By Don Feder, Creators Syndicate, Inc.
July 1996 – When it comes to gay rights, for the media, resistance equals aggression.
A story in Time magazine (“The Unmarrying Kind”) is subtitled “Focusing on local targets, religious conservatives wage a fervent campaign to stomp out gay rights.” Note the loaded language, “stomp” – as in bash, bruise, leave bloodied and lifeless in the streets.
Opposition to efforts to radically transform a 3,000-year-old institution gets the media’s goat. “Where is the Republican who will look certain conservative Christians in the eye and call them the bigots they are?” asks columnist Richard Cohen.
Hawaii’s Supreme Court is deliberating whether to institutionalize gay marriage by fiat in the Aloha state. To date, nine other states have declared legislatively that they won’t honor such arrangements.
Last Wednesday, Rep. Steve Largent (R-OK) and Sen. Don Nickels (R-OK) filed a bill to clarify the meaning of marriage under the U.S. Code and free states from the obligation to recognize gay unions legally contracted elsewhere.
Throughout the millennia of Judeo-Christian tradition, marriage has meant one thing – a man and a woman whose bond is formalized by religious or secular law.
If that definition is to be altered to permit same-sex unions, why should other distinctions be maintained? Why not extend official recognition to multiple partners? Why maintain traditional prohibitions against marriages between blood relatives, with minors or (High-ho, Silver!) other species?
Gay marriage will be coercive. Businesses will be forced to provide benefits to the “families” thus formed. State sanction will facilitate adoption by homosexual couples. School districts will be required to institute curriculums endorsing the gay lifestyle.
In the May issue of Out magazine, homosexual writer Michelangelo Signorile notes that legitimizing these relationships will be “the final tool with which to dismantle all sodomy statutes, get education about homosexuality and AIDS into public schools, and, in short, usher in a sea of change in how society views and treats us.”
Far from the modest move the media portray, “gay marriage is just as radical and transformative as the religious right contends it is,” Signorile admits.
We’ve already had one disastrous experiment with redefining marriage, by changing the way it ends. Until the advent of no-fault divorce in the early ’70s, marriages could only be dissolved for cause (infidelity, cruelty, desertion, etc.).
Then, liberals introduced flexibility. As a result, the divorce rate has risen 40% since 1970 and half of all children born today will spend part of their formative years with only one of their parents.
Once there were stringent taboos against premarital sex. They too fell to enlightenment in the ’60s. In consequence, out-of-wedlock births rose from 2% in 1940 to 31% in 1994.
Now with gay marriage, liberals are once again singing their siren song of compassion. Should they succeed, society will be buried in the debris. Marriage won’t tame homosexual liaisons, but the latter could revolutionize matrimony.
Homosexual monogamy is more myth than reality. There is no evidence of lower rates of AIDS or other sexually transmitted disease among gays in long-term relationships.
Exclusivity is alien to these couplings. Activists offer this as a positive virtue. Signorile says some gay men “have raised the concept of an ‘open relationship’ to an art form.”
In his book Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality, Andrew Sullivan – the bright young man who recently resigned as editor of The New Republic after disclosing that he is HIV-positive – writes that gay unions can serve as a model for heterosexuals.
“There is more likely to be greater understanding of the need for extramarital outlets between two men than between a man and a woman,” Sullivan suggests.
Whatever he thinks, philandering does not foster commitment. Why encourage adultery by offering homosexual relationships as a paradigm?
In his courageous, clear-sighted monograph for the Family Research Council, Robert H. Knight answers Time and others who yammer about the religious right “bashing” gay marriage.
“Ordinary people did not pick this fight,” Knight maintains. “They are merely defending the basic morality that has sustained the culture for everyone against a radical attack.” With luck, the bulwark of civilization
will hold. 
