OPINION & EDITORIAL
Letters to the Editor, 2/10/04
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Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Re: A deniable privilege?
I read your opinion piece (“A deniable privilege,” 2/9/04) in The Badger Herald and wish I skipped it all and went straight to your last sentence: “The right to nurture a family is reserved solely for a man and woman.” For then I would have known the whole piece was a waste of time.
Your whole argument was written to sound like a legal justification for excluding gays from the institution of marriage. You bounced around from historical references to societal purposes. You eventually settled on marriage as something that acts as a social-welfare institution. “Receiving tax, health, and other benefits is a privilege to two people joining together to start a family.” You acknowledge that many heterosexual couples do not embark on this path, but that is an obvious copout. Would you suggest that the people who don’t start families pay back the government for the benefits given to them to raise a family? What about couples who have children but choose not to get married? What about women who decide to have children without men, including lesbians and non-lesbians?
You also have the naive audacity to suggest that children shouldn’t be put at risk of being raised by gay parents, a.k.a. “anybody’s hands.” As if gay people as a group are horrible nurturers. Here you are now bordering on homophobic hate rhetoric. You go as far as to suggest that civil unions, second-rate marriages, carry a clause that zbans gay couples from raising children. Ban upstanding citizens from having kids — actually making it illegal! This is when my jaw dropped and my face got red. I couldn’t believe I was reading this in a Madison-area newspaper.
Then you ended your argument with the quote above, ignoring all political and legal arguments you tried drawing out throughout your opinion piece to hide your biased anti-gay beliefs, and freely passed out rights to raise children to heterosexual couples as if it were your personal right to do so. This smacks of early 20th-century eugenics, when minorities were forcefully sterilized because they didn’t have the “right” to procreate; because they raised wayward children.
You do not realize that human rights aren’t only for certain humans. When one speaks of “rights,” they go to all. Neither you nor anyone in government has the right to choose to which humans they go, especially the right to procreate and be a legal couple.
Now, opposing arguments only make my argument stronger. And different views of an issue should be published, but my opinion of the Herald is lower now that I read this piece. Instead of grabbing your newspaper, I will most likely reach for The Daily Cardinal from now on.
Diana Parker
UW junior
Farelamour@aol.com
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