SPRING BREAK IS OVER!: Today's Lesson Plan

225 Winter 2009

Writing Assignment 3 due: (BRING 3 COPIES). After reading the pieces in Chapter 26, “Marriage: What Is Its Future” (737-774), write an essay contradicting the legitimacy of gay marriage. Or if you believe that gay marriage should be legal, write an essay supporting same-sex marital unions.

Chief Arguments for and against gay marriage:

Pro

1. Various human rights acts are violated if gay marriage is denied (see Human Rights act passed by Congress in 1977). The choice of one's marital partner is protected by the Constitution, which guarantee's that all citizens have the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It was on this ground that laws forbidding miscegenation -- enforced in the United States as recently as 1967 -- were struck down.

2. Marriage gives societal recognition to a domestic relationship.

3. Marriage confers numerous marital benefits, such as pensions, health coverage, property rights, even citizenship.

4. Until 1967 interracial marriage was prohibited in about one-third of the states in this country. Opponents of interracial marrige argued, like today's opponents of gay marriage, that it threatened traditional values. We now recognize that this position was wrong.

5. Marriage -- not civil union or domestic partnership -- is what some gays want. They do not wish the sort of "separate but equal" status that civil union and domestic partnership imply, for such terms in effect stigmatize the relationship as something less than a loving relationship between two human beings. True, they cannot without a third party produce a child -- but neither can an infertile or sterile heterosexual couple.

6. The fact that the Bible does not sanction homosexual relationships is irrelevant. In our society, church and state are separate. And if the Bible's view of marriage were relevant, today we would tolerate polygamy and would regard wives as the property of their husbands.

7. Gay marriage promotes family life: Gay couples who adopt children have added incentives to stay together. Further, there is no evidence that children brought up by gays are less stable than children brought up by heterosexuals.

8. Gay marriage does not diminish anyone else's right to marry.

Con

1. It is unnatural, illegal, unsanctioned by the Bible, and a threat to traditional values.

2. Such a marriage can not produce children, and a marriage that lacks children is especially vulnerable. "Children are the strongest cement of marriage" (Richard A, Posner, Sex and Reason [1992], 305).

3. If there are children (adopted or from a previous marriage) in a gay marriage, they are at a disadvantage because children need a father and mother.

4. Same-sex marriage is the beginning of a slide down a slippery slope that will include marriage of an adult and a child, a person and an animal, a parent and a child, a brother and a sister, polygamy, or even one group to another group.

5. Males seek variety, and so a union of two men is doubly unstable. (Posner says , p.306, "The male taste for variety in sexual partners makes the prospect for sexual fidelity worse in a homosexual than in a heterosexual marriage.