May I simply say that that was one of the finest long explorations of the different meanings of marriage I have ever seen, and I’m intensely jealous of your having made it. 
Weird Al: I’ve decided that my last post is a bit of a jumbled mess… it says some interesting things, but it’s not concise. And while picking up my lunch, I realized what the two most important issues are, so I will attempt to clearly and directly address only them. Feel free to respond to, or ignore, my previous post as you like.
Anyhow, your overall arguments rests on two premises with which I strongly disagree:
(1) A key and fundamental part of the word “marriage”, purely from a language/cultural/nonlegal sense, is that it involves two humans of opposite gender
(2) By (hypothetically) allowing gay marriage, the government is tampering with words and language
(let me know if you think I’m misrepresenting you there)
To address (1), I have two hypothetical situations. I apologize for the number of hyptheticals and analogies and so forth that I’ve used, but for whatever reason, that ends up being the easiest way to actually address this question.
(a) Suppose you overhear a conversation between two men. The first man is going on and on about someone named Pat who is clearly his lover… “I’m so in love with Pat… Pat is great in bed… Pat and I took a romantic vacation to France last year… Pat and I had a fight last night because I brought up when we might want to have kids”. The second man, at some point, asks “so, are you and Pat married?”. Do you think there’s even a snowball’s chance in hell that the information that the second man is trying to acquire here is whether Pat is a man or a woman?
(b) suppose humanity makes contact with a race of intelligent space-faring extraterrestrials (like I said, the situation is hypothetical). And suppose these extraterrestrials have a cultural institution in which two of them fall in love, have a ceremony solemnifying that love and committing themselves to each other for life, move in together, raise little baby aliens, and generally become a family. But these aliens do not have genders, or sex. (They reproduce by non-pleasurable state-controlled budding, or by having a Queen Alien, or by cloning, or something.) Would it be reasonable to describe their cultural institution as “marriage”?
As for (2), I’ve already mostly gone over this ground, but I’ll try to do so in as clear and direct a fashion as possible. The government currently establishes, maintains and defines an institution called “marriage”. This institution is not directly related to the religious insitution called “marriage” and the relational status called “marriage”, but it obviously has the same name, and many people like to join in one or more types of marriage at the same time.
Nonetheless, the purely legal sense of marriage (let’s call it LMarriage) is something that exists. It’s here. It’s important to many aspects of our life. It’s dealt with by international treaties. It’s not something that we can make vanish by snapping our fingers.
If the government changes something about how LMarriage works, that is not the same as redefining words in the language. At no point has anyone suggested that the government pass a law saying “when conversationally referring to gay couples, the word ‘marriage’ MUST be used” or “…CANNOT be used”. Language and usage will continue to develop on their own. But the government does have LMarriage sitting there, existing, affecting people’s lives. Should the government refuse to modify or enhance or redefine LMarriage in a way that allows it to do its job better, remove injustice and unfairness, and generally lead to more life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, simply because of the existence of ReligiousMarriage and RelationalMarriage, which happen to have the same name?
Indeed. The “Fuck you asshole!” dynamic so common to the Pit is not asserting itself here. I usually prefer to debate in GD, myself.
Very possibly I would drop my opposition. Though I would still be unhappy about the situation, as I would have been if the loss of the plural “you” had occurred during my lifetime. And I would still be in favor of what I am now, the seperation of marriage and state. It would be interesting to come back in 20 years and revisit this. I bet the SDMB will still be around…
Actually, in case #1, if you are talking about a couple that has never had sex, there is historical and societal precedent for not considering them really married: The idea that a marriage has to be consummated before it can be considered valid, and that if it is not, it can be annulled. How much of this idea survives in our current law, and where, I don’t know. Turning my attention to #3, I honestly wonder if that is physically possible.
But those are just quibbles. Yes, of course the difference between a straight couple and a gay couple is really greater and more significant than the difference between a “normal” straight couple and any of those examples. That is because of the key difference in the composition of genders. It all goes back to what I’ve said before: 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.
What was that list again? Of components that make up a marriage? “…love, commitment, cohabitation, raising of children, sex, financial and emotional interdependence, forming of a social and economic unit, etc.” Take another look at it. With the single exception of sex, a relationship including some or even all of those components could theoretically be had between any two people, of any genders, of whatever sexual orientations. Two straight men could have it. Or two straight women.
Yet of course the mere inclusion of sex does not a marriage make, either. Two people can (obviously) have sex and not be married. But you can see how uniquely important it is.
First off, I see the word “love” on that list. I actually think that a case could be made that we should break that word down into seperate ones, to reflect different meanings of the current word. I dimly remember from 11th grade English Lit that the Greeks had two words that transliterated to love, “eros” and “agape”. Those Greeks had a lot of good ideas.
Putting that aside, perhaps some of those words should have specificity built into them that isn’t currently. But I don’t folow your argument here at all. If the language is already in an undesirable state, that’s not a reason for making it even worse.
I mean, we’re able to get along without a plural of “you”. Does that mean we should eliminate “we” and just use “I” for either circumstance?
If the state needs to use a word like “walk”, in a law where there is any possible confusion that could affect the meaning of the law, there needs to be a subsection that reads something like: “For the purposes of this law, the word “walk” shall be understood to mean: (insert definition here).”
Now, in this hypothetical law you present, the state could redefine the word “walk” to include biking, skateboarding, etc. But that would be both inappropriate and unnecessary. The goal of the law is to help keep the air clean by reducing the use of gasoline-powered vehicles. So with just a little rewording, it could read something like, “people who use something other than a gasoline-powered vehicle to travel more than 1 mile to work every day get a 2% tax break because they’re helping keep the air clean”.
Similarly, the state could include same-sex relationships in its legal definition of the word “marriage”, in order to achieve the goal of having equal rights for opposite-sex and same-sex couples. But that isn’t necessary to achieve that goal.
NB: As a libertarian I am opposed to even the existence of an income tax, never mind special tax breaks for people who engage in government-approved behavior. This has nothing to do with our debate, but I just had to say it.
I was actually going to pass over it when I saw this, but then I read over it one more time and my addiction kicked in.
Ummmm…assuming that marriage is still defined as it is now, yeah. Why not? It rather depends on whether or not the two men know each other or not, I would think. I honestly can’t at all see the purpose of this hypothetical, except maybe to give me a mildly pleasant Saturday Night Live flashback…
I doubt it, but a hypothetical like this is very difficult to answer, as your talking about something completely outside the human experience.
No! No, no, no. The government does no such things. It certainly did not establish the institution of marriage; that existed since before recorded history. It didn’t create the definition; it took one that was already broadly agreed upon. In a sense you might say that it helps to maintain the institution, although since the advent of no-fault divorce that has greatly lessened.
Yes it is, and yes it is. I see we disagree on some very basic things. I’d try to present an argument here, but I’m not even sure what we’re talking about any more.
True. But there are no such laws now. Nor would there be if the government were to do something along the lines of what Vermont did, retaining the legal definition of “marriage” but creating a parallel category of civil unions for same-sex couples. If the state were to do that, and make these civil unions equal to marriages under the law, many people on this board would still be unsatisfied. I assume that would include you. Therefore, the issue of the way that the state defines the word “marriage” clearly is important to you (and them), even when divorced from such other issues as equality under the law, or how the language will develop outside of the government.
But all those good things could be achieved by doing what I have suggested, seperating marriage and state, or by going the Vermont route, modified to make the CUs equal to marriages under the law. Politically speaking, I think that last option is more likely to happen than what either of us want. So why are you so hung up on exactly how the government defines a word, divorced, as I said, from all other considerations?
The problem is that we don’t get along without a plural for “you”. In the South, they have “you all”, contracted to “y’all”. In the western Pennsylvania/eastern Ohio region, we have “you ones” contracted to “yinz”. In NJ, NYC and LI, you have “youse”.
No, they’re not considered great standard English. But by usage, they’re standard regional English. I can tell you, about yinz anyway, that it’s not like we’re running around trying to make a joke with it. It’s absolutely natural around here, comes out of the mouth like as standard a word as exists.
Even if the word marriage isn’t ever used officially to refer to same-sex commitments, it WILL be used unofficially. By everybody involved. Ten years after “civil unions” are legally allowed, everyone will be calling them marriages anyway, so what’s the fight?
No, you still have to demonstrate that those differences are essential to the nature of the relationship. Merely saying “But they’re different!” doesn’t help.
Personally, I tend towards the opinion that people are different in fundamental ways, but that doesn’t mean that every instance of marriage gets its own word. My relationship with my husband is fundamentally different from my relationship with my mate, because they are two different people; however, the relationship type – spousal – is the same.
My friendships with men and friendships with women do not sort into different boxes; they’re all the same basic type. My professional relationships do not in any way depend on gender. And so on. I have left organisations and social systems in which I was expected to treat people as genitalia first, people second; I find the concept ugly. (Also, the only argument about “the essential difference between men and women” I’ve ever encountered that did not file me incorrectly is possession of a penis, which strikes me as only relevant for functions that require one; it also incorrectly flags most of the transfolk I know and gets glitchy around intersexuality.)
And I still find the obsession with the genitalia of the participants in a marriage to be shockingly crude. The only people who have any legitimate interest in the contents of my underwear are my partners and my doctors; thank the gods my marriage was registered in Massachusetts, which no longer has a creepy junior-high-school interest in whether I have an innie or an outie.
Except that, at least south of the St. Lawrence and the 48th parallel, they’re not equal. Not only are civil unions at the discretion of the individual state, but they’re not portable – you cannot force a state to recognize another state’s civil unions. And the Federal government will not recognize same-sex unions legitimated under the laws of any state for the purposes of Federal law, including taxation.
So you can build a hypothetical play-castle in which responsible, decent people respect the wishes of others all you want to, but in the real, practical world, separate but equal isn’t ((c) 2001 andygirl).
Go back again and look at what I said to MaxTheVool. Look at that list he gave, of ingredients for a marriage. All the things on that list except sex could be had in a relationship betwwen two people who are not married, who are not even sexually attracted to each other, who are even having sex with someone else. Not everyone who has sex is married, and not everyone who is married has sex, but there is a very high correlation between the two. And there is a very high correlation between sex and gender. Very few people want to marry, or have sex with, a “person”. The overwhelming majority of us want to be with someone of one specific gender…someone with a particular type of genital equipment, as you would put it…and not the other.
I went over this stuff at length in those GD threads.
Heh. Obsession with other people’s genitalia makes the world go 'round. Were it not for obsession with other people’s genitalia, the human race would be, as Mark Twain put it, mighty scarce. If you’re shocked, my advice is: Get over it.
But, in all seriousness, I am interested in what is going on in Massachusetts. Tell me: Has their admirable attempt to get over their creepy obsession about what is in people’s pants come to include their administration of the prison system? Last I heard, they segregated people within this system going by nothing more than what kind of genital equipment they had. Shocking, isn’t it? Claiming their men’s and women’s prisons were “seperate but equal” when we all know that’s a load of bollocks.
Not to mention, I noticed not too long ago, while reading a major newspaper from the great state of Massachusetts, that they had divided up the “Personals” section by…you guessed it…people’s genital equipment. How terrible! All those listings under “men seeking women” and “women seeking men”, smaller sections for “men seeking men” and “women seeking women”. I didn’t even see a section labelled “persons seeking persons”. All those people obsessed about other people’s genital equipment. And this newspaper was just catering to it. Shamelessly. Openly.
Perhaps an angry letter to the editor is in order…
It seems to me that you are avoiding addressing the questions I ask by shifting back and forth between hypotheticals and the real world whenever it suits you. Let me put this to you directly: If, hypothetically…hypothetically…the system I advocate were in place, in all 50 states and at the federal level, with marriage and state seperated with both gay and straight unions sanctioned by the state as “civil unions” with no mention of marriage, would you then be satisfied? If not, why not?
Second question: If, again hypothetically, we had the modified Vermont system I mentioned, with marriages and civil unions equal under the law, in all 50 states and at the federal level, would you then be satisfied? If not, why not? And please, no assertions without proof about how “seperate but equal isn’t”. Explain why “seperate but equal” is inherently wrong in all circumstances, or why it is wrong in this particular circumstance but not others.
And, if you want to talk about “hypothetical play-castles”, do you dispute my assertion to MaxTheVool that this modified Vermont system is a politically more realistic goal than what either of us want?
I would accept this with poor grace – it’s pretty close to the present French system, save for the acceptance of gay unions, which I don’t believe France has in place yet. I presume that, under the WAE Plan, one is required to take action to put what one has been licensed to do into place, i.e., the civil union equivalent of a civil marriage – and that for those who desired a religious marriage ceremony, the taking of equivalent vows before a clergyman and congregation would not satisfy the civil marriage requirement.
But my point is that my RMarriage is also a LMarriage and a CMarriage – using the handy code devised by Max the Vool above – and I see no particular reason why I and my wife need to separate the elements of it. A gay couple right now is able to institute a CMarriage, and if they so desire there are churches which will make it an RMarriage – the underlying issue in all these arguments is whether or not they may also constitute it an LMarriage. I see no reason why they should not be able to do so. I see reasons why people of a particular mindset towards RMarriage might not consider them as married at all – but I see no reason why those people’s points of view should be the basis for the making of public policy.
If this totally hypothetical scenario were in fact put in place, it would be acceptable though not satisfactory to me. But I’m not the one impacted by it – that question is best asked of the gay members here. Is there a particular reason why one must distinguish between man-woman marriages and same-sex civil unions? And, of course, this is in fact a scenario that calls for rainbows and bluebirds and reasonable men and women – Bricker notes, IIRC in the GD thread, and denounces, the Commonwealth of Virginia statute that forbids civil unions – or, more accurately, forbids the courts and bureaucracy to give any legal effect to civil unions. Note that the Louisiana state constitutional amendment that instigated this whole argument forbade both gay marriages and gay civil unions, and that numerous states have attempted to do likewise, some successfully and some not.
My assertion that “separate but equal isn’t” relates to the real world as we know it – while it might have theoretically been possible, and even instituted in a few places, to have a dual school system where whites and blacks received equal resources and a comparable education, in point of fact the blacks almost universally got the short end of the stick. If you’re ever down around here, I’ll take you over to G. W. Carver Elementary School, which still stands, boarded up, on the outskirts of Wendell NC – after integration of the Wake County system, it was used up until a couple of years ago as a facility for special-needs children. And it’s a pretty pathetic structure compared to the white school at the other end of town. Likewise, in the absence of universally-valid legislation, which I almost think would have to be a Federal constitutional amendment, mandating that civil unions be available to gay couples everywhere and recognized everywhere as the precise equivalent of marriage, they would not be equal – because any given jurisdiction could refuse to recognize them as equivalent.
Yes. For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the idea is either not an important issue, or is an issue because they misconstrue it as demeaning what marriage means to them. I concede that recent polls suggest that a majority would disapprove gay marriages and that a majority would consent to gay civil unions – but those figures are national numbers. And what we’re talking about here is something universal for 50 states, D.C., P.R., the territories, and the federal government – one objector in there, and it doesn’t fly.
So? Are you going to say that a woman who’s only interested in men should have a different word for her desired relationship than a man who’s only interested in women? And that men who are interested in men get the word for ‘interested in a relationship with a man’ and women who are interested in women get the word for ‘interested in relationship with a woman’?
That is the only way your position can be consistent.
And that’s ignoring the existence of those bisexuals who are interested in relationships with people they find attractive. Do they not get to use with-a-man-marriage or with-a-woman-marriage because they’re just interested in some form of marriage? Do they get to use the ungendered word?
Whether or not you (or anyone else) is only attracted to people of a specific sex is irrelevant to whether or not the word for a marital relationship is gendered. The word is describing the relationship type, the thing aspired to: a romantic relationship of a familial type, formally established.
Someone who says “I’m not interested in marriage” is saying that they’re not interested in formally establishing a romantic relationship of a familial type. They are not saying that they wouldn’t form that relationship with a person-with-different-genitalia but would be willing to have one with a person-of-same-genitalia; they’re decrying interest in the entire concept of formally settling down.
Not shocked. Disgusted. The idea that someone would judge the legitimacy of my relationships by counting cunts and cocks rather than looking at the nature of the relationship is vile.
When people freely and consensually seek out incarceration in specific institutions, I am sure that it will be deemed to be illegal in Massachusetts for the state to discriminate on whether or not they can achieve that status and location on the basis of sex. We do have an ERA here.
Until that point, I suspect that the Commonwealth will argue that it’s not attempting to provide “equal” institutions, but rather addressing matters of administrative efficiency. If you wish to argue that point, you will have to find someone to argue with to whom it is germaine. (An argument from administrative efficiency, incidentally, would reject both the idea of simultaneous marriage and civil union status and the downgrading of all marriages into civil unions.)
Clever straw man.
Fancy. People who are seeking partners, explicitly mentioned as those people who have a legitimate interest in the contents of their underwear, are going through that legitimate interest, as private individuals. How horrible that people with a legitimate private interest are going about their business without state interference.
Now, if your logic were applied here, those people who are looking for same-sex relationships should be forbidden from using the word “seeking” by the state’s prurient interest in their genitalia.
So, just to be sure we’re clear here, part of what you object to is not that the government is “redefining the word marriage”, but that it’s “redefining the word marriage” in a way that is not in alignment with the way the word is popularly used. Correct?
So for you, at least for this aspect of this discussion, it’s not a question of right and wrong, it’s just a question of the government immediately implementing the will of the majority?
True, although I also don’t know how relevant that is today. And in any case, I don’t know if that applies to a couple who are happy with each other, as opposed to a couple where one partner is disatisfied (presumably due to the lack of sex) and then uses the lack of sex as an excuse to get an annulment.
So, let me ask you point blank: you meet a couple who is exactly 100% what you think of as “married”, in every possibly way, except that when they go to bed together, kiss each other, and curl up together snugglishly, they then always fall asleep instead of having sex of any sort. Oh, and they refer to themselves as “married”. Are they lying? Would you feel uncomfortable using the word “married” to refer to them, as you would if they were a same-sex couple?
Well, and I type this from a protective hunched over position, guys can get castrated. And I’m sure that women can have bad enough accidents, particularly involving cliterodectomies (if that’s the right word), as to render them effectively unable to have sex of any sort. So, again, straight up, you meet such a couple. Are they “married”?
I’ve previously more or less accepted this statement without comment, as there’s obviously at least some level on which it’s true, but I really think you’re giving it far more weight than it really deserves, and it’s far more central to your argument than it really deserves to be. So, tell me, what are the fundamental differences you’re thinking of? Are you talking just about the sex, and the varieties of sex, so that for you, a straight couple who had only anal and oral sex would be just like a gay couple? Or are you talking about other things? And if so what?
Actually, no, I can’t. I’d say that the “magic ingredient”, if there is one, is Romantic Love (as opposed to familial love, or any other variety of love). If two people are good friends, care deeply about each other, live together, raise children, and have lots of good sex, but don’t actually RomanticalylLove each other, then I’d say their marriage is a lot faker than two people who do RomanticallyLove each other, but never have sex (for whatever reason).
Well, maybe. We’ve been focusing much of this argument on the downsides, both linguistic and legalistic, of gay marriage. (Which you obviously think are much greater than I do.) What we haven’t really discussed is the upside of legally and linguistically sanctioned gay marriage, which (in a nutshell) is Equality. So even if I agreed with every last word of every one of your comments about word usage, meanings being corrupted, second person plurals, etc., I still might be in favor of gay marriage, because I think that Equality is so important, and as you yourself have conceded, the whole language issue isn’t fundamentally earth-shattering. (Ahh, but what about achieving that equality through civil unions instead of marriages? I’ll get to that later in this post.)
Remember, you were responding here to my response to a very specific part of one of your posts, namely, where you said "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 was just trying to point out that it’s almost impossible to write laws without using words, and it’s almost impossible to use words without necessitatnig clearer and preciser definitions than are needed in non-legal context, and that can be viewed as “redefining”.
Ahh, if you don’t understand what I’m getting at here, then we’ve come to a Crucial Point of Miscommunication. Basically, (and I expect that if I were a linguist or philosopher, I’d know of a precise set of words to use to communicate these concepts) when one thinks about what it is that a word really means, there are some parts of what it means that are crucial, fundamental and underlying. There are other parts which are often associated with that word, but are not fundamental.
Let’s take, as an examlpe, the word “door”. I’d say that if I told most people “draw a door”, they would draw a human-sized thing between two rooms in a building for humans, with hinges on one side and a knob on the other. However, some parts of that are truly crucial to the concept of “door”, and others are merely supporting details.
I claim that for “door”, the absolutely crucial underlying property that makes something a door is that it’s something which can be opened or closed to block or unblock a passage of some sort. Sure, many doors are human-sized. Many are between rooms. Many have hinges. Many have knobs. Collectively, all of those secondary details, put together, combine to form the generic-most-common-door-image that I mentioned above, but they are not essential.
A sliding door is definitely a door.
A garage door is definitely a door.
A magical door-to-another-world from a fantasy novel obviously doesn’t exist, but most people would agree that the use of the word “door” there is reasonable
A doggy door is still a door.
If someone asks you “so, does your kitchen have a door”, they’re not interested in how many knobs and hinges your kitchen has. If someone says “man, we really ought to install a door there”, they don’t necessarily mean that it MUST have hinges and a knob.
A useful test of what parts of a word’s meaning are fundamental is what kinds of adjectives/phrases you can stick in front of it and still have it make sense. If someone argued that hinges-and-pivoting were fundamental to the meaning of the word “door”, you could ask them whether the phrase “sliding door” made sense, conveyed meaning, etc. However, a “non-openable-door” or a “has-no-distinction-between-open-and-closed door” would make much less sense.
I claim, and you may disagree with me here, that the fundamental meaning of the word “marriage” (at least when referring to purely relational marriage, not legal or religious marriage) has more to do with love and commitment than it does with the gender of the participants. Think about it this way: the phrase “gay marriage” obviously makes sense. You know what I’m talking about. It’s a natural extension of the word “marriage”. Whereas, “uncommitted, unloving marriage” clearly is referring to something that is a legal or religious marriage only, not a true relational marriage.
Thus, when you here someone ask “so, are you guys married”, it seems crystal clear to me that the information being requested is the level of love and commitment in a relationship, not the gender of the participants. And, thanks to lilairen for this excellent example, if someone says “I don’t feel ready for marriage”, they mean that they’re not ready for that level of commitment and love, not that they don’t yet feel sufficiently heterosexual.
This is also why I brought up the hypothetical example of aliens and whether their relationships could be considered “marriages”. If they could, then it’s clear that gender and even humanity aren’t fundamental to the word “marriage”. So if you’re reading a sci fi novel about aliens, and it uses the word “marriage”, and your honest reaction is “hang on, that makes no sense, that’s a misuse of the word, one might as well talk about a door that can’t open or close” then I guess you honestly have a different opinion about what the word “marriage” really means than I do. If, on the other hand, the concept of an alien marriage is one whcih you immediately recognize and accept (for the purposes of that story), then I suggest that you might agree with me more than you think you do.
I’m talking only about the legal institution of marriage here, which, being a legal institution, was created by the government. It’s entirely possible that the founding fathers could have decided early on that no level of government in the US would ever have anything to do with marriage, civil unions, or anything of that sort. If they had, churches would still perform weddings, and people would still refer to themselves as “married”.
Go back to my post #460 and reread the part about the three different types of marriage. Legal Marriage, as sanctioned by the government, often (ideally) coincides with relational marriage and religious marriage. But they are NOT fundamentally related to each other. Any of the three can exist without the rest of the three.
My point here (I believe) is that the purely legal aspect of marriage, divorced from religious and emotional meaning, is already something that is defined, created and maintained entirely by the government. Now, that definition might have been chosen by the people who first wrote it into law to coincide as closely as possible with their conception of religious or relational marriage. But it’s a separate entity, nonetheless. And if the government redefines it, that in no way impacts religious or relational marriage.
And I claim that the government has the responsibility to make sure that its definition of marriage is as fair and just as possible, and if it needs to redefine things to do so, that is NOT in any way interfering with, or redefining, religious or relational marriage.
Again, this situation is slightly more complicated than you’re letting on. Suppose that true equality under law were achieved, and in every square inch of US territory, gay civil unions were allowed and provided precisely the same rights as straight marriages. Would I be satisfied? Well, first of all, that would be a HUGE step up from what we have right now. But there are two issues I have with it:
(1) It’s kind of silly. So Adam and Steve went to a church, had a marriage ceremony performed, refer to each other as “married”, have all the same rights as a straight married couple, and yet have to remember to check a different box on legal forms? Isn’t that a bit pointless? Wouldn’t it be easier to just go ahead and use the word “marriage” in legal settings, since it would have precisely the same meaning, and would already be used in relational and religious settings?
(2) There’s still some lingering inequality. The word “marriage” is a powerful one with a lot of history and meaning behind it. Merely using that word is something of value which, if we deny it to gay people, or even if we just don’t sanction their use of it in certain contexts, we’re sending a message of unacceptance. This isn’t something which could never change. If we started calling gay marriages “snarfblats”, then several hundred years from now, the word “snarfblat” might eventually be as accepted, as fraught with meaning, and as powerful as “marriage”. But right now, it is not.
See the last 3 paragraphs of post #87 in this thread for an analogy concerning the word “parent”. Sure, there’s no logical reason why adoptive parents should be allowed to use the word “parent”. But there’s certainly an emotional reason why they would want to.
Well…all right, then. No law against “poor grace”…
Not sure what that means…
I note here how you shift from the present tense to the past…
…because it seems the one example you have to support the assertion that “separate but equal isn’t” is the Jim Crow system of racial segregation, from 40 years in the past. I note with interest that you do not try to address any example of “separate but equal” from the present. Like my example of the prison system being segregated by gender. How does the principle that “separate but equal isn’t” fit in there?
I find it interesting here that the only evidence you cite supports my position, in opposition to yours. Do you really consider yourself that good at reading people’s hearts and minds? How many of those seventy-something percent of Louisianans(sp?) who voted for that amendment do you know personally?
If you ever decide to climb down off your high horse, let me know. I have a nice tall ladder you can use.
You’ll need it.
Whoa. Let me get this straight. “Seperate but equal” is ok in situations where people don’t have a choice? I don’t see the logic there at all.
If Massachusetts announced tomorrow that it would henceforth send all its black prisoners to prisons seperate from, but equal to, those for white inmates, the time between the announcement and the filing of the first civil rights lawsuit you could time with a stopwatch.
Ahhh, now I see. Discrimination is justified by “administrative efficiency”.
Wait…no I don’t…
Things like this lead me to believe that you’re not paying attention here. I have said explicitly, a number of times in this thread alone, that I do not think the state should have that kind of power.
But those two things are, if not identical, highly correlated. How else does a word get a definition, than by being used popularly in a certain way?
I don’t understand the question. I’m not asking for the government to take a vote on word definitions, if that’s what you mean.
It depends. To paraphrase a line from one of my favorite films, you have to think four-dimensionally, ie. include the passage of time. Are we talking about a couple that used to have sex, but no longer does? If so, then I’d still call it a marriage. It’s normal for the sex drive to wane as we get older. I consider myself a heterosexual. I still will even when I am very old and no longer actually feel sexual urges.
If, on the other hand, we’re talking about a couple that has never had sex, then yes, I’d be uncomfortable calling it a marriage. Of course, for that discomfort to manifest, the couple would actually have to tell me that they’re not having sex, which would itself most likely cause me to be uncomfortable.
Same answer as above in theory, though in practice I actually can’t imagine an accident that would leave someone alive, conscious, and effectively unable to have sex of any sort. Even a guy who’s been castrated can perform oral sex.
To paraphrase myself again, the differences are those differences that cause an overwhelming majority of us to seek out a relationship with one particular gender, to the exclusion of the other, no matter how many good qualities, no matter how otherwise “marriageable”, a member of the gender we don’t want may be.
You tell me what that is.
I would never ask anyone to define “love”, but since you put so much stock in it, please tell me what is your definition of “romantic love”.
The issue of redefining this one word isn’t “earth-shattering”. The broader issue of whether or not the state should be able to redefine words by decree that have an existence outside of it arguably is.
I was just about to say that. You read my mind…
No. Defining a word, for the purposes of a law, to have a meaning that is a subset of its real world meaning, is not the same as redefining it to have a meaning that it has not had before. Surely you can see the difference.
I read your door analogy. I’m not going to quote it, to save space.
I would know what you’re talking about, more or less, in the same sense I would know what you were talking about if you referred to a “four-dimensional cube” (talking about a fourth physical dimension now, not time), even though that is a contradiction in terms, which is why the word “tesseract” got invented. But for you to claim that “gay marriage” obviously makes sense, that it’s a natural extension of the word “marriage”, presupposes that you’ve already won the debate we’re having.
Go back to your door analogy. You seem to be saying that a sliding door and a hinged door are still a door, and so a same-sex marriage and an opposite sex marriage are still a marriage. But the validity of the analogy depends on the observed facts. Do people typically consider the issue of the type of doors they have in their homes, hinged vs sliding, to be at the same level of importance as the type of gender they have romantic relationships with, male vs female? I submit that the answer is no. I myself would agree to have any manner of door in my home, or no doors at all, before I would have such a relationship with a man.
Are you a gender reductionist like Lilairen, who appears to think that gender can be reduced to nothing more than “equipment type”, “innie vs outie”, hinged vs sliding?
We simply disagree here. I do not see how the fact that any one or two of these can potentially exist without the other one or two logically leads to the conclusion that they have no relation to each other.
Assuming this is true, then why are you, and people on your side of the debate, so eager to have the government define marriage your way? If, as you say, the way the state defines marriage has no impact on religious or relational marriage, why are you unwilling to settle for any of the alternative methods of achieving legal equality, either the seperation of marriage and state, or a modified Vermont system? Ah yes, you said you’d get to it…
So? We already have all kinds of silliness in our laws. What’s a little more?
In the first place, doesn’t this conflict with what you said before, about how the way the state defines the word “marriage” for legal purposes has no impact on relational or religious marriages?
In the second place, I am deeply dubious about changing laws based on appeals to emotion, which is basically what this is. You seem to want to use the law as a therapeutic tool, to make people feel better about themselves, because they suffer from low self-esteem, the poor dears. If nothing else, isn’t this condescending?
Yes, emotional reasons. More appeal to emotions. Not to mention, I do believe the trend in government is towards neutral-sounding phrases like “primary caregiver”. I haven’t heard of any adoptive parents complaining about a “message of unnacceptance”. As long as the underlying legal reality is the same, they don’t care. As well they shouldn’t.
What practical purpose would be served by doing that?
Separation of the sexes in the prisons exists, as far as I can tell, because many, perhaps most, people will get wound up about male/female rape situations in the prisons, but not about same-sex rape situations and warden/inmate rape situations. By doing so, the thing that some people are squeamish about is prevented, and only the abuses that people don’t get wound up about happen.
(On the non-pejorative level, it also lets what sex-specific medical care needs to be done to handled with most efficiency by not needing to have it at all prisons, and significantly reduces the need to worry about infants born in prison environments. I don’t tend to believe that these are the actual practical reasons for sex segregation in the prisons, because I don’t have that much faith in people.)
If you’re so engaged with reading comprehension, why did you bring up the specious newspaper ad article in the first place? It’s not like it isn’t patently obvious that personals ads are for seeking partners.
If you’re so uninterested in state power to restrictively define the legitimacy of relationships, why so much resentment for the state choosing to bow out and allow any couple that meets its other requirements to use the term for legitimate relationship?
Any given individual will have their own preferences for who they will accept as a marriage partner; the evidence of my life suggests that I’m only interested in engineers. That I only consider engineers for marriage partners does not mean that engineering is intrinsic to the definition of my spousal relationships and something that should be generalised to all marriages; it’s a subjective personal preference, not a law of nature or government.
The preferences of individuals are not relevant to what marriage, the legal term, is; the fact that I prefer engineers, that person over there prefers redheads, that one there won’t partner with someone shorter, and so-and-so prefers women does not change that the type of relationship they are all seeking the same basic kind of relationship. They have differing additional preferences, but those are all in addition to the basic “a person with whom I can have a long-term relationship serving as the foundation of a family”. Marriage accomodates engineer-seekers, redhead-preferrers, heightists, and people who are attracted to women just as well as it accomodates journalist-seekers, blonde-preferrers, weightists, and people who are attracted to men.
“Marriage” is the word for a socially legitimate relationship contracted according to the forms that make it accepted as a part of the community (that is what its Max’s door-nature seems to me to be). The effects of denying it to some relationships on the basis of the subjective personal preferences within those relationships are: to declare that those relationships are not socially legitimate, to prevent those relationships from gaining community acceptance, and to divide the community (and potentially, if the situation persists, destroy marriage itself). (I do mean that; I’ve been berated for getting married by people who think the entire social ritual has been irrevocably corrupted because it enshrines subjectivity. I have encountered far more of those people than people who have gotten divorced because the lack of their subjective preferences enshrined in law has ruined their standing.)
(Feel free to take all the invective and anger that has been lacking from the actual substance of this discussion and direct it towards the lack of automatic quoting-of-quotes… GRRRR!)
In that case, we may just disagree, as I would, without hesitation, call such a relationship a marriage, even if they had married at the age of 17 and lived to the age of 80 without ever having sex. I mean, some people have much lower sex drives than others. Does that make their marriage less real?
Well, at least we’ve clearly identified another point of disagreement… So you’re saying that the way a gay man commitedly-romantically relates to another gay man is so different from the way a straight man commitedly-romantically relates to a straight woman that we should use different words to describe those relationships, and your argument for that difference in relationship is that the gay men would not want to/be able to similarly relate to either of the straight people, and vice versa.
But I don’t see why the fact that the relationships are not interchangable means that they are not describable with the same word. For instance, human mothers nurse their young, via a process in which the baby sucks milk out of the mother’s breast. Now, in blue whales, there’s also a process in which the baby sucks milk out of the mother’s breast. By your argument, we should not use the word “nurse” for that process, because a baby human couldn’t suck milk from a mommy blue whale, and a baby blue whale couldn’t suck milk from a mommy human.
Actually, there are many such words… for instance, “family” and “child” and “parent”. Humans are very different from whales. And you, personally, would feel a strong feeling of aversion towards having a blue whale as your child, your parent, or a member of your family. But it makes perfect sense to use the word “family” to describe whale groupings, in contexts such as “hey, did you see that family of whales that just swam by”.
Why should we come up with a new word for the concept of “marriage” when it is entered into by people who relate to each other, but who you yourself would not want to so relate to, when we don’t have a new word for the concept of “family” when it is entered into by whales? And if your response is “but we could have a new word for that group of whales”, then we’d end up with a zillion words for different types of families, one for each species of animal, not to mention one for each different type of human family. It makes language MORE elegant and powerful to have a word like “family” cover a wider variety of similar things, with modifiers to specify “human family” or “whale family” or “nuclear family” when necessary. Similarly, I claim the English language would be BETTER if the word “marriage” could be applied more broadly, with modifiers like “straight marriage”, “gay marriage” and “small fuzzy creature from Alpha Centauri marriage” used when necessary to avoid confusion.
I’ll answer your very reasonable request the day after I make the statement that the government should only use the word “marriage” to apply to relationships which include romantic love.
Arguable. As it is also arguable whether extending marriage to cover gay marraiges is “redefining”. If one accepts my argument about fundamental meanings and sliding doors (which one doesn’t have to accept, although I’d hope that it’s at least internally consistent), then the word “marriage” already, in its base nature, could cover gay couples. Allowing government-sanctioned gay marriage would then be no more “redefining” the word than if the DoD clarified some of it’s specifications for how its military bases could be built to ensure that when it talked about “doors” it meant “doors with hinges” OR “sliding doors”.
See above. A meaning that “marriage” did not have before would be “a type of cheese” or “three spinster sisters living together with no romantic love or sex”. If one believes that the fundamental MEANING of marriage is something like “a committed romantic relationship between two adult humans” then allowing gay marriage is not giving it a meaning it never had before, it’s just granting everyone equal freedom to marry as they see fit.
And yet, if someone talks about a “four-dimensional cube” or a “hypercube”, it’s quite clear what they are talking about. No meaning is lost. Only if there’s a context in which someone spends a lot of time interacting with both 3-d and 4-d cubes, and needs to be able to immediately indicate which is which through language, is there a point to restricting the word “cube” to refer to just 3 dimensions. Which I guess gets back to a Fundamental Disagreement we have, which is whether it’s important to be able to immediately differentiate straight marriages from gay marriages by the very word that is used to describe them.
(Also, there’s one important place where, to me, your analogy fails, which is that I believe that 3-dimensionality is much closer to being part of the Fundamental Meaning of the word “cube” than heterosexuality is to being part of the Fundamental Meaning of the word “marriage”, although, as I’ve said, that’s not something I can prove.)
I see what you’re getting at. I don’t think it presupposes that I’ve won the debate, rather, I think it’s dependent on the definition of the word marriage that I think is correct/useful/good, which is something I can explain and argue for, but not prove. Although I will continue to argue for it.
Suppose you had grown up in a society where every single person was straight, and you’d never heard of the concept of homosexuality. I mean, it would never even cross your MIND. You wouldn’t be offended by a guy coming on to you, because it would be so bafflingly outside your range of experience.
Then suppose that anthropologists discovered a new island on which homosexuality was rampant, and they came back and published a paper about it (without mentioning anything about marriage, one way or the other), and you read it, and were like “wow, the concept of ‘gay’ people is SO weird. Man. That’s just odd.”
Then one day, you turn on the TV, and you see a news reporter saying “Further study on the island of Queenland has revealed that not only do some people there engage in the practice of being ‘gay’, but that they actually have ‘gay’ marriages!!!”. Would your response be " ‘Gay Marriages’? I have no idea what those two words would mean together… it’s like he just said ‘Aggressive rice’ or ‘talkative eighteen’ " or would it be “Man. Gay marriages. I instantly grasp the idea of what he’s talking about, but… how WEIRD.”
Ahh, but when you’re selecting a spouse, you’re not selecting a “marriage”, your selecting the being with whom you want to join together to form a marriage. You yourself are already half the marriage, and you’re trying to find the other half. The fact that some partners fit your requirements and others don’t doesn’t make your relationship different from that of other people with different requirements.
If you’re a person building a house, you might just want a door, valuing sliding and hinged doors equally. To you, all doors are equally preferable.
But if you’re a doorframe with hinges on one side and a little plate for the latch on the other side, you want to be matched up only with a hinged door, not a sliding door. To you, some doors are VASTLY more preferable than others. That doesn’t make you (combined with the door that fits into you) any more or less of a door than a sliding door somewhere else in the house.
Similarly, if NASA wanted to send a spaceship to mars, and decided that, because it was going to involve two people cramped into a tiny steel cylinder for 4 months, a married couple would be the best choice, they shouldn’t care whether they got a straight married couple or a gay married couple. (I mean, obviously, politically, they WOULD, but they shouldn’t.) They would just say “hey, we need a marriage”, much as you, as a person building a house, say “hey, I need a door”.
I’m not quite sure what you mean here. Let’s put it this way: I’m 100% certain that, barring some absolutely preposterously weird or unlikely circumstance, the best tennis player in the world will ALWAYS be a man. However, I am quite convinced that men and women should have the same rights and responsibilities, legally. Similarly, I believe that gay and straight marriages should have the same rights and responsibilities, legally. I’ve somewhat lost track of the point, however.
So… what is the relationship, aside from the fact that many people get them all done at the same time? Actually, I think the fact that the word “married” can mean any or all of “legally married” (“we went to Vegas, got drunk, and now we’re MARRIED, dude”), religiously married (“he and I had an arranged marriage when we were four”) or relationally married (“after we’d been stranded on the desert island for 5 years, we married each other”) is FAR more of an abuse of its meaning, and far more likely to lead to meaningful lapses in communication, than potentially extending the word to cover both gay and straight couples.
Well, what if the Bill of Rights said something like this:
(1) Congress shall make no law restricting the right of men to freely assemble, speak, and practice religion. This shall be known as the right of Freedom of Expressoin.
(2) Congress shall make no law restricting the right of women to freely assemble, speak, and practice religion. This shall be known as the right of prattling on.
I mean, that’s perfectly equal. There’s nothing really WRONG with that, right?
Touche. I admit that my previous claim that there was ZERO relation between the different definitions was an overstatement. They’re not inextricably linked, certainly, but if legal gay marriage existed, that would lead (directly or indirectly) to greater societal acceptance for relational and religious gay marraige, imho.
It might be condescending if there were already a totally equal marriage/civil union system, which everyone was used to, and the straight people had their marriages, and the gay people had their civil unions, and everyone was basically happy, and then here comes me, Mr. Straight Boy saying “damnit, gay people, you CLAIM that you’re happy, but you won’t really be happy until you get behind My Pet Cause, namely being allowed to use the word ‘marriage’, which you have never asked for” or something like that.
As for the more important issue (changing laws based on appeals to emotion), that’s not inherently ridiculous. For instance, suppose there were a law which specified a military regulation that the flag at a military funeral shoudl always be given to the mother of the soldier, and someone proposed changing that to allow the flag to be given to the grieving widow. That’s obviously not a law that really matters in any sense other than the emotional, but that’s no reason not to pass it. Or to use a more outlandish example, suppose that the wording of the 15th amendment said something like “no citizen of the US shall be denied the right to vote just because he’s a darkie”. Now, clealry, there’s no REAL reason to change that, as it provides full equality. But I would certainly support an effort to reword that amendment.
If the word “marriage” were never used by the government, and civil unions were available equally to gay and straight couples, I’d be perfectly happy. But a situation in which straight couples could get “married” and gay couples could get “civil unioned”, even if the legal status was precisely equivalent, would be a distinct step less desireable.
So, to use your example, it’s fine if all parents (adoptive and biological) are referred to as “primary caregivers”, but if biological parents are referred to as “parents” but adoptive parents are referred to as “primary caregivers”, then I see that as a problem, even if the legal status is identical.
I apologize for my delay in responding. Inescapable obligations in the real world have been limiting the time I can devote to cyberspace.
So…that’s what excuses discrimination?
So…desire for efficiency excuses segregation?
That is precisely what I want. Now I really don’t think you’ve been reading my posts…
We all have our subjective preferences for the qualities we will be looking for in a life partner. But nothing, and I do mean nothing, is as universal as the desire for that partner to be of a specific gender. That desire is common the overwhelming majority of human beings, rendering it different in kind than preferences for blondes, engineers, etc.
Ahhh, something on which we can agree. Passionately, even. The person responsible for that should be darned to the dimmest pits of Heck.
There’s a difference between low sex drive and no sex drive; I’m no MD, but I’m pretty sure that having no sex drive whatsoever is a pretty good indicator that there is something physically wrong with you. That said, though, I guess we do just disagree.
No. In the first place, a gay man can be attracted to , and want a relationship with, a straight man. A straight man can consider a lesbian to be beautiful. I know that’s true from personal experience. A straight woman could have a crush on etc etc you get the idea. The interest just wouldn’t be returned.
In the second place, the difference is not about how people relate to each other. It’s about who they are. Refer to me collectively along with another man, the word you use is “men”, not because of how we relate to each other, or other people, but because of who we are. Same for the word “women”. And same for the word “marriage”. Same for whatever word we come up with, if we ever do, for an analogous same-sex pairing.
In the first place, to be nit-picky, inter-species nursing can happen. I recall seeing something on tv once about a momma dog nursing a baby pig, or something like that. Not to mention that humans drink cow milk all the time.
In the second place, if you had a word that referred, collectively, to a mother dog and her nursing puppy, it would be innappropriate to use that word to refer, collectively, to a momma dog and a baby pig, even if she is nursing the pig. The word “nurse” itself, however, is a word, a verb, coined to describe an action taken by many different species. It was never intended to be species-specific. Neither was the word “walk”, so it is appropriate to use that with a dog as well as a man. Nor is the word “walk” gender-specific…a man can walk, a woman can walk, two men can be walking together, or two women, or whatever combination.
The word “marriage” is, I believe, the only word we have that describes the exact combination of one man and one woman. Such is its uniqueness, another reason it ought to be preserved.
The above would appear to be true, as an if-then statement. I just disagree with what comes after the “if”.
Another true if-then statement. But again, it’s what comes after the “if” that is a sticking point. Words, ultimately, mean what people think they mean. The thing is, you need to have a large body of people in common agreement about a word’s meaning. Evidence that any sizable number of people, anywhere or any time in human history until very recently, has ever used a single word for both formally recognized same-sex unions and formally recognized opposite-sex unions is thin on the ground. Thus, I am skeptical of the idea that the meaning of the word “marriage” has always included same-sex relationships.
And yet a new word was invented. Because a four-dimensional figure is not what a cube is. When you are talking about geometric figures, the number of dimensions matters, just as, when you are talking about relationships involving “romantic love”, gender matters. You can say “four-dimensional cube”, but that doesn’t mean that the word “cube” got redefined to include figures with four dimensions.
I would know what the reporter was talking about, in the same sense that I would know what “four-dimensional cube” means, but…well, see what I said above.
Having re-read this several times, I have to say that I think you are really reaching the limits of this “door” analogy. Consider: What you are doing is basically comparing the union of a man and a woman to the union of a doorframe with hinges on one side and a little plate for the latch on the other side and a hinged door. This is ok so far as it goes, but then the analogy logically leads to a comparison of a same-sex relationship to a union of a doorframe with hinges on one side and a little plate for the latch on the other side and a sliding door, or a hinged door with…whatever the framework it is you need with a sliding door. Which would be either not a proper door at all, or at best a highly disfunctional door.
Gay people might take offense at this.
True, but I don’t quite see how this supports your argument. If NASA were looking for just one person for this capsule, they shouldn’t care if it’s a man or a woman. They ought to look for a “person”. But if the word “person” didn’t exist, it still wouldn’t be right to expand the definition of the word “man” to include “woman”.
I have no problem with that. But gay and straight couples can have the same rights and responsibilities, legally, without any word redefinitions. It wasn’t necessary, for achieving equal rights between men and women, for the definition of the word “man” to be expanded. Just as it is not necessary, for achieving equal rights between gay and straight couples , for the definition of the word “marriage” to be expanded.
I could certainly live with it. Do you know what the letters “NAACP” stand for? No one has referred to “colored people” in polite company for a long time. But this civil rights organization keeps this name out of respect for tradition.
Possibly, although it might also lead to resentment and backlash. Abortion has been legal in this country for over thirty years, yet we are still bitterly divided over it. NB: I do not mean here to be comparing getting an abortion to being homosexual. I just want to point out that you can’t automatically assume that something being made legal will lead to greater societal acceptance.
I didn’t say it was inherently ridiculous. I just said I was strongly skeptical about such appeals. Shouldn’t I be? Politicians try to gain support for their causes by playing on people’s emotions all the time. If they have a population easily swayed by such appeals…well, that can lead to a lot of bad things. Don’t you think?
Ahh, and no “poor grace” even. I’m glad there is something else on which we agree.
Because this would not lead to greater societal acceptance for relational and religious gay marraige? Or is there any more to it?
Well, I just…don’t. And I wouldn’t even if I were an adoptive parent, or child. Even if I had to fill out some kind of government form, and write “primary caregiver” instead of “parent”, I don’t think I’d so much as blink.
Not especially. But there is a case to be made there for legitimate state interest, if you really care about it; I’m sure you can find someone to argue with who is interested in the subject.
Cool. Gay couples and straight couples can get married, and there’s no more argument. Any couple that meets the state’s other requirements for marriage can get married, and there’s no more pissing and moaning.
The overwhelming majority of people are interested in a compatible partner. What factors go into “compatible partner” vary widely. Marriage is universal, it does not belong just to those people who have a sex preference.
I also clearly know many more bisexuals than you do. Including, so’s you know, a few who think that using gender as a preferential characteristic in relationships is immoral. (Actually, I also know a couple straight folks who think that caring about sex/gender in relationships is immoral; they have the entirely predictable guilt complexes that would result from having an orientation incompatible with their ideology.)
Actually, if I were to refer to you, there are a bunch of different words I might use to describe you:
“man”
“human”
“adult”
“SDMBer”
“debater”
“Weird Al Einstein”
etc. The word “man” is hilariously overloaded with meaning and implication, but for the current purposes, it’s usually used to indicate your gender, in a context in which your gender is relevant, ie, “Man, on SNL I never did figure out whether Pat is a Man or a Woman”. The situation is made complicated by the historic gender inequities of the English language… but in today’s world, we all get that “The Man Show” is a show specifically for men as opposed to women, whereas it used to be OK for Time’s “Man of the Year” to be a woman. And it’s made even more complicated by the fact that the word “man” is often just used to mean “person”, as in, “Bob is one of the nicest men I’ve ever met”, which probably means “Bob is one of the nicest PEOPLE I’ve ever met” as opposed to “Bob is really nice, for a man, although I know plenty of women who are nicer” (end of diversion) (the point of the diversion being that “man” and “woman” are such heavily loaded terms that it’s kind of pointless to use them as example when arguing by analogy… they aren’t really analogous to anything).
Anyhow, my point is, you were saying that the use the word marriage is about who we are, what a marriage is, something along those lines. Which again, I guess, comes down to a fundamental disagreement that we have, which I will address directly below the next quote:
Ahh, another point on which we might Just Plain Disagree. It seems to me that for thousands of years (at least in the obvious-looking-just-at-what-we-know-about-Western-culture-and-ignoring-native-americans-and-ancient-greeks-and-so-forth sense), the dominant culture has been almost exclusively, visibly, heterosexual, with homosexuality close to invisible, and subject to extreme prejudice. (I’m not saying that’s actually how it was, I’m saying that’s how we tend to THINK it was for purposes of arguments like this one). So in all that time, there was only one kind of romantically-loving-committed-relationship, that is, one man and one woman. So the word “marriage” was used for that type of relationship. But I think it’s somewhat nonsensical to claim that the word actually MEANT one-man-and-one-woman. Sure, it was only used to DESCRIBE one-man-and-one-woman. But that’s because those were the only kind of relationships that existed. It’s not like there’s a 1000 year tradition of happily committed openly gay couples being DENIED the use of the word. Similarly, the word “car” is always used to describe a vehicle with wheels. But suppose someone invented a hover car with no wheels, and wanted to call it a car. Does the fact that it has no wheels make it not a car? Or does the fact that it’s a personal transportation vehicle that travels on the ground, sits one to six people, and travels between zero and 100 miles per hour under the control of a driver with a steering wheel and brakes and stuff make it a car? So all cars have wheels, but that doesn’t mean that the word car MEANS wheels.
Actually, now that I think about it, there’s a very good example of the word marriage not meaning what you think it means, namely, polygamy, which has a long and sometimes controversial but definitely present role in human history, and which is universally referred to using the word “marriage”, sometimes with a prefix attached. The men and women in polygamous marriages use the words “husband” and “wife” to describe each other. And in all the arguing about, and protesting about, polygamy that I’ve ever heard of, I can’t remember any that focused on the idea that the word “marriage” was the wrong WORD to use to describe that type of relationship. Certainly, there’s a historical precedent that the word “marriage” really means “a loving committed sexual relationship between a man and some number of women, USUALLY ONE”.
My point being that if one accepts that polygamous marraiges and monogamous marriages are both marriages, what is it that really ties them together? That in both cases, there’s traditionally at least one representative of each gender? Or that they’re loving committed romantic relationships?
But would, say, 19th century people have refused to use the word “marriage” to describe two loving and committed gay people because they consciously and deliberately thought it was the wrong word? Or because they were bigots who couldn’t recognize the sanctity and reality of that relationship?
This whole line of argument, which I agree spiralled somehwat out of control, was a response to this line from you, two of your posts back:
Which I think is basically irrelevant, because when you talk about what kind of wife you want, you aren’t talking about what type of marriage you want, you’re talking about what type of marriage you want to be a PART of. I was trying to propose a better analogy: A man needs a door, so that his hall is separate from his room. He doesn’t care what kind of door he gets, sliding or hinged. NASA wants a married couple, to put into their space craft. They don’t care what kind of married couple they get, gay, straight, or all-hermaphroditic. The fact that the people in the straight relationship might or might refuse to be married to the people in the gay relationship doesn’t make the two relationships different in such a fundamental way that they can’t both be described by the word “marriage”, any more than the fact that sliding and hinged door parts can’t intermix makes those two types of door so different that they can’t be both described by the word “door”.
To take a step back for a second, much of your argument centers around the claim that the word marriage specifically MEANS “man-and-woman”. And, as we’ve discovered, this is a point on which we disagree. But it’s also a point which is, at some level, basically not debatable. If that’s what it MEANS to you, fine. But you have also at times attempted to argue that it wouldn’t make SENSE for the word marriage to mean “romantic loving committed relationship” in a gender-neutral sense, and if you are, in fact, so arguing, I think you’re just plain wrong. You might think it doesn’t mean that. Fine. But it certainly COULD mean that.
Again, I don’t really think that “man” and “woman” is a very useful standard for comparison, as those words already have such excess weight and baggage associated with them. Let’s try YAA (yet another analogy), this time with respect to women’s rights.
In ancient Greece, only men could be citizens. Suppose Greece hadn’t fallen, and eventually a women’s rights movement started, and women started pressing for the right to vote, and all the other accouterments of citizenship. And suppose they were told, “well, it’s well known that the word ‘citizen’ means ‘man’. So we’ll give you the right to vote and all these other rights, but we won’t call you citizens, we’ll call you ‘enfranchised females’”. Do you think that would be right? And fair? And true equality? Bear in mind here that I’m not saying that it’s impossible for words to be separate but equal. If, in this example, female citizens were given the name “comrades”, then there might come a time, decades or centuries later, when the word “comrade” had just the same weight and reverence and importance as the word “citizen”. But as long as people think of the word “citizen” as a hugely important word with weight and history and power, and the word “comrade” as “a female citizen”, the situation is unfair. (imho)
There’s a HUGE difference between a private organization choosing to use an archaic term in its name, and the US constitution adding a pointless distinction between two groups of people for no reason whatsoever in its text.
Anyhow, if you don’t think there’s anything wrong with not referring to women as citizens in my previous analogy (which, if you’re consistent, I believe is the conclusion you’ll come to), then I’m unlikely to convince you here.
Sure it might lead to resentment and backlash… from people who already are opposed to it. The question is whether the people who are growing up 20 years from now see a legal system which accepts gay and straight marriages as identical, equally valuable, equally important, or one which puts them into two different categories, even if it, on the surface, treats those categories equally. Symbolic things like that can be very important.
Huh? How did you get to that? I think you’ve forgotten what context “emotions” are being discussed in. I’m not talking about laws being passed with the arguments for them being emotional arguments rather than logical arguments. I’m talking about logical arguments ABOUT emotions. That is, I’m not trying to convince you to vote for gay marriage by crying and weeping and wailing and prostrating myself in horror. Rather, I’m going to quite logically point out that one reason to vote for it is that it could lead to a greater FEELING and PERCEPTION of equality and societal acceptance for gay couples. And since feelings and perceptions and emotions are obviously very real and important parts of the human experience, they should be recognized.
I suspect that most people would be happy with that result. Not meaning to speak for anyone else here, but, I suspect that most arguments against that are actually about something else… for instance, if I suspect that someone just hates the concept of gay marriage so much, and finds it so repugnant, that they want to ban all marraige rather than let gays marry, then I’d argue with that person, even if the actual ends they were proposing were the same ends you are proposing.
Huh. I find your response puzzling, so I must needs explore it somewhat more. I can envision three societal situations in which you might have to write “primary caregiver” instead of “parent”:
(1) Adoptive parents and biological parents are, in common use, and in common acceptance, both referred to as “parents”. No one would blink if you said “this is my son”, referring to, say, a child with a different race than yours who was obviously adopted. However, due to the way the laws were written, adoptive parents must always put “primary caregiver” on forms rather than “parent”. (And not on forms where the existence or not of a biological link is relevant, rather, in every government-related context.)
(2) The term “primary caregiver” has been used for so long, by so many people, with such love and affection, that it has developed equal weight and power and respect, and is just as meaningful as “parent”, and when an adopted kid wins an oscar, he tears up and says “and most of all, I want to thank my primary caregivers, for raising me and making me into a man”.
(3) There is some nontrivial section of the population who believes that primary caregivers are different, or less worthy than, “real” parents, and it is due to their pressure and influence that the government continues to maintain the “parent” vs. “primary caregiver” distinction. And while, legally, the rights are the same, there are many contexts in which “primary caregivers” are looked down on and discriminated against.
So, (1) I would have no problem with. But I also think that in (1), it would be silly to have the government make that distinction.
(2) I would have no problem with, but you can’t get there from here
(3) I would DEFINITELY have a problem with, and in (3) I would argue strenuously that the word “parent” should be applied to all. Obviously, (3) is the situation most analogous, in my mind, to the “gay marriage” vs. “civil union” question in the US today.
Hold on, now. If you are going to talk about the history of western civilization, I don’t see how you can ignore ancient Greece. Take the Theban Sacred Band, for one example. Publically acknowledged “committed-romantic” relationships between two men, and they did not use the same word as they did for a marriage. In later periods of western civilization, homosexuality was repressed, especially after christianity got going, but the historic example of the Greeks would have been known to them.
I don’t know. We already do have vehicles that hover. We call them “hovercraft”. If they became available in a personal size, perhaps people would call them cars. And perhaps not. I do recall reading about an attempt to create a “hover-car” back in the '50s. It fit your definition of “car without wheels”, but just barely. It was terribly innefficient…very hard to brake, and even a slight breeze could knock it off course, among other problems. So once again it seems we have an analogy that involves comparing a same-sex relationship to something highly disfunctional.
I don’t see any reason it can’t be both. However, I think perhaps you are confusing the traditional practice of polygamy with the amorphous “group marriages” that were briefly in vogue in the “Summer of Love” era. I don’t think a traditionally understood polygamous marriage involves a group of more than two people participating in a marriage all together. Rather, a polygamous marriage is like a conventional one, except that the man, but not the women, is allowed to have more than one of them. But the line of the relationship still runs from one man to one woman; the women are not “married” to each other.
Again, I don’t see any reason why it can’t be both.
Looking carefully at your analogy, what you appear to be doing with it is comparing the relationship between a sliding door and a sliding door framework, which adds up to a door, and the relationship between a hinged door and a hinged door framework, which also adds up to a door, to the relationship between a man and a woman, which can add up to a marriage, and the relationship between a man and another man, or a woman and another woman, which (you say) can also add up to a marriage, and goodness, I sure have written a long sentence here.
Anyway, correct me if I am misinterpreting you. If I am not, then I think your analogy is one that looks good on casual inspection, but which breaks down if you look at it closely. Consider: As part of your analogy, you can say that a hinged door is to sliding door as straight man is to a gay man. And a that a hinged door framework is to sliding door framework as straight woman is to lesbian. So far, so good. So the union of a hinged door and a hinged door framework makes a door, and the union of a straight man and woman makes a marriage. And the union of a sliding door and a sliding door framework makes a door, and the union of a gay man and lesbian makes…ahhh, wait a minute. No, that’s not right. We aren’t arguing about the rights of gay people to marry other gay people of the opposite sex. Legally, they already have the right to do that.
No, in order for your analogy to work, you’d have to put a sliding door together with…another sliding door. And a sliding door framework together with another sliding door framework. And from these pairings you would not get a functional door. Remember what I said in my last post about this analogy?
Well, I don’t think it’s nonsensical quite in the way that the phrase “square circle” is. Remember the phrase I did use, “four-dimensional cube”. That phrase does get a meaning across, but at the same time, the word “cube” still refers to an object that has three spatial dimensions.
I have to answer that question two different ways, because you didn’t make a distinction in your hypothetical between the state decreeing the different wording, and the Greek people doing it on their own initiative.
In the former case, the legally operative part of the amendment to our hypothetical Greek constitution would be the part stating that men and women would have equal rights to vote. This would establish legal equality. If the amendment then went on to say that voting males shall be referred to as “citizens” and voting females shall be referred to as “enfranchised females”, this would represent an addition that would have no real legal effect, which I would oppose as a matter of style if nothing else.
But I wouldn’t be marching in the streets against it, either. I believe very strongly that it is the obligation of the government to provide legal equality, not “fairness” or “true equality”.
In the latter case, the question of whether or not women could be called “citizens” would be settled in the marketplace of ideas. And I have said that I am fine with the question of whether or not a same-sex union can be called a “marriage” being settled in the same way, with the government remaining neutral.
Well, you said in your last post that you didn’t want to talk about the words “man” and “woman”, but I don’t think it can be avoided. Right now I see a legal system which treats men and women as equally valuable and equally important, but not identical, and that’s the way it should be.
I suppose what you are running into here is my libertarian desire for a minimalist government. Like I said, the obligation of the government is to provide legal equality. I feel emphatically that it is not the proper job of the government to make people feel better about themselves, and it certainly should not attempt to redefine words that have an existence outside of it in the service of doing so.
You would have a problem with the situation in (3). I would not. That is our difference. As long as the state provides legal equality, it has fulfilled its obligations, IMNSHO.
Oh come ON… that’s an incredibly cheap shot, and really is quite beneath you.
There’s a specific term, “sister wife”, for that relationship. However, my point is, much of your argument seems to stem from the fact that if you meet a man on the street and he says “I’m married”, you want to be able to instantly know that he’s married to a woman and not a man (I still don’t understand why, but that’s neither here nor there). So if polygamy were legal, if you met a man on the street and he said “I’m married”, you wouldn’t know whether he was married to one women or multiple women. So, supposing polygamy were legal, would you claim that a word other than “married” should be used to describe people in such a relationship?
So I want to take a moment and rehash things. We have a fundamental disagreement about what a word means, at its most deep and basic sense. And this is not an easy disagreement to resolve, as looking it up in a dictionary won’t really help. I agree that most dictionaries will probably mention something about a man and a woman, but that’s because of the difference between commonly used meaning and Deep, Basic Meaning, as discussed previously. And you claim the Deep Basic meaning is one thing, I claim it’s something else. As both claimed meanings are logically consistent, I’m trying to come up with thought experiments and little tests which will demonstrate what the Deep Meaning really is.
That’s why I keep bringing up aliens, doors, etc. I claim that if we encountered aliens who had no gender whatsoever, but had a concept of love, and two of these aliens had a ceremony in front of family and friends in which they committed themselves to live together, love each other, and raise baby aliens, we would without hesitiation absolutely positively refer to that as a “marriage”. Thus, I argue, the Deep Meaning of the word “marriage” is the love and commitment and ceremony of it, not anything to do with the gender (or even species) of the participants. Sadly, we have not yet encountered aliens, so my example (while clever, in my opinion), can not be tested.
Similarly, I claim that if someone says “I’m not ready to get married”, they are not commenting on their sexuality, but on their feelings wrt commitment, love, etc. And if someone says “so, are you and Pat married?”, they are asking about the level of commitment of the relationship, not the gender of the parties involved. And if someone asked someone “what’s something that’s almost a marriage, but not quite”, the response would probably be “an engagement” or “two people living together”, not “two people of the SAME gender who have had a commitment ceremony, live in a house together, and are raising kids”. All of these arguments are, I hope, at least sound and consistent, even if they’ve failed to so far sway you.
So, my challenge to you is this: Can you come up with an argument, a thought experiment, anything, which demonstrates that YOUR opinion about the Deep Meaning of the word “marriage” is the correct one? Bear in mind that I agree that the vast majority of marriages are, and will continue to be, heterosexual. So if you just say “So, if someone says they’re married, do you assume that their spouse is of the other gender?”, which of course I do, much as I assume that people are right-handed.
Well, the analogy only works if you accept that, while a gay man and a gay women might have all the biological bits and pieces and external fittings to have sex, they couldn’t, in any meaningful sense, be “married”. So A and B are a straight man and a straight women, and C and D are a two gay men. A+B = marriage, C+D = marriage, no other combinations are possible, even if B might look lustfully on the chiselled buns of C, and D might think A was kind of hot.
Similarly, A and B are the two components of a hinged door and socket and C and D are the same for a sliding door, only A+B together make a full door and C+D together make a full door.
But we’re getting distracted in the minutiae of this analogy, whose point was to respond to a point you made which I definitely think is outright WRONG. Namely, you have stated numerous times, in numerous threads (I’ll track them down if you like), that there’s a fundamental difference between a gay relationship and straight relationship, BECAUSE THE PARTS CAN’T BE INTERCHANGED. Now, there may be fundamental differences between gay and straight relationships, sufficient that they ought to be described by different words. I can’t prove that’s NOT the case. But the mere fact that the parts can’t interchange does NOT make that the case, any more than the fact that sliding and hinged door parts can’t be interchanged means that we should use the word “door” to describe them both.
Hopefully, you understand the point I’m making.
OK, let me ask you straight up, as a yes or no question. If we lived in a society where there were mostly straight people, but a few gay people, and the word “marriage” was commonly used to refer to both, with the modifiers “gay marriage” or “straight marriage” thrown on when necessary, would that situation be an internally consistent and stable one?
And, as a follow up, would that language (precisely like English, but with everyone accepting of “marriage” to mean gay or straight) be worse than our current English language, better, or equally good?
We agree that there are some (but not many) contexts in which the government treats men and women differently, such as only drafting men to fight in wars during wartime. What’s a context in which the government should treat straight and gay married couples differently?
I hate to bring up such an emotionally charged comparison, but how do you feel about “separate but equal”, Brown v. Board of Education, etc.? Do you think that private business owners should be able to discriminate, both in hiring and in who they serve, based on race or gender?
You’re conflating traditional polygamy with modern polyamory. Traditional polygamy is only one form of modern polyamory. To act as if that’s what polygamy still is is either disingenuous or uninformed.