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(47,953 posts) Tue Oct 14, 2014, 02:00 PM Oct 2014

It’s Not Bigotry, It’s Biology! Just Ask Greg Abbott

By Genevieve Cato

Last Friday, gubernatorial candidate and Attorney General Greg Abbott filed a brief with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in defense of Texas’ ban on gay marriage, which was struck down in February. Significantly more surprising than this move to defend inequality and the status quo is Abbott’s most notable argument: that gay marriage would cause more out of wedlock births.

According to both The Houston Chronicle and The New Civil Rights Movement, Abbott’s brief in defense of traditional marriage maintains that the ban on same sex marriage is necessary to encourage heterosexual couples to procreate. From the brief:

Texas’s marriage laws are rationally related to the State’s interest in encouraging couples to produce new offspring, which are needed to ensure economic growth and the survival of the human race.

Per Abbott’s argument, the constitutional amendment that explicitly bars Texas from allowing same-sex marriage – or any other similar designation for LGBT Texans – has nothing to do with bigotry. And though, as the Chronicle reports, Abbott’s brief recognizes the potential economic and social benefits of same sex marriage, that is beside the point. The point, ladies and gentlemen, is procreation.

If your head is spinning trying to follow that logic, you aren’t the only one. According to the brief, Abbott seems to believe that the only thing encouraging Texans of opposite sexes to get hitched is a nine-year-old constitutional amendment that makes it an exclusive club. Abbott explains:

By channeling procreative heterosexual intercourse into marriage. Texas’s marriage laws reduce unplanned out-of-wedlock births and the costs that those births impose on society. Recognizing same-sex marriage does not advance this interest because same-sex unions do not result in pregnancy.