I probably won’t get married or have kids…

I say probably because they say never say never.

Currently at this point in my life, being almost 23, I do not want kids, and I don’t foresee myself wanting kids any time in the future. When I tell my mother and my grandmother about this they get very upset, especially my grandmother. It’s really amusing to hear my grandmother try and convince me that I must have children, just because her view of family and gender roles is a blast from the past. (She was married in the 50’s)

I do not want to have kids for several reasons, chiefly among them is the fact that I honestly do not feel the strong need to make a copy of myself. There are billions of people on this planet, I don’t need to add to the strain by further burdening it with little versions of myself. The rest of my reasons are purely selfish, and there is nothing wrong with that.

My happiness is my number one goal. Having children would take the next twenty years of my life away from me. I would no longer be living my life for me, I’d be stuck changing diapers, rushing to keep doctor’s appointments and speeding off to band practice. I don’t want that. I have one shot at life and I want to experience and travel as much of the world as I can before I die. Giving up the prime of my life to drive a minivan full of children is not conducive to my happiness. Trying to have a raise a child and travel a lot at the same time would not be healthy for the child, so rather than try to do both or give up my dreams, I’m just not going to have children.

Furthermore, raising a child costs an incredible amount of money. Food, doctor bills, clothing, toys, school supplies, a car, birthday and xmas presents, $100,000 for a college education! Ignoring college and all the other bells and whistles, raising a kid on the bare minimum from 0-18 can cost anywhere between $126,000 and $250,000! And that’s just for one kid! I’m sorry, but that’s a quarter million dollars I don’t have. I think of how much my parents spent raising me and it blows my mind. Thousands and thousands of dollars on dental work, three surgeries, two cars, trips to Europe, and an expensive private college education. Not to mention everything else. I really do appreciate it and realize how lucky I am, but I often wonder what type of life they could have had if they didn’t have me or my sister. (To be completely honest (as sick as this might sound) during the roughest part of my life, this past summer, one of things that kept me from committing suicide was the thought of how much of a waste it would be of my parent’s money to kill myself after they spent so much money raising me)

As for getting married, the chances of finding a smart, funny, intelligent, attractive atheist woman who also does not want to have kids seems incredibly small. As much as I’d love to have a life companion like this, I doubt I’ll ever find one that isn’t already taken.

But in the very unlikely chance that I do find someone, I’m not sure if I’ll marry them. You see, my attitude on marriage has changed over the past year or two. I used to really want to get married because I wanted the recognition from other people that what I have is special. I realize now that it doesn’t matter what other people think of my relationship; they’re not in that relationship. The only opinions that matter are mine and my significant other’s. I don’t need a piece of paper from the government and an expensive party with lots of people to tell me what I feel is significant. If people want to get married, fine, but it’s not necessary or a prerequisite for being a family. In fact, I’m not sure I will get married just on the principle of the thing. Why should I get married to the person I love when other people are denied the right to marry the person they love?

If I did get married, we would have to redesign the ceremony to eliminate all the patriarchal elements. For example, I wouldn’t want my soon to be father-in-law to hand off my soon to be wife over to me. She is her own person and not his property to give to me. He can walk with her down the isle if she wants, but he doesn’t have the right to “give” her to me. I’m also not going to carry my wife over the threshold of our new place together. Again, she’s not some new property I’m bringing home from the store. She can walk over it of her own volition. In fact, I think that would mean a lot more than me carrying her since it would symbolize her knowingly and freely making the commitment as an equal person.

PS, Interesting video:

The government shouldn’t recognize marriage

Earlier this week I was elated to hear that a republican appointed federal judge over turned proposition 8 because it violated equal protection under the 14th Amendment. The entire argument against allowing homosexuals to marry can be boiled down to: “It is my personal religious view that homosexual marriage is wrong, and thus I am going to impose my religious views on you!” (Yeah, you could word it differently and dress it up to make it look like another argument, but deep deep down, at the heart of it is this religious intolerance) Trying to take this bigoted view and impose it on other people through law not only violates not only the 14th amendment, but the 1st as well.

Come to think of it, the government recognizing any religious marriage is a violation of the first amendment. Instead, the government should only recognize the civil unions formed by people who obtain the license and certificate from the local court house. (Which everyone, regardless of religion must do) If the government did this, then anyone could be joined in a civil union. A marriage and ceremony would be secondary. The legal privileges of a civil union would be open to anyone, regardless of sexual orientation, as the 14th amendment guarantees.

I’ve seen conservatives frothing at the mouth over this issue. They somehow have gotten it into their head that if the government allows same sex couples to form a civil union, then the conservatives will be forced to preform marriage ceremonies for them. They draw this image of a government officer holding a gun to the head of a minister, forcing him to marry two homosexuals in the minister’s church. This is so utterly and completely absurd! Nobody is going to force any religious figure to preform a ceremony they do not wish to preform. No government agents will storm into a church, hold a gun to a pastor’s head, and make him wed two gays. Ideas like this are another side effect of binge drinking the kuh-kuh-koolaid. The absolutely ridiculous nature of this belief aside, from a purely legal standpoint, the government could not do this for a plethora of reasons, two stand out immediately: A) The church is private property. B) This would violate the 1st Amendment. (Yes, kiddies, the separation of church and state protects churches from the state, so think about that before you try to tear down that wall)

The government cannot tell religions how to act. That would be “inhibiting the free exercise” of religion. The concept most conservatives don’t seem capable of understanding is that imposing their beliefs on people who are not members of their organization through the public legal system is NOT an instance of free exercise. Therefore the government if fully able (and is required by that very same amendment) to block any attempt by the religious to do so. You can be a bigot inside your church all you want. You can be a bigot in your home. You can even be a bigot and shout in the street so everyone else knows you’re a bigot. You CAN’T be a bigot and try to impose your views through law. Sorry, go home.

Instead, when homosexuals want to get married on top of having a civil union, they can do so with any person willing to preform that ceremony. That’s the keyword there, willing. You better believe there are people willing to do so. Homosexuals getting married is GREAT for business. More weddings means more demand for services, more demand means more jobs, more jobs mean a stronger economy and thus a stronger nation.

Conservatives will still be able to marry in churches that refuse to preform the ceremony for homosexuals. I think there is another big disconnect for conservatives on this issue: stopping homosexuals from getting married doesn’t stop them from loving each other. The will still be there, they will still love, and they will still do everything everyone else does when in a relationship., and their ain’t a damn thing you can do about it. The only thing trying to bar them from their 14th amendment rights does is cause suffering.

“Your partner of 40+ years, the person you love with all your heart, is dying in the hospital? I’m sorry, you’re not allowed to see him, but the family that disowned him 40+ years ago and haven’t spoken to him since can go right on up…oh wait, they’re not here…guess he’ll have to die alone…”

Or

“You want to adopt Sarah from her abusive and alcoholic home? That’s wonderful, this poor girl’s had a really hard life. I see you are mentally fit, responsible, have no criminal record, and are able to provide her with a stable home, food on the table, a roof over her head, and school supplies to learn, that’s great! Oh wait…before Sarah can start her new life, are you a homosexual? Yes!?!? I’m sorry then, Sarah’s going to have to go back to living with her abusive father that broke her arm. You homosexuals are bad people and your home is no environment in which to raise a child!”

It’s stuff like this that really makes discriminating against people disgusting. The ironic thing is, many of the people who would willfully cause this type of suffering (which is very real and happens every day) do so in the name of their god of “love”. That just makes me want to vomit.

Christians and premarital sex

Why is it so important to wait to marriage? Well, back when the bible was being written (and up until recently) there was no way to tell for sure if a child was yours. Women were property, their main value derived from their ability to have children. They were property used by men to beget more men. Marriage was primarily a financial transaction where the husband buys a wife from the wife’s father. The father then walks his daughter down the aisle and “gives” his daughter to the other man. It’s all about property. Thus it was important to the men that their “property” not be previously “used”.

The theology behind it was just whipped up out of early church father’s utter disdain for woman and the human body. St. Augustine for example hated women and sex, and from this hate centuries of boys and girls were brought up to be ashamed of their bodies and desires. Your body and desires are perfectly natural and there is nothing wrong or dirty about them. Believing they are can lead to all types of sick disorders and self-loathing.

Besides these side effects, waiting to marriage can have some disastrous consequences. There are plenty of young evangelical men and women who are now rushing into marriage way to early, and for the wrong reasons. They’ve been told their entire lives that they can’t give in to their strongest urges until they’re married, and so these young adults are diving into marriage in their late teens, early twenties, just so they can have sex. They might not have ever dated anyone else seriously, and they aren’t fully ready to support themselves. Financial stress is one of the leading causes of divorce, and these kids just aren’t set up well enough on their own two feet to be in a marriage.

Here are the divorce rates among Christians, Jews, and Atheists:

Religion	% have been divorced
Jews	30%
Born-again Christians	27%
Other Christians	24%
Atheists, Agnostics	21%

(I wouldn’t be surprised if  Born-again is so high up there because the kids rush into marriage just to have sex)

It’s important to experiment in life to see what works for you. You’re shooting yourself in the foot if you don’t experience all life has to offer before you die.  I have a housemate that is engaged to a woman he’s never had sex with. The woman does not want to have sex before marriage, and so he’s going to wait 5-6 years (supposedly, if they last that long) to marry her and then have sex. That’s a disaster waiting to happen. What if he marries this person and they don’t have good sexual chemistry? Then he’s shafted for life! And don’t try and say “Well, the other qualities that makes him love her should overpower the lack of sexual chemistry”. That’s naive and unrealistic. Sex matters. You can have a great personality, but if the sex just isn’t good, the marriage/relationship is not going to work.

Telling kids to wait until marriage also increases the chance of teen pregnancy. In September 2009, a study came out showing a link between how religious a state is, and the teen pregnancy rate. Here is an indisputable FACT of life that will not change no matter what any religious book will ever say: Teens will have sex. This has been true for all  time, and will continue to be true forever. Telling teens to not have sex until they are married does nothing to keep them from having sex. Abstinence only does not work. Instead they will just not use birth control and will get pregnant, which raises the number of abortions. (Hint, want to stop abortions? Teach safe sex)

When it comes down to it, sex is all about responsibility. Some people are more responsible than others at different ages. I was very responsible when I was a teenager, many of my friends were not. Now that I’m an adult, I’m even more responsible, yet I know people my age and older who aren’t. It depends on the person. Some people are emotionally mature enough to handle sexual activity in their teens, some are not. If they are ready for sex, they must be responsible enough to also use protection consistently. Diseases are out there and they do not magically disappear when you get married.

If some people feel they are not ready for sex and want to wait until marriage, that’s fine, it’s their body, they can make that choice, but don’t then go and try to tell me I should do the same, that my body is sinful and dirty, that
I should be ashamed just like them. Marriage is an outdated patriarchal institution when it comes to managing sex.