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Monday, May 26, 2008
Frank Turek :: Townhall.com Columnist
Gay Marriage: Even Liberals Know It's Bad
by Frank Turek
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            This leads Blankenhorn to assert, “One can believe in same-sex marriage. One can believe that every child deserves a mother and a father.  One cannot believe both.” 

            Blankenhorn is amazed how indifferent homosexual activists are about the negative effects of same-sex marriage on children.  Many of them, he documents, say that marriage isn’t about children. 

            Well, if marriage isn’t about children, what institution is about children?   And if we’re going to redefine marriage into mere coupling, then why should the state endorse same-sex marriage at all?

            Contrary to what homosexual activists assume, the state doesn’t endorse marriage because people have feelings for one another. The state endorses marriage primarily because of what marriage does for children and in turn society. Society gets no benefit by redefining marriage to include homosexual relationships, only harm as the connection to illegitimacy shows. But the very future of children and a civilized society depends on stable marriages between men and women. That’s why, regardless of what you think about homosexuality, the two types of relationships should never be legally equated.

            That conclusion has nothing to do with bigotry and everything to do with what’s best for children and society.  Just ask pro-gay, liberal democrat David Blankenhorn.  

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About The Author
Frank Turek is the award-winning author or coauthor of three books including Correct, Not Politically Correct: How Same-Sex Marriage Hurts Everyone and I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. His TV show airs Mondays at 8 pm ET on DirecTV, Channel 378. To learn more visit www.CrossExamined.org.
 
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Turek's rantings...
The woman concerned was roughed up by the New York City police department in what was not the City’s finest hour, and won a substantial monetary settlement. This incident sparked international outrage as well as a heated discussion of the relative merits of each society’s attitude towards children.

It is against this backdrop of different expectations and different attitudes that Turek attempts to correlate gay marriage in Norway and divorce rates in that country (completely forgetting the fact that gay marriage exists in Canada, South Africa, Spain, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Sweden, and completely omitting data pertaining to divorce rates in these nations). The notion that a heterosexual couple will now decide not to get married due to the fact that gay couples may marry is ludicrous on its face, as is the notion that a heterosexual married couple will now decide to get divorced due to the fact that gay couples may marry. That is simply not how people think or behave.

PHILIP CHANDLER

Turek's rantings...
Turek arrives at his bizarre conclusion – that “liberals” disapprove of gay marriage – by cherry picking the writings of one supposed “liberal” and then cherry picking data pertaining to divorce rates in Norway, completely forgetting the fact that correlation does not, in and of itself, prove causality (despite his genuflection in the direction of this knowledge), and completely overlooking the “third variable” problem in statistical analysis (in fact, Turek misrepresents the “third variable” as being the result in a simple cause and effect relationship, whereas any sociologist would refute such a grossly naïve analysis of a very complex phenomenon in a heartbeat).

Turek ignores, completely, the fact that the citizens of Scandinavian countries place much greater emphasis on the notion of communal responsibility for the welfare of children than do Americans (particularly conservative Americans, who vehemently reject the very concept of shared communal responsibility in their feverish attacks on the “It takes a village” model). Occasionally, cultural misunderstandings and clashes arise as a direct result of the inability of Americans to appreciate this emphasis – about 15 years ago, a Danish woman was arrested in New York City after leaving her child in a stroller outside the entrance to the restaurant in which she and her partner enjoyed a meal, ignoring the pleas of restaurant staff to bring the child in from outside (in Denmark, there is absolutely nothing unusual about such behaviour, because there is nowhere near the level of paranoia and fear of pedophiles as that from which we suffer; the sight of strollers parked outside Danish restaurants in warm weather does not give rise to concern or alarm).

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