JuridicsUSA: Gay Reparations: Left TV commentator advocates

Jeff Poor writes online (NewsBusters, Aug8,2k10) in response to the YouTube video snipped from a recent telecast of Thom Hartmann, leftoid TV commentator regarding openly-gay Judge Vaughn Walker's Aug4,2k10 ruling in San Fransisco. Poor's article is entitled, "Liberal talk show host Thom Hartmann says it's time for Gay 'reparations.' "

Walker, a conservataive jurist, after listening to arguments based on gay-motivated social-science discourses,  has foddered Hartmann's enflamed imagination to suppose that some kind of "reparations" are in order for his precious "gays."   The latter term is a political-ideology term, whereas to be homo or lesbian is another thing.  Disclosure:  I'm homo, and celibate, not a participant in the skewered equality-fetish with which the gay ideology is recondite.  

Please note  that marriage is not reducible to other intimate unions, whether of 2 women or of 2 men.  Nor are 2-women intimate-unions reducible to 2-men intimate-unions -- so ,much for the neologism "same-sex," as in "same-sex marriage."   Gay ideologists want to erase differences of structuration in the 3 kinds of intimate-unions.  These 3 kinds of intimate unions are all qualified normatively by by the same ethical modal norm, by the same creational moral character under God (Bible verses and Sharia quotes to the contrary notwithstanding) thus constitutes their internal structural principle., but only in one respect, the qualifying functional aspect.  

However, the sameness of the three kinds of intimate unions that bond each kind of  couple (even thru occasions of strife in the ongoing development of each couple's mutuality, reciprocity, and responsiblity) in regard to the the qualifying function of their self-constitution as a moral entity with a vowed relationship to undergird  the couple's mutual life,  excluding all others from the depth of their intimacy, with an intention of permanence.  However, the 3 kinds are typified also by difference.  The different foundational functions (following philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd) obtain to differentiate 1woman-1man intimate unions from 2women intimate unions and from 2men intimate unions.  A three-term differentiation, without reducing any of these three kinds to one another.  Along these lines, Dooyeweerd's  juridical-scientific approach is largely confirmed by two professional philosophical ethicists, Andre Troost and James Olthuis.

That's the proffered paradigm by which to distinguish kinds of intimate unions, only one of which is marriage.m  Whether it shoud be prioritized by the state, as I think it shoud be, is yet another question.

Besides intimate unions, there are two other chief sorts of relationships that are also qualified by the creational ethical mode (again qualifying function of a multifunctional, multi-aspectual human being in his/her/inbetween integral existence).  The two further are friendship, and family (parents, their kids,. and the sibling relationship among the children of these parents).

The philosophically-shallow decision of Judge Walker seems, on the basis of newsreports, to have confused family with couples (vowed, exclusive, intention of permanence).  The issue of lesbian reproduction (kids) and adoption of kids (male homos too)  is juridically not at issue in the question of the intimate union of any of the three kinds.  Judge Walker is probably guilty of a category mistake in this regard, based on his lack of an adequate philosophy of law, inadequate to the juridical problems at hand.

I have not tried to provide answers to all questions that m+t surge into mind for various readers, where their own sexuality can powerfully function when trying to absorb the set of distinctions I have so far made.  For instance,  bisexuality can be discussed in the terms and concepts already supplied.   So also can transgender concerns.   Suffice it to say that this juridical view, ethical theorizing for moral behaviours, and all else,  is not moralistic, not legalistic, not biblistic. (Arnolod DeGraaqaff).

-- Albert Gedraitis,  refWr+t publisher