I think he understands that perfectly well, which makes his post all the more appalling.
I agree. If people had a good argument for why a woman shouldn’t marry another woman, they’d use it. So using the argument that a woman shouldn’t marry a woman because a woman shouldn’t marry a washing machine is pretty much an admission there’s no good argument against same-sex marriage.
It would be like me arguing that people shouldn’t be allowed to own cats. And the best argument I can make in defense of this position is that bears are dangerous.
And I’m sure that, with enough funding, we could come up with a study asserting that children grow up healthier when raised by wolves. We don’t have that study. We have no indication that such a study could happen. The available evidence points exactly in the opposite direction. Using this as an argument is phenomenally disingenuous (and let’s be honest, just downright insulting). Especially when we’re talking about how good an entire class of people are as parents.
It’s perhaps a sickening irony that exactly this did happen. Remember Regnerus? Mark Regnerus authored a study on gay parenting funded by a right-wing Christian group. The result was a colossal pile of fail that even random online bloggers with no science background could immediately tell was bullshit (it compared straight couples who had been married since the child’s birth to a group of “gay parents” which included literally anyone who had a child and any sort of homosexual encounter in the past two years; at the end of the day, that group contained two homosexual couples who had been together long-term). Not only that, but it was virtually trivial to tell that Regnerus was not just in error but actively lying. Anti-gay activists whored this study out for about as long as its stubby, deformed little legs would carry them. Thankfully, it wasn’t very long, and it was retracted. With this context in mind, your post is just shameful. There is an insane stigma based on no scientific evidence surrounding gay parenting. What you said is incredibly offensive to any gay couple thinking about raising children or anyone with gay parents, and I think a few people here deserve an apology.
More to the point, is the most important thing about your marriage the fact that there exist other married couples who you believe should not be married?
In your rush to try and be clever, you seem to have overlooked the fact that I don’t actually object to it.
Also, you shouldn’t try to be clever. You’re not very good at it.
It’s like claiming one should be able to form a corporation with a washing machine as a shareholder.
ie bullshit.
I like this rgument better, because the shape of my spouse’s genitalia is in fact going to be of the upmost importance in my (hypothetical) marriage, let me tell you. Sorry to be that shallow.
I think you misunderstand. Yeah, I’m straight, and that’s part of who I am, and that’s part of my criteria when choosing a sexual partner. But when I think about what makes my marriage, that’s not what makes it a marriage. When I’m comparing relationships, trying to figure out which ones are marriages and which ones aren’t, I don’t look to make sure one person has an innie and the other has an outie.
My own marriage is based on the idea that I and my wife love each other, have decided to form a household together, have decided to support one another in following our dreams, have decided to create a family together. Yeah, it’s a man and a woman, but those aren’t the defining aspects of our marriage, any more than the fact that we’re both pretty academically-inclined is a defining aspect of my marriage (although there’s no way I would’ve married someone who was not bookish).
The way I see it, we’ve already got civil unions - they’re called “marriages”, and you get them down at the courthouse. The problem is that we also use the word “marriage” for a bunch of different types of relationship or different perspectives on the same relationship. My wife’s religious tradition, for instance, doesn’t recognize our relationship as a marriage since I’m not of the same faith, but frankly I don’t care what those guys think as long as they can’t kick me off her health plan. I am also reminded of this recent case from the 7th Circuit (warning, PDF), where the court struck down an Indiana statute that only allowed certain religious groups to solemnize marriages.
It’s an interesting counterfactual as to what might have happened in the 1990s if there’d been a serious push towards civil union legislation. If there had really been a good-faith effort to grant all the rights of marriage, including interstate portability, tax advantages, joint adoption, and so forth, it might have been accepted as a solution. However, I think that there would have been an effort to reserve some rights only for opposite sex couples and the status would have never been actually equal. I also don’t think that there was any sort of good-faith effort to create the status; there was a multi-state push to not only deny gay marriage but any sort of legal recognition of gay relationships at all. I hear some of these people coming out for civil unions now (“but we shouldn’t call it ‘marriage’” they say) but ten years ago they were trying to prevent gays from participating in civil society as gays in any way, and I don’t really see why advocates of gay marriage should bother bargaining at this point.
Hmmm. So if you were (hypothetically) married to a man who lost his genitals in an accident, you’d divorce him? Not seeing it.
All you are doing is restating your preferred definition of the word “marriage.” I could just as easily say that marriage is when two consenting adults of the opposite sex decide to marry. Or that when three consenting adults decide to marry. Or that when 2 men, 4 women, and 5 children decide to marry. Or that one consenting adult decides to marry an inanimate object.
Further, the burden is not on my side to articulate why marriage should be limited to only opposite sex couples when that statement, for nearly all of human history, was the very meaning of the word. The party advocating change bears the burden of why we should redefine a term. Just as keeping a definition “because its always been that way” is not a good rationale, changing it for the same reason is likewise not valid.
It’s almost like asking a person to justify why a four-legged animal who makes a “mooo!” sound cannot be called a tree, and demanding people who insist that a cow is not a tree to justify their definition.
No, the party advocating discrimination bears the burden. You want to tell a black man he can’t do something that would be allowed if only he were white? You need to supply a terrific reason. You want to tell a white woman she can’t do something that would be allowed if only she were male? You need to supply – okay, not a terrific reason, but a pretty darned good one.
You want to ban a ten-year-old from something that’d be okay if he were twenty-two? It’s still on you to supply a reason, but, hey, we ain’t askin’ for much.
You want to ban cows or trees or washing machines from something? Yeah, that’s not discrimination, so have at it.
Even if I agreed with this onus…it isn’t hard. Millions of people want the change, and no one who is opposed to it has shown any harm resulting. The people opposed to the change are dead-set on telling other people what they can’t do. Why? What’s their beef?
I’m beyond astonished that anyone would use “It redefines a word” as a justification for denying equal rights to millions of people. Do dictionary-makers govern us?
Come on, “genitals” is just a placeholder for sex or gender. The fact that my spouse is a woman is a fairly essential feature of my marriage.
Yes, you could say whatever you want and call it a marriage.
However there is such a concept as legal marriage and such a concept as equal treatment under the law, and it is not a stretch to see that heterosexual couples have access to something useful and homosexual couples do not simply because they are homosexual, and this is unfair.
So your slippery-slope arguments about washing machines are nonsense. If you want to argue that legal marriage for two people means it is unfair to deny legal marriage for three or more people, have at it, but sexual orientation is not relevant to such.
If you read a little more anthropology, you would realize that you are not correct. Marriage is normally between a man and a woman (or multiple women) in human societies, but there are plenty of languages whose word for “marriage” includes relationships that don’t fit that paradigm, including same-sex committed relationships. They’re never the main definition of marriage for the same reason that left-handedness is never the default handedness: the relatively low proportion of the population. I recommend this book to open your eyes to the variety of human culture.
For nearly all of human history, marriages were arranged by family and clan elders.
We’ve hugely re-defined the word by allowing people to seek out their own choice in marriage partners.
“Driving” an automobile hugely re-defines the word “drive.” One drives a horse or team; one operates an automobile. We should demand that they change the name of our Driver Licenses to “Automobile Operator Licenses,” because words must never be redefined, or else people will marry washing machines and society will collapse.
What the dickens?
Huh. That my partner is a woman is nice, but not essential to my marriage. :shrug:
I don’t give a damn what they did in history or what they do in other countries. I live in the United States. And we have a law in this country that says every citizen is entitled to legal equality. So if some adults are allowed to marry each other then all adults should be allowed to marry each other.
If you think people aren’t entitled to equal rights then the burden is on you to explain why.
Do you think this burden has not been met, exhaustively and thoroughly and persuasively, over the last decade? Maybe you’ve been in cryogenic suspension, in which case I should inform you that our president is a black man, Putin is back in power, and at long last you can watch videos on your phone.
Or perhaps you mean that, despite the millions of words written on the subject, we should start anew with each thread, as though the burden of proof must be met anew. No thanks.