Well, there’s this.
In 2009, Card joined the board of directors of the National Organization for Marriage, a group that campaigns against same-sex marriage.
The closest argument I’ve heard to a non-bigoted argument against SSM is a BAD argument, but I don’t think that it’s inherently bigoted. That said, it’s such a bad argument, that my guess is that anyone who seriously puts it forward is, fairly likely, bigoted.
It goes like this: Marriage is special and important to our culture. Therefore, something that makes marriage, as an institution, weaker, is bad for our culture.
Gay marriage opens up marriage to more people than it was open to before. This makes it less special and unique, and therefore less precious, and therefore weaker.
You can kind of squint and imagine a non-bigot honestly believing that gay marriage being legal might make things better for gay people, and honestly (being a non-bigot) being pleased with that result; while also believing that it would have a much larger detriment on the institution of marriage as a whole, and thus be sufficiently worse for society as a whole that it should be illegal.
(I’m not saying that many actual non-bigots actually non-bigottedly came up with and honestly believed that argument for fully non-bigotted reasons… but it’s at least kind of in the ballpark there).
(Btw, my response to that argument is that the central point in hinges on is in fact EXACTLY BACKWARDS. If you want little Johnnie and little Suzie to grow up respecting the institution of marriage – which you, the hypothetical argument-maker apparently do – what is going to make that more likely? If uncle Ted and his lifelong lover Uncle Bob are married, just like mommy and daddy, so that all their role models of strong committed romantic relationships are, or at least have the option to be, married? Or if they see Uncle Ted and Uncle Bob still perfectly happily committed to each other, but NOT being allowed to be married? It’s like a school’s academic honor society that only admits boys. If it starts to admit girls, then that broadens the pool of who can get in. Which… makes it less special? But if it does NOT admit girls, and anyone with a brain can see that half the smartest kids at school are just randomly not allowed into it, does that increase or diminish its reputation, its imrimpateur, as “the club for smart kids”?)
Well, your kids would have to put up with endless rounds of “go ask your mother”. Not to mention twice the number of Dad Jokes.
Sure, but the “stable long term relationship” doesn’t necessarily have to be marital. It might be an extended family structure instead of a two-parent family, or it might be a stable non-marital relationship between the two parents.
Definitely a stable, happy family life is better for kids than instability, emotional stress, economic insecurity, etc. But that’s true irrespective of the family structure. It may just be that the married-parents-and-child family structure tends to be more stable and happy because the people who achieve that setup tend to be more stable and happy in the first place.
If so, then incentivizing marriage per se is probably not going to improve outcomes. Kids will not be better off if more unhappy unstable single parents enter into unstable unhappy marriages, or if stable happy single people are discouraged from having children solely on the grounds of their marital status.
I 100% think it benefits kids (and parents) to have extended family nearby, but that conflicts with business’s desire for a mobile, unattached workforce. Which is more important for society?
Isn’t this situation pretty much the exact point of marriage? All those benefits that gay couples fought for are what these parents would also benefit from?
It might be. Do you have any evidence for this theory? The number of marriages has declined drastically since the 70s. Are marriages significantly happier and more stable now?
Young kids are a full time job. It’s really not practical for most single people to have children. Unless you are very rich or very poor, or have nearby supportive family, it’s going to be extremely difficult.
Reasonably stable communities, including extended families whether families by birth or by choice, are far more important to society than the convenience of those businesses that want everybody to be willing to pack up and move wherever at a moment’s notice. Society is human attachments. It’s not made out of anything else.
It’s not only minor children and their parents who benefit. It’s anyone in need of a social support structure: which is all of us, though not each of us all of the time. In addition, people who have no attachments to any particular location are less likely to take good care of either the human-built or the natural environment.
Yes, people need to be able to move, sometimes in families and sometimes as individuals. But it shouldn’t be considered the default for everybody at all times in their lives.
I think there’s some tension between happy and stable, here. People are more willing to get divorced now than they were before 1970. To me that means marriages are less stable, but probably happier on average, since the unhappy ones more often end.
I think divorce is actually the unsung hero of marriage benefits. Breakups are messy, especially when the couple has lived together and combined assets. Divorce creates at least a framework for dissolution and distribution of assets, however imperfect. Marriage equality for all is important for many reasons, one of which is that romantic relationships, no matter how loving and committed they may be at one point, don’t always last forever.
Sure, but marriage isn’t the only way to achieve it, nor does marriage in and of itself always produce a stable relationship.
If a stable parental relationship is beneficial to kids, then we as a society should be supporting stable parental relationships in whatever forms the parents prefer them. Not just telling all parents that they need to get married to make their relationship stable.
Yup, although it, like most other evidence for most theories about cause-and-effect relationships in social outcomes, is not conclusive. As this study describes (p. 30),
In other words, the evidence suggests that it may well be that studies purporting to show that parental marriage benefits children are actually mostly measuring the effects of other factors. That is, the causality may be backwards, indicating not that having married parents is per se beneficial to kids, but that the parental characteristics (higher income, better education, etc.) that are more likely to produce good childrearing are also more likely to conduce to parental marriage.
If so (and as I said, the evidence AFAICT is not conclusive either way), then obviously programs for improving childhood outcomes should concentrate on supporting those other parental characteristics directly, rather than just treating parental marriage as a proxy for them.
I agree, and it’s a good point that everyone benefits, not just kids and their parents. Yet it never seems to be given much consideration when discussing policy. The assumption is almost always that economic growth is the most important thing, and that people must adapt as best they can to the society we’ve built, never that we could or should reorder society to work better for the people who live in it.
This is one reason I think there is some value in encouraging couples to marry, even above the importance of forming stable relationships. But as @Kimstu suggests, it likely makes more sense to concentrate directly on the latter, and expect the former as a consequence, rather than directly incentivising marriage through tax breaks or something. The number of young people who aren’t in a relationship at all has risen alongside the number of unmarried people, so it isn’t just due to couples cohabiting rather than getting hitched.
I’ve read bits and pieces of this thread, on and off. At this point, I can’t read through a 400+ post thread, I just don’t have time.
But I’ve been trying to think of a non-bigoted reason why someone could be opposed to same-sex marriage. Just to be open-minded, I guess.
Anyway, this is the best I could come up with:
I could understand someone who belongs to a faith that opposes same-sex marriage thinking that, well, if SSM is something the state is going to do, I can understand the reasons for that, I see the point of civil/secular same-sex marriage, and I won’t oppose it, or refuse to vote for officials who support it, but I couldn’t get behind any legislation that would require my church to officiate at same-sex marriages, because our idea of marriage is something that cannot include two people of the same sex.
That could work. Some kind of limited opposition to same-sex marriage – permitted, but not required of non-state entities allowed to officiate at marriages.
I mean, as a queer atheist, I too am against a law that would require churches to perform same-sex marriages. That’s just first amendment stuff.
A more borderline example would be all the stuff you said about secular support for SSM, but opposing your church changing its own rules to allow it.
I guess. That really is borderline.
If my church (the Catholic Church), or even a faction within that church,* moved towards changing the rules to permit solemnizing same-sex marriages, I’d be absolutely all-in behind that. On the other hand, I’m not leaving the church because that isn’t happening now.** So I don’t know where you’d place me on the bigotry scale.
* There is actually a faction of German bishops pushing for “blessing” same-sex relationships. It’s a start, anyway. I don’t see it spreading to the US any time soon, some of the US bishops being the most reactionary element within the Church (along with a smaller number of African bishops).
** Even here in the US, some priests are finding ways, if not completely around the Church’s non-recognition of same-sex marriage, to work same-sex marriage into their pastoral care of parishioners. It’s not the Church, of course, just some priests doing what they can, but it is happening.
Do you think that this would be likely to happen?
A church can even legally refuse to marry people for racist reasons, and the law has nothing to say on that point. Anyone who uses the idea of their church being forced to participate in SSM as a reason to be against the state recognizing them is either ignorant or disingenuous.
Racist reasons? There no ‘’‘right’’’ to a church wedding at all!
When my brother was in his early twenties (thirty years ago) and his just graduated from high school girl-friend went to their respective churches to arrange for a church ceremony they were both refused because they were “too young to get married”.
No, not at this time, in this country. Somewhere else? Maybe, but not my immediate problem.
And no, I don’t use the idea of my church being forced to participate in same-sex marriages as a reason to be against state recognition of SSM, both because I’m confident that will never happen here and because I’m 100% behind marriage being available to all, and did a fair amount of volunteer work on that issue (before Obergfell) in my state.
And if my church did move in the direction of approving SSM (see my post above regarding German bishops and “blessing” (whatever that means) of same-sex marriages, I’d be completely on board with that.