As said upthread, I think most of the arguments you’re going to see against SSM are some derivative of “eww” or unnatural. I have seen two other arguments, and I don’t find them particularly persuasive and the underlying purpose behind them probably goes back to one of those two, but I’ll present them as fairly as I’m able with my thoughts.
One was related to the original purpose of marriage was to assist with things like procreation and inheritance, and since a gay couple are unable to procreate with eachother, a marriage doesn’t serve that purpose with them and so it’s not so much that it should be banned but that there’s no reason to codify it since it doesn’t serve a purpose. That some infertile couples or those simply not interested in having kids get to marry too is just sort of a quirk or feature or whatever and, of the same reason it doesn’t make sense to codify in SSM, it doesn’t make sense to explicitly ban that stuff.
I don’t find this argument very persuasive because it assumes that that is the only purpose of marriage today, that it’s utility hasn’t changed. It basically seems to boil down to the idea that it’s legislatively expensive to modify these existing laws, but with so much time and effort put into banning gay marriage and changing tax codes, it seems like a pretty small price to pay to make a lot of people happy. And issues like inheritance, should the couple have children, would essentially be equivalent to an actual parent and a step-parent type of situation. If anything, the only real complicating issue I see is when a child is introduced since one of them would necessarily be biological and the other one not, in determining if both should have equal custody and visitation rights and responisbilities or not. But that’s hardly a reason to not legalize SSM.
The other argument I’ve seen is related to health risks associated with homosexuality. I’m not willing to look up cites since it’s not my argument, but the idea was that gays, particularly men, have a lower life expectancy, greater risk of disease, and that sort of stuff. Thus by legalizing marrige we’re raising healthcare costs of heterosexuals by legally requiring that both the gay employee and his/her spouse be covered.
Even if we assume that there’s greater health risk associated with homosexuality, I just don’t see this as a persuasive argument either. First, we’re talking a pretty small percentage of the population, and we haven’t even established how much additional risk it may have, so I have trouble imagining it’s worse than other behaviors that aren’t controlled for like casual sex of any sort, unsafe driving, drinking, recreational drug use, etc. Second, even if there is a tangible cost associated with it, considering that insurance agencies can control with factors that most industries can’t, like sex and race and marital status, I presume they could also control against that, if they deemed it necessary. In short, it sounds like a whole lot of worry about something that I haven’t seen any proof for.
Anyway, those are the only two arguments I’ve seen, and I still don’t find either of them even remotely convincing.
Morality is religion. There isn’t any metastandard beyond Religion to which one can appeal any moral cause, so I am not personally swayed by any arguments–religious or otherwise–beyond a general agreement of what’s practical.
What would be the argument against eating defective children instead of using society’s resources to raise them?
Ewwww…
That’s about it.
Like a dictionary, religion slows down the rate of change and helps standardize a current convention that stabilizes society. At a biological level, this stabilization may also help increase reproductive success of a species. So far the reproductive success of our species does not seem to have provided a net benefit for all other species, so that argument seems not to carry much weight. And by whose argument should anything be a benefit to anything else anyway?
Once you take religion–arbitrary principles–out of the mix, there’s no such thing as morality. There’s just nature, and convention among sentient creatures. Ultimately, as with language, the polloi establish the norm and ultimately that norm is entirely arbitrary.
Actually, as long as the defective child is dead (I think that’s what you were referring to as defective), I feel like eating it is fine. I would NEVER participate in it personally, but a dead body is a dead body. It won’t harm the child, so eat it!!! I don’t imagine too many people would actually be a part of that, though. Morals are as thin as paper, and logic is like a razor sharp knife to it. Morals are illogical. But, as humans, we are driven by emotion, which dictates what we think, and makes us illogical.
Which is fine, really.
But, in an argument, logic tells me that ONLY logic should rule. So, eat the babies. Have intercourse with dogs and dead people. Share a bed with your mother, whatever pleases you. As long as it doesn’t affect anybody’s life negatively, go ahead.
(Just keep it away from me. EWWWWW!)
Anyone who has never heard a secular argument against gay “marriage” has not been trying very hard.
The purpose of marriage is to provide a stable environment to raise children. That is why it is permanent and divorce is difficult. Changing the definition of marriage to include gay relationships would be to change the purpose of marriage from providing a stable environment to the emotional fulfillment of the participants. Since people fall in and out of love all the time, emotional fulfillment can not be a stable base for raising children. If you look at countries where gay “marriage” has passed there are fewer people getting married and more children living in broken families.
Since we know people who get married and stayed married are wealthier, happier, healthier, and are better at raising kids, then changing the definition of marriage to make it more volatile is obviously a bad idea.
In my state you have to have a year long separation and either hire or lawyer or an arbitrator to divide up your stuff. To get an ID you need a birth certificate and wait in line a couple hours at the DMV.
(playing along)
So, do you think heterosexual couples that can’t conceive should not be permitted to marry?
Conversely, what about a gay couple who’ve adopted children (or one of the couple is actually the parent) and seem to be doing a great job raising them. They shouldn’t be allowed to marry…why?
Says who? The government? Your religion? My husband and I desire no children and yet we were allowed to marry. And people who marry after they are no longer physically capable of reproduction. Defining marriage by the ability to reproduce is nonsense. People don’t generally select their partners solely on the narrow grounds of using each other as a biological tool for procreation. Most people choose their partners based on psychological, emotional and intellectual connection and intimate bonding.
Also, your “research” from the heritage foundation is laughable.
Here is the actual research the heritage foundation wrote their opinion on.
Didja know in Utah, first cousins can’t marry if they can reproduce? The woman has to be beyond a certain age or able to provide medical proof of infertility. Thus, in at least one state and in certain circumstances, the state specifically recognizes that the purpose of marriage is not procreation and allows it anyway.
To no one’s great shock, this study was massively flawed: Regnerus compared children raised in stable two parent heterosexual households, with children who had a parent who had ever had a homosexual encounter. Most of these respondents had never lived in a household with a same sex couple. The study didn’t control for factors like divorce, infidelity, or economic status. It’s not science, it’s propaganda; unsurprising, since it was funded in part by the AFA and NOM.
I am just dumbfounded by why anyone has an issue with it if it doesn’t directly affect them. Pure ignorance, I suppose? I’m a straight, engaged man, but I fully support homosexual marriage, and I don’t even personally know any gays! Well, one, but she has nothing to do with that decision.
I’m sure it’s the other way around. We’re innately homophobic (probably just an extension of natural xenophobia), and major religions simply codify it. The Bible doesn’t have any parables that explain why “sodomy” (as the various terms are usually translated, somewhat ambiguously) is evil, it just states that it is. Not in many places, either; usually just including it in long lists of sins or sinners.
I disagree with your definition of morality, implied here. I prefer the definition used in Wikipedia:
While you’re right that a basis morality doesn’t exist a-priori, that doesn’t mean that it equates to religion. I’m a humanist. I choose to be a humanist. I have values, some of which seem innate and others I’ve thought carefully about and selected. These values inform my ethics and define a moral code. They have nothing to do with any religion. I don’t assert that they’re universal, and I can’t impose them on others without the consent of society.
Same reason we care about anything else that doesn’t affect us?
Because we evolved to care about the mating behavior of other people in our tribe?
Because when you grow up with one understanding of The Way The World Works, and somebody tries to come along and change it in some fundamental way, it’s scary and disturbing?
Our atheist PM couldn’t come up with much of a reason for her opposition to SSM. She cited the way she was raised, our culture being based on the values of the Bible, and threw in a red herring about her defacto relationship being just as meaningful and real despite her choice not to marry, and that it’s insulting to others in similar relationships to insinuate that their relationship is less valid if they’ve chosen not to marry. So… she’s got nothing, really.
I know Joe Hockey from the opposition party went for the “won’t someone think of the children” approach, claiming he opposed SSM on the grounds that children deserved to grow up with a parent of each gender. No word on his opinion of gay adoption or foster parenting already being legal in most states, and of adoption or fostering by single people being legal.
I often ask anti-abortion people who scream about “adoption” about “gay adoption.” As you can image, most of them only support adoption to the “right” people.
I once talked to a total homophone anti-abortion protestor who claimed that “gay adoption” was “child abuse.”
Humanism equates to a religion in the sense that the principles are entirely arbitrary. They don’t exist in the stars. The Universe is uninterested in being good to anybody, and might poke us all with a gamma ray tomorrow.
It’s fine to pretend that morality is about “good” and “bad.” But those are simply conventions and there is nowhere to appeal their definitions. Religion (the theistic ones, for example) posit an outside Arbiter. Humanism (usually, anyway) posits some sort of pattern tyically derived against a perception of a greater good. But in the end, the principles are entirely arbitrary, and in the end, equally meaningless from the standpoint of Absolute.
It may well be that the greatest good for the earth is to extinguish the human species tomorrow (again, depending on how you define “greatest good”). But if someone made that determination and tried to pull it off, we’d call him a madman.
To the issue in the OP: there’s no such thing as a “secular” argument against same-sex marriage that holds any force beyond opinion. A religious argument can posit a higher authority, and hold a course of action accountable for how well it conforms to that higher authority. A secular argument has nothing to appeal to because it has already discarded the proposition that a higher authority exists.
Seriously, your response here is reasonable. I disagree with your position, but I argue with those who unduly demean it.
I challenge you to face the possibility of change being good. If you’re young, you’re likely to lose on this eventually anyway. I changed my own position, and I’m glad I did.
All I’m saying is that both laws derive from our morals - for some people gay marriage or sex is just as bad or icky as incest or inbreeding.
Well, it sounds like we agree - that our morals and thus our laws are shaped by the world around us. All I’m saying is that part of that world has religion in it.
I was more picturing the human in a passive role here. I’m sure you’ve seen male dogs humping legs or couches before.
If you look at how alike parents and children are in their morals, I think you have to come to come to the conclusion that society is in fact the source of a lot of our morals. Granted, I suppose this could be genetic and I’ve never looked at, say, two kids one raised at home and one sent off for adoption to see how their morals differ but I think it’d be a stretch to say they’d end up the same.
We have to define them ourselves. We have to do this personally, to define our own morals and to decide what to do, and we have to do this as political units, to decide what is legal and what is not. For example, we agree that human life is valuable. Sure, this may be an arbitrary judgement, but it’s one we agree on, and we work from there.
You can say “arbitrary” but I say “value-based”. There’s a distinction, but not one that really matters here. You still haven’t made your point that Humanism is a religion. Humanism isn’t absolutism.
What you’re saying here is that all value judgements are based on religion. Yet people without religions can have values.
By your own sophist argument, there’s no such thing as a secular argument FOR same-sex marriage, because any such argument would be based, in part, on values.
Even science depends on the value judgement that truth is better than falsehood. It also depends on a few other assumptions, but we won’t go into that. Your definition of “secular” here is so far out of the norm, that your point loses any value.
