The speculating part is when you decide that the trend isn’t towards a new natural equilibirium, but instead must be an eternally accelerating shift that will only end when there are no marriages left to dissolve. At which point society will collapse, naturally.
This sort of speculation is pretty common among conservatives, I’ve noticed. Any little change is a harbinger of inevitable doom!
You were talking about all of society, not just gay people, buddy. Nice try, though.
Or maybe you’re one of those people who seriously believe that if we allow The Gay to infiltrate our society, heterosexuality will vanish from the earth, somehow?
Dude, even animals have been known to pair-bond. Society is conforming to natural inclinations, not the reverse.
I often take straightdope questions and create lively debate with my coworkers, friends, and neighbors. Here in California I get a wide variety of responses.
Still a question unanswered is - are there gays who are against gay marriage???
I actually found someone. His logic was extreme, but made a little sense the more I thought about it. He is a neighbor of mine, a gay man in his early 40’s, very much in love with his partner for 6 years.
He is a big conspiracy theorist. He hasn’t trusted the government since Lyndon LaRouche wanted to round up all the gays in the early 80’s and put them in concentration camps as a solution to the AIDS crisis.
He feels that government sanctioned gay marriage is a way for the government to take an account for how many gay people there are in the country. The gay population has been estimated at 10%. His extreme paranoia has him believing that one day a smooth talking homophobic bigot will come to power in the US and all the gov’t has to do is look at the gay marriage registry to find gays to exterminate. He says he has read that Germany openly gave many rights to gay people just prior to Hitler’s rise to power and he then snuffed out the gays, supposedly more gay people died in the concentration camps than Jewish people.
Second point he had was married people have a higher tax rate/percentage than single people. I am unsure if this is true, but he is adamant that he is right about this. So, his exact quote to me was “why would I want to pay more in taxes to a government that I do not trust or respect? This is a question the American colonists asked the British queen during the revolution.”
I didn’t say that society would collapse. Actually I predicted a collective socialism where pairings have been rendered financially irrelevant.
Actually demographic decline is a real issue and will cause some severe problems particularly since it is happening primarily in welfare states. Originally the welfare state’s retirement policies required several workers to support one retiree, but now the number of workers to retirees is becoming a 2-1 ratio in some places, like Japan. That is a very difficult ratio for a society to support.
I was responding to a ‘discussion’ if you can’t keep up with posters adding new context that’s not my problem. There is no biological reason for homosexuals to pair off as pairing exists for sexual/procreative reasons. Why is a gay marriage between two homosexuals any different biologically from a gay marriage between three?
Do you have something better than trite ad hominems? Like a valid response to any of the arguments I’ve made? If not, I am starting to put you at a two post limit where I stop responding to your boring ad hominems.
Yes, and animals have been known to not pair-bond as well. Society is conforming to natural inclinations with polygamy too. You are still without a relevant point.
…aaaand here’s where you predict society would collapse. I was just a little ahead of the game, is all.
There’s still no logical reason to assume that marriage will go away, even if people stop having kids. There’s lots of reasons to stay together or get married, and where one starts to wane, there are plenty more to take its place.
You were responding directly to me, of course. Your dodging doesn’t count as a meandering discussion.
And there is no biological reason for heterosexuals to pair up either, as you well know. Polygmay is a fully functional system for sexual/procreative purposes. So trying to use this as an argument against gay marriage makes no sense whatsoever. Nice try, though.
I couldn’t think of another perspective from which your arguments make a lick of sense. Unless you know of one I missed? Because if not, it’s not me that’s ad-homineming you, it’s your own arguments.
My point is that you are speculating wildly without a shred of basis in reality - which this response of yours continues to support. We are not in the position of starting from paired marriage moving towards polygamy. Polygamy has been around forever in human culture, and if anything society has moved away from it over the centuries. And despite your fantasizing, there is no reason to think that it is the next going thing in any country where it is not currently legal.
Well you are simply handwaving. It’s speculation yes, but the change in our cultural traditions regarding family have changed so much in recent history that the thrust of history supports it. Legal divorce has decimated marriages, and as I pointed out very few kids live with their grandparents unlike 100 years ago. In otherwords it’s hard to over-estimate how much different the family structure is today as it was 100 years ago, or 100 years ago to what it was 500 years ago. We went from families and clans in Europe that didn’t migrate pretty much at all, to the atomization of colonialism that destroyed the extended family completely and utterly. I’m really not talking about a more extreme change than that. What I propose happening in the future is less radical than what has already been done by modernity.
I didn’t predict society will collapse. I pointed out demographic decline.
Not go away, but become a fairly insignificant part of social organization. A cultural affectation as opposed to underpinning. Hell, I’m not even really predicting the future as much as describing the present where the precursors to this already exist.
I was responding to the wider argument. Your incapacity to keep more than one idea in your mind at once is not my problem, nor do I have much patience for it.
Actually there is a biological reason for heterosexuals to pair up, breeding. Which is what I was responding to as suggested by another poster above. Sure, polygamist groups have worked out, but only in a highly advanced technological civilization can you achieve the possibility of a totally atomized structure where coupling is irrelevant to the raising of children, as you see with the precursor of divorced parents who share custody.
Yes, your inability to comprehend what you argue so passionately against is certainly tedious.
There is a shred of basis in reality. The position of marriage in our culture has been significantly diminished in relative importance. I never said about moving toward polygamy. I am talking about a socialized atomism where no one has any prioritized bond with an individual for reasons of raising children, particularly if society will socialize the child-rearing. I’m talking about a society full of single parents, where the kids might go back and forth between their parents. Maybe people couple for short periods of time and trade off coupling, each coupling producing some children, or not, you know, exactly like it is now only without the vestigial pressure to couple, along with greater socialization of child-rearing, you know, like WIC.
What I am describing is not so different from how it is now.
With the notable difference is that there was a mechanism for the breakup of families, notably the increased ability to travel. Got a mechanism in mind for why people are going to completely abandon marriage, enough to think it’s “silly”? Keep in mind we haven’t even got to the point where people think it’s silly to associate with your grandparents yet.
You’re funny.
Would this be before, or after, the government ceases to recognize it and give it altered status?
Your desperate attempts to continue to defend your bait-and-switch argument are not my problem, nor do I have much patience for them.
Somehow I’m still noticing that the fact that polygamous groups has worked out thoroughly refutes what you said.
And at this point I’m not sure which you think you’re arguing for; polygamous groups creches, or everyone going it alone reproducing with sperm banks (which is of course so much cheaper and more fun than sex that it will obviously replace it). Or is this a just “It’s gonna change! It must! To something else!” kind of argument?
Isn’t it kind of hypocritical to ad hominem me here?
Oh, so that’s what you’re talking about. It’s so hard to tell with you pulling any and everything in to butress your arguments, no matter how cross-contradictory they are.
And as for your sci-fi vision of the future, I think ElvisLives said it best:
Recardless of crackpot fears about divorce being an unstoppable plague, it remains the fact that there are reasons for people to get married, and that whille some of the reasons are weaking and fading, various others show no signs of going away, ever. Despite fear that sex and rock and roll will destroy the world.
Openly gay people face a death sentence in many places in the world right now, and have, in the past in the US and much of the rest of the world, faced serious criminal punishment. Black people have been horribly treated, but I can’t think of a time that they were threatened with death or imprisonment simply for being black.
You have got to be shitting me. Slavery wasn’t imprisonment? Lynchings weren’t fatal?
See : Medgar Evers at al.
Since the OP refers to the United States I don’t see what the rest of the world has to do with it. I can’t imagine any group experiencing what Blacks went through during the slavery, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights eras. There is simply no comparison.
What’s your point with this post? To try and convince other people that I put words in your mouth, or that I have only one “mode”? Because I leave those determinations to them. Or was it frustration that I didn’t play along and slink away, leaving you the last word?
Oh, and feel free not to respond to this if you don’t want to - I will not be disturbed if you feel like actually sticking to your two/three post limit this time.
Convince whom? You all who seem to care what other people think continue to project upon me the same desire to impress people. You should know by now that impressing you and people like you is utterly irrelevant. If you cannot grok what is being said, your opinion of me is not important, it is meaningless to me, of no value at all.
The post limit was regarding that conversation. I’ll still talk to you, but I won’t continue to talk to you when what I am talking about is clearly going over your head and you are hostile to any attempt to make you understand that which you are arguing so passionately against.
As Groucho Marx said: I don’t know what it is, but I’m against it!
All of those statements that started with, “I don’t know what you’re saying.”, should have stopped there. It’s the only part of your post that was a relevant response. You don’t know what I am saying. That’s clear, but you are too obstinant to actually try and understand. You’re more interested in the battle than in actually understanding what you’re discussing. That’s your MO, and I am not going to keep doing it.
So we can keep talking, just not about the part that you know you don’t understand but won’t accept that you don’t.
Well, this is a zombie, but since the top of this page is a quote of me being an idiot, I should point out that clearly the treatment of black people has been much worse historically, and I have no excuse for what I posted a decade ago.
I’m going to claim youth and inexperience and long and faithful service and admit that I was very wrong there and I’m not sure what the hell I was on about.
As atonement, you now have to get gay-married.
Isn’t that what a lot of people in 2009 were saying, that if gay marriage became legal, it would inevitably be mandatory and involve pets and appliances and whatnot?
They also said that if gay people got married, they’d want to have sex in public, just like straight people do. Same thing they said about interracial marriage, and even women wanting to breast feed in public.
