I may be the only one here who can remember reciting the Pledge before it had under God in it. We didn’t like the change. It seemed awkward. We forgot. We messed up. It was embarrassing. We giggled and rolled our eyes.
At least it served the purpose of making me think about what I was saying.
And I don’t say the Pledge anymore.
The funny thing is that if I were a traitor or a revolutionary and wanted to harm or overthrow this government, I wouldn’t hesitate to go through the motions of saying the Pledge.
Oh . . . I’m happy to pay the $4.95. That’s a good deal. I’d be happy to pay $50 if they denied subscriptions to ill-mannered lawyers with overblown egos and tiny aptitudes. That would be an even better deal.
Personally, I have no moral problem with polygamy although I understand there would be legal complications. I do have a problem with people who use polygamy as an argument against gay marriage. I especially have a problem when those people don’t bother to explain why polygamy is supposed to be so bad, either, because that’s just the “ick” argument one step removed. (I realize you haven’t explicitly made this argument in this thread, LyricalReckoner, but your reference to allowing “sexual deviants” to get married is rather telling.)
I reject your contention that allowing gay marriage means that we must automatically allow polygamous marriage. Much better, I would think, to actually (gasp!) argue both issues on their own merits. If I feel that gay and lesbian couples deserve the chance to honour themselves and the principles of fidelity and commitment in front of their loved ones and the law (which I do) then why should I let the supposed moral status of polygamy affect that decision? Likewise, if I have compelling reasons why polygamous unions should be prohibited (although quite frankly I don’t) then why should the moral or legal status of monogamous homosexual unions change my mind?
Simply put, why should I draw a connection between these two different moral issues? You’ve offered no compelling reason to do so. If I said “Well, we let people eat fish on Friday so obviously we should let people steal other people’s housepets and eat them”, I would be making about as much sense, namely none.
Regarding your other issue, the hypothetical polytheistic pledge of allegience: well, yeah. I don’t see any more reason for “under gods” to be in the pledge than “under God”.
The connection between the two is what they have in common: civil rights and equal protection.
I’m not saying that we should men to marry men, or that if we do, then we should allow men to have several wives. The point is, if the courts decide that the government can’t tell men that they can’t marry men, then you can hear the arguments of all those fundamentalist Mormons: you’re going to allow sexual deviants to get married, but you’re going to deny us our right to practice our religion? How unfair!
Funny thing that the piece generates so much discussion about marriage, when the central point was about the Pledge, another civil rights issue.
Seems to me, if the Hindu Pledge case ever materializes, then folks like Ted Olson are going to regret the arguments they’ve made in support of the current version of the Pledge.
Well, they’re welcome to make that argument when the time comes. (And I’ll be biting my tongue to keep from saying “If gay married people jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?”. That’s just my inner snark coming out.) But in the meantime, I don’t see how that affects anything, as the issue of polygamy has no bearing on whether or not it’s right or wrong to allow homosexual marriage. The courts will hopefully decide the legal questions on their own merits, just as the public at large will hopefully decide the moral questions on their own merits. I admit on the latter issue I have less hope than on the former.
I suspect that most people who’ve replied to this thread so far simply agree with you about the Pledge. I know that I for one don’t like jumping into a thread just to say “me too”, so I only respond to the parts that I feel like actually contesting. But hey, you’re the one who brought up San Francisco and Utah and whatnot. We’re just responding to the OP.
Seems to me, any good, thoughtful jurist or legislator is going to think about any implications that could be read into an opinion or a law. One thing that has to be considered is this: if there’s no good reason to prevent two men from marrying one another, then what good reason could there be for saying NO to polygamy.
(Read Ted Olson’s briefs in the Newdow case. And consider the Hindu Pledge case. Olson has given the Hindus plenty of ammo to support their case.)
In certain circles (mainly liberal), the feeling seems to be this: we should allow two men to marry one another but we should NOT allow a man to have several wives.
Why not? After all, we do have a free exercise clause, and laws against polygamy do violate that clause (at least in the case of Mormon and Moslems).
All the various religious problems would go away if we returned to the original version of the Pledge, which didn’t involve God in any way. That’s what I’d like to see. And yes, it’s a little creepy that schools make children take a daily loyalty oath.
I’m comfortable with a definition of marriage that makes consenting adulthood the primary requirement. Let Bob marry Sheila if he likes, let Bob marry Bill, let Bob and Bill marry Susan if they like. Don’t see how any of that is a problem. I’d like to continue excluding marriage for anyone who isn’t a consenting adult, including children, animals, and trees. I’m not really clear on how you’d go about having sex with a tree anyway, but please don’t enlighten me and definitely don’t link to pictures.
I’m torn. I agree with the principal of the Three Item List, but ‘Hi, Opal’ has been beaten to death. I just don’t know what to do.
Again, why? What compelling reason do you offer to draw a connection between those two issues? If polygamy is somehow bad enough to discourage legalization of it, then it must be so for a reason. Then, either gay marriage is bad for that same reason or it isn’t. Let’s say for sake of argument that polygamy is high in trans-fats and is prohibited for the good of public health. Then either gay marriage is also high in trans-fats…in which case it should be prohibited on its own merits…or else it isn’t, in which case it’s a non-issue. In either case the status of polygamy is irrelevant to determining the proper status of gay marriage.
Well, I don’t hold that position so I’m not going to try and defend that point of view. Perhaps you could find someone who does support that position and ask them to defend it instead.
As far as I understand it, the main objection to polygamy is the legal repercussions - ie, being able to marry thousands of people and give them US citizenship. I don’t think anyone on this thread has said that polygamy should be illegal because it is morally perverse. You are comparing legal apples and oranges in a typical slippery slope model.
Zagadka, I’m not sure you’re seeing my point. I’m not saying that polygamy is morally perverse, and I’m not saying that anyone else in this thread has said so either. And I’m not trying to compare polygamy to homosexual marriage. Quite the opposite, in fact: I don’t think there’s a connection between the two issues, and I feel that comparing the two in order to somehow validate or invalidate gay marriage is a specious argument.
Or did you perhaps mean to address LyricalReckoner and not me?
Speaking of whom:
Fine, then. You’re claiming that allowing gay marriage and allowing polygamous marriage have a justifying reason in common. So if we evaluate gay marriage on its own merits, then we may conclude that it should be allowed for that reason. And similarly if we evaluate polygamous marriage on its own merits, we may conclude that it should be allowed for that reason. Or not, in either case, if there are other compelling reasons to disallow either scenario. I have no problem with that, but then again I’m not one of the hypothetical people in those “certain circles” of which you speak.
For me, the more important thing is that the supposed spectre of polygamous marriage is by itself not a compelling reason to disallow gay marriage (or to allow it, for that matter).
The compelling reason is the California constitution, and its equal-protection provision. Can the mayor of San Francisco say that he’s going to allow homosexuals to have their rights, but fundamentalist Mormons are on their own?
Well, for one thing this scenario is working across dissimilar categories. Gender identity and religious affiliation are not necessarily the same kind of thing, when judging how equally you’ll protect.
One case of “equal rights” between a set of categories applicable to controversy on one particular aspect of an issue does not necessarily map absolutely to every other set of categories in any other set of controversies that may arise.
BTW, in the case of the Hindu Pledge, there are other tacks the Court could take: (a) here, “God” is simply a meaningless cultural referent and not meant to stand for any actual worship ; and (b) nobody has to say it, stand for it, or even be in the room for it and the teacher can’t even look cross at you over it.
And the example is a little weak since Hindus I know hold that all the gods are manifestations of The Divine, and using the singular-capitalized noun “God” to refer to The Divine, encompassing all the individual gods, IS acceptable usage.
But back on the the gay marriage subplot: Gay marriage is NOT based upon the Free Exercise clause, it’s purely civil. Even then: gender of partners and number of partners can be argued to be two distinct issues. Lawyers should correct me but the overwhelming majority of current statutes and case law about the rights and duties of marriage can apply with no change or minimal wording change if the two parties are of the same sex. OTOH if you’re gonna have multiples, you need to make major substantive alterations all over the code.
In any case, even since BEFORE the Lawrence decision (=no anti-sodomy laws for consenting adults), in much of the country there’s NOTHING that forbids anyone to have as many live-in life-partners as s/he can handle. S/He just cannot try to legally claim all of them as wives/husbands.
Why should that be a problem? Unlike a traditional 2 person marriage, 15 people in a group marriage would probably have only 1 or 2 membes want out. You simply consider the departing person to have 1 share in the family, so they get to take their ‘share’ of the bank account, and are given monies or items to the value of their share when they leave. Sort of like a business partnership when one partner decides to leave. I dont even really see the problem with children being involved, it would still devolve to the biological parents. With genetic testing so readily available today, establishing biological parentage is pretty easy=)
Personally, i wouldnt mind having another husband around, then I would have 2 people to nag into taking the garbage to the town dump
Hm, is there anywhere that allows polygamy [2 men 1 woman type]?
The mayor of San Francisco said it was the state constitution’s equal protection provision that lead him to believe that he had to ignore state law and the will of the people. [In that regard, his reasoning reminds me of Judge Roy Moore in Alabama; that’s the judge who said that state’s constitution meant he had to honor a god.]
I don’t know why you mention the Free Exercise clause here. I mentioned it earlier as laws prohibiting polygamy restrict fundamentalist Mormons and Muslims from practicing their religious beliefs.
The question is this: if we’re going to allow men to marry men, then what restrictions are we going to impose on marriage? It’s only reasonable to raise the question here, as some are advocating that we scrap the traditional notion of marriage. It’s reasonable to ask how far they wish to go?
Can a women marry a male dog? Can a man marry a female dog? If not, why not? Of course, many would say the very idea is absurd, but many feel that the notion of a man marrying a man is pretty freaking absurd.
Well, it’s been limited to only two parties for a while now. We’ll start with that. If someone wants to broaden that to include a third or more parties, we can then deal with the legal ramifications of it.
Once again, the laws regarding division of property, etc., have been set up to handle two party marriages for a LONG time. They can handle the fact that both of the parties share the same gender without any difficult legislative hurdles. Basically, just drop the anti-SSM laws that everyone’s been running around the past few years passing, and we’re golden on SSM.
No.
No.
Consent, or the lack thereof.
And they are free to continue to feel that way, even if it’s just because they find it “icky”, but that doesn’t change the fact that the two parties can both give consent, and that there doesn’t need to be tons of legislation passed to handle all of the issues surrounding it. The traditional method of handling issues between a married couple works fine no matter the sex of those involved.
The current laws are set up for one man and one woman. So, if what you want to fit is current law, then there’s nothing to change.
Consider some of the legal problems that are left undone when one man marries another. Consider the problems related to the custody of children.
It’s no secret that a good many homosexuals play both sides of the fence, and they do wind up with children. Now, what happens in this situation? Bill is a homosexual, but he’s got a child. He and his man-wife, Fred, are raising the child as man and man-wife. Then, Bill gets killed by a meteor. Does Fred become the child’s custodian? What happens when the child’s mother says she wants custody?
So far as I know, we have nothing that says what are a man-wife’s rights in this situation.
If you want to go with existing law, then the issue is settled. Only a man can marry a woman and only a woman can marry a man.
Thanks to recent laws, which were passed solely to disallow gay marriage. They never should have been passed in the first place, and removing laws is just not that difficult. It’s a lot easier than creating new ones.
Exactly how is this different from a woman getting pregnant from a man other than her husband, then said woman gets killed by a meteor? Or do only gay people get hit by meteors in your worldview?
By the way, since you’re the one who brought up the whole gay marriage thing in your own Pledge thread, what are your actual issues with it? Is it the icky factor, as I certainly don’t see what it has to do with the pledge?
In the piece about the Pledge, I only used the goings-on in San Francisco (where I live) by way of introducing the issue. It’s certainly not the focus of the piece. The point of the piece was to get those who think the Pledge is just fine as is to reconsider. Take the Solicitor General’s arguments in the Pledge case, and then wake up one morning and find that a public school where most of the teachers and students are Moslem (for instance) and they recite a Pledge to ‘one nation under Allah.’ According to the Solicitor General, that’s just fine and dandy (e.g., it’s not a prayer, it’s not a call to any god, the kids don’t have to say it, etc.)
Seems to me, you sometimes have to turn something upside-down to see what it really looks like.
It also seems to me this: if we’re going to allow men to marry men, then what good reason can we have for telling men they can have only one wife? I’m not being flippant and I’m not trying to argue against men marrying men. I’m just saying that if homosexuals can get married, then why can’t polygamists?
As to laws against men marrying men, they’re not new. They’ve been around for quite some time. And it was just a few years ago that the good people of California had an open referendum on this. The overwhelming majority said NO: men cannot marry men.
Then, along comes the new mayor of San Francisco. I think it was a pretty astute political move on his part.
How do I feel about men marrying men? I’m open to the idea. I’d consider it. But I’d want the issue considered seriously first. Our laws don’t cover this and I don’t think you can honestly say that since we already have laws that cover a marriage of two, then all is settled. Niether do I think you can honestly say that we can dismiss the whole issue of polygamy. It seems rather arbitrary to say that since marriage has traditionally been between two people, then it should remain that way. It’s traditionally been between a man and a woman, and if you’re gonna dismiss tradition, you can’'t sieze it also.
There was a case before the Supreme Court, long ago, back in the late 1800s. It was the case of Reynolds v. U.S. and the issue before the court was polygamy. Do laws against polygamy violate the Free Exercise clause? The court decided this: since the law applies equally to all, it’s no violation. The court could use that same reasoning when it comes to men marrying men. State law prohibits it; the people of the state have said they don’t want it. And the law applies to all: homosexuals as well as heterosexuals.
And you will still get the counter-argument that this is an intersection of TWO sets of criteria: (a) gender (b) number. Either can be changed w/o changing the other.
Absolutely. However be prepared to accept that we’re talking about motion on several different axes here and that motion along one does not MANDATE motion along the other in he same direction. Nor that there is one great coalition-of-“they” at work. What it DOES do, granted, is to do away with a concept of “immutable absolutes” about the institution, which gets a big yawning so-what from me, the institution has been defiled quite soundly by heteros already.
And in the case of Judge Moore, higher courts assumed jurisdiction and acted according to what the constitution really says, and so will they in time in the case of the Mayor of SFco. Both were acts of insubordination for the sake of provoking that, IMO.
In your child-custody scenario:
News flash: Already there are laws regarding step-parenthood or surrogate-parenthood (vary per state). Most of them, worded in gender-neutral-terms to apply to both mothers and fathers. Amazing, ain’t it? Your scenario could just as well be set up as a het couple that raises a child obtained thru a surrogate-mother, or who raises a child product of one of the partners’ pre- or extra- marital dalliances.
In the easiest application of the law, the natural child of one spouse natural child is the other spouse’s stepchild. In which case the surviving natural parent has the first claim to custody regardless of how good a parent the step-parent was. OR the surviving spouse could actually have legally adopted the child, if the birth-parent willingly gave consent to that (in states where “open adoption” exists) in which case the default is the child remains in the adoptive family unit.
Notice no reference to the specific gender of the spouses or step-parents in the above paragraph. The only possible gender-based hitch would likely be a judge’s or jury’s predisposition to favour mothers over fathers and bloodline over in-law link when adjudicating custody and that already happens for male/female marriages. But still, THE LAW EXISTS and can be applied.
Because (a) dogs may not legally enter contracts, not being legal persons; (b) marriage is a “personal” contract: you can marry by proxy but you do not marry the spouses’ representation but the spouse him/her self, and w/o that individual person’s legally-binding consent the proxy representation and thus the marriage are null and void.
And once again, the categories across which a danger of “runaway equal rights” is being argued are entirely disparate: in this scenario the fundamental change would NOT be in marriage law, but in getting members of species other than H.sapiens recognized as (1) persons with civil rights and (2) competent to exercise legal privileges and obligations. Whole different, separate issue. Get to that point, and then we’ll talk interspecies marriage.
