You know, the one that opened the door for you will be able to marry your favorite angora goat.
Ah, the Billy v. Utah decision. Excellent.
Don’t…do that kind of thing, in the streets.
It frightens the horses.
Mmmm, horses …
Don’t do that kind of thing in the streets, either.
It frightens everybody else.
Many people who support one step of change, oppose the *next *step beyond that.
Many who supported interracial marriage, opposed gay marriage.
Many who supported gay marriage, oppose polygamous marriage.
And, no doubt, many who support polygamous marriage, oppose incestuous marriage.
It’s always about the *next *step. Today’s liberal is tomorrow’s conservative.
I get that this is supposed to be saying something negative about liberals, but I’m not clear what it is.
But when you declare by judicial fiat that morality laws are not a valid reason to legislate, there is no principled reason to allow laws against polygamy and incest.
Morality laws aren’t the only reason against anti-incest laws.
Anti-polygamy laws came about partly because of anti-Mormon religious bigotry, but also because polygamy, as it was being practiced, was exploitive. Women were being married in secret, denying them the legal protections of marriage. Women were being compelled to be married. The system was hopelessly corrupt.
Today, we could legalize polygamy and not open ourselves to that same degree of corruption. We could make sure that all participants were consenting adults, and that they could exit from the arrangement at will.
Incest has that problem with genetics. A law mandating a child-free marriage is about equally objectionable to a simple ban.
The comparisons aren’t straight-up one-to-one. We’ve got an apples and oranges situation here.
So would you support a law preventing haemophiliacs, those with sickle-cell anemia, or other genetic disease carriers from marrying?
He just said it would be objectionable to force a childfree marriage, one would imagine it would make it academic to try and ban it happenning.
Many same sex relationships are exploitative. Many heterosexual “shotgun” weddings are done because of demands of religious parents.
If we start with the presumption decreed by Lawrence v. Texas that what adults do in the privacy of a home is not subject to morality laws, then we can’t judge these polygamous or incestuous relationships with such a broad brush.
Think of an adult brother and sister who want to fuck each other and marry. Disgusting right? Many people think the same of a man taking it in the ass from another guy. There should be some principled reason why the public can outlaw the first thing, but be prohibited from outlawing the latter.
Suppose the adult brother has had a vasectomy. Suppose he has not, but the sister is on the pill. Suppose she has been diagnosed as infertile. Suppose that they say to hell with it, we are having children anyways, and science shows that the chance of birth defects are less than that of women having children over the age of 40.
Doesn’t the fact that it is legal for women over 40 to bear children but not incestuous couples mean that the only reason for the distinction is our moral approbation against it?
I have no problem with the strides that the homosexual community has made in public opinion and in laws which protect that status. That is what democracy and the modification of the common law does: it reflects the attitudes of people who live under new circumstances in new times.
However, when we constitutionalize this stuff, it makes it impossible to make these value judgments. Without* Lawrence*, a legislature could say that our morality can allow homosexual sodomy and same sex marriage, but we don’t allow incest or polygamy. Those are judgments the people make.
Scalia was right in his dissent. There is no principled way to distinguish incest or polygamy since we cannot have morality laws.
Hm. Maybe. Do you think they should have the right to inflict lifelong suffering on their offspring?
Except we can, and that’s what all the big laws are. (Murder and rape are just so immoral that we force the issue, for example. They don’t rest on any constitutional principle.) We don’t need to distinguish anything. If the people of the future no longer find something immoral, there’s no reason they can’t change that. There’s no reason that new information can’t change how we interpret the principles we’ve set up before. In fact, that’s an absolute necessity.
The thing about Scalia’s dissent is that it was a moral one. He brought up things he thought were immoral, and that this was supposedly a reason not to do them. If we do X, then Y will follow. And Y is bad, therefore we shouldn’t do X. That’s not anything principled, either. Y is bad is a moral judgment, which, under his principles, he should not be making.
The sole reason not to allow same sex marriage was morality-based. If you believe morality based laws are invalid, then SSM should be legal. The end. I actually wish it were that simple. But morality always informs the law. The law is ultimately just the government enforcing morality, subject to certain principled limitations.
Interesting spin, but Scalia was not reasoning in this way at all. He was just expressing his religious homophobia. Any attempt to rehabilitate his evil is sophistry.
Not all cases are exactly comparable to all other cases. In polygamy, you have additional viewpoints represented; the rules of marriage would need to be re-written by legislation to fit.
If the persons in question were secure against reproduction, my personal objections to incestuous marriage would largely disappear.
However, it is very wrong, disingenuous, and frankly dishonest to say that the constitutional protection of gay marriage must slop over to polygamous and incestuous marriage. That’s bad reasoning, of the most vacuous “slippery slope” variety, and simply doesn’t follow. (“Slippery slop.”)
With incest, there is a greater good argument. Which is what morality really is–arguments about finding something disgusting is not moral. With polygamy, there is a shakier greater good argument, but a lot of problems with implementation.
I fully believe that both will become legal in the future, though. I think there might be some genetic testing requirements for children of incest, but that’s it. The abuse angle with incest will just be its own crime, and not invoke incest at all. With polygamy, we’ll work out the bureaucratic hurdles and get some laws in place that make it fair, and don’t allow the law itself to be the cause of exploitation.
I do predict we will have more laws against exploitation, though. And we will get better at detecting it. You’ll file some sort of exception to prove that something that seems exploitative isn’t, and be under stronger scrutiny.
And I’m sure there are things that I don’t know about that I think are wrong which will be considered not wrong in the future. Things that are illegal now may be made illegal. I don’t get why I should care.
Evil? Is it evil to oppose both homosexual sodomy AND incest, but perfectly reasonable to agree with homosexual sodomy but oppose incest?
I am vehemently opposed to green bell peppers. Other people seem to enjoy them, though. I just look the other way and avoid them at all cost.
The word “sodomy” is unfortunate here, as it poisons the discourse.
(If poisoning the discourse is permitted, then Scalia was an evil fuck-head.)
One distinction is that we have millions of actual gay people, who want equal rights. Also, being gay appears to be a natural state, into which one is born.
There are no similar numbers of people asking for the right to practice incest, and there is no evidence that incest is a natural condition.
So, again, equating the two is invalid.
You are actually using the “natural” argument here? Are you sure you don’t want to rethink that? And since when does the number of people affected by something determine whether or not “something” should be illegal?