Posted by
Playful Walrus on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 7:06:05 PM
Steven Spielberg and wife (thats "Party B" now) Kate Capshaw joined Brad Pitt on Prop 8. It’s nice to know who stands where on judicial tyranny and mocking marriage. Here’s what I wrote about Brad Pitt’s similar move.
Spielberg and Capshaw have donated $100,000 to fight Proposition 8, they announced in a statement Monday.
"By writing discrimination into our state constitution, Proposition 8 seeks to eliminate the right of each and every citizen in our state to marry regardless of sexual orientation," the statement said. "Such discrimination has NO place in California's constitution, or any other."
Sure it does. We issue the marriage licenses. We should determine how to license marriage.
Meanwhile, GLAAD reports on homosexual and bisexual characters on television.
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said it was a positive sign of networks making their shows more representative, although more work needed to be done. These characters accounted for 2.6 percent of all the regular characters in TV series, up from 1.1 percent last year and 1.3 percent in 2006, according to the study, released Monday.
Sounds like things are already realistically representative. The GLAAD people, who often live in their little subcommunity, and entertainment types are used to being around a disproportionately homosexual population. They forget that very little of the population is homosexual.
None of the 126 regular characters on CBS shows are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, GLAAD said, and only one recurring character — Brad on "Rules of Engagement — is gay.
ABC will have seven characters that are either gay men or bisexual women this fall, NBC will have three and the CW will have one, according to GLAAD.
A total of 19 recurring characters, those who appear only time to time, fit the category, GLAAD said. That's up from 13 a year ago.
Television programs often try to appeal to the widest audience possible, and focusing on a character’s homosexuality is not going to be relatable to most people. Much more of the population attends church regularly than identifies as homosexual, but church attendance is definitely underrepresented on television - probably less than homosexuality - in part for the same reason.
Dan Morain and Jessica Garrison, Los Angeles Times staff writers, report that despite the Pitts and Spielbergs, the Yes on Prop 8 side is raising more money. But I but they aren’t taking into account the ads that have been running meant to defeat Prop 8, but don’t mention it.
Speaking of another ad that is officially anti-Prop 8, this guy gets it right:
Frank Schubert, managing the Yes-on-8 campaign, called the ad "a blatant appeal to sympathy and emotion."
"I'm not surprised that they're using a heterosexual couple," Schubert said. "I don't think they want to show gay couples. I think they want to make gay marriage as, quote, normal, as possible. They want people to think gay marriage is completely normal, when it was created out of whole cloth by four judges."
The article uses the standard imprecise language that the paper has used on this issue.
Finally, David Blankenhorn, president of the New York-based Institute for American Values and the author of The Future of Marriage, and self-described liberal Democrat, had a commentary in the Los Angeles Times on this issue.
Marriage as a human institution is constantly evolving, and many of its features vary across groups and cultures. But there is one constant. In all societies, marriage shapes the rights and obligations of parenthood. Among us humans, the scholars report, marriage is not primarily a license to have sex. Nor is it primarily a license to receive benefits or social recognition. It is primarily a license to have children.
Which is why a husband is considered the default father of a child born to his wife, even if she was out tramping it up.
In this sense, marriage is a gift that society bestows on its next generation. Marriage (and only marriage) unites the three core dimensions of parenthood -- biological, social and legal -- into one pro-child form: the married couple. Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you. Marriage says to society as a whole: For every child born, there is a recognized mother and a father, accountable to the child and to each other.
Look at that! A liberal Democrat making sense!
For these reasons, children have the right, insofar as society can make it possible, to know and to be cared for by the two parents who brought them into this world. The foundational human rights document in the world today regarding children, the 1989 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, specifically guarantees children this right.
And do I agree with the U.N.?!? Actually, only insofar as the parents are not abusive.
The last time I checked, liberals like me were supposed to be in favor of internationally recognized human rights, particularly concerning children, who are typically society's most voiceless and vulnerable group.
ZING! But as you're finding out, esteeming homosexuality, like abortion, trumps everything else to the activist Left.
Every child being raised by gay or lesbian couples will be denied his birthright to both parents who made him.
Uh oh. Now you’ve done it.
Do you think that every child deserves his mother and father, with adoption available for those children whose natural parents cannot care for them? Do you suspect that fathers and mothers are different from one another? Do you imagine that biological ties matter to children? How many parents per child is best? Do you think that "two" is a better answer than one, three, four or whatever?
Good questions.
Legalized same-sex marriage almost certainly benefits those same-sex couples who choose to marry, as well as the children being raised in those homes. But changing the meaning of marriage to accommodate homosexual orientation further and perhaps definitively undermines for all of us the very thing -- the gift, the birthright -- that is marriage's most distinctive contribution to human society. That's a change that, in the final analysis, I cannot support.
There is a difference between bride-groom marriage and same-sex “marriage”, and that should be reflected in the law. California already has a domestic partnership law that treats domestic partners as spouses. So there was no need to change marriage licensing, and the bride-groom licensing should be restored for the sake of children and for society.