A pretty recent development, and not yet entirely complete in practice, either. Hell, there are women alive today who remember not being allowed to vote, and many more who remember not having equal legal rights in many other regards, and many more than that who still have battles to fight today.
And then the obvious thing would be to call that single thing by a single name, which experience elsewhere has shown will happen and without civilization collapsing. It’s sad that you can’t recognize that, but your view is inevitably disappearing into the place it belongs as human society continues to advance despite it.
Uh, no, you’re the stupid bitch. What do you think happened in a Tibetan polyandrous marriage if the woman died? Do you think it dissolved and everyone split the property and went their separate ways? It was still treated as a communal unit, so you could have a marriage unit with only men in it.
Surely this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, though? I mean, if we say that we should not do something because people have never done it on a widespread and generally accepted scale, doesn’t that mean we won’t ever do it for that reason? I mean, what if that argument was one of the things preventing it from happening - people in the past looked to* their* past and said “Well, it hasn’t happened before”. It seems like an argument based on itself.
Beyond that, doesn’t the existence of disagreement imply potential fault? I mean, my common sense doesn’t register elevation of male-female relationships or marriages over same-sex ones as being obviously correct. Apparently the same is true for others. And, over the years, common sense for some has meant one thing and others another. I’ll readily admit that appeals to common sense are a bit of an annoyance button for me, but I just don’t see that it’s really worth all that much. It’s essentially saying, “People believe this” - only with the added advantage that someone could accuse another of ignoring or even burying their common sense, allowing them to believe that all, secretly, agree with them. So long as “what I think” differs so radically I can’t understand it being used to support a point, even when pointed at a majority.
That last part seems unreasonable. Though you may not agree with it, is it unreasonable to think that some may honestly believe that, without the name, there could not be or cannot be those same rights and privileges? For me it’s sort of like saying, “Sure, you can have a motorbike, but it can’t have two wheels”. I think probably we’ve had that argument before, but at the least, though you disagree would you accept that to me wanting the same rights and privileges and yet rejecting all-but-the-name systems is not contradictory or some unexplicable reaction?
Honestly, I can’t find anything very funny about it. It’s an important subject. Perhaps i’m just humourless, but were I in your shoes, the idea of a determined group campaigning to change something so important would cause me fear more than anything. If they’re stupid, too, greater fear yet. And if they have a chance to succeed - i’m not certain I could look at that kind of situation and laugh. Humour is subjective, and all that, I guess.
Hey, some people blow themselves up in the street to kill innocents. The reasonable assumption is that they must have had compelling reasons for doing so. But compelling is not the same as true; nor do those reasons necessarily stick around. After all, very few societies have ever used computers. Not having the technology is a pretty compelling reason. But sometimes reasons change.
Heck, there was a time within living memory when left-handedness was viewed as a correction-needing abnormality. Why was it so important to “fix” left-handed people? Ignorance, superstition…?
Because he’s fixated on the word “marriage” as a word in and of itself. That allows him to extrapolate from his Leave it to Beaver vision of the world through every period of history. His arbitrary definition of the word “marriage” allows him to shoehorn everything he likes into the word and exclude things he doesn’t like from the word.
But we’re not talking about the general usages of words. We’re talking about legal rights and responsibilities within a legal institution. And if you look at this debate through that lens, what you find is that there has been a wide variation in what the legal family unit has been throughout world history–sometimes it has revolved around a one man/one woman marriage, sometimes it has revolved around polyandrous unions, sometimes it has revolved around extended family units (some countries still do this today), and yes, sometimes it has even included homosexual unions. At the end of the day, this is an issue of how we define the legal rights and responsibilities around same-sex relationships today in the US. It’s not about whether he can shoehorn family relationships he likes into a certain specific word.
Heck, I’ll cheerfully concede that 90+ % of the time throughout history, “marriage” has meant one man + one woman, and this rate will likely hold steady though the next century at least.
Why that 90+ % apparently needs protection escapes me.
This is what gets me about the opponents of SSM marriage. They seem to have two lines of argument, and those two lines run in almost directly opposite directions.
On the one hand, marriage is a HUGE deal, and the fact that societies from time immemorial haven’t allowed gays to marry shows that marriage is a central and crucial institution that should not be messed around with, for fear of dire consequences to society.
On the other hand, why do those gays care about marriage so much? After all, people like magellan01 support extending to homosexuals ALL the rights and privileges of heteros, except marriage.
On the one hand, marriage is so huge and important that we shouldn’t mess with it; on the other, it’s just a little thing that shouldn’t detract from all the real equality that gays have.
And of course this make their whole argument problematic. If their first argument is true, and marriage is a huge deal with great significance to society, then surely they should appreciate why the privileges of marriage should be extended to everyone, in the interests of justice and equity.
And if their second argument is true, and marriage is just a minor issue compared to all the really substantive rights, then why the fuck do they care if gays can get married?
Desecration of the dictionary is an unforgivable sin. Sometimes. And just parts of it. Well, just one word, really. The crusading Knights of the Immutable Lexicon flung a holy dart one day, and guess which word got pierced? Just dumb luck, really… might just as easily have been “maroon” or “marshmallow” or “Marmota Flaviventris.”
Don’t have much time, but this and another post caught my eye. You grant that 90+% of the time marriage has been understood to be comprised of 1 one and 1 man. My question is: what % of the time through out history, say up until 1990, has the definition of marriage included relationships in which there was not at least one woman and one man?
If your answer is not zero, can point to the society(ies) in which this was the case?
I don’t have to, my argument is that history is irrelevant. My point is that I’m unclear what threat SSM poses to one-on-one hetero marriage, which has survived the existence of other permutations and will survive this one.
Unless you want to argue that it won’t, in which case I’ll need some evidence.
This is a helpful post. Here’s how I see it. the word marriage is a big deal in that it describes the man/woman institution, some form of which can be found in virtually all societies for thousands of years. And institution that most believe is the best is the best construct in which to raise children. I think it important that we have some acknowledgement of that fact.
The word marriage is a small deal when a group of people complain (rightfully) that the loving relationships they are in have obstacles that prevent their relationships—from a practical standpoint—from being as consummate (e.g., inheritance, hospital visits, etc.), and a method is found to give them that, without the label. So, it is a small deal in that can ostensibly have all the rights and privileges afforded OS couples, just not the label.
From a “rights” standpoint, they still get all the good stuff, while society is allowed to have a word to represent an institution that’s been so fundamental to its furtherance.
And since it is my contention that we won’t see the decline of OS marriage for 30, 40 years or more, I don’t have that evidence. Which brings us to a point we’ve been to numerous times. But I see no reason to gamble. The downside is to scary for me. We look to the sad state of the blacks in the inner cities and believe that a great contributing factor to the generation after generation after generation of poverty and dependence is the break up of the black family.
As we’ve also discussed before, when you expand a definition to include more, the definition becomes less special. This is just basic set theory, as seen in Linnaeus classifications. An analogy I’ve used before is how we describe a laugh. Is it a guffaw or a giggle. It’s as if people want to have giggle mean giggle, as we know it, and guffaw. They want to do the same thing to the word “marriage”. Broaden its definition to the point where we no longer have a word that represents the institution that has been so fundamental to virtually every society. Certainly to your own and those to which we are most closely related. I find that quite remarkable, unhelpful, and potentially dangerous.
Yes, you disagree. And at this point we can just read each other’s exchanges in older threads.