Stuffy, for one thing, it’s the behavior that’s important, not the label. Lots of gay people claim to be “married in all but name.” It’s seems like every person taking part in the current gay marriage wave is “marrying their partner of 19 years.” Study them.
For another thing, the burden of proof is always on the on the proponent of any proposition.
That’s the point I’d make to you, iampunha. It’s the proponents of gay marriage who have the burden of proof, not the defenders of the status quo. One key point seems to get lost in all this. Gay people are free to engage in “married behavior.” For that matter, people who want to engage in group marriage are free to engage in “married behavior.” In that sense, no one is interfering with their personal freedom.
In another sense, gay folks “rights” are being infringed because they can’t marry their partners while straight folks can. But this is fundamentally different. By recognizing a marriage, society bestows goodies (e.g. tax breaks, automatic inheritance rights, social security benefits, etc.) on the married couple that single people don’t get. So this is, in a very real sense, about getting a subsidy from the government.
Think of it like this. Congress gives a tax break to, say, the cherry picking industry. If the apple-picking industry wants the same tax break, it tries to get it by convincing Congress that apple picking provides the same benefits (in terms of jobs, campaign contributions or whatever) as cherry picking does. I’d really love to this argument made with respect to gay marriage.
My theory is that as smart and wealthy as many legislators are, they don’t talk much about homosexuality or may not know any openly gay people, and so don’t really hash the issues which affect them like members here do. Wasn’t it Blackmun who said that if he had known his clerk was gay, he would never have let Georgia’s sodomy laws stay on the books? Well, his clerk never TOLD Blackmun that he was gay, never discussed issues important to him with Blackmun because he didn’t want to “make waves”.
sounds to me like this guy you quote has a lot of ignorance to dispel - point him over here to the SDMB…
As another poster said earlier, incest is a social tabu because the children that result have a high chance of genetic problems. Gay sex just doesn’t result in any children at all, so it’s no different (in that regard) from an infertile heterosexual couple.
There is a very good reason for incest to be tabu!
It is also stupid to extend it to siblings who are not genetically related, eg one is adopted.
Cousins can marry in a great many states and presumably in each and every nation on earth. I think the way it works for Indiana is that they can marry but only if they can’t have children. Which is odd because here we have a law on the books that state that marriage (in this case) is to be completely without children.
Although since states recognize other states marriages any cousins who want to can just drive down to Tennessee and get married and Indiana will recognize it.
I’m not buying the genetic defect reason for not allowing incest anymore - it may have been the traditional fear, it may have been religious inculturation - but it isn’t a valid concern any longer.
I have friends and aquaintences with a variety of diseases - from Cystic Fibrosis to hemophilia to odd genetic kidney disorders I can’t name. No one is keeping them from having kids (and some of them have) despite that their children have some risk of inheireting or carrying the gene. We don’t force people to be genetically tested for sickle cell anemia or Tay Sachs recessives - and we don’t forbid them from marrying or require sterlization if they have the markers that indicate they are carriers.
Playing married is not the same as being married. You can’t really draw the same conclusions between the two. What if married people are happier, healthier, more stable and have better skin simply because they are married. Being married, they might have access to health insurance and the like. Or maybe they are just more care free since they don’t have to worry about if their partner can see them during a serious illness, or if their family is going to fight and try to get the house should one of them die.
I still think the burden of proof is on those who want to limit the right for SSM. Not the other way around.
I’m going out on a limb here… But are folks worried that the govt is going to be subsidizing our “lifestyle”. That money from your pocket is going towards gays?
Lets look at your big three govt subsidies you mentioned.
Tax breaks. I though it was a marrage penalty? Which is it? Having never been married, I really don’t know how all that works. As far as tax breaks for kids go, someone was going to get to claim the kid anyway. So no money out of your pocket.
automatic inheritance rights I worked my ass off for all this stuff. You didn’t. I get ot say who gets it when I die. So again, no money out of your pocket.
Social Security. Again, I have been working for all these years to earn those benifits. I’ve been paying my half, and my employer the rest. How is this money out of your pocket? I get the benifits when I retire. If I die early, I’d like my partner to be able to collect the rest. It’s only fair, since she supported me at home so I could work harder for a salary.
I personally don’t think that argument will hold up in the future. I personally am against incest just because it involves some major emotional confusion.
…not that I know from personal experience or anything
I will now try to speculate on a few reasons why some people are against gay marriage:
First, you can probably draw some parallels to the fall of Rome (though they’re not necessarily accurate). I don’t know much about history, but from my understanding Rome was in a pretty bad moral state at the time it ended, and I guess some people believe that helped contribute to its downfall. The allowing of gay marriage is a huge step toward that (in their perspective), and they want to delay that as much as possible.
Second, and here’s the one that bothers me a little too. I don’t buy into the “SSM will undermine that sanctity of marriage” BS because marriage will be as …santaceous as I make my own, but all my life I’ve understood marriage to be a man and a woman. It’s not been defined to me as two people, but distinctly two people of opposite sexes. So to me the definition of marriage has been a man and a woman for me. It’s sort of like saying “a triangle is now a square too” (Any incidental symbolism with the shapes is unintentional :)). Ignore the fact that it’s a flawed analogy and try to take it at face value.
However, this is a slight misgiving and one that I’m willing to live with. But if it’s a misgiving that I have, other people probably have it too and may be less willing to live with it.
I will post some good reasons for SSM that I’ve never seen brought up before.
They encourage monogamy. That can’t be a bad thing.
In about 20 years we’ll have some data and can compare divorce rates or whatever sociologists like to do.
Married behavior? Sure, as long as they don’t dare ascribe any legal meaning to it, nor attempt to get it recognized by any applicable agency (such as their state government). Hell, while we’re talking about married behavior, to borrow loosely from what gobear said recently, I might as well engage in pregnancy behavior. Means fuckall about what I can do regardless of what I pretend I can do or what I want to do (I’m male).
Know what? If people are going to say X and Y and Z and Q and 18 are going to happen if we allow for SSM, then burden of proof is on THEM for saying it in the first place.
I would say that it is, in fact, exactly the opposite. If someone wants to prevent someone else from doing something, it is incumbent upon them to provide a valid rationale for doing so. If someone wants to prevent gay marriage, they need provide some sort of basis for why it benefits society to make it illegal.
Powell. Not Blackmun. Powell was the swing deciding vote in the 5-4 Bowers decision. Several years after he retired he said that he was in the wrong on that vote, that the dissent had the better argument. I don’t know that Powell ever said that had he known his clerk was gay he’d have voted the other way. There’s an excellent book, Courting Justice by Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price, which discusses all the cases to the date of publication relating to homosexuality but I’m far too intoxicated at the moment to do the research.
I would say that it is, in fact, exactly the opposite. If someone wants to prevent someone else from doing something, it is incumbent upon them to provide a valid rationale for doing so. If someone wants to prevent gay marriage, they need provide some sort of basis for why it benefits society to make it illegal.
Will this argument can go on forever, so it seems the PRACTICAL thing to do would be for the pro-SSM crowd, since they’re the ones who’d most benefit, to start getting this proof, regardless if it’s FAIR that they should have to.
Silly liberals and their Head-in-the-Cloudism! They prefer the sense of moral superiority that comes from argument than the sense of real superiority that comes from victory!
You kind of miss the point. It’s not so much that is a valid concern or not compared to some other specific heterosexual pairings. It is a tabu that has been within our society from the start. There are real problems associated with inbreeding (basically any nasty recesive genes are allowed to possibly combine) and those problems are the reason that society doesn’t like inbreeding. It’s not even a conscious decision that people make, not to have it off with their mother, it’s an accepted tabu.
There is no similar tabu about non-related people who may have a genetic disease having children because that requires modern knowledge of diseases and a conscious decision. Basically our society hasn’t got that far yet. It’s possible that in the future this will be a tabu as well, but it isn’t at present and you can’t compare the two examples.
Getting back to my original point. There is a valid genetic reason for incest to be illegal. There is no valid genetic reason for homosexuality to be illegal. Therefore it is quite ok to consider incest to be bad, and homosexuality to be not bad.
The situations are not analogous. Marriage is a structure that provides societal incentives for couples to stay together, and even makes it somewhat difficult to dissolve a relationship. No such support structure affect gay relationships, creating a totally incomparable dynamic.
And since the proposition is a COnstitutional amendment barring gays from marriage in any situation anywhere in America, its on you people to support it.
So where do I get the right to make medical decisions for my boyfriend, without his parents, who have never accepted his orientation, from barring me from his sickroom and taking me out of the loop?
Where do I get the protection from being forced to testify against him in court?
Where do I get the ability to make parental decisions for any children he might have, just as a step-mother could?
No 1920s, I get it, I just think we should be consistent (not that I think that’s realistic, but I’m a dreamer).
The genetic arguement against incent holds water (although the cousins study indicates it might not hold as much water as we think - but I don’t want to be the researcher who goes out and tries to find a statistically significant population of siblings who have children to find out). But if we have an interest in making sure siblings don’t marry because of the possibility of genetic defects, we have an interest in making sure people with CF don’t marry and pass their genes along.
And the incest laws are really all over the place. In some states step siblings can’t marry - although there would be no genetic rationale there. In other states they can. There doesn’t seem to be a single clear cut reason on the legal state of incest.
Society may have not gotten as far as making marriage of genetic carriers of disease taboo - or we may not (and may never get - the incest taboo is really deeply ingrained - icky icky icky) have gotten as far as saying cousins can marry - and perhaps eventually siblings.
Well, I don’t know about that place in particular, but I do recall that some women I knew around the 15-22 age group were particularly inclined to bisexual behavior because of the attention it drew. They no longer care or express such sentiment, leading me to believe that it was only for the attention. If one wants to experiment, that’s one thing. If one does it for the attention it draws from the peer group, especially males, then I think it is worth being a little skeptical.
But I wouldn’t say that’s the case at a restaraunt. There’s no motivation for the behavior other than sincerity there.
Or perhaps not. What you have done is set up an argument as to why data that shows no benefits from long term-gay “marriage behavior” might not be valid. The argument falls apart if the data were to show that there are substantial benefits from that behavior. In any case, you could always look at a group of unmarried long-term straight partners as a control group.
Now we get to it. In the U.S. gay couples can, indeed, create many (though admittedly not all) the “benefits” of marriage. It’s just not all wrapped up in a convenient little package like marriage is.
Once again, many of these problems can be solved by using a power of attorney. (Though, I believe, the exact scope varies in the U.S. from state to state.)
By the way, you are mistaken in your assumption that step-parents acquire legal authority over their spouse’s children.
This is not, therefore, an argument in favour of gay marriage.
