How nice to have a straight person point out that "marriage is for procreation" isn't just legal but religious BS

Sorry, Frank, that's just some silly old myth about love having anything to do with marriage. Now, Peg and Al Bundy, they were a bona fide married couple, because they were, of course, Married -- With Children. Of course, once they stopped procreating, however grateful the world would have reason to be, Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Paul Niemeyer probably would have had to blow the whistle on them. Not that Al would have objected.

"In contrast to 'traditional marriage,' [Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Paul] Niemeyer said, same-sex marriage ignores 'the inextricable, biological link between marriage and procreation' and 'prioritizes the emotions and sexual attractions of the two partners without any necessary link to reproduction.'

"Why does this upset me so? Well, you see, I got married two years ago, a few days shy of my 60th birthday."

-- Amanda Bennett, in a Washington Post opinion
piece, "What's love got to do with it?"

by Ken

Amanda Bennett, former executive editor for projects and investigations at Bloomberg News and now a freelance editor and writer, explains in her Washington Post opinion piece "What's love got to do with it?" that until now she has merely understood same-sex marriage as "a civil rights matter," though even viewing it in that light, "I grew more committed as I saw how the happiness of friends and family members depended on it."

This sounds exactly right to me, and entirely in line with the proposition with which she has opened her piece: "No one is as passionate about a cause as someone touched personally by it."

Sympathy for strangers with dread diseases is nothing like the angst you feel when a member of your family is sickened. You may pity victims of hurricanes, but there’s nothing like wandering your own submerged neighborhood to bring the devastation home.

And now the argument about same-sex marriage has struck home.

[U]ntil I read the dissenting opinion in the marriage-equality case decided last week in Richmond, I didn’t realize just how personal the issue could be. Because if the arguments of gay-marriage opponents ever succeed, my marriage will be toast.

The two-judge majority, you'll recall, ruled that same-sex couples can't be denied the right to marriage simply because they're same-sex rather couples than some other kind. However --

In his argument for those who would ban gay marriage, Judge Paul Niemeyer asserted that the kind of marriage protected by the freedoms in our Constitution isn’t the same as the one between gay people. Why not? Because same-sex couples can’t reproduce biologically (with each other, that is). In contrast to “traditional marriage,” Niemeyer said, same-sex marriage ignores “the inextricable, biological link between marriage and procreation” and “prioritizes the emotions and sexual attractions of the two partners without any necessary link to reproduction.”

As you already know if you read the portion of this quite I extracted for the top of this post, you already know that Amanda "got married two years ago, a few days shy of my 60th birthday." (Maazel tov, Amanda!) And she's here to tell us that, while she and her husband have "six lovely children" between them, procreation is emphatically not on the table this time around.

Which means, if Judge Niemeyer and the legions of other religious pea brains who argue from "the inextricable, biological link between marriage and procreation" are right, that Amanda and her husband are in trouble.

If, as Niemeyer says, the whole point of marriage is not the mere parenting of kids but actual biological reproduction, it is clear to me that he believes that my marriage is invalid. To opponents of gay marriage, marriage is all about breeding. Since my breeding days are over, it looks like, marriage-wise, I should be, too.

And it isn’t just Virginia. Kentucky used the same argument. So did Georgia. And Texas. This argument is surely going all the way to the Supreme Court.

Amanda is, of course, absolutely right to be worried if any legal jurisdiction accepts any legal relevance to the proposition that marriage is about procreation. If this is the case, then people who are not at the very least trying to procreate have no reason and indeed no right to be married. In fact, surely it can be said that they really aren't married. Could anything be more straightforwardly apparent?

[W]hat if Virginia’s argument eventually prevails and the pro-procreation forces manage to enshrine in law what I would call the Donald Trump effect. You know: serial 28-year-olds. Since, near as I can tell from searching the Web, the oldest man to father children did so — twice — after his 94th birthday, where will this all end?

Men, you, too, should beware. What if anyone who can’t procreate was barred from marrying? Some researchers have suggested that George Washington was infertile (owing to a bout of tuberculosis). What if The Father of Our Country himself had been forced to live in sin with Martha because he couldn’t be the father of anything else?

THE "DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE" HAS BEEN TAKEN
UP BY PEOPLE COLOSSALLY UNFIT FOR THE JOB

As far as I know, no church has taken action against religionists who marry without the intention to procreate or who then live as "married" while failing to try to procreate. Until they do so, it seems to me unforgivably unallowable for any judge to pretend that there is the slightest religious, let alone legal, significance to the "marriage is about procreation" crock. Any judge who does so should be obliged to preface his/her opinion by saying something like: "Call me a lying ignoramus scumbag, but I think that marriage --"

Once again, we have people "defending" marriage who are singularly and utterly unfit to do so. They may well be correct that the institution is in need of rehabilitation, but the place they should be looking is in the mirror. Unless you're either a total buttwipe or a feel-no-pain liar, it should occur to you that the place to look at what's wrong with marriage is goddamned married people. The first person who tried to lay it off on the homos should have been promptly snagged off by the men in white coats in their butterfy nets and strapped into the nearest loony bin.

The only question, as far as I can see, is what should be done about married people who claim to be trying to procreate but somehow aren't succeeding. When I've written about this previously, I've tended to thinking "soft" -- suggesting that they should be indulged, for a certain amount of time, at least. Now I'm not so sure.

First off, can such non-procreators prove that they're trying? I'm sorry to have to point that it isn't enough to say you are. Just consider a plotline on the TVLand sitcom Jennifer Falls, where Jennifer's loopy brother Wayne and his goofily tight-assed wife Stephanie are officially trying to get pregnant, except that Stephanie is still taking her birth-control pills. Is there any question that, under the "marriage is about procreation" doctrine, if the truth were known these two should be immediately declared unmarried -- and probably judged to have been living in sin the whole time they pretended to be married before they were trying to procreate.

Now you may argue that a TVLand sitcom shouldn't have any more standing in a U.S. court of law than, say, international law. But then, where does religious-cult crackpottery come off claiming standing in a U.S. court of law?

Which just leaves the case of couples who are honest-to-gosh trying to get pregnant and just aren't succeeding. Well, now I'm inclined to say, screw 'em! If marriage is about procreation, can we really give a free pass to people who are merely trying?

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