Oklahoma's domino has fallen

[afleitch]

The societal demand that those who had the sex to have the children should raise them is a very recent one. All humans, sociopaths aside, have the ability to be care givers. It is often the parents or their extended family but that should never be exclusive. The idea of the 'nuclear family' while thankfully fleeting in practice is very much contrary to the traditional of shared care giving, yet people still hold it as an ideal. It's a damaging idea as it means that a failing marriage more disproportionately affect children than it otherwise would do where care giving is shared.

[afleitch]

Marriage equality strengthens families.  There are thousands upon thousands of abandoned children created from failed heterosexual relationships, who are now finding homes with dual-income couples who have only recently been able to prove to a court their suitability as adoptive parents.

And that doesn't even take into account the gay couples who create life via biological means.  (e.g. surrogate mothers, sperm donors, etc.)

And that is the key. All you need to do to be endowed with legal rights over a child instantanously is to have sex. That is it. And we have a society in which children's rights as a concept appear to be subservient at all times to the whims of the parent. The idea that children have rights independent of and at times contrary to their own parents is an enigma to some people. The rights of children are often not served in the heterosexual relationship, whether fleeting or embedded, that brought them into the world and the idea that the generations of heterosexual, married relationships that form and shatter and reform and have f-cked up so many people are automatically better for a child than another mother and father, or two fathers, or two mothers, or the aunt or the grandparent is a disgrace.

It is the job of the government and society to support all families that support each other and provide love and support for children whether they be their own or someone elses. The 'nuclear family' closes off this difference by insinuating other arrangements are lesser or not appropriate. It is this compact, self serving and often patriarical unit that has also led to the disconnect that has shattered what the 'family' used to be; cutting off the extended family as care givers and subjecting the elderly to being removed from the family care unit altogether when they are too old or too difficult to handle.

[afleitch]

When you fall in love with someone, what is it about them that you fall in love with? The answer that we should give; the ‘right’ answer is that you love them because of who they are; for their faults as well as what makes them special. That love should pay no attention to how people look, or what other people think of them. Love should be about the essence of that person and the joy that you bring each other. The ‘wrong’ answer should of course be that I love them because they have nice breasts, a large dick or a firm ass, or that any time I want I can plough this or ride that. The answer shouldn’t be as base and as carnal as that. But at times it is. Love is as complex as it is complicated and loving someone because of their physical attributes is not wrong in itself. But if it is exclusive or it dominates the relationship, then what a fleeting foundation on which to build it.

What traditional Christian understanding of sexual love does inadvertently is be over sensitised or predisposed to the physical even when it illicit a prudish attitude to what is carnal. ‘Love can only exist in marriage; marriage is about procreation. Only one man and one woman.’ You cannot get more ‘physical’ or more base than statements such as these being rooted as they are in sex, gender and physical acts of reproduction. When confronted with the love between two men, then that love is charged as being lesser on the basis of their physical incompatibility, the very fact that they have a specific sex or gender or on the basis of not being able to have children. By extension, there is an underlying assumption that the merit of a man or of a woman is in having their own children, not in being responsible for raising or supporting the children of others. In this mind-set, there is no scope for acknowledging the love of the ‘person’ as opposed to the body. Furthermore, amongst opposite sex couples within the traditional Christian understanding of love and marriage, the physical takes prominence over the person in matters concerning the relationship itself.  Within the context of what happens when the physical compatibility remains in that they are one man and one women perhaps with children, but the personal compatibility is breaking down, this has led to a rather unsympathetic and intrinsically unhealthy view towards separation and divorce.

I do not consider that the secular and permissive response to sex and relationships  is unhealthily concerned with matters of sex. Quite the contrary, I think those responses are broadly healthy. It is the traditional Christian view of sex, relationships, men and women that is overly concerned with the physical and the carnal even within the mandated confines of marriage. To deal briefly with the concept of exclusive celibacy, celibacy is an ‘anorexic’ view of sex; it is either a base fear, distrust or avoidance of sex that the person who is celibate tries to rationalise. As a concept it is also physical/carnal and detached from the idea of the person. Even dalliances and brief relationships that outwardly appear to be nothing more than sexual favours tend to have some connect, albeit fleeting, between those who participate in them. Those who are ‘anorexic’ towards sex sustain, though they are often greatly offended by this comparison, as unhealthy a relationship towards sex as those who are ‘obese’ towards it; those who overindulge who seek it out at all costs to themselves and to others completely disconnected from any personal relationship or concern towards the other ‘body.’

[afleitch]

I preferred your original response. But I think even you could see being the kind of guy who wrote that post was definitely worse than herpes.

I'd be interested to see that.

[afleitch]

Also, as you know I'm not usually prone to "checkmate, lieberals"-type statements, but what about that whole "being tolerant of different lifestyles and not being too quick to judge them" thing? This seems particularly relevant considering what this thread is originally about.

For what it’s worth my original comment on celibacy (which seems to have grown arms and legs since I last checked in) was a rebuttal of the argument (in case it arose from our latest troll) that celibacy should be the route taken by people with non-heterosexual sexualities. Arrangements like that are not psychologically healthy, laced as they often are, with religious connotation and expectation. Personal celibacy is one thing; people drift in and out of periods of sexual activity all the time, but celibacy because ‘it’s what god wants me to do because I am not a married heterosexual’ is another.