Your metric was “cornerstone of our civilization”. Applying your own metric, you’re concerned about a “future where there are fewer married OS couples having and raising children”, which “is not a good thing”.
So, by the metric you hold up as the one that matters, is same-sex marriage not inferior?
That depends on the nature of what the items are, does it not? Adding Quaker State to Valvoline still gives you motor oil. I submit that this is more applicable to committed, long-term heterosexual and homosexual relationships; they are far more alike than different.
The thing is, when you add a glass of pineapple to a glass of orange you’re left with one thing of juice. What we’re really talking about here is not combining the two, but leaving them in separate glasses, but calling both juice. And that gets right to the heart of it, I think – magellan looks at it as mixing or muddling or watering down or whatever, but nothing’s been mixed from my perspective.
It doesn’t seem, from where I’m sitting, that calling a new thing a marriage would act to change my perception of what a man/woman marriage is. From my perspective, a man/woman marriage remains a pure, unadulterated marriage even if I think about there also being a woman/woman marriage, in the same way that even though I don’t necessarily imagine two one-hundred-year-olds when I imagine a bride and groom, I don’t think that the marriage of two twenty-five-year-olds is cheapened or adulterated or affected in any way by the marriage of the older couple. I’ll even go so far as to say that the idea of two centenarians getting married is really weird to me and makes me uncomfortable if I think about it too hard. It has almost nothing in common with what I imagine to be a “normal” marriage. Still, if they’re married, they’re married, from my perspective. And when two fresh-faced and able-bodied and -genitaled young paragons of virtue get married, their marriage retains all the symbolic significance it ever would have. That’s how you feel about it, too, right?
From my perspective a gay marriage is the same (as far as the conclusion goes, I mean). It’s clear that you don’t view it that way, magellan, but does it make sense to you that because that’s the way I see it, I literally can’t come up with a reason why a gay marriage affects the – the “purity” or the “meaning” or the “orange juiceness” or whatever non-judgmental word you’d like to use to articulate what the change is – of what you or I imagines as a “normal” marriage? I don’t see where there’s any “mixing” going on any more than all the other changes the institution has survived. When a man and a woman get married, I call that a marriage. When they do it fifteen years from now, I’ll call it that then. Why will it mean anything different?
Right, and so far no one has come up with a reason it’s a “bad thing.”
It’s still (in theory) a lifetime commitment with significant legal and social consequences. Many people over the past few decades have questioned the value of the institution for various reasons. More people are “living together” without marriage, and others are waiting longer to get married. Lots of people get divorced. All of this, however, happened years before SSM was even a thing. I’ve never heard any heterosexual express any reservation about getting married because the institution has become more inclusive.
You know, it doesn’t really matter how many times you revise your analogy. You can’t make a bigoted idea non-bigoted just by dressing it up in different words.
Here’s the problem with your analogy. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with either water, or orange juice, they do have some pretty distinct qualities. If I want something sweet, tangy, with lots of pulp in it, I want orange juice. If I add water to it, I’m getting less of those qualities I find desirable in orange juice, because water doesn’t have any of those qualities.
I assume we’re all on the same page so far, right?
So, let’s apply that analogy to marriage. Marriage has a set of qualities - let’s just call them X, Y, and Z - that make marriage something valuable. If letting gays get married dilutes marriage, then it must be because gays lack some or all of those qualities. And that’s where your argument turns into simple bigotry, because there is no answer to that question that doesn’t disparage homosexuals.
So you agree that it does change it, just not to a degree that you would consider significant. Okay. But would you grant that some changes in degree can result in significant changes in result. How about if you like your coffee black and add it that way and a barista gives it to you with a little cream in it? How about if a someone chooses to remain a virgin until marriage? having sex just that once is no biggie, right? The fact is that either marriage stands for the traditional coming together of man and woman or it doesn’t. SSM is one change. The desire for some to enter into polygamous marriages would be another.
Well, let’s review. You won’t answer questions, you won’t explain your own views, and your remaining argument is a Seinfeldian ‘SSM weakens marriage… not that there’s anything wrong with that.’ Whatever my best is, I don’t think it’s required here.
I’m changing this from a note to a warning, magellan. That ‘T-ball’ thing in post 620 is a bit much combined with everything else. You’re addressing the poster and not the post.
If the metric is “has been the cornerstone of civilization”, SSM is not even inferior, it doesn’t register on the scale at all. Since it has not been part of your history it neither can be said to have contributed to it nor diminished that which has been the cornerstone of society.
And that is one valid way to look at it. It doesn’t invalidate my view. Correct?
Anyway, the NJ highest court has basically ruled that marriage and civil unions are not the same, since federal benefits that accrue to married couples don’t accrue to those who were civil unioned. So, saying that people who are married and those who are civil unioned are equal is not true, and that the differences are separate and unequal.
So, you can’t have the same set of laws but with different names. At least in NJ, that doesn’t work. I got your QED right here (as they say in NJ).
In any case, since SSM has now been legal for years in many states and many countries, none of the doomsaying about the institution of marriage becoming more pineapply makes sense anymore. It’s possible that you could make that argument a few decades ago, but now the evidence is in, and all is well, even though you’ve got your peanut butter into my chocolate (to mix metaphors).
Alabama Chief Justice states reasons to oppose SSM.
On the minus side, this guy is a raving loon.
On the plus side, it gives hope to thousands of other loons looking to get jobs in the judiciary branch of the government.
I appreciate this post, even though you still seem to tautologically employ charges of bigotry. Oh, well. That aside, let’s focus on the last paragraph. I would say that it is not the case that “gays” lack something, but if the metric is “marriage”, then gay relationships do indeed fall short, by not being comprised of the necessary components: a man and a woman. Now, you are free to feel that that is being overly restrictive, and for you, I’m sure that’s the case. But I, as you know, hold a more traditional view of marriage, one with centuries and centuries of western history to support it. A history, I will add, that has zero instances any society embracing SSM—and that includes those that were famously embracing of homosexuality. You might even accuse me of employing a tautology of sorts. And I’d admit to it. For me, a marriage is necessarily constituted of a man and a woman, a husband and a wife. This notion of two husbands and two wives is other worldly. They exist in only in places where there is up but no down, yin but no yang. Now, you or someone else can choose to be disparaged by that, but that is your choice. But I see that akin to me feeling disparaged by an NBA team telling me that I’m not tall enough.
It’s good that you acknowledge it, but it’s not a tautology of sorts. It’s a tautology: the definition of marriage is a man and a woman because that’s the definition of marriage. The question then becomes “why can’t marriage be defined another way?” Pointing out that marriage has never until recently been defined in this particular way doesn’t answer that question. The issue is possibility, not history. That’s typically where the false assertions like “marriage has always been this” and “historically this has always been the most important aspect of a marriage” come in.
This is mere passive-aggressiveness. You’re entitled to an opinion, but you don’t get to dictate how other people how can feel about your opinion. If you think your opinion is the right one regardless of whether or not people are insulted, say ‘I’m sorry you’re insulted, but that’s how I feel.’
Let’s go with “is a cornerstone of our civilization.” Given that:
a) You view opposite-sex marriage as a cornerstone, and
b) you view same-sex marriage as a threat to that cornerstone, and
c) you therefore oppose same-sex marriage,
it obviously follows that you value opposite-sex marriage more highly, to the point of prohibiting same-sex marriage in order to protect it. Correct?
No; what’d objectively invalidate your view would be evidence that same-sex marriage had no deleterious effect on opposite-sex marriages, agreed? This is to set aside the countless subjective arguments that could be made either way.
You do go on, repeatedly, to claim that this change (assuming we accept your claim that it is one) is a *bad *thing, remarkably, even though all the testimony on that aspect is to the opposite.
Is that because, to you, *any *change is bad? We’d still be living in caves and hunting mastodons if we followed *that *rule.
