From my reading FF&C has a “public policy” exception.
So, in the case of you marrying an opposite sex partner legally in one state you are married in all other states under FF&C. However, FF&C does not apply if the state has a stated public policy exception. So, for instance, you cannot marry your sister/brother in one state legally (just pretend) and expect it to be legal in all other states if they explicitly forbade such an incestuous pairing.
That is the purpose of the DOMA laws. Essentially that places on the books the very public policy exception they need to fend off a FF&C case.
This is the heart of the matter to me. I hope you will share your thoughts as you sort out the difference, not so anyone can pick on you but so we can celebrate what I expect will be an enlightening journey
Any info is good information
But what I am really after, is what is/are the best arguments that have been made in favor of SSM?
Even in courts of law, I am not aware of any states that have accepted the anti-ssm argument, including CA. I have read some of the legal briefs. Even CA’s current ban is based on the argument that in our state in particular, the People can pass such an initiative. It has nothing to do with the merits of SSM at all.
The underlying case on SSM was most definitely a failure for the anti- crowd. The Court simply shredded the arguments, and the arguments were far more sophisticated than any of the populist stuff you hear people toss out and hope it sticks. Seems rank and file anti-SSM people are not even aware of the arguments that were made on their behalf that might be intellectual in nature, even if not fully persuasive to the Courts.
There are far too many definitions, suppositions, assumptions, and grand sweeping conclusions in there for me to even venture an opinion. I don’t even know what you mean when you seem to conflate “birth control” and “marriage” as a means of “protection”.
If that is your hypothesis, then go ahead and make the full and complete case. Assume you have a skeptical reader who is aware of, if not 100% familiar with, varying schools of thought regarding the purpose and effect of marriage though history , whether or not he would tend to agree or not with the hypothesis.
This is not a simple question and I think you know it. I would ask, why would anyone sum up thousands of years of history in all of the worlds societies in a single neat conclusion and use that as a justification for taking away extant civil rights from anyone? Occam’ Razor alone tells me that is going to be an extremely unlikely case to be made successfully.
There is no real confusion here - 7 year olds can get it. There are tw kinds of marriage, they usually but not always occur together. Each carries its own set of rights and obligations.
Really, everyone who can’t tell the difference but was married in a church had to sign two sets of papers, right? Did they not understand what they were doing when they set pen to paper on that happy day? Really?
Really?
This is a red herring - every priest, minster, pastor, whatever could explain it to their congregation, and they would get it, probably in one single mention. But religious leaders allow this misinformation to fester. Why I won’t speculate as this is not the pit.
Der Trihs - I tried to contact you via PM, but I guess you have it turned off.
I see you are in CA (which part?)- are you active in the campaign to repeal Prop 8? Would you like to be? We can use your help! I can be reached via PM if you’d rather not answer here.
The religious argument. The Bible says so. I don’t think it is rational, and I suspect you don’t either, but then you wind up with a religion argument. Plenty of believers are pro-SSM, or course, but their argument is a bit more subtle than the anti-SSM position.
Definitional. It appears that some people truly object to changing the definition of marriage, and would rather SSM be called something else.
A slippery slope argument. Allow SSM, and pretty soon people will want to marry children, dogs, or farm implements - or people will want polygamy. The former cases are simple to refute because one party is not competent to enter into a contract. In the second, we can note that the Bible is full of polygamy, including some of the holiest people. So one man-one woman is not traditional, but a fairly recent advance. Why not let SSM be another?
The irrational arguments have more or less gotten covered - it will discourage ‘real’ marriage and the raising children issue.
All five are irrational when you get right down to it, but the opposition isn’t rational at its heart, is it? It reminds me an awful lot of the arguments against desegregation I heard when I was growing up. “Rational” arguments are just a coverup for visceral discomfort about the concept.
Yes, that is right, we have heard all these arguments before, including wrt marriage and antimiscegenation laws.
What I don’t get is this:
1 - Why do people keep trotting out the same arguments to deny others civil rights, when it never has worked in the long term?
2 - Isn’t there anyone on the anti-SSM side that sees these are the same old saws and can tell the others that it is a losing game?
3 - Are people really afraid that their secular education and common sense does not square with their non-secular education and faith? How do they endeavor to reconcile this and land in the lap of listening without question to what their church leaders tell them despite it not being in their best interests to conflate secular and non-secular activities?
Of those I think #2 is about as close as you come to a rational argument. The courts and the government do give a lot of weight to social custom. There is no really good reason I can see not to be able to go nude at the beach but we deem that to be unacceptable and you’ll get arrested if you try.
Historically, traditionally our society has viewed marriage as between a man and a woman. While the constitution does not mention marriage as a right I think it is deemed to fall under the umbrella cast by the rights that are there. In Scalia’s originalism I think he would say that when written the people of the time would not have dreamed of SSM so as such it is not covered and is not a right.
While that is about as good as it gets I think it is easily debunked. When the constitution was written miscegenation was unheard of. I am willing to bet the people of the time did not dream of black people marrying white people and would have been shocked to hear it suggested. The SCOTUS finally put an end to that some 50 years ago in Loving. Opposition to SSM sounds a heck of a lot like opposition to miscegenation and is just as unsupportable.
I would note that the religious argument should be stomped on at every turn. The US has freedom of religion and that includes freedom from religion. Ask any Christian who trots out the Bible as a source to oppose SSM how they’d feel if Jews gained enough political control that they outlawed all pork products. It matters not one whit what the Bible says on the subject of this. We are not all Christian or buy the Bible as an authoritative source.
Personally I think polygamy should be legal. I cannot understand it but if some adults consent to such a thing that’s their business. That said I do understand that already difficult divorce divisions of assets would become near impossible to untangle in a polygamous relationship so as a practical matter I can see opposition to it on that point. Farm implements, your dog and so I hope we can dispose of as the absurdities they are.
That’s a good analogy. I am to understand that we are to get rid of all laws like these, and in order for there to be any laws there must be a point-by-point logically sound argument, free from morality or religion, social custom or tradition? That each law must be viewed de novo, with an eye only on whether an athiest or agnostic with no predisposition toward the act would object to it?
What’s wrong with it? I think it is about as close to a rational justification as you will get. More, I think the courts tend to give this a lot of value. I think the courts are reluctant to redefine something like marriage against the will of the people and prefer instead to let the people sort it out themselves.
I am not saying it is a good argument, just the best I think the anti-SSM folks have.
I didn’t see the argument, only a setup for a yet another gotcha with a few technical terms thrown in with the hope that they are not non sequiturs.
I would expect any argument that purported to be rational that started with laws about nude beaches to cover a lot of ground very convincingly in order to arrive at the conclusion that SSM marriage ought be banned, and in fact existing marriages orphaned, on the same principles, whatever those might be.
I don’t see it myself.
If JTGain is going to make that argument, I would love dearly to see it.
If s/he was making a somewhat different point, I am all for that too, just not here.
In both these, they are not arguing with others but are arguing with themselves. No one wants to think themselves bigoted - those who are, from upbringing, culture, whatever, will keep on dragging out the lame arguments to justify their positions to themselves. That holds also for those who wouldn’t be bigoted at all of God hadn’t told them to be (though their local preacher, of course.)
The only exposure someone my age (57) had to gay people growing up was to the flamboyant types who were way out there. Moderates were closeted. Lenny Bruce had a bit about a friend of his who was flamboyant, and his friend’s mother who was totally oblivious. A lot of us were like the mother. My kids are different. it is a lot easier to oppose rights for those weirdos than for the guy in your class.
Sure they are - and a lot of them take their kids out of public schools to avoid having their kids exposed to enforced tolerance, sex education, and evolution.
I have seen people objecting to same sex couples showing affection the way opposite sex couples do. That is kind of like a nude beach argument. But that isn’t really a reason to oppose SSM, except that legalizing SSM would further legitimize these couples. Really, some Christians would happily be Taliban if they would only go with a different prophet.
If one were to give the reasons for such an objection, they surely are fallacious on the face of it.
E.g.
Moral: The bible says so. “adam and eve, not adam and steve, etc”
“Traditional values”: says who, and as though nothing ever changes
pseudo-science: Hurts species survival chances, no other species exhibit homosexual behavior, etc.
this is a “Christian” nation - no it isn’t, it is a secular one as far as government and government is concerned.
These things are so easily debunked as irrational and fallacious, people have to be actively ignoring the evidence, or brainwashed Jim Jones-style to not get it I think. They might as well be arguing that 1+2=4, it is just that easy. So what else is up I wonder?
Um, what? No. (Are you being sarcastic? I can’t tell.) I only had to sign one set of papers. I was additionally under the impression that to sign the papers mr. hunter and I had to actually vocally agree that we intended to marry each other (which for us took place as part of the religious ceremony, though could as well have been a civil ceremony), but maybe I am wrong about that. In any case, the officiant who signed it to validate it that day had no specifically civil credentials. So in that sense, our marriage certificate is both a religious and a civil document.
All that aside, I don’t think anyone seriously disputes that there is a difference between civil and religious marriage, but I do think it’s easy to conflate the two and not even necessarily realize one is doing it, especially given how much they run together. For another example where this occurs: I have a solution! Let’s just call marriage “gairam” and change all the laws so that it refers to “gairam” instead of “marriage.” I know non-religious, pro-SSM people who would be emphatically AGAINST this kind of measure, because they conflate the word “marriage” with the institution and can’t stand the idea that their marriage would not be a marriage anymore, even though a 7-year-old could understand that the word and the actual thing are two different things.
So perhaps what I’m trying to do is say, not that pro-prop-8 people are rational, but that they are not necessarily any more irrational than anyone else
Ha! Okay, you have caught me out. I have a bad tendency to like neat conclusions (and the more grand and sweeping, the better), and I will concede the point that evidence that makes sense to me in my pet theory is unlikely to convince you. I will, however, note once again that no one is using my particular neat conclusion as a justification against SSM (indeed, I’m using my neat conclusion to say exactly the opposite).
Perhaps I should instead repeat the other things I was trying to say with a slightly different focus:
Some people have a very different definition of marriage than, say, you. Here’s another example from some people in my life: some people’s definition of marriage includes the marriages being arranged (and the corollaries: marriage is not a right, or even necessarily a happy thing for a given individual, but rather a responsibility to one’s family; may come with an expectation that the marriage will support the base families financially; etc.). Such people are unlikely to understand, much less agree with the view that marriage is a right which ought to be available to all people.
These alternate definitions of marriage are no longer standard in the US, if they ever were (I would say some alternate definitions were, you would perhaps say not, but in any case I think we can both agree that at no point were arranged marriages standard in the US), especially because of the tangle of laws that have grown up around marriage, so 1. is not a long-term valid argument for the US.
However, I CAN understand why someone who was in an arranged marriage, and thought it worked out pretty well, and is sort of unhappy with her kids’ insistence on picking their own rather unsatisfactory mates (what is up with THAT?) instead of trusting their parents’ superior judgment, might not get why her kids thought they ought to have the right to marry anyone they liked, even leaving aside the question of gender. At the same time, though I do understand this line of thinking, I’m not saying I want arranged marriages at all, thank you!
Once again, I think a lot of the problem is that I am answering a different question than the one you have posed, because I don’t find your original question very interesting (as I’ve said, I think the answer’s no, no arguments, the end). I am interested in the question of “What are pro-prop-8 arguments where I can at least understand where the other person is coming from?” But I can see that by doing so I am kind of derailing a bit, so I promise to shut up on this point after this
I think the point you are still missing is that nothing else needs to be up. Absolutely nothing depends on whether a person’s (or any possible person’s) opposition to SSM is rational or irrational.
But, I think it does. Since the courts use a “rational basis” test when a law discriminates against a group of people.
My contention with the OP is that just because you personally disagree with a premise of the argument (traditional values, social construct, etc.) that doesn’t make the argument illogical or invalid; it just means that you disagree with the argument, which means there is a diversity of opinion on the subject which is why there is an argument in the first place.
That would be fair if that were in fact the case, and I wont be branded with that brush.
Without solicitation, a fellow approached me and said he could presnet with with a rational and fair (his words not mine) argument in favor of prop 8.
Being a natural skeptic, and having heard it all before, I presented to him what rational meant to me, offering to leave “fair” for later discussion. In a nutshell, I said his argument must be verifiably 100% free of fallacies, and there was a good description of various types of fallacies I am referring to on wikipedia if he was not familiar with them.
He said he was sufficiently familiar with them (I take him at his word on this), and agreed without modifications to these conditions. But then when asked for his promised position, it was not forthcoming. So I came here to see of others might know what he was getting at.
JT, I personally have not seen any positions proffered here in this thread that would stand up to the list of fallacies on Wikipedia, have you?
