Well, give me some slack for hyperbole, eh? You must surely admit that the meaning of the word “marriage” is far less clear when it’s in no way official than when it is. It certainly doesn’t mean what it did before. A violin has no history of being a societally recognised bond, whereas if marriage suddenly stops being such a thing, then a concrete change of meaning has taken place. Note that I don’t think this is important myself, but it is rather crucial to Weird_Al’s argument.
I didn’t say it was, and I would like to point out that I think the whole definitions argument is ridiculous. I just think it’s extraordinarily ridiculous to contend that stopping state sanctioned marriages outright somehow preserves the word’s meaning more than letting gay couples officially “marry”, as Weird_Al is doing. Basically, you seem to have my argument backwards. Weird_Al is saying “we need to preserve the meaning of marriage, so the state should stop doing it”. I’m just saying that if you want to preserve its meaning, that’s a silly thing to do. I do not, personally, think that preservation of a word’s definition is important at all. My feeling is that absolutely nothing is achieved by removing the word “marriage” from state-sanctioned unions, since everyone involved in such a union will invariably describe themselves as married in any case.
Is this making sense? I feel like I’m being misunderstood, but I’m not convinced I’ve made myself clear here. Only had 3 hours sleep last night, be patient…
But when the government starts making decisions that provide certain basic benefits to violin players, which cello players have to pay lawyers thousands of dollars for contracts that give them part of those benefits, and are denied other benefits, and decides to introduce a constitutional amendment making it illegal to play the bass viol at all, then the definition of violin as “stringed instrument held under the jaw” starts to make an important difference.
Yours for the Society for Overworking Metaphors, Polycarp
That’s why the government should say, “Look, wanna play music? We’re just gonna be issuing noise ordinances from now on. Y’all fools can sort out for yourselves what constitutes music and what constitutes rubbish.”
My friend who is a musician, who devotes most of her life to being a musician, who identifies strongly as a musician, who believes that music is the highest ideal–maybe my friend will be offended that she still doesn’t get any official recognition for her John-Cageian performances. And that bastard in the symphony who’s been getting government moolah (mullah? ask W) for years because he plays approved music–maybe he’ll be pissed that the government stops giving his music the imprimatur of Real Music.
Too bad, I say. The government shouldn’t be involved in that dispute at all.
But you are looking at this one case in isolation. Remember what I said about banning just one book? Weigh the pros and cons of banning “The Turner Diaries”. If you consider the matter in isolation, without regard to the question of whether or not you should be banning books in the first place, I’m sure you’ll also find more on the “pro” side.
You say you are disagreeing with me, yet it looks like you are agreeing. You said:
That’s exactly what I said the problem was. The distinction is, indeed, an important one.
Again, it looks like you’re agreeing with me. The situation as it stands now is a problem. What we differ on is how we want to fix it.
Ok. I’m going to quote myself here, and then quote you again, with emphases added:
Do you see the problem here? I said “the state”, you took that to mean “everyone”. That’s not what I meant.
Ummm…you do understand that I wasn’t literally arguing for banning that book, right? I was making an argument by analogy.
Why can’t you just let marriages exist and let everyone decide for himself whether or not they have merit? Why do you insist on having the state put it’s imprimatur on them?
I find it ironic too, except with the positions reversed.
I don’t see why that is. Two possibilities: 1 - You’re talking about the marriage of someone you know. If you have a friend who is married, you’ve known both of them for more than a few years, you have a pretty good idea of how married they are. Likewise, if your friend showed up on Monday after a drunken bender in Vegas married to a stripper named Babs who he just met, you’d have a pretty good idea of what was what. This would all be the same under either regime.
2 - You’re talking about the marriage of a couple you don’t know. They could be lying, of course, under either system. If they’re not, then if it’s a drunken-Las-Vegas-bender-style thing, they’d have to have some kind of basis for saying that they’re married. Under the current system, they have a piece of paper issued by the state that says so. Under the system I propose, they wouldn’t. Maybe they found a church that’s willing to marry drunk people in Vegas, but I’m sure that any church that engaged in such a practice would lose out in the marketplace of ideas…not enough people would agree to consider that church’s marriages valid.
And if you want to know about that bundle of legal rights and responsibilities that go along with a civil marriage, that would still be handled by the state, except with a different name, like “civil union”, which would have an exact, knowable legal definition.
So what more do you need?
Stop right there. You are conflating “society” with “the government”. They are not identical. Marriage would still be a societally recognized bond.
Why? Remember, the whole reason I keep harping on the example of the Las-Vegas-bender-style marriage is to show that the state has already inflated the meaning of the word “marriage” beyond what it ought to mean. That type of relationship shouldn’t fall within the definition of the word “marriage”, and the only reason it does now is because the state issues a piece of paper to the participants saying that they are married.
Not to mention, just because I think something is desirable certainly does not mean that I automatically think the state should provide it. It’s not the proper function of the state to preserve the meaning of words, except to a limited extent, in certain limited circumstances, to whit:
Indeed? You are aware of that clause in the constitution about “freedom of the press”? Would you have a problem if the government officially redefined the word “press” to mean spicy brown mustard? The state can shut down your newspaper, but you can have all the Guldens you want…
I don’t think it’s a bad metaphor at all, as it leads one to ask why the government is giving all this stuff to cello players in the first place. Always a good type of question to ask.
Quick question for you, Weird Al. Were you campaigning to get the government to quit recognizing marriages before it started looking like the queers might be getting close to being allowed to participate, say back in the 80s or early 90s? In other words, if homosexuals weren’t trying to get to equal rights in this respect, would you even be taking the stance you are that the government should only issue civil union certificates instead of a marriage license?
Yeah, it’s cliche to the point that it gets mocked – but in point of fact, the idea that there needs to be legal recognition of marriage is in part based on that.
It’s to the advantage of society that the two people who merged their gametes to produce children, and hence have the most invested in those children, be there and present to the children during the years when they are moving from helpless newborns to contributing adult members of society, providing care for them, teaching them by instruction and example, disciplining them to socialize them into people who will do what is expected of them in a given role, etc.
Naturally, this set of tasks is not exclusively theirs – the idea of teachers goes back into prehistory, and schools nearly as far back – help from members of the extended family is equally integral, and even the daycare aspect has historical antecedents.
Too, there need to be both carrot and stick present to ensure that the couple finds it advisable to stay together and together provide for their children. In days past, the woman’s investment was in the making of a home and the provision of life essentials for the man, who provided the resources with which she worked. While his skills were “portable” and he could survive quite well by himself or with another woman, hers were not as much so, and therefore his leaving his aging and not-so-attractive-anymore wife for the nubile young thing whose physical charms attract him needs to be guarded against. (And likewise, he needs to be protected against the situation where he, having put in a hard day at the boiler factory, just wants a good meal and an evening chilling out in his easy chair with a good beer, while the handsome young stud from down at the pub has the hots for her and she knows it, and is tempted.)
Put all this together, and you have grounds for social recognition and protection of marriages. And then we begin to get the cases on the edge of all this – what about the couple that has gone beyond child-bearing years? what about the childless couple? The couple that had no clue they’d be childless going into a marriage? What about the widow with children? Or the widower? What about the couple that doesn’t want children? Where do you define limits to what constitutes a socially proper marriage in all that?
So I personally am sick of the games. A marriage is what the people involved make of it – and I see a couple that has thought it through and wants to marry as being entitled to, with no semantic pifflery, no imposition of someone else’s definition, none of the above. And it’s in society’s best interest that such marriages be recognized and extended equal privileges one with the other. In short, I don’t care whether or not gay couples can file joint tax returns – but if straight couples can, they ought to be able to as well. A state that refuses to honor someone’s expressed will as to who ought to be his/her next of kin, the person entitled to act in his/her stead when he/she is unable to do so and the person to whom custody of his/her earthly goods pass when he/she is unable to deal with them, is playing games with the personal and property rights of the individual to whom it denies the right to name that next-of-kin. And that is a flat out 14th Amendment violation without recourse to “substantive due process” – if I can, by virtue of saying “I do” and paying $10 to the city clerk, transfer next-of-kin status from my mother to my wife, and it is legally impossible for Una Persson to do likewise to hers, something is rotten in the state of marriage.
This last commentary doesn’t go directly to marriage, though - it goes to the various amendments that seek to limit not only marriage but tovoid any contracts or agreements that might create civil unions.
In other words, the Fourteenth Amendment is not implicated if everyone has a vehicle to achieve that next-of-kin status with the person of their choice.
I must admit I still don’t really understand much of your position. And one part I do understand (I think), I disagree with vehemently.
Given your Turner Diaries analogy, you seem to believe that for a word to lose any part of its meaning is the first step down the slippery slope, or the first opening of the floodgate, that will lead to some unspecified horror. Which just seems preposterous to me, given that the floodgates are already open, the slippery slope has already been descended, and words have new meanings added, and old meanings lost, at an incredible pace. Particularly given that, as many, many people have argued, the important and unique part of the word marriage has very little to do with the gender of the participants, and a lot to do with commitment, I just don’t understand why you seem to passionate about that aspect of this issue.
And at the same time, you’re arguing in favor of a “government grants civil unions, everyone calls them what they want” stance (which is in many ways quite reasonable), but which will inevitably lead to gay couples describing themselves as married, which is exactly what you seem to be strenuously arguing against. So what am I missing that resolves this seeming contradiction? If you could snap your fingers, and suddenly the civil union plan was in effect, wouldn’t the meaning of marriage undergo some serious changes in common usage over the next months and years?
Anyhow, here are a couple of yes/no questions, which I would like you to answer: Suppose you have a coworker Dave, who is gay, and who has been in a stable, loving relationship for 5 years. Dave and his man refer to themselves as “married”, and refer to each other as “my husband”.
(1) Would you refer to dave as “married”?
(2) If so, would you do so grudgingly (ie, just to respect Dave’s wishes, even though it didn’t seem right to you) or would it actually feel to you as if you were using an appropriate word?
Now imagine that Dave’s husband takes ill, and is going to die, and Dave and his in-laws are in a bitter dispute over who will get to control funeral arrangements, visit him in the hospital, etc…, precisely the kind of thing that wouldn’t be an issue at all if Dave and his husband were of opposite sexes.
(3) Do you think this is fair?
Now further suppose that a ballot initiative is up for vote as precisely this moment which will allow gay couples to marry. There’s no civil union option, no remove-marriage-from-government-purview option, just yes/no, should gays be allowed to marry in your state. And suppose that if it passes, it will likely go into effect soon enough to allow Dave and his husband to marry before his husband gets too sick.
(4) Will you vote for this initiative?
(5) What if this initiative came up for the vote and you didn’t know Dave or anyone in his situation?
Mmmm. I respect your point. But kindly notice that we are both talking hypotheticals, proposals, and such.
The reality of the present situation is that in 48 states, the legal accouterments of marriage are not available to gay couples under any mode of application, with the result that some benefits accruing thereunder are not available at all, and others may only be accomplished by the preparation of extensive contractual and covenantual documents which the courts may nonetheless deem it against public policy to enforce. Those same accouterments are available to any opposite-sexes couple with minimal legal effort – generally, prove qualifications for and obtain a marriage license, with those qualifications requiring minimal degree of proof in most cases.
It’s for this reason that I see an equal protection argument completely divorced of any substantive due process questions, as being valid.
As noted above, though, I do see the issue of the state’s unquestioned right to impose limitations on the “right to marry” (whether or not one recognizes the Warren dictum from Loving as establishing it as a fundamental right). I have known my share of boy-crazy 13-year-old girls, and boys convinced that what they felt for their girlfriend was something not seen anywhere on earth since the Montague-Capulet double funeral – at least until they have a fight. Then you get Lilairen’s quite valid point that a similar set of feelings and commitments can exist between three or more people, and so on. And while my personal opinion is that Mary Kay LeTourneau is wacked, it’s interesting to note the sense of commitment of the young man whom she seduced has not changed over nine years – whatever may be her problems, he seems to have known his mind at a remarkably young age and not to have changed it with maturity. And the question of what role the state should play in regulating all that sort of thing in terms of giving legal effect to people’s emotions and commitments definitely raises some questions. There are interesting positive and negative points scattered all over that slope, whether or not it is slippery.
I believe that it is completely within equal protection guidelines to simply drop the “opposite sexes” clauses and make any marriage that would have been legitimate if contracted between a man and a woman of characteristic sets X and Y legitimate if contracted between two men or two women of the same characteristic sets. But I can see the question “why stop there?” as a valid one, which deserves intelligent answers without the usual nonsense about people marrying their toasters or German shepherds, or the pedophilia issue rearing its uglier-than-usual head.
Well now. I almost resent this question, given the implication that if I came to my beliefs recently, then they are suspect, maybe just a cover for bigotry. If I were to say that I came to my beliefs in the past few years, and you made that an issue, it would be an ad hominem attack. You should address my arguments, not the person arguing them.
That notwithstanding, I’ll be a good sport and answer your question anyway. First off, to take it literally, no I wasn’t back then, and I’m not now either. I’ve never “campaigned” for anything in my life. The extent of my civic participation outside the internet is voting in even-year elections. I’ve never marched in a protest, held up a sign, donated to a political cause or campaign, or anything else like that. On the internet I post to this board, plus one other one of which you are aware where I occasionally discuss politics, plus I went through a phase around '96 and '97 where I posted about political subjects on usenet.
As “campaigns” go, that’s pretty sporadic. If you were referring to my beliefs, well…let’s have a little trip in the wayback machine. I’ll keep it short, though be advised that the phrase “back in the 80s”, used in the right context, can cause me to ramble for a long time…
I was a social conservative for most of the 80s. This was due to my religious beliefs, until I shucked them off in 1984 at the age of thirteen. After that the social conservatism was vestigial, flaking off gradually, mostly gone by the time Bush Senior came to office. I was a big Reagan fan in that decade, still am in retrospect, though not as passionately.
I can date the firming up of my libertarian convictions into their recognizable modern form to the time period between the '92 elections and the '94 elections. In '92 I had a brief intellectual fling with Paul Tsongas. No campaigning, mind you, but I watched him a lot on C-SPAN. I see in retrospect how un-libertarian a lot of his policies were, but at the time it didn’t bother me. By the time of the '94 elections, I remember being overjoyed at the big Republican landslide, but that my joy was tempered by worries over how much Gingrich might pander to the religious right.
Somewhere in those two years, then, I had a conversation with myself in which I said something very much like, “And what is all this bullshit about needing a governmet issued ‘license’ for stuff? You need a ‘license’ to practice medicine. What bullshit! You need a ‘license’ to practice law. Bullshit! You even need a ‘license’ to get married, fer chrissake. Total bullshit!”
I didn’t become aware of same-sex marriage as an issue until late in the decade. I was aware of the court case in Hawaii, but paid very little attention to it. I was aware of the DOMA in '96, but all my thinking about it was tactical, political level, i.e if Clinton signs it, will that help him get re-elected? Of course he did, and it did, he bragged about it on christian radio stations and still (I’m sure) got the overwhelming majority of gay people’s votes, and people wonder why he got called “Slick Willie”.
Around '97 or '98 there was a court case in my state, which eventually led to the first civil unions law. That’s when I first gave the issue any really concentrated thought. It didn’t take me long to come up with the position I have now, less a few refinements. I remember putting it forward in a conversation with my sister shortly after the decision in that case, well before the Massachussets thing.
Of course, if only been a member of this board since 2001, so I guess that for anything before that you’ll just have to take my word for it. Well, I guess you weren’t expecting an answer quite that long. Be a good sport and put up with my rambling. Thank you.
I must take some responsibility for the confusion here. I have been vague, deliberately so, about my book-banning analogy. Specifically, vague about whether I am applying it to a situation in which the state decrees a change in the definition of a word, or one in which the change happens naturally.
The first makes more sense, as I would be talking in both cases about an action taken by the state. But as a “slippery slope” argument it can also be applied in the latter case. Consider: No government decreed that the english language shall cease to have a second person plural pronoun. It just happened, by natural evolution of the language, and because of that the language today has a grave defect.
In the future I shall try to be more clear.
First of all, I don’t know about that “incredible pace” stuff. How is this pace measured, exactly? Not to mention, neologisms come, but they also go. Back in the 30s there was one, “cinemaddicts”, that was widely used for a while. Time Magazine used it quite a bit. But it didn’t stick. Thankfully. What an ugly word.
Second, remember what I said to Left Hand of Dorkness?
Words routinely acquire new meanings, it is true, but not in such a way as to effectively strip them of the ability, to convey information, that they already had.
In the third place, specifically addressing what you said about my analogy: We’re already on the slippery slope of book banning, too. The state already has the ability to ban books. If you don’t believe me, try publishing a book containing step-by-step instructions on how to build a nuclear bomb.
Even if you’re already on a slippery slope, it can still be worthwhile to resist slipping further down.
Because I disagree. I think an important and unique part of the word marriage has very much to do with the gender of the participants.
I don’t at all concede that that is inevitable. It may happen, of course, but then, gay people with (or without) CUs can refer to themselves as “married” right now, if they wish. Remember, I am not in favor of the government stopping them from doing so.
It wouldn’t feel appropriate to me, no. I would try to avoid situations in which I would have to make a choice one way or the other. If it came down to it, though, I do have a strong desire not to be impolite to people.
Perhaps the word “spouse” would be an adequate compromise in some situations.
Certainly not.
I am sorely tempted not to answer this. What you have done here taken two seperate principles to which you know I adhere, one, that Dave and his…uhhh…spouse should not be subject to this unfairness, and two, that the state should not try to tinker with the meanings of words that describe things that have an existence outside of the state (remember what I said about redefining the word “press” in “freedom of the press”), indeed that the state should not have the power to do so, and worked up a contrived and implausible situation to bring those two principles into conflict. They don’t have to be in conflict, but in this artificial situation you’ve created, they are. I wonder if you would ask a mother with two children, if both her children were drowning and she could only save one, which would she save?
But no, I will answer. I will say, on (4), yes, because I am willing to compromise my principles for the sake of friendship, in fact I could see myself doing just that, in just this sort of situation (though it’s extremely unlikely ever to come to this) for some people who I consider friends. But I will say, on (5), no. I am well aware, of course, that there are likely to be people in that situation who I do not know, personally, so I guess this makes me a hypocrite. But then, so is every parent in the world with two or more children, so I guess I have lots of company.
This is just a side point, but I’m not sure if it’s possible for a word to gain new meanings without losing at least some of the ability to convey information that it already had. For instance, no one seems particularly upset about the word “Web” now being used to describe the WWW, but if you meet someone on the street and he says “I’m a web specialist”, it used to be the case that you knew a lot about him (he studied spider webs). Now that certainty is gone, and you’ll need to ask for further information.
Why? How often is that relevant or important?
To approach this same often-trodden ground from a slightly new angle, you seem to view it as very important that the word “married” convey the additional meaning of gender-specificity. But if that meaning is lost, there’s no real potential for communication lost, there’s just a slightly different, or additional, question that needs to be asked.
Q: Are you single or married?
A: Married
would become
Q: Are you single or married?
A: married
Q: To a man or a woman?
A: a woman
At the end of which, all the the information that was communicated in the initial example (although I still just don’t understand why it would be important to know the gender of the spouse…) would have been communicated.
Compare that to this question:
Q: So, are you guys just dating, or what?
A: We’re married
If the word “married” is restricted to just opposite-sex couples, then same sex couples can not similarly answer that question and communicate that information without a vastly more complicated response.
First of all, if it’s already happening, isn’t it, kind of by definition, inevitable?
Secondly, right now, people can call themselves whatever they want. Heck, me and you are married right now! I just said it, and no one is arresting me and dragging me off to people-who-misuse-the-government’s-language-prison. However, everyone also knows that when a straight couple says they’re married, one of the definitions they are almost certainly using is “legally married”, and when a gay couple says they’re married, they aren’t using that definition. If it were civil-unions-for-all, that distinction would vanish, and thus, people would be able to use the word “marriage” to describe a same-sex pairing with an asterisk always hanging over it. And, as for its inevitability, I abso-fucking-lutely guarantee you that it would happen. A lot.
I have two responses to this, a calm one, and a slightly outraged one. The calm one is that, in this hypothetical, the government is already tinkering with the meaning of a word. That is, it’s already defining the word “marriage” to mean what it wants it to mean, and enforcing that (via sanction and approval if not via whips and chains) on the populace. I’m not asking you to get the government involved in defining a word that had previous been untouched by governmental desecration. I’m asking you to have the government make its preexisting tinkering more equitable.
The slightly outraged response is… how on earth can you claim that those two principles are equal? I feel like you’re saying “well, I can see how there’s incredible injustice in the current situation, with portions of America’s population being denied their fair right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness with respect to one of the most fundamental institutions of human society, but on the other hand, see, there’s this one word in the English language, and I don’t want it’s meaning to be changed… you can see the bind I’m in.”
I can see the kind of situation you’re describing… for instance, a case where a judge knew beyond doubt that a defendant was innocent, but the jury had found the defendant guilty, and the judge had to choose between sending an innocent man to jail and grossly violating the rule of law. But I just don’t see that as applying in the current case…
Huh? I wouldn’t say it makes you a hypocrite… rather, what it makes you is selfish. A better parental analogy would be that you’d be willing to, say, have a finger chopped off to save your child’s life. Presumably, you would. But would you be willing to have a finger chopped off to save a stranger’s child’s life? What about if you thought that getting it chopped off might save some strangers’ children’s lives, but you don’t know how many, if at all?
An even better analogy: would you be willing to take a second to vote “yes” to marriage or “no” to a ban on such, even if it meant that you would walk out of the voting booth with all your digits intact, your children’s lives perfectly the same, your principles completely unshaken, your religious freedoms completely unharmed, your right to free speech and to believe what you wish to believe as intact as it ever was, the only thing changed being the knowledge that you’ve made a world of difference in the lives of thousands if not millions of mature, loving adults you’ve never met and who want nothing more than to be happy?
I have to wonder why voting for same-sex marriage is being equated with having to kill your children or cut off your finger.
True as far as it goes, but then it doesn’t go very far. This is kind of like your ballot initiative example: technically possible, but contrived and highly improbable. Whenever any word takes on a new meaning, you can always come up with some kind of situation, if you try hard enough, in which someone would use the word and the meaning would be unclear. So it is with “web”. It is very difficult to imagine a situation in which someone would say that phrase to you so devoid of context that there would actually be confusion. Whereas people communicate the phrase “I’m married” all the time to complete strangers just by wearing a wedding band.
I said it before, in this thread, and this one. A little cut and paste: If you accept as an axiom that men and women are different in fundamental ways, then an inescapable corallary is that a relationship between two men is fundamentally different from a relationship between a man and a woman is fundamentally different from a relationship between two women.
Please note, “different” does not mean “better” or “worse”. Just different. And if two phenomena in the real world are different, then I consider it a good policy to have two different words to describe them.
True, unless we come up with a new word. And that’s very difficult. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with using “y’all” or “youse” for a second person plural pronoun. But not enough people will agree to either one of those to promote it from slang. I don’t deny your point that there is an unfairness in the language as it is currently used. I’m just saying that there are other considerations as well.
No. Consider: You just said:
Yes you did say it. Does that mean that the definition of the word “marriage” has been expanded to include “people who argue with each other on internet message boards”? Of course not. Even if you had been serious, if you had really meant it, it wouldn’t have had that effect. Even if I whole-heartedly agreed with you, it wouldn’t have had that effect. Even if ten other people, or a hundred other people, agreed with us, it wouldn’t have had that effect.
Of course the exact number of people it would take is impossible to pin down. But think about it: How many people in this country use the word “y’all” on a regular basis? I’d be willing to bet it’s in the millions. Yet it remains in the slang ghetto, not quite good enough to be considered a “real” word, in spite of the fact that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it.
I understand your point. I think the difference between us is that I am much less amenable to government “tinkering” in the first place. Consider: If the government were making a practice of rounding up suspected drug dealers and imprisoning them without trail, but only if the suspects were black, that would be both wrong and unfair. If you were to come along and say that the government should imprison both black and white suspects without trail, because that would be more fair, you would have a point. But I would still be saying, never mind about this “fair” business, the government needs to stop imprisoning people without trail in the first place.
I don’t think the state’s tinkering with the definition of the word “marriage” is as bad as imprisoning people without trial. But hopefully my analogy will be helpful in conveying the depth of my feelings on this matter to you.
No. Remember what I said at the beginning of my last post. In the situation you presented me with, the principle I would have to either stick with or compromise was not the lesser principle that the definition of marriage should not change, but rather the much more important principle that the state should not be able to redefine by decree (or even by ballot initiative) a word that has an existence outside of it. Remember what I said about the government redefining words like “press”, “speech”, “freedom”, “religion”, etc.
But by that argument, every word that ever refers to a person should have two versions, one male and one female. After all, a female teacher is going to give a different learning experience to students than a male teacher. If all teachers ever had always been male, and then a woman wanted to be a teacher, your argument would claim that she would need a new word. Yet we obviously survive fine with just “teacher”.
But “y’all” certainly has a meaning that people understand. So would “married” in reference to gay couples. I’m not quite sure why it matters whether dictionaries refer to the word as “slang” or not. Whereas it certainly DOES matter if the government approves of a gay marriage. Although now we’ve gotten off into a bit of a sidetrack.
On the other hand, what about this: The government makes a law saying only white people can “dance”, and by “dance”, it means, “go outside without a Citizen ID Chip”. Now, there are two things wrong with this law. One: it discriminates against nonwhites. Two: it totally bizarrely redefines the word "dance.
But this law has been made. It’s on the books. It’s being enforced. At this point, you’d obviously like to repeal the law. But, for whatever reason, you realize that this is not practical right now. In the meantime, would you favor extending the law so that all citizens would be allowed to “dance”, regardless of race?
The flaw in your analogy is that extending things to be more “fair” just makes things worse for more people, whereas in my analogy, extending things to be more fair makes things BETTER for more people.
I brought up the contrast in Bowers more as a wry comment than a detailed effort to harmonize the two cases.
When Bowers was decided, the analysis considered and rejected the Due Process argument. They focused on the Due Process argument because it was on that basis that the case was before them: the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed the federal district court and held that the Georgia statute violated respondent’s fundamental rights because his homosexual activity was a private and intimate association that was beyond the reach of state regulation by reason of the Ninth Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Attorney General of Georgia appealed that decision. The equal protection argument was simply not before them.
The Bowers court did not refute an equal protection argument. They simply refuted the Due Process argument, pointing out that sodomy was not “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” nor “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and thus beyond the reach of substantive due process.
Okay, that makes more sense. Oddly enough though, in the process of looking all of this stuff over. I’ve found at least two different versions of White’s opinion. If I may ask, do you have a free source that you find most reliable in giving you the actual text of the opinion? For reference, the two sites were FindLaw and www.law.umkc.edu. Thanks!
Oh man. It feels like dej vu all over again. I got this exact same argument in those GD threads I linked to a few posts ago, and I addressed it at length there. Did you look at them at all? I could copy and paste from there to here, if I must, but I dislike engage in unnecessary repetition.
I would be fighting strenuously against the idea that the state should have the right in the first place to do this to anyone, never mind what is 'practical". In any case, I admitted the analogy I gave you was imperfect. It was simply trying to convey to you the depth of my feelings on the matter. Remember what I said about the principle that the state should not be able to redefine words that have an existence outside of it? You haven’t tried to address that.
I understand your frustration at feeling like you’re addressing the same things over and over again, and I appreciate your general level of civility and politeness… if we stick at it (although at some point I think we’ll run out of new things to say), we might break the all time record for longest pit thread on a hot button topic with no name-calling or profanity
In any case, I just read over the threads you linked to, and at least skimmed all of your posts in both of them, and, basically, I agree with many of the arguments that were made against you, and think that your rebuttals were unsound. So… I’m not quite sure where to go from there. I guess I’ll try to sum up a few important points that I still disagree with:
First of all, as you’re no doubt aware, there are at least three different contexts in which marriage is defined, namely, legal, religious, and purely-relational. Any particular marriage might exist in any of those three, more or less independent from each other.
If a girl and I go to Vegas, get drunk, and get married, despite the fact that we (soberly) have no intention of living together as man and wife, we are (legally) married. No one would claim that we were lying if we came back from our trip and said “damn it, we don’t even really like each other that much, but we are married”. So that would be a marriage that was legal, but not religious or relational.
A different girl and I get stranded on a desert island together, fall in love, begin to live together, have lots of hot sex, and at some point, have a solemnifying ceremony, witnessed only by our monkey butlers. Given that we have no access to any legal authority, we are not legally married. And given that we are both agnostics, we are not religiously married. But would you claim that we were lying if we said we were married? So that would be a marriage that was relational, but not legal or religious.
And finally, suppose that an arranged marriage was performed under the auspices of a certain religion between two 4-year-olds, who later emigrated to the US, which didn’t legally recognize their marriage, as they were 4 at the time, and they grew up, knowing each other as friends but not lovers. That would be a marriage that was religious, but not legal or relational. Again, they would not be lying if they said they were married.
So, as of right now, in most of the US, it is not possible for a gay couple to be legally married. However, there are religions that will perform gay marriages. And there certainly are gay couples who claim to be relationally married, and there are communities in which, socially, that claim is accepted, and the terminology of marriage is used to describe them. One facet of your argument (finally getting back to your argument) is that the government should not be using its powers to redefine words. But, given the three facets of marriage, the government really wouldn’t be doing so. Society, and religion, are already redefining the word “marriage”. The question is whether the government will go along with that redefinition.
If, 20 years from now, society has changed enough that it is totally standard and accepted among the vast majority of the people to refer to committed gay relationships as “marriages”, would you then support government-sanctioned gay marriage? (Again, assuming that government is clearly going to remain in the marriage business one way or the other, with the quesiton being whether it restricts itself to straight marriages).
Another entire line of argument concerns your repeated claim that there is something fundamentally different between a commited same-sex relationship and commited opposite-sex relationship. Some of that, obviously, is the sex. Is that the sole difference? If so, then:
-Are an absinent-by-choice straight couple truly married?
-What about a straight couple who engage in nothing but anal and oral sex?
-What about a straight couple both of whom had horrible accidents in which their entire genitals were removed, and they have the normal sex drives, and feel sexual towards each other, but never get to have sex?
-What about a straight couple in which the wife constantly fantasizes about being a gay man and having gay sex with the husband?
-What about a straight couple who are into some extremely kinky and non-standard fetish?
Is the difference between a straight couple and a gay couple really greater or more significant than the difference between a “normal” straight couple and any of the examples mentioned above?
To put it a different way, there are a lot of components that make up a marriage, among them love, commitment, cohabitation, raising of children, sex, financial and emotional interdependence, forming of a social and economic unit, etc. No two marriages have each of those components in precisely the same amounts. Some are missing one or more of them altogether. So I don’t understand why you take just one of those (the sex) and are so convinced that distinctions in only one characteristic of that component (not how often they have sex, or how passionate it is, but whether it’s straight or gay sex) is enough to immediately and instantly disqualify a relationship from being a marriage, even if it has all of the other components.
One last question: There are lots of words other than “marriage” which are generally used while discussing human relationships.
For instance:
-dating
-living together
-sex
-boyfriend
-girlfriend
-breakup
-love
-cheated on
-committed
-anniversary
-relationship
-romance
Couldn’t you take all of the arguments you make against gay marriage and use them to say that all of those words should have straight- and gay- versions? Doesn’t that seem a bit silly?
(For that matter, shouldn’t they also have a specific version to use when a woman is talking about a man and when a man is talking about a woman? I mean, surely when a woman says “I love my husband. I had sex with him yesterday”. She means something different than when a man says “I love my wife. I had sex with her yesterday”.)
(My point being that there are plenty of words that could, and perhaps should, have gender specific versions, which don’t. Why can’t “marriage” be one of them, particularly given that there isn’t an equivalent term for a committed and loving gay relationship, and given the great good and equality that would come from using the word “marriage” for gay couples?)
I don’t think it’s that cut and dried. Anytime the state passes a law, that law has to use words. And those words have meanings. And people will disagree over what those meanings are. If the state passes a law saying “people who walk more than 1 mile to work every day get a 2% tax break because they’re helping keep the air clean”, it’s using the word “walk”. What does that mean? What if you crawl to work? What if you are in a wheelchair and wheel yourself to work? What if you ride a bike? A skateboard? A segway? Should the government not pass that law becuase it’s afraid of getting entangled in big debates over the word “walk”?
There can be situations in which the government has to take words and make judgments about what precisely the boundaries and limits of those words are. That’s an unavoidable part of the having-laws-written-with-words process, and doesn’t mean that the government is trying to “redefine” those words (although of course abuses would be possible). In the above example, the government would have to decide that either wheelchair-wheeling did, or did not, count as “walking” for the purposes of that particular law. Either decision might be reasonable. Neither could really be described as the government “redefining” walking.
My point is, our code of laws is currently already heavily entangled with the word “marriage”. And that’s very unlikely to change anytime soon. But the question of “should the government extend its definition of marriage to cover same sex couples” is one that is frequently being debated, and if you attempt to opt out and say “well, I don’t think the government should be entangled with the word ‘marriage’ at all, I support civil unions”, then you’re effectively supporting the status quo, which means (particularly to people who feel, with some justification, that you’re denying them rights) that you’re effectively claiming that the government should, in fact, not extend that definition of marriage. So, you’d best prepare to be argued with as if that were your position. For someone to say “but civil unions are not on the table right now… do you support gay marriage?” is a perfectly reasonable, and likely, and relevant, and important question, not just some weird-ass precisely intellectual hypothetical.
