Excuse the possible hijack here, but can anyone tell me what percentage of gays are opposed to “gay marriage”. I only ask because I was surprised to hear that 25% of gay voters had voted for Bush and can only presume that they either are opposed to gay marriage or don’t really care about it.
I have not been able to ascertain any figures at all.
Slippery slopes do usually start your slide in a very midl way which is the actual danger. To be unmindful of the precariousness of the slide while there is still time will result in a steeper, more irreversible slide.
The significant aspect of marriage you mention is not a legal arguement. In the absence of a surviving mate, the next of kin decides and we all know what potential hornets nest that can turn into. Having a rabble of conflicting, selfish cousins, aunts and uncles, parents and siblings squabbling over your possesions and disposition is no more unmanagable than having one or 2 wives or husbands deciding your fate. Point of fact, it might be easier to have multiple spouses decide in your behalf mostly because they were at least close to you and would know your wishes better than anyone, related or otherwise. I mean, if you can hold a marriage with multiple partners, then your organization and relationship skills are above par.
As for the consent arguement, the dog can be trained and the furniture can be equipted with AI.
well, I foresee some wacko robotics expert using his skills in artificial intelligence to challenge the legal issues of consent to marry his state of the art artificial girlfriend. Worse things have happened.
X~Slayer
Well, I hate to break it to YOU, but by that defintion, America is a JEWISH nation! Jews had those “tenets” before Christianity came along, and Jews didn’t get into the whole Crusades/Inquisition/Witchhunts/Klan thing.
And I’m not religious, either.
Bush is supportive of a lot of issues, and a percentage of gays think those issues take precedence over the gay marriage issue. They may care about it a great deal, but they care more about other things like anti-terrorism, tax cuts, not voting for kerry and so on. I wouldnt be surprised that there are a number of gays that oppose gay marriage. Gays dont all have the same opinion and having differing points of view doesnt invalidate the issue of gay marriage. Afterall, there are straight poeple who favor gay marriage.
X~Slayer
I’m not unmindful of precariousness, I just don’t agree that it exists. It’s a weak argument which is actually kind of insulting to those trying to get the right to gay marriage, isn’t it? I’ve no doubt that similar arguments predicting the collapse of the nation were advanced when women got the vote.
Well, you can’t choose your relatives, but you choose your spouse and it would be a pretty big (if not insurmountable) step for the state to let you choose more than one. See below.
It’s a fact that it might, but for legal simplicity, it won’t. You’d have to establish some kind of “ranking” system where one spouse had the ultimate decision, or else you’ve created an untenable contract (kinda like how the fifty/fifty split of ownership between Steven Spielberg and Disney created a gridlock that prevented sequels to Who Framed Roger Rabbit).
Yes, and Earth may be invaded by fundamentalist aliens who find homosexual marraige so repulsive that they trash the planet with their Death Blasters. Doesn’t consent by convention require an informed human mind at work?
Actually, it doesn’t sound that bad, aside from the DON’T DATE ROBOTS!! aspect that might destroy Billy Everyteen’s home planet (it was EARTH!) I daresay the legal system of the future would adapt to such ideas, as it’s now struggling to do with cloning and stem-cell research and whatnot. Purely hypothetical future results are a rather poor reason to require present-day people to live unhappy unfulfilled lives, when the solution they request has no proven negative effect on anyone.
:rolleyes:
No, they just generally botched and held them back. But it’s okay: they catch up periodically.
Are you reffering to the Common law? You mean the body of standards that basically came into being out of long tradition of how merchant business and other secular matters were conducted? A body of law that owes far more to pagan traditions than Christian ones? The thing Jefferson did an extensive study upon before concluding that it was NOT based on Christianity? What ARE you talking about anyway?
And thus spaketh the Lord: two houses shall thee have, bicameral so as to mute the effect of the rabble and give each colony closer to equal share. And the slaves shall not count as whole persons for the purposes of apportionment because then Georgia might bolt. And neither shall the slaves vote. A separation of executive and legislative and judicial shall thee have… and so on.
The idea that the Constitution was based on the Bible is so laugh out loud ridiculous that I’m glad I don’t need my mouth to type.
Actually, they’re pretty much the values of most functioning socieites in human history and concepts spoken of sages long before and long after Christianity, but whatever.
What, do you have such a negative opinion of religion that you think that makes you immune to error?
Well I never said it was a good or strong arguement, I merely said it was the foremost. It has its merits in that the legal arguement to destroy the traditional view of marriage between a man and a woman would require explicit legal definitions of who can marry whom in lieu of the traditional view. My view is that politicians are reluctant to find out what that new legal standard would be.
well, heaven forbid we base our laws on legal simplicity. What would we do with all our lawyers if all our laws were made simple? Of course there will be a ranking, Bigamy is not a new or untried form of marriage. It is only our Judeo-Christian philosophy that dictate that bigamy is bad. Mormons did it quite well for some time (some still do), muslims are allowed to do it and if you remove the legal impediment for same sex marriage, there will be lawyers that will argue that the ban on bigamy is unconstitutional.
I’m pretty sure there already are (and have been) lawyers making that argument to SCOTUS, long before the notion of gay marriage hit the mainstream. I find it to be an uncompelling reason to fear the consequences of gay marriage.
and I will not presume to argue on that point, But both same sex marriage and polygamy are held in check because the general consensus is that marriage is “only” between a man and a woman. A legal advantage for one is legal precedence for the other. You cant allow one in legally without allowing the other.
what I mean is if you allow marriage between a man and a man because the traditional view of marriage only between a man and a woman has no legal exclusivity, then it can be argued that the traditional view of marriage only between 2 people also does not have legal exclusivity and what follows is same sex polygamy which will lead to multi-sex polygamy.
Whether same sex marriage becomes legal first, or polygamy becomes legal first, it doesnt matter. The other will surely follow.
Sure, you can. Define marriage as a permament legal status entered into by two contract between two consenting adults with a number of rights and responsibilities to each other etc etc. The law is full of arbitrary lines. The particular arbitrary line being questioned (two people want to formalize their relationship and just happen to be gay, so they can’t) seems uneccesary and the alleged harm created by removing it seems trivial or nonexistent.
Sure, it can be argued. So what? By that logic, any deregulation on any subject could have catastrophic results, which shows a rather fearful view of the future as well as betraying the notion of an amendable constitution.
I don’t agree that one guarantees the other. Certainly the various Arabic nations that have polygamy don’t have gay marriage, nor do I think the Utah Mormons ever considered it.
But you see you cannot logically undefine the traditional view of marriage to allow same sex marriage but then shut the door on multiple partners. How can you legally justify that? This is exactly why GWBush wants a constitutional ammendment legally defining marriage as the union of one man to one woman. Then the legal standard is set and there is no changing it. What he is doing is setting the “arbitrary line” to exclude same sex marriage. What you are proposing is settine the arbitrary line to exclude poligamy. So what you are doing is the same legal maneuver as GWBush. If the Same Sex marriage people can legally challenge GWBush (and win) then the polygamy people can use that same exact tactic to challenge your definition. I may agree it does not necesarily guarantee passage of the other, but it does allow for an opening for challenge where one did not exist before.
slippery slope.
IANA(A)J*, but I would call bullshit on this slippery slope argument. The gay marrage issue is about equal rights, not changing the definition of marriage. Since there is no current standard for polygamy or patio-furnaturagamy for any “class”, there is no equal rights issue, and gay marriage would not change that.
Pash
*I Am Not An (Activist) Judge
By considering cost/benefit. Laws designed to restrict homosexuals are increasingly irrelevant, because the longtime feared link between homosexuality and perversity doesn’t exist. There was (and I guess still is) a time in America when homosexuals were feared because it was thought that their goal was to molest children, or spread the word of Satan, or punch Christ in the face, or some other nonsense. The cost of integrating homosexuals into society with the same rights as hetero citizens (including being able to form mutually monogamous marriage contracts) is trivial. At worst, insurance companies might dislike the idea of having to extend employee benefits to same-sex spouses, since up to now they preferred insured homosexuals (and insured people generally) to stay single, which is cheaper, but too badfor them. Also, some people will just have to deal with their feelings of ickiness when a gay married couple moves in next door. That’s also too bad for them. The benefits of same-sex marriage is that a small but significant percentage of your population can lead happier, stabler lives. Couples will be able to pool their resources and make larger capital investments (as in houses), and individuals can have the satisfaction of knowing that by marrying, they can choose their legal next-of-kin and no third party can interfere.
As a potential downside, I expect the advent of gay marriage will inevitably bring about gay divorce, which I assume has the potential to get as vindictive and malicious as straight divorces. At least there won’t be custody issues involved most of the time.
In contrast, consider polygamous marriage which, unlike gay marriage, has been practiced in the U.S. (and other nations) and thus you have actual examples to draw on. In practice, polygamy actually means polygyny, with one man marrying multiple women. Almost invariably, this is paired with a subordinate role for women in the culture, with girls betrothed and married off at young ages to men they didn’t choose for themselves. The cost here is apparant: freedom for the subculture (to practice polygamy) is at the expense of freedom of some individuals within the subculture.
Polygamy-promoters can argue for the right to a gentler form of the practice in which all participants are consenting adults, but they still have that major hurdle to overcome. I wish them luck.
I think by defintion an amendment does not set a legal standard where “there is no changing it”, since a later amendment can do exactly that. In the specific case of GWB, I’ll wager his primary motivation in recent months wasn’t the defense of marriage, but the spectre of not being re-elected.
And they’re free to try. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. The objective difference between a homoesexual and heterosexual marriage is relatively minor (if we are to treat men and women equally before the law, there shouldn’t really be any distinction) while the difference between a two-person marriage and a three+ person marriage is quite significant in that a whole other person (or people) is directly involved, and has rights that must be respected. A major legal stumbling block is as I described earlier: in the event of incapacitating injury of a member of a polygamous marriage, who is the primary next-of-kin? Can this be determined via a ranking system at the time the marriage contract is written? How do you resolve disputes? Thinking of a future time when decisive action may be required, why create a situtation with an unclear “chain of command”? Also, multiple spouses greatly complicate existing inheritence laws, insurance benefits, social-security benefits, etc.
To take a simpler analogy, one could argue for the right of women to play in the NBA, but it’s quite a different matter to argue that the teams should not be limited to five players.
In the case of ploygamy, that challege has been open since at least 1878 and Reynolds v. United States. Even now, there are lots of consitutional challenges working through the federal court system, many with the basis of “since X is protected behaviour, the similar behaviour Y should be, too”. The vast majority of these die in the lower courts, but the very existence of the potential for challenge should not be used to prevent decision.
Or, just the nation deciding which laws are necessary and which aren’t. My guess is that in the next four years when it becomes clear that Vermont and Massachusetts (not to mention various Canadian provinces) have not managed to bring about the apocalypse, a few additional states/provinces will drop the restriction since it serves no purpose. A number of southern/midwestern states will hold out, of course, perhaps for decades. Brown vs Board of Education didn’t instantly desgregate southern schools except on paper. In practice, it required waiting until the pro-segregationists started to die out, and this fight will likely take a similar path.
I very much recommend that everyone in this debate go and read Jonathan Rauch’s new book on Gay Marriage: why it is good for gays, good for straights, and good for America.
It’s arguments are pretty darn hard to refute. But one of his main points is this: many of the people who are against gay marriage are simply in denial. They are in denial about the fact that gay people exist, are increasingly living out of the closet, and that we can’t turn the clock back on that. Given that, however, the real threat to marriage comes not from gays joining it, but from what will happen if they are excluded: a proliferation of “marriage-lites” with all the benefits but none of the burdens and responsibilities. The loss of marriage as a universal aspiration, turning it instead into a quaint peculiarity. People against gay marriage are rarely thinking through what will happen without it, and thus only weighing one side of the balance scale.
Let’s start slow: you tell us: what is marriage all about? What is it for? What is its function in society and why do we legally privalege it?
That all depends on what marriage is. You tell us.
When my wife and I were married, there were two different things that happened. One was a cermony at a church; the other was the filing of a marriage license. If there is any sanctity in our marriage, I assume that it is a result of the church ceremony. The marriage license has some tax consequences and establishes legal consequences if we choose to divorce. As an aside, if we were to divorce, since we were married in a Catholic church, the church would not recognize the divorce. As far as God is concerned, we would still be married.
The problem is that we are using the term “marriage” to refer to a something that is related to law and to a religious concept. As far as I know, there is not a single law you could pass that could convey or restrict the sanctitiy of our marriage license. At the same time, I can’t imagine anyone passing a law that required the Catholic Church to allow two gay people to receive the sacrament of marriage.
We have reached an impasse because both sides want something that is unreasonable. The “moral values” side wants to use law to enforce their moral code (and I thought that was just for Muslim extremists). The “gay rights” side (or the ones that aren’t satisfied with “civil unions”) want people in general to concede that what they are doing is okay and acceptable. Obviously, they are not going to do this if their religious convictions say that homosexuality is sinful.
At least for now, the “gay rights” folks are just way outnumbered. This is what is called the “tyranny of the majority” and it is what you are engagin in when you try to legislate morality. I have to say that it is somewhat amazing to me that we criticize this sort of behavior in Muslim countries at the same time as we are campaigning to “get out the vote” for it here.
-VM
Actually, a number of recent ballot intiatives sought to ban gay marriage and civil unions, and even in states where civil unions are permitted, they aren’t “portable” to non-CU states (i.e. if you move with your spouse to a different state to get a better job, you may find your union unrecognized in the new location). Civil unions are something of a stopgap solution. It’ll take a Supreme Court decision (or an amendment) to make them legally equivalent to marriage, or a decision reinforcing the full faith and credit principle requiring non-CU states to recognize the unions. It would still be a nuisance for marriage-minded homosexuals, who would have to travel to Ma. or Vt. to get hitched, but once done, they’d have a legal contract good anywhere in the U.S.
Until the issue is resolved, thugh, I have no doubt there will be a geat deal of dissatisfaction with civil unions.
Bryan:
No argument with your point. Just to clarify, the reason why I phrased it the way I did is that those who believe that a “civil union” is acceptable seem to recognize that getting the religious right to condone the relationship is not possible and are (reasonably, I think) only asking for the same legal standing.
Clearly, anyone who would oppose the civil union approach is trying to discourage homosexuality by means of government. In case it’s not obvious, I think this is completely UNreasonable.
Another subtlety: I’m not convinced that it matters what you call the “legal” relationship (the one with the marriage license). It would probably be clearer if the thing that we get at the courthouse had been called a civil union to begin with, so that it would not now be confused with the supposedly sacred rite of marriage that is the domain of the church.
-VM
I think I might do that. Thanks Apos. Didn’t I ask for an explanation about how same-sex marriage helps society? Can you give some examples?
Is helping society a requirement, incidentally? There are any number of hobbies I might be practicing which are of benefit (or harm, of that matter) to no-one but myself. Am I being “anti-social” by pursuing them?
I think you thought your big “zing!” argument (in this related thread, specifically post #138) was about gays wanting the rights of marriage with none of the social responsibilities, but then you failed (when asked) to clarify exactly what “social responsibilities” straight marriages had (I proposed, with a deliberate 1984 reference, if it was “to produce children for the state”). Assuming such responsibilities exists, how exactly do you think SSM proponents are trying to dodge them?