So, since so many are realizing how silly this taboo is, should religious business people who object to blood-relative marriage be forced to service such weddings if & when they become legal?
Are they in a state which prohibits discrimination on the basis of blood-relative marriage? Sure.
And while we’re on the subject of marriage equality, today’s news says that the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, Gene Robinson, and his husband are getting divorced after more than 25 years together.
Polygamy brings up a bunch of logistic and legal problems - for example:
How is ownership of goods consolidated when a person joins the group (esp. if there is an inequality of wealth one way or the other)?
How is it divided if one wants to leave (but the rest want to stay together)?
What about all of the benefit-type transactions that normally apply to main recipient plus spouse (work-provided healthcare, etc)?
I’m fairly sure that ingenious solutions could be engineered for most such problems, but it’s certainly true that a polygamous relationship isn’t just a scaled-up pair.
Because our entire legal system around marriage depends on the uniqueness of a spouse. Adjusting it to support gay marriage is easy, basically nothing changes, but multiple marriages would require new legislation to account for a myriad of special cases. (if A is married to B and B is married to C, does this mean that A is married to C or not?). If these issues got sorted out and the marriage was consensual for all involved than I don’t see a problem with it.
For the same reason we have statutory rape laws. If children are viewed as incompetent to give consent to sex, it is reasonable to view them as incompetent to give consent to marriage.
The law currently does not recognize animals as legal persons, as such they can not enter into legal contracts. So no marriage for Fido.
As for the OP: I don’t see any direct reason against incestual marriage that couldn’t be also applied to gay marriage.
Sorry, I don’t buy this. I don’t see its any better than saying that there are lots of black women out there, so a black man can pick one of them to marry and miscegenation laws are OK. The key is that consenting parties should be able to marry who they want.
But as stated above there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of demand of legalization of this, and pushing for this right now is just going to feed the paranoid fantasies of the anti-gay folks, so for now I think its in the best interest of civil rights to hold off on it.
Just so everyone knows, and I assume the OP doesn’t since he/she just joined, but we’ve done this same debate (incest and polygamy vs SSM) about a dozen times over the years. There are no new arguments being brought up this time around.
Good point.
After thinking about this further, I think it basically boils down to this: Morality is a human concept and it’s boundaries are arbitrary. We as a society have decided that marrying your sister is gross and marrying someone of the same sex is not (or at least we’re getting there).
As has always been the case with morality, our ideas of it will change with the passage of time. Who knows, maybe polygamy will seem like the norm a hundred years from now. I think the problem we have here is that people are trying to apply logic. to a concept that has none to very little.
I don’t disagree that it’s a complex and fuzzy collection of issues, but the societal change of mind about SSM has not (at least I think not) primarily arisen from heterosexuals starting to find homosexuality less icky - although that might have been an effect.
It was primarily from acceptance of logical arguments about what people who love each other should be permitted to do.
Well gay male sex squicks me, but rationally, I know it’s just monkey brain stuff, so I say, let 'em marry, I’ll deal with the monkey brain stuff. Incest also squicks me, but once again, its monkey brain stuff, so let 'em marry, I’ll deal with that.
Polygamy is different. About 15 minutes after polygamy is legalized, rich guys will have harems. Lots of harems – see income inequality. And billionaires will have LOTS of wives. Poor guys … not so much. The playing field will get real not-level, real fast. I oppose polygamy as it is fundamentally dangerous to the institution of marriage as we know it, unlike gay marriage and incestuous marriage of the brother-sister variety.
Given that there’s at least one couple out there that wants it, and there appears to be no compulsion about their desire, I support their quest to get married. Eww has nothing to do with it. jtgain, that was an exceptionally ridiculous set of three-headed-monkey “why not?” questions you asked; are you seriously unable to see the difference between allowing just about any two consenting adults to enter into this well-defined reciprocal relationship we call marriage, and all your hypos?
According to this page from the Australian Gov’t the risk of genetic disorder rises from 2-3% in unrelated parings to 30% in sibling pairings.
Assuming this is accurate, and this seems to be a legit governmental website, so I’m going on a bit of trust here, 30% is a big number.
While I personally don’t care whether someone wants to marry their brother, the health of the populace depends on incest being a very infrequent practice.
There are two problems. One is habitual close intermarriage over the generations reducing the complexity of the gene pool (what is happening in Pakistani communities in the UK currently) where cousins are marrying the offspring of cousins from the same gene pool. The other is catastrophic genetics- two parents carrying the same familial recessive gene that expresses with a serious disability. Although the risk on average my only be a few per cent higher, the risk in an individual pairing may be as high as certainty! This is vanishingly unlikely in random unrelated individuals, but may be highly likely in certain unfortunate related pairings.
I don’t have any desire to have sex with my sister, and I assume I’m normal, so I don’t see a huge downside to allowing sibling incest, except that if it is allowed when they are both of age, it may provide incentives for older siblings to groom younger ones before that time, when the younger siblings are vulnerable.
But SSM throws the law out the window!. And if we can slightly broaden the meaning of the word “marriage,” typewriter apple lambada!