Actually, depending on the society, marriage can identify the relationship among one man and one woman, one man and several women, or (in far fewer societies), several men and one woman, so the “one man and one woman” logic is irrelevant.
As to why anyone would choose to engage in that act, this has been addressed: it provides direct rules of inheritance, assigns responsibilty and authority for child rearing, and acknowledges responsibility and authority to act in the name of the other partner(s) in the case of medical emergency without the need for long legal documents. It also provides a public declaration, enshrined in law, of the devotion and commitment of the married partners to each other.
All of the first set of situations can more easily be handled by simply recognizing marriage among same sex unions than it would by writing a whole list of new laws to govern civil unions. To deny the final point to a couple simply in order to play a semantic game with the word “marriage” seems mean spirited.
You are going to need to come up with something better than a vague “special” claim for your point. You have provided no “special” nature about opposite sex marriage. You have certainly provided no actual difference between opposite sex marriage and same sex marriage that makes one special while the other is not.
WTF? I just jumped on here for a quick scan and see that 3 or 4 replies I made last night are no longer here. My computer did freeze up right after that, but the replies were already there. Drat! Anyway, don’t have time to address everyone right now, I’ll just make a few quick points:
I am not advocating anything that is “separate but equal”. I’m advocating ONE set of laws that two groups of people qualify for. When I was in high school in NY, there were two different sets of people who could drive at night. One was people who had a license and were over 18. The other was people who were 17, had a license and had also taken a drivers ed course. One set of laws…accessed by two different groups of people. Tomndebb, I agree that simply expanding the definition to allow SS couples to marry may be a quicker and easier way for SS couples to tap into the rights and privileges. But it is not the only way. If you don’t think there is value in preserving the traditional meaning of the word, it makes sense that one would advocate for SSM. If one sees value in preserving the traditional definition, then it makes sense that they would look for a way for SS couples to get all the rights and privileges while preserving the institution.
I often see SSM advocates erect a straw man (as my argument goes, anyway) via the question: “how does two gay people getting married alter someone’s existing marriage?” I don’t think it does much. It’s certainly not my argument. I think that anyone who is married has a set of shared experiences and feelings that define that marriage. My concern is how attractive the institution will be 30, 40, 50 years from now when two young people are in love. It is my contention that the more encompassing the notion of marriage becomes, the less special, the less attractive it becomes for people to enter into it.
I am baffled that people would advocate for a society that does not have a word to describe that societal institution in which man and woman come together in the most natural way, have children, and raise the future generations. To me it is civilization’s imprimatur on how humans best procreate.
Wonder of those posts will show up as magically as they disappeared. Now, I’m off to a busy day.
I think you’re incorrect–people pretty obviously these days are mostly entering into marriage for the civil benefits (taxes, visitation, etc) rather than the esoteric in-love stuff. Witness the divorce rate! Further, I believe that’s at least partially being driven by the fact that anti-SSM advocates are claiming “love doesn’t matter, only tradition/bio-children/natural order!” Including you–if love is to be the primary factor, your argument is smoke in the wind. When marriage is about who loves who, and who wants to spend a lifetime with who–regardless of the gender of the participants!–it will naturally come back into fashion because it’ll be harder to be as cynical about it as we are today, as a society.
Except that humans don’t need it to procreate, and the definition of marriage over time doesn’t seem to have anything whatsoever to do with the unmarried pregnancy rate. You’re trying to retain the definition without proving that it correlates in any way with the phenomena you’re trying to encourage by retaining the definition.
Nothing “natural” about one man and one woman. If anything is “natural” it’s one man and several women. And since we already allow gays to adopt children, and gays can easily have children of their own, I’m baffled that people don’t want those children to be able to grow up in a household with married parents.
Yes you are. You specifically are advocating separate types of marriage that are equal. You can’t say, “I want X” and then say, “But I don’t want X”. It isn’t honest.
One set of laws could just allow gays to marry.
This means nothing. One set of laws could allow for all marriages.
The institution isn’t harmed in any way by allowing gays to marry. It isn’t harmed by allowing Kim Kardashian to marry. It wasn’t harmed by allowing you to marry.
That’s not a straw man. A straw man is attributing a position to someone else that they don’t hold and attacking that opinion, creating the impression that you’ve out-argued that person.
People asking you what damage gay marriage would cause are asking you to defend your premise. It seems like it’s unfair because you don’t have a logical leg to stand on.
And you have no evidence for this. So your argument amounts to, “Something, in the far future, may happen as a result of this, and that something may keep kids from getting married.” That’s not a sound argument.
You are just repeating, “Why should anyone get married if they allow gays to do it.” That’s simply an argument based on bigotry.
So we aren’t going to call unions where the woman is post-menopausal marriage? Or men who have had vasectomies have to get civil unions? Or yuppie DINKs can’t get married?
You are not presenting logical arguments. You are raging against the coming of the night.
In NY, there was a separate-but-equal thing for drivers, in this particular respect. If it was one set of laws that everyone accessed, the difference you just described wouldn’t exist.
In the case of NY drivers, there’s a good reason for separate-but-equal. We’re asking you to provide a good reason for SbE in the case of marriage.
Like you, I think there’s great value in preserving the traditional meaning of marriage. I just disagree on what aspects of that traditional meaning are worth preserving.
I don’t know if you’re married. That may change your perspective. For me, the central meaning of marriage is a profound, sustained, and committed love between myself and my equal partner. It is a love that leads to our acting in many cases as a social unit (e.g., both of us go to the same social events most of the time), to our working within a single household, to our building a family together and mingling our existing families, and to our commitment to maintain this relationship even through the hard times.
Our specific reproductive plumbing is not a part of that definition.
It seems likely to me that the opposite will be true. By legalizing SSM, we emphasize that the aforementioned deep, committed, abiding love is the central aspect to a marriage. We show that that kind of relationship is key to a stable society, and we hold it forth as a high social ideal. Focusing on reproductive plumbing seems to me to cheapen marriage.
Do you disagree on what’s central to marriage? You of course don’t have to tell us if you’re married, but it’d be interesting to know both whether you’re married, and if so, what you think is central to marriage. If you’re not married, are you willing to give extra consideration to the thoughts on marriage held by married people?
As for marriage being “special”, that ship has sailed. People live together with impunity, and there is no social stigma anymore in most of the US. If you think the “special” nature of marriage needs to be preserved, you should bring back laws making cohabitation illegal.
Not much time, but I wan to address this important point. First, I’d like just say that I do appreciate you making the effort to understand what my points are rather than spout the usual boilerplate that some do.
That said, I think you’re plainly wrong on what is meant by separate but equal. The term SbE comes from the notion that black and white students could both get the same education by going to “separate, but equal” schools, etc… From Wikipedia:
So, for the NY situation to be a case of SbE, you have to point to the two different sets of laws. In the NY example, their was just one set of driving laws. One. If you insist that there was two, please provide a cite. I think we both know that there was only the one. To be subject to those laws (be a fully licensed driver, to be able to drive at night, on highways, and all the rest of the privileges), you had to belong to one of two groups:
be a licensed driver over 18 years of age
be a licensed driver over 17 years of age who had successfully passed a driver education course
The result is ONE set of driving laws that people are subject two by falling into one of the two scenarios mentioned. If you still think this amounts to a SbE situation, please show the two separate but equal sets of laws.
Ah, there’s your classic magellan anti-SSM arguments: “it’s ONE set of laws!”, and what might happen 40 years from now (or 30, or 50)…
Well, magellan and people with similar opinions weren’t born in 2012 - they carry whatever biases they may have formed decades ago and are now reluctant to give up. Arguably the real concern is how successfully they can impart these views on their children, which I guess is increasingly difficult since the children are exposed to competing social messages that gayness is no big deal.
Heck, I was surprised when in 2009 a Louisiana justice of the peace refused to sign off on an interracial marriage, but I guess the rarity is a good thing. It’ll be another two or three decades before anti-SSM sentiments reach a similar level of dinosaur-hood in the U.S., I figure. Some religious organizations will still refuse to perform them, and that’s fine, but a secular government clerk or JP refusing to file the paperwork? That’ll be a head-scratcher.
And that’s a perfect example of why separate but equal doesn’t work - because you have two groups trying to access the same privileges, but one has an extra burden: you have to have passed a driver’s education course. If the law didn’t distinguish between being 17 and being 18, it wouldn’t be able to pass a law specifically targetting 17 year olds, limiting their ability to access drivers license.
That’s precisely the problem with civil unions. If you have civil unions and marriages, you can pass a law specifically limiting civil unions in some way, without effecting marriages, just as New York passed a law specifically limiting 17 year olds’ access to drivers licenses.
“The different laws for straight and gay people are contained within the same US Code therefore they are a single set of laws” is the most cretinous argument I’ve heard for trampling on human rights and the Constitution since “gays can’t be considered full human beings because then we’d have to let Roger Maris into the Hall of Fame” or possibly “everyone, including homosexuals, has the equal right to a heterosexual marriage.” Are Christians literally incapable of understanding how logic works?
Condescending Robot, back off. In pretty nearly every post you use insulting language to describe the arguments with which you disagree. Once or twice might be simple emotional expression, but you are tap-dancing very close to making your views into personal attacks.
Take a deep breath and reduce the number of pejorative adjectives that you seem to feel compelled to launch.
This non sequitur is not helpful. There are plenty of Christians who are on your side of the argument while your primary opponent is not Christian. Leave the personal comments outside this forum.
Thanks. While I obviously find magellan’s view to be fatally flawed, I’d prefer the discussion focus on the arguments rather than on the snide comments.
I’ll ask you, Miller, and anyone else who holds that my position falls into the “Separate, but Equal” category to rise to the challenge I put forth in Post 208.