I deny the premise. There is no set of preferences that relate to public policy without affecting anyone else. There is no right which does not create a corresponding duty.
Yes, it does. Agents of the state must license and recognize the marriage. Places of public business generally may not discriminate between heterosexual/same-sex marriages if both are recognized at law. Potential heirs and relatives may lose inheritances and such as the spouse is entitled to a share of the estate. Hospitals must allow the spouse access. Schools must allow the same-sex spouse to parent functions, including in presence of other children. &etc.
Re: beef subsidies, I won’t have time to go into detail right now. But the desire is not about recognizing beef subsidies, whatever that means. It is a desire to subsidize beef because it is tasty. Compare, a desire to give marriages tax breaks because doing so promotes the sanctity of marriage.
You’re misunderstanding the premise, not denying it. I have a “right” to lead my life. You have a “duty” to leave me the fuck alone. Public policy proceeds from recognizing the relative strength of preferences.
Preference utilitarianism doesn’t deal in rights, just interests. There’s a general sense that interests about one’s own specific life are typically stronger and therefore more important than interests about someone else’s life; and interests about things like access to food and shelter and health are stronger and therefore more important than interests about things like owning a second beach house.
Interests must be balanced. But if my interest is in marrying the person I love, and your interest is in preventing me from doing so. my interest is typically going to be stronger and more important than yours: mine affects me every day at a deep, fundamental level in a way that yours simply does not, and even if yours does, yours can be met by your learning to stay the hell out of other people’s business.
Sanctity is an interest, sure; but when it requires the sanctimonious to meddle in other people’s lives, it’s not going to be a particularly strong interest. It’s an interest along the lines of “I’d like chocolate ice cream,” not along the lines of, “I’d like to marry the person I love.”
Purity is for chemicals. It has no business being applied to people. Humanity is inherently impure, which is one of our great strengths as a species. Any concept of “purity” enforced in the human sphere is inherently antihuman and linked to authoritarianism. We need to rip up the concept of human purity, cast the shreds to the four winds, and revel in our magnificent impurity, glory in it.* Inbreeding is unhealthy, genetically and mentally. Mixing is healthy and humanistic.
*Picture the hippies dancing in the park during the song “Aquarius” in the film Hair.
If you want sanctity, say your prayers. If you’re atheist and don’t pray, find something in nature to revere and connect with. I cannot conceive of some abstract “sanctity” separate from the direct experience of the sacred.
First, I don’t think on that graph that “Sanctity” means the Judeo-Christian conception of it; I think it’s ideological sanctity in the sense of proper Conservative thought.
Second, I feel like that graph is missing a few things- it doesn’t seem to be fairness/harm vs. purity/ingroup/authority directly; there’s a big chunk of “pull your own weight”/independence/freedom from government in there, and IMO the tradeoff among most conservatives of my acquaintance is that requiring/allowing people to pull their own weight and be free of government mandates as much as possible has the tradeoff that for some (typically the poor or minority) it may cause harm or be unfair, and that’s a tradeoff they’re willing to make. Sort of an “It’s better to let everyone have the choice to get loans/credit cards at whatever interest rate they may qualify for than it is to restrict it, even though some people are definitely going to get screwed by the CC companies, because there are people who will not get screwed, and their power to choose is more important than protecting the financially unsavvy.”
The ideological purity stuff seems to be a relatively recent addition- I don’t recall a lot of that as a kid in the 70s and 80s, but I do remember a lot of the ingroup stuff back then - “They” were always spoken of as if they were the enemy, not our fellow countrymen, and “they” could be black people, Hispanics, labor unions, left-wing blue collar workers, rich liberals (special disdain was reserved for them), or anyone else not one of “us”. It wasn’t 100% ideological though- “they” might well be other conservatives who disagreed on some critical point. That’s the difference from today - ingroup and purity are essentially the same thing- your degree of in-groupness is determined by your purity, and vice-versa.
To the best of my recollection, I had in mind the new community trust law in Florida. (We had just covered these in class.) The idea is that married couples put their appreciating assets into a trust, and then eventually one spouse dies, and the survivor doesn’t have to pay taxes on the gains up to the fair market value at time of death. Don’t ask me why the feds allow this trickery. I’ve since read/learned more about the history of community property states and taxes and the marriage penalty and I can confidently say it’s not about sanctity so much as just money and fair taxes between residents of different states.
But the spousal privilege (can’t be forced to testify against spouse) is a much much better example of something explicitly created to promote the sanctity of marriage. And it is directly analogous to the priest-penitent privilege, which is also explicitly about sanctity.
@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness, I apologize for not returning to the discussion in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe some other day we can talk more about preference utilitarianism, but for the purposes of this thread, I concede.