Terms like “diluted” only make any sense whatever in this context if the person using them thinks of gay marriages as inherently inferior. Otherwise they’d be talking about how marriage would be expanded and strengthened by extending the option to everyone, or that it’s no big deal.
It’s just another attempt to couch bigotry in less obviously offensive terms.
Same deal holds. I’d say good for them (the long life and no cheating part, the dozen kids maybe not so much) but the quality of my marriage is based on our goals going into it, not on anyone elses. Hell, my mother and father-in-law were married for almost 80 years, with no cheating, and while they had just one kid she turned out pretty good. Great role model for us. My parents were married for 45 years until my mother died. No cheating, except maybe when my father was in Paris during WW II - no evidence he did, but if he did I wouldn’t be that shocked. So?
But I agree with what I hope is your point, that other good marriages should have no more impact on yours than other bad marriages. If that ain’t it, enlighten me.
It is pure bad logic. Expanding a definition will water down something if the distribution is constrained in some way. Since the distribution of money is what it is, expanding the definition of rich to include 20% of the public waters down what rich means.
But how is the value of marriage constrained in this way? if 20% of OSMs are happy, or 50%, how does adding SSMs to the mix change this?
If you truly believed that more marriages waters them down, maybe you should be for forbidding divorced people from remarrying, or requiring a one year waiting period, or not allowing marriage until after the age of 25. That would make marriage more scarce, and thus more valuable, right?
I suspect this is the same giggle used 50 or 60 years ago for a woman who wanted to go to Medical school. I’m sure there were plenty of old doctors who thought letting women in, with their emotions and stuff, would devalue the profession. Let them be nurses like God intended. And as for men become nurses - oh the giggles.
So?
Any person who is more interested in preserving the exact definition of a word, than the equality and happiness of millions of people, is a person with a seriously warped sense of priority.
It’s a fucking word, a collection of letters with a popularly understood meaning, and you want to deny thinking feeling people the ability to have their most important relationship recognized equally by the government, because the word’s definition might be broadened.
Oh, I was just taking magellan’s claims to their logical conclusion (that is to say, grant the unproven premise for laughs and see where it goes).
[ul][li]If a gay marriage can make a straight marriage less special, therefore “specialness” is a relative quality and a straight marriage’s specialness is adjustable.[/li]
[li]If a straight marriage’s specialness is adjustable, it stands to reason that some are more special than others. Otherwise, we’d have to assume they were all equally special, and why would we do that?[/li]
[li]Therefore there is a spectrum of specialness even among straight marriages, with presumably the lengthy, child-producing, faithful, mutually-loving and respecting and all that being the most special, while the alcohol-fueled, quickly-regretted and almost as quickly annulled Vegas marriage being the least special. If there are other criteria to apply, I’m open to suggestion.[/li]
[li]If a married couple’s goal is to increase their position on the specialness scale, the logical approach is to destroy marriages more special than their own, rather than discourage ones that appear less special.[/li]
[li]Therefore fiftieth-anniversary parties should be high-security affairs, with the lucky (and special) couple wanting to display and preserve their specialness, while roving gangs of hit squads hired by the five-years, the adulterers, the wife- and husband-beaters and the childless circle the place with sniper-rifles, their scopes looking for very special targets…[/li][/ul]
That’s pretty close. But allow me to flesh it out a bit. I see #1 and #4 as being tightly related. But there are two aspects to it. One goes to what is best for an individual, the other to what is best for society.
While I do think that there is a degree of self-actualization that comes into play with being married and having children, I don’t think they’re absolutely necessary. and I have no doubt that many gay people do not feel unfulfilled by not having children. As do many married people who don’t have children. But number 4 is a starting point for me. Virtually all successful modern (5,000 years?) civilizations that we are aware of had some form of marriage, some recognition of a man and a woman joining together and being a unit, and usually, the head of a family.This predates religion, certainly a Judeo-Christian one.
So, we have as I see countless civilizations over thousands of years before Christ, or Moses, constantly experimenting and honing the rules that allow us to live together peacefully and prosperously. And in all that time, with all the different experiments happening, we can point to zero instances of a society that embraced SS relationships to the same degree they embraces OS ones. That leaves two options. 1) It was tried in some societies and they all failed. 2) It was never done. Given my belief that homosexuality is natural occurring in humans, and seeing that there are some societies that permitted it very openly, I can’t believe that this topic was not struggled with, or even discussed. Look at ancient greece. During various times when it was a robust, enlightened society, it, as far as I am aware, was a place that was the most accepting of homosexuality. But even there, SS relationships were not given the same status and OS ones.
I recount all this only to make the point that it seems that the institution of marriage is not only important to individuals, but to society, as well. We know that children who are raised in stable homes generally do better than those who aren’t. And the institution of marriage is the best way we’ve come up with to afford that benefit to the greatest number of children. And society at larger. so, while marriage may be a means to its own end, for the individual, it is quite useful as a way for society to raise future generations.
Well, you’re definitely correct about the last part. I think settling into a committed relationship will make him/her happier. And I do fear a time when kids ask “Married? Why would we do that?” But I’d be less concerned for them as a couple than I would be for society as a whole.
Is it possible that there is some other construct that might serve us as well? Or better? Yes. But we have thousands of years of experiments one the one hand (many without the influence of religion), and what I see as an interesting premise for a science fiction book on the other.
And just to save you or others work of asking what I think are obvious questions, I am absolutely in favor of allowing SS couples to adopt.
I’ll have to ask you to try harder to understand the point being made. Hint: it has nothing to do with a value judgement. Think paint. If you have The Blue Paint Store and all you sell is blue paint, people understand your business—you’re the blue paint guy. Not red, not yellow, green or orange. Blue. If you then to decide to carry purple paint as well. Then you’ve diluted the understanding people will have of your business from when they see the name in the phonebook and then come into your store.
I hope this helps. And unless you see purple as being inferior to blue, I suspect it will.
It’s unclear how gay marriage will accelerate any of the decline you claim to be concerned about, nor why attempting to base an argument on what was done (or not done) in the distant past is not immediately made ludicrous by it being typed out on an internet-connected personal computer.
You’re changing what we’re discussing. You’re introducing a particular flavor of marriage: happy ones. This is not helpful to the discussion. Unless I’m missing your point. Which I may very well be.
I don’t think I’ve opined that “more marriages” waters anything down. My position has been and is, that if you broaden the definition of the word marriage to include anything other than one man/one woman, you dilute the meaning of the term. If you accept SSM into it, it’s diluted. If you allow polygamy into it, it’s diluted. Etcetera.
As far as divorce, the institution of marriage certainly has its problems. An age limitation might be worth looking into, though given the age that people start having sex and having children it might be counter-productive. The more important point is that bringing to light the problems that the institution is currently suffering offers no rationalization for SSM. Or against.
Are you of the mind that homosexual desires and homosexual men and women were not around 5,000 ago? Or that CPUs were?
Perhaps you’d try to offer an explanation when even in the society that was most permissive of homosexuality SS couples were never afforded the same status as OS couples.
Firstly, my entire point is that it’s a poorly-concealed value judgement.
Secondly, “dilution” is a bizarre word to apply to your hypothetical. “Expansion” makes more sense, as stores actually do talk about expanding their inventories.
Thirdly, the hypothetical is actually useful. Railing against same-sex marriage is like throwing a fit because the paint store starts stocking purple, even though that doesn’t hinder anybody’s ability to buy blue paint in the slightest and nobody is forcing anybody to pay any attention to the purple paint aisle at all.
The only detail missing is that the paint store is the only place in the United States to buy paint and that the people who don’t want it to stock purple paint “because it’s different” are the same people who called purple paint immoral and wrong when it was more socially acceptable to do so, although I’m sure the latter is pure coincidence.
That is the more immediate result. Of greater concern is the weight the word will have 30, 40 years down the road. As per MaxTheVool’s post.
If people choose to feel hurt by this, that is there choice. I’m hurt that I can’t call myself an NBA player, as I wasn’t born with the prerequisites. Just to be clear, I am pro-everything the people arguing against me want, except the use of the term marriage. I wish there’d be a push to insist on the rights and privileges marriage affords people and families, allowing the meaning of the word to stay intact.
I also would like world peace and a pony.
Isn’t your claim, in effect, “gay marriage has never been successful, therefore we should resist it now” ? Such arguments can be leveled against any innovation - electronic communication, movable type, alphabets…
the wheel…
Because humans were, and to some degree still are, a bunch of fearful bigots. But just in the last 150 years or so, a combination of advancing technology, economic power, liberal democracy, education and general improvements in human welfare have greatly reduced our ignorance and we have (in some places) stable prosperous democracies where individuals are free to choose their own paths in life and social inequalities that were once accepted as the natural order are now widely seen as unfair and unnecessary.
Why is preventing gay marriage necessary, exactly? Because it’s never been done? Because it may have vaguely negative repercussions in future? These are increasingly and demonstrably untrue, as the first nations to allow gay marriage approach their first decade with it, giving it establishment and failing to demonstrate any negative results.
The Netherlands: 10 years this month
Belgium: 8 years in February
Spain, Canada: 6 years in July
Basically the process you are concerned about is underway, and has been underway for quite some time. If you claim to want to argue the issue logically, you should research the above four nations and honestly assess if straight marriage has become endangered (or “de-specialed”) as a result.
“Expansion” is a fine word to use. I used “broaden”. “Dilution” is also fine. IN fact, it’s the other side of your “expansion” coin. You can focus on either side. But while I can see both sides, you seem unable to grant the most minor concession: that dilution occurs. I don’t get why you and others are so intent on digging in your heels on this, but it does serve to let me know which conversations might be fruitful and which might be pleasantly replaced by banging my head on an engine block.
The analogy was crafted to explain the concept of dilution. Nothing else.
This—“The only detail missing is that the paint store is the only place in the United States to buy pain”—actually, is helpful. The fact is that we have “marriage” and we don’t have “<SSM term goes here>”. That’s a problem. If I were a gay leader I would 1) come up with a term and 2) argue passionately that “Marriage” and “???” be afforded the exact same rights and privileges.
Okay, let’s assume all hetero marriages have the property of “grue”. We need not define “grue” in any tangible way, nor provide examples of marriages that have more “grue” than others, nor describe how “grue” attaches to marriages, if it increases over the length of the marriage, increases with produced children, decreases with infidelities, and in fact we need never link “grue” to any aspect of the marriage beyond the fact that one spouse has a penis and the other has a vagina.
Now, let’s accept for the sake of discussion that same-sex marriage will cause a significant drop in the “grue” of straight marriages, though to what degree and in how many “grue-units”, we need not define.
Why should we care if this happens?
Society should care. As it may make the institution, now with less “grue”, a less desirable institution to enter into. This assumes, of course, that one assumes that we want people entering into marriages, as it benefits society.
I don’t know why you’d attempt to equate advancements in science, which introduce new possibilities and improves our lives, with homosexuality. Unless you think homosexuality is a new phenomenon.
But we haven’t even defined what “grue” is, or what it does, or how straight marriages get it, or what effect its loss has. And I never said “grue” is what encourages straights to get married in the first place or that more “grue” or less “grue” has any particular encouraging or discouraging effect, nor did I describe how “grue” could have such an effect, since the effects of “grue” remain undefined.
You assumed that “grue” was good, and that less “grue” would be less good, while I took pains to not define any qualities of “grue” beyond that it attaches only to straight marriages and diminishes if gay marriages exist.
It’s absurdly disingenuous for you to offer up that “unless”, and advancements in science certainly is linked with tolerance for homosexuality, in the sense that we no longer attribute homosexuality with demonic possession, and only in fairly recent decades stopped linking it (pseudoscientifically) with mental illness.