Virginia Votes for Marriage
By James Bowden (10/20/06)
Virginia has an amendment to its Constitution on the ballot this November. It’s a little institutional concrete to shore the riprap before the next big storm of Judicial Tyranny. The arguments for marriage may be illustrative for folks in other states who need the same protection for a fundamental institution.
The Marriage Amendment on the Virginia ballot asks:
Shall Article I (the Bill of Rights) of the Constitution of Virginia be amended to state:
“That only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this Commonwealth and its political subdivisions.
This Commonwealth and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage. Nor shall this Commonwealth or its political subdivisions create or recognize another union, partnership, or other legal status to which is assigned the rights, benefits, obligations, qualities, or effects of marriage.”?
Here are ten, among many, reasons to vote Yes!
1. Yes to what is best for children. The best family for children has a father and a mother who are married to each other. The statistics on physical, mental, emotional health, as well as success in school, work, relationships and all of life are off the charts for children with a mother and father. The children who suffer during divorce often gain new families through remarriage of mother and father. The many successful, healthy, happy children of single parents are outnumbered by many more who lost much in life - missing a mother or a father. Ask anyone who lost, at any age, their mother or father, or never had one, what was missing. Was a ‘parent’ gone or was it their ‘Mother’ or ‘Father’?
2. Yes to what is best for the Commonwealth. The secular state regulates marriage for the survival of the state. Every state regulates marriage. They always have. It’s not an intrusion. It’s the law. The best family, producing the most productive, educated, law-abiding citizens has been regulated by our law since 1607 as a family with one mother and one father.
3. Yes to close Pandora’s box on marriage alternatives. Most opponents to the Marriage Amendment want to legalize homosexual marriages. They just don’t have the political courage to say so truthfully. If marriage is changed from one man and one woman, then there is NO legal-ethical-moral justification to NOT let a Muslim have four wives, a fundamentalist Mormon forty wives, incestuous marriage or group marriage. Court challenges for these marriage alternatives are working now. If the state allows homosexual marriage it can’t stand against other alternatives.
4. Yes to the legal status for marriage. Opponents claim the second paragraph is so confusing. Read it again. It says the cities, counties and Commonwealth can’t make up marriage and call it something else. The confusion opponents shout is exactly the same ‘the sky is falling’ they made over the ’04 Marriage Law. Nothing happened then. Nothing bad will happen now. It’s about marriage – not contracts, wills, or any other legal document an individual can make. The Attorney General’s legal opinion is clear – this amendment is not a problem.
5. Yes to stop a social experiment. Social experiments like abortion, no fault divorce and welfare become social pathologies. They destroy families and cause personal pain, even death, to millions over the decades. Homosexual marriage is a social experiment of the worst kind.
· Homosexuals say woman as mother and man as father is “an abstract model of gender bipolarity.” And for them…
· It’s a “logical leap from definitive biological roles that fathers and mothers play in becoming parents to the assumption that fathers and mothers must therefore play equally definitive roles in parenting.”
· This places “reproductive roles of male and female with sets of attributes to which we have assigned labels “masculine” and “feminine”. This ‘error’ reduces “real men and real women to the two-dimensional symbols one finds on the doors of public restrooms.”
· “Like all cultures, ours has a way of categorizing people by gender, and we have labeled certain traits “masculine” and “feminine” as a sort of cultural shorthand: but that’s all it is.”
· Additionally, homosexuals say two men or two women can ‘parent’ as well as, or better than women mothers and a men fathers.
Homosexuals have to procure children, since they can not create them naturally, for this experiment. Children should not be used as social guinea pigs.
6. Yes to stop the cultural cleansing of Christianity. Marriage that follows the 2000 years of Judeo-Christian tradition isn’t forcing ‘religion’ on non-believers. Specific marriage regulations reflect the majority culture in every society. If Virginia were Muslim, men could have four wives and homosexuality would be punished by death. Virginians of all religions practice freely – precisely because our English Enlightenment Protestant idea of ‘Christian tolerance’ – not an established religion - is written in our Virginia Constitution. When pro-homosexual opponents talk about discrimination and hate being written into the Constitution, they speak from the overflow of their hearts. These Liberals have an agenda which follows homosexual marriage to include making the statement, “the Bible says homosexual sex is sinful”, a hate speech crime – enforced and punished by the state.
7. Yes to the most obvious and normal for all of history. NO culture producing a tribe, nation or great civilization EVER confused homosexual sex with marriage. Ever in human history around the world. Even declining pagan civilizations that honored and encouraged homosexual sex NEVER had legal marriage for homosexuals. Since homosexual sex can’t produce children to make a family no one, except modern Liberals, ever pushed for homosexual ‘marriage’. If you speak against homosexual marriage in public you are called a homophobe, bigot, etc. Look whose name-calling is un-gentlemanly and un-ladylike for Virginians. Look who will silence free speech.
8. Yes to keep the family strong. Marriage is the state’s business. Religion isn’t the state’s business. Every culture and state that ever existed regulated marriage, just as they regulate sex. The variations are wide and extreme for both marriage and sex across cultures and through the centuries. But, marriage has always been between men and women. It has never been between the same gender. Re-defining relationships because a tiny minority want their sexual orientation honored is wrong. The most effeminate man can never be a mother. The most masculine woman can never be a father. That is biology, not culture.
9. Yes to keep what is good - strong. Marriage between one man and one woman has served Virginia well for 400 years. Homosexual marriage doesn’t threaten individual marriages. Homosexual marriage threatens the future institution of marriage. It doesn’t need to be fixed to allow homosexual marriage, group marriage, one man and many women, one woman and many men, incest, bestiality or marriage to children. Every sexual orientation that cries out that their true love be honored by marriage is equal – and equally wrong to break the best model for marriage. It’s isn’t discrimination to make rules about marriage. Denying every sexual behavior the legitimacy of marriage isn’t slavery, segregation, racism or hatred.
10. Yes to stop Judicial Tyranny. It only takes one judge to declare the Virginia law keeping marriage between one man and one woman ‘unconstitutional’ to throw the will of The People at the mercy of courts who have grown arrogant with power. If the Virginia Constitution says marriage is one man and one woman, then it can’t be unconstitutional – even to a Liberal judge. Judges who make up laws and give executive orders from the bench can – and must – be stopped.
Please vote ‘Yes’ to Marriage.
James Atticus Bowden
Isaiah 59:21
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