This is why I try not to use analogies when I argue. magellan01’s have all been so bad they actually make a better case for the opposition than they do for him, but even if you select fairly appropriate analogies, they don’t usually shed light on the issue. What happens most of the time is that people get lost in the weeds while they argue about whether the analogy is applicable or not.
What difference, aside from eligibility, do you see between marriage and civil unions? Or do you see no difference between the Air Force and the Navy?
Aside from not fighting the hypothetical – and, um, I think that ship may have sailed – why do we need a separate term?
I suppose that, as in the gotcha you’re trying to trap Czarcasm in, if there were no such thing as homophobia in society and hadn’t been within living memory, if we somehow still had two different words for marriage according to the sexes of the people marrying, the distinction would be value-neutral.
I disagree. I think if there were no homophobia, the terms would already have conflated. We do not tend to use two terms when one will do. We do not tend to write two laws when one will do. We do not tend to separate things by kind when we do not intend the kind to matter. It’s just linguistic busywork. So if it’s being done, it’s being done for a purpose.
Of course, if there was no such thing as homophobia in society and hadn’t been within living memory, there would be no attempt to have such a distinction in the first place.
Marriage is used to describe a union of two men/two women, both legally and in common language practice, in many places.
Genuinely trying to understand your position here–are you no longer considering your proposal to be separate-but-equal? If so, in what way do you consider your proposal to be separate?
Here’s an analogy:
There’s a building, and a sign over the door says “MARRIAGE.” For a long time, only one-man-one-woman couples were allowed to go through that door. Now same-sex couples are demanding, or at least asking, to go in through the door. magellan01 and others are saying they should be allowed in the building, but first we should cut another door and put a sign over it that says “CIVIL UNION.” And I do not understand why. I don’t see why we need to go to the trouble of cutting a second door into the same building.
I mean, if the proposal were to build a second building and hang the “CIVIL UNION” sign on that one, I wouldn’t understand that either, but my confusion would be at a higher level of abstraction; I’d at least know what was being achieved by doing that.
Is it wrong that I’m picturing some people as Tom Michaels?
I believe magellan01 is saying something like this:
You think “civil union” implies something inferior to “marriage”, even given a scenario whereby the rights in question are completely the same. But in that scenario, homosexuality-vs-heterosexuality is the only salient difference. Ergo, to be consistent, you must think homosexuality is inferior to heterosexuality.
It’s bogus, but if you squint and are very tired, it seems profound.
Because there’s no need for a separate term, any more than we need a separate official term for a gay doctor or a gay librarian or a gay chartered accountant. We just use the name of the profession, e.g., “doctor”, “librarian”, or “chartered accountant”, and we recognize that people in that profession may be straight or gay (or something else).
If some people don’t like the fact that the same term “marriage” can apply to same-sex as well as opposite-sex partners, they’re free to use a different and more exclusive term of their own choosing for opposite-sex-only marriage.
Such a response, by the way, has historical precedent in the context of another development that many socially conservative people also saw as a potential threat to the status of traditional marriage: namely, the liberalization of divorce laws and decriminalization of adultery.
Marriage has traditionally been defined as a lifelong monogamous bond, and for a long time in most societies that definition was enshrined in various laws that made adultery a crime and divorce unobtainable. Over the past couple of centuries, however, due to changes in legislation, the legal definition of marriage no longer enforces the traditional concept of marriage as permanent and monogamous.
And just as in the case of same-sex marriage, many people have complained over the years that the less legally onerous “Marriage Lite” would “cheapen” or “devalue” the concept of marriage. Okay, fine: those people are entitled to their opinion. But they’re not entitled to insist that legal marriage under the new, more lax divorce and adultery laws should be called something other than “marriage”.
Instead, what many social conservatives have done is to propose a set of voluntary additional limitations on legal marriage that couples can choose to abide by. They call this “covenant marriage”.
So if social conservatives want to distinguish the traditional concept of opposite-sex-only marriage from the new broader legal definition of marriage that also includes same-sex couples, then they can do just what the covenant-marriage supporters did: make up a more restrictive term and apply it to their own more restrictive definition of marriage. It’s splitters, not lumpers, who need to “own their own term” for their own version of the concept that they’re trying to split.
This discussion with mags reminds me of this thread, in which he and I had a long discussion about why I insisted on calling certain statements “racist”, when he thought that they were “racial”, but not necessarily “racist”.
Exactly right. I’m not going to cater to someone’s bigotry by making sure they don’t get gay cooties. If they don’t want to share a term with SSM, they can go get their own term.
And it’s especially funky when you hear it in context. “We don’t want to share a term with the gays, but even though we have a history of hateful behaviors and discrimination and animus, this time we totally don’t mean it in any demeaning way and your insistence on seeing it as negative just shows how irrational you are.”
The fact is, the anti-SSM people have forfeited any right to the benefit of my doubt. (Not that it matters in this case, since there is no one who could suggest this scheme who I would find credible.)
Well, magellan finally made it to the thread, only to bring variants on his old claims as he does in any generic ssm thread, instead of addressing the specific topic of this thread which was his idea in the first place.
Excellent post, Kimstu. I’m still mad at how innovators like Les Paul forced me to start having to call my folksy instrument an acoustic guitar, but that’s how it is with retronyms. 
Maybe you should start a new thread about it!
Done.
“It doesn’t matter which door you enter through because both doors are identical.”
“Okay, if they’re identical then why can’t I just enter through the MARRIAGE door?”
“Because the MARRIAGE door is special.”
Fire safety?
“In case of emergency, you may exit your marriage through either of the two marked doors. Please follow the signs to your nearest exit.”
Nah, man, I mean you literally create analogies where you lay out a series of premises that are clearly building to conclusion A, and suddenly say they point to not A. Take this, for instance:
I’ve been staring at this for ten minutes now, and I swear to God, I cannot figure out how you think that’s an analogy for SSM advocates. We’re not the ones who are angry because someone else is using a term that we think should be reserved for us. That’s what you’re doing. Trying to apply that sentence to SSM advocates is literally anti-logic.
And this isn’t a one off deal. I swear to God, it’s every single analogy you make. Drivers licenses, branches of the military, separate but equal. You arrange a series of postulates that are all clearly aimed in one direction, and then, just before you come to the conclusion, you pull a u-turn and hare off in precisely the opposite direction that everything you’d been saying had been leading in.
It’s genuinely astounding.