I regret that my use of “Mr. or Mrs.” for C. Ehrlich came across as a “slam” to you. I had first written “Mr. Ehrlich” before realizing that I had no idea what C. Ehrlich’s sex is. Preferring to address people by a title and surname when possible, I tried to allow for my ignorance while still upholding the measure of respect due my interlocutor. Apparently, I missed the mark in your reading, and I regret that.

On the other hand, “Simple biology says that a gay man can’t marry a gay man” is neither prejudicial nor stereotypical. My mind “ran to sex” because that is fundamentally what marriage is about, or at least what differentiates it from all other relational arrangements. Others such as Robert George, et al, have argued this more clearly and persuasively than I can. There are myriad “supportive relationships” of all kinds in the world and these have existed from time immemorial with all justified social approbation. However, it was not until the last 30 years (thanks, Douglas!) that anyone had the absurdity to argue that these “supportive relationships” were automatically due the term “marriage.”

Forcing people to pretend there is no difference is forcing them to lie.

You are welcome to believe that the differences do not matter. But that is your personal belief. It is subjective. It is religious in nature: only one religion (humanism, also called Unitarian Universalism) rejects the idea that conjugal relations, and blood kinship, are sacred in favor of the optimistic ideal that mankind should live without limits and should have absolute control over every aspect of what we used to call natural law.

Every other major world religion recognizes the family-making union of man and woman as different in kind from sex that is primarily about recreation and pleasure.

A “Boston marriage” is a term from the 1880s. It uses the word “marriage.” People have thinking about alternative families for awhile now.

It’s too bad you don’t know Stein. She was a great writer and patron of the arts.

You can find my views on marriage in the “On the Square Column” entitled “Marriage and the Liberal Empire.” The subject here concerns the health benefits of marriage.

Neither prejudice nor stereotype is about taking offense.

A prejudice is a judgment made before you know someone, like stating that gays believe there should be no restriction on marriage at all.

A stereotype is a fixed impression, like believing that gays are liars.

As Sergio observes, you’ve leapt into this conversation accusing people of things they haven’t done, which I find to be tiresome behavior.

I am not aware of anything relating to Gertrude Stein’s relationship with Alice B. Toklas, and in fact I have no idea of Alice B. Toklas is. Apparently, they were lesbians together. So?

That two homosexuals lived under the same roof (or if 2,000 did same in Carthage for that matter) in the 1920′s has no more to do with marriage than does the fact that I took my basset hound for a walk this morning. You’ve simply decided, in an effort to support your effort to redefine marriage, that it has never been anything more than an association of any two persons all along, with no particular connection with procreation. Hey, who knew?

I’m curious though what you think about this though…when divorce courts ask when or if a marriage was consummated, why do you think the law has always seen that as a relevant question?

As for what you find stereotypical or prejudiced, it’s a little tough to pinpoint from the quotes you provide. As best I can tell, something is stereotypical and prejudice if you take offense to it in some way.

Excuse me, where did i name call any other person in this blog? Cause I said TimC analogy between gay marriage and the imposibility for men to procreate is not evident and “absurd”? How is that “name calling”?

Blake:

To be honest I do not understand your comments to me, since I was not talking about anything about “healthy commitments” or responsabilities of gay parents. Based on what you write, I see you are only repeating what you already said on this topic on other discusions, and to be honest I do not understand your insitence to attribute homosexuals in general for being irresponsible and egoists . When you manage to explain me how that is inherent for homosexuals (or homosexuals that intend for form unions and call it marriage) maybe we could get anywhere in the discusion.

I think you’ve misunderstood me. I don’t find their positions against gay marriage prejudiced and stereotyped. On another forum, I’ve had a long, serious conversation with Blake about his reasons for being against gay marriage, and I’ve indicated where I think he has a point and where I think he doesn’t.

In response to Carter’s post, however, they both ignored his point and the article he referred to and rushed headlong to leap onto their own hobbyhorses.

Here’s a sample of the statements made by Blake and TimC that I think are either stereotyped or prejudiced:

Gays believe “there should be no restrictions on marriage at all.”

They “force people to go along with “affirming” their relationship, even if it means lying”

They “are ideologically committed to the idea of a free and open market for child-selling”

“Err, hmm, Mr. or Mrs. Ehrlich,” which I take to be a gender slam.

“Simple biology says that a gay man can’t marry a gay man,” which is an example of his mind running to sex, not to a supportive relationship.

As for gay marriage being a recent idea, the idea of a “Boston marriage” is a century older, describing two women living together for mutual support, which may or may not include sex. Think, too, of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in the 1920s.

Nice try.

In your second paragraph you draw a parallel between homosexuality and the racially segregated south (or perhaps that never entered your mind?), so okay, got it: to oppose the redefinition of marriage makes one equal to those who wanted to treat human beings as less than human because of their skin color.

But wait!….You say I’m right. I’m right because you think we should allow a certain grace period for us knuckle-dragging troglodytes to get with the program. But then once your grace period expires and there are still some snake-handlers who have the audacity to believe that marriage only exists because men and women mate, well then those “people who display truly objectionable character traits are those who dogmatically refuse to budge from their pre-critical prejudices–even when faced with evidence that such prejudices are positively harming their friends, families, and people they’ve never even met.”

I do love your penultimate paragraph wherein you identify this sociological trend. The deep thinkers, you say, soften their pre-critical attitude (that attitude that says marriage only came into existence because men and women procreate) and then abandoned the meaning of marriage because they met a homosexual. Deep thinking is right!

Anyway, as I said, nice try.

I hadn’t seen that Ngram viewer before. It’s a fun tool. Thanks!

It seems to me that significant cultural advances with respect to human and civil rights can be made within relatively short periods of time, even within a single generation (which is not to say that prior generations and circumstances didn’t lay a lot of the needed groundwork for such advances). That certain civil rights issues were not part of the popular discussions of an earlier generation is no reason for dismissing them.

With gay marriage in particular, we seem to find the following trend: when people do deeply think about the issue (perhaps because their gay friends or family members have now come out of the closet), there is a tendency for one’s pre-critical attitudes and judgments to soften. Except in cases of conversation to fundamentalist religion, I’ve never seen the change go in a regressive direction, from sympathy to antipathy towards gay rights.

So I think you are right. If someone has never thought about gay marriage before, and then opposes the idea when suddenly asked about it, this doesn’t mean that this person is the moral equivalent of a Klansman. Most people, once given the time, opportunity, pressure to deeply think about these issues will begin to change, following their more well-founded moral sensibilities. The people who display truly objectionable character traits are those who dogmatically refuse to budge from their pre-critical prejudices–even when faced with evidence that such prejudices are positively harming their friends, families, and people they’ve never even met.

We’ve discussed this before, and I would think that you would remember that I don’t consider children as “products” and that I don’t define success in that way.

While you have some valuable arguments about rights that I’ve since pondered, you seem unable to move a conversation forward rather than circling back around to the same point. Let me know when you’re able to stick to a subject (here, marriage and the couple’s health) instead of sliding off in order to make the same point (the rights of children putatively violated in gay families) or when you are able to push the conversation deeper by answering questions directly, by asking questions that push at logical flaws, or by bringing fresh insights to bear. I’m always happy to discuss further.

I’m sorry I can’t resist…you write:

Blake and TimC,

Before you trot out all your prejudices and sterotypes,

Man, this got my morning off with a chuckle! Yes, don’t you hate those stereotypes! Up until a handful of years ago, there wasn’t a gay person alive that had even heard the term “gay marriage,” and then poof! Just kick around the term for a couple years against the span of all human civilization and suddenly the whole world is bigoted! Why are they bigoted? Because you thought up a new idea that even you had never heard of before 1980 (at the earliest) and those that haven’t signed up yet…well let’s do the best we can to make them out to be Klansman.