Staver: Marriage is Great, So Equality Must Be Denied

February 4, 2013 by 16 Comments

Liberty Counsel, Jerry Falwell’s legal group, has filed a brief with the Supreme Court in U.S. v Windsor, the challenge to section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act. And they’re trotting out the only argument they really have, the utterly irrational “Marriage is good, so we have to keep gay people from marrying” argument. And the Worldnutdaily is promoting it.

“The natural family is fundamental to our very existence,” Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, said as his organization filed briefs with the court.

“Thriving societies need healthy children who grow up into responsible citizens. Healthy children require committed parents who will sacrifice their own desires for the well-being of their children. This is all created within the context of natural marriage between one man and one woman.”…

“We are at a pivotal point in history,” Staver said. “Nothing will define the future of America more than the court’s decision on marriage.”

Now if you’ll just make a coherent argument for why allowing gay people to get married will have any effect at all on what you call “natural marriage,” you might have some credibility. But you can’t. Allowing gay people to get married has no effect whatsoever on the marriages of straight people, but it will give more security and protection for the children of gay people. But they don’t count, presumably because they’re no longer fetuses and their parents are gay.

Filed Under: Equality, Wingnuttia 16 Comments
About Ed Brayton

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

  • jnorris

    Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel:

    The natural family is fundamental to our very existence

    So I asked myself I did, what is Mr Stayer doing about the very high divorce rate among Christians? “Well nothing”, I would answer myself and I did.

  • Didaktylos

    Because what’s the point of having something good if we can’t also deny it to people we don’t like.

  • hexidecima

    darn, jnorris already mentioned the sacrament of divorce to these TrueChristian(tm) twits. Staver is the twit who claimed that homosexual marriage was just for “validation” and not for being “really” married at all.

  • http://thebronzeblog.wordpress.com/ Bronze Dog

    “Natural marriage.” There’s just so much wrong with wingnuts using that phrase.

    1. Not all animals are monogamous, and humans in particular have been polygamous for much of our history, so the wingnut “one man, one woman” thing seems more of a recent cultural shift (in the large scope of history) and often comes with whitewashing the Biblical polygyny. We’re just pushing for a culture that acknowledges there are other options.

    2. In a species as plastic and diverse as humans, variation is natural, not homogeneity. Hetero relationships are the most popular type, and have been the primary means of reproduction, but that doesn’t mean we should force people who are uninterested in the opposite sex to hetero-marry against their will. We don’t need everyone to reproduce to sustain the species, so we shouldn’t create an artificial expectation of reproduction.

    3. What’s more natural than two people who love each other wanting to spend their lives together and have their relationship acknowledged by society?

  • slc1

    The competition for the dumbest lawyer in the US between Staver, Klayman, and Taitz is really heating up.

  • jamesramsey

    I’m surprised that no one has brought up Roy Zimmerman.

    He put it perfectly in http://www.royzimmerman.com/lyrics/faulty_defenders.html

  • matty1

    @4 I don’t have the book right now but I seem to recall in Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation there is a comment that the difference in average size between men and women is evidence that humans evolved as weakly polygynous*. Of course a group founded by Jerry Falwell isn’t going to listen to evidence based on evolution but it certainly counts against the idea that one man one women = natural.

    * I forget which but it was either that over evolutionary time most men fathered children with two or three women or that a significant minority fathered children with tens of women.

  • The Lorax

    “This is all created within the context of natural marriage between one man and one woman.”

    Actually, is this not demonstrably wrong? Actual studies (omg facts!) have shown that children of homosexual parents fare no different than children of heterosexual parents. The only real difference is when there’s only one parent instead of two. So.. never mind the rhetoric, never mind the obviously bigoted nature of his argument… his facts alone are wrong. Case closed.

  • http://dododreams.blogspot.com/ John Pieret

    “We are at a pivotal point in history,” Staver said. “Nothing will define the future of America more than the court’s decision on marriage.”

    I happen to agree with Staver on that. Is America going to be a place that actually lives up to its often stated ideal of equal rights for all or is it going to teeter on the edge of a theocracy where “rights” are determined based on whether or not you conform to the repressive dogma of religious fanatics?

  • Sastra

    If the concern really was for the “family” and for “children” — and if they really believed that the true, best purpose of marriage was to foster the upbringing of children in stable homes — then you’d see at least some of these so-called pro-marriage advocates asking that homosexual couples consider adopting, fostering, or having their own children if they really want to be allowed to marry.

    With privilege comes responsibility. Marriage is primarily for nurturing children. Thus, the only gay people who deserve marriage would be ones who expressly want to use it to make a home for children, and will put it in writing and be bound by it.

    Somebody would be making that argument.

    As far as I can tell, not one single person getting all dewy eyed over how kiddies-need-married-parents has suggested a compromise of “well, okay — gay marriage if there are children involved, but not otherwise.” Nary a single one has even considered this small concession or approached the issue from this angle.

    Yet another way to tell that they are full of shit.

  • http://peicurmudgeon.wordpress.com/ peicurmudgeon

    What absolutely none.of them do is look at the experiences in Canada and other countries that have had gay marriage.

  • baal

    “Nothing will define the future of America more than the court’s decision on marriage.”

    Or the loss of our drinking water from fracking or loss of amazing amounts of national wealth from agriculture due to global climate change…. I could go on for a while.

  • frog

    peicurmudgeon: Well of course not, because American Exceptionalism! Whatever other countries do means nothing to the Superior American Breed (white people only)™!

  • Moggie

    The Lorax:

    Actually, is this not demonstrably wrong? Actual studies (omg facts!) have shown that children of homosexual parents fare no different than children of heterosexual parents.

    Here are two, linked to from the New Scientist:

    Compared with a group of control adolescents born to heterosexual parents with similar educational and financial backgrounds, the children of lesbian couples scored better on academic and social tests and lower on measures of rule-breaking and aggression. A previous study of same-sex parenting, based on long-term health data, also found no difference in the health of children in either group.

    http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19014-children-of-lesbian-parents-do-better-than-their-peers.html

    But those don’t count, because bible.

  • kermit.

    peicurmudgeonWhat absolutely none.of them do is look at the experiences in Canada and other countries that have had gay marriage.

    .

    Get real! What do facts have to do with any of their assertions?

    .

    baal:Nothing will define the future of America more than the court’s decision on marriage.”

    Or the loss of our drinking water from fracking or loss of amazing amounts of national wealth from agriculture due to global climate change…. I could go on for a while.

    .

    baal, you know that when it reaches the point where even these folks can’t deny something is happening, they will blame us. They will claim that God is punishing the entire planet because we were too nice to The Ghey.

  • Stacy

    Thriving societies need healthy children who grow up into responsible citizens. Healthy children require committed parents who will sacrifice their own desires for the well-being of their children. This is all created within the context of natural marriage between one man and one woman.

    Now if you’ll just make a coherent argument for why allowing gay people to get married will have any effect at all on what you call “natural marriage,” you might have some credibility.

    I suspect there’s an ultrasonic message encoded in “committed parents who will sacrifice their own desires.” Because everybody in Wingnuttopia knows that LGBTQ folk are hedonists who divide their time between having ghey secks and attending/throwing wild parties featuring ghey sex. Won’t somebody please think of the children?