Start breeding or get divorced, ladies:
Attorney Charles Cooper, the former Reagan administration official arguing in support of Proposition 8, stressed that recognizing same-sex marriages would “sever (marriage’s) abiding connection with its traditional procreative context.”
In turn, Justice Elena Kagan countered with the example of elderly couples and others who marry, despite being past child-rearing age.
“There are lots of people that get married that can’t have children,” Breyer added.
Yeah, but they’re not REAL families. They’re not families with 2.5 kids and a dog and a white picket fence. They’re not families with soccer practices and PTA meetings. They’re not really married, not really really. Not like real married couples are, browsing the baby aisle at Target, dreaming of the nursery. Those are the real families. These people are just second-class.
I can’t tell you how many times I was asked, early in my marriage, when Mr. A and I were going to “start a family.” I can’t tell you how many times it’s been implied, usually by relatves or co-workers with kids, that they had a life that somehow carried more weight because they “had families.” I can’t tell you how often we were treated like we had no responsibilities at all, like we had nobody we cared about or were obligated to, because we didn’t have children. Because the implication was that we two, we were not a family. Our friends, our pets, our house, our jobs, that wasn’t a family.
(Could have fooled me, come birthdays. Wasn’t the second cousins who showed up for those, thanks.)
I can’t imagine the extra level of horror attached if people then went on to imply we weren’t even a COUPLE. Assholes.
A.
What I noticed was that these dumb motherfuckers:
1) talk about age of a tradition as being a very significant thing for determining its legitimacy. I think it’s really too soon to write off slavery, after all, it was legally recognized for thousands of years. And women’s rights? Let’s not be hasty. And democracy, that’s one damn dubious concept. I mean, sure, the ancient Greeks, but look at their economy now.
2) act as if they were completely ignorant of existing states where gay marriage was legal and has been for a while now — “oh noes, whatever will happen??? we haz NO IDEA!!!”
3) talk as if this were THE most awesomely incredibly factor in peoples’ decisions to get married, have children, etc. Economic depression has a much larger effect on marriage and making babies (it’s real easy to have a larger effect than zero), yet you don’t see any of these clot-headed conservatives worried about that. No, it’s austerity to the max for them.
Never fucking mind that I know of multiple gay families with children. Presumably they made a special arrangement with the stork.
Today’s conservatives: unfair, discriminatory, and STUPID.
As an adoptee, I hear this kind of shit all the time. You would simply notbelieve how much this culture actually hates adoption (well, people adoption, anyway) until you start paying attention to it. And the people who inevitably put their feet (and everything else) in it about how families with adopted kids aren’treal families, and so on and so forth (the most recent example I can cite you was a NOM asshole saying that an adoptive family “like Justice Scalia’s” was the “second-best alternative”) are generally the same people who want to ensure that single people, childless/free people, and gay people are de facto or de jure second-class citizens.
As long as there’s only One True Way of doing things, which is Their Way, so they can shit on everybody else, I guess…
” “sever (marriage’s) abiding connection with its traditional procreative context.”
God I hate that fucking trope. It’s not even true. Marriage’s traditional context was not procreative it was ALWAYS about property.
And I thought a vital part of the legend of the 1950s Beaver was that the whole neighborhood participated in looking out for each other, especially in looking out for the children and seeing that they behaved – in short the whole neighborhood nurtured the children.
But then Hillary had to say , “It takes a village” and that whole concept became vilified.