Absurdly wrong.
from the Court’s ruling in Loving v Virginia.
Wrong about the State of Virginia, in 1966, yes, I was. But…“absurdly wrong”? Do you really dispute the underlying contention that laws against “miscegenation” were motivated by something other than the belief that people who weren’t white were less than fully human?
Crap. Please strike the words “something other than” in my last post. Thank you.
By the way:
So, are you conceding my point that the word “marriage” will lose the ability to convey information if we redefine it, and taking the position that this would be an acceptable loss?
To hop in here, I would answer your question with a minor “yes”, and a major “no”. In the sense that, if you meet a random man on the street, know nothing about him, and he mentions in passing that he’s married, you would no longer have gained the additional knowledge that he was married to a woman. So that particular shade of meaning would be lost, I agree. (Although I can’t honestly think of why it would matter.)
On the other hand, and here’s the important point for me, if you met two gay guys (or two lesbians) at a party who were obviously “together”, but you didn’t know the seriousness of their relationship, they would gain the ability to say “we’re married”, which tells you an extraordinary amount about the depth and status of their relationship with just two words, a capability which, currently, is lacking.
So strictly from the “words-being-able-to-convey-meaning” sense, I think that applying the word “married” to gay couples is a win. And that’s ignoring all the other senses in which it’s even more of a win.
I think you missed my point. My point was that if a person is married, the gender of the person he or she is married to is not relevant to the discussion. It has to do with people who are already married, not people who are looking for a spouse.
I would like to have a husband. What verb do I use for this? Married. “I want to get married.” If the person doesn’t already know I want a guy, I would say so. Straight people should also have to say so, should the gender be relevant.
Not only acceptable, but essential.
Okay, let me put some issues up for discussion here:
Marriage is a right. First, note that that does not say it’s a Constitutionally guaranteed right – merely that it’s something that everyone thinks that he or she at least should be able to engage in and commit to if he or she is so inclined.
Rights are not boundless. The most ardent defender of freedom of speech is prepared to say that there are legitimate limitations on its exercise, not connected to comment. He or she would not defend the right of someone to loudly express his/her opinions at a time and place where the defender is trying to sleep. He or she would not claim that it’s the obligation of every medium to provide unlimited space and time for anyone wishing to express a viewpoint.
Given those two propositions, the question then comes down to, Can a sovereign government limit marriage?. And the answer, unquestionably, would be “Yes.” Without raising the absurd “homosexuality=pedophilia” red herring, let me observe that the marriage of a 40-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl who feel that they are in love with each other and want to marry is something that very few if any people would claim to be their right.
So we have the position that marriage is a right, that it does have bounds, and now the question is present of what those bounds ought to entail.
Those opposed to gay marriage claim that marriage has historically meant the union of two unrelated presently-unmarried adults of opposite sex, and that that definition needs to be preserved because it is essential to what constitutes a marriage. Those favoring gay marriage claim that the “of opposite sex” clause is unnecessary – that two people in love, of age, unrelated, not presently committed to a marriage, can contract a marriage, and it ought to be appropriate for the state to recognize that marriage.
Now, I will ask the gay marriage proponents to concede that limitations are an integral part of the “right” issue. Then I would ask the opponents to make a case why opposite-sex is an essential criterion, which would constitute a valid limitation. Because what Weird Al is accustomed to infer from someone stating that they are married is not, IMO, enough reason to deny a couple which wishes to commit to marriage the right to do so.
Perhaps working from those basic assumptions, we can do a better job of ironing out positions and coming to some coherent meeting of minds than has previously been accomplished.
Sure. The default assumption will still be that it’s a member of the opposite sex, and that default assumption will still be right 95% of the time. If it’s really that important to know whether the stranger’s spouse has a penis or a vagina, you can ask. 
And another thing to mention here. As much as we United Statesians (or Americans if you prefer) like to pretend that we live in a vacuum and we can plug our ears and shut our eyes to what the rest of the world is doing, other countries have legalized gay marriages. The change in the word “marriage” is already taking place.
Forgive me for this, weird al, but I’m not consoled by renewing your addiction to this. Bricker has earned my respect, and so I was willing to take the time to debate this with him; until I read more from you, I’ll let other people handle this.
Suffice it to say that most grammarians are recognizing the silliness of a strong prescriptivist position, such as the one you’re advocating. It’s all about the descriptivist grammar, and letting words mean what the speaker and the audience together understand them to mean.
Daniel
My first question would be, “Why would you give a fuck?” To be sure, using the proper pronoun might be appropriate – but that would be clued in by the use of the terminology – I’d use “him” of MsRobin’s husband – and of matt_mcl’s husband, as and when he gets one. Likewise “her” for Airman Doors’s wife – and Una Persson’s wife (who is a sweetheart, BTW).
Unless you’re planning on a sexual three- or foursome, in which case I would hope you know the couple well already, I cannot see the slightest reason for needing to know what sexual equipment is attached to someone’s spouse.
Lessee: Canada, less Alberta, now or in the immediate future; Massachusetts; Belgium; the Netherlands; Tasmania – a fair chunk of the world is officially defining marriage to include same-sex couples. What have I missed?
So given the choice between extending marriage to same-sex couples, and eliminating it entirely from the legal vocabulary of the country, which do you feel has the most dramatic effect on the meaning of the word? In your system, what is a marriage, and who gets to decide? Do you not think that “civilly unioned” people will refer to themselves as “married”, be they straight, gay, religious or irreligious? I simply don’t understand what difference your system presents, other than the outright abolition of the word “marriage”, ostensibly to save it.
I say you’re confusing the meaning of the word with the connotations of the word.
When I hear someone describe himself as “married,” knowing nothing else about him, I get an image in my head, as I’m sure most people do. That image is of a white Christian man and a white Christian woman, with a child, living in a house in the suburbs with a minivan they use to go to PTA meetings and church functions, and they go home and sleep in the same bed and occasionally have sex when the woman doesn’t have a headache.
I would estimate that that image is correct for at most 20% of the marriages that currently exist on the planet. It’s an image, a perception, it’s not what the word “marriage” means. Are we really losing part of the rich diversity of our language if we say that “married” is not a synonym for “heterosexual?” That’s the whole question – what is the meaning of the word marriage, and why is the stipulation that both parties be of opposite sex so crucial to everyone’s understanding of it?
And the reason that people keep pointing out that the objection always (or almost always) comes down to homophobia at some level – you’ve hit at the reason in your post. Reasonable people aren’t claiming that homosexuals aren’t fully human, but they are claiming that homosexual love isn’t at the same level as heterosexual love. Therefore, they dismiss the idea of two men or two women calling themselves “married” as absurd.
In other words, a man is not a homophobe simply because he can’t conceive of himself ever falling in love with another man, any more than a man is a racist if he’s not attracted to people of other races. Attraction is irrational. Where bigotry comes in is if you can’t conceive of other people’s being attracted to members of opposite races, or the same sex.
And as for connotations of words and lack of meaning – how am I supposed to react when someone talks to me about his “partner?” Does that mean his business partner? Maybe they’re on some kind of team together? Is he telling me that he’s having sex with this guy? Or is he saying that he and another person are in love and have made a commitment to each other to live the rest of their lives together? If that’s the case, why can’t he just say “husband?” I know what that word means.
The Biblical justification for them was generally “God divided up the races at Babel and clearly He meant them to stay that way!”
As to the other argument, I’m deeply creeped out by the notion that my marriage will lead to people like you thinking about the contents of my underwear. (Completely setting aside the fact that I’ve known people in non-het-monogamous relationships who have referred to people as their spouses in defiance of this really freaky prurient interest.)
Looks like Spain is on the way.
I’m really interested to see what happens when someone tries to take advantage of a comity agreement; I think my position in this argument is at a standstill until that happens. And I hope to discover that my position is wrong.
Daniel
Alberta has no say in the matter, as the relevant jurisdiction belongs to Ottawa. Klein may or may not try to invoke the Notwithstanding Clause, but if he does the Supreme Court will bitchslap him into submission. Anyways, ol’ Ralph has bigger problems these days, like trying to figure out what to do with the multi-billion dollar oil surplus.
Ah, no. Not true, neither in your hypothetical, or right now, with heterosexual couples. Consider: If I meet a heterosexual couple at a party who tell me they are married, they might be a white christian suburban couple with 2.2 children, the kind that SolGrundy referred to. Or they might be Britney Spears and Whatsisname during their 70 hours*. That’s a problem, and it’s one of the reasons I am in favor of the separation of marriage and state. If it weren’t for the state of Nevada taking to itself the right to determine who is “married”, that wouldn’t have happened, and it wouldn’t be brought up about a thousand and one times in every debate about same-sex marriage, in fact the debate itself would be very different.
It seems you misunderstand my position. I certainly don’t want to deny a couple which wishes to commit to marriage the right to do so, based on that criterion. I shouldn’t have the power to do so, and neither should the state. All I want is for the state to take a neutral position on the issue…that “separation of marriage and state” thing I mentioned.
Right now, the state takes my position**. I’m perfectly happy to give that up, but clearly for some people that’s not good enough; they want the state to swing around and take their side.
Well, this kind of goes to that “It wouldn’t be the end of the world” thing I was talking about. But remember, I also said that it also wouldn’t be the end of the world if we banned just one book. Look, I’ll pick out a book we can all agree is terrible: “The Turner Diaries”. Awful piece of racist trash, that. Surely you won’t miss it if it’s banned. Neither will I. Neither will 95% of us. So what’s the harm?
Your privilege, of course. Though if you could respond to the specific points I made about your analogies, I would appreciate it. But of course you are under no obligation to do so.
I think that separating marriage and state would have the more dramatic effect, and it would be dramatically positive, as it would represent a big step away from including, in the definition of the word “marriage”, the “go to Las Vegas, get drunk, and get ‘married’ to a stripper you just met in a casino in a ceremony performed by an Elvis impersonator” style of “marriage” that is debasing the linguistic currency of the word.
Heh. You like the tough questions, I see. The question of what is a marriage is akin to the question of what is pornography…I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it. Some Supreme Court justice said that, I forget which.
Everyone gets to decide for themselves.
I’m sure many of them will. There will be nothing to stop them, just as there is nothing to stop them right now.
The word “marriage” certainly would not be abolished. The difference would be that the word would not be used by the government. Do you think that is the equivilent of “abolishing marriage”?
You may as well ask, why is the stipulation of any part of the definition of any word crucial to our understand of that word? It’s simply because, that’s the definition of the word. At its root, language is an arbitrary thing. There is nothing about the sequence of letters t-r-e-e, or the sound we make when we pronounce those letters, that is intrinsically related to those big things we see growing out of the ground, with the leaves on them. It’s just the word we decided to use to represent them.
As such, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if we expanded the definition of the word "marriage. As I’ve said. But it also wouldn’t be the end of the world if we expanded the definition of the word “dog” to include cats. But you can’t deny in either case that we will have lost something.
And by the by, my opposition to such a change wouldn’t mean that I was bigoted against cats.
I addressed these arguments at length in this thread. See also this thread. NB: If you decide to bump either of these threads, and want a reply from me, please let me know, in this thread or by email or something.
*[sub]This is strictly hypothetical, of course. The earth will crash into the sun before I ever get an invitation to a party being attended by Britney Spears.[/sub]
**[sub]For the most part, I mean. I am aware of the exceptions, like Massachussetts.[/sub]
In effect, yes; there would be no such thing as an official marriage. I still see no advantage, etymologically speaking, in the implications of your suggestion as opposed to full marriage rights for gay people. Since you agree that civil unions of all types will feel free to describe their union as a “marriage”, I feel that nothing has been gained. As you say yourself:
How can this situation possibly be preserving the meaning of the word “marriage”? I think it’s far clearer when marriage is the union of two people who love each other and have made legal declarations to that effect. In your system, “marriage” is … nothing. Nothing at all. And ironically, by removing the state from the marriage business you are fundamentally redefining all the existing marriages, in a way that simply extending marriage rights to other loving couples does not.
Nonsense. What’s the official government definition of a violin? Does the lack of such a definition mean that “violin” is…nothing, nothing at all?
Governments don’t define words, any more than cowboys buck the bronco. They ride along, sometimes trying to control the language, but rarely succeeding.
There are arguments to be made in favor of official government recognition of marrige. The necessity of such recognition to the word’s meaning is not one of the good arguments.
Daniel
I hate to be obtuse, but I don’t see how what you just said had much of anything to do with what I just said.
Let me try to be more clear: One of the most important parts of the human experience is forming couple-style relationships, which come in an enormous variety of levels of seriousness and commitment. And a huge vocabulary exists to describe these various levels of relating, “dating”, “seeing each other”, “engaged”, etc. Of these, probably the most Powerful (in some symbolic sense) is “married”, which says an enormous amount about the relationship, and in fact is so powerful that it can actually affect the relationship itself (as witnessed by gay couples who’ve reported that being able to describe themselves as “married” really made an impact on how they felt about their own relationship).
Now, clearly, the word “married” has been misused in the past. Some people have gotten married for idiotic reasons and gotten divorced shortly thereafter. But, while that may have slightly chipped away at the meaning of the word, it has hardly destroyed it.
So there are two different situations in which someone might infer meaning from the word “married”:
(1) You meet someone by him/herself who describes him/herself as married. Under the old definition of “married”, this tells you that this person has a committed loving life partner, who is of the opposite sex.
(2) You meet a couple, and are curious about the status of their relationship. They say they are married, and that gives you an enormous amount of information about their relationship (although of course it’s possible that their marriage is a Britney-style joke, but that’s unlikely).
So, if we redefine the word to include gay couples, the pro is that (2) can now be applied to a large number of people who currently don’t have access to that Linguistic Power, and the con is that we lose the last six words of (1).
Seems like an easy choice to me… (again, this is restricting my argument solely to the linguistic, since that’s the argument you yourself made).
No, it wouldn’t. It was the two people involved who took it upon themselves to say that they are “married,” and because of the laws in the state of Nevada, the government of that state and every other state in the union will recognize that marriage as legally binding. The distinction is an important one.
The reason that it’s brought up “a thousand and one times” is because it perfectly illustrates the disparity there. Our society is just fine letting couples decide for themselves whether they are “married” or not. The government acknowledges their choice to call themselves “married,” extends the couple legal and financial benefits, and leaves it to the rest of society to turn their noses up, shake their heads, gnash their teeth, and moan about the downfall of society. However, the government does not do the same thing for homosexual couples who wish to declare themselves “married.” That is unfair, and that is why there’s debate.
Wrong.
Supporters of same-sex marriage are not trying to get everyone to swing around and take their side. We are simply demanding that we get what everyone else already has. You and your position are completely unaffected by same-sex marriage. The biggest concession that you would possibly have to make is that if some guy at a party told you he were married, you wouldn’t automatically know that he’s heterosexual.
If you honestly can’t see the harm, then I doubt any of my arguments will do any good.
The harm is that you have taken it upon yourself to decide for everyone else what is an awful piece of racist trash, and what is acceptable. You claim that we can all agree that it’s terrible – who are “we all?” Obviously someone thought that the work had merit, or it never would’ve been written or published. And what gives us the right to judge? Is it because we’re in the majority? If 95% of us don’t see any merit to something, does that make it okay to suppress the 5% who do?
Why can’t you just let the work exist and let everyone decide for himself whether or not it has merit? What’s the harm?
You claim that strangers getting married in Vegas debases the concept of marriage. Others claim that a man falling in love with another man, pledging his life to him to the exclusion of all others, and starting a family together also debases the concept of marriage. Who’s right?
I find it ironic that supporters of same-sex marriage are so often accused of being unrealistic and pushing pie-in-the-sky ideas down people’s throats when they’re just not ready for them. Because the “reasonable compromise” we’re usually suggested that we accept takes the form of a fundamental change to the workings of marriage in our country. It’s unrealistic, it won’t happen in any foreseeable timeframe, and it’s just downright petulant. “Your so-called ‘marriage’ is so offensive to me that I’d sooner have no one be married than let you go on calling yourself that.”
Perhaps not. But when you suggest that our thinking the concept of “marriage” means more than just the genitalia of the participants is as fundamental a semantic shift as “dog now means cat,” that definitely implies that there’s something more going on here than a mere semantic debate.
As our resident wit and enlightened social commentator kanicbird put it, while cackling over the California government’s forced anullment of another Doper’s marriage: “So perhaps you would like to redefine the term water, air, fire and earth?” I still have to wonder why the idea that marriage – which I have always known as the exclusive union of two adults who are in love and want to pledge themselves to each other and their family until their death – might mean more than just sex, or more than just procreation, is as big a radical shift in thought for people that we might as well be saying “black is white, dogs are cats, truth is lies.”
Is it really because tradition dictates marriage as being exclusive to men and women, and so that’s how enough people think of it that it’s now a crucial part of the definition of the term? Or is it because people can’t see homosexual relationships as anything more than a capricious, lustful fling on the same level as getting drunk and hooking up with a stripper in Vegas? I think everyone should ask himself this question and be sure of what his true answer is, before he goes on insisting he’s not bigoted at the root of it all.
And for the record, that’s not just a blanket accusation. I will be the first person to admit that my initial opposition to same-sex marriage was based in homophobia and bigotry, as much as I tried to convince myself that it was just because I was a traditionalist or that “it’s just different” or “it’s not the end of the world.” I only hope that people don’t have to come out of the closet before they can come to the realization of what “marriage” really means.