To be perfectly honest I’m not sure the word “Dilution” is one whose definition you’ve got a solid handle on.
You would dilute the institution of marriage if you were to somehow spread the same number of marriages around a larger portion of the population. But that is not, in fact, what is being proposed. “Expansion” is literally correct. “Dilution” is not.
Just so you know, I wouldn’t advise running for the job of “gay leader” on that platform.
Asked and answered in the opinion of In Re: Marriage Cases, which is the law of the land in California once Prop 8 is invalidated. May I suggest you read it? It answers in plain language what the issue with this idea is, but basically, it doesn’t work as you think it does.
The opinion is online at the California Supreme Court site in PDF format.
That would be “Civil Union” Turns out, that even in CA, where supposedly all the rights are identical, there are still 1100 or so State and Federal rights that are different.
“Separate but equal” never is equal, but it has been passe since 1954 or so, haven’t you heard?
Certainly. I’ve never had any trouble understanding this point. If you start from the premise that homosexual relationships are inferior to heterosexual relationships, it absolutely makes sense to view the concept of allowing gays to marry as devaluing the institution of marriage.
Here’s the problem with your, “What happens in forty years?” argument: there is literally no issue on Earth to which that does not apply. Including the ones you alluded to in this post. If SSM must be avoided because it might, possibly, through some mechanism you can’t clearly articulate, lead to some negative outcome which you also can’t clearly articulate, how do you know the same nebulous fate might await us if we legalize civil unions? Or if we allow gays in the military? Or allow gays to adopt? And, of course, we can apply the same thing to any other political issue you care to name. If this fear is a valid reason to not act on gay marriage, why is it not a valid fear to prevent us from acting on any issue?
Of course, if you were gay, you almost certainly wouldn’t be opposed to gay marriage in the first place. And if you were gay, and still opposed to gay marriage, you sure as hell wouldn’t be a leader in the gay rights movement, because who the hell would follow you?
Other ideas that had never been tried in any society in history, until relatively recently:
Religious tolerance
Universal sufferage
Women’s liberation
I’d say most of these worked out pretty well, and none of them required any sort of scientific innovation to become possible: we’ve had women, religion, and systems of government since before recorded history, but it still took thousands and thousands of years before anyone thought, “Hey, what if we just let everyone practice whatever religion they want, without hassling them over it?” So I don’t think you can simply point to the fact that gay marriage is new as evidence of very much at all. Every good idea needs someone to be the first to try it out.
It’s worth noting, in response to this, that you’re the person in this thread arguing for *less *marriage in society.
Because throughout most of human history, marriage had a very different definition than the one we use today.
The reason no one will concede should be pretty obvious: we don’t believe that it’s true. If I were to accept that a dilution would occur, it would require me to believe that there is a fundamental difference between gay relationships and straight relationships. I know, from first hand experience, that this is not the case. If both relationships are the same, then mixing them together would not dilute either. If you add water to water, you don’t end up with diluted water, you just end up with more water.
I think the point being made is that a) if we are against dilution of the term “marriage”, because a less specific and more vague usage is bad, and b) we have a responsibility in society to attempt to ensure “marriage” has value, then logically it is not enough to simply avoid dilution - we should be concentrating the term as well. Not only should we be stopping SSM, but we should also be removing as much of the other vague language surrounding the idea as well. So we should call people in an unhappy marriage as having a civil union, or making marriage after divorce a civil union, or make marriage between two people with the same colour hair a civil union.
If we have a vat of seawater, and what we value is salt, not only do we not add more water, but we attempt to remove the water that’s already in there. So how else do we concentrate the term?
Not this stupid argument again. You’re not an NBA player because, when it comes to basketball skills, you are inferior to those who are. It’s not because they have a “special” title that you can’t have. They are simply (far far far far) better than you at a given job. Still want to argue that you don’t think gays are inferior?
Is the “gay agenda” still scaring the shit out of you, this many years later?
I asked this of KellyCriterion, who seems to have left the conversation. What about you, magellan01?
This, I think, is the crux of your argument- that gay marriage does *not *benefit society. I’d like to see your reasoning of how this is so.
Well, let’s make up some numbers:
10% of the population is gay. Under an SSM-ban, none will ever marry.
That leave 90% of the population as straight, and thus eligible for a marriage with “grue”, “grue” being a quality of straight marriages that need not be defined at this or any future time. What effects on “grue” are caused by abusive marriages, childless marriages, divorces and re-marriages, etc. are unclear, in large part because “grue” itself is undefined, but it exists, dammit, and don’t try to claim otherwise.
Of the 90%, maybe one-fourth will never marry and die alone and miserable. Maybe they die as children, maybe they’re just ugly and undateable… who knows? No “grue” for them!
So 75% of 90% of the population have to carry the “grue” for the entire society. Why does society need “grue”? Who knows, since “grue” remains undefined, but it just does, dammit! So that’s 67.5% of the population getting into straight marriages at least once in their lifetimes and keeping the “grue” supply stable, or at least as far as we can tell since we have no way of measuring “grue”, nor any need of figuring out a way to measure “grue”, since that’s not important, dammit!
So the SSM ban is lifted and homosexual can now marry. Let’s assume that they match the overall population for child deaths and undateability, so only 75% of them are marriageable, for 7.5% of the overall population.
So now we have 67.5% of the population in “grue” marriages and 7.5% of the population in non-“grue” marriages. Overall “grue” levels begin to drop, though without any measuring tools (or efforts to figure out a way to build “grue” measuring tools) we can’t say for certain how much “grue” is lost as a result, except it’s a LOT, dammit! And forty years from now we may face a critical “grue” shortage, dammit!
Does that help clarify things?
Is it about dilution or clarification? If you add people like blacks and women to the class of “people who can vote”, then you do make the term more vague. “Voter” can no longer automatically indicate white and male. It actually makes things more clear, because you are no longer dragging other characteristics into it. It now purely defines “people who can vote”, and cannot be used to imply other things about those people.
magellan01, I think I have a solution that you’ll like.
Let’s make marriage truly between one man and one woman.
Specifically, between Marty Finkelstein of Dade City, Florida, and Mary Watanabe of Modesto, California. No other people are allowed to marry, and all married people are now compelled to divorce.
Now that’s what I call undiluted. It’s special, it’s certainly unique, and it seems to satisfy your criteria of marriage. It has a very specific definition, and we can all happily agree as to what it means.
You happy now?
There is no law preventing you from having these.
Some people would like to get married. But there are laws preventing them from doing so.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Oh yeah, we might have to amend a dictionary. And that would be really inconvenient to those of us who take the right to marry for granted.
I love trying to figure out the hierarchy of what we should care about when it comes to coddling opposite sex couples concerned that those dastardly gays are robbing them of their specialness.
The vague possibility that some straight couples in the future won’t want to get married because it’s an institution that they share with gay couples (which doesn’t make them homophobic, of course; how could it?)? This is of great concern, and a valid reason to decline expanding right to gay couples. The fact that there currently exist straight couples who refuse to marry specifically because they feel that denying the right to gay couples corrupts the institution? Of no importance.
The fact that some straight couples (allegedly) are so reliant upon their perceived specialness that sharing an institution with gays would cause them to abandon it? Well, then the specialness of opposite sex marriage must be preserved at all costs. The fact that excluding gay couples from the institution of marriage deprives them of substantive rights and privileges (that are not automatically duplicated by a segregated institution) and places upon them a badge of inferiority relative to opposite sex couples? Not worth compromising straight couples’ unique snowflake marriages.
And none of this suggests that gay relationships are of lesser worth than straight ones, of course.
Oxygen (O2) is pretty special, IMHO. Not just a special gas, but a pretty special word. If we allow gay people full access to O2, then the word becomes less special. If “the word is diluted,” some straight people may choose not to partake of the gas. We should therefore save all of the O2 for straight people, and let the gay people consume O3 (which is practically the same stuff, right?).
Apparently magellan01 would have opposed ending Jim Crow laws because the meaning of “the front of the bus” would have been diluted by allowing coloreds in there.
Okay, instead of happiness let’s say importance to the couple. BTW, I agree with the four point Max imputed to you, especially the first and fourth. The value of marriage to a society is the sum in some sense of the value of it to those who are married and those not yet married. I don’t see how adding another category changes the value of marriage to any of these groups. It does let people now excluded from enjoying these values participate, though. I think that adds to it.
Change the meaning, yes, dilution no. Now polygamy exists in some cultures today. I happen to think that at least one of the parties in a polygamous marriage is not getting the full benefit of the marriage, so I can see being against it here for that reason. I don’t see that happening in a SSM.
People are spending a lot of effort on excluding people from marriage and not a lot in advertising the benefits of marriage. How often do you see, on this board, people say stuff like “get married - there goes your sex life” and similar crud. If SSM opponents, in an attempt to not seem bigoted, say that civil unions are functionally equivalent to marriage, don’t you think that that devalues marriage far more than giving people who desperately want to get married the chance to do so?
First of all, two general comments on your “dilution” argument:
(1) You seem to be arguing at cross purposes. If marriage is a fundamental building block of society, then you want as many potential couples getting married as possible to form that foundation. But if more people getting married dilutes marriage, then you should want FEWER people getting married.
(2) Imagine an honor society at a school which accepts people with the top 5% of GPAs. That would obviously be a prestigious thing that people would want to get into. And you could reasonably argue that changing 5% to 10% might dilute it and make it worse. On the other hand, chaging 5% to 0.0001% would CLEARY make it worse because only one person would ever be in it. So maybe 10% would be BETTER than 5%, because the benefit of having more people available to do service projects (or whatever this honor society did) would outweigh the drawback that came from dilution. Fewer people certainly makes something more exclusive, but it doesn’t necessarily make it “better” at doing whatever it’s supposed to be doing.
(3) But the real problem would be if the honor society didn’t actually include all the top 5%. Imagine an all-male school with a top 5% honor society. Then the school goes co-ed, but the honor society only admits the top 5% of boys, not girls. Admitting the girls would clearly “dilute” the honor by your definition, but it would also (it seems to me) very clearly allow the honor society to more clearly meet its aim (that being providing an organization that recognizes and encourages academic excellence, etc.)
Even if we accept your historical claim at face value (and I must say that the amount we really know about how marriage worked 4500 years ago, or even 300 or 400 years ago, is a lot less than you’re implying), the choice is not between “society exactly like it was 400 years ago, or that society plus gay marriage”, it’s between:
(1) “society kinda like it was 400 years ago, except that gay people are recognized as full and equal and acceptable members of society, able to openly live as gay people and express their love for each other in monogamous committed relationships, but not get married”
and
(2) “society kinda like it was 400 years ago, except that gay people are recognized as full and equal and acceptable members of society, able to openly live as gay people and express their love for each other in monogamous committed relationships, and get married”
You’re arguing that (2) has never happened in all of human history. But then, neither has (1).
So here’s the key issue… kids will want to get married if, as they grow up, they see models of healthy and happy marriages around them. So what happens when a kid is growing up and has an uncle or aunt who is gay and in a committed lifelong relationship, which the kid can see is pretty much the same as the married straight couples the kid knows, but that uncle or aunt is NOT married. I think THAT is what will actually do damage to the place marriage holds in society… both the “well, I could get married, but Bob and Charlie are perfectly happy and aren’t married, so what’s the point” factor and the “aunt Gayle is my favorite person ever, and I asked her why she couldn’t get married, and she said she wasn’t allowed because she likes other women. That’s unfair and stupid and poopy!” factor.
Heh heh… I caught magellan in my grue-trap…
I wasn’t following your line of reasoning at first, but it sort of grue on me.