Correspondence
Correspondence MARRIAGE ISSUES READING Maggie Gallagher's "Massachusetts vs. Marriage" (Dec. 1), one gets the impression that she has no substantive objection to same-sex marriage other than a...
...1), Fred Barnes makes an excellent point about the responsibility of the Republicans to govern like...
...GEORGE P CHRISTIAN Boston, MA...
...The difference is that we would instead have to get to know what it means to be a good spouse, irrespective of gender...
...An alternative proposal is the development of more sources of nuclear energy and clean coal technology...
...Labeling them as "enemy," while perhaps technically true, tends to lump together military targets and civilians...
...EVAN WINER Evanston, IL A TAXING PROBLEM I AM HAPPY to consider the logic of Irwin M. Stelzer's complaints against the energy bill in "Something for Everyone" (Dec...
...Ronald Reagan ran and governed as a conservative...
...In short, there are plenty of ways that Congress could help the United States solve its energy crisis...
...PETER BYRNES JR...
...The only concrete proposal Stelzer puts forward is the imposition of a tax on imported oil...
...This is a distinction we must do all we can to preserve, especially in times such as ours...
...well, Republicans...
...For if "the practical and financial benefits of legal marriage are largely a myth," as Gallagher argues, then marriage is disadvantageous to everyone, regardless of sexual orientation...
...Apparently, to Gallagher, the true difference is that the partners in a gay couple would not reproduce with each other...
...1), one gets the impression that she has no substantive objection to same-sex marriage other than a visceral dislike of the idea...
...If Republicans deliver the standard lukewarm dish of soggy policies to the people, they are no better than the Democrats they fought so hard to replace...
...But this position seriously misreads the history of marriage, recasting "the millennia-old, cross-cultural" concept of marriage in a contemporary light...
...we would still know "who is committing adultery, and who is having a child out of wedlock...
...While many of those killed by the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have indeed wished us ill, I am sure most were innocent people going about their daily lives...
...Severna Park, MD CIVILIAN SEMANTICS IN AN OTHERWISE SUPERB ARTICLE, I found myself bristling at Max Boot's description of those killed by the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan as "enemy civilians" ("Japan's Memory Lapses," Dec...
...This is a dangerous phrase, one I could imagine used by perpetrators of terrorism...
...if her real objection to gay marriage is that gays do not reproduce in the usual, biological way, then all i can conclude is that her objection is exactly what she says her critics hold it to be: "utterly irrational...
...But, I think, the high taxes envisioned by Stelzer will only turn off voters...
...And if she believes that the real benefits of marriage are "the good things that happen when husbands and wives are joined in permanent, public, sexual, emotional, financial, and parenting unions," then it would seem that marriage could be quite appropriate and advantageous for gays, for there is no reason to believe they either cannot or do not want to form unions that are permanent, public, sexual, emotional, financial, and parental...
...Americans will vote Republicans out if this legacy is forgotten...
...and we would still know "what it means to raise children in a family, to be good husbands and good wives...
...MARK LOWE Rancho Cucamonga, CA IT'S MY PARTY IN "The Governing Party" (Dec...
...If gays could marry, men and women could still "signal their intentions to each other...
...How else to interpret her claim that marriage "is about getting the people who make the baby to stay around and love each other and the baby too...
...President George W. Bush, as well as the congressional Republicans, should heed Reagan's legacy...
...But don't high energy costs slow economic growth...
...But perhaps Gallagher is also arguing for stereotypical gender roles...
...1), but what, exactly, does Stelzer have in mind to solve the problems of energy production and regulation...
...As Gallagher should know, voluntary marriage based on a notion of romantic love is a recent innovation in human history, only a few centuries old at best...
...He won reelection on that governing legacy, and helped the elder Bush with that legacy, too...
...The only difference is that they will be between people of the same sex...
...Marriage throughout most of history and culture has been an arranged institution, a way of insuring that men could bear legitimate male heirs who could lay claim to their father's property, or to bear girls who could, in turn, be married off to other men...
Vol. 9 • December 2003 • No. 14
