Oh yes...one other thing...

[chaoswolf]

If anyone would like to help me with my homework, I'd like these questions to be answered.
1. Do you believe that same sex couples should have all the legal rights & privelages that are granted to straight couples? Explain.
2. Do you believe that family needs to be contained to blood relatives? Explain.
3. Is family important? Why is this so?
4. How do TV Families differ from real families?
5. Please include legal name.

Comments

My answers, part 1

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

1) Do you believe that same sex couples should have all the legal rights & privelages that are granted to straight couples? Why or why not?

Yes. The reason is fairly simple: There is literally no good reason for heterogendered couples, as a class, to be granted these rights and privileges. There is a good reason for homogendered couples to be granted these rights and privileges.

The traditional reason for heterogendered couples to be granted special rights and privileges is because they provide a useful service: they create offspring. The death rate for females during childbirth (and even infant mortality) was high enough that giving incentives for men to stay with and support the women they impregnated was useful for preventing the population from dying out. (Make it easier for women to survive childbirth, more of them stay alive, thus more of them have more children.)

However, we're now in a different time, with different issues to address in our society, and our society isn't adapting. We face a population explosion, and an overstretching of resources, and the impetus to reward people for /producing/ children is no longer there. (There are children being born into welfare families, who have everything stacked against them. There are children who are born to drug-addicted mothers. There are children who are born to mothers who realize that they can't take care of them.) Thus, the impetus to provide for those families is also no longer there -- welfare stipends get smaller, mothers have to work because their husbands (when they have husbands) can't support all of their families' needs, and we have a huge number of children who are improperly cared for.

When a child isn't loved or cared for, growing up, the values that society is based upon are not ingrained into him or her. This creates a rift in the fabric, a snag in the weave of that society, and the society comes closer to falling completely apart.

Which is where homogendered couples come in: Historically, homogendered couples have had higher income than heterogendered couples, had higher amounts of disposable income than heterogenered couples, and been more affluent than most heterogendered couples who have children that they cannot properly care for. Allowing these homogendered couples to adopt children, and take care of them, would not be a bad thing -- if anything, the children raised by such relationships would be more accepting of diversity, and less insular and xenophobic. Thus, it would be a good thing to grant the same rights to homogendered couples as are granted to heterogendered couples -- raising a child isn't easy, and stacking the deck against the homogendered couples so that they're more likely to fail at it is unfair and very harmful to society as a whole.

As for homogendered couples who choose not to adopt or foster children... the same rights and privileges are granted to heterogendered couples who do not have children (either by biology or by choice) as those heterogendered couples who do have children. There would be a very, very large inequity if the same rights and privileges were not granted across the board. (After all, in the United States, our founding document states that everybody is entitled to equal protection under the law. Not granting equal protection would fly in the face of that.)

My answers, part 2

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

2) Do you believe that family needs to be contained to blood relatives? Explain.

I'm trying to figure out how to answer this, because it implies that there could really be any way other than to not constrain it to 'blood'. Relatives by marriage are one of the main aspects of this -- can you really say that your "in-laws" are not your family, even though you are not related to them by blood?

However, on the grander scale, I don't believe that the formal recognition of 'marriage' is really necessary to form a familial bond. On some levels, you choose who you want to spend your time with -- you choose your family. And you interact with their families, as well -- if your best friend's sister were in a horrible accident, and your friend needed your emotional support... could you deny it, even though the instigation was outside of those who you would choose as your family? Even if his sister was someone you despised, but he loved dearly? (Would you do it for your husband or wife, if his or her mother, whom you despised, was struck with cancer or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's Disease? Is there a difference?)

There's far too much to support the idea that you don't need to have blood relation to someone to act as though they are family -- and acting as though they are your family effectively makes them your family.



3) Is family important? Why is this so?

Family is, most definitely, important. Our families are those people who we can trust, those people who we have built bonds with, those people who we can go to for protection if and when we have very bad times and need time to recoup. Our families are, in a large way, our societies -- our social groupings, the places where we act out our biological needs and desires to interact with other beings.

Our families are also where we learn how to interact with others, and learn what's okay and what's not okay. (This is one reason why there is fracture between the ways that upper-class, middle-class, and lower-class families and social groups live.) We teach what we have been taught, we teach what we have learned from our forebears, and we learn what our forebears have taught the others in our families.



4) How do TV families differ from real families?

I do not watch much TV, so I'm limited in what I can say here. One thing that I do know, though, is that TV families hardly ever have to learn how to accept and deal with differences that we could consider 'irreconcileable'. TV families don't throw their children out because they're gay. TV families don't disown their members. TV families don't have to deal with situations where one member chooses no longer to be a part of the family -- or where the rest of the family chooses to no longer recognize or accept one member as a part of the family.

In many ways, TV families are shallower, more 'picture perfect'. Their lives stay relatively static, and they hardly ever have to deal with the 'hard problems' -- a member starts to become involved with drugs, or a member is diagnosed with a major disease, or a member has to move away, or a member goes to jail, or any of a hundred thousand different things that real families have to learn to deal with.

When one doesn't have effective role-models for living in a family... a TV family is a very, very poor substitute.


5) Please include legal name.

Kyle Andreas Hamilton