I TOLD YOU SO ! This is why we shouldn't allow same-sex "marriage"

The BBQ Pit
1

I told you so. I told you so, I told you so, I told you so.

In the whole same-sex marriage debate I stated my opposition to defining marriage as anything other than one man / one woman on the grounds that if we allow any other definition we must allow every other definition.

Slippery slope indeed. Unions of 3, 4, 5 people? Why not? Why not 10? 100? 1000? Entire damn cults, communes, and cities could “marry” each other and demand the privileges associated with marriage: employer-sponsored healthcare that covers the entire “family”, Family Leave for everyone whenever one of them gets pregnant, unlimited marital exclusion of passing assets at death (no estate tax would ever be paid because assets would just keep going to a different “spouse”). And I can imagine outrageous custody battles in cases of divorce further clogging our courts (“Well… these 3,427 people are not entitled to custody of the child but may have court-supervised visits, these 499 people must pay child support but have no visitation rights, while these other 6,201 people are entitled to custody of the child.”)

If we allow anything other than one man / one woman we must allow everything other than one man / one woman.

Everything. Polygamy, Same-Sex, Zoophilia, Human-Android, Solo (someone marrying themselves), Human-Inanimate Object, ad infinitum. Hey, just because you don’t like it, think it’s icky, don’t agree with it, don’t understand it, or don’t want it isn’t a valid reason to forbid any of these.

The article I linked to raises what I consider to be a valid point: if we allow same-sex “marriages” why not polyamorous “marriages”?

Please – someone present a valid argument that supports SS”M” while opposing polyamorous “marriage”. One caveat – any argument you use against polyamorous “marriage” I call fair game to use against SS”M”.

To tell the honest truth – I personally can NOT come up with such an argument. My personal logic and reasoning boils down to “If we allow one we must allow the other.” Unfortunately, that also leads to “If we allow one we must grant the privileges of marriage to anything that anybody feels like defining as a “marriage”.”

I am opposed to granting the privileges of marriage to anything that anybody feels like defining as a “marriage”. That is why I believe marriage should be defined as one man / one woman, and nothing else.

2

Aren’t these two statements completely contradictory?

3

The practical answer is that it’s too complicated.

. All of these, besides same-sex and human-android, are either too complicated legally, or do not involve other legal entities. I see no reason why human-android should be illegal if androids had the same legal rights as humans.

4

Yes, and somehow I suspect the contradiction is lost on the OP.

5

Well this should be interesting.

BTW, my reason against polyamorous marriage is it’s dumb.

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You can’t equate the two because the entire US legal system is set up for two people. Basically you would just change some pronouns and there you have it… SSM.

However, many, many, many legal questions arise with multiple partners. Property rights, custodial rights, and inheritance rights are the most obvious.

I have always found these slippery slope arguments against SS marriage to be disingenuous at best.

7

Says who? That’s like saying legalizing pot means that cocaine, heroin and every other currently illegal drug must also be legalized.

Same Sex Marriages can be made legal without making everything else legal.

Of course other groups will be able to campaign for their definition of marriage to be made legal - but this does not mean their campaigns will be successful.

Just because YOU say allowing A means that B C & D HAVE to be allowed don’t make it so.

8

Not at all: He believes that the same logical that allows same-sex couples to marry also would allow polygamous marriages, and because of that he’s not in favor of applying that logic.

Please note that although I understand what he’s trying to say I don’t agree with it. I’m in the “the state should stay completely out of the marriage business” camp.

9

Kee-rist but this argument pisses me off. “If we allow one then we have to allow the other” is bullshit. Either gay marriage should be allowed on its own merits or it should be denied on its own merits. Similarly, either polygamous marriage should be allowed on its own marriage or it should be denied on its own merits.

You think polygamous marriage should be disallowed. Fine. Then you better bloody well have a REASON to disallow it. What, precisely, is bad about polygamous marriage? Is it high in fat? Does it encourage outsourcing? Does it generate lint? Whatever it is, when you’ve figured out the REASON why polygamous marriage is bad, we can ask whether or not that reason applies separately to gay marriage.

But the idea that the legal or moral status of gay marriage automatically implies that polygamous marriage gets the same status is just as stupid as the eight-year-old who whines that all his friends get to stay up until 11:00 so why can’t he?

If I feel that gay and lesbian couples deserve the chance to stand up in front of their loved ones and the law and pledge their support to the principles of fidelity and commitment then what does the legal or moral status of polygamy have to do with the price of tea in China?

10

He says that he believes if we allow one we must allow the other. My question is then, why doesn’t he believe that allowing one (straight marriage) means we have to allow the other (ss marriage)? If poly-marriages MUST be allowed because SS marriages are (The OPs contention), why mustn’t SS marriage be allowed because straight marriage is? It’s nonsensical.

11

Well, couldn’t any arguement against same sex marriage be used against ‘normal’ marriage? Seriously, why do we allow 2 people of different sexes be married?

SSM is not the dam break that you fear. That alread happened when they allowed people of mixed races to marry. After that taboo was broken and society did not fall, it’s difficult for opponents of SSM to make the same claims again.

12

That would largely be because you are an ass.

You want to deny gay rights because some polyamorous people want to get in on the act? Just because they ask does not mean that we have to grant those rights.

But you do have a point. Once we allowed Irish Catholics to marry, that opened the floodgates and now 3-year-old girls are forced to marry gila monsters every day. If we allow one, then we will have to cram all others down your throat at all times.

Fucknut.

Oh, and your “see I told you so” attitude is something I’d expect from a 4th grader.

13

OK, here’s an argument for you - the legal issues between dealing with a married couple and a married “group” are drastically different and pose a ton of new problems for the legal system to cope with. The issues between a same-sex couple and an opposite-sex couple are pretty much the same. Remember, marriage licenses are legal documents - they bestow certain rights and privileges upon a couple that they do not have (at all or as easily) if they are unwed.

Polyamory throws a whole new wrench into the works. How do you handle adoption by multiple parents? What are the legal issues involved in divorce in such an instance, especially if one participant only wants to leave not all of the members of the group? How do you deal with custody of children if one of the members of the group is deemed unfit as a parent? If one of your spouses dies and that person wasn’t getting along well with one of the others in your group, can he/she cut that person out of a will? Can that person contest it? How do you deal with splitting the property in that case, if it’s going back to some but not all of the members of a marriage group?

See, regardless of how you want to spin it with religion and so forth - marriage has throughout much of our history been in place to facilitate the inheritance of property and other legal matters. The concept of married love has been mostly handled in works of fiction - and let’s not forget the Middle Ages concept of “courtly love” which married women of the court and handsome knights (who were not their husbands) adored each other, acted much as if they were in love, and even took it further than that. It wasn’t until the last couple centuries that the “marrying for love” concept really began to take hold, at least in the Western world.

Marriage does not have to be done with a minister, it can be done via a justice of the peace. You have to apply for a license through your county government. It is a legal institution, and it is an amazing display of contempt for the principle of the separation of church and state that religious arguments are used against same-sex marriage. Religion has no business decreeing that, and if certain churches do not wish to perform those unions, they have every right to do so - but should have no say in forbidding others.

BTW, your “must allow bestiality” argument is flawed - an animal is not capable of giving consent. Same with “solo marriage” - the marriage license in the eyes of the state bestows certain legal rights upon two people as a couple that a single person usually has on their own - can adopt, no need to visit yourself in the hospital or inherit your own property after you die, etc.

And on preview - dammit, others beat me to my arguments. I’m hitting submit anyway. :slight_smile:

14

Then you aren’t thinking very hard.

SSM is a dyad relationship; in that regard, it is identical to current opposite-sex marriage. So all the laws currently in effect regarding opposite-sex marriage can be adapted with no difficulties to same-sex marriages. SSM poses no unique legal challenges to our society.

Polyamorous marriage, on the other hand, by definition involves more than two people. Laws made to govern a dyad relationship CANNOT be simply adapted to work with polyamorous relationships - and given the inherent variety that occurs in polyamorous relationships in terms of total number of participants, the sex of the particpents, and the relationship dynamics between all the participants, it’s unlikely that a single “one size fits all” set of laws (which fundamentally is what legal marriage IS) could be written that would work for every polyamorous relationship. So it makes perfect sense for society to distinguish between dyad relationships and polyamorous ones, and to give dyad relationships a different status under the law than polyamorous ones.

15

Y’all have given this cown much more thoughtful replies than he deserves; IMO anyone who uses “human-android marriages” as a serious objection to SSM is too silly to waste time debating with.

Son, put down the comic books and join the rest of us in the real world.

16

OK, here’s a shot. FTR, I’m mostly ambivalent about gay marriage, but to the extent that I care about it I tend to oppose it. And the basis for this is primarily that I don’t think the government should be in the business of shaping sociology - the government should only recognize what already exists, as expressed by the people. So that the government should not recognize married couples as a family unit because the government thinks it is a good idea to encourage marriage or that marriage is good, but rather because the people already consider married couples to be a family unit independent of any government action.

So the issue with gay marriage is not whether it is good or bad to grant this status to gay people, but rather whether the public already considers gay people to have this status. Of course, this is sort of a catch-22 because these days, with the government interfering with every aspect of people’s lives, lack of government recognition itself will impact people’s opinion. Still, I’m not talking so much about official married status as much as whether people consider the couple to be a family unit, much as a common law marriage might be recognized on that basis.

It would seem to me, that since the concept of gay marriage is relatively recent, at least in western society, and opinion polls seem to show a lot of opposition to it (and possible other factors) that gay marriage cannot be said to be recognized by society itself, and the government should not take the initiative in creating a new sociological reality.

Having said that: a contrary case could also be made that there is a large segment of the public that does want gay marriage, and another that wants civil unions (which are indistinguishable from marriages IMHO) and some of the opposition to this concept is based on theological grounds or similar such, that gay marriages are in fact a sociological reality, and should be recognized by the government.

However, this would not apply to the other forms of marriage that you describe. These are arrangements that are recognized by almost no one, and I frankly suspect that most or all of the participants in these arrangements do not consider themselves family, but rather as people who have some sort of arrangement for a specific purpose. (The exception to this would be members of Mormon cults).

In sum, the distinction between gay marriage and the other forms of marriage would be that gay marriages are more of a sociological reality than the other forms.

17

Probably this is the real source of the Op’s ire. He secretly craves that red-hot android loving. I am somehow picturing a maladjusted 15 year old who has spent far too much time whacking it to pictures of 7 of 9.

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I see most of the sensible points have already been made (including the ones about the OP being a twerp and not worthy of intelligent comment). However …

You can’t have a marriage contract without informed consent on each side. So that lets out forms of “marriage” where one party can’t (factually or legally) give that consent - underage children, animals, inanimate objects. (As to androids, I express no opinion … )

Ferret Herder’s gone into some detail on the complexities of allowing group marriages; an argument I’ve also heard advanced, in that case, is based on imbalance of power - how do you make sure the marriage contract, with more than two people involved, is equitable to everyone concerned? (With only two people, it’s difficult for one to “gang up” on the other … ) I suspect that the legal and social complexities of plural marriage could be solved, in time, if there were enough social demand for group marriages … hmm. How would it be any skin off my nose if we did have group marriages? Got me there …

So that’s my two penn’orth. (Just because the OP’s silly, doesn’t mean we can’t give a sensible answer … )

19

Oh, I don’t think you’re going back far enough. I’m imagining a 40-year-old, who USED to, when he was 15, whack off to pictures of Sean Young in Blade Runner. Or maybe Daryl Hannah.

20

I’m in favor of human-android marriages. So long as I can be the android.

Beep boop whirrrrr.

Danger, danger: this whole thread is illogical!