There is currently a lot of discussion about how to protect “marriage“, such discussion is based on the issue of whether Gay Marriage should be prohibited to protect Straight Marriage. Some straight people believe that their own marriage would be better if homosexuals were allowed to get married, some have even declared that they won’t get married until discrimination in this regard is ended. I don’t believe that whether some other people get married will make any difference to my marriage.
I believe that any two consenting adults who are not closely related should be allowed to get married, but I am not going to write about that today. What I will address is some positive steps that can be taken by a government to protect Straight Marriage without regard to Gay Marriage.
By the most objective criteria, death is the greatest obstacle to marriage. To protect someone’s marriage you should first protect them from becoming a widow or widower for as long as possible. Also protecting the lives of children (both biological and adopted) is important for protecting marriage. Here are some of the many ways of preventing needless death:
- Don’t start wars except in the most extreme situations. Wars inevitably involve the death of soldiers (some of whom are married) and any war that is anything other than the smallest border incident will involve the death of civilians (married people and children).
- Protect the food supply and the environment. When toxic chemicals, heavy metals, or radioactive material are released in the environment it results in a statistical increase in the death rate from cancer.
- Increase the funding for medical research. Today there are many medical situations which can be routinely and safely resolved which would have been likely to be fatal 10 or 20 years ago. More medical research will lead to more diseases being cured.
- Spread positive technology around the world. Protecting marriage should have a larger scope than your local region, therefore life-saving medicine needs to be affordable in all countries. Patents that prevent this need to be voided in the poorer regions of the world.
- Increase the research on car safety. Car crashes are one of the largest causes of death and significant injury in the first world which can be easily reduced. Unfortunately there has been little research on making cars safe for women and children (crash-test dummies for woman and children are to a large extent scaled-down models based on research on men due to the lack of female and child cadavers for research [1]). Also I believe that the majority of car safety research in regard to crash test dummies was done in the US and therefore is biased towards caucasians and afro-americans – I believe that research on other races is needed to give equal protection to all races (caucasian and afro-american races are in a minority in the world).
This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it does cover some issues that are current and well known.
Now the next objective way to analyse this issue is to look at statistics related to divorce. It seems that money is an issue related to divorce and therefore protecting the finances of married people is a way of protecting marriage.
The first thing that can be done is to give people more continuity of employment. Being in a situation where you could lose your job at short notice is stressful and has to have a negative impact on a married couple. Recently the supposedly “conservative” Liberal government in Australia was trying to ban Gay Marriage while also introducing legislation to make it easier to lay off employees who have done nothing wrong (based on business issues). Among other things the Work Choices legislation made it more difficult for such employees to take out bank loans (which means that they often pay higher interest rates).
A final issue that causes stress for married couples is the school system (which is broken in many ways). I’m not going to try and cover this in detail here, but I will note that installing flag-poles (as the Liberal government wanted to do) is not the solution to problems with the education system.
Addressing these real issues will take some government funding, but it’s not a lot and a much greater amount of money could be saved by ending the “war on drugs”.
If the people who claim to be protecting straight marriage can address these other more serious problems that threaten straight marriages then I still won’t agree with calls to ban gay marriage. But it would make then seem less hypocritical.
