This isn’t a debate because I’m not interested in whether it’s true or not. I’ve heard referenced a lot of times in the SSM debate the position of straight married people who believe/feel that if gay people can get married it in some way diminishes or negates the marriage they have. I remember it being referred to as a very seductive argument, but I can’t say I fully understand it.
Can anyone who has been in that argument, or indeed holds that position themselves, explain it to me? Again I don’t want to debate whether the position is right, just understand what it is supposed to be. Thanks all.
The argument is usually that it devalues the *institution *of marriage. That lead to the slippery slope argument (“if gays can marry, the next we will have people marrying dogs”).
I get that bit, but I remember someone quoting a conversation with someone else and they referred to feeling their own marriage would be invalided by SSM. That’s slightly separate to the institution, and indeed even if people could marry dogs I’m still not clear what impact that has on someone else’s marriage. So if someone could outline the thinking there I’d be very grateful.
It’s not a legal argument. They are making the point that it would so devalue the sanctity of marriage, that the religiously sanctified component (vs the secular contract component) of marriage would be rendered largely meaningless.
The bottom line is the notion that “If men can marry men, and women can marry women, what does marriage even mean?”
Which, again, I get. I’m trying to understand how that would impact on the relationship between two people though. If I’m married to a woman isn’t there more going on between us than the institution of marriage? I’m just not getting the view of someone stating that they personally would be impacted on by marriage in general.
I have a feeling I’m arguing with the position already, which I’m honestly not trying to do.
To some people, what makes their relationship as a marriage so valuable special and great is that it is something that was divinely instituted as a holy thing in that form, something so divine that even the state has to acknowledge it. If you then accurately bring up that marriage is a human institution, created and defined by society according to the circumstances of the time and place, then that society is telling them they do not have a holy, special and great divine annointment, but just a paper from the civil registry regarding sharing of property and benefits. (Of course, to me that just means their faith is weak. Those strong in the faith would go on believing that THEIR mariage is holy and special and great because it’s the kind they believe to be so.)
OK… the truth…it’s really because Jesus will cry. Are you queers fucking happy now that you’ve made Jesus cry?! That’s right, he’s CRYING, and now MY marriage to the most wonderful woman in the WORLD, a woman whose boots you mincing FAGGOTS are not fit to lick, is TRASH! Pure trash! A vile septic lie! It’s OVER! DESTROYED THANKS TO YOU DIRTY ANIMALS!!! It wasn’t enough to FUCK each other in the ASS! You had to make everybody think GOD LIKED IT!
… wheeze… oh God I can’t breath… call 911… please…
My friend has a PhD in Psychology from a top tier university. You can get a PhD in the same subject from a variety of for-profit fly-by-night schools that do not appear to have the same restrictions or requirements.
Some professional meetings occur, and everyone is treated equal - they all have a PhD. My friend argues that at the surface her PhD has been devalued by the existence of some of these other degree holders.
That is as close as I can get with an analogy. Please note - I support SSM 100%, but I wanted to try and answer.
If someone thinks marriage is primarily a religious sacrament, and we secularists redefine marriage in a way which is totally contrary to their religious worldview, then we’ve destroyed the essence of all marriages, even that person’s.
Seems a pretty good analogy to me. When I attack it, note I’m not attacking you or your friend :).
Your friend wants to feel better than everyone else. She wants to be an elite. And I figure maybe she has a right to feel that way: she presumably put in a crapload of work to get that degree, and she wants that work to be recognized. A scarcity of the PhD resource increases her earning potential, and increases her social status in other ways. It says, “She’s smart, and she’s hardworking!”
Straight marriage? Sheeeeeit. Anybody can do straight marriage. Felons, wife-beaters, philanderers can do straight marriage. Gay people can do straight marriage. It already means nothing. If you attach some sort of elite status to being married, you’re an idiot. Getting married no more makes you an elite than getting a tattoo makes you elite. (I say this as someone who’s happily married–it’s a great thing to be, it’s just not something that makes me better than other people).
Unfortunately, there are a lot of idiots out there who DO think it makes them elite to be married. ANd then they go to the extra idiot stage of thinking that SSM is somehow a lesser form of marriage.
I can definitely get my head around the PHD analogy position, but I suspect that for a lot of people it’s more like JRDelerious describes it, which I also can sort of now see from his/her description.
Astro - I’m truly sorry we’ve driven you to this point, however in fairness we gays have been willing to share butt fucking with straights for decades now. Isn’t that a fair trade for marriage?
Another (not great) argument that I think somebody could make: “marriage” constitutes a set of rules designed to promote a healthy family relationship. By changing the definition of “marriage,” you make it less likely for those rules to be followed and become permissive of “unhealthy” behaviors and make it harder to couples to trust each other in knowing where the boundaries are.
Actually, I think you hit the nail on the head. Most of those folks aren’t so much saying that gay marriage devalues something between them and their spouse, but that it somehow destroys what marriage stands for (in their minds).
Bravo! Now, that was a truly masterful performance!
Seriously, now – I think that a lot of religious conservatives feel that their hold / influence on society is slipping, and that gay marriages being accepted is just another sign that ol’ Satan is gaining in power. They can get pretty emotional about any type of “sexual immorality” ; the acceptance of gay marriage is a sign that the wider society has turned its back on Godly values, and therefore all institutions, especially heterosexual marriage, have been at least partially invalidated.
Plus, I think that conservative Christians feel that there are a lot of people who have homosexual urges, but are able to keep them in check as long as they know that society frowns upon such activities. If society becomes more tolerant of homosexual behavior, these individuals would lose the incentive to “behave” properly, and will go out and find same-sex partners.
But this is a completely fallacious argument as most people don’t have same sex urges, and it’s no kind of temptation if you don’t. So, again, the ones banging on about resisting those powerful, seductive, sinful, lustful, THROBBING homosexual urges are most likely themselves experiencing them because it seems to matter to them. If you don’t have them, why would you care?
It’s also an argument that starts from an a priori position - homosexuality is wrong, QED, therefore anything that makes homosexuality more tolerated should be resisted because there will be more wrong doing. This argument never justifies or explains itself, it simply works from an assertion. If pressed for some kind of substantiation the argument is virtually always supported by [insert name of holy book here], which for those of us that don’t subscribe to said book, isn’t enough.
I had a pretty interesting conversation with a fellow once – he said that he figured that the vast majority of people were heterosexual in orientation, “pretty much no matter what” (his exact words). A fairly small percentage of the population are going to be homosexual, once again, “pretty much no matter what”. An indeterminate number could go either way – that is, were bisexual, and had attraction for both sexes. It would be people in this third group that could “control their urges”, and either conform to society’s default orientation of heterosexuality, or give in to their desires for relations with people of their own gender.
He also said that he thought that traumatic early childhood experiences of abuse and rape had the potential to change someone’s basic sexual orientation.
In at least some European countries (e.g. Switzerland) legal marriage is a totally secular affair. You go to the town hall and go through some proceedings and you are married. No clergyman can do that (unless he happens to also be the town clerk) and no clergyman is needed. You want to sanctify it with a religious ceremony? Your business, do what you like. You want to have a reception or an African safari or a Samoan ceremony? Your business. In other words, the secular and sacred/private aspects are, from a legal point of view, separated. A very healthy system that we would do well to adopt here. Now some churches are sanctifying gay marriages. You don’t like it? Don’t go to that church, there are plenty that don’t.
I guess the argument about the PhD is a good analogy. Someone has a diploma-mill PhD? Doesn’t bother me in the least. I know someone who, like Napoleon crowning himself, awarded himself a PhD in mathematics. Does that bother me? Not in the least (I think it hilarious). I am judged–and judge myself–by what I have accomplished, not by the letters which might follow my name. I even sort of agreed with this self-award.
If my next-door neighbor were to marry his dog, how would that impinge on my marriage? No, I don’t see the argument. How would you (all of you who are white) feel about the argument that if we allowed blacks to be citizens, my citizenship would be cheapened. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if people made this argument before the civil war. Once it became settled, it was a non-issue. (Not to deny that there were others and I am all too well aware that this was not settled until the 1960s and now one political party is doing its damndest–with the approval of the Supreme Court–to deny poor people full citizenship. But that is over voting power, not based on the cheapening of citizenship.)
I thought about this, wrote a post, then realized: maybe the only thing to the argument is that if claiming that gay marriage affected straight marriages in some tangible way, it seems a more persuasive argument. Think of how news stations always blare things like “H[sub]2[/sub]O in our water: how does it affect YOU?” “Some other people somewhere else are doing something we don’t like” just doesn’t have the same pizzazz to it.