So, because India has some arranged marriages, love is not a good reason for anybody?
So America doesn’t have to be different, and America doesn’t have to be similar? And why, exactly, do you get to pick the countries that we don’t have to be different from or similar to? Can’t you easily reword your above statement to say “America doesn’t have to be “different” (or in this case similar, since it seems to be a fad in India to not get this thing legalized).”
In other words, your above argument (if it can be called such) is completely arbitrary. Gay marriage should be argued on its own merits, not on what other countries are (not) doing.
So if the majority of some Southern state had wanted to continue the practice of slavery, would your accept that, too? At what point does something become wrong even if the majority wants it?
You’re missing the point, which is that allowing people with one sexual preference to marry the person they wish to marry, while denying people of another sexual preference that privilege, is discrimination based on sexual orientation.
So? America isn’t India or Africa. Why should the state of marriage in some other country matter in the least?
We’ll work on that. Meanwhile, why don’t you give us a good reason to allow heterosexual marriages? Heck, give us a good reason to allow people to have kids. After all, if the parents divorce, the kid will be screwed up, because you said everyone who grows up with a single parent is somehow screwed up. We have to ban all pregnancies to protect the children, right?
Seeing as TBR has fogged things up considerably around here, I’d like to pose a few questions for (him? her?).
All children don’t have a mother and a father. In fact, throughout history, children have been raised by single parents, or in orphanages, or in a whole vast variety of configurations. There are thousands of kids right now being raised by gay parents. Why do these children deserve less in the way of legal protections than the kids raised in nuclear families?
33% of adoptions from foster care are by single parents. I presume you admit that having one parent is better than being in the foster home system, despite the fact that there aren’t both sexes of parent. Why, then, is having two parents of the same sex, who can both provide for a child financially and emotionally, worse than having a single parent?
There are consistently more than 120,000 children waiting to be adopted each year in the US. There are less than 90,000 adoptions completed each year. Tens of thousands of children are stuck in the system, waiting for parents. What good does it do society to eliminate a massive pool of potential adoptive parents?
You bring up the idea that gay marriage will be detrimental to society. Please specify how. As in, detail for us the exact effect that you think the legalization of gay marriage will have on an enormous, centuries-old democratic republic that will cause it to cease to exist. Bring facts.
I am responding directly to the OP here, not to anything that came after it. What I post here is nothing I haven’t said already, in this very forum more than once. In fact I can cut and paste it directly from my save files. The OP must have missed it. I post with a certain forlorn hope…people here seem to relish taking on the kind of “arguments” put forth by The_Broken_Column, but when they come up against an actual “cogent non-religious objection to same-sex marriages” I get a sense they’d rather just avert their eyes…
Anyway…here we go again: Words are labels that we put on things, on phenomena that actually exist in the real world. To have clear communication, different things need different labels. Now, if you accept as an axiom that men and women are different in fundamental ways, then an inescapable corallary is that a relationship between two men is fundamentally different from a relationship between a man and a woman is fundamentally different from a relationship between two women.
Please note, “different” does not mean “better” or “worse”. Just different. And if two phenomena in the real world are different, then I consider it a good policy to have two different words to describe them.
And to address the idea that not calling it marriage is “discriminatory”: If we are to say that “seperate but equal” is an unnacceptable form of discrimination when it comes to gender, even if the discrimination consists of no more than the application of seperate labels…which would be the case if the state were to create a category of civil union with all of the same rights as marriage…wouldn’t it then be equally unnacceptable for the state to even so much as use the words “man” or “woman”, or any derivatives like “mother” and “father”, in any of it’s laws or statutes?
Think about it. If it is acceptable for a man to be referred to with the label “man”, and for a woman to be referred to with the label “woman”, as long as they are treated equally under the law, then why is it unnacceptable for a union between a man and a woman to be referred to with one label, and a union between a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, to be referred to with another, as long as they are also treated equally under the law?
I’m just amazed that The_Broken_Column has been so easily allowed to shift the burden in this discussion; when people called him or her out on supporting his/her assertions with facts, the response was to forget all about those unsupported claims and instead provide evidence that gay marriage was a good thing! That little primer about debate structure…I mean, geez, people, when he/she supplied the unsupported arguments, he/she pretty much said, “prove me wrong” and of course that is not where the burden of proof should lie…so instead he/she simply says, “OK, let’s forget about my claims (so it won’t be necessary to provide cites or examples, presumably) and in the meantime, here, let me make a claim for you for you to defend.” I’m just flabbergasted that no one has said, “Hold on a here, a second, the challenge in the OP is not to prove that gay marriages are good- they could be neutral in many respects, for example- but to provide non-religious arguments against gay marriage.”
Sorry, The_Broken_Record, but I’m still going to hold you accountable for your claims. You’ve got all of recorded human history to draw from, so let’s have your evidence, not just conjecture and assumption and so forth.
I couldn’t agree more. In fact, most of this debate is caused by the simple fact that marriage in this culture refers to two separate and distinct things; the secular contract that legally binds two people together in the eyes of the state, and the religious ceremony that binds two people together in the eyes of God.
So, in one regard, your argument is pretty silly; yes, it’d be nice to have different labels for every variation on every person, place and thing in the world, but in reality, different things are often referred to by the same word. Right is not only a direction, but a legal entitlement, correct, and a political inclination.
If I really believed that civil unions would be indistinguishable from marriages in the legal sense, I would be completely happy entering into one. However, all of the civil unions proposed to date have significant differences. The most common one is that, while a state may recognize a civil union, they have no standing under federal law. Seeing as there are 1049 federal benefits, rights, and privileges which are contingent on marital status, that’s a really big deal.
Even if the current proposed civil unions were totally equal in all regards to marriage, I’d be wary. Once you’ve established a separate category for one type of person, there’s the possibility that in the future, some legislature or other would start passing laws that applied to civil unions and not to marriage, or vice versa.
So, in other words, if civil unions were completely equal to marriage in all regards, and if there was a way to guarantee that in the future that equality would be maintained in perpetuity, I’d be completely in favor of civil unions, and this argument would be about semantics and nothing else. However, that’s not the case.
If you’re interested in a very thorough discussion of this aspect of the matter, I’d suggest reading the Massachusetts Supreme Court Judges’ Opinion given to the state senate about this very issue. One of my favorite parts:
I love that. Invidious discrimination. I’ve known it all my life, of course, but it’s amazing to see it condemned by the courts.
No eye-averting here. But then again, there’s also no “cogent non-religious objection to same-sex marriages” either. There’s simply an objection to the fact that gay people won’t be satisfied with a separate and unequal status under the law.
Would it have been acceptable to you if the marriage of an interracial couple wasn’t allowed to be called marriage, but was called something else instead? If the union of a black woman and a white man had most, but not all of the rights assigned to the marriage of a white couple? People of different races are, after all, referred to as such by the law, and some laws apply to them differently. Why extend the benefits of marriage to them, in that case?
You don’t deny people rights because of semantics.
I’m gay, and I’m just as much a member of a family as any hetero. The notion of the nuclear family is less than 80 years old, and hardly an ideal.
Nonsense. To one degree or another, we are all influenced and raised by our communities. Children in their formative years spend far more time out in the community, being “raised,” for lack of a better word, by teachers and school peers, than they do at home.
Sixty years of increasing single parenthood has disabused the rest of society of this notion. Time to catch up.
If anyone could love a “person” like you, that is.
This is the stupidest thing anyone has ever written on the Internet, ever. You should be ashamed for your continued comparison of human being to unintelligent, non-sentient animals.
Do you even know what the legal concept of “consent” is?
And no two consenting, loving adults should be treated differently by the law than another pair of consenting, loving adults just because of their gender.
Hello The_Broken_Column, or should I say FreeMason.
Whether it should or should not be legalized is going to become irrelevent here quickly. Either it will, or it will not because of the threshold the gay community is reaching.
A 1960’s Civil Rights Movement is approaching, very quickly.
It is not gays who are seeking to make this a national issue, but the people like you, who hate and despise us.
Rousseau said a lot, and much of it was wrong. He was also a philosopher of the French Revolution, which was a separate movement from American Democracy. I fail to see why his thoughts apply.
Yippee, I get to marry a woman I’ll never be in love with and whom I will never be attracted to. Thank you for condemning me to a life of Hell.
You’re exaggeratting. Even you don’t believe that this is the ONLY principle needed for a working civilization.
Well, duh, its an important basic component. Someone has to raise the children, and people like to form families. But in case you missed it, gay people like and already have families too. You even acknowledge this later on. So, yet again, this is either irrelevant or hyperbole, depending on how you mean it.
Yet to be seen. Yet to see a good argument as to how. In fact, the reality is that there are ALREADY gay families raising kids. Gay marriage wouldn’t create them, because they already exist no matter what. Gay marriage would help those families be more functional in the legal and civil and economic arena. Unless you advocate breaking up those families outright, why would you want them to be LESS functional rather than MORE functional? For your point of view, gay marriage seems at least like the lesser of two evils.
Actually, not true, depending on what you mean. Many native socieites existed this way in a wide variation of child-raising set-ups. Even across societies today, there is a wide variation of how families and extended familes work.
Again, true, but irrelevant. Of course such concepts exist in all societies, if only for genetic reasons alone. So what? What does the existence of concepts have to do with anything. Gay marriage won’t erase concepts.
Further, you’re again glossing over the realities that while these very general concepts exist, ACTUAL mother and father roles are so vastly diverse across not only cultures but just different people that it makes almost no sense to pretend that they are any one similar “influence” in a child’s life.
I’m confused: why is there a mother in the first scenario, and if there is, why can’t it be in the picture in the second scenario as well?
See above. There just isn’t enough consistency here at all to make such statements. The way my mother raised me was so radically different from the way my friend’s mother raised him that it makes no sense to claim that there was any distinct influence that could be called the “mother” influence. Our “normal” family experiences were far more different from each other than they would have been if my dad happened to be a woman. So how can both his and my families be lumped under “normal” when a gay family would be closer to my own experience than to his?
So you say. On this board, nobody gets to declare that something is a “fact” and expect others to simply accept it. Anyone can claim that their opinion about something is a fact, but in the telling of the fact smuggle in faulty reasoning or irrelevant connections.
Again: why? Can you prove that it doesn’t work? Can you explain any substantive REASON why it wouldn’t work other than this very vague “mother/father influence” you claim is essential?
But kids have grown up with gay parents, and they seem to come out just fine (in fact, in adopted non-genetically related kids, they are no more likely to be gay themselves). The only special problem they face are, well, having to deal with people like you.
Er, what? Ancient Greece was too a cohesive society. Athens was the first proto-democracy for goodness sakes, and the Greeks launched Western philosophy and learning. The fact that they got overrun in wars doesn’t say anything about their success in child rearing.
And regardless, how was Greece not a moral society compared to other major civilizations? They had mother/father based families.
Rome fell because of the squabbling of its rulers and their petty schemes in carving up their empires, not because of any change in family structure or public morals. The Empire stretched itself too thin. But you might as well claim that Christianity destroyed the Romans, because it was doing fine up until it became the official religion. Makes about as much sense (i.e. little)
YOU are the one calling gay marriage a collapse of morals. I see it as extending a moral institution to a group that has been denied it: moral progress. You might disagree, but let’s see you back it up with real arguments.
But I see your views as immoral. Why are you correct and I wrong? Not all changes are slips to immorality: some are progress to greater morality, as the civil rights movements were.
And in fact, things are BETTER today in this regard: children are more likely to have at least two parents while growing up. This is largely because of advances in medical care, but the outcome is the same: in pre-revolutionary Puritan America, an idealized time, a HUGE chunks of kids had lost one or both parents. It was very common to be raised by a more distant family member, and even to go through several different primary caretakers as illness cut people down willy-nilly in a way we can barely even imagine today.
Because homosexual relations have been seen as inferior for much of humanity’s history, and reinforcing the notion that they’re different is therefore a Bad Thing. “Marriage” is the societal standard, and what gays really want with the gay marriage movement is to be allowed into the societal standard.
Well…two people replied to me. I guess that’s better than nothing, but it seems that people would much rather get down with The_Broken_Column…
Civil and relious marriage are seperate and distinct, but not completely so. A religious marriage consists of a set of vows made publicly by a man and a woman to each other, enforcable by God in theory, by social pressure form the religious community in practice. A civil marriage consists of essentially the same set of vows, but is enforceable under the law, by the law enforcement authority of the state…a type of contract, in other words.
This is true so far as it goes, but doesn’t prove anything here one way or another. At one extreme we could be like the Eskimos who purportedly have 33 different words for different kinds of snow. I don’t think we need that myself, but at the other extreme there are the Marklars from South Park, who somehow are able to make themselves understood even though every third word out of their mouths is “marklar”. I don’t want that either.
The question is, given this particular label, “marriage”, that already exists to describe a committed relationship between a man and a woman, should it’s definition be expanded to include similar kinds of relationships between people of the same sex? I personally don’t see how this is fundamentally any more desirable than expanding the definition of the word “man” to include women, or vice versa.
Never mind the “however”, if the two contracts were treated equally under the law, on what basis would you object to the differentiation in labelling?
Well hell, the possibility of lawmakers making mischief of one kind or another will always exist, no matter what. In spite of the existence of diffferent labels for men and women, women did achieve equal rights. The possibility exists, though, that legislatures might pass laws treating them unequally. Do we have to abandon those labels as well, and take to calling everyone a “person”?
There is no way to guarantee anything in perpetuity, no matter what laws you make, or what labels you change.
No, but not because the two relationships were treated unequally under the law, if in fact they were treated equally under the law.
No, but now you are confusing the issue by assuming they wouldn’t be equal under the law.
I don’t think race and gender are at all analogous when it comes to intimate relationships. Would you like me to explain why?
I agree with that statement completely, though not in the sense that I assume you meant it.
Women have been “seen as inferior for much of humanity’s history”. We’ve gotten over that, mostly, in western society at least, and we did it without expanding the definition of the word “man” to include women. And what do you mean exactly by “societal standard”? Couldn’t I just as easily say that the “societal standard” is that marriage is between a man and a woman?
Yes. That doesn’t mean that it was automatically the correct or easiest way to go. Also, there is a point in maintaining the distinction between man and woman. If nothing else, doctors need to know it. Men don’t get cancer of the ovaries and women don’t get cancer of the testicles. I see no such point in maintaining the distinction between straight marriages and gay marriages.
I cited these ages ago but this one seems to come up periodically.
Flaks, Ficher, Masterpasqua, Joseph Lesbians Choosing Motherhood: A Comparative Study of Lesbian and Heterosexual Parents and Their Children.Developmental Psychology. 31(1):105-114, January 1995.
Here’s a more recent one:
Golombok, Perry, Burston, Murray, Mooney-Somers, Stevens, Golding, Children With Lesbian Parents: A Community Study. Developmental Psychology.* 39(1):20-33, January 2003.*
