Well, the gay marriage law would presumably say “A man can marry another man” and “A woman can marry another woman” without going into the sexual orientation of the people involved.
I take it my attempt at humor was unnoticed.
As I said in my first post it was an attempt at humor, I dont think the government should be involved at all in marriage.
A straight man may marry the person of his choice. A gay man may not.
I think the question deserves a bit more of a response than some people are giving it. For instance,
would be an argument in favor of legalizing, not just gay marriage, but marriage between close relatives (like siblings, or parents/children), group marriage, marriage between two 8-year-olds, marriage between an 8-year-old and an 88-year-old, etc. Maybe you are in favor of (some of) those things; but it’s possible to be pro-gay marriage without having an “anything goes” attitude toward marriage.
Basically, I’d say that the argument for legalizing gay marriage is that the essence of marriage is not that the partners be of opposite sexes from each other but that they be of the appropriate sexes for each other. If you see marriage as a committed, lifelong (or even not lifelong), officially sanctioned relationship or union with a person whom you deeply love (with the kind of love that includes a sexual dimension), then homosexuals could have such a relationship if, and only if, they were allowed to marry someone of the same sex.
Noticed, but not appreciated. It wasn’t funny the first time, and has been repeated far too often since then. Not to mention, it has been offered before as a “legitimate” reason to refuse equal rights to homosexuals.
I presume that you’re saying it should properly be the business of religions, then? So where do atheists go when they want to get married?
Is that nescessarily true? Least where I come from, a straight man may not be able to marry his first cousin. Presumably, if we had same sex marriage laws, there’d be no logical reason to apply that rule to gay couples.
Back to the OP, denying same sex couples the right to marry is exactly the same as denying them the right to a drivers licence. It’s a very arbitrary, groundless and ignorant discrimination against a signifciant section of the population.
mm
Argument against: It’ll cost too much to change the forms. 
That the government doesn’t want to endorse homosexuality. They’re willing to admit that it exists, but they really don’t want to go out of their way to encourage it.
That’s the closest I’ve ever come to a reason, and it’s a pretty stupid one.
That’s almost right. It’s not so much the government, but the majority of Americans. If there is no constitutional right to SSM (which I doubt there is*), then it’s simply majority rule. Unfortunate, but true.
*let’s not debate that here, as we’ve done it a millions time. If you want to think there is, fine.
Well, this may sound odd coming from me, but that’s not really an argument for it, so much as it is an explanation of its current status. (An explanation that is, I might add, entirely correct).
When someone asks for an argument, I assume they’re seeking a set of facts that invite the conclusion that a particular proposition ought, or ought not, to be so.
So from an argument perspective, I’d say the case is made when you show that people want it and it doesn’t harm anyone. It’s for the side arguing against it to then show reasons to keep it illegal.
The OP said “should”, not “would”. If the majority are bigots, it’s still wrong.
I think the OP is flawed. My understanding of the principles of our government is that you have to come up with a reason why something should be illegal - by default, things should be legal.
The argument in favor of gay marriage?
The government should not prohibit any action between two people unless it can show a compelling reason that it would directly affect some third party. Two people getting married does not directly affect anyone outside of the marriage so there is no grounds for a goverment prohibition.
The argument against gay marriage?
It will cause Nazi’s to ride on dinosaurs once again.
My religion’s position on marriage is that it’s a social contract and the business of the people and community involved, so probably wherever I’m stuck going since I don’t see a need to drag priests in for unnecessary functions.
This strikes me as backward. When you marry, you’re asking the rest of your community/society to formally recognize you as a couple.
It wasn’t meant to be an argument for it, but against it. You asked what the argument against it was. **Ethilrist **said the gov’t didn’t want to endorse it. I said it was the people, not the gov’t.
I wasn’t responding to the OP. I was responding to Ethilrist.
Perhaps that’s because the discussion is often framed in an awkward way. Let me take a stab at putting things in a slightly different perspective.
The family is one of the basic building blocks of society, and is an institution which is deeply intertwined in our civil law. Who is related to who, and in what manner, is critical for a great many legal issues. Heck, one of the largest legal specialties is family law. Most probably for a vast majority of people, their most significant legal issues are are intertwined with family - wills, divorces, child custody, etc. We have built a vast network of laws which are intended to strengthen the family as a social unit. Family members have legal rights and obligations towards each other that strangers do not have, and these are very often extremely important.
Now, besides relationships of blood, we also legally recognize certain relationships of choice, most prominently adoption and marriage. Marriage in particular carries with it huge legal ramifications, effectively making the relationship between the married couple more important that that between immediate blood relatives. A wife or husband stands closer to their spouse in terms of proxy decision making, inheritance, etc than even siblings, parents, or children, and we quite rightly view that as an important feature of marriage.
Now, it so happens that not everyone forms families in the same way. In most cases, a man and a woman marry and have children, but this is not always the case. A small but significant portion of society forms families where the co-heads of the household are the same sex. And here’s where the rights bit comes into play. These people have just as much right (morally, if not legally) to have their families legally recognized as anyone else does. Refusing to recognize the families that they form merely because of the combinations of genitals they possess is discrimination every bit as unjust as legal discrimination against a race or gender.
Now, you say you don’t think the government should have anything to do with marriage. Do you think that is even remotely feasible? Do you really believe that there should be no legal structure in place to govern child custody, for example? Or are you saying that relations of marriage shouldn’t be considered significant with respect to child custody? Should strangers off the street have as much right to inherit my stuff should I die without a will as my (hypothetical) spouse? It is completely infeasible for the law not to recognize marriage, given the way our society is structured. Now, you may wish for the law to refrain from calling what it recognizes marriage, but I sincerely doubt you wish it to refrain from recognizing it at all.
Thank you, Gorsnak, for that clear and thoughtful contribution.
The same guy who says there is a rational basis for making same sex marriage illegal can’t figure out the arguments for it? C’mon, you’ve quoted the reasons to me before, and said that those reasons are rational: it creates a favorable setting for procreation, it ensures optimal situation for the raising of children, and it preserves State funds.
Unless you’ve since changed your mind and think those reasons aren’t rational anymore.
Well said, Gorsnak.
I would also like to add that by restricting marriage to a man and a woman, and at the same time affording marriage certain legal benefits and status, you are implicitly implying that for all important intents and purposes, man and woman are not created equal.
If I had a very good friend, and he and his wife have a child, and his wife dies, then I could take his wife’s place in the family. Maybe he has a very good job, and I don’t, and I propose to become the housekeeper. I start to bond with the child at least as much as he does, and to all intents and purposes we are a family. In the case of his death, he would want his money, pensions, insurance, and the custody of the child to go to me. Marriage happens to be the legally most convenient way of settling it.
Any restriction of marriage to a man and a woman denies that the above is a valid way of building a family. Suppose that he and I never were able to find a woman that we could live with, but for some reason we get along great together. Then we have an opportunity to take care of someone else’s child and so we want to adopt the child, and marry for the same reasons as above. The situation is still the same. The conclusion that this option is not valid, means that you somehow think that a man and a woman together are better at raising children no matter what. Even if the man and the woman came from seriously disfunctional families, had no formal education whatsoever, and I and my friend both happened to be pediatricians with each 10 years experience in family therapy and having grown up in loving families, somehow according to the law we shouldn’t marry because … ?
Now, suppose that I was guy, and my friend was bisexual, and we happened to fall in love with each other. We even might have sex once in a while. Is that a reason why we can’t form a good family? There’s no proof whatsoever out there to say that this has in any way a negative effect on children. Teenage pregnancies, single parents who are paid too little to both work and raise their children and so have to compromise on the latter, I can name a great number of examples of possible problems, but children being raised by two loving adults who also love each other are not one of them.
Marriage has a place in society because it provides society with a stronger foundation in very simple and practical terms - two people take care of at the very least each other, so that if one is in trouble, he or she has at least one other person to depend on. These people make a commitment to each other, and the benefits this commitment has to society are clear and have been well-researched: these two people are less likely to become welfare/charity dependent, and so are any children they happen to take care of.
Two persons can make this commitment to each other, and their sex does not factor into it in any way. You can argue about three people making such a commitment in terms of practicality, but against two people of whatever sex, there is no argument to be made other than from the ‘homosexuality is evil’ point of view. Any two persons of any sex can love each other, and sex is a matter of taste.
What makes this a great injuste, however, is that a part of the population is biologically geared to experience the primitive, physical feelings of sexual love for someone of the same sex. Even though there is no harm whatsoever in them to act upon these feelings, there are still people out there who want to deny them its consummation, and apart from the practical issues I mentioned above, one legalised form of that consummation we have been widely taught in literature, is marriage.
Plenty of reasons, in other words, for legalisation of Same Sex Marriage, which is why the civilised countries in this word are slowly moving towards recognising it, with the list that allow either civil unions or full marriages growing every year.