So I suppose this article is flamebait, and honestly, there are very few issues I could care less about than the gay marriage debate. But like with a lot of issues, it seems like things get so heated that people tend to forget certain baseline facts when they launch their tirades. So I just want to clarify this one fact:
Conception requires a man and a woman.
Let’s clarify this. Anybody can love anybody. Anybody can associate with anybody. You can love men, women, your pets, your plants, heck I know a scientist who cries when her petri dish cultures collapse. And I certainly don’t care what other people do with their lives. Give people who want to marry/cohabit legal standing, provided there’s no abuse or coercion involved.
But, to make a new human baby, you need a human man’s semen and you need a human woman’s egg. You need the two to connect, and you need a woman to gestate that fertilized egg for nine months.
Of course, there are all sorts of technological ways to do this, like a third-party sperm donor, or a third-party egg donor and/or fourth-party woman to gestate your fertilized egg for you. (you decode that last part)
But barring any help from technology, the way it happens is a man inserts his erect penis into a woman’s vagina and squirts his semen at her cervix. It then needs to connect with a fertile egg of hers, which she then needs to gestate until she gives birth.
Whether the man and woman are actually in love, or are married, is irrelevant here. I just want to make sure we understand this fact. If a man and a man marry, or a woman and a woman marry, they still can’t conceive kids with each other. They need to do an end-run around this inconvenient biological truth to procreate.
Maybe the reason people apply this to marriage is that it’s supposed to be an institution that revolves around conception.
But even that is irrelevant. The relevant question I’m asking is this: is it possible to point out the fact that a baby comes from a male’s sperm and a female’s egg, without coming off like a bigot?