Same-Sex Marriage Invented in 1969!

Every time there is a news story about judges backing gay marriage I end up working on this post. However, I never get enough energy (or interest) to bother posting it. However, today's ruling in California must have pushed me enough to publish it in response to all the BS in attacking real marriage. So here goes.

Don't take this post the wrong way. I am all for having some form of legal union for same-sex couples.

However, I am against turning our society upside-down by liberal attempts to change the definition of marriage into something that marriage has never been. And that is the point of this post.

The argument by the left to legalize gay marriage has been presented as some sort of historical injustice where (traditional) marriages have been given legal recognition and that gay marriages have not, as part of some sort of discrimination against gay couples.

The problem for me is that upon further investigation, the real history of gay marriage goes all the way back to...1969.

Basically, gay marriage is just another bad idea that came out of the sixties.

Take a look at Wikipedia's entry for gay marriage. Sure it refers all the way back to ancient times, but the whole story is all guessing. the one conclusion that you can get from reading the 'history' of gay marriage is that there was no gay marriage in the past. Really, here are a couple of examples. Take this concerning Greece:

In Hellenic Greece, the pederastic relationships between Greek men (erastes) and youths (eromenos) were similar to marriage in that the age of the youth was similar to the age at which women married (the mid-teens, though in some city states, as young as age seven), and the relationship could only be undertaken with the consent of the father. This consent, just as in the case of a daughter's marriage, was contingent on the suitor's social standing. The relationship consisted of very specific social and religious responsibilities and also had a sexual component. Unlike marriage, however, a pederastic relation was temporary and ended when the boy turned seventeen.

At the same time, many of these relationships might be more clearly understood as mentoring relationships between adult men and young boys rather than an analog of marriage. This is particularly true in the case of Sparta, where the relationship was intended to further a young boy's military training. While the relationship was generally life long and of profound emotional significance to the participants, it was not considered marriage by contemporary culture and the relationship continued even after participants entered into traditional marriage to women as was expected in the culture when men reached age 30.(citation needed - Wikipedia

Hmm, pretty thin as far as gay marriage goes. And take this history of same sex marriage in the US:

In the United States during the 19th century, there was recognition of the relationship of two women making a long-term commitment to each other and cohabitating, referred to at the time as a Boston marriage; however, the general public at the time likely assumed that sexual activities were not part of the relationship.

Rev. Troy Perry performed the first public gay wedding in the United States in 1969, but it was not legally recognized, and in 1970, Metropolitan Community Church filed the first-ever lawsuit seeking legal recognition of same-sex marriages. The lawsuit was not successful. In March 2005, two Unitarian Universalist ministers Kay Greenleaf and Dawn Sangrey were charged with multiple counts of solemnizing a marriage without a license in the State of New York. The charges were the first brought against clergy for performing same-sex unions in North America, according to the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington, D.C.-based gay rights group.

The earliest use of the phrase "commitment ceremony" as an alternative term for "gay wedding" appears to be by Bill Woods who, in 1990, tried to organize a mass "commitment ceremony" for Hawaii's first gay pride parade. Similarly, Reverend Jimmy Creech of the First United Methodist Church performed his first "commitment ceremony" of a same-sex couple in 1990 in North Carolina. In January, 1987, Morningside Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends became the first Quaker Meeting to take a same-sex marriage under its care with the marriage of John Bohne and William McCann on May 30, 1987. Although several other Meetings held “Ceremonies of Commitment, Morningside was the first to refer to the relationship as a marriage and afford it equal status. - Wikipedia

So there you have. The strongest historical reference in the US of gay marriage is something that was not really a marriage at all, basically living as female roommates. And the first real US gay marriage was in 1969 and now the courts are fighting to declare it equal to marriages that have been going on for centuries. This boggles the mind.

Interestingly enough, fresh from Europe comes a ruling noting that there is no human right for gays to gay marriage. Given the lack of any true founding in society of gay marriage, it is not a surprise to see this kind of ruling. It is only a surprise given that you would think Europe would support this in all areas as part of their progressive agenda.

A panel of seven judges ruled unanimously Thursday that the couple was not covered by the guarantee of the right to marry in Europe's human rights convention.

The judges said there was "an emerging European consensus towards legal recognition of same-sex couples," but left it to individual states to decide what form that should take. - Yahoo News

And here is a neat explanation of how this new invention of Gay Marriage is getting shoved into our society:

Up until the early 1990s, when judges started acting as engines to install same-sex marriage, it did not seem to occur to most people that marriage meant anything other than the marriage of men and women. Judge Tauro’s affectation is to have us believe that it is quite as natural and legitimate now to assume that any couple of the same sex would be as plausible a candidate for marriage as the coupling, more familiar, of a man and a woman. One would hardly know, from Tauro’s opinion, that there are compelling arguments, grounded in nature and moral reasoning, that call into serious question the coherence of any arrangement that would call itself “marriage” while detaching itself from the union of a man and a woman. Tauro might have serious arguments to make against that case, but that argument has to be made. This late in the seasons of our experience, the overthrow of the traditional understanding of marriage is an act still sufficiently momentous that it deserves to have the reasons assembled to justify itself. Tauro simply begins by presupposing the legitimacy of same-sex marriage and the “irrational prejudice” of anyone who would deny it. As Bertrand Russell once said, presupposing has every advantage over demonstration that theft has over honest labor. - Bench Memos, National Review

Note again that this is all current (recent) history all trying to pervert centuries of common practice.

Also note that I am for some sort of civil arrangement to give gay couples benefits that they are looking for such as next of kin, etc. I would also say tax benefits as well but wonder exactly what benefits that might be given that the marriage penalty is coming back. One issue I do have though is that if we are going to start accepting the registration of alternate associations, where do we draw the line?

Finally, the position I have is that marriage is what it always was and it is assinine to attack it as part of appeasement to progressives. It is like arguing about how many cents are in a dollar. It is just plain stupid and those who do this are the very people that are helping to destroy this country.

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