Wrong.
…much as gay taxpayers have been forced to support spousal benefits to which they have had no access.
Is that the sound of sarcasm I hear? I love that sound.
All of those groups are forced into supporting views that they find repugnant. Does this somehow make it right to further force your views on someone else, especially is you are going to pit the other side for attempting to force their views on you?
Does this line of reasoning diminish the fact that those who want to allow same-sex marriage fall into the category of those who believe that their view “ought to be enforced on everyone else.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t married couples pay more in taxes than single people?
You have it backwards, dumbass. The exclusion of that first dime is what represents an imposition of a “definition.” It’s called equal protection. You do not have a right to demand rights or benefits for yourself that you would deny to others.
You do not have the right to deny educational grants or loans to those who do not meet your personal definition of “students,” and you do not get to deny the benefits of marriage to those who do not meet your arbitrary defininition of marriagable couples.
No one is forcing their views on you, dicktard. You are still allowed to loathe and fear homosexuals in your tiny, bigoted mind all you want. You simply are not allowed to interfere in their lives with discriminatory laws.
You’ve got a great point there, akennett. I think it ought to be expanded further- the government could save HUGE amounts of money each year by refusing to recognize marriages. Though, I think instead of disenfranchising specific groups of people, it ought to be done in a more homogenous way. A lottery perhaps. You draw a chip from a bag after your wedding ceremony, and you have a 1 in 10 chance that you don’t get government recognition of your relationship. That ought to more than make up for all the homosexual marriages that would take place. It would be fair by being uniformly unfair. Because it IS all about the money, after all.
:rolleyes:
Actually, it does. If you’re following his advice:
You consider your relationship with your heterosexual life mate to be a marriage. Nobody can tell you that it isn’t.
If you eventually decide that you’re gay, and meet a life mate, but don’t consider your relationship to be a marriage, nobody can tell you it is.
However, if two other people decide that their relationship is a marriage, you can’t tell them that it isn’t.
Fair’s fair.
-lv
I’m going to file the OP in this thread under “problems I’d like to have”.
I see your point Polycarp, but I’ll start to really care about the remote possibility in change of nomenclature when we get a few more politicians in Washington that care* at least* 80% as Barney Frank suggests:
(although Frank was wrong about Kerry preventing a state from marrying same sex couples).
Just like no one is imposing their beliefs on anyone else if they are forced to tithe to an established church, right? It’s not like they have to be members, or believe in the rhetoric, or are stopped from going to any other church.
Thank you for the permission to fear and loathe homosexuals, but I hope you don’t mind if I take a pass on doing that. I have much better things to do with my tiny, bigoted mind. :rolleyes: I don’t want to interfere in anyone’s life. If two (or three, or four, or any number of) people meet, fall in love, and want to be with each other I couldn’t be happier for them.
And you can come up with a completely non-arbitrary definition?
This is the first suggestion I’ve seen in this thread that would pass the OP’s test. I’m not the one who came up with the standard, just the one who is asking those who want to clap the OP in the back to see if their own positions pass muster.
Well, to complete the OP’s words to the fullest, I can’t them that their marriage isn’t one, but they can’t tell me that it is. (“Them” and “They” as well as “Me” and “I” being, of course, hypothetical people, as I have not expressed any personal sentiment against SSM in this thread.)
Well, if you want to get all Saussurean, i’ll concede that any definition of “marriage” is always going to be somewhat arbitrarily determined. No natural and direct relationship between the signifier and the signified, and all that.
But at least we can arrive at a definition that is considerably less arbitrary in who it allows to participate in marriage.
How about something like “a contract entered into by any two consenting adults”? That’s considerably less arbitrary than restricting it to a man and a woman, IMO.
Not terribly specific, though; I mean, I’ve written up Purchase and Sale Agreements that were contracts enterered into by two consenting adults.
“A contractual declaration of a spousal relationship.” Howsat?
That is exactly my point, mhendo. I don’t think that your definition is any less arbitrary (though certainly not more) than the man/woman definition. I can see how it is more desirable to a fairly large minority population (and to an even larger portion of the population when you add in the numbers of straight people who --admirably I might add-- take up this cause). But does the definition being more acceptable to that group make it less arbitrary in a neutral viewing (bearing in mind that it makes a less acceptable definition to others)? It seems to me that we are merely shifting to another arbitrary definition, rather than coming to a more authoritative definition.
Why, for instance, must your definition limit marriage to two people? (To prevent any of the standard attacks, let me just say now that I am not equating SSM with polygamy, bestiality, child molestation, or anything else) This seems to be an arbitrary part of both your proposed definition and the currently held one. Why is this arbitrary limit acceptable but another is not?
Your definition, on its face, does not prevent brother/sister or brother/brother marriage (and, as such, I am implying that you hold the following position). However, I am sure there are those who would support SSM, but would vehemently oppose such marriages. Why is this arbitrary limit acceptable?
My point is not that a SSM ban is not arbitrary, rather that the ban (or, rather, the lack of acceptance) is no more arbitrary than any other position. In this case, there is (1) No moral high-ground in advocating allowing one of these categories of relationships/marriages while denying the others and (2) a very small (if any) moral distinction between those who advocate SSM on humanitarian or equal rights grounds and those who oppose such an extension of the definition of marriage on true ethical/moral grounds (to exclude the “Eww, homosexuality is icky” arguments).
I did think about that, but i guess i was sort of assuming that we would leave the general definition of what constitutes a marital relationship intact, and simply expand it to include any two consenting adults.
Well, the reason i limited it to two people was mainly to emphasize that we can keep the definition almost the same as it is now, but simply extend it to same-sex couples.
To be perfectly honest, i personally have no problem with extending the definition to include polygamy and sibling marriages. The key thing for me is that the people involved are consenting adults, which would rule out bestiality and child sexual relations.
Which is why I carefully did not include them in my list of “why aren’t these acceptable” marriages (and I certainly wasn’t going to get into the “what kind of contract” issue – I’m not that much of a jackass 
). I can certainly respect that position, but I’m sure that there are many out there who cannot, and for very deeply held moral/ethical/religious reasons. We then get into the game of whose arbitrary definition to follow. It is a never-ending cycle, and not helped in the least by rhetoric decrying the other side for imposing their beliefs while this side does it themselves.
Which side is in the right? It would take a much wiser man than I to determine, but I don’t think threads like this(let’s pat ourselves on the back for our superiority) do much to help answer the question.
I’m not sure how following its dictates of the governments’ laws and what they decide in the context of democracy is extended to “forcing” someone to “support” someone else’s views. I mean, they (and the state, etc.) believe that we all should pay taxes, wear a seat belt, participate in some sort of schooling for children, and so on. Although I’m pretty certain that many people vehemently disagree . However, they can ensure that we comply whether we want to or not because it’s __________. Fill that in with; necessary, good for the overall well-being of the country/community, the lesser of two evils, whatever. That’s not “forcing” us to do something in a sense of ::: stomp, stomp, stomp ::: “But Moooom! That’s SO not fair!! I don’t want to/think that/because I don’t feel it is right!” and we should all revert to only looking out for our own preferences rather than the collective good.
Paging the Borg anyone?
Ultimately, I can’t see how that insisting on EQUAL rights for everyone infringes on the life(s) of anyone else. Because if that was the case, the default positon or tradition would be the only standard we’d ever see. No one would have a chance to institute something different due to it encroaching on another. Just MHO. For when you broach basic human rights, there shouldn’t be anything to consider but whether or not they are granted uniformly across the board. To ALL humans. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that the most important thing? And what Poly seemed to be driving at.
Bingo. Unfortunately the current definition places the government in the role of quasi-religious arbiter. I agree with Bricker that the government should get out of the marriage business entirely and limit itself to what amounts to civil contracts. After all, those contracts have serious impact on legal rights and responsibilities associated with them. The current default is the largely religious man-and-woman definition, period, regardless of the broader civic damage by placing so many citizens beyond the pale.
I part company with Bricker et. al. for insisting on a full loaf of bread or none. It’s disingenous to demand a full redefintion of marriage for everyone before permitting gays to partake in any form of it. That’s a blatant political impossibility for any politician to even hint at in this increasingly venomous, divisive atmosphere. So insisting on that lofty (and IMO ethically and legally just) standard amounts to little more than stone walling when it comes to actual effect. Gotta revamp the whole system and nullify “official” straight marriages before giving it to gays. Right. That’'ll fly real soon.
I truly believe this will change because it’s simply wrong on a such a basic human level. Not to mention that it’s so damned stupid. Let’s refuse to recognize commitments between adults that already exist all over the damned place. Determined blindness makes swell law. I don’t know what the answers are but they can’t be worse in actual human consequences than the status quo.
Why not take the simplest route and use the definition that is least restrictive, the definition that does not tell consenting adults what they can and cannot do in their personal lives?
Those who oppose SSM seem to believe that their own marriages will somehow be devalued or reduced in legitimacy by allowing gays to marry. Such people want to deny gays the possibility of marriage based on nothing more than their own squeamishness.
Those who support SSM, on the other hand, present absolutely no obstacle to straight or “traditional” marriage. Supporters of SSM don’t ask that straight people be denied the right to marry, nor do they allege that straight marriages reduce the legitimacy of the institution. All they ask is gay couples be allowed to marry.
Personally, i would say to those who oppose SSM on the grounds that it will devalue or weaken marriage, that if marriage as an institution is already so weak or corrupt or decrepit that it will be brought crashing to the ground by allowing a few homos in, then maybe it’s not even worth fighting for.
Well, no, I guess they couldn’t. They believe their marriage is one, and so would the law. That’s good enough for them. I imagine that they care rather little about what other people think, so long as the law supports the view of no restriction on same sex marriage.
Along the same lines, you couldn’t tell them that your marriage is a “Real” one, as oppposed to their “fake” one, simply because of some arbitrary definition that would no longer be supported by the laws of the country.
And the Law says things like “you must drive less than 65MPH on the freeway”. Is that imposing a belief upon you? Of course not, you drive however fast you deem prudent. Likewise, no law can force You, Mr. Hypothetical Private Individual, to believe that Gay Marriages are truely equal to Heterosexual Marriages. The law can only take away the right of homosexuals to consider their relationship a marriage, in effect forcing your views about marriage onto them.
-lv
Then you need to declare that the contract is for establishment a spousal relationship, not just “a contract entered into by any two consenting adults”.
(I also have a suspicion that “the general definition of what constitutes a marital relationship” only remains intact so long as nobody actually tries to pin it down. I know quite a few such definitions that somehow fail to render me unmarried. Thus, I figure ‘contractual declaration of spousal relationship’ may well stand, whereas any attempt to specify a meaning for “spousal” beyond an “I know it when I see it” is all going to end in tears.)