How could someone be against gay marriage?

Question

I don't understand the counter-arguement.

Answer 1

I don't know neither, I really don't care who is with who, and as long as two people love each other, they are causing no harm to no one. I have many friends who are gay and they know where I stand and we can all go out and have a blast and we know who is going home with who. There are way too many haters out there and they are wasting time and efort hating, when they could be using all that energy lovign their partner or enjoying a hobby, when no matter what, their hate will never change the fact that people can and will fall in love no matter the gender.

Answer 2

Religious arguments I have heard include
(1) Views that marriage is a sacred institution for husband and wife who by God's design are man and woman. (Note: by acknowledging marriage as a spiritual or religious institution, it can be argued the state should not be involved at all in any type of marriage, but stick to civil contracts only concerning estates and custody)
(2) Views that homosexuality is an abomination, and thus state-sanctioned recognition of gay marriage would unconstitutionally impose on dissenting voters and taxpayers who religiously oppose this. (Note: the opposite is also true, state denial of equal rights to gay marriage would unconstitutionally impose on the religious freeodm of those who believe in it; thus, the deadlock and the need for separation of jurisdiction, or consensus on policy, to avoid imposing one side over the other)
(3) The view that toleratin gor validating gay marriage promotes homosexuality as acceptable, and loses focus on marriage as a spiritual sacrament for the purpose of procreation and family.

Secular arguments I have heard include
(1) That gay couples already have rights to civil unions and legal contracts and protections, and/or seeking legislation beyond that is a masked effort to force public validation of their lifestyle
(2) That the technical, linguistic definition of marriage is between men and women, and trying to change that is redefining a term in the dictionary (my boyfriend has this view, and is not religious)
(3) My argument that since marriage is a spiritual institution, no laws can be made one way or another without the consent of the public in that jurisdiction, because taking one side or the other would impose unfairly on the religious freedom of dissenters. Private individuals may discriminate this way, but not the state.
So on constitutional grounds, what is unlawful is either imposing it on citizens who disagree, or denying it to citizens who believe in gay marriage. Jurisdiction would have to be divided, where people invest in private churches of their choice, govern their social security that way, where they do not fear they are paying into an institution which enforces the opposing policy, and the state should limit interaction to civil unions and contracts for any partners entering into an agreed arrangement, while marriage itself is kept private and personal and not under state jurisdiction.
Only if a district, city or state agrees on a policy can the state be involved in marriage. Otherwise it should remain private.

Answer 3

Because people feel that marriage is a sacred union between husband and wife, no one really wants to re define marriage! Many people view marriage as a religious event something that is done before God and your family, which is why ministers are also allowed to perform wedding ceremonies in addition to judges! People also believe that one of the purposes of marriage is to raise your own family, gay people can't have babies... Gay marriage just doesn't work whose last name do they take, who pays for the wedding, who is the man, who is the wife, what roles do each person play in the relationship... Gay marriage would force us to redefine to many things, like family, husband, wife... A marriage is a ceremony that is typically religious most religions aren't open to homosexuality and once gay marriage is legal there will be law suits of discrimination for people who believe they are gay and christian and want to get married in a church... there is a lot of reasons people don't want gay marriages!

Answer 4

We don't want this shoved down our throats, if you're gay- keep it to yourself. The less gays I see the better the environment for ALL heterosexuals and their kids. There needs to be a small island that's designated for gays only.

Someone once said this-
If we can send man to the moon, we can send a GAY man to the moon. If we can send a GAY man to the moon, we can send ALL GAY men to the moon.

Shouldn't this have been in the GAY category anyway?

Answer 5

You might find this striking, but I am not. As a conservative, I feel that I own my body and my rights are above the powers of gov't. As such, I am a consenting adult, and can enter willingly into contracts(such as marriage) with anyone I choose.

Conservatism isn't about greed, or power, or racism, or any of those other things. It is about the freedom to make my own decisions, for my good or ill.

Answer 6

I believe these individuals that are opposed to gay marriage all have different reasons.
For some, it is forbidden or looked down upon by their chosen religion. I am a Catholic (not a religious Catholic) and my religion forbids it and looks down upon it. I personally don't look down upon it (I believe gay marriage is one's own personal choice and it should be honored). But strict, religious people are usually the one's that are opposed to it.
Others see marriage as the traditional "man and woman" joining, and not as two individuals who have fallen in love & chosen to commit to one another for the rest of their life. These people are just not very open-minded.
Then you have the "homophobic" part of the opposing population. These individuals just don't like others that have chosen the gay lifestyle. Yes, ignorance at it's best. Period.
Hope that answers some of your question. :)

Answer 7

What is to understand. Homosexuality in, and of itself, is defined as perversion according to Paul in Romans 1:24-27 when he said "Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator-who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion." Now, I know you will say something about this scripture. But it is the Word of God and you know if you are right you have nothing to lose. But if I am right, you have EVERYTHING to lose. Think about it.

Answer 8

as long as you leave me alone and don't bother me with your s*it, get married, and if you can get your own kids (no adoption) that's OK too, don't know how, but that would be your problem.
and would it be OK to you Gay's if the teacher says "it takes a male and a female to make kids, except for you Mickey, you have to ask your two dad's, or two mom's how they did it.
again I don't care, do what you do, just leave me alone

Answer 9

Some people feel that allowing gay marriage is paramount to condoning homosexual activity, which offends their moral standards.

Answer 10

Some people, myself included, consider it a sin and both an insult and a disgrace to the sanctity of holy matrimony.

What's not to understand?

Answer 11

The problem in the debate thus far has been the failure to grasp what marriage means in most people’s lives. Marriage is so much a part of our world that we have trouble imagining how things would look without it. Some people say marriage is “by definition” between a man and a woman, but that by itself tells us nothing. We have to consider seriously what stands behind this definition, and why people are so attached to it.

It seems to me undeniable that the potential for reproduction constitutes something unique about the union of one man and one woman. Science may eventually change that, but sexual reproduction is sure to remain the easiest and manifestly most natural way. Even if some marriages are childless, it surely makes a difference that all marriages are between men and women. Marriage as we know it is bound up with, even a product of, natural sexual differentiation, whose most massive and undeniable feature is the potential for reproduction. This gives rise to a feeling that marriage is part of the natural order, an order bigger than our desires and ourselves. To be sure, widespread divorce has weakened this feeling over the past 30 years; but it remains a powerful force in people’s lives, one that we perhaps take for granted precisely because of its ubiquity. Permitting marriage between people of the same sex would make marriage a different thing—and not a better one. It would fatally weaken the arguments against polygamy and lead to its eventual legalization (which the American Civil Liberties Union has argued for since 1991).

More than any other institution, marriage provides guidance that helps people live their lives. One need only think of the times in one’s youth when one wondered whom one would eventually marry. (I can attest that even young homosexuals wonder about this—though with a certain ambivalence.) Those youthful daydreams, which are so important in shaping and coloring the rest of one’s life, would not be possible in a world without marriage, and would not be easy in a world where marriage was merely one choice among many. Our youthful (and not so youthful) daydreams presuppose marriage as a touchstone, a choice that isn’t simply a choice but is somehow the choice.

Disconnecting marriage from procreation would make it seem less bound up with a world larger than we are. Marriage would seem more like a commitment we make, an act of the will, and less like an acceptance of or conformity to the fundamental order of things. Perhaps such a change would, to some extent, constitute greater realism. However, I don’t think it would produce greater happiness, either in itself or in its consequences—which would include people taking their marriages less seriously, considering alternatives more readily when the going gets rough, and seeking guidance more often in desire, whim, and fashion. This is not a religious argument, nor is it “homophobic.”

Moreover, we should be wary of fundamental changes in laws and institutions, even when those changes are in themselves improvements. Humans are not so rational that we can dispense with awe or the sense that some things are greater than human enactment. Any major change in marriage laws would weaken people’s sense of marriage as something slightly awesome that must be accepted or rejected on its own terms. Any such change would encourage us to pay less attention to the demands of marriage and more attention to ourselves, to consider how we might gratify the desires we feel, even to look within ourselves to see what desires we find.

We humans are ambiguous creatures. We are of course unhappy if our desires are thwarted; but we are also unhappy if we have no guidance apart from desire. Our desires themselves need to be guided or informed by a view of what is good, what constitutes happiness. Some desires can lead to happiness, others cannot; distinguishing between the two is sometimes a delicate task, one at which we all need help, especially when we’re young. No institution informs the desires of most human beings in as profound and salutary a manner as marriage.

In my view, instituting homosexual marriage would indeed provide guidance to some young homosexuals, and would thereby improve some people’s lives. This is a serious argument; however, I don’t think marriage could be as crucial to us as it is to other people. Marriage has developed over many centuries to meet the needs of heterosexuals. Gay marriage would inevitably be a kind of imitation. Like most imitations, it couldn’t wholly succeed, and would therefore result in more or less self-conscious parody.

Widening marriage to include people of the same sex means stripping it of much of its meaning and diminishing it for everybody. This would have a relatively small effect on the lives of people who are already married, and whose notion of marriage is already largely settled, but it would have a profound and harmful effect on future generations of Americans.
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