Correction, I claim there is evidence of the destruction of the society that the social conservatives would like to preserve. This thread is about the rationale, and if you are not willing to look at the through-line of the social conservative narrative, then you are uninterested in actually comprehending the topic, and thus are taking an anti-intellectual position.
This isn’t about validating your opinions for me, it’s about trying to understand a particular mindset.
Whether or not SSM is a valid social institution is irrelevant to the discussion IMO.
If the other side’s arguments don’t have merit, they have no case. That’s what we’re arguing and what you’re ignoring. Who cares if they have arguments if those arguments are false or irrational or have no merit? That makes them…what’s the word? Oh, “WRONG”. Which means they lose on the issue. Why are we giving time to this again?
How does recognizing the value of families headed by same-sex couples “dismiss” the value of the nuclear family? That’s like saying, “I like blueberry pie. I’ve never had apple pie, because if I ate apple pie I might stop liking blueberry pie.”
If you’re actually disturbed by (real or imagined) derision of the “traditional” family (I assume you mean mother, father, and biological children), you can direct your efforts toward making it easier to support this kind of family. However, this has nothing to do with whether or not same-sex couples get married, raise children, and so forth. Same-sex marriage does not threaten opposite-sex marriage - continuing to prohibit same-sex marriage won’t make gay people enter into heterosexual unions, won’t make heterosexual people get married instead of shacking up together, and it won’t make heterosexual couples want to have more children than they would otherwise. Conversely, recognizing that same-sex couples should be able to marry won’t make heterosexual people turn gay, leave their spouses, or start using contraception.
And something they cannot even provide speculation about as to what form or degree that harm may take. Compare that to the known, actual harm that denying equal rights causes, in the present and in the future as well if no change is made, and there is literally no argument. The “anti-SSM contingent” indeed does have nothing but fear to offer, as you have (doubtlessly unintentionally) just pointed out. And they can’t even say just what it is they’re afraid could happen! Yet to point out that complete lack of substance is called “anti-intellectual”. :rolleyes:
That isn’t vacillation, those positions are both held simultaneously and are both valid. The rebuttal to either one is, well, what? That their notion of civilization, where the fags know their place just like the darkies used to, is somehow worth defending and whose loss would be regrettable, even if they can’t explain why?
Where do you see that being stated? Imagined, by the anti-SSM side, maybe, but who have you seen or heard making that argument or anything reasonably construable as such? Where? :dubious:
All right, I’m listening. Setting aside the evidence for a moment–exactly what IS the society social conservatives would like to propose? What do they want the world to look like?
Then, given that, you can show us the evidence they use to support the argument that society has been “destroyed.”
Then we can get to the real debate–whether that is a rationale to oppose, and to advocate a ban on gay marriage or not.
???
Isn’t the rationale being put forward exactly that SSM is not a valid social institution? Because if it is a valid social institution, it’s irrational to justify opposing it on the premise that doing so well help protect valid social institutions.
First part is correct. Our society has become incredibly crass as a result of the death of tradition, but not because of SSM. This of course is a different argument, and one I don’t believe you are capable of comprehending, because it’s not so much the death of Christendom that makes the society crass, but the death of traditional culture in general. Marriage has become a consumer product like everything else, and that is crass. ‘Til death do us part’, has no meaning anymore, and as such if we cannot develop loyalty to the traditional family we really have no loyalty to anything. Real culture and belonging has been replaced by crass commercialism and crass political ideology. Ideology has become more formative of identity than any deeper sense of belonging to a particular culture. People violently adhere to the cultural signifiers based around a passionate adherence to macro-economic theories most of them don’t even understand. The vast majority of people who think they are socialists or capitalists don’t even understand what that means, it’s h a team to belong to absent a tribe/religion/culture.
The crass part of this that relates to SSM is that people identify heavily with their sexuality. Sexuality should be something that underlies your identity and not something that you fling around and flaunt in front of everyone. It is a part of who you are but displaying it on the surface at the expense of other things doesn’t help. Of course Evangelicalism is a crass commercialization of Christianity. Megachurches, ‘Jesus wants me to be rich’, reduces religion to the level of the transaction the same way flamboyant gay culture reduces homosexuality. There is no sensuousness, it’s all Spectacle. Read: La Societe du Spectacle by Guy DeBord.
But as you have said this is a different topic. I will take part if someone wants to discuss this in a different thread, and then I might actually engage in a thread and argue my own opinion passionately on this board, but I have found that people are pretty disinterested in the topics that I am passionately interested in hereabouts.
The problem here isn’t SSM, it’s possible that SSM may actually save marriage in the long run, anything that brings marriage back to the solemn and the sacred and removes it from the transactionary commercial space that it currently inhabits. So no, SSM marriage doesn’t destroy marriage, but it does represent a nail in the coffin of traditional marriage. Marriage as a valued institution is already dead, SSM marriage proponents are humping a corpse.
It’s more like saying "I like blueberry pie. I don’t like apples. We ought to ban apple pie, because if YOU ate apple pie, I might stop liking blueberry pie.
I personally prefer that rationales be rational, myself. Out of curiosity, am I included in the navel-obsessed?
Isn’t this by definition a groundless worry, then? How seriously should we take it? I suppose we could acknowledge that the fear exists, even if the fear is groundless, and act accordingly. Thus, the decision isn’t put in the hands of majority voters but in the more methodical and thoughful judicial and legislative process.
They might say it does, but does it, really? There’s nothing I’m aware of in SSM that requires the destruction of churches and bibles and whatnot.
Consider if you will a man in 1900 confronted with an aggressive suffragette. From his perspective, women don’t vote. Women have never voted. The very idea of women voting upsets him and, he feels, will undermine society as he knows it. Perhaps he campaigns for laws that reinforce his beliefs in an effort to maintain society as he knows it, laws that very specifically say that only men can vote, period. We may acknowledge his motivation, while questioning his reasoning. Why can’t women vote? What’ll happen if they do? Before the 19th Amendment in the U.S., a few states had already extended the franchise to women (though sometimes, later laws redisenfranchised them). A reasoned argument would (or at least should, I figure) include studying the effect of suffrage in places where it already existed. The man of 1900 has his concerns, to be sure. But did he come to them, and is he maintaining them, out of reason? And was his notion of civilization destroyed after 1920?
I’m not sure if I’m being included in this “side”, but I have asked repeatedly for proof. I still do.
They want it to look like what it used to look like. Remember it’s a conservative ideology not a progressive one. They aren’t trying to build a new society like progressives are, they are trying to preserve a dying one. Conservatives by definition are always trying to preserve that which is dying, that’s what makes them conservative. Leave it to Beaver is an idealized fantasy of that world. They live in terror that Gossip Girl is the new ideal.
A specific view of society is being destroyed. That distinction of specificity is important. You need to go more granular for it to make any sense. They think that Christian values built western civilization and that it will degenerate without it. And to a point they are right. Atomized cosmopolitan globalism is anti-thetical to the society they want to live in where people are rooted to time and place and dedicate themselves toward the service to God. To understand Christianity and its opposition to SSM you need to recognize that Paul was against marriage IN TOTO. He just saw it as a superior alternative to fornication. IE, Sex is worldly and thus sinful. So if you are going to engage in it at least engage in it for the purpose of propagating the species.
That’s not a debate I care to engage in. As I said, I am pro-SSM, so whether or not you ‘should’ value or oppose it is uninteresting to me. It just seems like platform seeking. There are plenty of threads discussing the value of SSM, this one is about the rationale of the opposition. If you want to get up on a soap box to crow about your support for SSM and its moral superiority to the opposition, by all means do it, but don’t ask me to be the standard bearer for the other side, I am just trying to describe the rationale, not defend it.
I have decided which side I am on, but I seem to have a fairly rare ability to have sympathy for opinions I do not hold.
Yes, that is part of the rationale. I don’t think it’s at all irrational. The validity of SSM is purely subjective, arguing it from a position of rationality is a non-starter. jayjay got it right. It’s all about his feelings, and the validity of his relationships, that’s an emotional issue. The validity of his personal feelings and the personal feelings of others in his situation and their proponents is pitted against the validity of the people who want to preserve their social institutions. This isn’t about rationality vs irrationality, it is about one subjective worldview fighting against another. It’s memes at war with one another, and we as people who are able to contain those memes choose which we would like to devote our wills to upholding. Rational/Irrational are non-starters, we aren’t solving a math problem here.
That’s being done in the other thread where people are talking about the church that lost its tax exemption for a piece of property over it and such. You can go there for that debate if you want to see what some of the arguments are.
Amusingly, I’ve heard the blame for this put at the feet of Ronald Reagan, who while governor of California signed the first American no-fault divorce law. After that, a marriage could end because both partners wanted it to end, not because one had wronged the other in some way.
Anyway, the rest of your argument is lamentations for a rosy past that never existed. Whether you personally believe in it or not doesn’t matter; it’s a shaky base for an argument.
If you insist on dismissing all the facts and all the reasons and all the principles on the other side as “subjective”, then it’s no wonder you’re not learning a damned thing or helping your own cause one damn bit.
Wrong. It is logic, fairness, principle, law, and basic human decency “at war with” fear and hatred. You are equating them falsely.
The thread topic is “what is the rationale?”. As in rational. You have confirmed that there isn’t any.
Well, now, hang on a second. Civil unions have been rejected as a final compromise to the issue. But they are an acceptable stepping stone to marriage rights. In many states, winning civil unions would be a great victory, compared to what rights are currently afforded to gay couples. Arguably, it’s even a necessary step towards increasing acceptance of gay rights to the point where a marriage law is a possibility, in those states. However, in states like California, where we already have a strong civil union law, we’ve moved onto the next step, which is marriage. Civil unions have been “rejected” only in the sense that we’re not settling for them in lieu of marriage. No one is arguing that we either have full marriage rights, or nothing at all.
That being said, allow me to add that I, for one, have been appreciating your contributions to this thread.
Actually, mswas is entirely correct on this point. As Dan Savage has pointed out multiple times, the war against gay rights is nothing less than a new front on the war against heterosexual rights. Another theater in this particular war is opposition to the HPV vaccine. Or giving out condoms to college students. Or Africans. The goal of the anti-gay movement is to establish a precedent for the control over other people’s sexual activity. Quashing gay rights is merely a stalking horse for their real agenda.