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Do homosexuals want to get ‘married’? Newspaper story highlights divide

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)–Canadian homosexuals can attain marriage licenses, but they’re not yet flocking to their local courthouses, according to a story in The New York Times.

Additionally, some of those who are likely to attain licenses say they have no intention of remaining monogamous.

The story in The Times Aug. 31 bolsters social conservatives’ claims that legalizing same-sex “marriage” will further corrode the institution of marriage itself.

Courts in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and British Columbia have legalized same-sex “marriage,” and the country’s prime minister is pushing to legalize it nationwide.

But in Toronto — an Ontario city with a large homosexual population — same-sex couples are thus far hesitant. In 2001 alone, more than 6,600 same-sex couples in Toronto registered as permanent partners, The Times reports. However, only about 600 couples acquired marriage licenses in Toronto’s city hall between the June 10 court ruling and Aug. 25, The Times says.

“In Canada, conservative commentators worry aloud that gay marriage will undermine society, but many gays express the fear that it will undermine their notions of who they are,” the story reads. “… It is a debate that pits those who celebrate a separate and flamboyant way of life as part of a counterculture against those who long for acceptance into the mainstream.”

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The story tells about two men in their 40s, David Andrew and David Warren, who have lived together for seven years. Andrew sees marriage as a “dumbing down of gay relationships.”

Although they promise to protect one another, the story says “they stop short of monogamy, which is something Mr. Andrew also says he does not believe in.”

The story’s findings don’t surprise Tim Wilkins, a former homosexual who is now married and heads Cross Ministry, an evangelical ministry to homosexuals.

“The homosexual community’s definition of fidelity is a completely different definition,” Wilkins told Baptist Press. “Fidelity means that they are partners. [But] it’s an open relationship. They live together. They have benefits together. … But they are in fact involved in other sexual relationships.”

Focus on the Family’s Glenn Stanton agreed.

“Gays are not really looking for marriage,” he said. “They’re quite happy to live like they are. … Many gay males just scoff at the idea of monogamy as we understand it.”

A recent Broadman & Holman book by author Timothy J. Dailey, “Dark Obsession,” quotes statistics showing that over a lifetime the majority of male homosexuals will have several hundred sex partners.

The New York Times story quotes homosexual-themed magazine editor Mitchel Raphael as acknowledging that homosexuals are prone to promiscuity. Raphael is editor in chief of Fab, a Toronto-based magazine for homosexuals.

“I’d be for marriage if I thought gay people would challenge and change the institution and not buy into the traditional meaning of ’till death do us part’ and monogamy forever,” Raphael told The Times. “We should be like Oscar Wildes and not like everyone else watching the play.”

Wilkins told Baptist Press he believes that the push for same-sex “marriage” is only a path toward a much broader goal.

“There will not be a flocking to get married if and when it becomes legal in the United States,” he said. “It is only a means to an end.”

The end, Wilkins said, is “to infiltrate homosexuality into every part of Americana. [It] is to saturate America with the belief that homosexuality is equivalent and in some cases superior to heterosexuality.”

While some homosexual couples may have sincere desires to acquire marriage licenses, the norm among homosexuals is promiscuity, Wilkins said.

Stanton said the story highlights a divide within the homosexual community.

“It’s certainly not the full body of homosexual activists clamoring for this,” he said. “There really is quite a vibrant disagreement within the community as to whether marriage is a good thing, and the New York Times story illustrates that.

The Times story includes an excerpt from a column in Fab magazine by Rinaldo Walcott, a University of Toronto sociologist. Walcott warns against the fallout of legalizing same-sex “marriage.”

“I can already hear folks saying things like, ‘Why are bathhouses needed? Straights don’t have them,'” he wrote, according to The Times. “Will queers now have to live with the heterosexual forms of guilt associated with something called cheating?”

Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of National Review Online, criticized the arguments made by the story’s homosexuals activists.

“[M]arriage is an institution of rules,” he wrote in a column on Townhall.com. “If pro-gay marriage activists aren’t liars, they should respect those rules and not seek to undermine them. Pro-same-sex marriage advocates, including the editorial board of The New York Times, constantly compare gays to blacks under Jim Crow. They flatly assert that male-male unions are directly analogous to white-black marriages in the days when racial intermarriage was illegal.”

Goldberg said he rejects such comparisons.

“No blacks denounced the concept of monogamy in their struggle to do away with anti-miscegenation laws. When Jackie Robinson fought his way into professional baseball, he didn’t want to change the rules of the game. He wanted the rules to apply to him too.”
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