Fine by me, as long as you have the same rules for everybody. I’m just saying the government can’t award special rights to heterosexuals.
And I think they could, if there is a compelling reason. And there are reasons (tendency to have children, etc.); I’m just doubtful that they are really compelling. But because they are not really compelling, I think that what is effectively being said is that there is no compelling reason to have government recognized marriages.
The “same rules for everybody” should apply beyond simple homosexuality then. You either have a compelling reason for keeping me as a non-married individual from sharing the legal benefits of marriage, or you allow me the benefits or disallow marriage for everyone.
Look at it this way; just as gays now complain, “Hey, I don’t get government recognition because of my sexuality,” a decidedly asexual individual could say, “Wait, just because I’m asexual and choose not to get married, I don’t get governmental recognition (and accompanying benefits) that these two get?”
So there has to be a reason for denying it. That is where I think the slippery slope (which is often overused) is legitimate. The same people who bash tradition are the first to step up and simply state, “Well, of course homosexual marriage is fine (impliedly because I care about the issue), but all of those other relationships (or lack of relationships) that harm no one should not be recognized.” It’s a bit hypocritical to me, which I think the argument might need to be: 1. recognize it is a very limited subset (i.e. man and woman); 2. open it up to everyone; or 3. get rid of the institution all together.
Asking for marriage is not asking for recognition of anything, it’s asking not to be excluded from a fundamental right without a rational justification.
You are, so far as I am aware, free as a gay person to enter into a legal contract with another gay person. I don’t think it has much to do with marriage, which is a separate issue. Marriage is not a “contract” in the legal sense. It is not treated as a contract by the law.
Of course three people can enter into a legal contract, as can an adult and child (under certain circumstances). If ability to enter a contract is all important, this should not be a barrier here. So can three people get married, or an adult and a willing 14 year old (presume for the sake of argument that he/she is legally emancipated and mentally capable of agreeing)?
You are keeping part of the definition of marriage (two people) while you willingly cast aside a separate traditional part of the definition (man and woman). Why?
BTW, what other potential relations that “harm no one” are you referring to?
I would define marriage as a contract between two consenting adults. That lets out children, animals and corpses. What’s left?
It is abundantly clear that you, never having read the Constitution, believe that repetition of your uninformed opinions is the supreme mode of constitutional analysis and argumentation. No other scholar, not one, has adopted this view. You have been told dozens of times, by people who actually know what the law is and how it works, that there cannot be a “preexisting right” in the absence of any recognition, explicit recitation, or enforcement mechanism for that right. No one – not even the most liberal scholar – adopts your view that there is a currently-enforceable right to “gay marriage.” Does being absolutely alone in your opinion, at the same time you know yourself to be absolutely uninformed as to that opinion, not have the slightest iota of an effect on the shrillness with which you are willing to repetitively assert it?
The question, I guess, answers itself.
Not aware of the concept that there might be a concept of such a concept?
And what’s wrong with begging the question, whatever it is, anyhow? I’m defending EQUAL PROTECTION!!!
Get a new cheap rhetorical gimmick. You already used the whole mock-puzzled “Just so I’m clear, what you’re trying to say [INSERT RIDICULOUS EXAMPLE POSTER NEVER SAID]” shtick on Dewey.
Because of course my counterexample intentionally didn’t relate to marrying cats or patio furniture or the whole town. It related to a much less fantastical hypothetical – why can’t three people get married, or why can’t I get married twice at the same time to two different people? Never did quite answer that, did you?
Let’s also keep our eye on the ball: Where did the descent into “hysteria” begin? Oh, that’d be right about when you plunged into the “Denying ‘gay marriage’ rights is logically indistinguishable from banning miscegenation!” theory. Not quite the argumentum ad Hitlerum, but close, close; I’d give you a 9 out of 10.
Having set the bar for “hysteria” at the level where you’ve assured us that for constitutional purposes, regulation denying recognition to “gay marriage” is constitutionally identical to that struck down on racial grounds in Loving, you’re unhappy, and won’t answer, when I pose the modest counterexample: Why can’t three, or one, person(s), claim the right to marriage benefits?
The funny thing is, unlike your much-beloved “gay marriage,” which has absolutely no scintilla of a precendent of acceptance, legal recognition, approval, or enforcement in America until, oh, two or three years ago, “marriage” among three or more people has a significant history of acceptance, legal support, enforcement, and validation, in America, amongst millions of people. So it’s hard for me to see where you’d characterize my counter-example of plural marriage as some crazy strawman, while soberly championing hitherto-nonexistent-gay marriage as a logical necessity.
I really mean it: Given that millions of Americans have entered what they thought were lawful, enforceable, wholesome, socially-normal polygamous Mormon marriages, whereas a de minimis handful of showboating activists have even thought it possible to enter “gay marriage,” please explain on the constitutional grounds by which you purported to be arguing (if you can explain; there’s the rub) your grounds for arguing that it is obviously “hysterical” to suggest that three people have any right to marry, or that the state can’t ever stop them from doing so, whereas it is simultaneoudly an unavoidable constitutional conclusion that “gay marriage” among two persons is indistinguishable from, and thus equally as undeniable as, interracial marriage.
I strongly suspect that if you don’t dodge again the argument entirely this time, we will hear a “constitutional” argument that amounts overtly to “marriage is clearly and traditionally between only two persons” (and covertly to “Oh, but ‘gay people’ are witty and sophisticated and deserving and sympathetic, so they must have a fundamental right to marry, but those nasty Mormons are fat and unentertaining and conservative, so their weird preferences are justly suppressed.”).
Do you deny that there is a fundamental right to marriage?
“Tradition” doesn’t mean dick, btw.
Well, you’re going down the checklist of things you don’t know about the law, and you haven’t missed showing your ignorance of one yet.
If you mean “tradition” is meaningless legally, then you are being redundant in going down your checklist: You already proved long ago that you don’t understand the first thing about what it means to live in a common law jurisdiction (America and England follow the common law, just to try to keep you on the same page). But see, you’re boring us – you’ve already checked your ignorance of what kind of legal system we have firmly off your list. “The hell with your ‘precedent’ and ‘prior practice’ and ‘earlier decisions’ and ‘custom and usage!’ I’m here to get my pre-existing legal rights!!!” Hey, wait a minute! You hate tradition! Doesn’t that include your “pre-existing” rights?
If you mean tradition is meaningless societally, then you don’t understand how societies work. But then having 11,000 posts and understanding social interactions and dynamics may well, indeed, be mutually exclusive.
I’m saying tradition doesn’t mean anything when it confkicts with the constutution. It used to be “traditional” to pass anti-miscegenation laws. If a tradition is unconstitutional it’s worthless.
I deny that there is:
(1) a “fundamental right for any one person to marry any other person, without regard to any other factor.”
This must be so because you can’t marry an infant, a comatose person, or a dead person.
(2) a “fundamental right for any one adult to marry any other adult, assuming both are consenting.”
This must be so because you can’t marry someone else’s current wife, and it’s questionable whether two retarded people can demand the right to marry, if their consent is denied legal effect.
(3) a “fundamental right for any one adult to marry any other adult, assuming both are consenting and of sound mind.”
This must be so because you still can’t marry your mother, or your daughter.
(4) a “fundamental right for any one adult to marry any other adult, both consenting, of sound mind, and not related by two or fewer degrees of consanguinity.”
This must be so because, damn it, you still can’t marry your hot single neighbor if you’re currently married to your high school sweetheart.
So . . . we’ve expanded the uselessly-vague concept of a “fundamental right to marriage” out to a fair degree of specificity, and still we’ve arrived at formulations where none of us have a problem saying, nope, there’s no right to that kind of marriage, and the state can and routinely does deny such “marriages” without a constitutional qualm.
One of your problems is that you think by simplistic repetition of simplistic mantras you can pull a shell game, and “force” people to admit that “equal protection” is a good thing – whereupon, voila, you spring it on us that you have a very peculiar-to-you, and circular, question-begging definition of “equal protection” as implicitly meaning “equal protection for anyone to marry anyone they want” – which PROVES that “gay marriage” is a necessity.
You tried that here, and it worked just about as well. “Don’t you believe in a fundamental right to marriage?” Surely, the little gears in your head clicked and told you, no one can be “anti-marriage!” And it’s only after they necessarily agree with me that I will spring on them the fact that “marriage” actually means [in the private Constitution-by-Diogenes dictionary] “marriage between any two (but not more!) consenting sane adults of either sex who want to get married!” Gotcha!
Well, sorry no one bought into your third-grade ploy. You can’t have particularized term-of-art definitions (at odds with other definitions of the same word), then expect to “prove” that those definitions are NECESSARILY AND CONSTITUTIONALLY legitimate by tricking people into agreeing with the generic statement that there is a “right to X,” when you’ve laden down the (secret) definition of both “right” and “X” with lots of your concealed, and peculiar, qualifications as to what kind of “right” you’re implying, and what “marriage” is.
You can’t smuggle the answer into the question, is another way of putting it. This is not logic 101, it’s logic .005.
No, what you said is that “tradition doesn’t mean dick.”
If you had ever read the Constitution or a case interpreting it, you would know that there are very few interpretations of what is “constituional” or “unconstitutional” that can be made, or have been made, without consulting tradition. In a common law system (again, it’s unfortunate you don’t know what that means), it could hardly be otherwise, and to posit the separate and parallel existence of “tradition” and “constitutionality” reflects a profound ahistoricity. Really, did you ever take a civics class, in America?
Look, it’s okay that you don’t understand the law. Please just say so, state your opinion, but for God’s sake quit thinking that your opinion becomes any stronger when, without any understanding of the Constitution, you say: “That’s not just my opinion – anything else would be UNCONSTITUTIONAL!!!”
Really, your argument is the same after using those magic words as it was before.
This led me to think how society views sex in the cases described above.
(1) Is it illegal to have sex with an infant, a comatose person, or a dead person?
Yes.
(2) Is it illegal to have sex with someone who is not of sound mind?
Yes.
(3) Is it illegal to have sex with your mother or your daughter?
Yes.
(4) Is it illegal to have sex with your hot single neighbor if you’re currently married to your high school sweetheart?
No.
(5) Is it illegal to have sex with a person of the same sex?
No.
So, it seems that society has no problem if one person has sex with any other person if both people are
a) adults
b) consenting,
c) of sound mind,
d) not related by two or fewer degrees of consanguinity.
If any of the above is removed, then society has a problem with those two people having sex.
However, the race of the person is not an issue, being married to someone else is not an issue, and also, being of the same sex or not is not an issue.
It seems that there is an overlap of cases where society considers sex as acceptable/not harmful, and cases where society permits marriage.
Given the above reasoning, to be consistent, society should permit gays to marry, but also allow people to marry more than one person.
Anyway, not a legal point by any means, just some random thoughts on connecting “acceptable sex” with “acceptable marriage”.
You’re loading up the debate with a lot of red herrings, but those same herrings could have been used in Loving and they would have been just as worthless.
Scotus already ruled that citizens have a fundamental right to enter into a civil contract of marriage with a consenting partner as long as neither partner is already married ABSENT the ability of a given state to show a rational basis not to permit it. Since there is no rational basis to prohibit same sex unions (certainly nothing you’ve been able to show has risen to the level of a"rational" reason not to permit it), it is ispso facto a constitutional right, regardless of individual state bans and regardless of bigoted tradition.
Incidentally, I don’t give a crap about polygamous or incestuous marriages. If all parties are consenting adults, have at it. None of my business.
You can’t have missed it that badly, can you? The entire point here is that Hamlet brought up the “‘gay-marriage’-bans-can’t-be-acceptable-because-any-bans-on-two-persons-marrying-are-**analytically-and-constitutionally-indistinguishable-from-the-antimiscegenation-laws-in-Loving” slippery-slope argument.
It was in response to this slippery-slope (or “red herring” argument) that I pointed out that there were indeed many denials of marriage to two adult persons that no one – and specifically, the Loving Court – had the slightest problem with. This isn’t a diversion from the point (though the homosexuality=race argument was a diversion) – it is the point that he raised.
Finally, please – you have already proven you don’t know anything about law and we don’t need further demonstrations. You’re obviously not happy with the inability to come up with a glib “constitutional” answer to my three-party-marriage question, so you’ve simply re-cast the holding in Loving (which I doubt you’ve read; why make that the one legal text that’s the exception) so as to solve this problem, by having the Court provide a sweeping (but not too sweeping!) right to marriage “with a consenting partner as long as neither partner is already married.” So there’s no right to plural marriage, in your mind, and my hypothetical ceases to be so problematic, because the almighty and inerrant Court limited “fundamental” marriage rights to single people.
Except they didn’t. Except they couldn’t. It was never an issue in Loving whether the right to marriage would change if the parties weren’t already married. Neither was married, and no one disputed their single/married status as a grounds for denying marriage. Any holding predicated on or relating to their single status have been an advisory opinion – which is why the Court didn’t announce its holding in those terms. Go ahead, find the reference – it isn’t there, and would be unenforceable dicta if it were. Nor, unfortunately for you, did Loving announce or endorse a right to “same sex marriage” – and it couldn’t have, because that issue wasn’t before it, either. So Loving does not either ban (or ban the banning of) plural marriages, and the states are free to allow their citizens’ preferred democratic policies to obtain. Neither does the case ban (nor ban the banning of) “gay marriage,” and so the democratic law of the land may be carried out as it has been enacted.
Look, quit trying to play a game the rules of which you don’t know, and the skills of which you’ve never possessed. Make your policy arguments like any other lonely and not-terribly-informed American – at the ballot box. Quit trying to claim some enhance legitimacy your shrill repetitions have no claim to by playing lawyer, because it’s really boring, and is convincing no one.
More words without substance. You didn’t really address what I said, which is that Loving reasserts a fundamental right of marriage absent a rational justification to prevent it. YOUR insertions of polygamy, dogs, etc. are just red herrings since each of those factors would have to be taken on its own as to whether there is a rational basis to ban it.
. . . whereas it goes without saying that there can NEVER be a rational basis to ban “gay marriage,” but there OBVIOUSLY can be to ban polygamy.
Damn. We’re back to “obvious unconstitutionality” reducing to, effectively, “Diogenes sure wishes that his favored groups would be found a suspect class, though they never have been.”
You didn’t read Loving. You couldn’t have, as you’ve shown your intolerance for more than two sentences of coherent legal thinking (or “words without substance,” as an illiterate who is without the capacity to understand words or comprhend substance might put it). Loving has instead become for you the talismanic phrase of the day (yesterday was “equal protection”): a magic gift, dropped from the sky by mysterious people of intellect beyond your ken (hey Hamlet, I’m praising you here, albeit I’ll understand if you’re not overly flattered given the comparison). Work your mojo with Loving – work it! Don’t forget to click your heels three times! The cargo gods will come back, and tomorrow will confer on you yet another constitutional principle with which to conjure (if not to understand)! What will it be? “Third Amendment?” “Necessary and proper?” “A republican form of government?” Only the Shadow knows.