Same-sex ‘marriage’: A welfare program, not a right

By Ben Johnson
Fri Aug 03, 2012


Despite all the Sturm und Drang about equal rights, ending prejudice, and transcending the final frontier of the civil rights movement, the homosexual “marriage” movement is essentially just a pitch for another welfare program. Yes, insecure LGBT activists want the government to formally legitimize their sexual behavior as “equal” to the nuclear family norm. But when one pierces through their pseudo-moral arguments and high-sounding rhetoric, one encounters an unremarked reality: it’s all about the Benjamins.

Reading their complaints more closely shows, like all revolutionaries, they have a set of demands: They want government benefits, mandatory health insurance coverage, and tax shelters – an unearned wealth transfer from taxpayers or employers to themselves.

One homosexual told CNN it was “unfair” and “un-American” that he could not receive $2,000 a month in Social Security survivor’s benefits from U.S. taxpayers after his “partner” died. In a more costly move, the “husband” of late U.S. Congressman Gerry Studds is now suing the government, because he cannot receive the federal benefits other spouses collect when a congressman dies.

Marriage redefinition advocates also complain that, while most large corporations provide health care benefits for same-sex partners, they must pay more than married couples. One such partner called the extra $15 a month he must pay to enjoy insurance from someone else’s employer “simply unjust.” A lesbian activist lamented that the University of Michigan requires same-sex couples to prove their commitment by living together for six months before receiving university health benefits.

They also demand tax shelters heterosexual couples enjoy. “Queer advocate” Erik Lappman writes, “It is essential that progressives across the United States highlight” the fact that same-sex couples pay “on average at least $1,069 more than identical heterosexual, married couples in taxes.” There’s a bumper sticker: “Same-sex ‘marriage’: ‘Cause it’s not love if I don’t get a tax break.”

Same-sex couples must pay estate taxes if they inherit more than $5 million. Karen Mateer, a California tax attorney, claimed, “It may mean selling a home or business to raise cash to pay death taxes.” I’m opposed to estate taxes in principle, but as an example of “discrimination”? Cry me a river. Even same-sex divorce is about cash. Christel de Cries, a Dutch immigrant, grouses that she cannot deduct the alimony she pays her ex-“wife” from her taxes.

But why precisely has society arranged itself to provide health benefits and other temporal goods to support the natural family? In the hoary long ago, we extended health benefits to employees’ spouses, because they were usually stay-at-home moms raising children. The government, which has an interest in well-rounded children from healthy homes, blessed and financially encouraged the decision.

Beginning with the Revenue Act of 1948, the government extended tax credits to offset the economic costs families face when raising children. This bill was passed in an era before widespread contraception, when abortion was illegal and children were still considered God’s blessings upon a healthy marriage. Social Security survivor’s benefits were designed to help women who spent their whole lives raising a family in lieu of earning a company pension.

Although most Americans now work outside the home – often more by necessity than choice – most women still take time off to raise their children. Working women, in the workforce or at at home, focus more on their loved ones than slavishly climbing the corporate ladder. Thus, they have lower lifetime earnings than men and may, for a few years, have no income at all.

Homosexual couples, who can neither get married nor have children, need no such help from society. Put bluntly, they could and should go get a job to provide for their own insurance and retirement. Society does not have the same interest in supporting their shacking up as it does in facilitating a married heterosexual family raising children.

Call me heartless, but I’d just as soon the private sector take the money it would have used to provide insurance benefits to workers’ paramours and use it to create more jobs. In a work-starved society, where more Americans are filing for disability payments than filling new jobs, this should be a top priority. And I’d just as soon Social Security save the money it would spend to extend benefits to the survivors of homosexuals and use it to stave off the day of its rapidly approaching bankruptcy.

The logical position of the lifestyle Left is that Americans have to pay for benefits to allow homosexual partners to stay home and raise children they can’t have. Then, to rectify nature’s oversight, we must honor their associated “right” to have children – by adoption or surrogacy, a process that exploits vulnerable women in nations like India, Cyprus, and Ukraine. After all, this will allow gay couples to qualify for more child tax credits.

Florida attorney Chuck Rubin noted federal government calculations about the health of Social Security, and federal tax revenues, were calculated under existing law. Changing the rules “does affect the budget deficit,” altering how much “the government is spending on benefits and receiving in taxes. It’s definitely going to increase budgetary pressures.”

In an era of trillion-dollar-plus deficits, is that what we need? And since when were liberals interested in giving anyone a tax break, anyway? In effect, the Obama administration and LGBT advocates are saying we should go further in debt to China to provide benefits for those who could have worked but did not. Their proposal will cost an already bankrupt nation money it doesn’t have to distort every facet of natural design in opposition to the will of the people.

Make no mistake: this is an economic debate, one that deserves a rational analysis of whether these costs are worth the “benefit” society would receive. And the burden of proof is on those who want to overturn thousands of years of tradition to put their hands in our wallets.

It’s not just about money; it’s about other people’s money, our money. The greatest PR triumph of the socialist-progressive axis to date is to claim that if those who pay those tax dollars dare to object about the use of our money, it is an act of mindless bigotry. We reject the redefinition of marriage for many reasons, one of which is its proponents’ monumental selfishness and sense of entitlement.

This article originally appeared on TheRightsWriter.com and is reprinted with permission.