NO, he was not including slaves in that.
It’s fine to argue that the concept is applicable to other situations. What I had issue with was this ridiculous notion that Warren meant for his comments to apply to gays being married. That is demonstrably false.
Which is why I said “Sure, Warren didn’t intend for his remarks to apply to gays, because at the time he was striking down racial laws as a violation of basic human rights, he probably didn’t even consider that gays deserve basic human rights too.”
I’d like to add that Warren’s thoughts on SSM are irrelevant just as Jefferson’s thoughts on slaves were irrelevant in the late 60’s. We reference his words and apply them to whoever we think it applies to based on the society we live in. I want to apply those words to gays, because I think they are just as deserving of those rights as anyone else.
The concepts are good even if the authors didn’t recognize the limitations they put on the idea of “all” men.
This is a sentiment that is frequently expressed, and I think that it’s not really accurate. If marriage meant “the union of a man and a woman”, then it wouldn’t make any sense to use it metaphorically (ie, “in superDynaCorp, we have a marriage of technology and forwardthinkingness”). Think about it this way: suppose that no one had ever heard of the idea of gay marriage, and the word “marriage” (and “married”, etc.) were only ever applied to precisely one man and one woman. And there were no gay people at all. And then two gay men were born, and they met each other, and fell in love. And everyone else thought it was totally bizarre. But anyhow, these two gay men went up to you and said “hey, we want to get married”. Would you understand what they meant? Would you get that they were implying “we want to formalize our loving relationship and make it (hopefully) permanent”? Or would you think they meant “one of us is going to get a sex change, and then we will have a man-woman marriage”?
As long as the first of those is what you understand them to be saying, then I claim that “marriage” means “a loving committed romantic relationship (USUALLY between a man and a woman)”. The “man and woman” part is certainly something we’re aware of, but it’s not part of the essential meaning the word conveys.
I’m glad to hear that, but my posts in this thread were specifically intended to rebut the idea that there is something wrong with making that comparison.
Well, how do we show them otherwise without… showing them otherwise?
It can help, because blacks aren’t the only people in this country with an emotional investment in the civil rights movement. The argument may not convince a single black person to change his views on gay rights, but if it gets whites, or blacks, or asians to change their views, then it’s a worthwhile argument.
Oh, I’m definitly arguing causation. Homophobia is a medical condition caused by high levels of melanin.
:rolleyes:
So, that’s why I was so filled with self-hatred growing up!
Because the argument we’re talking about doesn’t really show them otherwise. It doesn’t really present a case for why gay marriage is valid. It is just an appeal that opens itself up to debate and contention.
Does it automatically follow that because it’s wrong to deny blacks the right to vote, it’s wrong to withhold that right from kids? Most people would probably take issue with this conclusion because they believe that age is not comparable to race and therefore, age-based restrictions are more socially acceptable than racial ones. So can someone who wants voting rights for children really play the black Civil Rights movement card and expect to get very far? Even if they insist and insist that they are no different? I say no. In fact, they’d probably be booed off the stage if they went this route!
Well, sure, if you’re debating gay rights, and you just shout, “Loving v. Virginia!” and sit back with a smug look on your face, you’re not going to get very far. But is anyone actually doing that?
Read post #118. You said what you quoted AFTER that I quoted in the above post.
Correct. I didn’t quote him, nor did I try to pretend that he was actually referencing SSM.
This is a joke, right?
Wow. Am I being whooshed?
Worst argument ever!
You’re oversimplying my position if this is all you think I’m saying.
Was Warren pretending that Jefferson the slave owner was referencing interracial marriage in the Declaration of Independence?
Let me try to be a bit more clear about this. People talk a lot about how supporters of gay marriage are “redefining” the word. (As if changing the English language is somehow a bigger deal than depriving millions of people of legal and societal recognition of their love, but that’s neither here nor there). I claim that no redefinition is going on.
What’s a “redefinition”? That means that the word now means something different than it did before. If it’s a non-trivial redefinition, it means that when people use the word in an otherwise identical sentence in an otherwise identical context, it must mean something else.
The word “gay” has been refined. “He is so gay” no longer means that it used to. The word “computer” (which used to refer to people who did mathematical calculations" has been redefined. It no longer means what it used to. “We need 15 computers to solve this problem” no longer means what it used to. The word “faggot” has been redefined. “I burn faggots in the winter to keep warm” no longer means what it used to mean.
So, suppose gay marriage becomes legal and accepted tomorrow, and 30 years from now it is totally accepted and the word “marriage” is used by everyone to describe both gay and straight weddings. Sentences like “I hope to get married someday” or “I flirted with him, but he said he was married” or “will you marry me?” will meaning pretty much exactly what they do today. Thus, no meaningful redefinition.
Well, you called it “an appeal that opens itself up to debate and contention.” Isn’t that the point of the comparison, though? To open up debate and contention? If someone objects to the comparison between blacks and gays, isn’t that the opportunity to explain why you think the comparison is valuable, and (ideally) convince the other person that there’s as much merit to gay rights as there is to black rights? (Or, more importantly, that they’re ultimatly the same rights.) This is only a bad tactic if you expect that simply claiming the similarity is sufficient argument in and of itself, but I don’t see anyone doing that. The comparison is almost always part of a suite of arguments in favor of gay rights, and followed up by concrete reasoning explaining why the comparison is apt.
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No. If an appeal turns the debate into a pissing match between gays and blacks (or anyone else who thinks race is different than homosexuality), instead of keeping the focus on making people understand why SSM isn’t a threat to society, then I think that kind of appeal needs to avoided. People tend to become “hardened” against a position the more they argue against it, but more importantly they just stop listening to you.
Is the point to prove that gays are as worthy of rights as blacks? Or is the ultimate goal to prove that they are deserving of the same rights as straights? The quickest way to any destination is via a straight line (pun unintended, honest). Using blacks as a rhetorical device introduces an unnecessary bump in the road.
And another thing: We keep talking about laws against interracial marriage as if they were only a black issue, but by definition, white rights were restricted as well. It’s more honest and accurate to portray IRM as a loss for both whites and blacks, but it’s often easier to focus on black suffering in this area and completely ignore the white side of the equation. I think the temptation to do this is even greater when linkages to IRM are drawn to SSM. But why not make the case to whites that they too were once denied the right marry whom they wanted, and this was as unfair as bans on SSM are? I’m interested in seeing how both whites and blacks would respond to this particular appeal.
Well, in post [URL=“http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=10576187&postcount=106”]#106](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=10576187&postcount=106)you essentially claimed that if comparisions to black civil rights movement don’t work, then no argument will work. And I disagree with that.
Bricker, IIRC, has done so.
You’d have a point if black people weren’t allowed to marry each other because that would be equivalent to gay people not being able to marry i.e. two people of the same group. Interracial marraige was designed to keep the “white race” pure because the marraige was always understood to produce children which in an interracial scenario the offspring would be black, not half white or half black, but black, go figure.
And one way of showing that it’s not a threat is by comparing it to other social changes in society, ones that were far more fundamental and far-reaching, and which ultimately were to the benefit of all of us. One good example of this would be the black civil rights movement.
As to it being a “pissing match” between blacks and gays, if we say, “We’re just like you,” and someone else says, “Like hell you are, you deviant freak,” I’m not really clear how the blame for that is on us.
Once again, how does that not apply to absolutely any argument we can make for gay rights?
The quickest way to any achievement is to work on a pre-existing foundation, not to start over from square one.
And again, blacks are not the only group in America we need to convince to support us. But they are the only group that appears to have any objection to comparisons with the black civil rights movement. If the comparison is helpful with the other 87% of America, does it make sense to abandon it just to appease that 13% that seems unlikely to ever support us in the first place?
It’s an interesting suggestion, but I don’t think it would make too much of a difference. Most people aren’t interested in marrying outside their race in the first place. I mean, I’m white, and the fact that fifty years ago, I couldn’t marry a black woman isn’t particularly insulting to me, because the law wasn’t predicated on any sort of shortcoming in me as a white person. While the law technically affected me, it wasn’t about me. Conversely, I doubt that there are a great many black people who are okay with the idea of miscegenation laws because, hey, they weren’t planning on marrying a white person in the first place.
And I stand by that. If the obvious truth of the comparison actually serves to drive someone further away from supporting gay rights, then there is no argument that is going to be persuasive to that person, and tailoring our arguments to try to appease them is crippling ourselves unnecessarily.