opting not to get married, even before having children. Teenage pregnancy is on the rise.
None of this has any thing to do with s getting married. It was ALL HAPPENING before s started getting married.
Marriage has changed in definition throughout history. Get over it.
You seem to not hold the sanc y of being married in a very high light. Yet you treat it as some right you deserve.
[C]hildren living with single mothers are five times more likely to be poor than children in two-parent households. Children in single-parent homes are also more likely to drop out of school and become teen parents, even when income is factored out. And the evidence suggests that on average, children who live with their biological mother and father do better than those who live in stepfamilies or with cohabiting partners.... In light of these facts, policies that strengthen marriage for those who choose it and that discourage unintended births outside of marriage are sensible goals to pursue.
--Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope[1]
When compared to similar children raised by two married biological parents, children raised in single-parent homes are more likely to fail in school, abuse drugs or alcohol, commit crimes, become pregnant as teens, and suffer from emotional and behavioral problems. Such children are also more likely to end up on welfare or in jails when they become adults.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Family/sr0045.cfm
When compared to similar children raised by two married biological parents, children raised in single-parent homes are more likely to fail in school, abuse drugs or alcohol, commit crimes, become pregnant as teens, and suffer from emotional and behavioral problems. Such children are also more likely to end up on welfare or in jails when they become adults.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Family/sr0045.cfm
What makes you think Americans hold marriage in high regard in the first place?
Seriously, the conclusion here is if gays are allowed to marry, God fearing, churchgoing families will throw up their hands and say "screw it, this marriage thing is now worthless, let's stop going to church and let our kids do drugs."
Apparently, Americans have pretty weak faith.
This.
This is like potheads shouting at everyone that it would make for great tax revenue. You don't care about taxes, you just want to light one up.
Hard religious should know by now the masses have degraded marriage quite a bit by now. You don't really believe gay marriage would crush the glory of marriage, you just don't like teh gheys.
I find it interesting how Christians redefined marriage as something between a mankind and God when Biblical marriage is between 2 people.
"Marrying anyway outside of god cheapens marriage."
Dan Savage on what marriage means:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tM0Pg_KKV8
He says it well.
Fail. They create the strawman of gay marraige, legal since 2001, as some kind of catalyst to social anarchy, and then start quoting from the 1980s.
You have a LOT of work to do on straight marriage, then, before you should even worry about teh gayz. Shore that up, and get back to us, 'k?
But this is a Christian country based on 'Christian Values', or so my Christian acquaintances keep telling me...
[/sarcasm]
What has "degraded" marriage is the fact that women have some power now that they overwhelmingly work, and thus aren't nearly as dependent on men as they were in the good-old days when a woman's choice was to stay married or starve.
.
Last edited by baseline bum; 12-10-2009 at 01:21 AM.
you are assuming that unwed parents = single parents
and you are assuming that a quote from an American president also equally pertains to Dutch society
...and for the record, I was just speaking out of my own curiosity......it wasn't really an argument.
I already knew this thread was a horrible fail......I was just wanting to see a few responses before I blew it up.
Here we go.....
was that realllly what supporters of gay marriage were arguing?
November 9, 2009, 3:16 pm
Dutch Views on Same-Sex Marriage
By LISA BELKIN
When I wrote about same sex parenting in the Times Magazine this weekend, one of the people I interviewed was M. V. Lee Badgett, who is both the director of the Williams Ins ute on Sexual Orientation Law & Public Policy at the UCLA School of Law and a professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She is also the author of “When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage,” which focuses mostly on data from the Netherlands, where same-sex marriage has been legal for nearly a decade.
My magazine article focused primarily on the effects of same-sex marriage on children. But Badgett has more to say — about the effects of same-sex couples on marriage, and also about the effects of marriage on same-sex couples.
She shared her thoughts in a follow-up email interview:
Q.Why study how gay marriage works in the Netherlands?
A.The Netherlands let same-sex couples marry in 2001, so they have the longest experience for us to see what effects it might have. And like some states here, the Netherlands also had a civil union-like status (“registered partnerships”) before same-sex marriage rights, starting in 1998. So the Dutch have had a long time for things to change — the cultural meaning of marriage, choices about marriage by different-sex couples, and the impact on gay and lesbian people, in particular. Also, Dutch couples have lots of choices for organizing their relationships, so we can see which legal ins utions appeal most to couples, whether gay or heterosexual couples.
Q.Did legalizing same-sex marriage face the same objections there as here?
A.The Dutch gay activists worked on the issue for about 15 years, so things clearly moved faster there. (We’re already past 15 years of serious effort here in the U.S.) A majority of their public supported equal rights for same-sex partners and marriage rights fairly early in that process. The most powerful opponents were in the Christian Democratic Party and other religious parties. (Even now some civic officials who have religious objections to gay marriage refuse to marry same-sex couples.) The two biggest issues would be very familiar to people in the U.S.: whether there should be a separate status for same-sex couples and how to deal with children — whether adoption rights would be included and what the status of children born into same-sex couples would be. That’s why the Netherlands ended up with two legal statuses for both same-sex and different-sex couples. And married same-sex couples still don’t have the same parental rights as different-sex married couples. Same-sex married couples can’t adopt children internationally, and a non-biological lesbian parent only gets “parental authority” for a child born to her female spouse, not automatic parental rights. To get full parental rights, the non-biological parent must still formally adopt the child.
Q.Did marriage change the individuals who entered into it? If so, how?
A.On a personal level, many people said that getting married made them feel more committed to or responsible for their partners, or that they felt some larger emotional or spiritual effects, even though most of these couples had already been together for many years before they could marry. Many same-sex couples were surprised to find that marriage changes how other people see them. Marriage triggers expectations of friends and family members, who support married couples and remind them that they’re part of a larger social ins ution.
Q.How did people who did not marry feel about having the right to marry?
A.The right to marry even changed people who chose not to marry. Everyone I interviewed noted that they were glad the law had changed — they felt “invited to the party” in the words of one person — and they said that they felt more a part of society as a result. The long-standing anger and resignation that many lesbians and gay men felt as the result of being excluded from such an important ins ution as marriage is not healthy, psychologically or physically. I believe that the sense of increased social inclusion that I saw in the Netherlands has the potential to profoundly change all lesbian, gay, and bisexual people in positive ways in the U.S., too.
Q.Did the legalization of same-sex marriage somehow change marriage in the Netherlands?
A.I looked hard for evidence of changes in the cultural idea of marriage and for evidence that heterosexuals and gay and lesbian couples have different ideas and behavior related to marriage — but I couldn’t find any. The trends in marriage and divorce didn’t change. The ideas about marriage expressed by lesbian and gay couples lined up with the ideas of their heterosexual peers: marriage is about the love and commitment of two people who work together as equals to weather life’s ups and downs, become members of each other’s extended families, and often (but not always) raise children together. Couples who formalize their relationships — gay or straight — are more likely to choose marriage than a civil union.
Q.What is the “take away” for those who are debating these questions in the U.S.?
A.The big point is that all of the evidence suggests that same-sex couples will fit right into our current understanding of marriage in the U.S. Marriage itself will not be affected. Dutch heterosexuals appear to have adapted to the legal change by changing how they see same-sex couples, not how they see marriage. Now they see gay couples as people who should get married, and they are happy to remind their gay and lesbian family members of that fact!
We also see why the word “marriage” matters. The Dutch same-sex couples I interviewed saw their civil union-like status as “a bit of nothing,” as one person called it, or as a political compromise that an accountant might invent. Only marriage has the social understanding to back up the legal status, and the social meaning is as important as the legal rights. Civil unions just don’t have that social meaning. One woman I interviewed put it this way: “Two-year-olds understand marriage. It’s a context, and everyone knows what it means.”
Finally, as in Europe, in the U.S. we see the most liberal states — the most tolerant of sexuality, the least religious, and the ones with more family diversity — taking the earliest action through courts and legislatures to legally recognize same-sex couples. That’s not surprising, of course, but it suggests that we’re going at about the right pace for social change.
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2...-sex-marriage/
Last edited by Blake; 12-10-2009 at 02:25 AM.
Why Dutch Kids are Happier Than Yours
By Lauren Comiteau Wednesday, Jul. 11, 2007
Dutch children are the happiest children in the industrialized world. Don't take my word for it, that was the finding of an extensive survey in UNICEF's Report Card 7. The Netherlands, my adopted home and birthplace of my children beat out the compe ion in a study that took account of material well-being, health and safety, education, family and peer relationships, behaviors and risks, and their own perceptions of their well-being. The U.S. by contrast finished second to last ahead of Britain.
So, what's the secret of Dutch happiness? "I suppose teens are happy for the same reasons adults are," says Ruut Veenhoven, professor of social conditions for human happiness at Rotterdam's Erasmus University. "Holland is a livable, rich, free, well-governed country. People are happy in those conditions." And their positive Dutch outlook is fostered in the education system.
"I think in Holland, we are very open with our children," says Esther van der Zaag, who teaches my four-year-old at Amsterdam's ASVO primary school. "There are rules, but not too many... Play is the most important thing to learn. We teach them through play, not through rules."
Play gives way, further up the education ladder, to learning based on conversation and consensus: "Sometimes the Dutch are criticized for too much negotiation, for not being strict enough or not having rules," says Tom van Veen, a father, teacher and co-principal at Het Amsterdams Lyceum. He says Dutch children are encouraged to form and express their own opinions. "They're used to negotiating at home. In school, too, it's not just, "Here are the rules, follow them.' It's a good thing, but it is tiring." The same model of consensus decision-making pervades the highest levels of Dutch politics and corporate culture.
A group of 12-year olds I cornered for an impromptu opinion poll outside their public school enthused about their teachers, their friends and their school work. Their only complaints about life in Holland? The drunks in the park, and the rain.
The freedom allowed to Dutch high schoolers would shock their American counterparts. The country's legal drinking age is 16, so at school parties — at least in Van Veen's school — kids 16 and over are allowed to drink beer and wine, although no hard liquor, in what he calls "a controlled setting." Fifteen-year-old Tess ten Pos, who I find sipping a latte with friends in a cafe during a break from morning classes, agrees. "When we read in English class about coma drinking in the States, it's crazy! We don't do that here."
"There is more freedom here," agrees 17-year old Karima Adda, whose father came from Morocco more than 30 years ago. "You can't wear short clothes, smoke or drink in Morocco, so that makes me happier here." Despite exceptions like Karima, who plans to be a doctor, immigrant children are less likely to get the best of Holland's impressive levels of investment in children. A recent city-wide survey of Amsterdam primary schools revealed that children of Moroccan and Turkish descent were being directed to lower-level schools than their Dutch counterparts, despite scoring identically on the all-important placement exams. Says Sahro Ahmed, a Somali researcher at Leiden University,"Dutch education is meant for Dutch people. Somali people have a different framework. They don't fit in. The Dutch think: You're black, your mother wears a veil, you talk funny, you're not articulate. You're not going to make it in Dutch schools." As a result, she says, "our children are learning how to make tables, cupboards and coffins. But Somalis want their children to be pilots and doctors, too."
Despite the raw deal experienced by many immigrants, the Dutch social system, with its extensive support structures and family-friendly work ethic, is clearly designed to make parenting as painless as possible. "If you're happier, it's easier to bring that over to your kids," says Clemens Klein Goldewijk, father of two. Dutch parenting is largely shared, and in the professional classes, most women and men work only four days a week, each devoting their free day to the kids. That means young children spend only three days a week at child-facilities which are employer-subsidized. So, what's not to be happy about? (Did I mention free health care until the age of 18?)
"Both parents want to have a role in their kids' lives," says Van Veen. "It's fun, interesting, and over before you know it." And obviously, beneficial for the kids. Ninety percent of Dutch families still eat their main meal together around a table several times a week. Compare that to 65.7 percent of Americans.
The real source of Dutch happiness, of course, will remain a mystery. Professor Veenhoven says that although people know they're happy, they never really know why. Not that it matters: "It's good to be happy," says Veenhoven. "Happy people are nicer, more productive, better citizens, healthier. If you're happy, you live longer." That's certainly an argument for raising my own kids here. They look Dutch, speak Dutch and, admittedly, they're from the right side of the canal. But maybe more importantly, they're on the right side of the pond.
http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...642488,00.html
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