Worthy Reading

Don’t miss this article. Marriage, contract, covenant, the Left, the polis:

North Western Winds: The New Social Contract?

The New Social Contract?

The covenant idea is not as crazy as it sounds. It says that children are the marriage made flesh. They cannot be undone, and neither can the marriage.

Interestingly, people who would balk at this description of marriage might willingly apply it to a nation.

NorthWestern comments on this post at The Conservative Philosopher who opines on where The Left is today.

edited to add
Curt @ North Western scores again. This time with the Feb. 15 post on gay genes and the SSM debate. If you care to read some thoughtful commentary on the issue and its social implications, read his post which ends with this

Gay genes and determinism are a bit of a red herring in the marriage debates because the question is at least as much about the nature of marriage as it is about the participants. Is it about 1) getting what I want? Is it 2) about an environment of submission and giving? Liberals generally chose option one, conservatives option two. While I favour the conservative answer, one could make a case based on getting what I want. It has logical coherence and is not subject to a revision by science.

Perhaps the solution is instituions that are couple centered and child centered, leaving the question of gay and straight out of it. This avoids the discrimination charge that some heap on the idea of a different sort of institution for gays and it keeps marriage focused on the creation of healthy new citizens in a way that the current situation does not.

It raises questions for me. I start to wonder what the real goal of this social engineering effort is really about. It is put into gay and straight terms, but it’s something that has a much wider ripple effect than merely whether one thinks that the gay lifestyle is a valid one. It is reaching down into the innards of the bond between man and wife and hastily changing all the terms and provisions.

That ought to be more scary than I think the common view of it is, presently.

The Gay community might think that it adds to its cache of social acceptance to accomplish this change in laws and social thinking. I don’t know. I do doubt that it would be so much of a catalyst for acceptance as it would be for more social confusion on what constitutes marriage and what the rights and duties of that would be under law.

That is not a statement of opinion, just the question that starts to surface in my mind.

Read Curts blog, he has a novel approach to looking at some of these issues.