Homosexuals have been getting married in the United States for at
least 30 years. Ever since the Metropolitan Community Church was
created, a church created by and for homosexuals, wedding ceremonies
have been performed without much ado or fuss by anyone else. The
difference between those wedding ceremonies and the ones which are now
taking place in Massachusetts is that the civil law did not recognize
such marriages as conferring the legally benefits of marriage in the
eyes of the state. That is to say, they weren't illegal. Anybody can
have any religious ceremony he or she wants to have so long is no one
is hurt. But the marriage was not going to qualify to get you social
security benefits when your spouse died. What is going on now is a
move to require the state and all of the rest of us to recognize such
marriages as conferring those legal entitlements heretofore conferred
upon spouses in heterosexual marriages upon spouses in homosexual
marriages.
When pressed, those who agitate to legalize homosexual marriage state
that there are over 1000 legal benefits conferred on those who are
legally married which are denied to homosexual couples . This
assertion is probably true. It is this assertion that people ought to
look at carefully before they endorse the legal recognition of
homosexual marriage.
Before embarking on that discussion, it is useful to remember that the
state has been pretty picky about which heterosexuals can get married
legally. A person can legally have only one spouse at a time. In
fact, having more than one spouse is a crime in most states. The
spouses have to be old enough to consent to a marriage. There are
still sects in Utah who find that these rules interfere with their
desires and beliefs.
Putting that aside, let's look at just some of the benefis. The first
one to come to mind is that one I have already mentioned-- Social
Security. If you have the necessary quarters of coverage and you die,
your spouse can collect social security survivor benefits for either
the rest of his or her life or until he or she remarries. So, if we
recognize a marriage as legal we are adding a potential cost to our
social security system. How much? No one knows because no one has
studied it. Let us go further-- worker's compensation also allows
spouses to collect for work related deaths and the civil system allows
spouses, but not mere partners, to file claims for wrongful death.
What will the additional costs be? Again, no one knows because no one
has bothered to make a cost analysis. The law prohibits employers from
discriminating in health insurance benefits, so if one spouse is
covered all spouses must be covered for health insurance. Usually
today, the cost for adding spousal coverage is less than for the
employee alone. This is another additional potential cost where
employers subsidize health insurance coverage.
Homosexual activitists will argue that this is, after all, only fair.
They pay the same, sometimes more, in taxes. Why shouldn't they get
the same benefits? Their arguments are pretty much the arguments of
all single people in our country. It is unquestionably true that
single people pay higher taxes. And the arguments for that are the
same as they always have been. They have not taken upon themselves the
burden of conceiving and raising children. ( By the way, married
people without children tend to pay the highest taxes) There is a
reason for all the tax and other benefits conferred on people who raise
children. It is, in fact, our children who will be paying those
benefits in the future.
Savings accounts and investments and all of those other financial
instruments are a way of placing a demand on future generations that
they pay back the investment we have made in them. To be less abstract
about it-- if you are not employed at some useful and productive job,
no matter what the source of your income is, you are living off of the
labor of others-- the people who actually go out and farm and
manufacture and produce. Financial instruments are a reflection of the
fact that you, in the past, produced and invested and created a
situation where today's workers could be more productive and could
produce more goods with less labor. It is a great system and it works
very well. But it only works if there is a new generation to take on
the burdens which we shouldered in the past.
And that is one biological social fact which has not changed. it takes
a man and a woman to create a child. Even in a test tube it takes a
sperm and an ovum. This is the unchanging biological fact. A new
generation can be created only by the union of many men and many
women. Another sociological fact-- a man and a woman who are legally
committed to each other make the optimum family for raising a child.
Men are different from women. Children raised in homes in which they
have both a father and a mother tend to, themselves, be more likely to
engage in successful marriages and raise children themselves.
Another sociological fact rarely commented upon by the people who
discuss the issue of marriage is that we in the United States and more
so in Europe, are not having enough children to replicate our
societies. In the United States the problem is being solved by
immigration mostly from south of the border. In Europe it is being
solved by immigration from the Middle East. After years of
environmentalist screeching about overpopulation, no one wants to talk
about the declining birth rate as a problem.
But getting back to the compelled legal recognition of homosexual
marriages, the government has the right and the duty to try to preserve
the future of our country through assuring that we will have a next
generation to pay the benefits. Homosexual marriage by its nature is
not a vehicle toward that end.
Homosexuals are free to get married already. They are not, however,
under current law, able to compel anyone else to recognize that
marriage. They should not be allowed to do so in the future because
they cannot confer the benefits on society that are the reasons that
government recognizes and bestows benefits on married people-- the fact
that married people tend to bear a disproportionate responsibility for
assuring that there is a next generation to take care of us when we are
too old to take care of ourselves.
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