Thursday, February 28, 2008

A Bit of A Rant

Okay, so here's something that pisses me off.
There's this guy, John Howard, who believes that this country should have an "egg and sperm" law - Basically, he thinks there should be a law stating that only the sperm of a human male and the egg of a human female should be allowed to be combined to create offspring. Not a big deal, right? I mean, that's how humans procreate, so what's the problem? Well, the problem is that he believes that when you get married, and ONLY when you are joined in marriage, that you should receive so-called "conception rights". He goes further to say that you shouldn't be able to be joined in a marriage without conception rights, and therefore gay people shouldn't be able to get married. WTF??? So, basically, because I cannot conceive children with my spouse-to-be, we should not be allowed to get married.
Obviously, I have more than one issue with this logic. First of all, people (including myself) conceive children all the time without being married. People get married all the time with no plans whatsoever to conceive. Old people, infertile people, and child-free people get married without any intentions of having children. Conversely, people have children all the time without being married (again, like myself). So, why bother tying "conception rights" to marriage rights? As far as I'm concerned, this is one step closer to forcing people to become part of some kind of "registry" before they can conceive children. It's ridiculous.
He has essentially said that since "marriage rights=conception rights", if gay marriage is legal, then gay people would have conception rights (um, don't we already?) - Which would lead to 'dangerous' same-sex procreation, i.e. cloning. Utterly ludicrous. If gay people want to have babies, they just do it using the more conventional methods (at-home insemination, IVF, sperm donation, etc.). I don't think we need to be worried about gay/lesbian couples using unsafe practices to conceive children. I mean, who in their right mind would use a method of conceiving that could prove unsafe or even deadly for the unborn child? No one, that's who. People who have to jump through hoops to have children wouldn't do something so risky.
Anyway, so that's my "what pissed me off today" rant.

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