Jewish World Review March 17, 2004/ 24 Adar, 5764

Marianne M. Jennings

Marianne M. Jennings
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Homosexuality and totalitarianism


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Three op-ed topics bring out the Stephen King ids. Topic one: Animals can survive in conditions less charming than a Kennebunkport bed and breakfast. Animal rights activists wish me death by dismemberment. Two: Overeating is responsible for heft. Fat rights activists place curses upon me. A husky idler from New Zealand wished me an early death from my exercise and use of cottage cheese.

Topic three: gay marriage. Homosexual activists are unequaled in both the length and volume of their op-ed mental snaps. They too wish me death by dismemberment, preferably early on, and also hurl curses, but they are Energizer Bunnies. They go on and on and on. Columns from 5 years ago still bring hate mail. Rational discussions or thoughtful rebukes are welcomed, even at 5 years out, but childish attacks grow tiresome. One homosexual correspondent insists that my data on homosexual men having higher education levels are skewed. This chap fervently argues, "The dumb ones stay in the closet."

These groups have three tactics in common: emotion, not rational thought; facts, science, or studies be damned; and hatred toward those who disagree. Gay rights activists have one more trait - they harass the employers of their opponents. Applying economic pressure, they obtain agreement, or, at a minimum, silence. They preach tolerance and acceptance, but are, oddly, totalitarians. I cannot speak for the views of my correspondent's doofuses in the closet.

The rash of defiant homosexual marriages and judicial usurpation of public policy formulation on marriage are further evidence of the gay movement's totalitarian nature. The slumbering and subservient public has finally awakened to the homosexual movement's usurpation of process through press-starved politicos and courts that relish end-runs.

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Cornering straights and frightening them into submission is the gay modus operandi. An entire nation is now backed into a corner with the U.S. Constitution's full faith and credit clause serving as one wall and the borrowed emotion of the civil rights movement as the other.

Judicial, media, economic and political forces have allowed the gay movement to run roughshod over complacent straights. Forced silence on the parts of the straights now finds gay marriage an inevitability. I predicted as much years ago. I write now with one additional thought that accompanies policies totalitarians impose: bad idea.

Homosexual activists argue that the straights don't deserve dominance over marriage policy because they have an abysmal record. Moral authority here is misplaced. Dr. Maria Xiridou's 2003 study of Dutch homosexual men found their relationships last an average of 1.5 years. Other studies found an average of 8 partners per year among male homosexuals and near 100% rates of unfaithfulness even in committed relationships, with the longest lasting having some "provision for outside sexual activity." In the U.S., heterosexual first marriages last an average of 10 years.

But, for purposes of argument, I'll concede their point on our failure at marriage. However, such is an argument AGAINST gay marriage. All the "liberating" changes to marriage over the past 35 years are now acknowledged by conservatives, liberals, social scientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and, lately, Britney Spears, as failed public policy with dramatic negative effects on children. No-fault divorce, open cohabitation, and acceptance of births-out-of-wedlock have resulted in a plethora of social ills that include emotional instability of children, inability of children to commit to relationships, and increased reliance on therapy and medications to fix the voids in the hearts and minds of even grade-school children. Another change, to two mommies and two daddies, can hardly halt this trend.

Children have the best chance for a normal life by living with a mother and a father, of different genders. This ideal does not spring from religion or prejudice. Common sense dictates such. Thousands of years in a lab of innumerable cultures and faiths support the proposition.

Stanley Kurtz has ably outlined the impact of just civil unions, not homosexual marriages, in Denmark and Sweden. The resulting degradation of marriage there has resulted in an increase in out-of-wedlock births. With the status of marriage no longer unique, fewer couples there marry. Over half of the children there reside in homes in which there is no permanent couple, let alone a mother and father.

Marriage exclusively between a man and a woman is a violation of no one's civil rights. Governments have uniformly reached consensus on that limitation for self-preservation reasons. Those with biological capabilities for procreation warrant special status for the role they will play in preserving society by repopulating it with responsible citizens, not neurotic messes, confused about who is in charge and how they got there.

How it all lays out! So rational. So logical. But, rational thought and logic are not the components of totalitarian thought, to wit: What I want, right now, forget consequences. This is no way to run a democracy, but we cower in fear because these Stephen King ids have been unleashed. The ending for this thriller does not bode well for the straights. Worse, it spells destruction for the children of the totalitarian state.

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JWR contributor Marianne M. Jennings is a professor of legal and ethical studies at Arizona State University. Send your comments by clicking here.

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© 2004, Marianne M. Jennings