All my friends, with one exception, have zero to two kids. Which means that on average, they aren’t hitting the replacement rate for population maintenance.
The exception is a single gay man with two kids. He paid for a couple of surrogates. He and the kids are doing fine: he’s retired, can afford an au pair, and has a close family network. I find it mildly ironic that he’s the only one that’s more than pulling his weight population-wise.
congrats on the nibling! or cousin once removed, or… anyway, congrats on the new member of your family.
A person who is not the least bit bigoted suddenly appears to turn into a huge bigot due to a brain tumor. They revert back to their unbigoted old self (and stay that way for the rest of their life) when the tumor is succesfully removed. When asked about their behavior after being cured, they said they truly believed horrible things would happen to their loved ones if they didn’t behave the way they did. They feel terrible of how they behaved and try to make amends with anyone they may have harmed or upset.
Were they bigoted during that time when being affected by said tumor? Or were they merely temporarily mentally ill and delusional? This could be analogous to someone being forced to do heinous acts at gun point or to a fervently religious person who fears going to hell if they don’t do as they are told.
These might be examples of people who can check all the boxes for bigotry/bigoted behavior but not in fact be bigots/bigoted, but only if the reason why they behave in a bigoted way or voice bigoted beliefs matters. How many people who are against same sex marriage are like this, namely, against it simply for having an irrational fear of the consequences of not being so? I have no idea, but I would imagine it is non-zero.
This does not mean that any argument against SSM is not bigoted. You can voice bigoted beliefs and behave in any other bigoted way without being a bigot yourself. Therefore, if someone is espousing anti-SSM ideas or arguments, those can be called out as being bigoted without having to label or call the person voicing them a bigot. So the answer to the OP appears to be yes.
That’s an odd take. It’s like the Nuremberg defense, but if the Nazi leaders were a hallucination.
I don’t view bigotry as an unchangeable aspect of a person’s character. In fact, I think the gay rights movement, more than any other, has showcased how possible it is to disabuse people of their bigotry. I have personally witnessed parents come around after their kids came out. If you hold bigoted beliefs only out of ignorance or illness, they’re still bigoted. But you might not be a bigot forever.
Yeah, I think the OP is asking for a justification or rationalization for the belief itself. Otherwise this works in any situation:
“For what reason would a surgeon operate on a patient with covid? Well, if the surgeon had a brain tumor…”
If it’s a joke, I don’t think it’s a great joke, as I think there are reasonable answers to the OP, such as the argument about how marriage is heavily state-subsidized in many countries for reasons that might not make sense for other kinds of partnership on average (NB: This is not my position, I’m just saying it’s a defensible one. My personal position is that those subsidies are largely outdated anyway).
Many posters in this thread appear to be making the circular argument that since there are no non-bigoted reasons for opposing gay marriage, any argument against it is necessarily a bigoted one. Not much point trying to debate with that.
I was just thinking the opposite. Given the long term decline in marriage and fertility rate, maybe the government needs to subsidise marriage more.
Why?
What I was trying to get at in my previous post, is that if it was ever clear that a traditional hetero marriage really is the most stable environment to raise kids, it isn’t now.
Why not just subsidize parents? Why should my tax dollars go to Mr and Mrs DINK, and not the lesbian couple who’ve adopted 3 kids?
I don’t think there’s much disagreement that a stable long term relationship is a better environment to raise kids in. Marriage is a public commitment to and recognition of that relationship. And since having kids commonly affects one partner’s career and earning potential more than the other, marriage helps protect that partner if the relationship breaks down. Since the lesbian couple are now equally able to get married, what’s the problem?
Two things:
I was mentioning this in the context of an argument some people give against gay marriage. If you’re agreeing with me that gay and lesbian married parents can be just as stable as hetero married parents, then you’re agreeing with me that this argument no longer holds (if it ever did).
Once again: why promote marriage specifically? Why should the state give tax breaks and other perks to a married couple that has no intention of having children vs an unmarried couple / single individual / other responsibly raising kid(s)?
Yeah, I wasn’t trying to support that argument.
To encourage the unmarried couple with kids to get married, and because couples who marry may be more likely to have children. They can also subsidise kids in general, but IMHO should avoid policies that promote single parenthood, because that is usually a less stable environment for kids, and much harder on the parents too.
Gets tricky, though; because people often wind up single parents anyway, including for reasons not their fault; and they’re more in need of help than couples are. And their children are on average more in need of help than the children of stable couples are.
So if we subsidize specifically the married couples, we’re subsidizing more the ones who need it less; and punishing both single parents and children for things they had little or no control over.
Also, if there’s a significant financial bonus just for getting married, that encourages people to get married who shouldn’t marry each other; which is likely to eventually increase the number of children growing up in dysfunctonal and/or divorced families.
The military unfortunately has historically done exactly that. Still does.
Is there any evidence for this?
Definitely my intent!
I really don’t think “Well, if you were mentally ill and thought that God/the Devil/Shub Niggurath/etc were going to punish you for being pro-same-sex-marriage” is in the spirit of what I’m looking for.
“I’m against all marriage” is also not in the spirit of the OP; it is an answer to a different question.
So here, 400+ posts later, I’ll explicitly call out the assumed qualifier: “… but pro-hetero-marriage?”
Yes, it’s tricky. You need to weigh up helping out existing families vs potentially increasing the number of kids growing up in a worse situation.
I’d be very surprised if married couples aren’t more likely to have kids than unmarried ones, but I’m not at all sure how the causation would run.
I have a vague recollection of Orson Scott Card (science fiction writer) saying something along those lines, but I’m not sure if that’s who you’re thinking of.
I don’t think it was Card; though I can’t guarantee it. I think I might have remembered if it was Card, though, as his name was already familiar to me.
IIRC, there was a former Doper who had that happen. (I think they had already been banned, though. I believe she e-mailed some people to apologize to them, however)
It definitely wasn’t Card, at least I vividly remember someone talking about why we had to shun gay sex, because making it ‘acceptable’ would cause men to eschew women for the lure of other men. I could only think, here’s a gay man pretending to be straight, who doesn’t understand straight men at all, and it wasn’t Card.
But… who knows, maybe these types of statements happen a lot and Card said it once.
I wouldn’t say it happens a lot, but it happens often enough that it’s a bit of a cliche. A lot of vocal homophobes are closeted themselves, and not everyone is good at keeping the door closed.