Gay Marriage: Unanswerable Questions

On the radio this morning, talking to same-sex civil marriage supporters, talk jock Rusty Humphries claimed he was trying to take emotion out of the question and was just trying to ask questions that the people he was talking to could not answer.  (Of course, what he was really trying to do was to force them to answer questions based on emotion, at which point he could either goad them into raving or just hang up on them.  That's how most talk radio works.)

The tables got turned at one point, though.

He was using the tack about marriage being for raising kids.  The person on the phone commented that gay and lesbian couples could raise kids as well.  Rusty declared that this was different, because those weren’t their kids, that they weren’t from a mixture of the two parents’ DNA.  The caller then pushed to the divorce matter: what about those kids who come from a family where the natural parents are married, and then the couple gets divorced, and then remarries, such that the people raising the kids aren’t both of the natural parents?  This is treated as perfectly acceptable in our society.  How is it then horribly different when the people raising the kids are the same sex, with perhaps only one being the natural parent?

No response from the right winger, just a quick change to a new question.  Couldn’t answer the question without emotion, I guess.  Point, our side.

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Updated on March 9, 2004

Updated on Decemeber 29, 2010