Conservatism Under Fire

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Conservatism Under Fire: Debate on Marriage

Editor's Note: Richard Chappell writes The Arizona Conservative taking conservatives to task over the Protect Marriage Arizona initiative. Editor Dennis Durband responds. Mr. Chappell's letter appears first:

I just finished reading the PMA article at http://www.azconservative.org/PMA_Launch.htm, and I am once again amazed at how badly yet another conservative organization has missed the point. Before I start, I’d like to point out that I am heterosexual, 36 years old, agnostic, and single. I do not vote on party lines. In the 2004 election, I voted for an independent Congressman, a Republican Senator, and a Democratic President…though to be honest, that was just a “lesser of two evils” thing, and I really wished we’d had at least one Presidential candidate who was worthy of my vote.

I think my favorite line from the article was Ron Johnson’s claim that “marriage is important because it is the foundation of the family.” That statement could not possibly be more wrong. Love is the foundation of the family, and love exists independently of marriage. I have a 5-year-old daughter, though I’m sure you would disagree with my definition because she was not a product of my sperm and her mother’s egg. She is my ex-girlfriend’s daughter from a previous relationship, yet that has no effect on the way I love her and she loves me. If you ask her who her “daddy” is, she’ll point to me. I will provide her with much more in the way of love, support, and parental guidance than her biological father ever could have. She also has a god-father who is very active in her life. I know her biological father on a personal level (we’ve spent a lot of time socializing through mutual friends in the last two years), and I can tell you without any fear of being proved wrong that she is much better off being raised by the “village” of pseudo-parents and family friends that she has than she would have been if her mother had stayed with her biological father.

You know what I wonder whenever I read or hear conservative attitudes about same-sex marriage’s supposed negative effect on children? I wonder if the people who foster those attitudes have ever known someone who grew up in an abusive household. I did. My father claimed to be Christian, but he also beat my mother and molested my sisters. Given those facts, do you still think marriage was a positive factor in my upbringing or that my mom should have remained in that marriage instead of divorcing him and raising us herself? Were we somehow worse off when we were deprived of our father’s presence? Before you start to think this is an isolated incident, consider the fact that well over 50% of my female friends (a conservative estimate) were molested or abused by one of their parents or grandparents at an early age. It’s an epidemic in this country, and I believe it completely undermines the opinion that children are better off being raised by their married biological parents.

Same-sex marriages and civil unions have no effect whatsoever on the institution of marriage among heterosexuals. You’re seeing higher divorce rates, fewer marriages, and more children born out of wedlock now because women finally have enough financial independence to raise children and live their lives without husbands. Sure, there was a low divorce rate in the 50s when women couldn’t get good jobs and had been raised to believe that their role was to stay at home, raise children, and do whatever their husbands told them to do. That doesn’t mean they had better lives than women do now, and it doesn’t mean the children were better off then than they are now.

I believe your efforts would be better directed toward making sure couples are ready for marriage and/or children before they get married or become pregnant. You want to see fewer children born out of wedlock? Provide free, confidential birth control (including vasectomies and tube-tying). You want to see a lower divorce rate? Make it harder to get married and provide free and mandatory couple counseling before the marriage. Yes, you heard me right. The vast majority of married couples in this country should never have been married.

The best way I can think of to combat frivolous marriages that soon end in divorce and single-parent families would be to remove ALL legal benefits of marriage then make all of those benefits available to any two people who want to enter into a legal contract for those benefits (healthcare benefits, rights to things like estates, hospital visitation, custody of children, etc.) Return marriage to a strictly religious practice with no legal ramifications, and we’ll end all of this ridiculous debate about same-sex marriages. It will also give heterosexual couples a greater understanding of why same-sex couples are fighting for the right to marry or at least enter into a civil union. Most same-sex couples don’t really care about being “married”. They just want the same rights that married couples have. Frankly, I can’t think of any logic-based reason why we’re still denying them those rights. In saying that, I want to make it clear that I read the entire article I referenced above and did not see anything in it that even resembled an opinion based on logic and reason. You scoff at lines like “go back to the Taliban” coming from protestors, but they are more accurate than you think. Those protestors are merely trying to point out that you’re trying to deny rights to a group of people based entirely on archaic and outdated religious beliefs, even when granting those rights would have no effect whatsoever on your own lives.

Regarding the “let the people decide” mantra… It sounds great as a battle cry, but history shows it is usually just leads to several decades of delay in providing people with rights they should have had from the beginning. Let’s not forget that “letting the people decide” led to 89 years of slavery (counting only from the point when our country achieved independence from England) and kept women out of voting booths until 1919. “The Sheeple” usually have no idea what is best for them or their country, because they base their votes entirely on their emotional responses to other people’s opinions about a topic rather than applying logic to the facts.

I know you’ll dismiss my views as those of a “knee-jerk Liberal”, but you couldn’t be farther from the truth. I believe in letting each individual fend for him- or herself rather than allowing the government to dictate what we can or cannot do. I don’t believe it is my responsibility, for instance, as a responsible self-sufficient taxpayer to fork over my money to support someone who chose not to take full advantage of our free public education system and is now living in poverty. I believe people should take personal responsibility for their actions and the lives. My conservative friends keep trying to convince me that conservatives stand for just that sort of thing, but I don’t see any evidence of it in the real world. Both the liberals and the conservatives just keep trying to force their beliefs on everyone else. I’m not asking you to change your beliefs about same-sex marriage. I’m asking you to remember that those beliefs are YOUR OPINIONS and should be left that way, not forced upon everyone else through laws. I don’t think people should be using email or surfing the web unless they know how to protect themselves against viruses, worms, and identity theft, but I’m not about to lobby for the enactment of laws that will keep those people from using the web or email even though that actually DOES affect me personally. Think about it.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I wish you well.

Richard Chappell

Hi Richard,

Thank you for writing to discuss your thoughts on this important issue. I sympathize with those who have been abused by parents, especially by those claiming to be Christian. That is a direct violation of the Word of God. There are a lot of walking wounded in this world, as a result of that abuse and deceit.

Your claim about the importance of love cannot be understated. I would just state, though, that we don't marry everyone we love. Be careful where you take that argument because best intentions sometimes have unintended consequences. And that is a key point for those who want to re-define marriage. No one is arguing that women and children should remain in harm's way by staying in abusive marriages; they need to get out of them.

On another point, the fact that your dad was abusive is not in and of itself an indictment of marriage. It is an indictment of an abusive marriage in which love was not present. Aside from marriages involving abuse, a large percentage of people who were unhappy in marriage but who worked out their differences and remained married revealed that they had happy marriages five years down the road.

The statistics are overwhelming that when children live in a single-parent home (regardless of the reason for the divorce), there is more poverty, and for the children there is more juvenile delinquency, behavioral problems, teen pregnancy, abuse (often from live-in boyfriends) and more drug abuse and alcoholism. This is why we say that marriage is the best model statistically for families. And that is not an endorsement of marriages in which there is abuse. In the homes headed by homosexual adults, the rate of pedophilia is 46 times that of homes headed by a married mother and father.

The attempt to re-define marriage to include homosexuals and civil unions has had a very detrimental effect in the European nations where these arrangements are legal. Far fewer couples, of either gender, get married in those countries because marriage has been so marginalized and re-defined that its value is greatly diminished. Eighty percent of children in Scandinavian countries are born out of wedlock, and whenever you get into the out of wedlock statistics, that means more poverty, more social problems of the variety I mentioned above and a greater drain on government resources. Here in our country, $1,000 is spent on cleaning up the messes of broken marriages for every $1 spent on marriage strengthening. Something is seriously wrong with that picture.

So the liberals' question of "how does SSM [same-sex marriage] affect your marriage" really misses the mark. The proper question is how does it affect communities and governments. And the answer is a resounding "negatively." Without dispute.

The argument is not that children are better off raised by biological parents. The statistics say children are better off in the homes of married men and women.

One in three girls are molested as children, nationally, and this is appalling!! But the perpetrators are not only fathers. This can include brothers, neighbors, teachers, and even dentists, among others. A former dentist of mine was convicted of such a crime against his neighbor girl.

We need marriage strengthening. Many Christians are too insecure to subject themselves to marriage counseling. They think they know better. At their own peril.

More abstinence education is needed. Comprehensive safe-sex education, by Planned Parenthood, is aimed directly at undermining taboos against under-age sex and focuses on getting children riled up and sexually active. Very lucrative for the abortion industry. It's all about money for Planned Parenthood.

You're right; there are an awful lot of bad marriages in which people just drifted into them, or cohabitated and then got married. Statistically, cohabitation is training for divorce and that is a fact.

Let's also remember that the U.S. divorce rate is in decline, though it is still too high. No-fault divorce has created an environment of disposable marriages and that is wrong. Many divorces occur without abuse in the picture; people don't honor commitments like they used to. Marriage is often seen as a temporary arrangement. When one tires of it, he or she just drops out and then bounces into another marriage ... and maybe only temporarily.

Homosexuals have all the rights that heterosexuals have. They just don't like the legal choices. Same-sex marriage is not a civil rights issue.

Good traditional morality is timeless. Conservatives do not re-invent their morality to fit the fad of the moment, as liberals do. Twenty years ago, the MASH TV show had an episode denigrating homosexuals. Now Hollywood is completely homo manic. Liberals are entirely unstable in their morality, which changes all the time. Infidelity is the rule of the day in homosexual couples. I linked to a story in which a girl who grew up in the home of her HS [homosexual] dad and his many partners was horribly abused; she wasn't the only one. Liberals have no transcendent base for their morality. Every time policy makers and change agents go against the grain of traditional morality, we pay the price; witness STDs, AIDs, teen pregnancy, cervical and breast cancer linked to abortion, easy divorce and child poverty and juvenile delinquency, etc. What you call "archaic" works when it is followed. In the entire history of the world, abstinence has never failed.

The marriage issue has nothing remotely close to do with slavery. The Taliban oppresses people. Traditional values, when followed, enrich lives. Talk to the people in good marriages and see what they say.

Last year, the pro-abortion crowd held a huge hate rally in D.C. One woman yelled "keep your hands off our uteruses!!!" I say, "tell that to John Biskind and Brian Finkel and all the other butchers out there -- imprisoned or not -- who literally do put their hands on women's uteruses and dismember pre-born children in the process."

Conservatives have come late to the public square. We were forced there by judicial activism and radical change agents. We have long been on defense against those who want to force their harmful morality on society by overturning the social order. They can't do it legislatively; they can only accomplish it through judicial activism, in most places. We are not going to stand by and let the radical, tyrannical minority force our children in public schools to abandon the faith of their parents or accept the homosexual agenda. We will fight. Period.

Thank you for reading.

Best regards,

Dennis Durband