Well, I’m a Republican (no, really!), and this is my view:
I’m hesitant to fully endorse gay marriages, not because I have a problem with gays marrying, per se, but because I value the notion of marriage as a valuable social construct, and want to keep the spirit of that construct intact. If it was just about gays marrying, that would be fine. But there are those who view gay marriages as a doorway to allowing marriages between any number and type of marriages, and THAT I am opposed to. There are also those who seek to legalize gay marriage specifically so they can destroy it from within, and I oppose that, as well. How widespread are these ideas? I can’t say. But even if they’re minor, they could grow. Lots of people on these boards have mentioned that they hate the idea of granting state recognition of marriage - certainly they would support destruction of the institution of marriage.
Maybe this just represents a small fringe group. Or maybe it represents a larger group that chooses to remain silent, because let’s face it - “We want to destroy the notion of marriage!” isn’t the type of rallying cry that’s going to generate a lot of support right now. Right now. But things change. 50 years ago, I would wager the idea of allowing gays to marry was unthinkable. Now it’s close to becoming reality. Who can say what would happen in the future?
So, what would set my ming at ease? Well, how about this: Rather than the “Defense of Marriage Act” defining marriage as between a man and woman, how about defining it as between two people? Drive home the concept of one person settling with one other person to do… whatever.
And also, I would ask a question of the gays on the boards - what if there were to be a new classification of union specifically for gays? Heteros get “marriage”, gays get “gay-union”, or whatever you want to call it. The new gay-union offers every single last effect of marriage (even the tax penalties, yay!), is functionally equal to marriage, but isn’t marriage. You get state recognition of your love towards whomever, the Christian heteros get to hold onto their idea of marriage, and everybody wins. Whaddaya think?
Jeff
For the first part of your post, I have only the following to say…
Destroy marriage from within? How the HELL does one go about doing that? When you see what some heteros have done within the bounds of marriage, there just ain’t no way to go about such a process. To deny one group of people rights because a small fringe of that group may abuse them is rather inane, and should definately bar heterosexuals the right as well. Unless you want to go about shutting down the Las Vegas Stop-n-Weds…
For the second part… I’m a realist. No I don’t think heterosexuals are going to release their death grip on marriage as a state just for them, but I do insist on equal rights. Separate but equal is okay in my book as long as separate indeed remains equal.
I honestly do not understand what this phrase is intended to convey.
Does it mean that a particular contract must be used in the same way it’s always been used? Why bother? Tradition can be valuable, but a course of action isn’t right just because it’s been used before.
Does it mean that the religious aspects of marriage should be preserved? What religious aspects? Many churches recognize a merely legal marriage to be valid, but the government doesn’t recognize a church marriage if the participants don’t have a license.
Why shouldn’t a social constract be available for any competent adults who wish to formalize their mutual relationships?
By “destroy marriage from within”, I mean the twisting and redefining of marriage until it no longer has meaning. Right now, marriage has a specific meaning - two people (in most places, one man and one woman) loving each other enough to want to spend the rest of their lives together. Sure, some people (arguably lots of people) get married for different reasons, but when you hear “We’re married” from a couple, that’s what goes through your mind.
But what if any number and type of entities could marry? What if “marriage” could, and frequently did, mean man-woman, man-man, man-man-woman-woman-man, man-father,mother, man-woman-child-dog, man-toaster, and whatnot? Gradually, “marriage” would lose meaning. The traditional notion of “marriage” would have ceased to exist.
We see this to different extents all the time. The word “fascist” is used all the time in methods different from what the “real” definition of “fascism” is. “Fascist” now means, basically, “something I don’t like”. “Politically correct” now means, “somethine I disagree with”. Terms are getting redefined into meaninglessness constantly. Such could happen to marriage. And this I oppose.
Jeff
Eve, they have “High Hopes” (and I refuse to duck and run for that, though I hope the song runs through your mind!).
I’m fairly confident that none of the LCR leadership is self-deluded; they simply see that it’s better to have the gay people whose political views would be Republican if the party weren’t out to crucify them supporting the other half of a two-party system, and to change the Republicans from within. I think they’re under no delusions that it’s going to be a long, slow, fraught-with-failure-and-back-slippage process – but they’re in it for the long run.
Walloon, that would be hilarious if it weren’t so typical of CWA and FRC – Bush and Cheney pushing “the gay agenda”!!
I don’t see why two men can’t love each other, even if they’re not gay. (I think it’s clear that our society always associates love with sex, as I’ve heard many people scoff at the idea a man and woman who weren’t planning to have sex might marry.)
There are plenty of loveless heterosexual marriages. How does permitting them but preventing homosexuals in love to marry protect marriage?
I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand your position at all. Oh well.
So, ElJeffe, do you have any particular reason for your opposition to multiple marriage or variant marital structures? This is one of the things that I truly would like to understand; it has confused me for a great length of time.
One of the things that I’ve seen as being fairly common in certain communities is the sort of opposition to the concept of marriage that I’m gathering you have issues with; I think this is not uncommon when people feel that they are barred from being part of the “in-group” and see no means of changing that status. (As, after all, if they can’t be part of the in-group, some people feel a need to run down the in-group and say that it’s not valid or worth being a part of anyway.)
From my point of view – and this is substantiated by my experiences with my own marriage – one of the primary effects of “marriage” is that the relationship thusly solemnised is given a certain social status and legitimacy. I tend to think that marriage is as much a contract between partners and community as it is between the individuals involved; it obligates the community to treat that partnership as a real thing. (This is explicit in some religious ceremonies; community support for the partnership is solicited.) I’d been partnered to my husband for six years and living together for two or three when we got married, but I still found the social difference noticeable.
I think that a community that does not respect the legitimacy of human partnership bonds – in whatever form they may take – is setting itself up for divisiveness and difficulty. I think the social value of marriage is significantly derived from its aspects as a contract between individuals and the larger community, and that excluding certain forms of partnership from that contract is tantamount to excluding them from the community.
I don’t find it at all surprising that some gays and a goodly large number of polyfolk want to unmake marriage, given that. The ability to have one’s partnerships recognised as valid is currently a mark of full community membership. If, on the other hand, nobody could get their partnerships recognised, the community is weakened (by loss of one of the means of connecting individual groupings to the larger whole), but at least the weakness is equally distributed.
ElJeffe: its great that you have a concept of marriage that you want to defend. Please, form a church that only performs marriages that you deem correct. But as far as the legal issue goes, what’s the problem giving people the same legal rights? You can call it something different if you please.
What does number have to do with anything? If two men and a woman or three men and two women (to use some of your examples) “loved each other enough to want to spend the rest of their lives together,” what does that matter, anyway? Apart from an arbitary number, the relationship seems just fine to me. Heck, one of the reasons conservatives oppose gay marriage is that they just can’t believe that any love other than heterosexual can be “real.” I suppose that’s connected to the whole “lifestyle choice” thing.
Apart from the fact that, aside from the legal ramifications of tax and property, I don’t see much magical about marriage anyway, I think that your concerns are too late. I think marriage has already been destroyed, by divorce and spousal abuse. Time was, the former just wasn’t done by “good people” and the latter was never ever talked about. Today, it’s so out in the open that, at least in my eyes, the term marriage HAS lost its meaning. I take a “married couple” with a grain of salt until I know them better, and can see that the relationship is truly strong. And I certainly know there are plenty of unmarried couples out there of all types who have better relationships than a good deal of “marriages.”
Sorry, but I think you’re trying to defend a word/image/ideal that’s been dead for decades…
Jeff, if you happen to be acquainted with toasters with the capacity to love a human being and commit to a lifelong monogamous relationship with him/her, I’d be most interested in knowing about it, on a variety of levels. Until then, how about getting rid of the ridiculous slippery-slope definitions.
What’s being advocated is that two men or two women can love (not have sex with) one another in precisely the same way as a given man-woman couple can, and therefore will often desire a permanent committed relationship with each other in the same way the man-woman pair usually will.
Why you see this as an offense against the concept of marriage is beyond me, other than the occasionally-raised argument about children being a purpose of marriage. That is true for many but not all marriages, and it is often the case that the couple is not fertile with each other – which can be remedied by adoption or some form of surrogate parenthood in precisely the same ways that a gay couple can “have” children using one of those methods.
In short, loving relationship? Check. Intent for lifelong commitment? Check. Willingness to have children? Not applicable. Fits somebody else’s religious concepts of a marriage? Not applicable. Identify the problem.
And if you bring up a person marrying his/her father, dog, or toaster, do consider that you will most likely find yourself Pitted for it. That’s not the issue here, any more than the gun control question is not dealing with whether five-year-olds should have automatic rifles.
gasp! Surely you wouldn’t deny the Brave Little Toaster his right to love his owner in a lifelong monogamous relationship! After what the poor thing has been through?!
In creating the “gay marriage will lead to the dissolution of the institution of marriage itself” and the less common but more colorful variant which postulates a group of anti-marriage guerillas trying to infiltrate the institution of marriage like a level in Duke Nukem 3D, the straight supremacists have created that ultimate form of substance-free argument: the slippery slope strawman.
Congratulations. Now, if you can pry yourself away from the idea that specifically worded legislation is a gateway drug to all sorts of weirdness that you’re unable to cope with, have you got any actual concerns about gay marriage itself? Or are you just scared of your bizarre what-if postulations, founded on nothing but scare tactics and improbable expostulation?