Hi Fran 🙂 See, you’re so special to me that you get your own poem, your own YouTube song dedication, now even an entire post analyzing your point. I’m making a new post for this because I didn’t see your comment on the previous post until much later, and I don’t want to have a long string of long comments on a back-dated entry. We always learn the most from people with whom we disagree and I appreciate that a lot. (It sounds a little silly say that to someone I consider a close friend, but I don’t want to offend you unintentionally again; so there!)

To begin, I think we can and should both take a step back and realize that our views aren’t completely contradictory and that we do have significant common ground.

I agree that the Christian view has been twisted, but we have to ask why this is so. Does the average person inherently want to “twist the Christian view”? I don’t believe that anybody is inherently anti-Christian or anti-anything for that matter. While the Church may have an official stance, not every Christian believes in the same thing or behaves as they’re told to. Some Christians present their own twisted views to the world, and it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the whole barrel. It is normal for us to misinterpret or condemn the conflicting views of a conflicted people who can’t even really agree amongst themselves. The Christian view is indeed twisted, and most of the twisting takes place before it leaves its speakers’ lips.

I agree that you cannot, ignoring future advancements, have children who have genetic links to two partners of the same sex. But is that really what’s important in a family? That everybody is genetically related? Just because a method of having a child is “not biological” doesn’t diminish the worth of the child, or the relationship it has with its parents. There are those who adopt children who are not their own and raise them beautifully. There are also those who abuse and desecrate their own flesh and blood.

I agree that it can “potentially be detrimental” for a child to grow up with gay parents- but that isn’t saying much, considering it can also “potentially be fatal” to play on monkey bars these days. People have grown up in all sorts of different family situations since time immemorial, and turned out just fine. There are communities in Nepal where women marry all of the men in a family, and others in Papua where boys are taken away from their mothers to live with the men. (They even have to perform oral sex on the older men and ingest their semen before the can be considered men.) My point is that we can’t impose our own views, values and ideas about our own social conventions on other people. The only problem I can imagine coming out of allowing gay couples to have children has nothing to do with the couples or the children themselves. I worry that if we legalize gay marriages and allow them to have or adopt children tomorrow, we will see the more prejudiced and homophobic side of our society rear its ugly head. Yet this is quite a natural phenomenon, considering how people always reject what is strange and foreign to them. I believe that we can still move forward with this. Perhaps we can start by legalizing marriage but not adoption, and advance as as society progressively, together.

I avoid quoting the Bible in any argument because its been through so many change of hands and rewrites and whatnot that I simply cannot consider it a credible source without compromising my own intellectual integrity, so I will avoid debating about what the Bible (or the people who wrote the Bible, or the rulers at the time who influenced the rewriting of the Bible) does or does not have to say about the matter. I don’t think it’s really very relevant, and I think the passage quoted by the first commenter in the previous entry points that out very well.

I agree completely that you don’t need to marry someone to prove your commitment and love to him or her. That said, just because you don’t need to do something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be allowed to. You don’t need to eat meat to survive, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be allowed to. You don’t need to go to a good university to get a job, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be allowed to. You get the idea. It’s a weak argument for disallowing something.

I don’t want to argue this much further also lah. Tired already. Always so much more fun over prata and milo peng than online. I miss you!