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  • This is not the reason why conservatives oppose gay marriage. Here are the reasons I can understand (though not necessarily agree with):

    • having 1x mom and 1x dad is important because men and women provide different functions when raising a child, and children deserve to get both of these things.
    • "marriage" is a religious thing, not a legal thing; maybe gay-"legally married" is fine, but religious congregations shouldn't be forced to perform gay marriages as they go against their religion.
    • the normalization of homosexuality will spread and convert more people to homosexuals/bisexuals and/or encourage people to come out of the closet. (I'm not exactly sure why this is a problem tbh.)

    Are there other reasons that they have?

    • First of all. Thank you so much for refusing to fight against strawman arguments and putting forward what people actually believe. It's much more productive, and interesting to talk about. I hate religion and I hate their stupid arguments, but I wish that criticisms would focus on the stupid arguments they actually make, instead of stupid arguments they don't make.

      On the marriage front, and I know it's not your beliefs I'm rebutting here, that argument has always especially bothered me. Because it's like. Yes, actually, I do think gay marriage is nonsensical. Marriage is indeed a religious concept, and all of the religions that promote it condemn homosexuality. I hate marriage in general and wish nobody would get married. Yet it still happens, why? Why do gay people even care about being married then?

      Primarily, it's because the Christians forced their religious construct to become so intertwined with legal and financial benefits that are otherwise unobtainable, that you put yourself at an objective disadvantage as a couple, economically, medically, legally, if you do not get married. The problem is that once marriage passed from the religious conceptual realm where it gestated, and into the political sphere, it should have become a separate, secular concept under the idea of separation of church and state. But of course the Christians can't accept that kind of compromise either. They want to have it all, all, all. So if Christians didn't want gay people to want to get married, then they shouldn't have enshrined their religious concept unfairly above others in the governmental system. Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, motherfuckers.

    • Yeah I honestly don't get this. It's like saying kids should be raised by one scientist and one artist because the kid deserves both influences. Even within the nature of "women" and "men" the diversity of experience and personality is so massive is seems to defy logic that this could possibly create some unified, prescriptive parenting framework, unless you are desperate to pigeonhole individuals into gender roles which simply don't exist in reality.

    • Ohhh I can feel downdoots incoming but hell.

      1. Yeah, parents being of both sexes is important. No, it doesn't have anything to do with marriage, it has to do with adoption/in-vitro or other means of reproduction.
      2. Marriage is both politcal and religious. You cannot force religion to recognize gay marriage, but you should force law to recognize gay marriage.
      3. Heard this, irrationally feared this, but truth be told fuck my discomfort and that of other people, nobody deserves to be denied who they are. -.-' But the reasoning is simply fear of unknown coupled with fear of change. I was raised in a straight society with straight values - it can be offputting, or even straight up disgusting to see them broken. To be able to come above this you need to be able to put your values above your ingrained feelings so a lot of people won't.

      And I think you aced it with the reasons, conservative people couple marriage, family and having kids together so gay marriage is turbo-evil for them cause it "hurts" all three. I myself am on the fence where it comes to children, but marriage and family? Fuck off, that's people private business, they have the same right to it that anyone else.

      • I appreciate risking downdoots. I have downdoots disabled in my user settings, so I only see updeets. The lack of downdoot etiquette on lemmy is aggravating sometimes. "Downvotes are not for disagreement" my ass :P

        it's important to understand viewpoints of conservative people, even if we don't agree with them. I think the community on lemmy really struggles with taking political opposition seriously.

        regarding (2) I don't know about "cannot force religion to recognize gay marriage," since Canada does indeed force religion to recognize gay marriage. So it's not a can/can't thing. Personally, I don't really have strong feelings one way or the other if religions don't want to recognize gay marriage; I don't really understand religion.

      • Something to consider on two fronts.

        1. Parents being of both sexes is not terribly important for long term child raising. Same sex couples sometimes choose to adopt but they often have the capacity to have children themselves without assistance of a medical body and often with the help of friends or compassionate donors. There are a lot of gay folks whose names are on the birth certificates of their kids because they did the deed the old fashioned way in the interest of having a kid. They maybe just didn't enjoy the process. This doesn't present a problem legally because mechanically speaking people have kids out of wedlock or split up amicably all the time and the mechanisms for transferring parental rights are pretty much the exact same.

        Also your concerns are not new. They are also not unstudied. It has been studied extensively. Science has found there is no meaningful difference between the outcomes of being raised by a same-sex couple as a mixed sex couple. They measured their rubric across a number of success variables across physical wellbeing, mental and emotional health, acedemic outcomes and so on. Basically if you are raised by adults who show affection, are responsible and committed to the wellbeing of the child it doesn't really matter what their sex is. At some point trusting a body of science is nessisary over one's gut feelings or supposition.

        Here's a study with an approachable abstract to get you started.

        https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4091994/

        1. Marriage exists in a number of cultures, its functions even in a traditional sense are not always religious in nature and not all cultures that have marriage have bans on same sex couples marrying. Religions can also be newly formed and are still valid. Banning same sex marriage is in effect favouring some religion over others. Christianity does not have a monopoly on the concept of marriage as a religious feature. When a religions (ie Christian) reason is given to enforce a marriage ban it stops other religions from being able to properly function. Gay marriage being federally allowed does not stop Christian denominations from being allowed to refuse to marry couples under the beliefs of their religious creed.
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