What love's got to do with it

Bauman is the co-chairman for Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays for Blacksburg and the New River Valley. He lives in Blacksburg.

Jim Ludington's commentary "Gay marriage threatens our culture" (June 29, Horizon) raises again the grim specter of American culture threatened by marriage between two persons of the same gender.

He progresses from gay marriage to polygamy to pedophilia to "no legal standing against any form of perversion." The very foundation of our nation will crumble as "activist judges destroy the basis of our culture, and indeed, our civilization."

The final comparison is to Nazi Germany, where good people stood by while the nation fell into depravity.

Good grief. Chicken Little has run amok. Who knew that gay people had such power?

and

The value of a person is not determined by sexual orientation, nor is the quality of a family decided by the differing gender of the parents. Gay people, like straight people, can be good or bad, or like most of us, somewhere in between. As parents, they can be loving, kind, and exempalry of good character and high moral standards -- or not.

If there is the potential for demise of the American family, it will not come because of same-sex marriage. Heterosexual parents in America haven't exactly made the mold for marriage excellence. Divorce happens, like spousal and child abuse, in families of all persuasions. Gay marriage can strengthen families by providing two loving and care-giving parents by adoption to children who have no family, or by combining split families. It can be the tie that binds for committed couples.

Read the whole response to a commentary "Gay marriage threatens our culture" - What love's got to do with it
by Dick Bauman
July 02, 2008 - The Roanoke Times, Roanoke VA