I can agree with that suspicion. However I’ve never actually heard anyone say that their own marriage is devalued though, only that other people…either not yet married or not even born yet…will feel it is devalued.
Well, what can you say? You pretty much have to couch it in terms of what others will feel rather than what you feel when the position in inherently bigoted.
“I don’t want to live in this neighborhood now that I have black neighbors” sounds a lot worse than “I’m afraid my house values might go down because people are so racist and won’t want to live next to black people.”
“I have problem with gay people getting what I have” versus “I’m just concerned that other people will feel that marriage is watered down by the addition of gays into marriage and that will make them not want to get married and that will hurt society, so it’s best that we keep the gays out. I’m totally not a bigot. I’m just dealing with reality here.”
People quite often try to put their own fears and biases into the mouths of “some say” in order to keep some plausible deniability.
Yeah, that’s the problem with this whole range of analogies.
I approve of SSM. I have a couple of lesbian friends who desperately need to be able to get married. TO EACH OTHER. If my marriage is orange juice and theirs is pineapple juice, WE’RE NOT MIXING THEM. My marriage will remain orange juice; it’s just that there’ll be a glass of pineapple juice right next to it.
I have no desire to drink the pineapple juice. It doesn’t appeal to me. What sort of schmuck would I have to be to tell other folks they can’t have it, because I’m worried about demeaning the word “juice”?
I mean, Jesus Christ. If you want to make marriage more sacred, more meaningful, deny it to those whose grasp on their own marriage is so weak that they’re worried about what someone else’s marriage will do to their own. Those folks shouldn’t be able to get married, for sure. But committed, loving couples who happen to have different genitals? Let them get married, ferchrissake.
Snipped the quote for space. 
Of course. People tell these sorts of lies to themselves and others all the time. I probably do too, but try to avoid it whenever I realize I’m doing it.
Please do. So many who rationalize their own fears and hatreds by claiming it’s Christian doctrine have only a single line in Leviticus to point to. That’s in the Old Testament, the pre-Christ half of the Bible if you will, and so is a whole bunch of other stuff that someone today really doesn’t want to claim to believe in. Christ himself had exactly nothing to say about homosexuality, but he said a whole awful lot about loving and cherishing and not judging and being excellent to each other.
Some say I should too, but I don’t!
Seriously, though, I find that when I’m faced with something and I become really worried by what someone else will think, if it’s really that it’s about the someone else, I’ll say “Let them be bothered. That’s not my problem.”
It’s when I can’t do that that I realize that it’s internal.
So, if I say “I have no problem with X, I’m just worried that other people will, so we shouldn’t do X” what it really means is that I have a problem with X.
If I say “I have no problem with X. I know that other people will, but that is not my problem” what it really means is exactly what it says.
Well, at least he admits they’re both juice, as opposed to orange juice and pineapple civil unions, ONE set of beverages, ONE!!
I guess it’s progress, of a sort.
Before same-sex marriage started happening I never heard anyone argue that the specialness of marriage was based on the fact that some couples couldn’t get married. That’s a concept that gets weirder and weirder the more you think about it.
No doubt. And the vague free-floating “fear” of dame age to the institution of marriage becomes somehow very difficult to explain of justify in any rational way. Hence such nebulous and impersonal phrases like “Thats the fear.” That fear becomes so difficult to pin down that the harder you look at it the less you can see.
FFS, no one is going to “serve” you up a SSM against your will like a barista messing up your order. It’snot as if you go the chaple, someone’s going to say, “OK Bob, we know you had your heart set on marrying Suzy but you’re getting a Steve instead.” Don’t want a SSM? Don’t have one.
Right now, two groups, U.S. Citizens and Legal Residents, can get a license and drive. Yet, they both have to adhere to a single set of traffic laws.
In your mind does that fall into Separate but Equal, too? No. It can’t, because there is just one set of traffic laws.
What Brown v. The Board of Education eliminated was the notion that, simply put, two different schools, one on each side of the tracks, could be both separate and equal.
Brown case: 2 different groups; 2 different schools
My idea: 2 different groups; 1 set of laws
An analogy used to illuminate Point A has no Burden of also illuminating Point B, C, or D.
Most people realize this.
Some opponents of SSM would love that. They’d be gay married without having to admit that gay sex was what they wanted all along.
-
The degree to which they symbolize the necessary ingredients for procreation.
-
They are the components present in the ideal environment to raise children.
Before you respond, do remember that I am in favor of gays—either single or a couple—being able to adopt children.
And both groups get a driver’s license.
This is a great comparison for advocates of same-sex marriage: it’s about two different groups who get the exact same set of privileges (including the name!) under the law. For you, it doesn’t work at all. For one thing the DMV doesn’t divide them up into different classes. That’s an immigration issue. What you’re proposing is that we divide people into two groups and give them the same privileges, but we call one group Drivers and the other, I don’t know, Vehicle Operators. By doing so, we are protecting the sanctity of driving or something.
Again, “sets of laws” are not relevant to discrimination and as far as I can tell they’re not even really a thing. You’re separating marriages into two different groups. The number of laws required to achieve your purpose is irrelevant. “White children go to one school and nonwhite children go to another school” could be written as a single law.
Why does this symbolism matter?
I’m sure you’ve already seen the studies that debunk this.
Which means you don’t care about this ideal environment thing anyway.
Wrench ottoman sunset effort spoon nickel calico. Uvula!
There is no evidence that a married man/woman couple is superior in child-rearing to a same-sex couple.
If man+woman doesn’t equal lesser man or lesser woman, perhaps same sex+marriage doesn’t necessarily mean lesser marriage.
For the purpose of licensing, they are each identified as “licensed driver,” so that odd attempt fails.
Actually, what Brown did was point out that any effort to promote “separate but equal” inevitably led to inequality. No evidence has been presented that that conclusion has ever been successfully challenged.
And under Brown, there was one set of laws, so your claim does not even address your own point.