>But it is hard to see how a mutually committed monogamous relationship
>between >two homosexual persons is injurious to either of them or to any
>one else.
In addition to the responses already posted about the injurious affects of
these relationships, consider also the mortality rate, which (if I recall
correctly) points to something like a 54-year life expectancy. So far as I
know, an assumed monogamy might place one at the higher half of the curve,
but still several decades less than a monogamous heterosexual lifestyle.
Correct me if I'm misstating the issue, but isn't a loss of ten to twenty
years of living considered injurious?
To paraphrase others, intentionally planning to have a parentless family is
like setting out intentionally to build a Yugo.
>Indeed such relationships often seem to be enriching for the persons
>involved >in them and can also be a blessing for friends and family around
>them.
I respect an attempt to be accepting and nonjudgmental, but... Consider
the enriching aspects of a mutual suicide pact. There is some potential
enrichment I suppose within the context of suffering minds and tortured
feelings. But from the perspective of society as a whole, the picture
becomes entirely different. To some, the difference is a matter of
intensity, immediacy, and degree, but the principle underlying the two are
related.
Lastly, I share a reluctance to water down the meaning of family. To quote
John Leo (in USNWR Feb 5, p 22) while addressing the risks associated with
fatherless families:
"It's impossible to overestimate how deeply our intellectual and cultural
elite is implicated in the continuing decline of the American nuclear
family. It's not just the constant jeering at the intact family as an
Ozzie-and-Harriet relic of the Eisenhower era. It's the constant
broadening of the definition of what a family is (for example, a New Jersey
judge said that six college kids on summer vacation constituted a family)
and the equally constant attempt to under-mine policies that might help the
intact family survive."
For what it is worth...
John