This is a factual question, but such questions nearly always end up in debate so let’s start here.
I understand opposition to abortion on morality grounds, since that is based on the sanctity of life. But if two people of the same sex want to have a relationship equivalent to the marriage of a man and a woman, why does the Moral Right care? I can’t see an argument that there is any harm caused. (I didn’t see the point in prohibiting homosexual sexual behavior either. Those laws were prevalent at one time but seem to be going by the wayside.)
So tell me about your opposition, or play devil’s advocate.
Disclaimer: The following does not express my own opinion, but is as unbiased a presentation of their position as I can manage:
In His wisdom, God established marriage as the sacred bond between one man and one woman, made it the sole proper place for sex acts, and decreed homosexual sex acts as an abomination. That means all homosexual acts – while we are enjoined to love our homo-sexual brothers and sisters, that means tough love to boot them out of our churches and lives until they come to their senses and repent of ‘being gay’, but at that point we must welcome them back like the Prodigal. For someone to describe their desire to have homosexual sex with the term ‘marriage’ is to denigrate and demean it. Besides, they already have the right to marry – someone of the opposite sex, just like the rest of us.
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And yes, unintentionally they equate marriage with sex – I’ve flagged this on other boards. But like the definition of the Sinister Gay Agenda ™, it’s a question they won’t answer.
Hey, don’t redefine marriage! Just call it a civil union. Marriage is and always has between one man and one woman (except, that’s not true, of course – polygamy has been pretty prevalent throughout history and even today). Leave the word alone, man.
It’s a slippery slope! If we allow this, then we have to allow incest, people marrying a chicken, people marrying a car, incest, polygamy, all kinds of crazy things.
Gays are evil! We’ve lost on the homosexual activities front, but we’re not losing on the marriage front. God hates gays and they can’t get married.
It’s a threat to the institution of marriage. This one is always odd to me – just because gays can get married doesn’t mean all people are secretly gay and just waiting for legitimacy. Weird. Plus, divorce and the Spears family seem like bigger threats to marriage and we haven’t banned them.
Marriage is an institution for protecting children or encouraging having children or something. Well, that’s not true – we allow sterile people to marry, old people to marry, and we don’t dissolve marriages after x years with no kids.
It’s too expensive to extend all of those marriage benefits to gay people.
Eww. Gay people.
There’s probably more, but that’s all I can think of without caffeine. I guess there’s an argument that if homosexuals can marry, then we should allow polygamy. (The incest/dog/furniture thing doesn’t follow, in my mind, but that’s another thread.) I think there are tricky legal issues in the US legal framework that would have to be worked out before polygamy is allowed, but with proper oversight (no forced/coerced marriages, for example), I guess I’m not really opposed to polygamy.
Hopefully it’s clear I’m playing devil’s advocate here. I’m for full marriage rights for any couples, gay or straight.
There is no reasonable rational. IMO it’s born of a misunderstanding and deep seated homophobia that comes from that. For some strange reason some people think that their hetero marriage will be diminished if same sex marriage is legal. Also certain Christian groups have opposed same sex marriage based on their interpretation of a few Biblical passages which have been discussed on this board at length. They see same sex marriage as America’s slide onto moral decay.
A similar thing happened with interracial marriage and there were movements to prohibit it. They failed. These new ones will as well. They really have nothing to go on other than gay people make them feel icky and those few passages in a 2000 year old book.
Normally on this board, I´m a defender of the opposite view point that´s being bashed by the liberals here. In this case, I´m going to go ahead and agree with what´s been said here. It´s a mix of “But God says they´re evil!” and “Eww gross!”
ETA: I don´t think anyone is actually opposed to gay marriage. It´s gay sex that they don´t like.
There is only one reason: homophobia. Same-sex marriage neither picks their pocket nor breaks their leg. They have only either vague spiritual objections to it (which are, by their nature, moot as far as US law goes), or they have absolutely silly slippery slope arguments involving incest, polygamy, pedophilia and bestiality.
…some other reason that they hold that isn’t actually defensible, but they don’t realize it because they’ve never fully explored it.
My own objection was merely to the use of the word “marriage.” I fully supported civil unions but opposed the use of the word, and it took a very detailed and very complete argument here some years ago to make me see that my objections were ill-founded.
But I did oppose it, and for reasons that were not homophobic or religiously based.
Surely there must be others in the same position I was a few years ago, who do not have the benefit of the argument I had.
You’re right, and I apologize. Some people really do have (irrational (sorry!)) reasons that aren’t actually homophobia, and those are actually probably the most successfully “evangelized” segment on this subject.
Bricker, you do know that you make it very hard to be an automatic-pilot, kneejerk liberal sometimes, don’t you? I always have to actually stop and think about what I’m thinking when you step into the picture…
Actually, there is more than semantics involved, as to make something called “civil unions” actually and progressively equivalent to something called “marriage”, you need to basically duplicate the existing body of marriage law, with all the language about taxation and rights and privileges, to produce an equivalent body of “civil union law”, and still have the possibility that one will be added to without the other being brought along.
Whereas if you simply add same-sex language to the existing body of marriage law, you save probably 90% of the work of that while guaranteeing that changes made to marriage law will also affect same-sex weddeds.
So, it’s supposed to just occur to me one day that marriage isn’t one man and one woman like I’ve always just assumed it was, with good reason I think, otherwise I hate all gay people? Somehow that just doesn’t make me amiable to your cause. And telling my 85 year old mom that she hates all gay people because the idea never occurred to her is probably going to make her say: “well, OK then”. I’m sorry but when you’ve been going along in one direction for a while without thinking about a thing it’s not that easy to make a sudden turn.
That said, before I ever heard of the idea of same-sex marriage, I’ve supported the idea of civil unions and, before that, provisions in places like work, insurance and hospitals to allow a designated partner who has the rights of a spouse. Well, supported means here that I knew about the problems and would have voted for some sort of law to allow for such designation. I swear, it just never occurred to me 30 years ago to say “you don’t need a special provision to get each other’s survivor benefits, you should get married!” Does that make me a hater?
Even though I do support the right to marry whomever you want, I’ll give you two reasons why I do so reluctantly:
I think we have a lot of problems with the marriage laws already. In some states getting married and/or divorced is as easy as buying a candy bar. In other states it is difficult, divorce in particular. There are all kinds of odd stuff throughout the states. Some places apparently you can marry a 14 year old!? In some places an abused spouse can’t get out of a marriage; not easily anyway. There are things that I think need to fixed and opening the franchise to more couples isn’t going to help that at all and it would probably distract from it.
I’m not convinced that people won’t find a way to abuse the system. Back in the day, when a man worked and a women stayed home and they were married to each other the laws were made to reflect that reality, such as it was. What will keep people from marrying for business purposes, to hide or shift funds or prevent testifying, for example. Sure that can be done now and it is done now. People marry to give citizenship, to join assets. They divorce and remarry to save on taxes. It’s a little limiting when it has to be a man and a women.
Same-sex marriage is coming, I’m sure, but after that we are going to see a huge number of new laws passed to adjust the meaning of marriage and I’m not sure it will head in a good direction.
I’m sorry, but it’s to my detriment that people “don’t realize” what damage the way things are are doing to me. Once it’s explained to them, and I may just be a cockeyed optimist here, I expect them to now realize that, yes, the old way is causing harm to people.
This is one reason I can’t even begin to be a conservative. If the old way is causing harm to people based on nothing but irrational devotion to the old way, then it’s time for the old way to hit the trash heap. I can’t understand being committed to doing things the way one’s great-grandfather did to the detriment of another human’s well-being or rights.
Now, IF there’s no way to change things immediately to remedy that, then I can understand slowness of researching and implementing a way for it to happen. But in cases like marriage, where all that needs to be done is to change the wording of laws pertaining to marriage, delays are a result of footdragging, which may be due to homophobia, or a misunderstanding of one’s religion’s place in law, or just plain inertia. I have no patience for any of those. They’re all either unnecessary, outdated or mean-spirited.
I have sympathy for you grandmother…change can be difficult for older people. But I don’t have enough sympathy to delay justice so she can be comfortable. Honestly, I don’t care about her comfort. Her comfort is completely irrelevant to the administration of justice in the issue of equality. I mean her no harm, but neither does the possible harm that same-sex marriage does her rise to the level that not having same-sex marriage does me and my partner.
The family is the foundation of civilization. Marriage is a union that recognizes the family unit. The family unit presumes that there are children involved. Without the procreative aspect the marriage is irrelevant. By allowing same sex unions you reduce the marriage to being about just sex, rather than being about raising a family.
So I thought. But as it happens, “merely semantics” makes a great deal of difference. It’s not “merely.” Trust me.
Or find that old thread of mine. It’s long, and frankly if you get through it and think of an argument I didn’t, I’m willing to listen and be re-converted. But don’t hold your breath.
No need to apologize at all… irrational is exactly right: positions that cannot, upon close examination, be supported by reason are irrational. No need to apologize for calling a spade a spade.
That’s most of the ones I’ve heard, but I’ll add that some people apparently believe that homosexuality is all about sex and lust and promiscuity and anonymous encounters in bathroom stalls, and not true love and bonding and sharing a life together, and that’s why letting gays marry each other cheapens marriage.
So why does no one blink an eye when two 80-year-olds show up at the JP? Why is there no “fertility test” to determine who gets a marriage license?
And that’s not even noting that there are a LOT of gay couples WITH KIDS. Why should those children have no protection for their family? Who died and made straight families the only ones who have a claim to the word “family”?
Another thing…what kind of family has been the foundation of civilization? Because the nuclear family (mother, father, children…only) has had a fairly short lineage. Who gets to say that the single mother whose husband died shortly after their child was born doesn’t form a family with that child? Who gets to say that the two sisters whose husbands left them each with a kid who live together to share expenses isn’t a family? Who gets to say that the two lesbians, one with kids from a previous marriage to a man, don’t form a family? If the biological mother of that child dies, who gets to say that the other woman, who has helped raise the child for the last five years, isn’t that child’s mother?
A major objection is not merely the concept, but the way in which its proponents are trying to get it implemented.
The definition of marriage as “one man and one woman” is pretty foundational, and goes back to the common law. For judges to say, “OK, now it is different” without the rest of us having a chance to decide if we agree or not is a pretty blatant example of judicial activism.
I think that has a lot to do with the worry that allowing gay marriage to be created by judicial fiat will downgrade current marriages in some way. It is not merely this change, IOW - it is that allowing so fundamental a change to proceed unquestioned leads almost automatically to the question “what the hell are they going to try to pull next?”
You can call that homophobia if you like, but it rather misses the point.
A useful though exercise might be the following -
Suppose we set the precedent that judges can create these kinds of new rights, and nobody gets to overturn them. Cool - fundamental advances in bioscience mean that Judge Roy Moore has been cloned, and nine versions of him have been confirmed to the Supreme Court.
Does judicial activism sound like such a good idea now?
Yes, because no man in a straight marriage has ever frequented a prostitute, had an affair, pleasured himself in a XXX theater, sexually harrassed a female coworker or underling, entered into a marriage of convenience for the advantages that her name, money and family could give him, entered into a marriage because “bachelors don’t get promoted in this company”, entered into a marriage solely because he got her pregnant…etc., etc., etc. ad nauseam.
I don’t think I’ve seen you proffer an opinion on the recent Vermont goings-on, Shodan. How do you feel about actual legislatively-passed same-sex marriage?
