Ted, I don't know if you've noticed this but we don't really care about the consent of animals. We lead them around on leashes. We eat them. We have them do circus acts for us and so on and so forth. It's to your credit that your mind is looking for some way to justify your innate sense of "right"eousness or right and wrong, clean and unclean... but there's nothing in what you're writing that really makes sense yet.
The definition of a child and sex itself has always been up for debate too, I'm reminded of some Talmudic Jews debating this in ways that we would consider utterly perverse. As a civilization declines, there is usually a blurring of the lines with respect to basic natural categories like child and adult*, male and female, human and animal and so forth.
*E.g. Another subtopic of interest to anthropologists is the homosexual mentorship (Herdt, G.H. 1981. Guardians of the Flutes. New York: Mcgraw-Hill)(Herdt, G.H. ed. 1982 Rituals of Manhood. Berekeley: Univ. Calif. Press) (Herdt, G.H. 1984. Ritualized Homosexual Behavior in the Male Cults Of Melanesia. 1862-1983: Ref 178. :1-82) Mentorships are a much more common form of homosexual behavior than previously considered. These relationships usually form between a preadolescent and either an older adolescent or an adult. Adams (Adams, B.D. 1985. Age, Structure, and Sexuality. Journal of Homosexuality. 11:19-33) has summarized the ethnographic data for male mentorships.
[....]
Ethically this is a particularly touchy issue. There is an enormous prejudice against similar kinds of partnerships in the United States (indeed they are typically illegal), and the older partner is usually defined as mentally ill or as a sexual criminal.
(Annual Review of Anthropology,
Vol. 16, 1987, The Cross-Cultural
Study of Human Sexuality by D. L. Davis, R. G. Whitten :69-98)
2) propensity for abuse, there are many unions such as polygamy, close familial, group marriage which facts have proven over and over again have a propensity for abuse and as such our government does not sanction it
If that's the standard and you're interested in the general welfare, note:
Gays and lesbians are more likely to be victims of domestic violence than anti-gay violence, according to a survey made public yesterday by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs.
(The Gazette (Montreal) October 23, 1996, Wednesday,
Final Edition. News; Pg. F10 Gay domestic violence; Study
documents abuse in homosexual relationships.
Byline: Vicki Haddock)
Battering is also a problem among gay couples: the National Coalition on Domestic Violence estimates that almost one in three same-sex relationships are abusive, seemingly more than among heterosexual couples.
(Newsweek October 4, 1993 , U.S. Edition.
Special Report; Pg. 26 Patterns of Abuse.
Byline: By Michele Ingrassia et al.)
Most recent violent crimes involving gays and lesbians were committed by other homosexuals..... said Michelle Lamoureux... 'We realized that there is a lot of conjugal violence and violence within the gay community.'
(The Gazette (Montreal)
April 4, 1996, Thursday.
News; In Brief; Pg. A3
Pilot project tracking violence against gays)
...now of course maybe a polygamous family would claim they have no abuse and all are equal but truth in facts show there is a propensity to abuse in this type of relationship (and sadly mainly directed at women)
They could reply that is due to the pressure that society puts on them by keeping them in the closet, etc. It would be a clever technique of blaming you for problems that arise based on their own behavior patterns and psychological dynamics produced by them. Yet that wouldn't be without precedent. On a side note, if people want to wander off into their own compounds and be polygamists as they sometimes do I don't believe that the State (generally just collective violence and coercion at the point of a gun) should take an interest in trying to police their relationships. But I guess if they passed DOMA then they might be able to pass another law to raid the compounds with guns drawn or have a SWAT team raid to "save" the kids (If the government doesn't wind up burning them to death first, e.g. Waco.)
and of course the flip side is that there are homosexual and heterosexual couple marriages that are abusive but again the majority are loving and supportive (at least one hopes)
Unfortunately it's more likely that you're looking at the usual decline of civilization, in which less and less people have marriages straight out of the 1950s and bad things begin to happen as more deny the singular nature of the type of marriage that gave birth to them and their civilization in the first place. Not to mention the wake of destruction that will be left for children, given that they need stability and a "more perfect union" of that which produced them in the first place maintained too.
Stability and their father and mother in so far as that is possible, as contrasted with other possibilities like this:
[A] specter…. haunts some children of homosexuals: AIDS. For Stefan Lynch, 24, watching his father die five years ago was particularly lonely. The father talked about it little, already feeling guilty about “abandoning me when I was a teenager,” recalls Lynch.
….In some families, AIDS strikes more than once. Breauna Dixon, 7, wrote a picture book about her father’s death that is used in AIDS support groups. Breauna now lives with her father’s partner–who became her guardian–and the man’s new live-in partner (her third “dad”), who has HIV.
(U.S. News & World Report
September 16, 1996
Culture and Ideas; Pg. 75
Kids with gay parents
By Joseph P. Shapiro; Stephen Gregory)
No comments:
Post a Comment