If I don't see it, it isn't there

A commentary on William Murchison's commentary in the Dallas Morning News, April 8th 2009,

The Gay Marriage Fantasy

By William Murchison

You really can't have "gay marriage," you know, irrespective of what a court or a legislature may say.

Ok, so here it begins, a bad position is founded on a bad argument and defended in a bad way. Murchison's first argument is: I don't care about the constitution, it's wrong and I am right.

You can have something some people call gay marriage because to them the idea sounds worthy and necessary, but to say a thing is other than it is, is to stand reality on its head, hoping to shake out its pockets.

Nice, his 2nd argument says that the fight for (and against!) gay marriage is meaningless because "gay marriage" is just a word that has no meaning in Murchison's realm. So basically, this whole cultural battle is superfluous, and the same would be true for this op-ed. Interesting way to defend your argument....

Such is the supposed effect of the Iowa Supreme Court's declaration last week that gays and heterosexuals enjoy equal rights to marital bliss. Nope. They don't and won't, even if liberal Vermont follows Iowa's lead.

See... "If I don't see it, it isn't there..... the "Nope" proves it...." Oh, and Vermont is a liberal swamphole, anyway (too bad Iowa isn't....).

The human race -- sorry ladies, sorry gents -- understands marriage as a compact reinforcing social survival and projection. It has always been so. It will always be so, even if every state Supreme Court pretended to declare that what isn't suddenly is. Life does not work in this manner.

Ahem.... well, obviously the human race is developing a different understanding of the term "marriage" even if you declare that it will never happen. Besides, how does gay marriage go against "reinforcing social survival and projection"?

The supposed redefinition of the Great Institution is an outgrowth of modern hubris and disjointed individualism. "What I say goes!" has become our national philosophy since the 1960s. One appreciates the First Amendment right to make such a claim. Nonetheless, no such boast actually binds unless it corresponds with the way things are at the deepest level, human as well as divine. Surface things can change. Not the deep things, among them human existence.

Another argument along the line of "this fight is useless because it doesn't change things" - so why fight at all? Let's allow gay marriage if it doesn't really change things anyway....

A marriage -- a real one -- brings together man and woman for mutual society and comfort, but also, more deeply, for the long generational journey to the future. Marriage, as historically defined, across all religious and non-religious demarcations, is about children -- which is why a marriage in which the couple deliberately repudiates childbearing is so odd a thing, to put the matter as generously as possible.

Well, procreation and marriage are not necessarily intertwined. There are so-called illegitimate children, and there are marriages without children. But you are going to refute your own argument anyway....

A gay "marriage" (never mind whether or not the couple tries to adopt) is definitionally sterile -- barren for the purpose of extending the generations for purposes vaster than any two people, (including people of opposite sexes), can envision.

So a gay marriage will have to be content with the promise to stay together "in good times as in bad".... but that's the real purpose of marriage anyway, I'd say. It's a promise of two people made to each other to spend the rest of their lives together, it's not a prerequisite to have children.

Current legal prohibitions pertaining to something called "gay marriage" don't address the condition called homosexuality or lesbianism. A lesbian or homosexual couple is free to do pretty much as they like, so long as it doesn't "like" too much the notion of remaking other, older ideas about institutions made, conspicuously, for others. Marriage, for instance.

Once again: "Don't bother me with the law, I've got my own set of rules"

True, marriage isn't the only way to get at childbirth and propagation. There's also the ancient practice called illegitimacy -- in which trap, by recent count, 40 percent of American babies are caught. It's a lousy, defective means of propagation, with its widely recognized potential for enhancing child abuse and psychological disorientation.

Ah yes, thanks for refuting your previous argument.... Besides, I believe that child abuse and psychological disorientation aren't exclusive to illegitimate children... sad, but true.... and your arguments about what's better, or what's worse, what's more likely and what not, is just out of place when you're talking about the law.

Far, far better is marriage, with all those imperfections that flow from the participation of imperfect humans. Hence the necessity of shooing away traditional marriage's derogators and outright enemies -- who include, accidentally or otherwise, the seven justices of Iowa's Supreme Court. These learned folk tell us earnestly that the right to "equal protection of the law" necessitates a makeover of marriage. And so, by golly, get with it, you cretins! Be it ordered that.

Imperfect humans.... like gays and lesbians? And a little fake outrage at the end of the section.

One can say without too much fear of contradiction that people who set themselves up as the sovereign arbiters of reality are -- would "nutty" be the word?

Now that I have seen you arguing within your own reality and your own rules, could you please tell me, are you nutty?

The Iowa court's decision in the gay marriage case is pure nonsense. Which isn't to say that nonsense fails to command plaudits and excite warnings to others to "keep your distance." We're reminded again -- as with Roe v. Wade, the worst decision in the history of human jurisprudence -- of the reasons judges should generally step back from making social policy. For one thing, a judicial opinion can mislead viewers into supposing that, well, sophisticated judges wouldn't say things that weren't so. Would they?

"Legislating from the bench, blah blah blah...."..... I am tired of conservatives supposedly supporting the constitution but then rebelling against every verdict against their ideology.

Of course they would. They just got through doing it in Iowa, and now the basketball they tossed in the air has to be wrestled for, fought over, contested: not merely in Iowa, but everywhere Americans esteem reality over ideological fantasy and bloviation. A great age, ours. Say this for it anyway: We never nod off.

Soon these outcries will be lonely voices in the desert, thanks to the demographic development. Confusing and confused op-ed's as this one here don't help either.

Let's conclude: This commentary basically says that this whole argument about gay marriage is not important because gay marriage isn't a marriage, that the law and the Constitution don't matter because ...well.... the author doesn't like them, that marriage is about children, even though in reality it isn't, and that marriage itself might be better than no marriage, but maybe not, and judges suck so let's get out the pitchforks.