Many homosexuals – perhaps most – are not even interested in marriage. Thus it must be asked, just why is it that some homosexuals are so insistent on marriage rights? Why the very strong push by at least some in the homosexual community to be able to marry?

As many homosexuals themselves admit, a major reason why they want marriage is not so much to be like heterosexuals, or because they want to abandon their more free and promiscuous lifestyle, but because of its symbolic value. It will give them public recognition, approval and acceptance. This has long been the overriding goal of the homosexual lobby: complete social and public endorse-ment and approval. Thus by getting marriage rights, and, in turn, the last hurdle for homosexuals, full adoption rights, homosexuals will have achieved their longstanding goal: legitimizing the homosexual lifestyle.

As even Time magazine admitted, in an article on same-sex marriage, the real goal is complete social acceptance and validation: “Ultimately, of course, the battle for gay marriage has always been about more than winning the second-driver discount at the Avis counter. In fact, the individual who has done most to push same-sex marriage – a brilliant 43-year-old lawyer-activist named Evan Wolfson – doesn’t even have a boyfriend. He and the others who brought the marriage lawsuits of the past decade want nothing less than full social equality, total validation – not just the right to inherit a mother-in-law’s Cadillac. As Andrew Sullivan, the (also persistently single) intellectual force behind gay marriage, has written, ‘Including homosexuals within marriage would be a means of conferring the highest form of social approval imaginable’.”

A leading American homosexual who has championed the cause of same-sex marriage, Jonathan Rauch, admits that this will be an important effect of same sex marriage: “it will ennoble and dignify gay love and sex as it has done straight love and sex”. Exactly, but such a dangerous threat to public health and safety should not be ennobled or dignified, certainly not by governments who have the duty and responsibility to promote the health and wellbeing of all its citizens.

Australian homosexual activists have also acknowledged that their attempt to join heterosexuals in marriage is about legitimacy and acceptance. Consider the words of long-time homosexual activist Rodney Croome: “this isn’t about sex, it’s about symbolism. Despite, or perhaps because of, an increase in de facto relationships and divorce, many Australians value marriage highly. For better or worse, it bestows on a relationship society’s ultimate seal of approval. This is why social conservatives deeply loathe marriage equality and why, as the inheritors of centuries of stigma, many same-sex couples yearn for it.” That is what Mr Croome and so many others want: social approval. That is why there is such a concentrated effort to redefine marriage by the homosexual lobby.

Indeed, the bottom line of all homosexual activism is ultimately just that: complete social acceptance and approval. As Kirk and Madsen put it back in 1989, “to gain straight tolerance and acceptance is not just a legitimate goal of gay activism, it must be the principal goal.”

Plenty of other homosexual activists have admitted as much. For example, same-sex marriage advocate Arthur Leonard put it this way: “Legal recognition of same-sex couples would have the effect over time of ‘normalizing’ such relationships. . . . Those who argue that the gay rights movement is out to transform society by getting people to view gay people as ‘normal’ are completely correct.”

Exactly. The activists realise that the majority will not acknowledge normalcy concerning the homosexual lifestyle, so they must resort to bypassing the public will and the legislative process, using instead the blunt instrument of judicial activism. It is the activist courts who are forcing the homosexual lifestyle on the rest of society, whether they like it or not.

As African-American Shelby Steele, in an article on why same-sex marriage is not a civil rights issue, rightly notes, “In the gay marriage movement, marriage is more a means than an end, a weapon against stigma. That the movement talks very little about the actual institution of marriage suggests that it is driven more by this longing to normalize homosexuality itself than by something compelling in marriage.”

Stanley Kurtz puts it this way: “Ultimately, it may be that what lies behind the demand for same-sex marriage, whether couched in conservative or in ‘civil-rights’ terms, is a bid to erase entirely the stigma of homosexuality. That bid is utopian; as radical gays like Michael Bronski acknowledge, the stigma arises from the fundamental separation between homosexuality and reproduction, which is to say from the fundamental fact that the world is, for the overwhelming part, heterosexual. Nevertheless, in pursuit of this utopian end, we are being asked to transform, at unknown cost to ourselves and to future generations, the central institution of our society.”

Or as family researcher Peter Sprigg has said, “The logical answer would seem to be that this campaign is not really about marriage at all. Instead, it is about the desperate desire of homosexuals for society at large to affirm that homosexuality (not just homosexual individuals, but homosexual sex acts) is the full equivalent of heterosexuality in every way – morally, socially, and legally.”

Quite so. What this is really all about is a major campaign of social upheaval, designed to bring the rest of an unwilling society into line with the demands of a very small but very vocal activist group. All this social engineering is about forcing the rest of the community to fully embrace the homosexual agenda and lifestyle, whether they want to or not.