Cooper says:
The concern is that redefining marriage as a genderless institution will sever its abiding connection to its historic traditional procreative purposes, and it will refocus, refocus the purpose of marriage and the definition of marriage away from the raising of children and to the emotional needs and desires of adults, of adult couples….Justice Kagan presses him: What about older heterosexual couples over the age of 55? Their sexual intercourse isn't going to produce children. Letting them marry when they can't procreate ought to present the same problem of centering marriage on adult "needs and desires" instead of on children.
Cooper says:
[S]ociety's interest in responsible procreation isn't just with respect to the procreative capacities of the couple itself. The marital norm, which imposes the obligations of fidelity and monogamy... advances the interests in responsible procreation by making it more likely that neither party, including the fertile party to that...The fertile party? Yes: The man can still reproduce, just not with this woman.
The marital norm... [is] designed... to make it less likely that either party to that — to that marriage will engage in irresponsible procreative conduct outside of that marriage.... That's... the marital norm. Society has an interest in seeing a 55-year-old couple that is -- just as it has an interest of seeing any heterosexual couple that intends to engage in a prolonged period of cohabitation to reserve that until they have made a marital commitment.... So that, should that union produce any offspring, it would be more likely that that child or children will be raised by the mother and father who brought them into the world.Got that? In this view, marriage is about children and not adult desire because it is a device to rein in male desire, to keep men from fathering children they aren't going to raise. It's not that marriage can keep that bad thing from happening. It just makes it less likely, because the marriage norm is fidelity.
Obviously, fornication and adultery go on despite this marriage norm, and it's hard to see why letting gay people marry would mess up the norm. I'm trying to picture this man at the heart of Cooper's vision of society: He's true to his wife, because he's gotten the message that's the norm, but if some gay people can marry, then he's going to start cheating, knocking up some other woman, and it's because of this guy that gay people can be excluded from marriage?
What a nutty set of things we're asked to believe! Who the hell is this stereotypical married man, constrained by what other people are forbidden to do? And why should his ridiculous, tenuous connection to norms carry the day? And how can obsessing over what makes him tick work to keep marriage focused on the raising of children and not on the emotional needs and desires of adults? It seems to be all about the needs and desires of adults — really ridiculous heterosexual male adults.
Who are these people?!
Posts
251 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 251 of 251@Gerry -- See John Lynch's comment. It's the first one.
What happens when gay couples are allowed civil marriage is that people who really want to get married get married.
I fail to see how allowing people who want to make public vows of commitment "ridicules" marriage. The institution benefits from the persons, not the other way around.
Gays who want to marry are allies in your fight. Or should be.
I'm reminded of a remark by Wendell Barry: Some Christian spokespeople give the impression that the highest Christian bliss would be to get to Heaven and find that you are the only one there--that you were right and the all the others wrong.
And the other part of it is ridicule of religion.
So, get government into every intimate aspect of our lives and get religion out.
That has always been an effective way to have a stable society. You know, because government is really effective at making things work.
Renee
I was just talking about referendums. Has one (for) ever passed?
I too think the proper way to do this is state by state via legislature or referendum. I think it will (probably) ulitmately pass that way, AND will be expressive (or more likely so) of the will of the people (not everything is, think O'care).
I knew a gay couple that had a religious marriage 20 years ago.
It's ironic that gays can have (and be denied) religious ceremonies independently of the status of civil marriage. A number of religions explicitly declare that the religious marriage (the temple vows, the sacrament) is uniquely more important than the civil marriage. The civil marriage is just the necessary hurdle to appease the state.
It's opposite world. Defenders of traditional marriage are trying to save it from people who value and support it.
Sorry if this has already been addressed, but I wonder how all of this reasoning applies to marriage between first cousins (or even siblings). If you say that procreation is not relevant to whether a couple should be allowed to marry (which I happen to agree with), wouldn't that undercut much of the rationale for not allowing marriage between people closely related to one another? I think the risk of birth defects is often cited as a reason to not allow incestuous marriages.
Separating marriage from its fundamental purpose, childbearing and childrearing, has bad social and cultural outcomes...
A very common argument in this thread supporting SSM revolves around eliminating the government's role in defining marriage.
If they don't see the logical conclusion to that argument, they're being willfully blind.
If they do, then it reinforces my understanding that this battle is about the destruction of marriage as a traditional institution.
"Robert...No one is preventing gays from marrying."
Of course they are, or trying to.
"Gay people can have all the weddings they want and agents are not going to burst on the scene and arrest them as if they were selling raw milk or something."
Without the legal imprimatur of the state, such ceremonies are purely, uh...ceremonial, and the legal protections and advantages conferred upon "legally" married couples remain nonexistent for the "pretend" married gays.
"What is under discussion is government recognition of these marriages."
Yes, the significant point of it all.
"There are a lot of aspects to consider about whether this policy change should be effected. Given that gays can happily live together and carry on a relationship and set up legal protections for each other unmolested--"
How can you be so sure? The law provides certain legal rights to recognized family members that it does not provide to friends, even close friends or lovers. How can you be certain that a gay couple can simply "set up" legal protections for themselves that countermand such family rights already enshrined in law (or that they can anticipate all the legal pitfalls in order to protect against them)? Why should a gay couple have to go to this trouble and expense when simply recognizing their marriage under the law provides all the legal rights automatically available to straight married couples?
"I don't understand your impatience with those who want to think carefully through the ramifications of bringing gay marriage to the same legal level as straight marriage."
What are the ramifications? To be specific, what are the negative ramifications that might result from conferring legal status on gay marriages?
All denials to the contrary, the tortured arguments offered by those who would deny gays legal recognition of their marriages strike me as simply obfuscation of the actual basis of their objection to SSM: bigotry and a failure to recognize gays as being as fully human as everyone else.
Loving, supporting parents . . . [are] the single most important thing," the president told his audience of young, mostly minority children at Hyde Park Academy High School in Chicago. He made the case for parents as the key to giving children a sense of self-esteem beyond the barrel of a gun.
Sure. Let's make marriage just a thing for gratification of sexual desires!
For this reason alone, civil unions are a solution, separating marriage for its importance in childbearing and childrearing.
Robert Cook said...
It's not SSM that needs defending
Uh, yes, yes it is.
John Lynch: Same problem with SSM. If marriage is in trouble, why go after gays when they have nothing to do with it? If marriage needs to be fixed, then fix it. If divorce and illegitimacy are out of hand, then propose solutions to them. This has nothing whatever to do with gays.
So you think it's merely a coincidence that the current huge to-do about gay marriage comes at the tail end of the rise, entrenchment, and indifferent acceptance of the social pathologies you enumerate here? Absent those pathologies (which, I'll agree, have nothing whatever to do with gays in their origin), do you think it's reasonable to suppose that SSM would even be an issue now, that the timing is merely coincidental, and that the current cranked-up-to-11, saturated media crusade could very well have happened during the great civil rights movement of half-a-century ago, or even earlier?
To advance the argument that gays don't cause the above-mentioned pathologies, as an argument for SSM, is to avoid thinking about how SSM and those pathologies are culturally and historically related.
Now, that is not to say that noticing those connections would necessarily lead one to oppose SSM. Unfortunately, ignoring those connections, refusing to think about anything beyond abstract appeals to individual choice and liberty, puts proponents in the position of flippantly ignoring or dismissing the very real consequences of their arguments. (None of the proponents here, for e.g., seem to be able to do anything but respond like peevish children when asked about the precedents set for allowing polygamy. In the end they'll go along with the push for polygamy, because all they've got as tools are appeals to "equality" and individual rights, and they haven't got a clue why polygamy is not a good idea. Though right now they'll just start screeching that it'll never happen, or more likely, sulk and ignore the point.)
Oh, they do occasionally trot out, as you do, the argument that SSM will simply allow gays to be brought into the wholesome fold of bourgeois monogamous marriage. Unfortunately, once the field is gained (and even before), the squawking to change the institution to suit gays and their indifference to monogamy begins. With, I might add, the same arguments you present here - "Well, lots of straights are unfaithful, too, so monogamy and fidelity are just bullshit..."[cont'd]
[cont'd]
It seems to me that the fight over SSM is drawing a line in the sand and saying, "this far and no farther!"
A bit late for that, and it misses the point. Traditional mores are almost dead, and they need to be replaced with something workable that will perpetuate society as something beyond a cloud of individuals. Simple prejudice isn't enough.
Well, that's just the problem, John. That society is nothing but a culture-less "cloud of individuals" is exactly what the push for SSM is grounded on. It is an entirely libertarian, abstract argument about individual rights with no acknowledgement whatever that inherited forms of family organization have anything, anything at all, to do with the form of life we prefer and the values, like liberty, that we claim to cherish.
When you have a "society" whose members no longer share an implicit agreement on what form the most fundamental unit of society should take (and it is precisely that implicit agreement and understanding that you are so airily dismissing as "simple prejudice"), you cannot have anything but a "cloud of individuals", whose "traditional mores" are, as you say, pretty much dead.
Unfortunately, these can't be replaced by "something workable" that you happen to dream up on the spot. It's silly to insist that society is nothing but relations based on contract and individual rights, that culture is nothing more than entertaining folk customs (and, of course, "simple prejudice"), that have no real relevance to "society", and then turn around and moan about this society being nothing but "a cloud of individuals" who feel no sense of loyalty or civic duty to one another.
But "very silly" is exactly what we've become.
gerry wrote: Separating marriage from its fundamental purpose, childbearing and childrearing, has bad social and cultural outcomes...
Given your link to the Juan Williams piece, you might want to strike the word "childbearing" from your summation.
"This is not a criminal trial."
Learn the word analogy. It's in the dictionary.
"What this is, and what gets my dander up, is an attempt to use the courts to impose the will of a tiny minority on the people of the country. Prop 8 passed with a large margin, but the minority refused to abide by the decision and is trying to get the court to side with them similar (in their minds) to how it ruled in Roe V Wade. SSM has failed to pass every time it is brought to a vote. A few states passed laws through their legitimately elected legislatures, good for them. That's their business. Forcing the rest of the country to accept what they clearly rejected is opression. So, if you maintain that gays are currently oppressed, which then is the greater evil? Opressing 3% of the population? or 97%?"
How are you or anyone who dislikes gay marriage "oppressed" if gays are allowed to marry? How does it make a tinker's damn of difference to you?
BTW, the Constitution serves not only to describe the workings of our representative republic, allowing for an approximation of "majority rule," but also serves to protect the rights of minorities.
At the time slavery was abolished, a significant number of Americans nationally, and distinct majority in the states most affected, were in favor of slavery as a legal institution.
Should the preference of that significant portion of the populace, that majority in the southern states, have been allowed to hold sway? Were those in favor of slavery "oppressed" by the freeing of the formerly enslaved human beings? Certainly the slave holders were more negatively affected economically by the abolishment of slavery than will be those who oppose SSM if SSM is legalized nationally, but economic interests do not and should not be the (or even a) primary deciding factor in matters of human rights.
As to your questions in re: "the greater evil." The "greater evil" is that which denies equal rights to subset of a population... the majority will in such cases be damned.
Jay said:
"'Robert Cook said...
'It's not SSM that needs defending'
"Uh, yes, yes it is."
No, Jay, it's not. In this, as in virtually everything you assert, you are wrong.
People used to call me stupid for supporting civil unions for gays back in the 80's. Now they call me a bigot for supporting civil unions for gays.
Funny how that works.
Robert Cook said...
"You can't engage in an argument defending SSM."
It's not SSM that needs defending; it's the position that gays should be prohibited from marrying. (Think of a criminal trial: the defendant has no obligation to prove his innocence; it is the state's obligation to prove his guilt. In this case, the defendant is SSM.)
This is ridiculously, obviously false. The status quo is that gay relations are not included in marriage. No one woke up last Tursday and banned gays from getting married.
Robert Cook said:
As to your questions in re: "the greater evil." The "greater evil" is that which denies equal rights to subset of a population... the majority will in such cases be damned.
Ah, now we get to the meat of it. To reiterate: SSM is not a civil right. Marriage in general is not a civil right. Society saying that we don't want SSM is not slavery, no one is whipping gays back into their closets. If Americans vote on a matter that is NOT a civil right, and the courts/special interests/vocal minority demand! that the will of the people be damned, well then, the people are disenfranchised, and yes, they are oppressed. See, you are conflating two things: SSM and the right of the people to determine the manner of their own laws. Prove to me that marriage, ANY marriage is a civil right. It is (to the state) nothing more than a set of contractual obligations and license, literally, to do certain acts.
So you think it's merely a coincidence that the current huge to-do about gay marriage comes at the tail end of the rise, entrenchment, and indifferent acceptance of the social pathologies you enumerate here?
That's a rather bizarre effect and cause postulation you have there.
By the way, the answer is "yes", it is coincidental. Or at least very very very tangentially coorelated.
Oh I suppose you could come up with an argument. You could say that illegitimacy and its outcome of abandoned children makes adoption and parenting by stable gay couples more important to society than it was a generation ago.
You could say that, but I don't think you want to.
Henry said...
Defenders of traditional marriage are trying to save it from people who value and support it.
This is false. The people who value it are mostly sitting on the sideline. Defenders are protecting it from people who are using it as a weapon in the culture war. People complaining about tax benefits aren't interested in marriage, they're interested in tax benefits.
I can imagine civil unions being extended beyond gays to couples who don't have a romantic/sexual relationship but just want to bundle together to help each other through the trials and tribulations of life. Toward the end of life, this becomes a big deal, having somebody to help you through sickness, etc.
As far as gov benefits, legal powers and decision making re: your civil union partner, civil unions can provide everything that marriage provides. The advantage that civil unions have over gay marriage is that religious people and social conservatives may feel that the institution of marriage will less threatened by civil unions than gay marriage and that marriage will not be forced to change dramatically by government decree.
It seems like before we adopt gay marriage nation wide, we should first try out civil unions on a broader scale and see how that works out.
Having said that, I have no doubt that gay marriage will be broadly accepted in the near future. The entertainment industry is totally committed to gay marriage and will mold the culture accordingly, it is just a matter of time.
Tank said...
Renee
I was just talking about referendums. Has one (for) ever passed?
A couple have (Maryland, Washington), but only after it became obvious the courts were going to enact if from the bench anyway.
I always become skeptical when someone identifies a problem but their solution has nothing to do with solving it.
Then you should be against SSM. It doesn't solve the problems its proponents say it will.
Aside from that, why expect sweet water from a poisoned well?
The SSM movement has come from the same ideological source that caused the decline of marriage and the black family: Progressives/liberals/the left
They brought you such disasters as:
- No-fault divorce
- Abortion-on-demand
- Using contraception to move child-birth from a woman's most fertile years to the years where pregnancy is improbably and dangerous
- The Great Society
- Welfare to replace Husbands as a source of support to let women stay at home with children
- the elevation of maternal rights to the specific exclusion of paternal rights
So what reason do you have to trust the SSM advocates that there won't be unintended, negative results?
"So what reason do you have to trust the SSM advocates that there won't be unintended, negative results?"
Hard to escape the long arm of the law (of unintended consequences).
Henry: That's a rather bizarre effect and cause postulation you have there.
Only if you're being obtuse about the point.
By the way, the answer is "yes", it is coincidental. Or at least very very very tangentially coorelated.
So you believe that, if sexual and marital mores had remained unchanged from, say, 1955 to the present, "gay marriage" would still be the number one with a bullet issue it is in 2013. Or could just as easily have been in 1970. Or 1930. Or 1870. Being completely coincidental or only very, very, tangentially related to those things.
OK.
Well, well, well. I have made a point in practically every post i have done on this subject that SSM is NOT a civil right. Why is it, do you suppose that no one will respond to that assertion? Not got much to respond with? Do we just ignore inconvenient facts today that don't support the narrative? huh.
"The status quo is that gay relations are not included in marriage."
The status quo in many--if not most--societies throughout history is that slavery is an accepted norm, or that women (in patriarchal societies) must be subservient to men. Does this mean they deserve to be continued without complaint, that those who argue against these and other such social norms/institutions have the burden of proof to support their arguments, rather than those who encourage the continuance of the subjugation of human beings to the "status quo," however miserable?
Prof. Althouse, Mr. Cooper's response should have been the Hayekian: we cannot know, because nobody can know, what harms may flow from redefining one of the two bedrock institutions of society. Millenia of social development have been based on male/female marriage.
No one person -- or even one generation -- can have the knowledge required to disentangle the web of social assumptions and commitments entailed in that institution. A legislature might mess with it, but a court should not.
By analogy, what would be the harms of redefining "parenting" to include what teachers do during the school day?
Nathan,
Impressive (actually depressive) list of failures. Guess the one item I question is birth control, it seems useful, on the whole. One aspect of birth control is that it facilitates young women delaying marriage while they focus on career, etc. A downside of this is that just by delaying getting married from their 20's to their 30's makes finding an acceptable husband much more difficult.
Robert Cook said...
No, Jay, it's not. In this, as in virtually everything you assert, you are wrong.
It is beyond comical you think what you typed is responsive.
Robert Cook said...
Learn the word analogy. It's in the dictionary.
Except your "analogy" is exactly backwards.
I guess in your silly, blinkered thinking, you coming up with an "analogy" - no matter how stupid - means you proved a point.
It must be fun to be so silly.
Robert Cook said...
"The status quo in many--if not most--societies throughout history is that slavery is an accepted norm, or that women (in patriarchal societies) must be subservient to men. Does this mean they deserve to be continued without complaint, that those who argue against these and other such social norms/institutions have the burden of proof to support their arguments, rather than those who encourage the continuance of the subjugation of human beings to the "status quo," however miserable?"
If you want to make a significant change to society via government edict, you should first persuade a majority of the populace that the proposed change is a good idea. Ideally the proposed change would first be field tested on a relatively small scale to expose and learn how to deal with the unintended consequences of the change.
Robert Cook said...
"The status quo is that gay relations are not included in marriage."
The status quo in many--if not most--societies throughout history is that slavery is an accepted norm, or that women (in patriarchal societies) must be subservient to men. Does this mean they deserve to be continued without complaint, that those who argue against these and other such social norms/institutions have the burden of proof to support their arguments, rather than those who encourage the continuance of the subjugation of human beings to the "status quo," however miserable?
1. So by abandonment you admit your earlier assertion is wrong.
2. Continued without complaint? How do you think those rules were changed? Those against slavery et al demonstrated the harm and got the rules changed.
"1. So by abandonment you admit your earlier assertion is wrong."
What?
"If you want to make a significant change to society via government edict, you should first persuade a majority of the populace that the proposed change is a good idea."
Sez who?
Any time a law is passed anywhere the net effect is a "change to society via government edict."
The test should be whether the change will remove equal rights and accepted freedoms from an excluded minority or whether it will expand rights available to the majority to the excluded minority, making those rights inclusive rather than exclusive.
As gay marriage is not prohibited by the Constitution, and as laws against it serve no purpose and their repeal will do no harm, but much good, where is the obligation to "test" whether SSM is a "good idea" or not.
Robert Cook said...
Learn the word analogy. It's in the dictionary.
I wasn't going to address this... It falls under the logical fallacies, see 'False Analogy' in YOUR dictionary. the court case before the supremes is not a criminal trial and SSM is not a 'defendant' This is a question of whether the act of marriage is a civil right under the constitution or a license to engage in behavior regulatable by the state.
Marshall wrote: People complaining about tax benefits aren't interested in marriage, they're interested in tax benefits.
You must know different people than me.
Anglelyne wrote, "... if sexual and marital mores had remained unchanged from, say, 1955 to the present ..."
At some point the envelope for your hypothetical is so large as to be unmailable.
You're essentially saying "if contemporary culture wasn't". But it is.
If you really want to hunt down some possible antecedents to the gay marriage movement you might want to look at the woman's movement.
More substantially you might want to look at the gay rights movement. It has its own history.
But to say in effect: "modern culture is depraved! Gay marriage! AAAAAAGH" is not much of an argument.
My own sense is that the politics of coming out of the closet -- inspired by the civil rights and women's movements -- took precedence. There was a strong impetus to define gay culture as separate from the mainstream that had rejected it. It was the '70s after all.
Then, young activists grew up.
I had a friend in the early '90s whose long-term partner died of cancer. My friend was barred from his partner's hospital room by his partner's hitherto absent sister who superseded him as "next-of-kin".
Those kind of events change minds.
Re: Erika:
Robert, use clear language. No one is preventing gays from marrying. Gay people can have all the weddings they want and agents are not going to burst on the scene and arrest them as if they were selling raw milk or something. What is under discussion is government recognition of these marriages.
Yes, there's a lot of deeply dishonest base stealing that goes on when people claim that the current state of affairs is a "ban" or a "prohibition" on gay marriage. That's so obviously false that it really ought to be treated as a lie in every instance.
Polygamy is banned. People are criminally prosecuted for bigamy. And if there were criminal prosecutions for gay marriages, I would be wholeheartedly in favour of repealing those laws. Private gay marriage shouldn't be banned -- if it were then yes, I think the burden would be on those who support the ban to justify that exercise of state power. As it happens, though, gay marriages are generally just ignored by the law, rather than being banned. That doesn't seem to me a problematic state of affairs, or one that requires much justification.
Althouse is phrasing the argument in the most ridiculous manner. The point is not that one day, a heterosexual man will wake up, realize gay marriage is legal, and start cheating. I don't think anyone is arguing that.
The point is that changing the definition of marriage will have an effect on the way people view marriage - it's purpose, it's benefits, etc.
Look at the way the pill has changed the sexual mores of society. It wasn't an instantaneous change, but it still happened. Now, perhaps you're not worried about that change in the perceptions/purpose of marriage, or you welcome them, but it's not difficult to understand that there are people who are and why they are.
I lean more to the side of getting government out of marriage altogether, but I can quite plainly see that it will have quite wide-ranging effects, some of which are not easily predicted and many of which are not intended.
Palladian said...
Cheers to a happy and long life. :D
And to you!
This silly "culture wars" shit is just divide-and-conquer nonsense, as far as I'm concerned. We, all of us, have more in common as liberty-loving Americans than we do disagreements.
Agreed. For example, $16+ trillion debt and an administration spending money as if it's infinite due to it's marxist policies. On the grand scale of things, tackling that is far more important, but hey, I'm just one guy and I deal with the issues as they come.
Jay said...
Palladian said...
What about HPV? Or breast cancer? Who's responsible for those
I think you should go on comparing STD's to cancer.
They are totally like the same thing.
HPV can lead to cervical cancers.
Robert Cook said...
Nothing like a discussion of gay marriage to bring out the halfwits and bigots and their "fresh-outta-my ass" arguments opposing the right of gays to marry. I only read through the first 25 or 30 comments before I became impatient.
Does the commentary get any better further on?
Marxist,
Which right are individual homosexuals not allowed to exercise again?
wyo sis said...
And the other part of it is ridicule of religion.
So, get government into every intimate aspect of our lives and get religion out.
That has always been an effective way to have a stable society. You know, because government is really effective at making things work.
Well, whenever religion or faith or the exercise of either is expunged from society, we all know what that becomes.
The bottom line is, is that Obama needs to thank whoever is orchestrating all of this Kabuki from his falling polling numbers and failed political policies because the squirrel is working as proposed right now for him.
"I had a friend in the early '90s whose long-term partner died of cancer. My friend was barred from his partner's hospital room by his partner's hitherto absent sister who superseded him as "next-of-kin".
Those kind of events change minds."
They change minds and they might even prompt a change in some laws that affect power of attorney or other civil laws that can be easily made without changing the definition of marriage and family. This kind of incident can be addressed without a sweeping change in the foundation of families. Why swat a mosguito with a sledge hammer?
Henry: At some point the envelope for your hypothetical is so large as to be unmailable.
You're essentially saying "if contemporary culture wasn't". But it is.
I fail to see what is so unwieldy or crypto-tautological about what I asked: "So you believe that, if sexual and marital mores had remained unchanged from, say, 1955 to the present, "gay marriage" would still be the number one with a bullet issue it is in 2013. Or could just as easily have been in 1970. Or 1930. Or 1870. Being completely coincidental or only very, very, tangentially related to those things."
Seems pretty straightforward: "Yes, I do believe that", or "No, I don't believe that" would cover it. Or maybe, "I have my own private meanings for 'coincidental' and 'very, very, tangentially'".
Henry: But to say in effect: "modern culture is depraved! Gay marriage! AAAAAAGH" is not much of an argument.
But I didn't say that. You made a knee jerk response to the beginning of my comment without, as far as I can see, even reading it through, and now you've ended up arguing with yourself.
Please note, what I think about gay marriage has nothing whatever to do with whether the above-mentioned allegedly unwieldy hypothetical is true or not, so I don't know where you're finding the "culture is depraved, aaargh gay marriage" thing. (Well, actually I do - a tad south of "knee" and left of "jerk", but no matter.)
If you really want to hunt down some possible antecedents to the gay marriage movement you might want to look at the woman's movement.
More substantially you might want to look at the gay rights movement. It has its own history.
Yes, and they both rise pretty much contemporaneously with the civil-rights movement. And just about nobody cared about "gay marriage" for most of that history. The exponential spike in "gay marriage" agitation is of recent vintage.
I had a friend in the early '90s whose long-term partner died of cancer. My friend was barred from his partner's hospital room by his partner's hitherto absent sister who superseded him as "next-of-kin".
Those kind of events change minds.
Did these events not occur before the post-60s transformation in sexual and marital mores? Why wasn't there widespread "changing of minds" in 1955 or earlier? Or for that matter in 1970 or 1980? Were there no gay people then? I don't remember gay activists giving a rat's ass about "marriage" then. Did the entire gay cohort mysteriously comprise young people only then? Do people oppose SSM only because they have no gay friends or relatives? Is this appeal to emotion addressing some point in my comment? Not that I can see.
You got it backwards. why do the proponents of the status quo of marriage have to say or defend a damn thing? how about you guys explaining why this is such a good idea, and convincing everyone else? Should not the burden of proof be on the side that wants to change things? Again, marriage is not a civil right. get that through your head and make an argument from some basis of reality.
The presumption of liberty.
The burden of argument should always lie on those who want to restrict freedom of action. Never on those who want to increase freedom of action.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roger-pilon/the-journal-led-astray_b_2951559.html
This is exhausting. The government has a financial interest in DOMA...Hello?!
Quayle said...
I note that nobody tried to address how they'd logically set limits on marriage.
Oh, but the government has already done this, and gay couples would like to benefit from the marriage provisions of Title 26 USC [IRS cocde of 1986 as amended], but perhaps avoid the bite of Title 11 USC [Bankruptcy] when it occurs.
And Palladian ... you are egregiously wrong about your 90% assertion regarding commenters here. Few appear to be wholly against gay/lesbian couples, with a similar contractual commitment, acquiring the full rights and benefits of hetero couple when married. The victim-hood semantic demands are what rankles.
**********
The DEBATE has been over the word "marriage" and the purported embarrassment and humiliation felt if not accorded to gay/lesbian couples. Most folks don't think "humiliation" belongs before SCOTUS if all other benefit stipulations are met.
The debate has now wander in to stupid shit territory about old hetero couples, and non-prolific heteros, etc. That fact fairly establishes the fundamental inequality of the whole concept.
The solution will eventually be a total Federal elimination of benefits for "married" or "civil joined" [or what-the-flip-ever]couples, and treat every single swishing muff and swinging richard the same...exactly the same. period. The federal government will gain in tax revenues the very moment that determination is made...to eliminate all discrimination by federal statute or edict or code/rule.
Enjoy it when it happens...all y'all advocates for this universal sexual equality asked for it. You just don't seem to grasp it that government, especially monsters like the US Federal, will seek their own best interests, particularly financially ...which are invariably contrary to yours or mine.
This is not rocket science. Civil law recognizes marriage mainly to protect the rights of children to a relationship with their parents. Begin there. Respect THAT...and then maybe these arguments won't seem so idiotic to you. If you don't get the foundational reasoning, the rest won't make any sense.
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