Christian Group has bank account removed due to "unacceptable views"

circumscribing and protecting the NATURAL sexual function...
====
If anything doesn't need protecting its humanity's number one pastime.
====That description alone should tell you why it needs protecting. I really mean the fruits of it need protecting. Social chaos is even now as we speak growing as a result of our having lost sight of the importance of the basic unit of marriage and family to a healthy society. We are wealthy enough to absorb the immediate consequences of our current permissiveness and defiance of God's law, so far, and ignore them, but they are growing. Look at the consequences: huge numbers of teenage pregnancies; huge numbers of abortions (yes, murders of our own offspring); huge numbers of fatherless babies and single mothers who have to depend on parents or welfare to survive, or put their babies in childcare which they can barely afford while they work; huge statistics on the increase in STDs of all kinds, many of which were unheard of only a few decades ago. An orderly society depends on the basic organization of a secure family, and ideally children need both sexes to raise them.

It's a matter of qualifications. We don't marry children. We don't marry animals. The qualification is heterosexuality and the potential -- IN PRINCIPLE -- to conceive children. It is in society's interest to protect this institution. Gays have no qualifications for it no matter how hard they work to ape it. They can live as they please, no problem, but they do not qualify for marriage. None of those situations was universal, marriage is, and if you just pick and choose among negatives you can make any point you like, but it's a fallacy to do that. Marriage is the foundation of order in a society. What we are doing is brand new on planet earth, large-scale denial of this fundamental of order. When marriage is demeaned as it now is, and increasingly so, when people do without it altogether as so many do (which is really only feasible for the very rich such as all the celebrities who are setting the example these days), put it on and take it off at will, shuffle children hither and thither, which is recognized as being very hard on their psyches, marry people who aren't qualified and in general trash the institution you might as well toll the bell for the society as a whole. An extremely rare occurrence both historically and crossculturally. That's a joke of a nonargument that's always trotted out. I daresay you will have to also if you live to experience the full chaotic results of the trashing of marriage, growing poverty, burdened single parents and grandparents, alienated younger generation, growing sexually transmitted diseases. Not a pretty picture and society as a whole has to pay for it. Gay marriage is just the last straw I believe, added onto the violence done to marriage over the last few decades. See above.This message has been edited by Faith, 07-04-2005 04:19 AM

Did you raise them in answer to me or in some other context? I've certainly had to answer the same old same olds more than once. Certainly the same position keeps coming up against me as if I'd never said a word. That's life on a message board seems to me. Moot? A universal custom is MOOT? That is WHY I emphasize that we're talking about a principle of heterosexuality. In that case so does a "couple" under the age of oh eight or nine. So does a hetero couple over the age of sixty. In the first case, as with gays, they are not qualified for marriage, and in the second case, cultures nevertheless recognize their heterosexuality apart from their childbearing capacity and until recently required them to marry.Things have changed and quite recently too, which is your point, and this clouds the issues involved, but historically marriage was a protection for women and children. Even in the most gay-oriented societies the idea of marriage was never considered except in the silly way demonstrated by Nero as far as I know, or in some utterly anomalous fringe groups. It's ludicrous. There is no purpose for it. With two men there is no need to protect either one of them, and with two women neither is being protected in principle, or their children in any case. The protection idea is irrelevant in today's circumstances anyway, but it demonstrates the purpose of marriage and gays don't qualify. They don't need marriage to protect their nonexistent childbearing capacity or their ability to adopt or have children some other way. The principle remains: NATURALLY men and women have children together, at least in principle, and two of the same sex simply do not. Legalizing/sanctifying the NATURAL heterosexual union is the purpose of marriage. See above. Being able to imitate it doesn't qualify it for marriage which has the purpose of legitimizing the NATURAL function. I have no answer for this. It's something I think should be obvious upon serious reflection. The order I'm talking about is the legitimization of the *natural* order. No, what we have been doing with our general widespread trashing of marriage over the last half century is absolutely unique in history I believe. That's because it doesn't happen. The changes of the last few decades are unique. As I already pointed out, that idea was an extremely limited situation, and again, the principle that underlies marriage throughout all time and all cultures is heterosexuality. Over half the nation voted for Bush. Remarkable how the "people" of the nation are described as if we didn't even exist. The "younger generation" only includes leftists, right? Others don't exist. Christians don't exist, we just don't count. Why don't you line us up and shoot us, then you can have the America YOU want without the bother of people who disagree with you. Ted Kennedy says "the people" will expect "them" to counter Bush's judicial nominees, as if We The People who voted for him and want a fair and honest justice chosen for a change didn't even exist. Oh right, abstinence-only education causes STDs. Right. Mind like a steel trap there.This message has been edited by Faith, 07-04-2005 08:03 AM

The argument against polygamy is a separate argument. The point with respect to gays is heterosexuality and historically that haas included some polygamy. Western civilization under the influence of the Bible has rejected polygamy, rightly. When God gave Eve to Adam he established the principle of monogamy.What I've said about the growing chaos as a result of the sexual freedom of the last few decades which includes many varieties of the demeaning of marriage already ought to show the basic ordering function of marriage.Sorry, promiscuous sex causes STDs, not abstinence or abstinence education. Blame the cure. Smart.This message has been edited by Faith, 07-04-2005 08:12 AM

What's needed is a return to the respect for marriage and for abstinence that previous generations had. That should be the focus of abstinence education. Perhaps it's too late. In any case condoms aren't going to solve the problem. Say bye-bye to civilization in the West then.

Can't wait to see what kind of world "science" produces. Going going gone.

I see, only your statistics have merit though God knows how valid any of that is.

Getting nasty personal again I see. Sigh. Can't just stick to the argument can you. In fact can't even FOLLOW the argument. Actually, mentioning the dangers is trying to warn people, which isn't exactly an act of hatred, but that's OK, kill the messenger, I understand that's what you have to do. The point, you silly frog, was that like holmes I too have to repeat arguments over and over because the same old stuff keeps getting said by my opponents on MANY subjects, not any particular subject. See, that's how it reads in CONTEXT. Get it?

This is the Coffee House, for casual chitchat I've always thought, not debate. There are plenty of sites that discuss a general epidemic of STDs and other social ills as a result of all the Liberationisms, but finding statistics that answer yours point for point is going to take a while. And I'm busy elsewhere too. Hang tight.

Gay marriage is simply one of many topics we seem to have landed in here, not in itself a cause of any of the statistics under discussion. The point about gay marriage is that the very idea destroys the meaning of marriage. There is not one single reason for gays to be married, it's all cosmetic, all psychological. It accomplishes nothing for the society except the final destruction of the meaning of marriage in the public mind, and what it would accomplish for gays legally can be done in other ways quite easily and leave marriage alone for what it has always been intended for. But I see the handwriting on the wall. It's going to happen no matter what the sane people think.I didn't bring up abstinence education. Somebody here brought it up as not stopping kids from having sex anyway-- well, duh, if you keep saying "they're going to have sex anyway," then of course they will, but a strong anti-acting-out attitude on the part of the whole society, parents, teachers, TV, would go a long way to ending it. The problem is nobody's really against it. They think it's a "right" or a "liberty" -- gad, it's even HEALTHY, good for the sperm yet. Again, it's going to happen no matter what the sane people think.That is a problem in the public schools and my position is that Christians at least, and anybody who really cares about keeping their children from the sexual libertarian influence of today's society should simply get out of the public schools altogether and away from a lot of other sources of such influence. Let them teach whatever they want to teach. It's going to be a disaster but there's no stopping them. It's going to happen no matter what the sane people think.

The state has a definite interest in supporting stable hetero two-parent families for the sake of its own stability, and has no interest whatever in supporting gay marriage.

No, I at least don't say otherwise. I don't know much about abstinence-based programs, how they approach the problem, I'll have to read up on them, but it seems to me that yes, an abstinence focus should definitely be to promote abstinence for its own sake.It IS incidentally the answer to the obvious diagnosis that the problems of teenage pregnancy and STDs are the result of NON-abstinence, but the idea overall is that pre-marital abstinence is simply a good thing for people and for society in general. Absolutely.The reason it is a failure, if it truly is, is that there are mixed messages in the culture today, some egging them on while the abstinence programs are a pretty weak alternative in such an atmosphere."Be careful" isn't working either however. Condoms don't solve all the problems and even when encouraged aren't often used.

Yes, as I've been saying, marriage is being devalued daily in our society, has been pretty much trashed over the last few decades, but that means the task is to try to resuscitate it, not give it the death blow.Love has historically not been the primary reason for marriage. That is a rather recent romantic idea. Marriage is for sanctifying and legitimizing, setting apart and making permanent the heterosexual union that produces children, and it extends to all heterosexual unions, fertile or not, on principle. There is no principle that includes gays in this definition and to include them is to redefine marriage to the point that it loses all meaning.

Not that it affects a given marriage, but that it demeans the IDEA of marriage, contributes to its trivialization. If it is merely to give an aura of phony legitimacy to a sexual aberration, it loses what little seriousness is still attached to it.

By demeaning marriage which is the basis of a stable state, by rendering it a travesty.