Frank Zappa nailed it on the head many years ago when he feared that a “fascist theocracy” based upon Christianity dogma would attempt to command first American society, and then American government.
An Iowa group called The Family Leader has placed one more brick into that wall of fascist theocracy. This group of Christian pinheads has formulated a 14-point document entitled “The Marriage Vow”.
There are so many moral outrages contained within this short missive that I’m gonna take this puppy down in several posts.
First up–the intro!
We kick things right off with “proving” that “faithful monogamy” is the core of proper morality by invoking the Holy Quartet–scripture, philosophers (obviously these people have never read Herr Nietzsche), “natural law” (nature has nothing to do with volitional morality), and the American founding fathers. I’m surprised they didn’t toss in Mom and apple pie while they were at it.
~~~
Next up: race!
“Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA‟s first African-American President.”
Really? Really?? Slave marriage was not recognized by the government of any state that observed legal slavery. Mothers, fathers, and children were separated at the whim of slaveowners and the demands of economics, including those slaves owned by American founding fathers.
And note the not-so-subtle racial dig at Barack Obama. There was no need to mention his race in that statement, and yet there it is. Don’t let it be said that fundie Christians are color-blind, because a lot of them are of the “well, you know that family is…*that* color” level of bigotry.
~~~
And now, a Trifecta! Gays, divorce, and infidelity!
“Social protections, especially for women and children, have been evaporating as we have collectively “debased the currency” of marriage. This debasement continues as a function of adultery; “quickie divorce;” physical and verbal spousal abuse; non-committal co-habitation; pervasive infidelity and “unwed cheating” among celebrities, sports figures and politicians; anti-scientific bias which holds, in complete absence of empirical proof, that non-heterosexual inclinations are genetically determined, irresistible and akin to innate traits like race, gender and eye color; as well as anti-scientific bias which holds, against all empirical evidence, that homosexual behavior in particular, and sexual promiscuity in general, optimizes individual or public health.”
No reputable study I’ve ever read says that homosexuality is genetic in nature. Of course, claiming that being gay is not something you inherit is seen as an open door to “Oh! then they must choose to be that way”. Wrong, bunky. No one knows what causes one person to feel attraction toward another of the same gender, and that includes you.
So, it seems that, according to The Family Leader (can I hear a sieg heil?), if we all just get married, and stay married (never mind that black eye and broken cheekbone he gave you last month), and have children (poor infertile couples!), and not be gay, America will be great. This is just one more pisspoor attempt to foster some mushroom-eater’s view of what the world ought to be. But it’ll never be that way…
…because we’re human, goddammit! with human frailties. And the only healthy way to get over the frailties is to find the moral fiber within ourselves to do the things that are good, and not to do the things that are bad. We should NEVER allow someone to persuade us that God, or Allah, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster for that matter, will show us how to be good people. Good comes from within, not without.
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…and in our next thrilling episode: the 14 points, and how to sign the pledge AND worm out of the points of the pledge–all in one place!
Since your 1st point is opinion I’ll not argue it. I’m also not of a much different opinion anyway.
Your 2nd point seems to be false though. Everything you said about slave marriages and the ability to separate families on a whim is true, but there’s some evidence to support the theory that, in fact, more Black children, as a percentage, were raised by the mothers AND father then are today
As for the 3rd point – “They’re born that way” means it’s either genetic, congenital, or some combination of the two.
The first point I was trying to make is that the FL pulls out the same neo-con talking points pulled out a hundred, a thousand times. Repeating a statement ad nauseum doesn’t make it correct. If the writers had brought up one objective fact to support what they claimed, I’d have considered their point. They didn’t, so I didn’t.
To the second point–there are no hard statistics on slave families, but there is more than adequate documentation proving that slave families were torn apart on a regular basis, usually because it was far cheaper to buy a 10-year-old slave that was born locally than it was to bring a slave from the Caribbean or Africa. Further, is it better for a child to be raised by one steady parent than two parents, the one of which abandons the family at the first good provocation. (And blacks have no monopoly on *that* event.)
Since there doesn’t seem to be a genetic link to homosexuality, my money’s on some combination of identity predilection and nurture, and no one knows where predilection comes from. No other set of circumstances explains the appearance of gays within a given population.
We have some statistics, though I admit that they’re a bit shaky. They support the theory that, while what you said is all true in regards to slavery, the current likelihood of a Black child being raised by a single mother (67 – 70% chance!) outstrips what occurred during even the vile period of slavery.
As for the queers – you’re not even making an actual argument. “Predilection: has to have a basis and that basis, if current science is close to correct, has to have a genetic and/or congenital basis.
And adding “nurture” into the mix just confuses me since you seem pro-queer and implying “nurture” has a role is essentially saying that they weren’t raised to find adherent sexual practices wrong, a statement normally reserved for the “homophobes.”
[...] Frank Zappa nailed it on the head many years ago when he feared that a "fascist theocracy" based upon Christianity dogma would attempt to command first American society, and then American government. An Iowa group called The Family Leader has placed one more brick into that wall of fascist theocracy. This group of Christian pinheads has formulated a 14-point document entitled "The Marriage Vow". There are so many moral outrages contained within t … Read More [...]
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