The New Jersey case exemplifies the merger of marital status with the nonmarital one-sexed alternative.

Instead the thing recognized would be substituted by its legal shadow, and all marriages would become “civil unions”.

Legalisms are not at the heart of the issue being contended. This is not a civil rights issue, truly. It is not even about homosexuality.

Marriage is a unique social institution. Its esteem arises from its combination of sex integration (equal gender participation) and responsible procreation (bonding men and women with their children). Same sex marriage is selectively sex segregative and responsible procreation is extrinsic to it.

State authority recognizes the social institution, it does not create it. This redefinition is a swap, not an extension of marriage.

What the same sex marriage campaign is truly about is the extension of approval of homosexed behavior. That’s the core of the campaign. It is not really about marriage itself. It goes further than tolerance and further than acceptance. It demands approval.

And the flipside is that it demands disapproval, disapprobation, of the normative social insitution that uniquely integrates the sexes combined with responsible procreation.

Note: this does not mean that marriage is only about procreation. Responsible procreation combined with bonding humanity together. The nature of humankind is two-sexed; human generativity is both-sexed; marriage is not sex-segregative and presumptively sterile.

In this New Jersey case, the Attorney General provided a very weak argument in favor of the man-woman criterion of marriage. This sent the message to the justices to reduce the dispute to one of labels rather than the actual social institution that the law recognizes.

This story has national implications. [Link 1], [Link 2], [Link 3].

Do you suppose the wingnuts are freaking about the New Jersey Supreme Court decision directing the legislature to give gays rights that every other Garden Stater has? Count on it (and yes, one is a direct quote): Ace of Spades…

Therefore, I am going on a crusade to create the new institution of SINGLE MARRIAGE.

For too long, the elites in this country have discriminated against singles. We have to pay higher taxes, we are alone a lot, and we always have too many leftovers in the freezer.

Single marriage will change all that. And the risk of divorce is much smaller than it is with traditional marriages.

So who is with me?

(sound of crickets)

Yes, of course! I am single and I am proud!

Gay people want to be respected, considered as ‘normal’ as straights. As they generally do not ‘breed’-conceive children to perpetuate the human race, what good are they to humanity? What should we respect? Narcissistic lifestyles? Sorry-I have no respect for selfish people. Especially when they agitate to have their sexual preference considered a ‘civil right’ which is being trampled on.

Doug on October 26, 2006 at 1:18 AM

So you’re saying that people who elect to stay single, celibate clergy, infertile people–these people have to go through life lacking your “respect”.

How will they go on?

My right to marry my daughter?

My mother? The 12 year old neighbor kid?

What about polygamy? Restricting me to one spouse seems rather arbitrary. What about my right to three or four partners?

Marriage never has been a “right”. It’s a privilege much like driving a car.

I understand that there are arguments on both sides of the gay marriage issue that folks find persuasive. But yesterday’s decision by the New Jersey Supreme Court should frighten and offend folks on either side of the issue. After all,……

Well, I guess Brad Pitt doesn’t have to start sweating yet…

I still think it’s sophistry to argue equal protection. A gay man has exactly the same rights to marry that I do. If we at large were abridging his right to marry, it would be a civil rights problem; but we aren’t.

We cannot escape the reality that the shared societal meaning of marriage — passed down through the common law into our statutory law — has always been the union of a man and a woman.

And why the attempt to escape reality, and the sadness of not being able to? I don’t think the “shared societal meaning of marriage” is arbitrary. We’ve accommodated marriage under law, not created it.

And today we can take the time to accommodate something different, but acknowledging that it’s different isn’t “preserving a nominal stigma”–it’s just being rational.

Huh? Some call that passing the buck. I’m going to go with “woussing out”. If you are going to be a breathingist judge, be one. Don’t be scared. Go to the mattresses with it. Well, it looks like this bunch stopped short of the bedroom threshold….

Finally, justice for all the gay mobsters in Jersey."Hey!  Now I can finally marry Finn.  Thanks guys!"…

Basically, the New Jersey Supreme Court gave the legislature the option to either rewrite the state’s marriage statute to include gays or create a new statute which would allow civil unions and give gays the same rights afforded to straights…….

Black robed judges telling people what should be the norms of our society is not going to stand. There is nothing here that couldn’t be handled by lawyer and the right and the right agreement between the parties. There is absolutely no reason to change the societal definition of marriage.

The problem is we have already gone to far towards speciation, we don’t need to be forced by fiat any further down that path.

2. The court’s opinion (37-43) provides a clear warning to any states that are thinking about providing significant statutory protections to gays and lesbians: Once you do so, judges will rule that your failure to provide all the rights and benefits of marriages is irrational.

Sounds like a slippery slope to me.

Whenever you bring up the arguement of slippery slope, somebody will say that’s a logical flaw. No, it isn’t. If you look at the definintion of that logical flaw, it states that the slippery slope flaw states that if you do A, B is bound to happen when there is no real or logical connection between them. Such as “They just passed a law saying parents couldn’t use a belt to spank their kids. You know what that means. This will eventually lead to the state taking control of your kids and raiseing them in state institutions.”

Err, no.

But sometimes that slippery slope is real. Heck, the whole poem about “when the Nazi’s came for Catholics, I didn’t say anything, so when they came for me, there was no-one left to speak for me” is the slippery slope arguement.

To me, it is starting to look like a lot of the compromises that were made on homosexual issues in the last 15 years seem to have been made in bad faith. A typical example is the “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the military. Prior to this, homosexuals weren’t allowed in the military at all. Period. They’d ask you right to your face prior to joining if you were a homosexual. Say “yes” and you were denied. Clinton decided to change that. The don’t ask, don’t tell seemed to me to be a good compromise.

But I never heard any sort of acknowledgement of the fact that the military had made a big compromise with this from the gay lobby.

And so years past. And the military didn’t collapse with gays in it. And then the gay lobby seemed to pick up the chant that the bad old military was oppressing gays. After all, just look at that don’t ask, don’t tell policy! It’s oppressing them!!!

Crap. I think they negotiated in bad faith. If they would have approached this issue by saying “look, you’ve had gays in the military for the last 15 years in the don’t ask, don’t tell, and they’ve done fine, and the straight troops haven’t freaked out, don’t you think that maybe, if you let them come out of the closet, it wouldn’t be such a big deal?” I could have respected that approach. That would have indicated good faith. But they didn’t and haven’t.

And that’s what I am starting to think all of the comprmises on this issue have been. Made in bad faith. The only thing on this issue that I am sure of is that marriage is between a man and a woman. Almost anything else is negotiable. Including even civil unions, which I was extremely sceptical of at first.

But if the only reason people are trying to get things like that and other issues passed (inheritances, hospital visitations, etc) is to then turn arround and tell me that since all the others have been passed, you HAVE to grant gay marriage, well to heck with all of that.

Honestly, the whole idea of civil unions and what not has taken a huge hit in my eyes. I was willing to compromise on that before, but not now. Now I just say no.

They decided that we are racists because we want to leave a school district because we pay 27,000 per student. While the other 2 towns pay 5k and 3k each.

Now this?

I’m not surprised although I’m surprised I can tolerate staying….

We cannot escape the reality that the shared societal meaning of marriage — passed down through the common law into our statutory law — has always been the union of a man and a woman. To alter that meaning would render a profound change in the public consciousness of a social institution of ancient origin. When such change is not compelled by a constitutional imperative, it must come about through civil dialogue and reasoned discourse, and the considered judgment of the people in whom we place ultimate trust in our republican form of government.

But F it! Do it anyway!

…the rights of Gay to have half their stuff taken in a divorce settlement…

E L Frederick on October 25, 2006 at 3:44 PM

Hmmm, sounds like an idea for a new reality show on Bravo.

“War of the Pansies”