Same-sex marriages began in California. I’m not enthralled with the process that got us here, and I don’t think the last show has dropped on this.
But I think that once people begin to see the impact – to see, and I hope accept the fact that the loving couple next door is both male or both female – that some of the heat will go out of this issue.
My position is simple. Stable nuclear families are the best form of social organization this society has to offer, and any change that allows there to be more of them is a good thing.
If you want to know why, read this old post.
Congratulations to the new couples, and welcome to the joyful hard work of marriage.
AL,
“Congratulations to the new couples, and welcome to the joyful hard work of marriage.”
Well said. I hope NY follows suit soon. I have many friends who would love to tie the knot.
Marriage to the one you love is a beautiful thing. Everyone should experience it.
AL I take the opposite tack. Gay Marriage is likely to be the final nail in the coffin of traditional nuclear families.
First, not many gays will marry. MA had something like 4,000 during the first six months of gay marriage, leveling off to about 1,000 or so per year. Second, gays will likely not have kids. They are, after all, gay. Third, and most important, gay marriage means by definition polygamy.
There will be few takers for gay marriage. There will be many takers for polygamy. Gay Marriage means the erosion of standards to pretty much anything goes. Re-inforcing btw the standard Islamist critique of Western society as debased and corrupt and decadent. It certainly won’t convince Muslims here or abroad of America’s “goodness” or “decency” though perhaps that does not matter as long as Muslims at home and abroad fear America and any response from her.
But you will get many, many challenges that will succeed in legalizing polygamy. We are already seeing public acceptance of it in the FLDS case (the men should IMHO all be in prison for lengthy terms). We see feminists and gays defending polygamy already.
This is a disaster of the first order because you cannot have gay marriage without polygamy. It’s like smoking to lose weight. Any gains in health for the body politic are outweighed by the massive losses.
My church may or may not have a problem with gay marriage; it can’t seem to make up its mind. I may or may not eventually find a way to decide whether my religion, which I take very seriously, prohibits homosexuality and with it, virtually all non-procreative sex. In the meantime, I love too many gay individuals to find it in my heart to tell them they can’t organize themselves into families recognized by law. I’m not at all sure the government should have a say in this. It’s not that I’m cavalier about protecting the institution of the nuclear family, which is so important in providing children with a reasonable home to grow up in. But I see easy divorce as an overwhelmingly greater threat to the child-bearing nuclear family.
Also, being in a childless marriage myself, of 25 years duration, I don’t feel entitled to tell other people they have no right to a marriage that doesn’t intend to produce children.
As for whether it’s called a “marriage” or a “civil union,” I don’t really care. Certain churches will not recognize it as a marriage; that’s their right and an issue for their adherents, not for me and not, I think, for the government.
Jim, I know a lot of gay people, and I’d wager that we’ll have quite a few more than that.
And how in the wide world of sports do you get “…gay marriage means by definition polygamy.”??
A.L.
Its hard to be in the position of being a party pooper, it really is. If this is their real chance at happiness, even if they are jumping off a cliff who can deny that opportunity to have everyone look dotingly on them?
I mean no harm to them, but then because I mean no harm to them and others I really wish they would re-consider their actions. And be more considerate of others, rather than demanding others just be considerate of them.
I’ve written “more about it”:http://opine-editorials.blogspot.com/2008/06/celebrate-and-forget-your-worries.html at Opine, and linked here.
Armed, my question to you about polygamy, or polyamory, etc… is how do you not get there from…
bq. But I think that once people begin to see the impact – to see, and I hope accept the fact that the loving couple [trio, quadrille, etc…] next door is both male or both female [or polygamous, etc…] – that some of the heat will go out of this issue.
bq. My position is simple. Stable nuclear families are the best form of social organization this society has to offer, and any change that allows there to be more of them is a good thing.
The argument hinges at one point, look at the family next door as a snapshot. Do you wrap them in the comforting regulation and carrots of marriage to help them be a nuclear family or do you not? If not, please tell me why not?
Jim,
Where I think you are correct is, it may be the case that lots of homosexuals, don’t want to get married.
But still – the values that we care about – consistency, faith, commitment for the long haul – these are things that are fostered by marriage (you aren’t marrying just that person, but their whole family, etc).
So for the percentage of gay couples who want to go for that – good for them!
As far as polygamy/polamory, whatever, I’m against it. For as much economic and social reasons, as moral ones. “Rootless and angry males” are, have always been, the greatest source of unrest – from the U.S. to Iraq/Saudi Arabia.
One of the best ways to combat this, is a 1 to 1 ratio in terms of unions. If that goes askew, then to put it bluntly – then the rich guys get all the chicks. Just ask Saudi Arabia, and the legions of frustrated lower and middle class men, who do things like join terrorist organizations (because they have nothing better to do).
So – 1 to 1 is a societal goal, for stability. As A.L. says, nuclear families are the bedrock of our social organization (and I would say, supported by “the Village” to quote Hillary Clinton. You need both.)
Hypocricyrules,
I appreciate your comments about rootless men, and it reminds me of a “post by Wretchard”:http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2006/12/rootless-men.html at Belmont Club of a similar title…
bp. Ironically, the real losers in a society with no standard family models may in the end be those groups which sought to drape themselves with the legitimacy of traditional marriage. With traditional marriage debased to the point of abolition, all modes, including the alternative forms, will simply become ones of cohabitation. In that future, it will be impossible to “get married”. That term, as we understand it today, will have lost its meaning. About all that one can do is “live-in”.
The model of the nuclear family has a mother and father who’s very relationship is literally embodied in their offspring. If you don’t support marriage as an institution which seeks to keep those roots intact, would you support that institution by any other name?
I agree, Marc, this is a good end achieved by not-so-good means. Since the anti gay marriage forces seem determined to qualify a California state constitutional amendment for the ballot, we’ll soon find out the will of the populace, albeit in the reverse order of what I’d rather have seen.
(Like Texan99, I’d personally prefer that the state only define and enforce a contractual relationship between two – and only two -people, with some suitably boring name. Then let the parties concerned solemnize the relationship any way they choose and give it any name that makes them happy. Like a lot of my policy ideas, this seems to satisfy neither side of the dispute.)
So sorry for On and Jim, but the quicky polls for a constitutional amendment here in CA are running against. I’ve also got to say that the visual impact of the news stories is adverse for your cause: On one side happy couples, on the other frowning religious zealots.
I also can’t see where the polygamy argument comes from, other than bigotry. The court case here was about equal access to a state sanctioned contract between TWO – and only TWO – people. Believe it or not, even the denizens of the PRC can count. I’ve also never comprehended the ‘threat to marriage’ business: My wife and I have known two committed gay couples well – one of each sex. Neither they or anyone else of that persuasion has any bad effect on our (pushing 30 year) marriage – they’re just someone else interesting to hang out with.
Tim,
Honestly, its the simplistic folks in this dialog who seem to have the most confusion and the hardest time understanding what is going on.
But I’m not sure where your grounds on in anything you raised. You don’t see how changing marriage from an institution to ensure children’s rights and equal gender representation, to an institution of government regulation of romance, doesn’t invite discussion on all romantic forms?
Having destroyed the definition of marriage created by 4,000 years of experience can the author of this piece now oppose any ndividuals who wish to marry?
Giving sanction to perversion does not make it acceptable nor does judicial fait make it cvilized. I have no objection to gays doing their thing in the privacy of their bedroom. I do object to them parading down mainstreet in the same way I don’t care what Hugh Hefner does in his bedroom although I think fire hoses should be turned on him if he paraded down main street.
I guess this is why the barbarians destroyed Rome. I wonder how long before I see the first man-sheep marriage or the first father-son marriage. After all how can you stop or oppose the actions of conscenting adults?
On: Where the heck did you get ‘government regulation of romance’ out of what I wrote? That seems as backward as those who suggest cutting taxes is ‘stealing from the poor’.
Is anyone suggesting that heterosexual marriage is somehow invalid, or that the legal protections extended to spouses and children in such a relationship are withdrawn? Is your notion of marriage so frail that it’s overthrown by what others choose to do in their relationships?
While there is potential for this to be positive, I do worry about what the future unintended consequences shall be.
In less than a century, we have had two, ultimately positive, major societal changes from which we are still feeling the unintended consequences. Both of these changes were pushed through to correct inequalities and imbalances in our society, but in the push to right the wrongs that were happening, little thought was given to mitigating the negative side-effects of these changes.
Now, before I name them, let me state categorically that I believe both of these changes were the right end goal, because I have no doubt this stance will be controversial. I have no quibble with what was sought to be accomplished, indeed I feel both have enriched our society greatly and made much of what we have today possible, but I wonder if there would not have been another path by which we could have identified the unintended consequences and mitigated them.
The first, of course, was desegregation. While it has brought enormous benefits in bringing us on the path to integrating a large and talented labor pool, corrected a fundamental flaw and in-balance in our system of governance which only held us back, and brought us on a path to heal the open wounds left over from the Civil War; it has also brought a number of unwanted side-effects. These include a population that does not wish to assimilate, an enormous increase in black crime and violence, a meltdown of the black nuclear family, and a subpopulation which believes they are entitled to benefits beyond anything reasonably owed to their generation.
The second was women’s liberation. Again, this corrected a harmful imbalance in our system and provided a new and talented labor pool. On the unintended negative side, we’ve had had to grapple with how to manage our children without a full time resource dedicated to that, which I think is at least partially reflected in the “troubled youth” and degradation of our public school systems as well as the significant rise in medication use for mental issues (like AD/ADHD). I think it is also responsible for the degradation of the buying power of low and middle income earners as I suspect the standardization of two incomes for a family has created an inflationary situation which makes it very difficult to live on one salary.
Now, let me point out that I believe we are dealing with the negatives of both of these, however it is over the span of generations and has resulted in a lot of harm to the follow on generations as society has grappled with how to deal with the fallout.
Which brings me to my ultimate point. Whenever you make a fundamental change to our societal structure, and gay marriage is such a fundamental change, there will be fallout. Society is like a large, enormously complex, self-correcting system in that it will tend to over-correct for a period before finding a new equilibrium point. I would much prefer if we could spend the time and effort to attempt to identify, at least in part, what this fallout will be and attempt to mitigate it upfront rather than pay for it over a period of decades. What this fallout will be, I don’t know. But I do know we have a lot of smart people out there and I would like to see them put their heads together and try to work out as much as they can before hand.
Tim,
In fairness, I wasn’t stating what your beliefs were. Perhaps you over-personalize? Yet, if that doesn’t represent your position please explain your position a bit better.
What role does marriage fulfill as a state regulated institution?
_”Do you wrap them in the comforting regulation and carrots of marriage to help them be a nuclear family or do you not? If not, please tell me why not?”_
Because this is America. We are not required to live our lives in service of what is best for some nebulous idea of what is good for society as a whole.
But lets reverse the slippery slope argument for a second. If you argue that the nuclear family is our most pressing societal concern, how does divorce figure in to that. Shouldnt divorce be radically curtailed via force of law if we find the institution of ‘traditional’ marriage sacrosanct, so to speak?
Gay activists have a damned compelling argument. Our current divorce rate is 50%. Just how much worse can it get?
All this fretting about polygamy can be resolved with a simple legal definition of marriage as follows: “Marriage is a union between two people.” Or something to that effect.
Just pass that and quite wringing your hands about the death of marriage. Seriously.
The issue at hand was the wisdom or lack thereof in the court’s decision about the state’s role in marriage, specifically what sexes can be involved in one in California. That legalistic role seems more relevant here than the spiritual or romantic sides of marriage, which certainly exist. I don’t, however, recall the county clerk ever asking questions about one’s religion, sexual mores, or ‘whether you kids have really thought this through’. That’s not the state’s job. They just care whether both parties are capable of meaningful consent and are giving it.
From the state’s POV marriage is a contractual state between two (and only two) adults. Its control over that contract is exhibited by the need to formally go through a divorce proceeding to exit. The legal implications of the contract started out relatively simply with things like community property and inheritance laws, and have become further encrusted as society has become more complex: spousal insurance benefits, survival rules with respect to estate tax, healthcare powers of attorney and on and on. And there are implications for children that may come, again starting simply and becoming more complex, particularly as the divorce rate climbed. Again, I don’t recall being asked by the clerk whether we intended to have children. It’s none of the state’s business.
I don’t see where ‘regulation of romance’ comes into this. It’s nearly a clerical procedure. That’s why I suggest it should have some boring name; domestic partnership would do except that’s already become a loaded term. The only issue is whether two adults have to be of opposite sex to enter such a contract. The mechanics of the contract needn’t change a whit for them to be of the same sex. So I have trouble seeing why people who are so inclined, some of whom happen to be my good friends, should be denied that right. Nothing they do puts a blot on the sanctity of the contract I signed and maintain, nor on yours if you don’t choose it. Nor does it impact anyone else’s ability to have and raise children or enjoy the nookie style of their choice.
The social and spiritual side of marriage are something for civil society and one’s faith, not government. A couple’s peers and spiritual community are going to accept the relationship, or not. The downside is undoubtedly one of the reasons the gay community tends to cluster out here in CA already. A rebuff by civil society is certainly going to present challenges to a relationship, but is that the fault of the couple, or of their peers? As far as the conclusions of faith go, is that something we want the state examining? Let the clerk stamp the papers, and let one’s religious community decide what it means.
(And I agree with everything HR wrote above, for the first and perhaps last time.)
Tim is dead on. I find it highly hypocritical that so called conservatives are looking so longingly to government to enforce their idea of marriage. Conservatives of all people should understand that government is a double edged sword.
Marriage, vis-a-vis the legalities, should be minimalized as much as possible. Its a simple contract, and as such can be defined as exlusive to 2 parties.
Anything more is rife with unintended consequences. Conservatives should understand that big government is not a reliable guard dog to be called on to uphold your preconceptions. Far more likely it will go the other way, and you damn sure have no right to be surprised by it.
Congratulations to the new partners.
Congratulations also to those who have secured the signatures to fight this act of judicial activism with a referendum, amending the constitution to restore traditional marriage. May traditional marriage be vindicated, soon and permanently.
Fortitude and comfort to those who, till traditional marriage is vindicated, will increasingly come under hostile judicial scrutiny. Hang in there, true believers, and get on with your lives as best you can, till stars peek from behind the clouds once again.
Personally, I’ve changed my mind on homosexual marriage several times, and may do so again. There are persuasive arguments on both sides.
For me, process was the tie-breaker. California gay marriage, imposed by a dictatorial judiciary in violation of the people’s law, is very bad. I might have had a different attitude to homosexual marriage laws created by referenda, but that’s all history now.
This is judicial tyranny, and a preparation for greater judicial nastiness to people whose consciences recoil at this imposition.
What’s really driving this is the passion of the lawyer class for imposing their own views on people’s most intimate lives, on matters of life and death, on birth, sex, marriage and child-rearing. I hope the lawyers are beaten: soon, often, comprehensively and permanently.
#18 from Mark Buehner:
bq. _”I find it highly hypocritical that so called conservatives are looking so longingly to government to enforce their idea of marriage.”_
OK. I find your position highly hypocritical too. Just on principle, in a tit for tat way. (In the long run, I don’t think giving people free shots promotes civility.)
#18 from Mark Buehner:
bq. _”Conservatives of all people should understand that government is a double edged sword.”_
I’m fairly statist, with some limitations. I think the nation should come first (that is, before the state, not before the family), social solidarity is important, government should serve the people (hence the need to promote social solidarity, without which there is no “people” to serve, just a bunch of mutually hostile “communities” using state power as a weapon against each other), and mainly the state should not blow up forms of organization more basic than it, older than it, and more personal and local than it. It should not be totalitarian.
None of this commits me to the view that the government must not allow in its laws for ancient realities like marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
#18 from Mark Buehner:
bq. _”Marriage, vis-a-vis the legalities, should be minimalized as much as possible. Its a simple contract, and as such can be defined as exlusive to 2 parties.”_
No, on multiple counts. Marriage is a matrix of relationships before it is a contract. That is, it is a contract only secondarily. It is not simple, it is complicated and emotional, especially when the kids come along. And lawyers can definite it as something or other exclusive to two people, but that doesn’t make it so, and the abstract “person” concept is highly problematic.
The modern concept of the person is an odd, highly technical thing, and deliberately made so. It suits academics, and cuts against our animality, which is so unpleasant from an abstract, academic point of view. When people start talking technically about “persons” it’s often a sign that diabolical things are going to start happening to actual human beings. Non-persons can be killed with impunity, experimented on, and so forth.
An instance of this was the Terry Schiavo case. She could be and was killed because she was not seen as a person. Yet she was still married to her husband, which was a strong reason for him to kill her: for her money. If a marriage is a contract between two “persons”, should the loss of “personhood” by one of the contracting parties, permanently or temporarily (as in a coma that may end) automatically nullify the contract?
This stuff is potentially or actually problematic, it’s not simple.
#18 from Mark Buehner:
bq. _”Anything more is rife with unintended consequences.”_
When it comes to marriage, _everything_ is rife with unintended consequences.
That is why we do best to be very conservative, sticking to patterns of custom and law that have proved themselves sound over great periods of time and wide areas of the Earth. Then, we know pretty well what the unintended consequences are likely to be, and that we can live with them.
Quick and falsely simple abstract formulas are much more dangerous.
#18 from Mark Buehner:
bq. _”Conservatives should understand that big government is not a reliable guard dog to be called on to uphold your preconceptions. Far more likely it will go the other way, and you damn sure have no right to be surprised by it.”_
Well sure, when “government” consists at root of liberal activist judges it is not to be counted on to guard anything except their prejudices. Conservatives are well aware that in this case “more likely it will go the other way.” And so they are not inclined to surrender the most important and fundamental institutions of private life to the will of those runaway judges.
And you damn sure have no right to be surprised by that.
Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.
The thing that has always struck me about the “gay community” is the war between extremes of conformity and non-conformity. Before AIDS, there was a culture of outlaw hedonism, which was a deliberate inversion of heterosexual norms. Since then the inversion has been inverted, and now the Happily Married Couple Next Door is the new paradigm.
My libertarian conscience is all for people living their lives as they want to, within the broad limits of the law, without moral interference from church or state. The question is whether that means I should be in favor of gay marriage, and it’s by no means obvious to me that the answer should be “yes”.
As a personal commitment between two individuals, yes. But nothing has ever stopped two individuals from committing to each other – every love story ever written is about love overcoming outside obstacles, and in this country those obstacles have long been very minor. That part of it – which is by far the most important part – is a non-issue.
As a social-legal institution, though, I’m ambivalent. If it’s a simple matter of legal and financial convenience, then I can’t object. Caesar allows what Caesar allows. If it’s meant to send a political message to the rest of us, I’m not impressed. The truth is that gays are not really free to live their lives as they want to, but the gay movement is the would-be dictator. Not me, not America, not Christianity or society.
The problem is not gay people who want (or don’t want) to get married. The problem is a gay political movement that dresses up in certain costumes and demands to be taken at face value.
That gay political culture is not monolithic, and it is not all bad by any means. But some of it is very bad indeed. Gay politics hosts some of the worst politicism in the country, some of the worst social and religious bigotry, and even some naked fascism. In the culture wars, they are major aggressors, not victims. If the public pageantry of marriage changes that, good – but of course it won’t. Nor should it be allowed to obscure it.
_”None of this commits me to the view that the government must not allow in its laws for ancient realities like marriage as the union of a man and a woman. “_
Thats ridiculous, nothing in this decision forbids the union of a man and a woman, as much as you’d love to imply it.
Polygamy is an ancient reality of course, as are concubines, females servatude, etc. Playing the historical norms card has never been particularly convincing when it comes to extending and protecting civil liberties.
_” Marriage is a matrix of relationships before it is a contract.”_
Matrix of relationships. That just _screams_ for government oversight, doesnt it?
Your argument for the complexity and sensitivity of marriage made a better case than i did for why government should be as minimally involved as possible.
Do you REALLY want government in this business? If so, how do you suggest we go about abolishing divorce? Historically speaking, its never been this widespread or easy to obtain after all.
Glen, if you think that “outlaw hedonism” is an “inversion of heterosexual norms” you need to get out more.
The difference is that the radical hedonists didn’t fight to occupy the central position in defining heterosexual relationships – they are and have usually been pretty marginal. One good thing about gay marriage is that it will put a stake in the notion that bathhouse culture – with the risks to physical and emotional health that come with it – might occupy the core of gay relationships. Which is also a damn good thing.
A.L.
Mark wrote:
bq. . We are not required to live our lives in service of what is best for some nebulous idea of what is good for society as a whole.
Agreed. At some point we simply vet our ideas through the public and move forward based on that democratic dialog. It doesn’t have to be logically consistent. But then, that doesn’t explain the travesty that happened in California and Massachusetts, does it?
In fact, what happened to neuter marriage doesn’t sound much like “America” at all.
Michael Totten wrote:
bq. All this fretting about polygamy can be resolved with a simple legal definition of marriage as follows: “Marriage is a union between two people.” Or something to that effect.
bq. Just pass that and quite wringing your hands about the death of marriage. Seriously.
There are two points here, that I will take separately. The first is that a legal definition is enough to stop a slippery slope. As with the above, I agree that should be the case. But that isn’t the case with marriage. It could be just between two people, but more on that later…
The death of marriage? One thing is for sure, it is the death of marriage equality. For the past century (or longer) marriage equality has meant the quality of representation and participation of both genders in marriage. We have terms that have slipped into being epithets, like “patriarchy” which have symbolized marriage inequality. But now, can someone tell me of the patriarchy in a gay marriage?
The civil rights movement fought for the quality of their representation through integration. Now, we are told gay is the new black. Gender segregation is the new integration. And the old gender integration is the new segregation. As “was put recently”:http://opine-editorials.blogspot.com/2008/06/maggie-gallagher-httparticle.html …
bq. Gay-marriage advocates say it all the time: People who think marriage is the union of husband and wife are like bigots who opposed interracial marriage. Believe them. They say it because they mean it.
Tim Oren wrote:
bq. From the state’s POV marriage is a contractual state between two (and only two) adults. Its control over that contract is exhibited by the need to formally go through a divorce proceeding to exit. The legal implications of the contract started out relatively simply with things like community property and inheritance laws, and have become further encrusted as society has become more complex: spousal insurance benefits, survival rules with respect to estate tax, healthcare powers of attorney and on and on.
And from what I can tell, that be an argument to get the state from assigning its own benefits to marriage, and getting the free society to quit assigning its own benefits to marriage.
But what I fear is that is a horribly irreconcilable position of stating marriage is a contract between only two people (like Mark said above) yet expecting third party participation with benefits and privileges. Its like me signing a contract with Bob that Wal Mart will give me health benefits. This assignment and expectation of third party benefits is exactly what this battle is supposed to be about, right? (Only the recent celebration in CA brings that theory in question as they have actually gained no additional benefits and privileges but are celebrating a victory of some sort anyway).
Which one is it there Tim and Mark? Is it just a two party contract or is it something more? The latter is a much greater vacuum that invites government control than anything stated by “one man and one woman” ever did. The government changes the definition and expects everyone to see it the same? Sounds more Orwellian than Utopian or libertarian.
_”But what I fear is that is a horribly irreconcilable position of stating marriage is a contract between only two people (like Mark said above) yet expecting third party participation with benefits and privileges.”_
Huh? Expecting? Wal-mart isnt required to provide benefits to anyone. Its their policy.
Its funny that all the same arguments you guys are making were made _identically_ against interracial marriage. Should wal-mart really have to give benefits to ‘race traitors’ if they dont believe in it? Is it Orwellian to force them to?
This death of marriage is such an amazing red-herring. Is anyone really arguing gay marriage will do _a fraction_ of the damage out of wedlock pregnancy or divorce does already? If so, please explain the mechanism. If not, why arent we recriminalizing premarital sex and divorce?
Are the commenters here seriously unclear on the link between gay marriage and polygamy? I can understand if you disagree with it, but the argument itself really shouldn’t be so surprising.
The conservative concern is the simplest form of cohesive logical argumentation. You can’t posit the “happy couples should get married” idea as an argument for gay marriage without allowing the same for polygamy/polyamory. You can’t make a moral argument against polygamy because you’ve rejected morality arguments against homsexuality and SSM. You can’t decry conservatives for being liberty-hating curmudgeons when they restrict the institution of marriage along the traditional gender lines for the participants, then arbitrarily decide to limit it based on the number, age, or blood relation of participants.
In short, if you accept the arguments people have been making in favor of SSM during the past few rounds, you can’t logically reject them when the polygamists start their round of litigation.
Now you could make a societal benefit argument about each dimension of marriage, and retain a consistent arguing framework. That would let you make the argument against polygamy (by citing the Saudi Arabia example noted above), but it puts the SSM argument at a disadvantage since it’s a recent creation, and the results from societies who have adopted it aren’t exactly models Americans would find appealing.
I have never, really honestly never, understood the modern conservative horror at homosexuality and gay marriage. I find it hard even to take seriously because the arguments and even the forms of the arguments strike me as non-sensical, emotionally over-wrought, and often in outright special-pleading contradiction to other supposedly held positions. (Except I have to take it seriously, because so much ink gets spilled over it.)
For instance, I’m seeing above that the California Courts are now “dictatorial” and their imposition is a “tyranny” all of which is driven by, and I quote directly, Mr. Blue: “the passion of the lawyer class for imposing their own views on people’s most intimate lives, on matters of life and death, on birth, sex, marriage and child-rearing.”
I am to take this seriously, Mr. Blue? Giving two men or two women the option to marry is tyranny? Allowing people far away from you, that you do not know and will in all likelyhood never know, the option to marry, is an act of dictatorship? Mr. Wishard likes to make elegant-sounding points about inversion, but what I see here is an outright inversion of the words tyranny, and dictatorial. Tyranny, to me, is denying someone a choice, rather than allowing them to make it. And the imposition of views, here, has been happening to gay people being treated not even as second-class citizens but as non-citizens in the eyes of the marriage system, not to you Mr. Blue. The marriage of two men or two women getting married is no more an imposition on anyone but themselves than the marriage of one man to one woman, and even the wildest narcissists have not been able to explain otherwise to me.
Don’t insult my intelligence by going on about a redefinition of marriage by redefining tyranny and dictatorship! Not you, Mr. Blue, not you, Mr. Wishard, not anyone. I know what those words mean, and legal acceptance of gay marriage rights is not either of those.
“Judicial tyranny,” my fat white ass.
Some other scattered shots, while I’m on the topic:
1) Like half this discussion, I utterly fail to see the link between homosexual marriage and polygamy. Like Tim Oren, I’m willing to call that line of attack what it is– bigotry. I guess I should be thankful we haven’t seen the homosexuality-leads-to-pedophilia canard. Wow. Progress.
2) Nemo: Yes, yes, the law of unintended consequences. You know what? When it comes to advancing civil rights, I’m prepared to say, “We’ll deal with it.” I see no reason to expect the republic will crash and burn over this, than over civil rights for women, or civil rights for ethnic minorities. It is, in fact, a bedrock belief of mine that the advance of civil liberties does, in the long run, strengthen a society, once all the bigots get over themselves.
3) Tim: The problem with your re-naming suggestion is that it binds reasonable people to reasonable actions, but leaves a lot of loopholes open for unreasonable people to keep mounting legal challenges. If you declare two people as married, the courts then have very clear legal guidelines on the rights of both people, individually and united. If you call it something else, no matter how strongly worded, the door remains open (wider, anyway) for legal challenges on the grounds that, “Oh, that’s a marriage right; they couldn’t possibly have meant to include that!”
It’s unacceptable to bigots because they know you’re trying to do an end run around them; it’s unacceptable to homosexuals because they know it’s a weaker solution than simply saying “We’re married.”
(And frankly, given the long legal history of marriage, it would have to be defined in terms of marriage, anyway, defeating the entire purpose.)
_”You can’t posit the “happy couples should get married” idea as an argument for gay marriage without allowing the same for polygamy/polyamory. “_
Screw happy couples. This is a simple contract and there is no reason to muck around with gender. Its entirely possible to have a contract restricted to 2 parties (power of attorney for instance). This is a simple pragmatic line to draw, all of the contractual stipulations of marriage become impossibly complicated between more than 2 people.
Mark B:
Huh? Expecting? Wal-mart isnt required to provide benefits to anyone. Its their policy.
He can strengthen his bad argument by citing, e.g., marriage taxation rules, inheritence rules, etc.
His argument is still irremediably broken, though, because men and women getting married already obtain those benefits. It’s really up to him to go through each and every single one of those instances and explain why there is a compelling state interest in awarding those rights to men and women (the vast majority of marriages even in a hypothetical world where gay marriage is uncontroversial) but not to men and men, or women and women.
Special pleading, again and again.
_An instance of this was the Terry Schiavo case. She could be and was killed because she was not seen as a person._
I felt like this deserves a longer response, but it’s off topic so I’ll let it go. Can’t you let it go?
My feelings on gay-marriage are simple: Why the hell not? I don’t understand the degradation issue, I think the polygamy/beastiality link is tenuous at best. I think if the law says two-consenting adults, the problem is taken care of. Gay people already adopt kids, so that’s a total non sequitur. Massachusetts has dealt with gay-marriage FINE thus far. Or has “it?”:http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=156320&title=mass.-hysteria
_I guess this is why the barbarians destroyed Rome._ I’m sorry, but this is stupid. Rome, Sparta, Athens (& the barbarians for that matter) were societies built on & around homosexual relationships. Rome didn’t fall until hundreds of years after the government switched to Christianity, and had literally nothing to do with the “homosexual” issue
David Blue: I agree that the process is messed up. If anything, this will draw this conflict out longer, and keep residual hateful feelings. But you know what? Over time people will realize that this gay “threat” is blown way out of proportion. And slowly, Americans will just get used to it.
On the last note, I think easy divorce is a problem. But so is easy marriage, easy childhood and easy adultery. Many people make rash decisions in our society, and unfortunately the innocent children suffer the most. That’s just the way the world is.
Re: Defining marriage as “between two people,” How dare you oppress bisexuals like that. Why is it any of your damn business if my partner and I are both in love with another person who is in love with both of us?*
Does nobody see any problem with that?
*This is writ ironical.
As for heterosexual divorce being a greater threat to marriage than gay marriage (which someone suggested upthread), I would argue that the culture of self-absorption and victimology that produced both is the greatest threat. I don’t believe gay marriage is a disease; it’s a symptom. The disease is cultural entropy. And yes, if I were king for a day I _would_ limit divorce by law. When there are children involved, divorce should only be allowed for the 4 “A”s, adultery, abuse, addiction, or abandonment (and there should be some penalty attached to the abandonment). I’m not holding my breath on any of this, though. I just hope I’m not around for the final collapse of our entropied culture. It’s going to be very ugly.
A.L. –
My underground fortress might not be the social center of the universe, but we get very good intelligence down here.
Instead of “norms”, which of of course all heterosexuals don’t follow, I should have said “ideals” – meaning relationships based on love and responsibility towards one another. The bath house culture was indeed a deliberate inversion of that – the whole point was that it was anonymous, impersonal, and free of any commitment.
I think they did fight for a central place as the public image of gay culture, and still do. How marginal they are is another question, but AIDS definitely toned things down.
Minority cultures struggle against negative stereotypes, often by trying to advance positive stereotypes. Whether good or bad, a stereotype is a sorry thing to live by. Stereotypes are also offensive to reason and common experience, so as cultural strategy they tend to backfire. Notice how the old NAACP image of blacks – clean-cut, articulate, educated – was decisively defeated in popular culture by the gangster-pimp. Now blacks get to see themselves depicted in ways that would make D.W. Griffith sick.
Individual freedom and choice, yes. Collective norms dictated by politics – if you want, but it’s a lamentable choice.
_I would argue that the culture of self-absorption and victimology that produced both is the greatest threat. I don’t believe gay marriage is a disease; it’s a symptom._
So, if you’re gay, you must be self-absorbed? Explain your reasoning, because it seems like BS from here.
_And yes, if I were king for a day I would limit divorce by law._
And you know what? You would have made my childhood miserable. My parents were married happily for 12 years, and unhapilly for another 3. They yelled, they fought, they just didn’t love each other, and that friction got in the way oftheir parenting. My parents tried to come to terms with their situation, but they just couldn’t do it.
A month after their dual-parternship divorce they were healthier people, and better parents to me & my brother. I’d rather have good divorced parents than unhappy married parents. I agree that too many people cut ties to quickly, but limiting divorce won’t solve our family crisis.
_Notice how the old NAACP image of blacks – clean-cut, articulate, educated – was decisively defeated in popular culture by the gangster-pimp. _
And you know why this happened? Because many inner city black people in the 70’s believed they had a better chance to make it as a drug dealer than they did in a “white man’s world”. I didn’t say it’s an accurate belief, but I definately believe that negative stereotypes of black culture directly infected black communities with the belief that they’re only chance is music, athletics or drugs. This has been a continous problem for the last 100 years, and it’s changing very slowly.
I don’t expect this to be the same problem with gay people, because they’re not raised in gay families or insulated to gay communities, and can succeed without anyone knowing they’re gay (GASP!).
Marcus V:
Maybe I was unclear, but I support the right of gays to enter into monogamous relationships. I just don’t believe that the legal definition of such relationships is an insurmountable obstacle.
I also support the rights of those gays who reject marriage, or who embrace hedonist lifestyles with other adults. And as long as we’re recognizing gay rights, I’ve got a couple more:
1. The right of gays to conceal, or even deny, their sexuality. Hypocrisy and self-loathing may not be laudable things, but since when are they anybody else’s business, let alone the public’s business?
2. The right of gays to seek “cures” for their sexuality, through Scientology or some other moonshine, even if they are doomed to fail.
If you have a right to do A, you have a right to do B, C, or D – by the same principle. Obviously rights do not require public approval, or the support of law so long as they are within the law. And so long as they do not harm others they should be within the law.
But if disapproval is tyranny, who are the tyrants?
bq. Like half this discussion, I utterly fail to see the link between homosexual marriage and polygamy.
The link is that the same arguments supporting the former can be used, with minimal modification, to support the latter. It’s a pretty simple logical construct.
bq. Like Tim Oren, I’m willing to call that line of attack what it is– bigotry. I guess I should be thankful we haven’t seen the homosexuality-leads-to-pedophilia canard. Wow. Progress.
You’re talking about behavior leading to other behavior, but that’s not what the conservatives are arguing. Leave the strawman at home. (The actual argument is that _societal acceptance_ of one type of behavior will lead down the proverbial slope to acceptance of another kind.
And for the nth time, can we please stop screaming BIGOT! whenever someone opposes SSM? It’s about as tired as people screaming RACIST! when someone points out the problems and logical inconsistencies in affirmative action.
bq. Screw happy couples.
(I admit I had to edit out 5 off-color jokes here…)
bq. This is a simple contract and there is no reason to muck around with gender. Its entirely possible to have a contract restricted to 2 parties (power of attorney for instance).
Well fine then; codify a system of contracts that approximates the marriage contract, and can be entered into by any two consenting adults. Don’t call it marriage. Mock AL for celebrating a bunch of random people signing an arbitrary contract in California. Is everyone happy now? No?
Maybe I was unclear, but I support the right of gays to enter into monogamous relationships.
You are unclear: Do you support their right to marry under the same laws as heterosexuals? If not, I will unapologetically consider that to be endorsement of a separate-but-equal doctrine.
But if disapproval is tyranny, who are the tyrants?
Personal disapproval is not tyranny. Disapproval with the force of the state behind it is tyranny. You got included in that rant because you’re the one claiming that the only tyranny in this discussion is tyranny (dictatorship, actually, was your word) of homosexuality. You actually went so far as to say that there is no tyranny flowing in the other direction, that the only dictatorship here was “Not [you], not America, not Christianity or society.”
And that, I say, is rubbish, because it is exactly dictatorship to hem and haw and draw up reasons to deny two men or two women equal treatment under the law. You may not be enthusiastic about it. You might, depending on the answer to the question of whether you support the right to marry, be personally against it.
But you are also an apologist for it if you pretend that there is no dictatorship involved in the arbitrary denial of equal rights under the law.
_Notice how the old NAACP image of blacks – clean-cut, articulate, educated – was decisively defeated in popular culture by the gangster-pimp._
No. I don’t. I have seen the addition of several image types of blacks in pop culture over the last 3 decades…almost to the point that today a black actor can play any part and it needn’t have anything to do with his or her blackness. Also blacks as clean-cut, articulate and educated was not an “image” created or fostered by NAACP, it was simply who and what they were. It was reality. (Would a white person every consider those qualities to be an “image” of white people?); nor should NAACP “images” be confused or contrasted with images in popular culture, any more than reality should be confused with entertainment.
Mark wrote:
bq. Huh? Expecting? Wal-mart isnt required to provide benefits to anyone. Its their policy.
Well, then we are expecting that Wal-Mart can give benefits to whomever they wish? They can recognize only marriage that means something relevant to social concerns of protecting in-tact relationships, children’s rights and marriage equality.
I’d like to have hope in that Mark is really for that kind of freedom, but that is undermined by his next paragraph:
bp. Its funny that all the same arguments you guys are making were made identically against interracial marriage. Should wal-mart really have to give benefits to ‘race traitors’ if they dont believe in it? Is it Orwellian to force them to?
Well, is it? By the way, the fact that a racial caste system was found to not be in the social interest does not mean that protecting children’s rights, and marriage equality is not. Those are different ends of the rational test spectrum.
Its not rare that someone offers the ability to harbor a self-contradictory opinion as an escape from the rigors of debate. But that wasn’t the only case in his comment which continues by saying:
bp. This death of marriage is such an amazing red-herring. Is anyone really arguing gay marriage will do a fraction of the damage out of wedlock pregnancy or divorce does already? If so, please explain the mechanism. If not, why arent we recriminalizing premarital sex and divorce?
If it contributes to the death of marriage, it isn’t a red-herring — even if it is a fraction of what other forces do. But Mark does a disservice to himself and others by pretending that the mechanism wasn’t given already and by many. Start at the top of this thread and start with “nuclear family”, then continue reading to my statement of the squelching of marriage equality and problems of “rootless men” (which neutered marriage does the opposite of discouraging). Also read “The Unbeleiver’s summary”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/last_night_marriage_for_all_in_california.php#c26 which is also salient to that question.
Hello, just to bring a little sense to the discussion.
There is already something that exists where two people can form any type of contractual union they want.
Its called a “contract”.
People arguing that marriage is just a contract are simply arguing that marriage need not exist anymore. And funny enough it seems to be those that are crying the most when the dialog ponders the death of marriage.
Alchemist:
Yes, but how did they come to believe that? Was it before or after their theaters were filled with Superfly knock-offs?
Actually, there was no strict causal relationship either way. It was an unrealistic expectation to think that every black man was going to be Sidney Portier. The utopian stereotype was replaced by the comic one.
So it is common for black characters in film to speak inner city argot and to be half-criminal, even if they’re cops. They are also commonly portrayed as cowards, and above all as comic figures. White audiences are not only invited to believe this, but to join in ridiculing blacks who reject that image.
Gays who are looking to craft a public face for themselves as a group should look on this as a cautionary tale, and notice how gays are depicted in popular culture: Not so much as happily married couples, but as clowns with feather boas.
_”Well fine then; codify a system of contracts that approximates the marriage contract, and can be entered into by any two consenting adults. Don’t call it marriage.”_
EXACTLY. If you guys want marriage defined to be this quasi-religious social institution with all kinds of societal implications, _get government out of it._ Otherwise dont be surprised when you have to jump through a lot of legal and moral loops to be inclusive to everyone.
_”Mock AL for celebrating a bunch of random people signing an arbitrary contract in California. Is everyone happy now? No?”_
Realistically all marriage is a bunch of random people arbitrarilly signing contracts. Anything more exists only in the minds of those who think government needs to sanctify the sacrament. I’m just suggesting we cease confusing the two and let any two consenting adults agree how they split their shit up when one drops dead. You can call it whatever you want, as long as everyone gets to call it the same thing.
_notice how gays are depicted in popular culture: Not so much as happily married couples, but as clowns with feather boas._
Really? I don’t recall Will the title character of the major hit sitcom “Will & Grace” wearing too many boas or clown noses. Nor the cowboys in the Oscar-nominated “Brokeback Mountain” Nor Sarah Silverman’s gay stoner friends. Maybe I’m just watching the wrong stuff. Don’t care for clown noses, but love boas, so perhaps you could direct me to the proper viewing spots.
_”Well, then we are expecting that Wal-Mart can give benefits to whomever they wish? They can recognize only marriage that means something relevant to social concerns of protecting in-tact relationships, children’s rights and marriage equality”_
That doesnt exist independent of gay marriage. Can Wal-mart deny benefits to anyone not officially married in a Catholic church? Do you think it should be that way?
_”Start at the top of this thread and start with “nuclear family”, then continue reading to my statement of the squelching of marriage equality and problems of “rootless men”_”
And, again, i bid you show me what you are doing in the hetero world via government fiat to force the nuclear atom back together.
You argument is nonsensical either way, and basically only stands up if you actually believe gay men are just confused straight men that would be happily married to women and raising good american children if it wasnt for that insipid gay lobby.
I fail to see how continuing to forbid a group virtually forced by law and society to be ‘rootless men’ from settling down makes society less rooted. Doesnt make much sense to me.
_”People arguing that marriage is just a contract are simply arguing that marriage need not exist anymore”_
People arguing that special government sanction is what makes marriage work arent very consistant conservatives in my opinion.
This idea that without that special stamp from city hall 10,000 years of human civilization will come crashing down is silly. Or better yet, if heteros have to share the distinction we are doomed. Thats just crazy talk. Marriage existed BEFORE GOVERNMENT existed.
Mark B (aka Il Fantastico),
I agree and think there’s a good working model already in place. The Catholic Church, e.g.. The state sanctions marriages performed by a priest.
The priest, however, would never marry two divorced people, just as the priest would never marry two gay people. But the state will allow two divorced people to marry and it should allow two gay people to marry. If your religion doesn’t allow you to recognize the marriage of divorced people or gay people, fine, don’t recognize them. But don’t force the state to follow the dictates of your religion when it is applied to people who aren’t of your religion.
Marcus:
There’s no pretense on my part, just a somewhat narrower definition of “dictatorship”. Insofar as marriage is a right, it has never been equal even for heterosexuals. At one time you could marry at 13 in Mississippi; now you can’t marry in Mississippi at age 20 without parental consent, though you can in Georgia. And so on.
And the law does not pay equal respect to all possible definitions of marriage. You cannot marry two women. And so on.
I meant “dictate” in the sense of dictating norms of behavior, not legal coercion. We all have norms of behavior dictated to us, by family, spouses, and peers. This is not real tyranny, especially if you don’t listen to it.
Minority groups get additional dictation on how they should or should not behave, and it does not come from outside, but from their own self-appointed leaders.
Another Mark writes about the same argument:
bq. His argument is still irremediably broken, though, because men and women getting married already obtain those benefits. It’s really up to him to go through each and every single one of those instances and explain why there is a compelling state interest in awarding those rights to men and women (the vast majority of marriages even in a hypothetical world where gay marriage is uncontroversial) but not to men and men, or women and women.
bq. Special pleading, again and again.
Three points. It was the other Mark who suggested, “Wal-mart isnt required to provide benefits to anyone.” Yet they are required, even if against their will by the argument you present. It was also the other Mark who suggested, “We are not required to live our lives in service of what is best for some nebulous idea of what is good for society as a whole.”
Perhaps you two (or from my perspective the other Mark needs to do this just on his own) can reconcile those different opinions then let me know. Present it here. I really hold nothing more than a passing interest in one’s ability to harbor inconsistency on whether or not the jackboot of the government is coming down as a result of this ruling.
The second point, the ruling did not say that homosexuality is not a suspect class but “sexual orientation”. What kind of vague nonsense is that? Can you really suggest that sexual orientation is, or is not in and of itself a class — let alone a suspect class?
There is a compelling state interest, as was recognized by the lower court as well as courts around the US. That the social interest in encouraging responsibility in procreation was not even presented by the state attorney, or recognized by the court, means little when it does for so many other states. That the court does not think protecting in-tact, (or nuclear) family bonds, or marriage equality in the quality of the representation of both sexes, is as much admitting they want marriage dead, long live regulated co-habitation under the same name.
Now as far as special pleading, that brings up my third point. Have you not read this thread? Seriously, I can’t believe you haven’t read all of the comments complaining that the arguments that brought about neutered marriage does not bring about polygamy, polyamoury, or any other kind of romantic co-habitation. To say that the arguments apply only to one group and not the others is special pleading.
But lets look beyond this. Do they even have to be romantically intimate? Why not just committed to having and maintaining a household? Two widow sisters, or a mother-daughter team raising their children. As someone mentioned on my site once about the special pleading that is gay-advocacy in creating civil unions applies also to neutered marriage:
bq. The mask slips — to reveal the visage of asexuophobia!
bq. This sort of “there goes the neighborhood” ruling against Aunt Tilly and Aunt Milly is the logical extension of the logic of the Goodridge reasoning that marriage isn’t really about children, but rather about “promoting love.” Under Goodridge, the state has an affirmative obligation to make sure that Aunt Tilly is doing Aunt Milly.
In the name of equality, we had DP’s in California. We have CU’s in many other states. But they don’t include all committed households. They don’t include any two people who want to contract in mutually beneficial reciprocation. Is that equality? No. It is very much special pleading from the gay advocates from day one.
bq. …the fact that a racial caste system was found to not be in the social interest does not mean that protecting children’s rights, and marriage equality is not.
Like Marcus, I find the inversions in this discussion to be both stunning and fascinating. So keeping same sex couples from marrying is “equality” and denying likely-to-be-childless relationships is “protecting children’s rights”.
Right.
bq. There is already something that exists where two people can form any type of contractual union they want. Its called a “contract”. People arguing that marriage is just a contract are simply arguing that marriage need not exist anymore.
A conventional contract doesn’t require a divorce for exit. Obviously the state has had and continues to have a role in not only defining the marriage contract, but enforcing it. If not, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Even most libertarians will grant that the state has a legitimate function in enforcing the observation of routine contracts, let alone something as complex and long-lasting as a marital relationship. (Community property, anyone? We’re talking about California, remember.) Is that enough sense for you?
The only question is why the two names filled in on the marriage license have to be of different sex.
It seems that when lefties invoke a specious right to not be offended by other’s actions, it’s “political correctness”. When theocons and paleocons do it, then I guess it’s “defense of marriage.”
_”Perhaps you two (or from my perspective the other Mark needs to do this just on his own) can reconcile those different opinions then let me know”_
Its simple- if you are going to provide something to your employees you have to do it in a way that conforms to the civil rights laws. I’m sorry if you arent ok with that.
You cant just give health insurance to your white employees either. Do you agree with that? Is that a contradiction to freedom?
bq. EXACTLY. If you guys want marriage defined to be this quasi-religious social institution with all kinds of societal implications, get government out of it.
…and we’re right back to the tyranny argument other commenters have been having. The polls for the last few years have indicated the majority _do_ want “marriage” to be exactly that, to the exclusion of SSM. The courts are forcing an opposite result. Isn’t such an usurption of the will of the people by unelected officials the very definition of tyranny?
bq. Otherwise dont be surprised when you have to jump through a lot of legal and moral loops to be inclusive to everyone.
Careful with the usage of “you” there. If it were up to me, I’d kick government out of all kinds of institutions… but said government insists that its regulations are there to prevent discrimination and provide inclusiveness, and will not leave. How does one break the chicken-and-egg cycle? Is inclusiveness _qua_ inclusiveness such a necessary part of civil life that conservatives arguing against encroaching government intervention should all just pack up and go home?
You ignore an incredibly simple truth: marriage was _already_ a quasi-religious social institution _before_ government got involved in defining it. Conservatives and limited-government types will bemoan the initial encroachment, but presumably that battle is already lost. So given this entrenchment the conservatives will argue the Western definition that is _older than the government_ should remain society’s/government’s definition. That’s not a cry for more government intervention, that’s a pragmatic appeal in the face of existing state regulation.
Do we have to copy/paste arguements against state-enforced common definitions before we can argue for a realistic modern position that takes it into account?
So many posts, so little time…
Glen:_Was it before or after their theaters were filled with Superfly knock-offs?_
I don’t know, was Superfly filled in the 1900’s? Do you know anything about early jazz history and black repression?
Mark:_Really? I don’t recall Will the title character of the major hit sitcom “Will & Grace” wearing too many boas or clown noses_
Have you watched the show? The gay people were FABULOUS!
_I just don’t believe that the legal definition of such relationships is an insurmountable obstacle._
No it’s not, unless you want any of the legal rights provided to you by being married. But who uses those things?
Mark wrote:
bq. People arguing that special government sanction is what makes marriage work arent very consistant conservatives in my opinion.
Conservative is your label, not mine. I used to balk at everyone calling me a conservative because I (ironically) take a very liberal position towards marriage equality (equal gender representation) and children’s rights to their heritage. Sadly it is the adults rights at the expense of the other gender and children that grabs the “liberal” label from people.
As far as consistent, I see that government recognizes the family creation. How a man and woman come together children are a reasonable expectation. I have no problem with that.
I also have no problem with a government welfare system of banding together otherwise broken families, whether through polygamy, polyandry, or homosexuality — or even friends who are simply pushing through.
So far Hawaii, which was the first state to neuter marriage through judicial fiat, is the only one that recognizes such programs. In many ways they, not California or Massachusetts are the most mature in this debate.
The right to marry is not the issue.
The right at issue (at least in California) is the right to state recognition of a relationship as a marriage. The harm at issue is the alienation one feels upon not being able to tell people at a dinner party that one’s significant other is one’s lawfully wedded spouse.
What’s fascinating to me is how support for civil unions became bigotry.
_”Isn’t such an usurption of the will of the people by unelected officials the very definition of tyranny?”_
No, the tyranny of the majority is at least as grave a threat to liberty as simple dictatorship, and our constitution reflects that truth.
It is the courts job to make sure our laws jive with each other, and the law of the land makes it clear you cant prevent a contract on the basis of gender, which is what banning gay marriage does. It is no different that passing a law saying women must have female lawyers only, or something of the like.
_”You ignore an incredibly simple truth: marriage was already a quasi-religious social institution before government got involved in defining it.”_
True indeed. And 50 years ago it was between a man and a woman _of the same race_. A couple hundred years ago it was arranged by the patriarchs of the familys. Falling back on precident doesnt hold up when the entire concept of the argument is extending equal rights. “We’ve always been racist, masoginist, homophobes” is not a good argument.
_The polls for the last few years have indicated the majority do want “marriage” to be exactly that, to the exclusion of SSM_
A majority of people didn’t want women or black people to vote either, but that’s been found to be unconsitutional. Sorry, mob appeal does not rule our constitution.
_You ignore an incredibly simple truth: marriage was already a quasi-religious social institution before government got involved in defining it._
And you’re missing my point: I DON’T CARE. I DO care about the legal status of marriage; and since OUR goverment is not ruled by the catholic church, religous belief in marriage is totally irrelevent to this conversation. End of story.
Tim wrote:
bq. So keeping same sex couples from marrying is “equality” and denying likely-to-be-childless relationships is “protecting children’s rights”.
You simply need to ask someone you trust about where babies come from. It follows from there how best to ensure the children’s rights to know their heritage.
Do you, or do you not, support a child’s right to be raised by their parents in a loving married home?
Remember, I’m not arguing the jackboot of government involvement here like the equalitistas in this argument. I’m just wondering if you support recognizing that children are better off — all else being equal — in that environment. And if the government is within its purview to encourage that with an institution called marriage.
bq. A conventional contract doesn’t require a divorce for exit.
So to you the nature of keeping the contract bound without an easy exit is important. You see value in government oversight of the contract to keep that romantic bond together, and not easily broken?
You should get with Tim Oren above, and help him understand that as he said, “I don’t see where ‘regulation of romance’ comes into this.”
Mark wrote:
bq. It is the courts job to make sure our laws jive with each other, and the law of the land makes it clear you cant prevent a contract on the basis of gender, which is what banning gay marriage does.
Perhaps you should talk to Mark Beuhner above who stated, “Because this is America. We are not required to live our lives in service of what is best for some nebulous idea of what is good for society as a whole.”
_”Do you, or do you not, support a child’s right to be raised by their parents in a loving married home?”_
Careful, the gay crusaders are coming to kick in your door and take you child away to be raised by a polygamist transgender quintuplet.
This is ridiculous, i keep hearing about ‘the death of marriage’ ‘nuetering of marriage’, blah, blah, blah.
Lets get down to brass tacks. Please someone explaing to me the _specific mechanism_ via which this will harm: 1.me. 2.you. 3.your neighborhood 4.your city 5.your country.
And i dont want any more hyperbolic constructions. EXACTLY what is going to happen that is so terrible (that isnt hapenning now by the way).
What will the divorce rate look like in 10 years? What will out of wedlock births?
Give me some specifics we can look for so i can shake this feeling that this is a religious and not scientific argument.
On Lawn, im sorry you are having so much trouble understand the not-so-subtle nuances of living under our constitutional system of law.
Freedom doesn mean you can do whatever you want to whomever you want. It isnt a contradiction. We have laws and we have liberties. You cant have one without the other. _Please_ tell me you understand the concept that just because you arent free to open a ‘white’s only’ restaurant doesnt mean you are living in a fascist hellhole.
PD
_The harm at issue is the alienation one feels upon not being able to tell people at a dinner party that one’s significant other is one’s lawfully wedded spouse._
Apparently, you aren’t married. I lived with my wife for several years before we got married. Once we did marry there was a significant and profound change in the nature of our relationship which had absolutely nothing to do with what we told other people at dinner parties. It did have to do–partially–with how we were now regarded and recognized as a unit by society at large. Society’s view of us, in turn, has an impact upon how we feel about ourselves. Of course, much of the change was strictly internal and had nothing to do with other people or society. But I doubt that we would have felt the profound shift had we simply entered a civil union rather than a marriage.
_What’s fascinating to me is how support for civil unions became bigotry._
Support for civil unions is not bigotry. Denial of marriage to gays is. If civil unions were available to all who chose that course and marriage was available to all who chose that course, bigotry wouldn’t enter into.
Glen, #48:
I meant “dictate” in the sense of dictating norms of behavior, not legal coercion. We all have norms of behavior dictated to us, by family, spouses, and peers. This is not real tyranny, especially if you don’t listen to it.
Minority groups get additional dictation on how they should or should not behave, and it does not come from outside, but from their own self-appointed leaders.
But again, the only dictating going on, here, is mainstream society, driven from the right, dictating that gays can’t join the marriage club. That is dictating the social norm. It’s a big fat unambiguous “Thou shalt not!” encoded in law pointed at gay people. If you construe a legal directive to stop dictating your social norms in law to everyone else as dictatorship, then your notion of what dictatorship and tyranny are, are radically out of step with the last several hundred years of western philosophy.
The only dictate here is for people to mind their own damn business and their own damn marriages and keep out of everyone else’s. It’s a right heterosexuals take for granted.
Unbeliever, #52:
…and we’re right back to the tyranny argument other commenters have been having. The polls for the last few years have indicated the majority do want “marriage” to be exactly that, to the exclusion of SSM. The courts are forcing an opposite result. Isn’t such an usurption of the will of the people by unelected officials the very definition of tyranny?
Are you even glancingly familiar with the term “tyranny of the majority?” Are you even remotely aware that, fifty years ago, you could poll the south and find a tyrannical majority opposed to mixed race marriages? Or in favor of separate but equal racial relations that were anything but? Or in favor of strict segregation to the point of separate entrances?
When people make the bigotry point, it’s because the arguments are exactly the same form! How do people not see this?
bq. Do you, or do you not, support a child’s right to be raised by their parents in a loving married home?
Sure, assuming such a home remains available. And having same sex couples married abrogates that good exactly how?
Like Mark said, be specific. The fact that two of my lesbian friends will be able to call themselves ‘married’ is going to harm the newborn child of my next door neighbors – exactly how? Your ‘yuck factor’ or religious beliefs don’t count. Nor do hand waves back to the 16th century. Exactly how, please.
Mark wrote:
bq. Careful, the gay crusaders are coming to kick in your door and take you child away to be raised by a polygamist transgender quintuplet.
I don’t appreciate being made into a strawman, and neither would you.
Marriage protects the in-tact bonds of parents and children. Is that, or is that not a concern to you?
Either way it is to many people. Especially children who have found out that their desires to know their real mothers or fathers are thwarted by the adult needs of their care-givers.
Your commentary is, perhaps, enough to show the death of marriage. You show a complete disregard for children being raised by their parents, as if any two people can raise a child as well as their parents — all else being equal. And if that is the case, then do you think that philosophy will equate to more or less parents abandoning their children?
bq. On Lawn, im sorry you are having so much trouble understand the not-so-subtle nuances of living under our constitutional system of law.
You obviously have a very high opinion of your understanding. But it comes across as arbitrary, simplistic, and even hypocritical. I’m just pointing that out. Sure you need both ways, but for you it seems just a one way street. Liberty when you want it, but enforcement of ideals when it comes to people you disagree with.
That is all.
Fred: Defining marriage as “between two people,” How dare you oppress bisexuals like that. Why is it any of your damn business if my partner and I are both in love with another person who is in love with both of us?*
You obviously directed that at me, so I’ll answer.
I’m not oppressing you, dude. If you want to have threesomes or move a off-the-books second wife or husband into the house, go right ahead. No one is stopping you. What you don’t get to do is get health-insurance benefits for your spouse and all your friends.
I know what oppression looks like, and this isn’t it.
I know you’re being ironic, Fred, but I can see that your point is that someone might make that argument to me in good faith. And that’s what my answer would be were that the case.
bq. No, the tyranny of the majority is at least as grave a threat to liberty as simple dictatorship, and our constitution reflects that truth.
You might think it is arbitrary for me to claim that tyranny of a government over the majority is worse than tyranny of the majority over the minority. Regardless, I’d say it is uncontroversial the former should be included in the definition and taken into account in any system we set up to limit to limit “tyranny”. And unelected officials dictating anti-majority policies fits the bill.
(Actually I’d say the “tyranny of the majority” is more about the absoluteness of individual rights than about actual tyranny over an entire population. But now we’re just arguing labels.)
bq. A majority of people didn’t want women or black people to vote either, but that’s been found to be unconsitutional. Sorry, mob appeal does not rule our constitution.
Yes, yes, we’re all bigots, thank you for playing.
But I’m curious to know when the majority in a society stopped being the majority and started being a “mob”. When a court rules against them? When they hold an opinion we deride 100 years later? When an enclave over in Berkely pass a town council resolution? Do I get to call the majority who currently disapproves of the Iraq war a mob, or do I have to wait a few years?
In any case, your statement is wrong. The courts didn’t find these majority opinions unconstitutional, *we passed Constitutional Amendments to extend the rights beyond their orignal Constitutional definition*. Those Amendments require a supermajority to pass; by definition, expanding the right to vote was an expression of the will of the people. You may not like that those rights were restricted in the first place, but that’s hardly an indictment of majority sentiment.
Last I checked the term “mob” was reserved for groups of citizens acting outside of the law to enforce their will. Make an argument about “unelightened societies” if you will, but majorities in alignment with the current laws of their representative democracies deserve better treatment than you, or the judges in California, afford them.
bq. And 50 years ago it was between a man and a woman of the same race. A couple hundred years ago it was arranged by the patriarchs of the familys. Falling back on precident doesnt hold up when the entire concept of the argument is extending equal rights. “We’ve always been racist, masoginist, homophobes” is not a good argument.
I’m making an argument about marriage in Western culture, not American civil regulations. Not all marriage codes were racist or patriarchical. It’s also true that many cultures have clan, tribal, or class divisions that shaped the institution (and those who believe in the historical necessity of cohesive societies will be glad to point out the benefits of these divisions). But the common thread among the various codes–even the polygamist strains–was the distinction of man and woman.
Surely a thousand years or so of multiple traditions having a core commonality counts as a strong argument about the core definition of a societal institution?
On-Lawn, i can only keep asking you: _specifically,_ how is gay marriage going to impact these families you keep on about.
_”Especially children who have found out that their desires to know their real mothers or fathers are thwarted by the adult needs of their care-givers”_
What does this have to do with gay marriage?
_”marriage. You show a complete disregard for children being raised by their parents, as if any two people can raise a child as well as their parents — all else being equal_”
What does this have to do with gay marriage?
You asked me not to set up strawmen… well it LOOKS like you are suggesting people ware going to have their children taken away. Could you please explain how?
Marcus V:
Again, I’m not in favor of telling gays they can’t marry. And again, society dictates all kinds of things about marriage and sexual relationships, and not just from the right.
Unless we are like George Bernard Shaw’s Brittanus (“A barbarian who thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature”) we have recognize that our society does set limits on marriage that other societies would not. We are obviously not willing to set aside all such customs – such as our customary prohibition of polygamy and pedophilia. Arbitrary does not mean unjust.
_Surely a thousand years or so of multiple traditions having a core commonality counts as a strong argument about the core definition of a societal institution?_
Certainly, but not about the enduring value of that definition, institution or practice. Slavery, torture, xenophobia, bigotry e.g., all have thousand-plus-year pedigrees and can be found in multiple traditions and have been codified and institionalized. Things do change. People do grow up. Superstitions do vanish. Just because my grandmother was married to my grandfather doesn’t mean my son can’t marry another man, nor should it, if you can make a good argument for the change. On the other hand, the argument that we shouldn’t let gays marry because the Romans didn’t, is a pretty weak one.
And, as has been pointed out, no one is being forced to do anything or prohibited from doing anything, so why on earth does anyone care?
Unbeliever: My point is that law CAN be mob rule. So how do you decide? You take an argument to a court system, and make your case in front of people who are educated in american law. That is how our constitution is set up. If you don’t like it, you’re free to challenge the constitution up to the supreme court, or get a supermajority to change the constitution. If you do those things, there’s not much I can say about it.
But if you can’t explain how gay marriage breaks the constitution, or damages the nation, you’re going to lose.
bq. Are you even glancingly familiar with the term “tyranny of the majority?”
I discussed this above in #67. You’re using the phrase wrong–it applies to the majority restricting the rights of their opponents–and it doesn’t refute the problem of the majority itself being overruled by its nominally representative government. Frankly I don’t care who wins in the battle of labels: is “tyranny” the larger society who refuses the tiny minority of gays who wish to marry, or is it the local judge who forces a policy preference over an entire nation? (Why can’t it be both?)
I’m a conservative. I side with tradition on the former question and democracy on the latter. That probably loses me some cocktail party invitations, but at least I recognize when someone is trying to play word games to win an argument via an end-run around logic.
bq. When people make the bigotry point, it’s because the arguments are exactly the same form! How do people not see this?
The same way SSM advocates can’t see how their arguments have exactly the same form as the polygamists’ arguments?
_…such as our customary prohibition of polygamy and pedophilia. Arbitrary does not mean unjust._
The differences here are large and massive. Consensual adult is the law of the land here. Two concensual adults can do whatever they please. Pedophilia is not consensual adults, and therefore will never be legal. The problem with polygamy is it’s close ties (historically) to pedophilia and abuse.
Oops, typo. The differences here are just massive.
_”The problem with polygamy is it’s close ties (historically) to pedophilia and abuse.”_
I disagree- the problem with polygamy in my mind is that it is not conducive to the ‘power of attorney’ and aset splitting type agreements that are the point of marriage from a legal standpoint.
Mark demands:
bq. On-Lawn, i can only keep asking you: specifically, how is gay marriage going to impact these families you keep on about.
Which is all well and good except you keep ignoring the answer. Perhaps you are overly constraining the question? For instance, I could ask how marriage as an institution of gender integration (hence marriage equality) harms gay couples?
The answer is it does not, but one could answer like PD did above:
bq. Apparently, you aren’t married. I lived with my wife for several years before we got married. Once we did marry there was a significant and profound change in the nature of our relationship which had absolutely nothing to do with what we told other people at dinner parties. It did have to do–partially–with how we were now regarded and recognized as a unit by society at large. Society’s view of us, in turn, has an impact upon how we feel about ourselves. Of course, much of the change was strictly internal and had nothing to do with other people or society. But I doubt that we would have felt the profound shift had we simply entered a civil union rather than a marriage.
There’s just something about marrying that is impacted by our social understanding of it? I’m inclined to ask if that suggestion of how homosexual couples are benefited by “marriage” is real enough to you to accept as an answer or not. But I believe I can guess, albeit unintelligently, that it is.
So lest you continue to move the goalposts, or impose unneeded restraints on the answers I want to just nail this down with you. Could you give an example answer to your questions that you would accept (though disagree with) as actually answering the questions you posed?
I’d like to keep trying, honestly, since you seem very persnickety on this I’d rather let you talk first about where your parameters actually lie before continuing to simply fail to meet your criteria.
_The same way SSM advocates can’t see how their arguments have exactly the same form as the polygamists’ arguments?_
What polygamists’ arguments? Who’s advocating for polygamy? How would their arguments be similar to arguments in favor of gay marriage?
This gets sillier by the minute. We can’t allow gays to marry out of fear that polygamists will adopt their arguments?
The problem with equating slavery and marriage equality as both “traditions” ready to be re-evaluated is that the mechanisms of their evaluation are entirely different.
Consider that we didn’t abolish slavery by redefining it to mean people are allowed to say “hello” as they pass on the street. But taking buying and selling people as property — that is bad.
Nor would we allow buying and selling people as property if it arose under a different name.
Marriage, on the other hand, as an institution of equal gender representation is a definition. Evoking it, and its use through history, is more than tradition it is precedent. Tradition and precedent are similar, so I can understand the confusion. But they are very different.
On Lawn,
for the record, the lengthy quote in #76 was from me, not from PD. It was addressed to PD.
_”Which is all well and good except you keep ignoring the answer. Perhaps you are overly constraining the question?”_
By asking you for a SINGLE example of the imminent demise of civilization you are claiming? Wow, just wow. Forgive me for constraining you by, you know, asking what the actual damages you forsee are. It is enough for us to know there will be damages, and they will be horrifying.
Can i take it you are unable to provide any specifics? Or even attempt to connect your earlier rants i quoted to the subject at hand?
_Evoking it, and its use through history, is more than tradition it is precedent._
Throughout history, by tradition, and precedent, marriage included arranged marriage, forced marriage, polygamy, and unequally distributed rights among spouses, some of which continues to the present. It would be a mistake, in my opinion, to let either tradition or precedent regarding marriage, hold much sway over how we decide to view it or define in today’s society. I personally don’t wish to feel bound by the traditions of Visigoth’s, Greeks, Romans, Christians or Lepruchans, if those traditions, in my view, are unjust, unfair, impractical or silly. If there are a class of people who wish to marry but who were previously not allowed to marry, and if their marrying does no harm and has no effect on anyone else, beyond spreading joy and bliss (& the potential for ugly, bitter disputes), then it would be wrong to stop them from doing so.
A different Mark wrote:
bq. What polygamists’ arguments? Who’s advocating for polygamy? How would their arguments be similar to arguments in favor of gay marriage?
This gets sillier by the minute. We can’t allow gays to marry out of fear that polygamists will adopt their arguments?
You know, it is already painful enough to try to have an honest dialog in this discussion. But to deal with people who call things silly that they are ignorant to is even worse.
I like “this writeup”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200505/steyn by Mark Steyn on the matter. Or perhaps this government report in Canada which does a very keen job of extending argumentation for neutering marriage to allowing polygamy, from “Pro-Polygamy.com”:http://www.pro-polygamy.com/articles.php?news=0038
What is getting silly to me is how so much of this argumentation to neuter marriage depends on people having the same perspective, however limited or inconsistent it is, over generations and through cultures. Only marriage as an institution based on the biological facts of humanity (as two-sexed) can claim it has such acceptance.
_But to deal with people who call things silly that they are ignorant to is even worse._
Enough said.
Mark wrote:
bq. By asking you for a SINGLE example of the imminent demise of civilization you are claiming?
There is a good example of over-constraint. First, I didn’t claim the demise of civilization, nor is that the only outcome that would give cause for pause in instituting this drastic change as neutering marriage.
A good example of why I’m asking you to present your criteria for review. Like I said, if what I’ve said is insufficient I would like to know from you exactly how it was.
The other Mark wrote:
bq. Throughout history, by tradition, and precedent, marriage included arranged marriage, forced marriage, polygamy, and unequally distributed rights among spouses, some of which continues to the present.
I can understand trying to shore up your attempt to call this simply a tradition by conflating tradition and precedent. But it doesn’t work in reality.
Marriage has had many different protocols and traditions, but what marriage means is precedent. You don’t year anyone saying “marriage means arranged marriage”, the recursive nature of the statemet is alone enough to show it as a silly attempt.
What marriage means is consistent in all the examples and different implementations, and that is the precedent.
bq. Certainly, but not about the enduring value of that definition, institution or practice. Slavery, torture, xenophobia, bigotry e.g., all have thousand-plus-year pedigrees and can be found in multiple traditions and have been codified and institionalized.
A fair argument. But you’ll pardon us silly heterosexuals for thinking marriage is a little “above” slavery and torture. Cue the stand-up comedians making the inevitable comparisons.
Pedantic note: There’s a good Hobbesian argument that a tendency to engage in the above malevolent behaviors is an inherently _human_ trait, not a result of the institutions or traditions which codified them. It takes both societal desire to change for the better AND laws to stop those practices. When talking about marriage, the human tendency might be _against_ the “bonds of matrimony”; the analogy of codas which encourage negative human impulses to an institution which _restricts_ some of those impulses would not therefore work.
Anyway, I’m not making the case for immutable traditions, or tradition for tradition’s sake; rather that you can’t just ignore tradition as irrelevant. Abolitionists made a damn good argument for throwing out slavery; MLK made a damn good argument for ending bigotry. I have yet to see anything on this level from SSM advocates beyond the cries of BIGOT, the “happy couples” idea, or Mark B’s contractual construct (to be honest it’s the best of the group–logically sound, but emotionally and historically lacking).
bq. Unbeliever: My point is that law CAN be mob rule.
Sure it can. But in this case, when them “mob” has been going on for a thousand years, across multiple nations, ethnicities, and institutions, is it really a mob any more? Saying “some A are B” doesn’t quite get you to “this A is B”, contrary to the commenters in this thread talking about mobs and majority tyranny.
Further: we live in a republic, an institution _specifically_ set up to avoid the mob rule of direct democracy. Does that mean every majority opinion is the result of a mob? How does anyone ever judge between a majority and a mob? Has every law passed been the result of a “mob”… including the ones providing the basis for SSM? (the post-Civil War Amendments, the ERA, etc.)
bq. So how do you decide? You take an argument to a court system, and make your case in front of people who are educated in american law. That is how our constitution is set up.
That’s how they decide between competing _interpretations_ of American law. That is *NOT* how public policies should be settled. I know lawyers are experts at getting a thousand laws out of a single sentence, but my general contention is that the definition of marriage is one of those policy-level decisions that should not be decided by a judge, but by representative vote (in a state legislature, in Congress, in an Amendment, etc).
bq. But if you can’t explain how gay marriage breaks the constitution, or damages the nation, you’re going to lose.
So… if the defense of marriage amendment gets passed, essentially making the heterosexual definition unequivocably constitutional, do we still get the mob rule label?
I support same-sex marriage as sound policy, bad judge-made law, but I don’t for a second believe that there is not a potential for harm here.
Marriage is a three-way contract between two people and the state, a social contract. Its first feature is that there is almost never anything in writing. In fact, writings are often illegal. One can’t agree to marry for only a set number of years. One can’t agree to marry for money. One can’t impose conditions. AFAIK marriage contracts are in no way negotiable.
Instead, marriage is an agreement to enter into a status that is based on custom and law. For instance, when a couple is married in a foreign land, experts in foreign customs and (gasp) religious observances may explain to a US court what marriage means. Its not definitive because the US has its own customs and laws to consider, but its part of the muddied mix of what marriage means. People who are married in California are effected by this new development, whether hetero or homo, because they are all part of the social contract.
I think the institution of marriage is injured for all if that social contract begins to be seen as “whatever two consenting adults agree to.” If same-sex couples want to agree to the customs and traditions of opposite-sex couples, that’s one thing. But most, if not all of those customs and traditions have to do with promoting childbirth and child-rearing. They may not make particular sense where children are impossible.
On the other hand, allowing same-sex couples to adopt children, but not marry, does not make much sense either.
So the harm is in the “ideas matter” type. The idea of marriage matters because (a) its about the children and (b) the idea of marriage is the sum total of the marriage vow.
_”Like I said, if what I’ve said is insufficient I would like to know from you exactly how it was.”_
Here is what i am asking:
When you say “the death of marriage”, how can this be identified? Will the divorce rate increase? How much? Will more children be born out of wedlock? How many? Will more children grown up to be serial killers?
Or, if you like, give me some other metric we can look at in 10 years to judge whether you were correct or not.
Or to address one of your fears:
“_It follows from there how best to ensure the children’s rights to know their heritage.”_
What does this have to do with gay marriage, particularly unique to gays? Exactly how does legal gay marriage affect children knowing their heritage, just as a single example of negative affects we can look for with this judgement.
Mark continues:
bq. When you say “the death of marriage”, how can this be identified?
I’ve identified many ways. the question is how can this be identified for you. You are the one claiming an inability to see the answers to these questions.
bq. Will the divorce rate increase? How much?
If it does, is that enough for you? How much is enough?
bq. Will more children be born out of wedlock? How many? Will more children grown up to be serial killers?
Ibid. Where are your goalposts here? That is all I’m asking.
bq. What does this have to do with gay marriage, particularly unique to gays?
I’ll argue that showing that it is exclusive to gays is not enough of a criteria. I don’t see gays as an island or sole arbiters of any real social charechteristic. Should I?
I submit that it is enough to show that it is inherent and intrinsic to the notion of same-sex, as opposed to the ideal of equal gender representation in marriage (and by correlation the responsible procreation ideal they share).
Do you agree or not?
_”I’ve identified many ways. the question is how can this be identified for you. You are the one claiming an inability to see the answers to these questions.”_
Nooo, not really, you’ve ranted quite a bit but aside from your perception of reality vis-a-vis marriage i havent seen any specifics.
_”Will the divorce rate increase? How much?”_
_”If it does, is that enough for you? How much is enough?”_
Thats the political quesion. But before we get that far i’d like to know if the ‘Death of Marriage’ will increase the divorce rate. Is it really that hard for you to see how this is an exremely relevant question?
_”Ibid. Where are your goalposts here? That is all I’m asking.”_
Unimportant. You are the one making the claim, i’d like to see it established before we talk about cost-v-benefits.
_”I’ll argue that showing that it is exclusive to gays is not enough of a criteria. I don’t see gays as an island or sole arbiters of any real social charechteristic. Should I?”_
I think if you oppose gay marraige because of its affect on society you are required to show how it us uniquely detrimental to society in some particular way. For instance simply saying gays will have a 50% divorce rate would not be a relevant, because _everyone_ has a 50% divorce rate. So in what ways will gays harm marraige as opposed to anyone off the street?
_”I submit that it is enough to show that it is inherent and intrinsic to the notion of same-sex, as opposed to the ideal of equal gender representation in marriage (and by correlation the responsible procreation ideal they share).”_
_”Do you agree or not?”_
With what? That wasnt even a sentence. “It is inherent and intrinsic to the notion of same sex”? Can you restate? That seems like circular reasoning to me from what i can decypher. Marraige is between a man and a woman because the union of man and woman define marraige?
David Blue:
bq. _”None of this commits me to the view that the government must not allow in its laws for ancient realities like marriage as the union of a man and a woman.”_
#22 from Mark Buehner:
bq. _”Thats ridiculous, nothing in this decision forbids the union of a man and a woman, as much as you’d love to imply it.”_
(holding up mirror) No, that‘s ridiculous, I didn’t say anything in that decision forbade the union of a man and a woman, much as you’d love to imply it.
#22 from Mark Buehner:
bq. _”Polygamy is an ancient reality of course, as are concubines, females servatude, etc. Playing the historical norms card has never been particularly convincing when it comes to extending and protecting civil liberties.”_
It’s true that when coercive social reformers invent, enforce and extend new rights, they are not stayed by any reference to historical norms.
But that lack of caution in imposing abstract virtues is itself dubious to reasonable and historically aware people. It has an ugly record, and we can see it around us in bad consequences like common fatherlessness.
Let me throw in another distinction about polygamy. One of the points of marriage is to create a unique individual with certain property rights, pension rights, child custody rights in case of death or divorce, etc. These issues have to be handled very differently in a polygamous society and I see no reason that marriage must, under some reasoning similar to gay marriage, be altered to provide for same.
I dont find equality before the law to be an abstract virtue. I also fail to see how what you just outlined differs from what was offered up when the ban on interracial marriage was litigated. Ugly record indeed.
David Blue:
“Marriage is a matrix of relationships before it is a contract.”
#22 from Mark Buehner:
bq. _”Matrix of relationships. That just screams for government oversight, doesnt it?”_
That’s so empty it doesn’t even qualify as sarcasm much less argument.
Yes, in practice this is exactly the sort of stuff that calls out to antidemocratic liberal “reformers” of the same kind imposing homosexual marriage: “regulate this!!” You can see almost total life regulation in the court-ordered arrangements of divorced couples with children.
This is why the breakdown of traditional marriage means more state control and less personal freedom. The more the state beats up on the institutions that prop people up together without it and outside it and before the state was, the more it throws them into dependency on the state, starting with the lives of kids who live one day with mommy and the next with daddy because a family court said so.
So David, where is your petition to outlaw divorce?
Mark,
Its getting hard to take you seriously. You are having a real problem coming up with any real examples of what would be a good answer. And the examples you did provide, you quickly disavowed.
In fact, I appreciated how you put this… “Unimportant. You are the one making the claim, i’d like to see it established before we talk about cost-v-benefits.” So its unimportant, then important.
Which is reminiscent of the court in Alice’s Wonderland…
bq. `That’s very important,’ the King said, turning to the jury. They were just beginning to write this down on their slates, when the White Rabbit interrupted: `Unimportant, your Majesty means, of course,’ he said in a very respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke.
bq. `Unimportant, of course, I meant,’ the King hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone, `important–unimportant– unimportant–important–‘ as if he were trying which word sounded best.
bq. I dont find equality before the law to be an abstract virtue.
And I don’t find SSM to be a question of equality before the law. Do you really want to go down that road?
_I also fail to see how what you just outlined differs from what was offered up when the ban on interracial marriage was litigated. Ugly record indeed._
There are a few differences. First, IIRC a number of those cases explained that the essence of marriage was a relationship between a man and a woman, color didn’t matter. Second and probably most important, color restrictions did not have the support of tradition and custom. Most, if not all of them, were enacted around the time of World War I. Third, adultury was then a crime which placed a criminal consequence on the state’s refusal to recognize the relationship.
Mark wrote:
bq. I think if you oppose gay marraige because of its affect on society you are required to show how it us uniquely detrimental to society in some particular way.
Why does the detriment have to be unique? If it raises the divorce rate, but so does making divorce easier to access, then does that mean neutered marriage is off the hook?
In my book no. If it is detrimental, and intrinsically so, it is enough. Uniqueness is not a criteria I’ve seen applied before in this kind of inquiry.
#22 from Mark Buehner:
bq. _”Your argument for the complexity and sensitivity of marriage made a better case than i did for why government should be as minimally involved as possible.”_
Why thank you. However, I want the government first to do no harm to the institutions that let people live relatively free of dependence on it, and when government does intervene, since it’s bound to to some extent, I want it to be supportive of traditional, ancient, globally proven and popularly accepted beneficial arrangements that really work.
And good old-fashioned marriage is of course what I have in mind.
#22 from Mark Buehner:
bq. _”Do you REALLY want government in this business?”_
You are REALLY not going to get government out of the business of regulating marriage, if only because when kids circumstances are awful enough the government will intervene to take the kids away from their parents – or whatever mess of multiple mummies and no daddies, or multiple daddies and no mummies, or polygamous predators lining up for indoctrinated child brides the kids were under the control of in the first place.
#22 from Mark Buehner:
bq. _”If so, how do you suggest we go about abolishing divorce? Historically speaking, its never been this widespread or easy to obtain after all.”_
Slowly, openly, legitimately, and though popular will – the opposite of the way homosexual marriage is being imposed.
On Lawn, its obvious you arent going to go on record with any actual substantative metric for the harm gay marraige will do. Thats fine. Just realize all your dancing around the issue and refusing to take a stand make you look foolish. You’re fencing with me (badly, i think) instead of simply stating the harmful things you forsee.
So nevermind. This is for the rest of the class:
Half of marriages end in divorce.
Our current illegitimacy rate is 34% and has been climbing for years. In 1950 the illigitimacy rate was 3.9%.
This creates 2 problems for me.
1.How much worse is gay marraige going to make this breakdown? If you hold that gay marriage should be banned for pragmatic reasons (defending the institution) please sack up and make a prediction for what divorce and illegitimacy will top out at.
2.If retention of the atomic family is so crucial to our society that we are going to use government power in an attempt to protect it, why stop at gay marriage? Gay marraige isnt going to increase our illigitimacy rate by 30%. Society has managed that on its own. So what are we willing to do to turn back the clock? Outlaw premarital sex? Why not? If this issue is so vital that we are willing to screw over gays, put your money where your mouth is and lock up people for out of wedlock sex.
#96 from Mark Buehner:
bq. _”So David, where is your petition to outlaw divorce?”_
There’ll be one when enough hearts are changed that there’s a genuine consensus that divorce ought to be outlawed – then and not before.
It’s the opposite approach to the judicial coup method.
PD Shaw: _Most, if not all of them [Anti-miscegenation laws], were enacted around the time of World War I._
I think I’m wrong about that. Virginia passed such a law in 1691, which I would still describe as an innovation, not rooted in custom and tradition. Several states never passed such laws, many of them repealed them during reconstruction, and then the tide reversed in the 1910s and 1920s.
_”And I don’t find SSM to be a question of equality before the law. Do you really want to go down that road?”_
Isnt that the entire root of the question? How do you have this conversation otherwise?
We have in question a contract that prohibits participation based on gender. Try passing a law prohiting women from employing men as lawyers and see how far it gets.
#27 from Marcus Vitruvius:
bq. _”I have never, really honestly never, understood the modern conservative horror at homosexuality and gay marriage.”_
You got that right.
#27 from Marcus Vitruvius:
bq. _”I find it hard even to take seriously because the arguments and even the forms of the arguments strike me as non-sensical, emotionally over-wrought, and often in outright special-pleading contradiction to other supposedly held positions. (Except I have to take it seriously, because so much ink gets spilled over it.)”_
Twofer! You’re not addressing conservative positions seriously, just applying stock negative labels to positions of your own invention.
#27 from Marcus Vitruvius:
bq. _”For instance, I’m seeing above that the California Courts are now “dictatorial” and their imposition is a “tyranny” all of which is driven by, and I quote directly, Mr. Blue: “the passion of the lawyer class for imposing their own views on people’s most intimate lives, on matters of life and death, on birth, sex, marriage and child-rearing.””_
#27 from Marcus Vitruvius:
bq. _”I am to take this seriously, Mr. Blue?”_
Well, I’d gladly answer, but…
#27 from Marcus Vitruvius:
bq. _”Giving two men or two women the option to marry is tyranny?”_
First you missatate my position by leaving out a key part, the illegitimate way this bad policy was imposed. I said: there are persuasive arguments for and against homosexual marriage, but a process this bad is tie-breaker. That means that leaving out the whole bit where the radical change in the definition of marriage comes about just by some judges pretending to discover in the state constitution what nobody had seen there before in a century and a half, and thus by the judges unreasonably and dishonestly nullifying a clear law recently passed by popular initiative, leaves out the democratic legitimacy issue which is the point of the word tyranny. It was not a word I proposed to apply to homosexual marriage brought about legitimately, by popular referendum, rather it was a negative label I attached to a very bad process.
#27 from Marcus Vitruvius:
bq. _”Allowing people far away from you, that you do not know and will in all likelyhood never know, the option to marry, is an act of dictatorship?”_
More of the same: a weak straw man game.
#27 from Marcus Vitruvius:
bq. _”Mr. Wishard likes to make elegant-sounding points about inversion, but what I see here is an outright inversion of the words tyranny, and dictatorial.”_
What you see is your own fog of misrepresentation.
#27 from Marcus Vitruvius:
bq. _”Tyranny, to me, is denying someone a choice, rather than allowing them to make it. And the imposition of views, here, has been happening to gay people being treated not even as second-class citizens but as non-citizens in the eyes of the marriage system, not to you Mr. Blue.”_
I’ve already shown your assertions about what I’m saying are worthless.
#27 from Marcus Vitruvius:
bq. _”The marriage of two men or two women getting married is no more an imposition on anyone but themselves than the marriage of one man to one woman, and even the wildest narcissists have not been able to explain otherwise to me.”_
There’s little to be proud of in your unwillingness to understand.
#27 from Marcus Vitruvius:
bq. _”Don’t insult my intelligence by going on about a redefinition of marriage by redefining tyranny and dictatorship! Not you, Mr. Blue, not you, Mr. Wishard, not anyone. I know what those words mean, and legal acceptance of gay marriage rights is not either of those.”_
Ordering people not to explain to you what you consistently misrepresent and refuse to understand is superfluous belligerence.
#27 from Marcus Vitruvius:
bq. _””Judicial tyranny,” my fat white ass.”_
Since you refuse to and have demonstrated your unwillingness or inability to advance beyond exactly that level of understanding, I have nothing to add.
Mark B.
AJL:
These are technical arguments, and not convincing. Robert A. Heinlein described complex polygamous marriages in several of his books – the old boy was quite keen on the subject. Yes, that’s science fiction, but hardly far-fetched. If a corporation can represent hundreds of thousands of people, a marriage can represent more than two.
Contemporary polygamists have taken a different approach to their unpopular arrangement. Rather than asking society to recognize polygamy, they have generally retreated from society, often remaining within the letter of the law. (You can have as many wives at home as you want, so long as you don’t legally marry more than one.)
That path has been open to gays all along, and many have taken it. The difference here is in demanding legal recognition of such marriages.
David- I appreciate that there is a difference between your procedural issues with this decision and some of the pragmatic/idealogical arguments that are being bandied.
Here is why i think you are wrong: The Califonia Supreme Court (which believe it or has a majority republicans, this is not the 9th circuit), ruled on Constitutional grounds, which by definition trumps a simple majority will in the matter.
_”After carefully evaluating the pertinent considerations in the present case,
we conclude that the state interest in limiting the designation of marriage
exclusively to opposite-sex couples, and in excluding same-sex couples from
access to that designation, cannot properly be considered a compelling state
interest for equal protection purposes. To begin with, the limitation clearly is not
necessary to preserve the rights and benefits of marriage currently enjoyed by
opposite-sex couples. Extending access to the designation of marriage to samesex
couples will not deprive any opposite-sex couple or their children of any of the
rights and benefits conferred by the marriage statutes, but simply will make the
benefit of the marriage designation available to same-sex couples and their
children”_
“link”:http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/documents/S147999.PDF to decision
You may certainly disagree, but this decision was made right in line philosophically with interracial marraige cases like Loving, using exactly the same logic.
_”Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.”_
“Loving v Virginia”:http://www.ameasite.org/loving.asp
You substitute sex for race and they are identical, which you certainly can because race and sex are protected classes in the eyes of civil rights law.
So you may not like the way this case went down, but you can hardly call it some unprecidented move by an activist court. The law practically _demands_ this decision. Pass a constitutional amendment if you are unhappy, but this is _exactly_ the same way interracial marriage was made the law of the land. Reject this and i think you must reject that.
_”Reject this and i think you must reject that.”_
The process, not the outcome.
_”These are technical arguments, and not convincing”_
Its not a technical argument. There is a compelling reason not to give multiple people power of attorney, mainly because the entire point is to give one person the right to make decisions.
If i’m on life support and one of my wives wants to pull the plug and the other doesnt… thats hardly a technicality.
Mark wrote:
bq. Thats fine. Just realize all your dancing around the issue and refusing to take a stand make you look foolish.
No, the problem is that you’ve refused to meet on grounds of mutual agreement and pre-disclosed guidelines. The games started when I asked for real criteria of what you would address as an answer to your question. Not even one you agreed with, but answering.
And that doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Many instances have been provided which you danced your way around, and apparently I’m not the only one who’s seen it. I could just call you on it and let that be enough. Or I could honestly engage you in a discussion of just what criteria you are looking for. And to be called a dancer and fencer for it makes me question how serious you were in discussing this in the first place.
Mark wrote about the Loving decision:
bq. You substitute sex for race and they are identical, which you certainly can because race and sex are protected classes in the eyes of civil rights law.
That is an interesting substitution, and platform for that matter. I’m not sure you understand what the Loving ruling is.
Loving was a decision which struck down laws which mandated racial segregation between blacks and whites in marriage. Substituting race for sex would have a decision which strikes down sex segregation in marriage between men and women.
But marriage is already integrating men and women — and that marriage equality is a problem for some. So much so that those that see marriage equality as the quality of that integration, are called bigots repeatedly in this thread.
Mark wrote (in #62)
bq. Support for civil unions is not bigotry. Denial of marriage to gays is.
Someone see of you can spot the special pleading.
Civil Unions are enacted as homosexual marriages, which are a small fraction of same-sex headed households. Its an exclusive arrangement, but not bigotry according to Mark.
Marriage supports something unique to the two-sexed nature of our humanity, integrating both genders and helping the quality of the lives of children. It includes every man and woman, and has come to mean equality of the sexes over time. That is bigotry according to Mark.
Unbeliever, #72:
I discussed this above in #67. You’re using the phrase wrong–it applies to the majority restricting the rights of their opponents–and it doesn’t refute the problem of the majority itself being overruled by its nominally representative government.
We are talking about a situation in which the majority are, in fact, restricting the rights of the minority. Specifically, a majority of citizens (heterosexual) are restricting the right of their minority opponents (homosexuals) to marry.
I have used the phrase perfectly.
Frankly I don’t care who wins in the battle of labels: is “tyranny” the larger society who refuses the tiny minority of gays who wish to marry, or is it the local judge who forces a policy preference over an entire nation? (Why can’t it be both?)
It can’t be both because granting a civil liberty is never tyranny.
Mr. Blue, #106:
First you missatate my position by leaving out a key part, the illegitimate way this bad policy was imposed. I said: there are persuasive arguments for and against homosexual marriage, but a process this bad is tie-breaker. That means that leaving out the whole bit where the radical change in the definition of marriage comes about just by some judges pretending to discover in the state constitution what nobody had seen there before in a century and a half, and thus by the judges unreasonably and dishonestly nullifying a clear law recently passed by popular initiative, leaves out the democratic legitimacy issue which is the point of the word tyranny. It was not a word I proposed to apply to homosexual marriage brought about legitimately, by popular referendum, rather it was a negative label I attached to a very bad process.
As Mark Buehner pointed out above, #108, This is the same process used by the Supreme Court to strike down the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. Still burning with outrage over that one, are we? Think it was wrongly decided? Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, 1954? Still standing up for the right to segrate black and white? Yes? No?
Those are both 14th Amendment, equal protection clause arguments. So is this.
On Lawn, #112, the substitution to be made is not race for sex, but race for orientation. The discrimination and segretation struck down here, is not between men and women– I think we all know that– but between heterosexual (who may marry the person of their desire) and homoexual (who may not.) I think we all know that, too.
The ruling specifically sites another California decision (an integration case in fact) that establishes a right to marry whom you choose.
_”Or I could honestly engage you in a discussion of just what criteria you are looking for.”_
Is anybody else having trouble understanding the criteria im looking for, or think its too demanding? I need an intepreter, i really can’t understand his point.
As simply as i can put it- what bad things happen do to gay marriage that can be quantified?
I’d be interested in knowing, if they do.
Guess I’ll consolidate answers to objections. Mark B:
bq. “And I don’t find SSM to be a question of equality before the law. Do you really want to go down that road?”
bq. Isnt that the entire root of the question? How do you have this conversation otherwise?
No, the root of the question is the _definition_ of marriage. As is, using the traditional construct (one man marrying one woman), there’s no discrimination based on sexual orientation: a gay man or a straight man may marry a gay/straight woman, and both the gay and straight man are prevented from marrying another man. You don’t get to a question of legal equality until you re-define marriage as “the union of two adults” without the traditional qualifiers, or the happy couple idea where “you should be able to marry whoever you love”.
Obviously the traditional construct doesn’t satisfy gay persons wanting to marry other gay persons of the same sex. And I’m well aware that argument makes for easy jokes on the Daily Show. That still doesn’t make it discrimination. If you want to argue an equality line, you have to define-down Western marriage first… and I’ve yet to hear a good case for doing so.
(Your case for a contract construct is only a legalese re-stating of a proposed revised definition. It is _not_ the traditional definition, it’s _not_ the socially recognized view of the institution, and it’s _not_ a starting point from which you can argue an existing violation of equality. Its main utility, to be honest, is a way to push back against conservative slippery slope arguments… although as David Blue points out, having a legal construct replacing a social institution may be the last leg of that slope.)
Marcus V:
bq. We are talking about a situation in which the majority are, in fact, restricting the rights of the minority. Specifically, a majority of citizens (heterosexual) are restricting the right of their minority opponents (homosexuals) to marry.
I’m sure that’s how you would like to phrase the debate, but as I mentioned above, that’s not the legal reality. It’s the _emotional_ one, perhaps, and again it requires a radical redefinition of a long-established positive institution. The case for a libertine “right to marry” is a fairly weak one, as the nominal right to pursue happiness is among the weakest and most restricted “rights” in _any_ society. Or, to borrow from “Heinlein”:http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers#Chapter_8 without total seriousness:
bq. “The third ‘right’?—the ‘pursuit of happiness’? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can ‘pursue happiness’ as long as my brain lives—but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.”
Going back to the question of laws versus mob rule: at some point, the majority in a population gets to define the institutions the group will live under. Absent persecution of the minority, this is not tyranny, it is _society,_ and calling traditionalists names won’t change this simple dynamic of human interaction.
Unbeliever, #119, in response to me:
I’m sure that’s how you would like to phrase the debate, but as I mentioned above, that’s not the legal reality.
No, the legal reality is exactly that. That you happen to be stuck on a one man, one woman formulation and are arrogantly demanding others to give you some sort of a justification to do something that harms no one says nothing good about you.
Your prior arguments had that same ugly flaw, too, with the implications that there needed to be a justification to set slaves free beyond the basic goodness of freedom, or that MLK needed to provide a justification to end bigotry beyond the basic goodness of equality. Here we have the basic goodness of freedom.
Mark Buehner has been asking persistently who, exactly, is harmed by gay marriage (largely because of unsupported assertions that gay marriages are somehow harmful to nuclear families) and gotten nothing. I think Mark is going the extra mile in even bothering to ask– in a free society, the burden shouldn’t be on the minorities to petition every act they want to take that you haven’t already sanctioned. It’s on the nay-sayers to demonstrate the harm, and no one here has been able to do that.
The Supreme Court, in Loving disagrees with you, point blank. They considered it a basic civil right of man.
Why don’t you?
bq. The Supreme Court, in Loving disagrees with you, point blank. They considered it a basic civil right of man.
I won my bet with myself. Since my second post, I was wondering when _Loving_ would thrown my way, and I figured the last post would finally do it (though Mark B cited it to David Blue in #108). But first things first:
bq. No, the legal reality is exactly that. That you happen to be stuck on a one man, one woman formulation and are arrogantly demanding others to give you some sort of a justification to do something that harms no one says nothing good about you.
The legal rulings for SSM have involved tortured logic, except when state constitutions were specifically changed to accomodate it. No, the legal realities is that, barring a specific statute change, the discrimination doesn’t exist.
My “arrogant formulation” is the _de facto_ formulation for the last thousand years or so; when talking about a historic social institution crossing so many cultures, nations, and law systems, that carries a bit more weight than your relatively modern indignation.
bq. Your prior arguments had that same ugly flaw, too, with the implications that there needed to be a justification to set slaves free beyond the basic goodness of freedom, or that MLK needed to provide a justification to end bigotry beyond the basic goodness of equality. Here we have the basic goodness of freedom.
That may be true of the _moral_ argument, though you’re still characterizing it in a way you prefer in order to reach a forgone conclusion. However it lacks any legal, historical, or societal weight. You don’t automatically get infinite freedom just because freedom _qua_ freedom is good; you can’t walk around naked, you can’t set up an impromptu gun range in the middle of a public park, you can’t even protest wherever you want without getting a permit. And you don’t get to redefine a thousand years’ worth of a positive institution just because you feel a little libertine today.
bq. in a free society, the burden shouldn’t be on the minorities to petition every act they want to take that you haven’t already sanctioned.
But it’s _already_ been sanctioned. SSM advocates aren’t asking for something that’s been done for years before the evil Christian wingers jumped up and down, they’re re-writing the rules in a way the original rule-writers never would have countenanced. There *is* a burden of proof to be met that changing a thousand years’ tradition will provide some benefit other than making a tiny minority of people happy.
(That, I suppose, is the core distinction between conservativism and liberalism: conservation of tradition versus the automatic assumption of liberalizing them.)
bq. It’s on the nay-sayers to demonstrate the harm, and no one here has been able to do that.
I haven’t tried, and I don’t intend to. Those discussions always end up in non-anthropologists arguing social science data and no one ever concedes a point. I’ll mention “Kurtz’s study on Scandinavia”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/660zypwj.asp as the standard starting point, but as I said above, I believe you have the burden of proof backwards.
Now, on to _Loving_. I obviously agree with the policy outcome. But I slightly disagree with “the Court”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia#Decision that
bq. Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival
because it glosses over a lot of area in natural rights and the role of the _polity_ in the _polis_. Besides which, if we’re to decouple the role of child-bearing and -rearing from the nature of marriage, it no longer becomes “fundamental to our very existence and survival”. Justice Warren may have gotten it more accurate “when he said”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life%2C_liberty_and_the_pursuit_of_happiness
bq. The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.
but I’ve already said my piece on how the “pursuit of happiness” is insufficient justification for a radical overhaul. Instead, my main objection is to the equation of race with gender, and to the application of _Loving_ to SSM. Something similar to what the appeals court said in “Hernandez v. Robles”:http://www.blogdenovo.org/archives/001368.html who made the general argument better than I could say it:
bq. [T]he historical background of Loving is different from the history underlying this case. Racism has been recognized for centuries — at first by a few people, and later by many more — as a revolting moral evil… But the traditional definition of marriage is not merely a by-product of historical injustice. Its history is of a different kind. The idea that same-sex marriage is even possible is a relatively new one. Until a few decades ago, it was an accepted truth for almost everyone who ever lived, in any society in which marriage existed, that there could be marriages only between participants of different sex. A court should not lightly conclude that everyone who held this belief was irrational, ignorant or bigoted. We do not so conclude.
The legal argument on this case against applying _Loving_ to SSM is “here”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia#Future_implications from which I will cherrypick quotes:
bq. [in Loving] The Supreme Court struck the statute on both equal protection and due process grounds, but the focus of the analysis was on the Equal Protection Clause. Noting that “[t]he clear and central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to eliminate all official state sources of invidious racial discrimination in the States,” the Court applied strict scrutiny review to the racial classification, finding “no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification” (id. at 10, 11).
bq. …There is no question that the Court viewed this antimiscegenation statute as an affront to the very purpose for the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment—to combat invidious racial discrimination. In its brief due process analysis, the Supreme Court reiterated that marriage is a right “fundamental to our very existence and survival” (id., citing Skinner, 316 US at 541)—a clear reference to the link between marriage and procreation… Although the Court characterized the right to marry as a “choice,” it did not articulate the broad “right to marry the spouse of one’s choice” suggested by plaintiffs here.
As an extremely informal argument, I would summarize it as saying gender differences are more substantial than “so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications”. Because of this, the traditional definition of marriage is solid enough on these grounds that _Loving_ doesn’t strike the automatic blow you think it does for SSM.
Two points regarding equal protection:
1.Its been applied to gender for decades. Its incorrect to insinuate the SSM debate has broken new ground in this regard. If you want to argue that gender isnt a protected class under the 14th amendment you will be the one writing new law from the bench, as this is already well established. Hence, the logic of Loving stands up, it is only pointing at a different protected class.
2. There are standards of scrutiny the government is required to meet when equal protection arguments are in the offing. The _government_ must demonstrate a compelling interest, not the complaintants. Which is one reason i keep asking for specific damages- thats what the courts have to ask for.
_”Besides which, if we’re to decouple the role of child-bearing and -rearing from the nature of marriage, it no longer becomes “fundamental to our very existence and survival”.”_
The problem is that by this logic, bans on interracial marriage would only be unconstitutional when child birth/rearing is a possibility. Those too old, sterile, etc would not be protected. I think its highly unlikely the court made that distinction. The court explained why marriage as an institution is so important, but it doesnt follow that every individual case (or even an entire subset) need to rise to that level of importance on its own footing.
Equal protection by its nature demands inclusion of all citizens (unless the government displays a compelling and specific reason), _especially_ in an institution held to be critical to society.
In other words, the specific pursuit of happiness clearly tied to marriage will trump ambiguous and unspecific threats to society, and this is _exactly_ how equal protection has been held by the courts in the past.
Gender discrimination is not the issue, sexual orientation is the class that is being anylzed on equal protection grounds. From the California Supreme Court case:
bq. _In drawing a distinction between opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples, the challenged marriage statutes do not treat men and women differently. Persons of either gender are treated equally and are permitted to marry only a person of the opposite gender. In light of the equality of treatment between genders, the distinction prescribed by the relevant statutes plainly does not constitute discrimination on the basis of sex as that concept is commonly understood._
“In re Marriages”:http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/documents/S147999.PDF
That the California Court decided that sexual orientation was a suspect class, like race, was a first.
Marcus wrote:
bq. Mark Buehner has been asking persistently who, exactly, is harmed by gay marriage (largely because of unsupported assertions that gay marriages are somehow harmful to nuclear families) and gotten nothing.
No, Mark has been playing a game of denial, and you apparently wish to do so also. The ability to not see, or deny, the connection between neutering marriage how that disconnects society from the human reality that causes so much attention, is one of self-will at this point.
Neutering marriage removes its reference to the gender construction of marriage, one man and one woman. It is a human reality, we are one race with two genders. It unifies those genders, which speaks to the equality of integration. It unifies those genders because of the construction of our humanity is such that two genders are required to procreate. And procreation means new citizens who’s rights need protecting.
Mark has been toying with strange constraints which have nothing to do with finding who specifically is harmed. He has expected unique problems in neutering marriage, when it is simply compounding in problems we’ve already seen attack the health of the marriage institution. Problems many marriage neutierists here have already acknowledged, and have yet to explain why neutering marriage would be different.
Will we see more broken homes like McGreevey’s with neutered marriage? Yes. Will we see more children raised to believe that fathers are meaningless in children’s lives, because Rosie O’Donnell and other wish to tell their children that they were meant to have two mommies?
Consider already the problems of fatherless societies. Consider, if we tell people that two mommies equal a man and a woman, will there be more or less fatherlessness?
Consider also that monogamy is rooted in the fact that a relationship lives on whether the man and woman wish it to, because of children. Staying together, working to ensure the nuclear family, is based on the fact that two parents want to be true to their children as much as each other.
Rootless men and women. Goodridge painted people who note where babies come from as the equivalent of white supremacists. One of the reasons California and Massachusetts are so overboard on this idea of neutered marriage is that they would love to see the reality of where children come from become a source of income for state and business.
For the last two decades a growing medical industry has arisen that pays parents to abandon and remain anonymous to children as much as have them. Does this industry help people realize the importance of raising your own children, or does it encourage abandonment? Does neutering marriage, and calling the realities of procreation a divisive political game encourage or discourage this practice?
I’ve played the game of denial with too many marriage neuterists to take their claims of “not seeing any harm” seriously. What it amounts to is that they don’t care if there is harm, just don’t blame them. They didn’t mean any harm, they didn’t intend any harm, and they really believed that their social understanding was enough to ensure there wasn’t going to be harm.
That kind of hubris is either going to be the mark of future generations looking back on us with the same disgust as they look on slavery, or we are going to realize the folly soon and once again establish working to help children and gender integration as liberal principles.
bq. Its been applied to gender for decades. Its incorrect to insinuate the SSM debate has broken new ground in this regard.
Take it up with the majority in Hernandez v. Robles. They disagree with you.
You have yet to point out how banning SSM is a violation of equal protection. Men _and_ women, straight _and_ gay, all have the same protections and restrictions under the traditional marriage construct. This is not the same thing as paying women less for the same work, or your example of forcing women to have female lawyers. Like I said above, this only changes if you can change the underlying definition of marriage, which, may I remind you, is NOT “two adults joined in union”.
bq. The problem is that by this logic, bans on interracial marriage would only be unconstitutional when child birth/rearing is a possibility.
No, this is the logical extension–borrowed from someone above who was arguing against On Lawn above–showing that the modern decoupling of marriage from child raising and legitimacy is the force doing so. I was pointing out a problem SSM poses against the Court’s _general_ case, not the legal one. You can’t claim marriage is “fundamental to our very existence and survival” if you advocate for a society where it is no longer the sole or primary vehicle for procreation. Once society elevates _intentionally_ onanistic relationships to the exact same level as the procreative ones, they’ve essentially declared procreation to be an option in the institution and it no longer becomes *necessary* for survival.
Given such a situation, your legal read of reduced protections may be correct. IANAL so I can’t be sure. But if so, that’s a problem SSM created, not the traditionalists.
bq. If you want to argue that gender isnt a protected class under the 14th amendment you will be the one writing new law from the bench, as this is already well established.
Now you’re outright misstating the case. The 14th doesn’t mention gender at all, and it only becomes a “suspect class”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause#Suspect_classes under “intermediate scrutiny”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_scrutiny of gender-based classifications. Borrowing from the article,
bq. The Supreme Court has seemed unwilling to extend full “suspect class” status (i.e., status that makes a law that categorizes on that basis suspect, and therefore deserving of greater judicial scrutiny) to groups other than racial minorities and religious groups.
The _Robles_ court follows this trend, and nothing in _Loving_ contradicts it. Both _Loving_ and _Robles_ applied strict scrutiny to the 14th in the case of marriage, and neither you nor the courts have provided an argument why a less rigorous standard of scrutiny should be applied.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but you simply don’t get to an equal protection violation unless you first redefine marriage itself.
PD wrote:
bq. That the California Court decided that sexual orientation was a suspect class, like race, was a first.
Mark, IMHO has a better case than the California Supremes. Sexual orientation is an indistinguishable quality. It is a vague term which can be extended to mean almost any sexual pursuit. In naming sexual orientation as a suspect class, the over-broad language opened up the door to many different issues.
In fact it is probably the most easily recognized mistake in their ruling.
On Lawn, I would think that the McGreevey’s marriage discredits your argument. In a somewhat different world (one I suspect we are nearing), Gov. McGreevey would not have felt compelled to mask his sexual preference with a bogus het marriage.
While I think there are some theoretical arguments to be made for an ideal one-father one-mother family, the truth is that in an age of easy divorce, exceptions to this model are routine. (Incidentally, before modern medicine made childbirth safe, exceptions were routine from the death of the mother.) I hardly see why adding a relatively small number of single-sex marriages changes things.
The truth is, On Lawn, you are not really arguing against gay marriage. You are arguing against straight divorce and open homosexuality.
_”You have yet to point out how banning SSM is a violation of equal protection. Men and women, straight and gay, all have the same protections and restrictions under the traditional marriage construct.”_
No- a woman is not allowed to marry the person of her choice _because she is a woman_. A man is not allowed to marry a man of his choice _because he is a man._ That’s the gender distinction.
Imagine a law being passed (lets really spice it up and say its in a heavily Muslim city) that forbids women from hiring men as a doctor: by your argument there is no equal protection violation because she can still hire a female doctor, hence she can still hire a doctor. This immediately is reminiscent of seperate but equal. (Moreover the defenders will be sure to point out that allowing women to see male doctors will surely bring society to the brink of doom.)
The point is- equal protection requires that a person’s race/gender/etc not prohibit them from doing what someone else can do, or allow the government to treat them differently. In this case a woman can not marry a woman, but a man can. This violates equal protection.
_”You can’t claim marriage is “fundamental to our very existence and survival” if you advocate for a society where it is no longer the sole or primary vehicle for procreation”_
I still fail to see how gay marriage makes marriage no longer the sole or primary vehicle for procreation (lets also not forget that 30% of births are out of wedlock, so sole is out of the question).
Lets look at the numbers- there are still going to be more marraiges between post-menopausal and sterile couples than between gay couples… society hasnt ground to a halt.
Plus- gay marriage isnt exactly pulling potential breeders out of the gene pool either. Im still foggy on the mechanism involved here. Why should gay marraige affect our race’s ability to procreate (again, taking into account birth rates have been plunging for years regardless).
On Lawn makes a rather vague argument (finally, thank you) about society turning on marraige and fatherhood etc.. but again you would have to prove how this will accelerate what is currently happening in society. A gay couple down the street just doesnt impact how anyone else raises their kids… bobby _already_ potentially has two mommies, gay marriage doesnt affect that. Even so we are talking about very tiny proportions of adoptees etc involved in gay households. If our society cant handle a few gay adoptions we’re surely doomed anyway… and again they are already happening so its a rather moot point.
Andrew wrote:
bq. Gov. McGreevey would not have felt compelled to mask his sexual preference with a bogus het marriage.
Here is a good post analyzing the message about marriage in that “world”.
With that platform it is opportune at this point to note that Unbeliever has brought up a very interesting point that relates to the overall discussion of finding harm. He notes, “you simply don’t get to an equal protection violation unless you first redefine marriage itself”. And I respectfully present that in the search for harm, much of it is not seen because the damage is already done in their own eyes. If marriage is already re-defined for them, it is difficult to see how neutering marriage presents additional harm. Truth is it may not, the damage is already done for themselves.
Lets also not forget that McGreevey tried to remove the mother from the children’s lives because he feared that she would poison them against him with anti-homosexual rhetoric. Homosexuality is many things, but a platform of unassailableness (as McGreevey is using it) it is not.
Andrew presumes:
bq. You are arguing against straight divorce and open homosexuality.
Which is, to be honest, not true. I believe in marriage being a voluntary organization. While we can adjust the barriers for divorce based on the level of commitment we expect from people entering the institution (some snidely argue it is easier to cancel their cable than get a divorce) the access to divorce should be there. Especially because some people cannot live up to the commitments of marriage.
And I have no problem with open homosexuality. While the television loves to parade the anti-homosexual movement within the marriage defense, the reality of marriage defense does not dovetail so neatly with the inculcation of bigotry (which has been seen in this thread also).
Marriage equality, the quality of the representation of both genders in marriage, does not condemn open homosexuality. Marriage just isn’t a homosexual pusuit. While monogamy, openness, and commitment could be, and marriage has those qualitities, the truth is that neither marriage or any other institution can really survive as simple romance regulation.
Mark wrote:
bq. On Lawn makes a rather vague argument (finally, thank you) about society turning on marraige and fatherhood etc..
A casual perusal of the conversation shows that the themes in that post have been constant in my participation here. But otherwise, many thanks for the appreciation.
bq. but again you would have to prove how this will accelerate what is currently happening in society.
Proof is not the bar here, but plausibility. Since neutered marriage re-enforces ideals which are currently causing social problems, as has been outlined by many above, it is sufficient to wonder why we go down the road further at all.
Consider this, to be succinct; We know that children do best when raised by the parents who gave them life in a loving commitment we call marriage. We know that from adoption, to foster care, to downright abandonment that the results show in how the children view themselves and how they interact with society.
Prove to me, or even give me some plausible attempt to explain why homosexuality bridges or compensates for that known impact. If it is not part of the cure, its not something worth considering.
Civil rights activists were able to show how holding them back, held back society. They showed how they had equal access to water, education, until the contrivance of white supremacy took that away. There is no such discourse coming from homosexual activists, and perhaps that one reason why black americans are as a group more opposed to neutering marriage than any other group. They see their hard work re-defined. They see civil rights re-defined to mean something other than what they fought for.
bq. A gay couple down the street just doesnt impact how anyone else raises their kids… bobby already potentially has two mommies, gay marriage doesnt affect that.
Explain better the phrase, “bobby already has two mommies”.
bq. Even so we are talking about very tiny proportions of adoptees etc involved in gay households. If our society cant handle a few gay adoptions we’re surely doomed anyway… and again they are already happening so its a rather moot point.
The question of the impact being limited by the low participation rates of homosexuals has always been a curious one. But not a consistent platform with which to claim there will not be any additional reenforcement of detrimental forces to our health as families and a society as a whole.
Consider this, to be succinct; We know that children do best when raised by the parents who gave them life in a loving commitment we call marriage
Do you have studies to back this up? Because almost all the research in this area has been shown to be “flawed”:http://www.slate.com/id/2097048/. Besides, gay couples already 1) adopt, 2) artificially inseminate themselves 3)raise neices and nephews in the absence of the natural parents. Furthermore, marriage is not a requirement to procreate and legal marriage rights have very little to do with procreation, so this is a moot point anyway.
The religous definition of marriage, however DOES imply procreation. However, again, that should have little effect on the government.
Do you want to try an actual legal, or statistically-supported argument next time?
I am not especially knowledgeable in the field, but I think the two most serious problems with On Lawn’s “fatherless” households are the economic costs of single parenthood and the related use of surrogate childcare and reduction in parent-child interaction. Neither of these factors will matter in two-person gay marriages. So that leaves us with, AFAICT, some sort of father “role model” argument, which seems to me to be obsolete. The technological revolution, leave alone women’s liberation, already devalues most occupations dependent on physical strength. Title IX revolutionized our picture of women as athletes. And in many (although not all) gay relationships, one partner has personality attributes usually associated with the other gender. When we’re done here, I don’t see much problem left with “fatherless” and “motherless” households except an appeal to prejudice.
I also think you and your source misunderstand the McGreevey’s marriage. It isn’t gay marriage but toleration of homosexuality that has allowed McGreevey and his ilk to leave their (straight) marriages. This should, however, be a short-term phenomenon as the pent-up demand for homosexual relationships (married or otherwise) is satisfied. In the long run, we should see fewer of the wrenching, child-immiserating episodes like theirs, as persons of some level of bisexuality feel better supported in making a lifetime choice that includes the possibility of raising a legally-recognized family no matter which gender partner they take.
bq. The religous definition of marriage, however DOES imply procreation.
The general idea of marriage _itself_ implies it. Religion is just one of the interconnected social institutions that handled the ceremony. It’s downright silly to think that social institutions sprang up and started with the advent of secular American government, and are therefore beholden to the same standard the feds are.
(Random data point: family Bibles and church records are admissible in lieu of birth certificates for many proof of birth/residency requirements. This isn’t the result of establishing a state religion, it’s a common sense acknowledgement by the government that social institutions exist outside the state, and provide similar structures, functions, and services for communities.)
Or, to put it another way, *there was marriage before there was government*. If you think government gets to grab hold of the definition of marriage and rewrite it just because it grants tax breaks, you’ve got your general arguments more backwards than I can begin to describe.
bq. However, again, that should have little effect on the government.
Arguments about maximizing a small number of people’s “happiness” should have little effect on government, but no one here seems to mind letting them throw out a thousand years’ worth of tradition to accomodate them.
_”Proof is not the bar here, but plausibility.”_
Not according to our legal system. Thank god. Hey, its plausible that gay marraige will enlighten the country and end hate crimes against homosexuals. Its plausible. Its plausible gay marraige will renew the nations faith in the institution and drop the divorce rate 30 percent. Its plausible.
A serious of plausible possibilities does not equal an argument.
_”We know that children do best when raised by the parents who gave them life in a loving commitment we call marriage. We know that from adoption, to foster care, to downright abandonment that the results show in how the children view themselves and how they interact with society.”_
_”Prove to me, or even give me some plausible attempt to explain why homosexuality bridges or compensates for that known impact.”_
This is a non-sequitar. You have not demonstrated how gay marriage impacts children. As so aptly stated- _gays cant have their own children,_ and gays can already adopt. So where is the change?
_”If you think government gets to grab hold of the definition of marriage and rewrite it just because it grants tax breaks, you’ve got your general arguments more backwards than I can begin to describe.”_
You are the one granting government that power. Government can grant tax breaks, government cannot sanctify a sacrament, and that is essentially what you are demanding.
Socially, religiously, marraige will be no different. That was my point- especially for conservatives, why mix up government in that definition? Once you start down that road, well hey, lots of people dont consider you truly married if its not done in a Catholic Church as a holy sacrament. Why not hold that to be the standard?
I’ll reach into my usual bag of tricks and ask this question that i ask everyone that insists on the government defining life for you- if gay marraige goes through, is it going to impact your marriage? Just as if drug legalization goes through, are you going to start smoking crack? Then why worry about it. Assumedly because you think its your fellow citizens that have the problem.
Mark writes:
bq. Not according to our legal system.
Wrong.
The legal system notion of proof is not the same as what is needed for causality (which you demanded), or other logically rigorous academic pursuits like mathematics. The legal system requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
But beyond that the democratic system requires a vote, meaning that the reasonableness of the claims is vetted across the collective experience of many divergent people and societies. There is no doubt that with a very narrowly constrained view of life neutered marriage makes sense. The question is how narrow and how constrained that is required to be.
cf: kangaroo court, or the court in Alice in Wonderland noted previously.
You simply have to admit you have no case at all. And if you were more honest you’d admit that the case to defend marriage has more grounds, more evidence, and even more claim at equality.
For instance when asked for proof of your own claims you simply stated:
bq. This is a non-sequitar.
And went into a round of how I haven’t proven something.
A very transparent attempt at that.
So I’ll ask again and continue to collect answers before commenting:
“We know that children do best when raised by the parents who gave them life in a loving commitment we call marriage. We know that from adoption, to foster care, to downright abandonment that the results show in how the children view themselves and how they interact with society.”
“Prove to me, or even give me some plausible attempt to explain why homosexuality bridges or compensates for that known impact.”
It is most relevant, in that if you cannot grasp what is helping society, you probably will never grasp what changes will do. Which, IMHO, you’ve not shown interest in let alone competence.
If we replace that ideal, how and why will homosexuality work differently than anything else that works against that ideal?
Mark writes:
bq. if gay marraige goes through, is it going to impact your marriage? Just as if drug legalization goes through, are you going to start smoking crack?
A->B
bq. Then why worry about it. Assumedly because you think its your fellow citizens that have the problem.
Just note, that is your association, not mine.
No one is making churches marry gays against their beliefs. Sometimes I think half the opposition to gay marriage is a picture of Court Marshals ordering a priest or rabbi to solemnize a marriage that would not be valid in their religious tradition. That’s no more going to happen than Court Marshals forcing priests and rabbis to perform “intermarriages” across faiths that they do not accept.
In this country, however, marriage has a secular component. If we were to rename that component a “registered domestic partnership” for everyone, and let marriage be a word reserved to religious institutions, well I’d be fine with that, too.
bq. You are the one granting government that power. Government can grant tax breaks, government cannot sanctify a sacrament, and that is essentially what you are demanding.
Again, careful with the “you” there. _I_ don’t want government to be allowed to define marriage, but gay couples in California are demanding that the government step in and do so. Given the “full faith and credit clause”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_faith_and_credit in the Constitution, which may force all other states to recognize it once California does, why should I _not_ speak out against the government’s newly scribbled definition?
If conservatives think the battle over government meddling in non-government institutions has already been lost, why should they not fight for a preferred definition? Do we also have to wait for gun rights to be utterly abolished before we can argue against incremental gun control laws? Do we automatically lose every obscenity case just because public copulation has not yet been legalized? There’s no hypocrisy in fighting specific regulations on its own terms where the government is determined to regulate.
bq. I’ll reach into my usual bag of tricks and ask this question that i ask everyone that insists on the government defining life for you- if gay marraige goes through, is it going to impact your marriage? Just as if drug legalization goes through, are you going to start smoking crack? Then why worry about it.
Because my kids might start smoking crack. Because the guy next door might start smoking crack. Because living in an area with a lot of drug users generally leads to a lesser quality of life. Because I believe society as a whole will be worse off if the barriers to a life of drug addiction are lowered.
Since when did rational-selfish utilitarianism become the guiding light for policy arguments in this country?
I know the libertarians are all proud about their rigidly coherent framework, but there’s good reason no one votes for Libertarians. Bad public policy in exchange for ideological purity is a poor trade, so unless we’re going back to calling the majority a mob, you’ll just have to put up with society debating the larger societal ramifications of private actions.
_” The legal system requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”_
Noo, thats a criminal case. Equal Protection requires the government demonstrates a level of “Scutiny”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny
_”the concept generally refers to something necessary or crucial, as opposed to something merely preferred”_
_”But beyond that the democratic system requires a vote,”_
Violations of the constitution are not decided by a vote.
_”cf: kangaroo court, or the court in Alice in Wonderland noted previously.”_
Reread the thread. If you find this to be a kangaroo court you find the Loving court as well.
_”So I’ll ask again and continue to collect answers before commenting:”_
My friend, i’m not sure why you arent grasping this, but just railing about the threat against children and the downfall of society _does
not imply that gay marraige is either the present of future cause._ You have to connect them logically, not just state that it is a fact.
Specifically, gay marraige has NOTHING TO DO WITH HOW CHILDREN ARE BEST RAISED. If you want to make that connection, you better start their. You cant just assume your conclusions.
_”Because my kids might start smoking crack. Because the guy next door might start smoking crack. Because living in an area with a lot of drug users generally leads to a lesser quality of life.”_
Indeed. Its the other people with the problem, not me. Better bust some heads to keep everyone else in line.
But of course when a majority of people feel the same way against something I’m ok with, that’s different.
bq. Noo, thats a criminal case. Equal Protection requires the government demonstrates a level of Scutiny
bq. …If you find this to be a kangaroo court you find the Loving court as well.
As I pointed out above, in both _Loving_ and _Robles_ the court applied strict scrutiny, under which neither gender nor sexual orientation (and all the vagueness that term carries) are protected classes. The California court’s “innovation” (as PD Shaw pointed out in “#123”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/010298.php#c123 above) was to reject the state’s interest so they could get away with applying the looser standard.
Naturally I think the tactic is BS, and the “reasoning” in the ruling is woefully insufficient for applying it.
bq. Indeed. Its the other people with the problem, not me. Better bust some heads to keep everyone else in line.
Oh give it a rest. If I applied the same bad faith imputations to your arguments that you are to mine, the anarchist label would have come out instead of libertarian. Just state your glorious case for letting everyone do whatever they feel like, deliver your rousing soundbyte in support of “liberty”, and be done with it.
bq. But of course when a majority of people feel the same way against something I’m ok with, that’s different.
A “majority”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_Desecration_Amendment#Polls seems to be in favor of an anti-flag burning Amendment. I’m against flag burning _and_ against an Amendment banning the same. Sufficient counterexample? Or do I have to keep torching the strawmen you throw out?
You’re taking a rather circuitous route to make the usual “don’t force your morals on everyone” cry.
_”Just state your glorious case for letting everyone do whatever they feel like, deliver your rousing soundbyte in support of “liberty”, and be done with it.”_
If you can’t provide evidence that it will directly harm an innocent party, it shouldnt be illegal. There, glorious rallying cry.
_”I’m against flag burning and against an Amendment banning the same”_
Were you upset when anti flag-burning was struck down, not by the will of the people, but by the courts? Was that Kangaroo justice when it was something you agreed with?
I became curious about the interesting vocabulary used by our visitor, and did a little Googling. (Neologisms are such handy markers when following someone around the Web.)
“This post”:http://fanniesroom.blogspot.com/2007/12/handy-manual-for-opine-speak.html while more than a bit opinionated, does have a snapshot of the more curious terms, and links for those who want to investigate the source further.
Mark writes:
bq. Noo, thats a criminal case. Equal Protection requires the government demonstrates a level of Scutiny
More accurately written, yes thats a criminal case. Equal protection requires the party discerning between a suspect and non-suspect class pass one of (IIRC) three levels of scrutiny.
Which, if I understand it right requires (again not in logical mathematical proof) proof that they are a suspect class and that they are actually being harmed. But, opposite of what you have claimed the burden of proof first is on those who are asking for the change to demonstrate harm. Then it is up to those who are making the discernment to justify that discernment as if there is a legitimate interest or purpose behind it.
So, prove that homosexuals are a suspect class and harmed by marriage equality ensuring the quality of each gender’s participation in marriage. And then prove they are harmed.
bq. Violations of the constitution are not decided by a vote.
More accurate to say, what the constitution holds is decided by vote both direct and through representation. What violates the constitution is first decided by that vote, then judgments based on that taken by judges.
bq. If you find this to be a kangaroo court you find the Loving court as well.
Does not follow. As I wrote above (speaking of reading the conversation)…
bq. Loving was a decision which struck down laws which mandated racial segregation between blacks and whites in marriage. Substituting race for sex would have a decision which strikes down sex segregation in marriage between men and women. But marriage is already integrating men and women — and that marriage equality is a problem for some. So much so that those that see marriage equality as the quality of that integration, are called bigots repeatedly in this thread.
Brown v Board of education noted that only through integration do you have real equality. And because of that you cannot open a whites only school and get recognition as a public school. If you rule that a all-male combination publicly recognized with benefits is along the same line of reasoning, I submit it happened through the tortured selective focus of a kangaroo court.
bq. Specifically, gay marraige has NOTHING TO DO WITH HOW CHILDREN ARE BEST RAISED. If you want to make that connection, you better start their. You cant just assume your conclusions.
The state’s interest in marriage is in promoting the environment how children are best raised.
“gay marraige has NOTHING TO DO WITH HOW CHILDREN ARE BEST RAISED”
Ergo, the state’s interest in marriage is not served by gay marriage.
It is as simple as that.
Tim,
Was there any specific usage you wanted to ask me, rather than someone who I’d characterize as a malicious slanderer?
No there wasn’t. Others can do the same searches that I did, and draw their own conclusions about what you mean.
bq. Others can do the same searches that I did, and draw their own conclusions about what you mean.
I’d like to think I’m at least a good authority on what I mean. At least a bit better than someone who complains every other paragraph that they don’t understand what I’m writing. (Actually to be fair, she probably does understand but the rhetorical bemusement is something she was probably taught from the comedy channel.)
Anyway, you can pass on slander if you want. People sling it often, especially in politically charged debates like this. Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
But I like to think of people as being more genuinely curious and minded towards the facts than search out for it.
So just so I know, what phrases were unique enough to find your interest?
Tim,
Just because you brought it up, I decided to “write up a bit”:http://opine-editorials.blogspot.com/2008/06/fannies-room-digging-out-straight-down.html in response to that author…
A few other links in response to a few items in your link…
“Link 1”:http://opine-editorials.blogspot.com/2005/04/marriage-equality-now-part-3.html?showComment=1213748640000#c5052599463091410027
“Link 2”:http://opine-editorials.blogspot.com/2005/04/marriage-equality-now-part-2.html?showComment=1213748160000#c1058807409181675757
And from an earlier conversation on the term “neutered marriage”, I will provide a better explanation than found on her site.
bq. Same-sex or even gay marriage simply discusses who is being targeted with benefits. And even that is a misnomer since only a program such as Civil Unions really justifies as catering to gays or same-sex couples. It does not describe the actual change being proposed to the institution itself, which is to render the definition of marriage gender-neutral — to remove the reference to gender altogether. Hence neutered marriage.
Just as easy divorces benefited our society, so to will this travesty. Let’s face it folks, marriage is a farce. This society is in the process of destroying our basis for a stable society and this order from our unelected courts is just another step. God help our children.
I was wondering where some of that terminology was coming from, used as though it were self-evident.
Mark wrote:
bq. if gay marraige goes through, is it going to impact your marriage? Just as if drug legalization goes through, are you going to start smoking crack?
And I was wondering where your reckless attitude towards social change was coming from.
Andrew wrote:
bq. I am not especially knowledgeable in the field, but I think the two most serious problems with On Lawn’s “fatherless” households are the economic costs of single parenthood and the related use of surrogate childcare and reduction in parent-child interaction.
I appreciate the admission. But we even see impact of adoption on children when raised in otherwise in-tact homes. We also see that in many ways children of step-families are statistically much like children raised in single-parent homes.
bq. Neither of these factors will matter in two-person gay marriages.
What matters is that many children do not appreciate being torn away from their parents. Not in donor scenarios, and not in the case of Rosie O’Donnell. They not only want adult attention from both genders, they seem to want a connection with their heritage. Marriage provides both. Same sex marriage provides only for adult needs, hoping that through trickle down economics children are helped also.
bq. So that leaves us with, AFAICT, some sort of father “role model” argument, which seems to me to be obsolete. The technological revolution, leave alone women’s liberation, already devalues most occupations dependent on physical strength.
I’ll give you credit, that is better than reducing fatherhood to just a paycheck. But children identify with each gender, and nothing teaches diversity and tolerance to the young children more than a man and woman who appreciate each other for who they are.
But I can’t leave this topic without asking, is it just fathers that are obsolete or mothers too? If both then it seems we’ve found another area where neutering marriage has an impact on what people believe about society at large.
It may be equality to say both are obsolete, but it also rings very inhumane.
bq. I don’t see much problem left with “fatherless” and “motherless” households except an appeal to prejudice.
To borrow from Mark who stated that race and gender were interchangable in some applications, here is the race version of that statement…
“I don’t see much problem left with black-free and white-free schools except an appeal to prejudice.”
Although that is not the only parallel I’ve seen between gay advocacy and the arguments of segregation in the 50’s.
Lets be real for a minute. The real fear of gay marriage is that somehow its gonna gay up your kids, or that you might have to see two dudes holding hands.
I noticed some traffic coming my way from this site and hey, wouldn’t I know it, “On Lawn’s” involved in yet another lengthy drawn-out internet “SSM” battle. Surprise, surprise!
Just for some disclosure here, this “On Lawn” character is obsessed with trying to discredit me personally. His criticisms of those he disagrees with are so personal, over-the-top, and exaggerated, it’s hard to take him seriously. He recently compared one man he argued with to Hitler! And, not only does he throw around terms he doesn’t understand (“slander,” my dear, only applies to oral, spoken, communications), not once have I seen “Lawn” tell me why my Manual of Opine-Speak is “erroneous.” Rather, in true hyperbolic form, he has merely labeled it as “malicious slander” without bothering to correct the “errors.”
Note to “On Lawn,” “malicious slander” is not defined as something you disagree with. As an attorney, I’d like to inform “Lawn” that matters of opinion and fair public comment do not constitute “slander.” Get a grip.
It would be refreshing if those who threw around big words actually knew how to use them or what they meant.
As this is now the part where “On Lawn” narrates a fictional version of me, anyone who wants to read what I’m actually like is welcome to visit my blog. I’m confident in the ability of people to form their own opinions.
Mark wrote:
bq. Lets be real for a minute. The real fear of gay marriage is that somehow its gonna gay up your kids, or that you might have to see two dudes holding hands.
No, actually my fear is not about homosexuality or its public or private practice.
It is rather presumptive to think that a false insinuation would invalidate “the fears”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/last_night_marriage_for_all_in_california.php#c124 I have expressed above.
You have likely found a friend in Fannie on that regard.
Fannie wrote:
bq. Rather, in true hyperbolic form, he has merely labeled it as “malicious slander” without bothering to correct the “errors.”
Attempting to re-write history is nothing new to Fannie. But to attempt it “in light of arguments”:http://http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/last_night_marriage_for_all_in_california.php#c152 so recently in the thread is astounding.
bq. not once have I seen “Lawn” tell me why my Manual of Opine-Speak is “erroneous.”
This is discredited by her own public record. At the end of the “handy manual” is this note:
bq. [ADDENDUM: I see that “Lawn” is in the process of responding to this parody in the comment thread of each Opine article I link to. And by “respond,” I mean he faithfully recycles his same sorry, tired, utterly unconvincing arguments and presents them anew as though he, this time, “wins.” This is all part of “Lawn’s” self-indulgent need to narrate who wins and loses various arguments (hint: he usually “wins”) because god forbid, people read two different sides and decide for themselves what occurred.]
Yet after the short notes I’ve written about it in response (which amount to pointing out that she needs to employ better rigor in restating others arguments) it is interesting to see her label it as a “parody” is enough to note it as less than a serious work that needs to be considered erroneous. Perhaps she is complaining that I don’t give enough attention to her comedic attempts?
Like I said, friends come and go but enemies accumulate.
I reread your previous post onlawn: Guess what: children are raised without fathers and mothers everyday. It’s sad: people get divorced, they die, they suffer massive depressions (etc, etc etc). Still, I’ve never heard anyone say: Boy I’m glad there’s not a father in that young man’s life!
I’m sure there are some that exist (less than 0.0001%) but even the gay couples I know have pulled in friends of the opposite sex to help raise the child. They understand that a child having access to both the masculine and feminine side of society is important.
On the flip side, I also know many couples who give their child either 1) no exposure to feminine ideas or 2) no exposure to masculine ideas. That also is a mistake, and leads to children who don’t know how to relate to the other (or their own) sex.
Some parents have been screwing up their kids for thousands of years. I have no doubt that some gay parents will not be suitable parents: but that number is likely to be statistically insignificant compared to such issues as: Class, wealth, education, prior abuse history (etc).
It’s funny. I had to help my nephew write a report on the short story “The Lottery”, about a group of people who have kept a tradition alive for thousands of years although they don’t understand it, and can’t explain the need for it, other than basic (flawed) assumptions. It reminded me of something…
On Lawn, I’ll Google around for some comparisons with adoptive and step-families, but in both these cases, the child has probably already suffered some deep trauma (abandonment, abuse, divorce) that doesn’t follow in a two-parent single-sex household. As of now, there are few such households where the children are not the result of an earlier (straight) marriage, so I don’t see how an argument can be made in either direction.
You can’t reason somebody out of a position they werent reasoned into in the first place.
Alchemist wrote:
bq. Guess what: children are raised without fathers and mothers everyday. It’s sad: people get divorced, they die, they suffer massive depressions (etc, etc etc).
Your larger point about it being a tragedy each time is directly speaking to my point. I’m glad to see we have agreement on that.
Alchemist continues:
bq. even the gay couples I know have pulled in friends of the opposite sex to help raise the child.
Which is not unlike what single-parents have done. Also divorced parents are often agreeable to enlisted help from the other parent.
Alchemist continues:
bq. I also know many couples who give their child either 1) no exposure to feminine ideas or 2) no exposure to masculine ideas. That also is a mistake, and leads to children who don’t know how to relate to the other (or their own) sex.
Or worse, spend their lives dragging their kids through their gender chauvinism and actively working against understanding of the other gender. This happens in marriage too, which is why the cry for marriage equality has such a longstanding tradition as providing the quality of each gender’s representation in marriage. Which, by the way, is severely hampered when we are to believe it is the same if only one gender is represented in that marriage.
Alchemist notes:
bq. I had to help my nephew write a report on the short story “The Lottery”
My wife played the winner of the Lottery in a local production when she was growing up.
Luckily for marriage, no one is being stoned and we know why we are doing it.
When people know what marriage is, and they agree to its value in their life, they will cross the Mojave desert on their knees (if needed) to find someone of the opposite sex who understands it too.
We are participating in something that is intrinsic to our humanity. Not just in bringing about life, but in how we prepare and unify with the other gender in doing it. There is likely nothing we will do that will impact the future more than marrying right and for the right reasons.
Alchemist adds:
bq. As of now, there are few such households where the children are not the result of an earlier (straight) marriage, so I don’t see how an argument can be made in either direction.
Just a few notes. A majority of same-sex households are not homosexual. A majority of homosexual households with children come from previous heterosexual households. Many children when they realize they were donor children feel a real loss, like their heritage was robbed from them. Their connection to their past is an unknown. Google, “Whose Daughter” and “my daddy’s name is donor”. Also cross reference “this brief review”:http://opine-editorials.blogspot.com/2006/12/same-sex-householders-in-us-population.html of statistics…
100% of children come from heterosexual relationships of one kind or another. For me, making that relationship simply a for-hire commercial exchange is not a way to save ourselves from the pitfalls we’ve already identified in family constructions.
Oops, that last quote was from Andrew, not Alchemist. And while I have what I noted in the comment above, I largely agree with it.
“On Lawn” wrote:
“Yet after the short notes I’ve written about it in response (which amount to pointing out that she needs to employ better rigor in restating others arguments) it is interesting to see her label it as a “parody” is enough to note it as less than a serious work that needs to be considered erroneous. Perhaps she is complaining that I don’t give enough attention to her comedic attempts?”
Actually, Lawn, I take issue with the fact that you hyperbolically declare a parody to constitute “malicious slander.” Take it down a notch, and please for the love of god look up words you do not know or understand before you throw them around the internet. (Not that I expect you to acknowledge your error.)
What’s next another article about how your internet “enemies” are like Hitler? When faced with criticism, your responses are so over the top it is ridiculous.
Speaking of which, you also said,
“Like I said, friends come and go but enemies accumulate.”
What a profoundly sad statement. That has not been my experience in real life or the internet at all. I’m sorry it has been yours, and that that is the window through which you view social relations.
On Lawn, Fannie: I respectfully direct you both to a relevant portion of the Winds “comments policy…”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/003367.php
bq. Rule #4a: […W]e’re not interested in the blog war you and so-and-so are having at some other forum. Leave it there, and respond to the arguments and issues here on Winds, or our Marshals have the discretion to shoot on sight and delete your posts.
Don’t make me go there, please.
#38 Marcus Vitruvius said:
bq. Do you support their [gays] right to marry under the same laws as heterosexuals? If not, I will unapologetically consider that to be endorsement of a separate-but-equal doctrine.
The marriage law does not prohibit on the basis of gayness. So the answer to your first question is, yes, under the marriage law’s man-woman criterion which applies to all-comers.
I’ve answered your question, please answer this: do you support the marriage presumption of paternity?
That presumption is part and parcel of what people are supposed to consent to when they enter marriage.
It integrates motherhood and fatherhood. It cannot apply to the all-male nor to the all-female arrangement.
The marriage presumption of paternity is both-sexed. It stands as one of the strongest legal traditions in our society.
This arises from the both-sexed nature of human generativity, of human community, and from the two-sexed nature of humankind itself. These are not religious impositions on human beings.
The marriage presumption is not one-sexed.
This demonstrates that the man-woman criterion is not a religious criterion of lawful marriage in our pluralistic society. As a law, it is expressed in secular language even if it is religions pretty much provide universal endorsement.
Do those who favor the merger of SSM with marriage also endorse the marriage presumption of paternity or is it to be marginalized simply because it cannot apply to arrangements that lack one of the sexes?
That is, must all unions of husband and wife be treated as if they lacked either husbands or wives, just like with the all-male or the all-female arrangements?
If you’d point to third-party procreation (i.e. extramarital procreation) then perhaps you’d require society to treat the all-male arrangement exactly the same as the all-female arrangement? And these as exactly the same as the both-sexed union of husband and wife?
I doubt the pro-SSM answers could avoid invoking some type of seperate but equal doctrine. But maybe you could.
#60 Mark Buehner said:
bq. Please someone explaing to me the specific mechanism via which this will harm: 1.me. 2.you. 3.your neighborhood 4.your city 5.your country.
Hang on.
Is there a legal requirement that people engage in same-sex sexual behavior when forming entering SSM?
Nope.
If we follow the pro-SSM argumentation that says that procreation is not compulsory in each and every marriage, and that procreation occurs outside of marriage, and that procreation is not essential to the state’s recognition of the social institution of marriage …. then there is a direct implication for the relationship type that is proposed in the pro-SSM reform.
It is not a sexual relationship type, at law.
So, by discarding the centrality of 1. the man-woman criterion (i.e. sex integration) and 2. the marriage presumption of paternity (i.e. contingency for responsible procreation) and 3. the sexual basis for the conjugal relationship status … the pro-SSM reform must provide new foundations for prohibiting related people and multi-marriage (i.e. polygamy), for starters.
With the pro-SSM reform — whether imposed by judges or by legislators — lines must still be drawn around the core of the relationship type. That’s how it can be identified and then accorded protections.
What is the core of SSM? Not of this or that instance of SSM, but of the relationship type, at law? In the California decision?
Now, based on that, does the relationship status exclude some people?
On what basis if not concerns about integration of the sexes and responsible procreation?
Given the clear implications of SSM argumentation, don’t assume that related people would engage in in-ces-tuous sexual behavior. In fact, some related people can and do marry — but not all — so you will need to find a strong basis to exclude in the name of the pro-SSM call for greater inclusivity and diversity.
In fact, don’t assume that society ought to treat the new thing, post-SSM-reform, as marriage anyway. It will be a replacement, not an expansion of the conjugal relationship type.
Then there is polygamy which is a series of marriages of one man and one woman.
In the American tradition, this is prohibited based on things attacked and marginalized by SSM argumentation: concerns regarding sex integration, responsible procreation, equality of husband and wife, religious foundations, and the assertion of public morality.
However that tradition also includes divorce and remarraige post-divorce, as the pro-SSM side is so fond of reminding us all. This is also serial marriage. Yes, our marriage laws have been greatly complicated by divorce, re-marraige, and increased state (i.e. court) intrusions into private family life, but somehow the laws have “evolved”, as the SSM side is also fond of saying.
So on what basis to prohibit this or that form of serial marriage but not some other form? Surely not the traditional connection with monogamous sexual behavior. Nor the obvious connection with responsible procreation. It can’t be about integration of motherhood and fatherhood — for even people with children may re-marry.
Let’s use the pro-SSM rules that attack the cor eof the social institution and turn these rules on the proposed SSM reform. Now, justify whatever lines you would have society — or perhaps just the judges on behalf of society — so as to distinguish the relationship type you have in mind from all other relationship tyhpes that would be prohibited for the status.
Nope. Trying to copy-paste from the current prohibitions on related people and on already-married people will not suffice.
Societal esteem for the social institution, and the state’s preferential treatment of that institution, is a long-term commitment, surely. So look down the road. Strengthen the special status of marriage in society by first spelling-out what you would make the core of the relationship type that you would have society call marriage.
Oh, and please remember not to depend on tradition — such as the relatively new tradition of romantic feelings, because, first, there is no love or romance legal requirement and, second, SSM argumentation has downgraded the significance of tradition when it comes to recognition of a foundational social institution.
Rising to the challenge is an exercise in sink or swim, for the SSM side.