What are the stakes in the New York state legislature’s upcoming vote on whether or not marriage is between a man and a woman? Via Kathryn Jean Lopez, one state senator offers an answer:
“What we’re about to do is redefine what the American family is,” [Carl] Kruger [of Brooklyn] said. “And that’s a good thing.”
Gay marriage advocates usually prefer to talk about the needs of adults and brush aside those of children, so it’s strange to hear one of them acknowledge that this involves families and not just couples.
Of course, redefining marriage will reshape much more than the family. It will also reorient our law and culture, creating an environment of legal and regulatory hostility against churches and other groups that continue to admit the truth that marriage is necessarily between a man and a woman.
First Things friend Archbishop Timothy Dolan highlights these threats—to the family, church, and community—in a moving plea that lawmakers would do well to heed:
Last time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in New York, in the United States of America – not in China or North Korea. In those countries, government presumes daily to “redefine” rights, relationships, values, and natural law. There, communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition of “family” and “marriage” means.
But, please, not here! Our country’s founding principles speak of rights given by God, not invented by government, and certain noble values – life, home, family, marriage, children, faith – that are protected, not re-defined, by a state presuming omnipotence.
Please, not here! We cherish true freedom, not as the license to do whatever we want, but the liberty to do what we ought; we acknowledge that not every desire, urge, want, or chic cause is automatically a “right.” And, what about other rights, like that of a child to be raised in a family with a mom and a dad?
Our beliefs should not be viewed as discrimination against homosexual people. The Church affirms the basic human rights of gay men and women, and the state has rightly changed many laws to offer these men and women hospital visitation rights, bereavement leave, death benefits, insurance benefits, and the like. This is not about denying rights. It is about upholding a truth about the human condition. Marriage is not simply a mechanism for delivering benefits: It is the union of a man and a woman in a loving, permanent, life-giving union to pro-create children. Please don’t vote to change that. If you do, you are claiming the power to change what is not into what is, simply because you say so. This is false, it is wrong, and it defies logic and common sense.
Yes, I admit, I come at this as a believer, who, along with other citizens of a diversity of creeds believe that God, not Albany, has settled the definition of marriage a long time ago. We believers worry not only about what this new intrusion will do to our common good, but also that we will be coerced to violate our deepest beliefs to accommodate the newest state decree. (If you think this paranoia, just ask believers in Canada and England what’s going on there to justify our apprehensions.)
But I also come at this as an American citizen, who reads our formative principles as limiting government, not unleashing it to tamper with life’s most basic values.
June 14th, 2011 | 5:36 pm
The Archbishop is right. He is also late, and has not thrown the full weight of the office into this as would certainly have been done a generation ago.
Woe, woe, woe to us.
We have surrendered the culture to the enemies of the truth in the name of aggiornamento.
True disaster now looms.
But then again…..Hillair Belloc said “when persecution comes, then it will be morning”.
There is a brightening on the horizon, no doubt about it.
June 14th, 2011 | 5:39 pm
Gay marriage changes an institution/sacrament, but it embraces its essence. As Andrew Sullivan has written, it is actually quite conservative.
A few thoughts: marriage has been many things in many eras. It has not been an ‘undeniable truth’ ‘as old as human reason.’ It has been: an institution where families preserved political power through forced arrangements, an institution where a woman had no economic rights– her husband owned everything, and it has been a loving, family building sacrament.
My love for my partner of ten years and my love for my two year old son is not a ‘chic cause.’ It is a manifestation of God’s love, on earth, for two other humans that He brought to me, in the same way He brought together my parents and bless them with me and my siblings. Our family is not the result of a “desire” or “urge” or “want” and I feel diminished when you use those words.
I am part of a “permanent, loving, life-giving union.” We “pro-created’ in the same way that older adults, beyond childbearing years, can “pro-create:” we “pro-created” using the same fertility medicine that many pious Catholics have used in the past twenty years.
And we have “pro-created” in the same way that many faithful, loving Catholic adults have done for centuries, through adoption.
God gave us a free will; God loosed us upon the earth to use our God-given talents to improve, to cherish, to steward and to love His creation. He does not intervene and ‘give’ all that is desired by those who pray to him; we are called upon by Jesus, as St. Francis prays, to be “instruments of [God's] peace.”
We have improved upon a world where slavery was sanctioned by the bible, where St Paul told women to submit to men and where we were instructed, in Leviticus, to stone people who commit adultery. We have made the world more just in the same way that Jesus made the world he lived in more just with his good news.
Things change and yet they stay constant. I will always love and care for my partner and my son and though my partner is not a woman and my son was not born as a result of our pregnancy, we will always be a family and I will always love and care for my partner and my son.
June 14th, 2011 | 6:57 pm
A few thoughts: marriage has been many things in many eras
Not really.
Families are defined by biological ties and links in all cultures and all places.
Gays are trying to use guilt and force to make people play along with a fantasy. They aren’t real families, and they’re doing real harm to their children – and destruction to their communities – in using such dysfunctional methods in their attempt to reconcile the fact that their desires are in conflict with what is practical, sustainable, ethical, and moral.
June 14th, 2011 | 6:59 pm
it does not embrace its essence. It redefines it. Marriage in the Bible was always tied to procreation: to “being fruitful and replenishing the earth.” It was clearly delinated to being something one man and one woman did, because it was not good for man to be alone. Woman was created out of part of man for that purpose.
Women and men will be complementary in a way two men never will be, even if they try to mimic the roles. It’s a matter of creation. Marriage and sexual ethics in the Bible are based on that difference.
You can say as you did, that it should be something to be surpassed, but its hard for this agnostic to see you justifying it in the spirit of Jesus when you pretty much break the authority of the text and of the church identified with it to do so. The only real basis left then is you.
June 14th, 2011 | 7:43 pm
It was clearly delinated to being something one man and one woman did, because it was not good for man to be alone. Woman was created out of part of man for that purpose.
Dblade,
Polygamy (more specifically, polygyny) was common in the Old Testament. King Solomon (who was the son of David and Bathsheba—remember that story) was said to have 700 wives and 300 concubines. A married man having sex with an unmarried woman was not adultery. Prostitution was not condemned.
There is no mention of “one man and one woman” (or marriage, for that matter) in the first creation account in Genesis:
The story of the creation of Adam and Eve says nothing about procreation.
If we are to believe God is making a sex partner for Adam to procreate with, why does he make beasts of the field and birds of the air? Sex and procreation come only after expulsion from the garden.
Women and men will be complementary in a way two men never will be, even if they try to mimic the roles. It’s a matter of creation. Marriage and sexual ethics in the Bible are based on that difference.
I am in the middle of reading something about this that I haven’t finished yet, but I will tentatively say that the “complementarity of the sexes” is quite a modern concept. More on this later, but up until quite recently, there was only one sex—man—and women were simply thought of as inferior men.
Other than the fact that men deposit sperm and women bear babies, I have never been able to pin anyone down on exactly how the sexes are complementary. People say things like, “Women tend to be more nurturing, etc. etc.” That, to me, doesn’t amount to complementarity. For the complementarity of the sexes to be a valid concept, there has to be something that all men possess, and something else that all women possess. Otherwise men who were very nurturing would be complementary to men who were not very nurturing.
June 14th, 2011 | 8:28 pm
David:
Gen 2:21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place.
Gen 2:22 Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man.
Gen 2:23 And Adam said: “This [is] now bone of my bones And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man.”
Gen 2:24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
These are the quotes. The complentary basis in christianity as far as I understood it was linked to this, man as a helpmeet.
As for Polygamy it may have been common, but where was it ever sanctioned? The kings of the OT did a lot of wrong things. David murdered Bathsehba’s husband. The whole OT is a cycle of people screwing up and repenting.
June 14th, 2011 | 9:20 pm
Tom,
Thanks for this contribution. I’m a member of a reconciling congregation in the Methodist Church, and we’re blessed to have a number of families such as yours. When we gather to discuss how difficult it is to raise faithful children and nurture them, and when we gather to discuss how difficult it is to be supportive and faithful life partners, it is then that we straight couples realize just how much we share with our lesbian and gay church members. It is especially cheering when new grandparents join to celebrate the baptism of their grandchildren into the faith. Grace is truly open to all.
June 14th, 2011 | 9:30 pm
I’m sure like the other weekly SSM posts this will generate a comment threat that will break over one hundred posts. Before we get to the old arguments yet again, I would like to do something slightly different.
I would like to the anti-SSM crowd to reflect on some of the reasons why they are losing this debate. So here’s a shout out to those like Blake and others who helped push SSM to the edge or over the edge of being legal in NY.
1. Pay attention only to your own arguments and ignore the arguments of those who disagree with you. Esp. useful here is the scattershot approach to the debate. Hit them with a reason against SSM. As they take your reason apart go on to three or more additional reasons. When they start taking those reasons apart return to the first reason. If they get mad toss in a few more reasons, then return to the second reason if the thread is still going. After that wait till the next thread then repeat your reasons all over again as if they were all brand new.
2. Remember the valuable lessons that Marxist revolutionaries from earlier ages taught about rules; they are there to help you get your way, nothing more. If you’re saying the interstate commerce clause will force poor anti-SSM states to recognize same sex marriage, don’t just propose a law to let states choose. Choose for them then lock in any future changes to the supermajorities needed to adopt a new amendment or get a law through the Senate! People will take you seriously if you declare you just want a tiny sliver of cake but then grab the whole thing!
3. Make sure those you disagree with have no options at all. Don’t just ban SSM, ban civil unions too! Write your proposals so that even private contracts may be voided! Make it so that even private companies can be prohibited from giving same sex partners benefits. REMEMBER, at all times make sure you back anyone you disagree with into a corner, then poke them with a stick too! Don’t buy into that sissy talk that civil laws are there so we can all live together in peace. Civil laws are there to reflect, glorify, and push your and only your values and stick it to anyone who thinks otherwise.
4. Related to #3, make sure you have absolutely no regard at all for gays. They won’t vote for you, they are icky, you don’t have to actually say it but make sure everyone knows your primary motive is not to come to some sort of arrangement where gays can live their lives and you yours, your primary motive is to make it so that gays are as invisible as possible. This will require you to compromise a bit on your part, in debate you’ll have to actually stoop and discuss the existence of gay people. It’s helpful at this point to lump in child molesters, axe murderers, and if you want to look sophisticated toss in the Fall of the Roman Empire (don’t worry, most people don’t know anything more about Rome than the movie Gladiator…you won’t get called out on it!)
5. Don’t let other people dare tell you what motivates them! You decide for them at all points. Why do people disagree with you? Because they hate you. They hate your children, your house, your dog, they hate everything about you. Don’t let them pretend otherwise. How can they possibly know why they feel the things they do? If they weren’t insane they would agree with a fine fellow like you!
6. Remember your friends. No matter what someone else says or does, if they are on your side loyalty matters. If he agrees with you, it’s because he is brillant. If he says all children will spontaneously burst into flames if SSM is made legal, it’s because its true! What if they don’t? Doens’t matter its still true. Has Living Saint Harold Camping taught us nothing about what to do when predictions fail?
If you all continue to work together, you’ll proudly bring about SSM in most of the states, possibly even the whole country. So far so good, keep up the good work.
But Boonton, you innocently ask, what shall we do when we have all battled SSM into full existence everywhere? Then you should proceed to the Howard Camping phase of your battle. You will prove you were right all along. To do this all you have to do is data mine data until you find something bad. For example, suppose NY legalizes SSM tomorrow and three years later all the normal metrics look just about the same as they did before. Kids are as well off, divorces are about the same, out of wedlock births no higher. No no no! Something is always worse, just keep looking. Maybe math scores for left handed Latino kids will be a bit lower. There you go, it was SSM! Left handed people have always been more morally sensitive. No doubt the morally sensitive Latino kids were too distraught to do math homework. Damm you SSM! How many botched applications of the quadratic equation will be nailed to your cross! If you look for it, you will find it…and if you don’t make it up.
June 14th, 2011 | 9:35 pm
Dblade
As for Polygamy it may have been common, but where was it ever sanctioned? The kings of the OT did a lot of wrong things. David murdered Bathsehba’s husband. The whole OT is a cycle of people screwing up and repenting.
I don’t think its ever specifically sanctioned, but I don’t think its ever specifically prohibited. But OT polygamy as well as most other types of polygamy is technically a kind of monogamy. A man marries more than one wife, but he is married to each wife. If the husband dies, the wives aren’t considered married to each other and even when the husband is alive the wives are not married to each other but may consider each other some type of ‘sister wife’. This works when you have marriage built on specific gender roles, but developed countries haven’t for at least a few centuries.
June 14th, 2011 | 9:54 pm
Tom, I appreciate your witness here.
“Families are defined by biological ties and links in all cultures and all places.”
Not really. Not in ancient Rome. Not in a late medieval system that involved patronage. And certainly not today. My wife and I have no biological connections with our daughter. But she is truly our family. That is an ecclesial reality–the Domestic Church. And when our church shares the sacramental life in Christ, the ties become sacramentally strengthened. We don’t need a genetic connection, paternity confirmation, or any human construct to tell us we’re a family.
“And, what about other rights, like that of a child to be raised in a family with a mom and a dad?”
If the archbishop were truly convinced about this, he would assemble his resources, his ability to persuade, and get more Catholic families adopting more of the thousands of children who lack a mom and a dad in his state. I want to hear more from Archbishop Dolan on adoption before I can take him seriously on this milquetoast essay.
“There, communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition of “family” and ‘marriage’ means.”
Well, maybe its better that people themselves decide what their assemblage of loved ones means to them. And leave the government out of it.
June 14th, 2011 | 10:39 pm
If the archbishop were truly convinced about this, he would assemble his resources, his ability to persuade, and get more Catholic families adopting more of the thousands of children who lack a mom and a dad in his state.
That argument has so many fallacies I can hardly count them.
But it does not matter. There is nothing wrong with allowing gay couples to adopt, if better families are not available. All custody decisions should be made with the child’s interests in mind, and to be taken in by a less-than-fully-committed couple that can do an okay – but not ideal – job caring for that child’s needs might very well be better than the alternative.
That does not however mean that we should pretend that a gay couple is as good as a real family – one that is both able and willing to meet the child’s needs, instead of merely presenting arguments as to why the child’s needs aren’t really as important as My Rights.
Men and women are not interchangeable; if they were, gay marriage would not be necessary, would it? All that would matter is that your spouse be a “loving person”. But in this world, being “loving” is not all that is relevant: gender matters, too – and a mom just isn’t the same as a dad, & vice versa.
June 14th, 2011 | 10:48 pm
Well, maybe its better that people themselves decide what their assemblage of loved ones means to them. And leave the government out of it.
I’m okay with people deciding for themselves “what their assemblage of loved ones means to them”, but in our culture, we recognize family as a special relationship – and gays are not family.
Redefining what a family is so that gays can have the procreative benefits of marriage is not equality, it is fraud.
I don’t care if we grant to gays the benefits suitable to a life partnership, but I have yet to hear any argument as to why being gay is a special case whereby children can or should be reduced to “transferable goods”. All children have a right to a relationship with their biological parents – both of them – and the only time that should be severed is when it is in the child’s best interest – which from an ethical point of view is, necessarily, limited only to cases of unintended crisis, since it is never in a child’s best interest to deliberately arrange the situation such that one parent will abandon the child so that a stepparent can “buy” that parent’s “share” of the child. (This is an adoption loophole that needs to be CLOSED.)
June 14th, 2011 | 10:53 pm
Dblade,
I find this quote from John L. McKenzie’s Dictionary of the Bible to be enlightening about the real nature of marriage in the Bible. McKenzie says:
The notion of men and women being complementary, and of Eve being Adam’s “other half,” sounds very sweet, but women in the Old Testament were basically chattel. Eve was a “helpmeet,” but exactly how did she help Adam? She got him to eat from the forbidden tree.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, after Chapter 5 of Genesis, Adam and Eve are never mentioned again in the Old Testament.
June 15th, 2011 | 12:04 am
Marriage is a religious sacrament, homosexuals seek to attack and destroy Christianity because they hate Christ’s teachings. The state only became involved in the licensing of marriage, to insure the rights of inheritance and obligation of support for the naturally occurring offspring of a man and woman’s union.
Homosexual couples can NOT procreate, and do not bring children naturally into the world. Irregardless of how they obtain children, they must go through the legal framework of adoption, for any child, so the law is involved. Just as there is legal framework available to insure rights of inheritance, property rights, wills, medical power of attorney, and so on. The lies told by homosexual activists are puny and easily rebutted.
They do not seek what constitutes a marriage, but to use marriage as a club by which to beat Christians and Christian churches. They seek to abuse power, and exploit it for their own ends, none of which are conducive to civil rights and liberties. Their agenda is the same sick and twisted agenda of a Caligula. The homosexual journalist Johann Hari, wrote an article that appeared in the Huffington Post several years ago, titled, ‘The Strange, Strange Case of Gay Fascism’, where he described the involvement, attraction to and in fact, predilection for fascism among homosexuals. That in every fascist movement since fascism’s inception, homosexuals have been involved in them. What we’re seeing now, is the true face of homosexuality, a diseased mental illness. Homosexuals have a higher rate of domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse rates, suicide rates among other things. Homosexuality is a mental disorder, one where those infected with it desire to inflict as much pain and harm on others, as they can.
June 15th, 2011 | 12:06 am
The two creation accounts answer two separate, but related, mysteries. The first asks whether humanity is single or duple and why. The answer is that we are both single (made in the image of God) and duple (male and female). Why are there two sexes, both made in the image of God? In order to reproduce and thus expand our rule over the earth.
The sexes are a means to an end. We are to rule over the earth as God rules over us. We are made in the image of God to the extent that we are rulers somewhat as He is.
The first creation account answers the kind of questions philosophers ask, but the second account answers the kind of questions parents ask. If I extend my rule over the earth by having children, then why do those children want to leave and start their own families? Why is my rule broken by their desire to rule their own lives?
The second creation account answers this question by explaining that by ourselves we are lonely. Parents might give their children life, emerging out of their bodies, but children are not born whole. Even before the Fall, they were not born whole. They felt themselves to be missing part of their flesh. And so children seek out a helpmeet, their other half. They break away from their family in order to form a new one.
It is the second account that is more germane to gay marriage. The lesbian asks where her helpmeet is, and she learns that it is not a man but another woman. And so she pledges her life to that woman, cares for her, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. They form a union as solid as any marriage, and they leave their parents in order to start that new union, their new family.
They cannot reproduce between themselves, but they might decide to live childless as so many married heterosexuals do. Or one woman might have tried to be married to a man and might have children that she brings to this union. Or they might adopt. Some might find a sperm donor, either an anonymous one or someone who wants to stay active in the rearing of the child. But childless or fruitful, they have a family, two people made one flesh.
If this couple is to prosper and live as God intended, they will have to triumph over the same adversities every married couple faces: infidelity, selfishness, deceitfulness, boredom. But what they will not have to triumph over is their homosexuality. The couple will never be destroyed by their own lesbianishness. If they are going to be destroyed, they will go down fighting the same sins every straight man and straight woman does.
Anyone who knows a gay Christian couple well, anyone who has listened to them explain how hard it is to be loving or supportive of their partner or to give the love and guidance a child needs, knows that they enter lifelong partnerships the same way we do, with the same desire to find a helpmeet, to rule over the earth, and to love and honor each other until death do them part.
It’s only hard to imagine if all you have is an imagination. But if you are there with them, witnessing the fruits of the spirit, then there’s no question.
June 15th, 2011 | 4:58 am
For Todd to suggest that the Roman family was not based on biological ties is difficult to reconcile with the prominence given to the Paterfamilias and to the Proximus Agnatus in the Law of the XII Tables (450-449 BCE) One has only to look at the great importance of the Gens, or clan; now, the Gens was a body of people agnatically related. Moreover, the maxim “Pater est is quem nuptiae demonstrant” [The father is designated by marriage] was taken by all the jurists as expressing the central function of marriage.
Regardless of its other incidents, filiation has remained the primary legal effect of marriage; until very recently, maternity was a matter of fact, but paternity was a matter of inference. It is no coincidence that mandatory civil marriage was the product of the same Revolution that turned 10 million tenant farmers into heritable proprietors.
Accordingly, the argument against SSM is really very simple: (1) Mandatory civil marriage makes the institution a pillar of the secular Republic, standing clear of the religious sacrament (2) The institution of republican marriage is inconceivable, absent the idea of filiation, enshrined, not in Church dogma, but in the Civil Code (3) The sex difference is central to filiation. Booton, this, I promise you is my sole argument, clear, simple and impeccably “laïque.”
It is somewhat misleading to say that the legal purpose of marriage is procreation, for this makes it impossible to explain why the law facilitates marriage in extremis or why, in certain very rare cases, marriages can be registered posthumously. A death-bed marriage is unlikely to lead to procreation, but it may establish (legal) filiation.
It goes without saying that the question of SSM cannot be considered in isolation from questions of adoption and assisted reproduction, to which other considerations applybut to develop this would be too long for one post..
June 15th, 2011 | 7:01 am
Archbishop Timothy Dolan, in a recent statement pleading with New York lawmakers to reject same-sex marriage, said:
Did the position of the Catholic Church change? Here is a paragraph from Some Considerations Concerning the Response to Legislative Proposals on the Non-Discrimination of Homosexual Persons issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Later on, the document says the following:
Contrary to what Archbishop Dolan says, the Catholic Church opposes laws that grant rights to gay people. After all, the CDF says, “As a rule, the majority of homosexually oriented persons who seek to lead chaste lives do not publicize their sexual orientation. Hence the problem of discrimination in terms of employment, housing, etc., does not usually arise.”
Regarding insurance benefits, note this from the Washington Post of March 2, 2010:
Archbishop Dolan almost sounds like he’s saying, “We’ve granted so much, but please, let’s draw the line here.” However, in a very real sense, the Church does not recognize the right of gay people—as opposed to celibate, closeted “homosexual persons”—to exist.
Having a same-sex partner, being in a same-sex civil union, or getting legally married in those states that permit it are all “objectively disordered external conduct,” and in the eyes of the Church, put gay people in the same category as the mentally ill or people with contagious diseases whose rights may be limited by the state.
The Catholic Church consistently opposes anything that would guarantee the rights of gay people, and when nondiscrimination laws are passed, the Church either seeks to be exempt from them, finds a way around them, or closes down whatever of its operations are affected. I think Archbishop Dolan is well aware of this, but it is not what he said.
June 15th, 2011 | 7:15 am
Archbishop Dolan alludes to the fact that nothing – no call to compassion, understanding, tolerance – can negate the fact that children are being deprived of their right to know their mothers and fathers.
If we speak in plain language, we all do know (crisis situations notwithstanding) that one’s father is the man from whose body issued the living (in more ways than one) substance from which one began. If we speak in plain language, we all do know that one’s mother is the woman whose body issued the other half of the living substance from which one began.
Children can be deprived of their relationship with their familial heritage by those who believe they have the right to do so. They are being deprived of this relationship now, right before our eyes, in commercial transactions, paid for in currency or by donation of their heritage by those who are in fact their parents. If this is not wrong, what is?
June 15th, 2011 | 8:41 am
The reiteration of the second creation story of the Book of Genesis, above, is quite romantic. However, the text does not bear out the asserted meaning: the first human was differentiated in the flesh such that the newly differentiated flesh acknowledged that Other as “flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone.”
The union of the differentiated flesh – differentiated again in sperm and ova – is yet another human unique in time. Small children understand this when listening to the answer to the question “Where did I come from?”
“The other half” is not a mental construct alone but has a bodily form.
June 15th, 2011 | 8:54 am
Dblade:
Deuteronomy 21:15-17…
15 If a man has two wives, and he loves one but not the other, and both bear him sons but the firstborn is the son of the wife he does not love, 16 when he wills his property to his sons, he must not give the rights of the firstborn to the son of the wife he loves in preference to his actual firstborn, the son of the wife he does not love. 17 He must acknowledge the son of his unloved wife as the firstborn by giving him a double share of all he has. That son is the first sign of his father’s strength. The right of the firstborn belongs to him.
June 15th, 2011 | 9:15 am
People for gay equality have been accused of wanting to “redefine marriage”. Once gay marriage becomes legal across the USA, if a religious fundamentalist shows up and says “marriage should only be between a man and woman”, will he be trying to redefine marriage?
June 15th, 2011 | 9:29 am
Ars Artium,
Actually, what Archbishop Dolan said was, “And, what about other rights, like that of a child to be raised in a family with a mom and a dad?”
I have done a quick search of adoption services provided by Catholic Charities in various locations and while some require that adoptive parents be married, others allow single individuals (but not same-sex couples or cohabiting couples) to adopt. What about the right of a child to be raised in a family with a mom and a dad?
June 15th, 2011 | 9:32 am
It is the second account that is more germane to gay marriage. The lesbian asks where her helpmeet is, and she learns that it is not a man but another woman.
That’s very nice, but it doesn’t change the fact that these two women cannot start a family together, and marriage is not just about two people loving each other – it also includes benefits that are meant for the starting of a family.
It’s fine by me if those two lesbians want to love each other.
The problems start when the law starts taking actions for the specific purpose of enabling them to pretend they are founding a family together. They are neither eligible nor qualified to found a family together, because all the arguments that they claim for themselves –
“the right to not live a lie”
“you can’t make me pretend that sex/gender is irrelevant because it isn’t”
“relationships are important – it is morally wrong to deprive someone of important, societally valued relationships” -
These also apply to a child, who has the right to not be forced to “live a lie” by pretending that he “has two mommies” – he doesn’t; he has a mother and father like everyone else.
All children have the right to both a mother and a father. These relationships are societally valued and important. They are not interchangeable.
If two lesbians want to love each other, that’s okay by me – but it has not been established, and will not (can not) be established that this relationship is the same as marriage, because while it arguably qualifies for “life partnership” benefits, marriage is more than life partnership – it is just as importantly (maybe more importantly) also about enabling a man to care for the woman who bears his child.
The two lesbians will always be two able-bodied adults, each capable of supporting themselves, and each able to split whatever they’ve got fifty-fifty. It is only when children come into the picture that the benefits of marriage become relevant, and if those two lesbians are truly married, they’ll never get pregnant, because marriage means no adultery. They do not need, are not eligible, and are not entitled to the benefits of marriage. Their relationship, if it needs to be recognized at all, needs to be recognized as different in kind.
The government has no right to force people to recognize something as true which is not in fact the truth.
June 15th, 2011 | 9:34 am
That does not however mean that we should pretend that a gay couple is as good as a real family – one that is both able and willing to meet the child’s needs, instead of merely presenting arguments as to why the child’s needs aren’t really as important as My Rights.
This is all well and good but has nothing to do with SSM. You don’t have to be married to be able to adopt a child and more importantly simply being married isn’t some type of automatic ticket to adoption. Plenty of married couples cannot adopt children simply because better families are available.
For example:
And, what about other rights, like that of a child to be raised in a family with a mom and a dad
Since it takes a mom and a dad to produce a child any child who is denied a mom and a dad has been so denied not because of a same sex couple but because a different sex couple failed to fulfill their duties. The only exception might be orphans who are not all that common nowadays, at least in developed countries.
June 15th, 2011 | 9:36 am
[...] NY Considers Redefining the Family – In a rather stunning admission, a NY lawmaker has said that redefining marriage will also mean redefining the family. And, further, to him this is a good thing. [...]
June 15th, 2011 | 9:36 am
Ray:
That’s hard to call it sanctioning, as opposed to a thorny matter of property rights. It reminds me of abram and hagar, and for something sanctioned it sure seems a raw deal for the other party: Hagar flees, and the second wife’s son loses out.
Or Jacob, Rachel, and Leah. It happens, but it’s bad and leads to bad things.
David:
The helpmeet matters because if you think women were chattel then, that’s nothing if the creation myth has them come from a different species. They were created from us, and created so we wouldn’t be alone. They myths of Lillith are instructive as to why: when a woman was made apart, she refused to even deal with Adam.
As for a literal one man, that’s a side point. Whether God split an entire population into male and female, the principle would be the same.
Boonton:
I get your argument, but it’s more “I want to possess the people I sleep around with.” We’d probably be discussing the merits of it even now if we used violence to solve things. I’d like to address your first post and others too, but it will have to be in a later post.
June 15th, 2011 | 9:55 am
Response to David Nichols: “Crisis situations notwithstanding” was included in my comment.
Once the mother and father from whom the child is descended are unable to or refuse to care for and protect the child, other arrangements must be made out of necessity.
What we are proposing to do artificially creates the necessity.
Thank you for your response to my comment and to First Things for the opportunity to respond. I do not think it is possible to exaggerate the importance of this subject or the necessity for civil, respectful discussion.
I
June 15th, 2011 | 9:57 am
Accordingly, the argument against SSM is really very simple: (1) Mandatory civil marriage makes the institution a pillar of the secular Republic, standing clear of the religious sacrament (2) The institution of republican marriage is inconceivable, absent the idea of filiation, enshrined, not in Church dogma, but in the Civil Code (3) The sex difference is central to filiation. Booton, this, I promise you is my sole argument, clear, simple and impeccably “laïque.”
Michael PS, you’ve never established this either logically or historically. Your argument seems to be that marriage was associated with filiation (aka paternity). Yes an age old problem has been the man who questions whether the child his wife or lover has just had is really his. In an era before DNA testing, this was a receipe for a judicial nightmare of ‘he said, she said’ accusations, trying to see if a child ‘looks like’ the alleged father etc. It’s pretty clear why the courts would have always wanted to have a clear and simple rule that would eliminate at least a portion of these difficult cases and filiation does that. If you marry a woman and she has a baby you are assumed to be its father. If you don’t trust her to be faithful, then don’t marry her period. Is that fair? Not really since it means a husband can end up being ‘conned’ into being responsible for a child that isn’t his but its the best thing for the child. Courts still, of course, had to contend with cases where out-of-wedlock paternity was challenged.
From this very pragmatic (and since applied law is about trying to address actual cases pragmatism is of great value) way of doing things, you’ve inexplicably blown this up to be the core and only purpose of marriage. This ignores the facts that:
1. DNA is now available which is cheap, easy and can reliably determine filiation whenever there’s a dispute.
2. The legal role of fatherhood is independent of marriage. Whether or not you’re married to the mother you’re legally responsible for the children you father.
2.1 You seem to confuse American law here with French law. From our previous discussions, it seems like French law has special duties to children who are born to a father within marriage, for example I suppose a father cannot disown his adult children in his will. Maybe this makes sense for a country with an aristocratic tradition where one must be concerned with Titles that are passed down. But very few people have any claim to an aristocratic title these days so your secular view of marriage would basically make it relevant to only the tiny portion of the population that has to worry about titles of nobility.
2.12 American law does not require one to leave their estate to children born within marriage, and this really shouldn’t be a surprise, American law specifically rejects ‘titles of nobility’.
June 15th, 2011 | 10:03 am
They were created from us, and created so we wouldn’t be alone.
Dblade,
If you are taking the story of the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib literally, there’s not much I can say, since I find the idea untenable in the light of the modern scientific understanding of human origins.
Kathryn Schulz, in her excellent book Being Wrong,, points out that it was a traditional Judeo-Christian belief that women had one more rib than men, since Adam’s rib was used to make Eve. Schulz says, “This belief somehow survived until 1543, when the Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius finally showed otherwise—by, you know, counting.”
June 15th, 2011 | 10:08 am
Dblade
I get your argument, but it’s more “I want to possess the people I sleep around with.” We’d probably be discussing the merits of it even now if we used violence to solve things.
I’m not sure where you’re getting this as my post here was mostly concerned with the flaws in the anti-SSM arguments and advocates, not the merits of the pro-SSM argument and advocates….but I’ll look forward to seeing your argument when you detail it out more extensively.
I suppose in a sense marriage does entail ‘possessing’ the person you sleep with….but it’s a mutual ‘possession’ in that your spouse also ‘possesses’ you.
June 15th, 2011 | 11:20 am
Michael:
Sorry, I missed your response about the second helpmeet. It’s hard not to go indepth on this, so forgive me if it’s an unsatisfactory response.
The problem with your argument is that the creation myth says its physical.The spiritual act iis based on the physical creation. When you extend it to a different category of relationship, you need to provide a basis within the text to be faithful to it.
Paul gives a reason why in 1 cor 6-that sexual sins cause us to transgress in our body that is not our own. Since we are redeemed and owned, its important to be careful about this.
That is the problem I usually see with ssm christian advocates: they do not give scriptural basises, and they forget they are bought at a price. We are not the ones that can extend the terms, and we are fallen. Instead, I see them taking their basic nature as good, despite the text saying it is a sin, and not engaging with it.
This is dangerous to have as a mindset for a Christian believer. It is redefining terms extrinsically to suit an interest group.
Boonton, re your list:
1. This is the internet. Happens to any argument.
2. I think most people disagreeing would just be happy for that. The problem is that the ssm advocates dont seem to be willing to allow conscience clauses or leave it to the states. To be honest, is it even possible to do so?
3. Where have you seen civil unions argued against? The argument here is redefining marriage, not civil unions.
4. The flip side is that we are forbidden to mention gay promiscuity or any negative, justifable aspects, and are forced to sanitize the gay experience. It’s not just demonization, its demonization and idealization.
5. Uh, no offense Boonton, but I’d forgive Christians in particular for thinking that, considering how much abuse they get. If you don’t think this is the case, go to Salon, and comment on any article from the perspective of a religious fundamentalist, without ad hominems. Watch the abuse come rolling in.
6. Because groupthink is a religious thing only. Sigh. How many straights think SSM is the BEST THING EVAR without even KNOWING a gay person?
To be honest, its damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
June 15th, 2011 | 11:24 am
Boonton:
I meant that small specific post. Polygamy is like sleeping around, except the guys all have guns and with itchy trigger fingers. So your alpha male wants to sleep on the side, but he needs something quasi-legal so other people don’t kill him.
It’s marriage as in the “shotgun marriage” part, except the guy keeps doing it.
June 15th, 2011 | 12:01 pm
And, what about other rights, like that of a child to be raised in a family with a mom and a dad
Since it takes a mom and a dad to produce a child any child who is denied a mom and a dad has been so denied not because of a same sex couple but because a different sex couple failed to fulfill their duties
Same-sex marriage has already demonstrated that gays will actively pursue adultery and parasitism as forms of reproduction.
They have already demonstrated that they will use the benefits of marriage – in particular the presumption of paternity – to “make” a family using fraud.
If gay marriage is ever legalized, it will be necessary to either bring in strict anti-adultery laws, and protections – for both the child and the extended family tree – against the sorts of misrepresentations gays use to (parasitically) “make” a family, or else we will be forced to confront the issue we have so far ignored: the real consequences – including the unexpected and unintended consequences – of redefining “family” such that “choice”, rather than biology, defines kinship.
The first question will be “whose choice?” (since obviously not everyone can have equal choice).
The most dramatic problem will be structural: in family life as in chemistry, replacing a strong bond (like biology) with a weak, fickle bond (like “how I feel – for now”), changes the stability of a thing – whether that thing is a physical entity or a family, community, or other “social construct”
June 15th, 2011 | 12:04 pm
Dblade: 5. Uh, no offense Boonton, but I’d forgive Christians in particular for thinking that, considering how much abuse they get. If you don’t think this is the case, go to Salon, and comment on any article from the perspective of a religious fundamentalist, without ad hominems. Watch the abuse come rolling in.
=========
Don’t need to go to Salon.
That’s usually what Michael brings to most threads he participates in: a slew of snide comments, cheap shots, and just lame insults. It’s just the degree of abuse that he varies a bit.
And here he is claiming he’s Christian. Now that’s funny.
I guess that’s how a man with a twisted idea of Christianity goes through life: throwing the Bible in the toilet at any and every opportunity, on- and off-line.
June 15th, 2011 | 12:13 pm
The problem is that the ssm advocates dont seem to be willing to allow conscience clauses or leave it to the states. To be honest, is it even possible to do so?
Marriage must be left to the states. Each state has its own marriage laws. I am not sure what “conscience clauses” would be. Certainly religions that do not accept same-sex marriage will not be forced to perform them. And straight people will not be forced to enter into same-sex marriages!
Twenty state amendments banning same-sex marriage also ban civil unions.
The flip side is that we are forbidden to mention gay promiscuity or any negative, justifable aspects, and are forced to sanitize the gay experience.
I have not seen this rule followed on First Things! You are free to mention anything you want, in my opinion. Is the average gay man more promiscuous than the average straight man? I don’t doubt it. Just be careful how you use your observations. If arguing about black people, what caution would you take not to be considered racist if you alluded to the high rate of incarceration among black men, or the sky-high rate of abortion and out-of-wedlock births among black women? Exercise that same caution when discussing the negative aspects of gay life in America.
June 15th, 2011 | 12:24 pm
Marriage equality (so-called) is on a disastrous collision course with marriage reality.
In large part, marriage reality is the well-grounded belief that procreation is internal to marriage. This means marriage writ large—marriage as an institution—and procreation as a general fact about human physicality and its social consequences. Marriage as an institution came about because of the general fact of procreation—because of human nature being what it is. Human nature has not changed in at least the last hundred generations, when marriage originated.
Nor has society changed in such a way as to make the consequences of procreation (the *fact* of procreation) unimportant for individuals and society. Because neither of these kinds of fundamental change has occurred, procreation remains internal to marriage as an institution, and internal to the very idea of marriage.
Fundamentally changing the meaning of marriage—its parameters of inclusion—is incompatible with the realities on the ground, as attested by all of civilized history. These realities declare the true nature of marriage. The supporters of SSM want to suspend reality. Why, for heaven’s sake? What sound reasons, as opposed to ideological predilections, can be given for doing so?
It seems to me that the supporters of SSM are ultimately staking their claim on the belief that liberalism’s grand abstractions are always interpretable in a politically correct fashion. They are wrong. To be sure, if people are convinced that liberalism is the truth written in the stars, they can support SSM honestly (but not necessarily if they are Christians—though why a Christian would ever assume that liberalism, as a political philosophy, is the truth written in the stars is beyond me).
But these people should remember that the path to hell is paved with good intentions. More importantly, what if liberalism is actually oblivious to the truth of the matter about human nature, marriage, the vulnerability of social frameworks, and the depleted cultural capital of western civilization? What if liberals are dangerously naïve? Is same-sex marriage a manifestation of dangerous naivete? Well, if procreation is internal to marriage, there is only one answer.
June 15th, 2011 | 12:43 pm
Our beliefs should not be viewed as discrimination against homosexual people. The Church affirms the basic human rights of gay men and women, and the state has rightly changed many laws to offer these men and women hospital visitation rights, bereavement leave, death benefits, insurance benefits, and the like. This is not about denying rights. It is about upholding a truth about the human condition. Marriage is not simply a mechanism for delivering benefits: It is the union of a man and a woman in a loving, permanent, life-giving union to pro-create children.
===========
I think the problem started at a much more radical level. When the archbishop wrote the above, he was already adept to a grave, enormous fallacy.
There is no such thing as a “gay” and a “lesbian” person. These are heterosexual people with a homosexual problem, thus they cannot live nor experience their heterosexuality as it was intended by God, nature, and all the forces in the universe.
Once you have fallen for this liberal ideological misrepresentation of the homosexual condition (that some people are “biologically homosexual”), it is #1) logically delusory to insist on a distinction for roles and behavior in society compared to heterosexuals, #2) feeding into a harmful current which neither upholds a truth about the human condition, nor aides in solving the puzzle about how to help people with a homosexual condition resolve their psychological sexuality problems. We can’t help them if we don’t know the causes for homosexuality.
We can’t know the causes if the Church preaches that to have an ignorant misunderstanding of homosexuality (the most stupid “born that way” dogma) should now be adopted as the basis for Church policy, theology, and doctrine.
“Our beliefs should not be viewed as discrimination against homosexual people. The Church affirms the basic human rights of gay men and women, and the state has rightly changed many laws to offer these men and women hospital visitation rights, bereavement leave, death benefits, insurance benefits, and the like.”
When you have already legitimized all of this, really, you’ve lost your footing a long time ago.
There is no discrimination issue at hand. Human sexuality cannot be reduced to be made equivalent to a skin pigment and the issue of racism.
Americans clamor for prostitution, promiscuity, abortion, adultery, and, having already largely legitimized all of these, they have now embarked on their homosexuality crusade.
The worst of it is, that up until now, and with all other deformed sexuality issues, you were not branded a criminal if you disagreed with the people who wanted to shove pornography and adultery as norms in society, for example.
But with homosexuality, there is a new wave that is becoming distinctly repressive. Gone is the freedom of conscience, gone is Christianity, really. Anyone who does not submit to a deformed, ignorant understanding of sexuality espoused by liberals will be attacked.
Regarding freedom of speech, there is already an enormous degree of censorship, and most of it is not even by the government, but by social communication, private, and media communication gatekeepers. The repression of conservatives is already happening in the form of expulsion from schools, job firings, denial of parental rights, horrendous levels of verbal abuse, and, if conservatives refuse to have the liberal homosexual boot on their necks, there will be jail.
“We cherish true freedom, not as the license to do whatever we want, but the liberty to do what we ought; ”
Good luck. If conservatives don’t organize and strike back, these will be nothing but words strewn in the wind.
June 15th, 2011 | 12:44 pm
Boonton,
I didn’t reply to your long comment on my “Thirteen Theses” (on a recent thread) because your points seemed to me to be confused or to misunderstand what I was actually saying. But if you’d like to take it up again, I will respond.
June 15th, 2011 | 12:52 pm
Dblade
I think most people disagreeing would just be happy for that. The problem is that the ssm advocates dont seem to be willing to allow conscience clauses or leave it to the states. To be honest, is it even possible to do so?
Leaving it to the states is quite possible. The interstate commerce clause doesn’t force states to recognize marriages, if it did there would have been no need for a SC case on interracial marriage. A ‘concience clause’? For whom? No one is required to perform a marriage ceremony, attend one, applaud one or even respect any particular married couple (for example, you could have told Anna Nicole Smith that you didn’t think her marriage to that old rich guy was a true marriage and no cop would have arrested you). What would a conscience clause actually do?
Where have you seen civil unions argued against? The argument here is redefining marriage, not civil unions.
Numerous ‘defense of marriage’ acts went beyond simply implementing amendments to prohibit SSM but also included language to close off even non-marriage alternatives like Civil unions. Some even went a step beyond and were written with broad sweeping language that could be read to take away even the right to private contracts that might ‘look’ like aspects of marriage! As I said if defending traditional marriage was so important to you guys then consider part of your defeat was your insistence on going a step beyond just SSM. If you are unaware that your leaders did this then you have yourself to blame for allowing yourself to be represented by foolish strategists.
The flip side is that we are forbidden to mention gay promiscuity or any negative, justifable aspects, and are forced to sanitize the gay experience. It’s not just demonization, its demonization and idealization.
Really? It seems like its on the endless play list of ‘arguments’ against SSM. If you’re forbidden to mention it why have I refuted it like at least 4 times or more on this very blog?
Uh, no offense Boonton, but I’d forgive Christians in particular for thinking that, considering how much abuse they get. If you don’t think this is the case, go to Salon, and comment on any article from the perspective of a religious fundamentalist, without ad hominems. Watch the abuse come rolling in.
True you can always find a place for someone to call you names. But I think the more relevant question here is why are you guys losing? Why are you losing support from people who used to support you? It’s not because NY State Republicans have suddenly aspired to become popular commentators on Salon’s discussion forum.
Because groupthink is a religious thing only. Sigh. How many straights think SSM is the BEST THING EVAR without even KNOWING a gay person?
Best thing ever? I don’t think so, nor does any straight person I know. Like my previous point, though, if your team looses a major game, you ask what are your flaws…..that the winning team may share them in some ways as well doesn’t alter the fact that you’re the one racking up the loss.
I meant that small specific post. Polygamy is like sleeping around, except the guys all have guns and with itchy trigger fingers. So your alpha male wants to sleep on the side, but he needs something quasi-legal so other people don’t kill him.
No I was speaking about OT polygamy as well as polygamy as was practicised by Mormans and by some Muslims. I believe the idea there is that each marriage is its own two person union of husband and wife….only that the husband may have multiple unions.
Think of it as analgous to a franchise. If you owned a Dunkin Donuts, you have a partnership with the corporation. That partnership is exclusive in the sense that you have a contract that forbids you from buying Starbucks coffee and offering it on your menu. Polygamy from older times is a bit like a small grocery shop. The grocer may have one contract with a Pepsi distributor and another contract with a Coke distributor. Each contract is ‘monogamous’ but the grocer is not legally limited from making as many as he wishes. Old style polygamy is sort of like that. The man may make as many marriage contracts as he pleases but each one is seperate from the others.
This would be distinctly different from a ‘group marriage’ type of polygamy where each person is married to ever other member of the marriage.
Blake
Same-sex marriage has already demonstrated that gays will actively pursue adultery and parasitism as forms of reproduction.
Again the only children denied a ‘mother and father’ are different sex couples who fail to fulfill their obligations to their children. A gay man who sleeps with a woman is still a different sex couple, like it or not. SSM isn’t removing any road blocks from that happening.
They have already demonstrated that they will use the benefits of marriage – in particular the presumption of paternity – to “make” a family using fraud.
And how exactly would that work? The ‘presumption of paternity’ only applies to a pregnancy and birth inside a marriage. Since men don’t get pregnant two men married to each other would have no opportunity to utilize the ‘presumption of paternity’.
The most dramatic problem will be structural: in family life as in chemistry, replacing a strong bond (like biology) with a weak, fickle bond (like “how I feel – for now”), changes the stability of a thing – whether that thing is a physical entity or a family, community, or other “social construct”
The failure in your logic centers on the word ‘replace’. No bonds are getting replaced. If SSM is legalized in NY today no heterosexual is going to say ‘yipee, now that SSM is an option I’ll marry some of the same sex instead of opposite sex!’.
This I believe is a real serious flaw in the ‘but children will be hurt’ argument against SSM. To the degree that children raised by same sex couples are getting a ‘weaker bond’ than different sex couples is irrelevant. Outlawing SSM doesn’t outlaw same sex child raising. The question then boils down only to whether same sex couples who are raising children have a weaker or stronger bond with or without SSM.
June 15th, 2011 | 1:21 pm
This I believe is a real serious flaw in the ‘but children will be hurt’ argument against SSM. To the degree that children raised by same sex couples are getting a ‘weaker bond’ than different sex couples is irrelevant. Outlawing SSM doesn’t outlaw same sex child raising.
The problem is not that gays are raising children.
The problem is that gays want the right to use adultery as a means of reproduction, and they want the right to override existing protections that currently exist to protect children:
1. the presumption of paternity – that is, the married man’s right to be presumed the father of his wife’s child – is currently bundled with the explicit expectation that married partners should not be making babies with anyone other than their spouse.
There might be an argument supporting the claim that infertile couples are a special case – that would be a separate argument, but regardless of its outcome, it would not apply to gays, because gays have options that infertile people do not have, and so “need-based” arguments that apply to infertile people would not apply to fertile gays.
2. The right to a relationship with one’s parents.
This is a right in all fifty states. Under existing law, the only time a child does not have a right to a relationship with his parents is if a judge, acting in the child’s best interest, severs that right.
Gay marriage would strip children of this protection. It would enable gays to bypass the judicial review. It would legitimize adultery and fraud as legally binding and socially acceptable reproductive techniques.
3. The right of all dependents to have custody decisions made with their own well-being taken into consideration.
Gay marriage is quite bluntly based on the argument that the needs, desires, and wishes of the parent are to be prioritized over the well-being of the child.
“Freedom from exploitation” – a basic human right – forbids any human being from being subject to decisions made by their guardians, that do not prioritize their own well-being and their own interests.
Gay marriage would basically lend legal cover to a type of baby-selling that is currently only permissible via a legal loophole – nobody has yet closed the loophole that has enabled bad people to abuse and misuse laws that were originally meant to help children in crisis find good homes, and now those laws are being perverted such that “children needing parents” has become subordinate to the needs of “parents needing children” – a very crucial distinction, and one that WILL be addressed sooner or later.
The fact that gays “do it now” does not mean it should be legitimized. It should not: what gays are doing is very close to trafficking in human flesh, and they need to be called out and shamed – if not brought up on abuse charges – for the way they are compromising their child’s well-being, in order to use the children to satisfy their own emotional needs.
In ways that don’t stand up to scrutiny. If you look at the gay families who are raising kids right now, you see many decisions that violate common, basic ethics. These are people doing something wrong – and they should know better.
June 15th, 2011 | 1:31 pm
The failure in your logic centers on the word ‘replace’. No bonds are getting replaced.
The current recognition: family is primarily biological, and ideally made of three ties: biological ties, legal recognition, and of course “love” or “affection”.
The proposed change: biology is optional.
If Larry and Mark want a baby, Mark can make a baby with Susan – then just take a crayon and cross out Susan’s name and write in Larry’s.
Existing social norms suggest that in the case of “adoption” we just go along with what everyone knows is really a little white lie – because everyone benefits if the adopted child “bonds” with the adoptive parents, and it’s in all of our interest for that bond to occur. Adopted kids themselves were the ones to challenge this little white lie: biology and genealogy does matter, and many of them want to search out more information about their own parentage – even though they love and did properly bond with their parents.
But “gay marriage” takes that little white lie and uses it as a fact: adoption does not hurt a child, and can therefore be used as an elective procedure – not to be reserved solely for a child in genuine need, but we’re now expected to act like biology itself doesn’t matter.
But it does matter. There’s nothing pleasant about child being forced to come to grips with the fact that his mother gave him away – a truth that is usually softened with phrases like “but she did it because she loves you”.
But if that is unpleasant, just imagine how it must feel for kids who are expected to come to grips with the fact that they don’t have a mother – they have a parts donor and a “gestational carrier”, raising questions of prostitution and exploitation as well as the unwelcome truth that mom most certainly did not “do it because she loves you”.
Kids do care about where they come from. It’s the basis of one’s identity. Gays care so much about their own identity, how come they’re so insensitive to their kids’?
Oh – and adopted kids also have the comfort of knowing their good, loving parents are not at all connected with the terrible crisis that caused them to be abandoned by their real mother. The children of gays have to live with the fact that they’re motherless because their dad wanted them that way, and went out of his way to make it happen like that.
And just to add insult to injury, they’re not allowed to talk about how they feel – ideally they’re not even supposed to think about the sorts of negative feelings that are actually normal to adopted and motherless and fatherless kids – because having thoughts like that is bad; they are supposed to be happy!to have a “second daddy” instead of a mother…..
No kid should have to be pressured to feel unnatural things because of an emotionally needy parent.
June 15th, 2011 | 1:32 pm
The proposed change: biology is optional.
Actually I misspoke.
Biology isn’t just “optional”. It is actually going to be discrimination to value biology and use it as a basis for family organization.
June 15th, 2011 | 1:58 pm
Blake
1. the presumption of paternity – that is, the married man’s right to be presumed the father of his wife’s child – is currently bundled with the explicit expectation that married partners should not be making babies with anyone other than their spouse.
Here we go again:
1. This isn’t a ‘right of the married man’. It’s a legal presumption from the days before DNA testing.
2. If you think about it, it’s not even a benefit to the married man. It basically says your wife can cheat on you, get pregnant and everyone can know about it but YOU are still responsible for the child as its legal father!
3. I’m still not getting what this has to do with SSM couples? Why would legalized SSM impact the way paternity laws work? A state that keeps the assumption of paternity on the books would still apply it.
This is a right in all fifty states. Under existing law, the only time a child does not have a right to a relationship with his parents is if a judge, acting in the child’s best interest, severs that right.
Not getting it, sorry. Again how does the fact that ‘Steve and Bob’ may be legally married down the street magically absolve you of your legal obligations to your biological kids? Likewise your screeds about adoption seem totally irrelevant here as well. Whatever laws adoptive kids have that entitle them to find their birth parents (and they don’t have many laws), would still apply even if a kid was adopted by a SSM couple.
The right of all dependents to have custody decisions made with their own well-being taken into consideration.
Again you seem to forget that a marriage license is not a child license. Many couples are married but could never adopt children because of their numerous problems. I’m sure some couples who have already had children taken from them for abuse or neglect might be so bad that they are presumed unfit until proven otherwise. Yet they are able to get married. There is no principle that says being able to get married is a license to be a fit parent. Quite a few who are quite legitimately married are also legitimately deemed unfit parents for good cause.
The current recognition: family is primarily biological, and ideally made of three ties: biological ties, legal recognition, and of course “love” or “affection”.
The proposed change: biology is optional.
A married couple is not biological, in fact the law prohibits biological family members from marrying.
Second adoption has never been viewed as a ‘white lie’. Just ask Octavian Ceasar who secured all of the Roman Empire on his ‘adoption’ while Ceasar’s actual biological son by Cleopatra ended up murdered.
Third, you are still dealing not with the replacement of a heterosexual-couple to child bond but the failure of different sex couples to do proper by the kids they create. Since its undeniable that all cases of adoption represent some failure of different sex couples (in the case of orphans it may be an innocent failure), the question isn’t whether SSM is ‘better’ than DSM for a child but whether same sex child raising is better with or without SSM.
If Larry and Mark want a baby, Mark can make a baby with Susan – then just take a crayon and cross out Susan’s name and write in Larry’s.
Where? On the birth certificate? I don’t think so. Nor does the fact that Larry and Mark may legally be married impact the fact tht Susan is legally the child’s mother just as Arnold’s legal wife doesn’t magically become the mother of the child he fathered with their maid.
June 15th, 2011 | 3:00 pm
Lot of things to respond to so I may miss points:
State’s rights/Conscience clauses:
The problem with this is that we are not talking things like driving ages and store hours. We are talking about the legal status of two people and their dependents. I don’t think SSM advocates in general would be okay with a marriage being null in Utah and good in California. Given the uproar over prop 8, it’s a toss up if they’d even abide by it in their own state.
Conscience clauses would be similar to the furor over abortions and catholic hospitals. It means for specifically religious institutions, doctrine may be used in hiring. You can’t force a church to hire or retain an atheist pastor, for example.
The thing about the civil unions is that many conservatives also publicly stated they had no problems with them, and many states allowed them. It wasn’t enough.
As for specific points, David: first things is a catholic magazine. Try it elsewhere and it’s not so fortunate. Also, I wish i could be as confident as you about the continuation of religious practices: I don’t see in other secular nations that recognization. Back to the circumcision wars, for a USA example.
Also, it doesn’t need to be god taking a rib. The point is that woman is a part of man and spiritually was designed to be part of him. The principle is that it’s a physical creation and woman isn’t a different species, but intimately related to us.
Thing is though, if you don’t believe that, why worry about Christian answers to this at all? Just say the book is rubbish and leave it at that.
Boonton:
The problem is I can think that Anna’s marriage isn’t true or valid in a religious sense. You are forced to recognize it in every legal sense though. That’s a states right dilemma.
The reason why we are losing has to do with an easy template to get anything accepted in most progressive society:
1. Small avant-garde has a thing.
2. Small avant-garde gets noticed by progressive mainstream, mostly due to artistic ability.
3. Progressive likes the art, likes the artist, and soon agrees with the artist that the thing needs to be made legal.
4. Helps if artist is iconoclastic.
5. Progressive mainstream uses their control over visible and trusted media to disseminate info about the thing and controls the debate about it.
6. Filters to young through captive markets, i.e. college.
7. A few generations later and you have the thing.
That goes along with the best thing evar i said, because its propagated through the general standards your average cultured person takes for granted.
Its the artistic edge most social cons lack tremendously, and thats why they don’t do well. The root of a culture is its myths.
June 15th, 2011 | 3:15 pm
Dblade –
Banning same-sex marriage “wasn’t enough” for some conservatives, though. See Michigan and Virgina, where the ‘defense of marriage amendments’ specifically forbade civil unions as well.
June 15th, 2011 | 3:29 pm
David: first things is a catholic magazine.
Dblade,
First Things is not a Catholic magazine. From the Masthead:
Thing is though, if you don’t believe that, why worry about Christian answers to this at all? Just say the book is rubbish and leave it at that.
I don’t believe I have ever given an interpretation of the Bible in a religious forum that was incompatible with Christianity. I don’t claim to be a Catholic, although that is my background, but I still consider myself a Christian. And among Catholic exegetes and biblical scholars, the literal interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve is long gone. I really don’t believe the Bible needs to be thrown in the trash heap by those who don’t believe God created Adam and Eve six thousand years ago. I believe I respect the Bible more than people who quote Leviticus 18:22, 20:24, and Romans 1:26-27 and think they have told us “what God said” about homosexuality.
June 15th, 2011 | 3:43 pm
It is the second account that is more germane to gay marriage. The lesbian asks where her helpmeet is, and she learns that it is not a man but another woman.
==========
Where does she learn that? Who says it is so?
Perhaps it’s at the same place the polygamist asks where their helpmeet is, and they learn that it’s not one woman, but three women. Or two men and two women. Or “just” two men. Or one man on paper and two women with a homosexual problem on the side.
“They cannot reproduce between themselves… ”
given their profound homosexual psychological problem that prevents them from forming and experiencing a wonderful, sacred male-female marriage where they would be able to reproduce.
“If this couple is to prosper and live as God intended, ”
They would solve their homosexuality problem, and seek out a blessed heterosexual relationship.
God has intended homosexuality as much as he has intended anorexia, pedophilia, or gambling addiction.
It is worth mentioning once again that in countries where SSM marriage has been legalized, only at most 2% of homosexuals had any interest in getting married.
Now, the whopping majority of homosexuals already have a vicious attitude towards Christians, they work tirelessly day and night to deny conservatives their most fundamental rights, and, when given opportunity to get legally married, they hate the idea as well.
Obviously Michael will say that this is what God intended, to have so many deformed homosexuals (and liberals) in society, but I disagree.
Lastly, there are plenty of bisexual and homosexual women with a clearly perverse and perverted mind regarding sexuality and that certainly isn’t restricted to atheist circles. Many come to Church and blabber Bible verses, giving the greatest display of hypocrisy and disrespect to their Church.
But the Church is open to all. Too bad some people only come in to sully it.
June 15th, 2011 | 4:14 pm
Dblade
I don’t think SSM advocates in general would be okay with a marriage being null in Utah and good in California. Given the uproar over prop 8, it’s a toss up if they’d even abide by it in their own state.
This issue came up with interracial marriage because for a long time there were states that allowed it and states that didn’t. In general states that didn’t recognize interracial marriages were able to decline to recognize out of state interracial marriages when the couples were moving into the state or appeared to be trying to dodge the state’s laws. When the couple was more or less ‘passing through’ they were given a bit more slack. At the time the issue wasn’t coming up because of children but because of laws prohibiting pre-extra-marital sex. Children are the responsbility of their biological parents unless something like adoption has come into the picture. Hence Arnold is responsible for his son with the maid but his wife isn’t.
Conscience clauses would be similar to the furor over abortions and catholic hospitals.
Catholic hospitals don’t have to do abortions period. Whatever furor there might be over that doesn’t exist in the law. Likewise Catholic churches refuse to perform numerous marriages that are perfectly fine per the civil law. For example, most marriages where one or both partners were divorced will not be performed by a Catholic Church unless they obtain an annullment from the Catholic Church itself.
The problem is I can think that Anna’s marriage isn’t true or valid in a religious sense. You are forced to recognize it in every legal sense though. That’s a states right dilemma.
1. Actually the state isn’t. Since the bans on interracial marriages fell, there hasn’t been many tests of cross state marriages because for the most part states are roughly synchronized but there are some areas where states have conflicting policies.
2. What does this have to do with you? You are not a state, you remain perfectly free to refuse to recognize any marriage you wish for any reason.
3. The tears you and another anti-SSM advocates cry over states rights simply lack credibility. Why? Because of consistent advocacy of trampling states rights when it comes to the issue of states that want to recognize SSM. It would be one thing if DOMA or the Marriage Amendment had simply allowed states to do what they wanted and clarrified that states could decide what to recognize or not, but that wasn’t the case. Now you want to claim you’re defending states rights? I don’t think so.
Your reasons why you’re losing are silly. An ‘avant-garde artistic’ thing? Sorry you guys had won earlier in NY and CA yet the tide is clearly turning. Did these states suddenly turn more gay? Some huge influx of new artists, writers, and fashion designers from where? I don’t think so, you lost the support of moderates and even some conservatives you had in the past.
Even more damming you’re losing the debate here. I don’t mean in the democratic sense that some type of flash poll of First Things Comment readers would win for SSM, but in the sense that you’re arguments are stale, old, tired and designed for preaching to the those who are already on your side. You don’t make any real responses to those who counter your assertions, don’t buy your reasoning. That has nothing to do with a progressive media ‘controlling’ the debate, it has everything to do with people like you taking the debate for granted because you thought you had won it.
June 15th, 2011 | 4:30 pm
Booton
The history of civil marriage is not difficult to explore; it dates from 1791 and the civil code and the numerous commentaries on them are easy of access.
The fact of the matter is that the presumption of paternity is the only distinctive feature of marriage, that sets it apart from civil solidarity pacts on the one hand and unregulated cohabitation (which is, nevertheless, not without legal consequences) on the other.
The following quotation expresses this very clearly:
“Preserving the presumption ” is est pater quem nuptiae demonstrant “, adopted in all European legislation as Ms. Frédérique Granet-Lambrechts, professor at the Robert Schuman University of Strasbourg, told your reporter, Article 312 of Civil Code provides that a child conceived or born during the marriage has the husband for its father.
The presumption of paternity of the husband rests on the obligation of fidelity between spouses and reflects the commitment made by the husband during the celebration of marriage, to raise the couple’s children. The report presenting the order to the President of the Republic rightly points out that ” it is, in the words of Dean Carbonnier, the ‘heart of marriage,’ and cannot be questioned without losing for this institution its meaning and value.”
All the other legal incidents peculiar to marriage flow from this principle. It enlists the couple in a parental alliance and affords the child an indivisible filiation. This special nature of marriage is the basis for the existence of rules governing its conditions, its effects and its dissolution.
If anyone can suggest a different reading to the civil law, as it now exists, I should very much like to hear it.
I would add that given the provision of the civil code that “The consent of the person must be obtained previously and expressly. Save an express consent given by the person during his lifetime, no identification owing to genetic prints may be effected after his death,” DNA testing is of limited use, particularly in inheritance claims. Add to this that a civil status the enjoyment of which has been “ongoing, peaceable, public and unequivocal” is thereby rendered incontestable and the presumption retains its value
June 15th, 2011 | 8:46 pm
The presumption of paternity is helpful for children born inside of marriage but not essential. The presumption says a husband cannot try to assert he is not the father of his wife’s child. However I wouldn’t be surprised if some states at this point have allowed husbands to so contest paternity when they have cause and enlist DNA. At no point do I believe such a reform was greeted with cries that it would essentially dissolve marriage.
You’re confusing a legal issue that has always arisin with civil marriage with the core of marriage.
For example, consider this site: http://www.faupel.com/Articles/Revoking-Paternity.shtml
A husband CAN contest the paternity of his wife’s child if he so wishes and may do so in a divorce proceeding. Has Michigan, by allowing this, accidently abolished marriage without anyone noticing?
June 15th, 2011 | 9:53 pm
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/grossman/20051227.html has much more detail. Long story short, in most states in the US the presumption that the husband is the father of any child born to his wife is only a pragmatic way to establish paternity when no one objects.
If a husband feels his wife was unfaithful, paternity can be disestablished through a paternity test either during the marriage itself or in a divorce proceeding. There is, however, a limited period of time for him to do so after which if he doesn’t then he must live with being the legal father.
http://www.policyarchive.org/handle/10207/bitstreams/14067.pdf likewise offers some helpful information. Most interestingly, even in the pre-DNA era husbands sometimes could successfully challenge paternity, however this usually only worked in clear cut cases where the husband as impotent, sterile, or not around at the time of conception so could prove beyond doubt
Also of interest, there are times when the wife may wish her husband NOT to be considered the child’s father (such as when the boyfriend is willing to take responsibility for paternity). Here too the law is open to allowing husbands to not be declared the father. So what and were is this ‘right’? At least in American law it doesn’t seem essential to the institution of marriage. I can’t speak for French law or Michael PS’s reading of it.
One thing I notice about French law is a pretty solid system of civil unions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacte_civil_de_solidarit%C3%A9) that are highly utilized by both heterosexuals and gays. By creating a ‘marriage-lite’ and ‘marriage-full’, France may have an argument for reproductive centered marriage law, but that’s because they split marriage essentially in two….one form let’s people basically write whatever they want into a marriage-lite type ‘contract’ while the other type is a sort of ‘marriage-classic’. Interestingly while there has been pressure to allow SSM, it appears to suffer from much more resistence than in the US.
Perhaps anti-SSM could learn a lesson here. If they had offered real civil unions or something like that as an alternative, rather than fight any and all options they might have saved their view of marriage. Instead they opted for all or nothing and will likely end up with nothing in a few years.
June 15th, 2011 | 11:23 pm
“Last time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in New York, in the United States of America – not in China or North Korea. In those countries, government presumes daily to “redefine” rights, relationships, values, and natural law. There, communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition of “family” and “marriage” means.”
Get rid of this man.
Has he honestly not heard the phrase, “WE, THE PEOPLE?
Has he not heard of the Eighth Commandment?
Have you no shame, sir? Have you no shame?
June 16th, 2011 | 5:31 am
Booton
The fact that the presumption of paternity can be displaced in some cases does not render it valueless, or undermine its central position in marriage.
Firstly, one has to consider who can contest it. In the Civil Code, this is restricted to the husband, the wife, the claimant to paternity and the child himself. No one else can do so, notably other heirs. Secondly, the usual doctrine of personal bar arises, for example, a husband who consents to assisted reproduction using donated gametes cannot subsequently contest paternity. Finally, the prescription period, in all cases of civil status, is normally five years, where enjoyment of the status has been “ongoing, peaceable, public and unequivocal;” this in order to better ensure the stability of the children’s status and legal security in the settlement of estates. The child has ten years from attaining his or her majority, but, again, the question of personal bar may arise, for example, if, after attaining majority, he or she claims an inheritance or seeks maintenance from a paternal ascendant.
Contrast this with the position of cohabitants or civil partners, where paternity has to be established by acknowledgment or decree and where anyone with an interest can usually challenge it, even after a decree, if they were not cited in the process.
In Belgium and the Netherlands, the presumption only applies to opposite-sex married couples and some jurists have argued that this is to concede the name of marriage, without the substance.
As for the PACS [pacte civil de solidarité = Civil Union], I certainly agree that this has served to focus the minds of jurists on the distinction between such unions and republican marriage. Their availability carried weight with the Conseil Constitutionnel in France and with the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Schalk & Kopf v. Austria, in upholding the restriction of marriage to opposite-sex couples. Note that it remains illegal to conduct a religious marriage ceremony for a couple not legally married and this prohibition includes civil partners.
June 16th, 2011 | 6:53 am
The presumption of paternity is helpful for children born inside of marriage but not essential.
Then you should have no problem with gays having a version of marriage that does not include the presumption of paternity.
That would be a “civil union”, no?
Which benefits should be accorded to such a union? The ones that are not procreative in nature.
Gays are eligible for every type of benefit that is based on the idea of one person loving another person.
They are not eligible for any type of benefit that is based on the idea that kinship is a special type of relationship, with special/unique obligations.
Honesty demands that we acknowledge that gays are fundamentally incapable of forming kinship unions: no matter how many times they have sex, the only way they can end up on the same family tree is if one of them makes a baby with the other’s brother or sister.
I won’t begrudge them what they’re entitled to, as soon as they stop demanding the right to what they’re not entitled to. We need to recognize that there is a fundamental conflict between their desire to play at being a “real family”, vs. the lies and the frauds that must be forced on people to enable such a deceit – that is a conflict, it is a significant conflict, and it cannot simply be resolved by demanding that we ignore the conflict in favor of letting gays pretend they’re the only people with rights or interests at stake.
June 16th, 2011 | 7:33 am
Booton
You are right about French resistance to SSM. This was led by the jurists, at a famous colloquium held in 1998 (the year before the PACS was introduced), when 154 professors of private law unanimously opposed it, that is, most of the professors in the country [Hervé Lecuyer in La notion juridique de couple, Economica, 1998, p. 1, citant P. Catala « personne et patrimoine », Dr. Famille nov.1996.] It is impossible to overestimate the influence on that whole generation of jurists of le doyen Jean Carbonnier, the leading commentator on the Civil Code, whose” Droit civil 2/ La famille, l’enfant, le couple, Thémis, 1999″ was then in its 20th edition.
It is significant that, in a country so committed to the principle of laïcité as France, no one has suggested that Carbonnier’s views are either the result of religious convictions or an attempt to import them into his interpretation of the Code. Perhaps, this is why the debate has been so much less embittered than it appears to be in the United States.
Carbonnier saw the PACS primarily as an alternative, not to SSM, but to unregulated cohabitation, for both same-sex and opposite-sex couples and the legislation is largely his. One of his maxims that I would recommend to any legislator is that social evolution is to be preferred to legislative revolution.
As always, the courts took their lead from the jurists, so any attempt to change the law through the courts was always doomed to failure, though one must admire the heroic efforts of Me Caroline Mécary.
It is sometimes said, with some exaggeration, that American law judge-made law. It could equally well be said that Continental law is professor-made law.
June 16th, 2011 | 12:32 pm
Firstly, one has to consider who can contest it. In the Civil Code, this is restricted to the husband, the wife, the claimant to paternity and the child himself. No one else can do so, notably other heirs.
Well actually it seems the biological father (or man who claims to be so) can contest paternity even if when the woman who gave birth is married to another man.
I think it’s pretty clear that ‘presumption’ is:
1. Pragmatic – it arises to make it easier to get an essential job done…namely trying to place a ‘daddy’ to each baby born. But its not essential. Changing the law in light of the fact that DNA testing allows paternity to be easily tested with no chance for error and without a messy fight over whether or not a woman had an affair has happened in numerous jurisdictions without anyone noting that anything ‘essential’ about marriage was at stake.
2. Variable across jurisdictions. For example, in contract law one of the most basic tenants is that contracts must concern consideration….some type of ‘payment’ for what is being offered by one and accepted by another. This feature you’ll find in nearly all jurisdictions. But other aspects of contract law is quite variable. For example, real estate contracts have in most US states have a requirement that they be in writing and either party may cancel up to 3 days after signing. Some other places may allow oral real estate contracts…or have a week cancellation period or none at all! That variation, though, does not mean that the jurisdiction is rejecting the legal concept of contracts. The fact that the ‘assumption of paternity’ appears variable hints that its not quite as important as you’re making it out.
I do appreciate the education you’ve given us on how French law works. Sitting in the US one would figure all Europeans are just more left wing than the US but it seems like France can be described not so much as more left or more right here but simply different. When it comes to discussing US law, then, I think you should note that the French ‘solution’ to SSM entails not simply rejecting SSM but establishing literally two different types of marriage, but he might agree today that ‘social evolution’ does not imply that all societies will come to the same answers for the same questions. I suspect in the US it would be less destructive and easier to simply establish SSM and reject creating ‘variants’ on marriage like PACs
Blake
Then you should have no problem with gays having a version of marriage that does not include the presumption of paternity.
I agree if a man becomes pregant and gives birth it should not be automatically assumed his husband is the father. I believe the courts would demand some type of investigation.
In the example you cited, though, that’s not what happened:
If Larry and Mark want a baby, Mark can make a baby with Susan – then just take a crayon and cross out Susan’s name and write in Larry’s.
This is not how the ‘assumption of paternity’ works. In a hetroesxual marriage if Larry and Susan are married but Susan has an affair with Mark then Mark goes on the birth certificate as father.
Now yes Susan can lie and say Larry is the father. But marriage isn’t relevant there…..Susan can lie and assert that Larry is the father even if no one in this little story is married and unless Mark wants to make an issue out of it she’ll likely get away with it. (Or Susan may honestly believe Larry is the father and simply be wrong about it).
Either way the ‘assumption of paternity’ does not work as a ‘right of marriage’ the way you seem to think it does. Suppose Larry stands to inherit $10M from his aunt provided he is the father of a baby. Suppose Larry, therefore, wants to be listed as the father. It doesn’t matter, as husband Larry has no special right to trump biology and overwrite Mark’s status as father. If Mark or Susan are asserting Larry isn’t the father and they have DNA to back them up Larry doesn’t get to go on the birth certificate. There is no ‘right of paternity’
You’re entire argument here Blake, which you’ve repeated over and over again with dozens of comments on at least a dozen threads is premised on a complete misunderstanding of how paternity law works.
June 16th, 2011 | 1:05 pm
Boonton is in good company when he fails to get what traditional marriage is about. Take Evan Gerstmann, the author of “the best book” on SSM (according to Richard Posner). Gerstmann makes the same mistake that Boonton does—Boonton in his reply to me on another thread, and Gerstmann in his book. It’s the mistake of confusing marriage writ large—the instution of marriage—with marriage writ small. How procreation is tied to marriage has everything to do with this.
Gerstmann says that, in the traditional-marriage understanding, procreation is the sine qua non of marriage—he uses that Latin phrase meaning “necessary condition.” If we’re talking about marriage writ small—Bob and Jill’s marriage, or Dave and Sue’s (and Gerstmann is talking about just that)—then we’re driven to a conclusion of the bizarreness of anyone’s thinking that procreation is the sine qua non of marriage.
Bob and Jill might not want to procreate at all—in the sense of having kids, not in the sense of not engaging in the precursor act to kids; how can procreation be a “necessary condition” of a genuine marriage for them? Or Dave and Sue might be infertile; where’s procreation as a “necessary condition” in *their* case? Answer it straight up. Go ahead and admit the obvious: when it comes to marriage writ small, it’s a little bit nutty to think procreation is marriage’s sine qua non. Gerstmann’s point exactly (and Boonton’s, minus the Latin).
Is procreation the sine qua non of marriage writ large—the *institution* of marriage? In a sense, maybe it is—a slightly strained but not entirely implausible sense. Gerstmann, however, doesn’t consider the possibility of a distinction between marriage as an institution and marriage for Bob and Jill or Dave and Sue. It’s hard to believe he doesn’t, since it is intellectually careless, at best, to simply assume that the link between procreation and marriage is logically ill-founded. What would Grandpa have said about that?
As applied to marriage writ large, the best way to give past generations their due for venerating marriage as the union of a man and a woman is to regard procreation not as the sine qua not of marriage—slightly strained as it is—but as the raison d`etre of marriage, or the reason for its existence as an institution. This must mean marriage writ large and not marriage writ small, since the reason for the latter—the reason for Tim and Alice getting married (not the “existence” of their marriage) is love, not procreation. Commitment follows in love’s train. “Commitment is needed” (says Boonton rightly) for marriage, by which he means marriage writ small (and which he then proceeds to confuse with marriage writ large).
The big mistake that must be avoided is to assume that in marriage writ large commitment is likewise needed. It’s not. Procreation is what’s needed in marriage writ large, or marriage as an institution. It’s the only plausible means of explaining why the institution exists.
I think this common mistake, which is a caricature of the traditional-marriage worldview, is unconscious but inexcusable, in the sense that liberals tend to assume that anything that goes against the grain of SSM must be tainted by bigotry, and this kind of ignorance and one-sidedness is reason enough to fault them even if they are not *consciously* engaging in acts of intellectual trickery, such as erecting a straw man and then knocking it down (and prematurely declaring—as Boonton has a bad habit of doing—victory in the SSM war).
If Evan Gerstmann unwittingly engages in such tomfoolery, we can pardon Boonton for doing so. But pardoning them does not mean allowing them to get away with it.
June 16th, 2011 | 1:22 pm
Michael PS
I agree that US law is often ‘judge made’ but this goes back to the roots of the country, we have the ‘common law’ which was literally ‘judge made’ as part of our system.
Something I’m noting about French Pacs…. It sounds like they are customized ‘contracts’ that couples enter into whereas marriage is like a prewritten contract. What’s interesting is that there doesn’t seem to be anything preventing a couple from writing a pac that essentially mimics everything in regular marriage, including assuming paternity.
If that’s the case then there seems to be a problem with the idea that the assumption of paternity was the ‘essence’ of marriage under French law. How could it be an essence if anyone could get essentially the same thing out of the ‘alternative’?
To illustrate with a different analogy…in the US you can form a business as a corporation or as a partnership. Most very large businesses are corporations. An essential difference between the two (among others) is liability. In a partnership the partners are liable for the business’s debts. In a corporation they are only liable up to the amount they put into the corporation. No matter how much debt a corporation piles up, the owners are not personally liable except in some very limited cases of fraud where creditors can ‘pierce the corporate veil’ and go after the assets of shareholders.
Now liability is an ‘essential’ difference but size is not. You can, in theory, have a partnership that is as big as Exxon or Mircosoft. But liability is an essential difference. If you have limited liability you aren’t a partnership. If you’re a corporation by definition you enjoy limited liability that is exclusive of partnerships.
This being the case it would appear that parental assumption is NOT essential to French marriage law (otherwise pacs would basically be a type of ‘do whatever you want except assume paternity!’ type of civil union).
June 16th, 2011 | 1:42 pm
Ken,
I feel bad that I haven’t had more time to focus on your comments rather than others…
As applied to marriage writ large, the best way to give past generations their due for venerating marriage as the union of a man and a woman is to regard procreation not as the sine qua not of marriage—slightly strained as it is—but as the raison d`etre of marriage, or the reason for its existence as an institution. This must mean marriage writ large and not marriage writ small, since the reason for the latter—the reason for Tim and Alice getting married (not the “existence” of their marriage) is love, not procreation. Commitment follows in love’s train. “Commitment is needed” (says Boonton rightly) for marriage, by which he means marriage writ small (and which he then proceeds to confuse with marriage writ large).
So I’m not seeing any real contradiction here with SSM.
Let me illustrate. You say the reason that marriage exists is procreation (writ large). The reason for particular individual marriages are varied (writ small, Bob and Alice are marrying for love, Sue and Tom are marrying becaue they want to have sex, Zed and Nancy are marrying because they want kids etc.).
OK so society has marriage writ large for procreation understanding, though, that many marriages will not be procreative but that’s ok because a huge portion of them will be. So out of 100 marriages you may have 5 that aren’t procreative because they are SSM (using Joe’s figure of less than 5% of the population being gay and herorically assuming all gay & bisexuals will opt for SSM), maybe another 5 won’t be procreative because of physical problems, another 10 may not be procreative for various personal reasons etc.
In this sense for marriage writ large SSM seems like a big yawn. No otherwise procreative marriage is prevented by SSM and some procreative marriages might actually be facilitated by SSM (quality counts here too….the woman who marries a gay man might end up procreating but there’s a big chance of a bad marriage which will impact the kid, if SSM ties up that gay man in a SSM then there’s a chance she will look a bit longer for a more suitable husband).
The big mistake that must be avoided is to assume that in marriage writ large commitment is likewise needed. It’s not. Procreation is what’s needed in marriage writ large, or marriage as an institution. It’s the only plausible means of explaining why the institution exists.
I don’t quite concede though that marriage’s reason for existing is procreation. IMO marriage’s reason for existing is askin to the reason why we have two legs rather than one. We are better balanced on two legs than hopping around on one. Two people together better balance out their advantages and disadvantages. This leads to procreation directly and indirectly. Directly in that a couple whose ‘secure’ will feel safer putting in the time and effort in procreating. Indirectly in that we are social creatures. Family members who are suffering will draw away our resources before we put those resources into procreation. In other words the fact that “Uncle Bob” is stable and doesn’t need our help because he has a partner increases the ability of ‘Sally and Steve’ to turn their attention to procreation.
This is why, IMO, marriage is considered lifelong rather than a temp. ‘project based’ partnership. If marriage’s reason for existence was procreation, then it wouldn’t be a lifelong obligation. It would be a 15-20 year partnership type of obligation that would dissolve upon the oldest child reaching adulthood. Instead marriage ideally lasts for life, deep into old age beyond any possibility of additional procreation.
June 16th, 2011 | 3:00 pm
I don’t quite concede though that marriage’s reason for existing is procreation.
Boonton (and Ken Z),
Granting, for the sake of argument, that the only reason the institution of marriage came into existence is because of heterosexual procreation. That does not seem to me to be a significant reason to rule out same-sex marriage. The institution of marriage has taken on many purposes and functions across the millennia at different times and in different societies, a great many of them having nothing directly to do with procreation. I see no need at all to limit it to the purpose for which it arguably evolved originally.
June 16th, 2011 | 3:14 pm
Booton wrote
“What’s interesting is that there doesn’t seem to be anything preventing a couple from writing a pacs that essentially mimics everything in regular marriage, including assuming paternity.”
Well, yes there is. Jean and Marie can agree that Jean will acknowledge any future child of Marie as his, but Jean cannot agree that Jean’s brother will not dispute the child’s paternity in an inheritance claim, if Jean dies. But if Jean marries Marie, no one, except Jean, Marie, the child or a person claiming to be the child’s father can ever dispute that Jean is its father. No other family member (or anyone else, for that matter, say the defendant in an action for wrongful death of Jean or the child) can dispute it.
Similarly, a PACS does not create a legal duty of (sexual) fidelity, so Jean, despite the agreement to acknowledge Marie’s children, would have no delictal claim against Marie’s paramour. The presumption of paternity and the husband’s claim against his wife’s paramour are two sides of the same coin.
No mere contract can affect third party rights, or impose duties on them; only a civil status can do that.
June 16th, 2011 | 3:35 pm
For the sake of illustration, I am assuming such an agreement would not conflict with Article 1128 of the Civil Code,”Only things in commerce can be the subject of an agreement.”
Under this article, the Court of Cassation has ruled that a child may not be the subject or source of an agreement
June 16th, 2011 | 3:53 pm
David Nickol,
You’re conflating the argument from the nature of marriage with the argument from tradition. You’re right to think that the argument from tradition is inadequate by itself. The ultimate question is, what is the nature of marriage? Here’s an off-the cuff definition: Marriage is the social ordering of the two sexes (and of sexual passion) intended to provide for intimate communality and the creation of a family along with, and by virtue of, procreation.
What makes procreation still relevant to the idea of marriage today is that the conditions which made procreation intrinsic to marriage in the beginning (and caused the institution of marriage to exist) still obtain. Human nature and the necessities of social order still privilege marriage as an essentially procreative institution–in other words, as the union of male and female.
If you really want gays to have something like that (it helps to be a staunch nominalist), you will have to call it by a different name. Marriage just is the thing which involves men engaging with women in socially sanctioned sex and procreation (which is the act in which the offspring has the DNA of both partners), among the other forms of communality.
The argument from nature and the argument from definition (and, actually, the argument from tradition) go hand in hand. They are simply different and closely connected ways of describing and justifying the same real and objective thing called marriage.
June 16th, 2011 | 5:51 pm
Argentina has 1st gay divorce since law approved
(AP) BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Argentina is about to have its first gay divorce, not quite a year after a groundbreaking law legalized homosexual marriage.
The Argentine Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transsexuals says the divorce involves a female couple who have only been married since April 20.
[[Let's see - a whopping two month-long "marriage!"
coming to a New York justice court near you!]]
In July 2010, Argentina became the first Latin American nation to authorize gay marriage everywhere in the country.
Paulon says the breakup is due to an alleged infidelity. He identified the women as 46-year-old Angela and 25-year-old Vanesa.
Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/16/ap/latinamerica/main20071652.shtml#ixzz1PTc31x7d
In Argentina, even lower ridiculous rates of homosexuals wanting to get married than in Europe, even though it’s been legalized.
The sexuality circus continues.
June 16th, 2011 | 6:00 pm
Ken Z,
It seems to me this kind of argument brings us back to the question raised by “my side” a million times now, and that is, if procreation is essential to marriage, why can people who are unable to procreate permitted to marry? I am not sure I see much difference in the argument from tradition and the argument from definition. Where do we look to find the definition of marriage? There is not much I can say to someone who claims that God invented marriage, and it was part of God’s plan for men and women to marry, but it was not God’s plan for men and men to marry, or women and women to marry. But aside from people who claim to know for a fact what God’s plan for marriage was, I am unsure of how to arrive at the definition of marriage. I did some research on the attempt of anthropologists to define marriage, and what they do, in essence, is take all arrangements that strike them as marriage-like, and then try to come up with a definition covering them all. Since we now have ten countries that have same-sex marriage, and if that trend continues (which I believe it will), anthropologists are certainly going to have to include same-sex marriage as a form of marriage. If procreation were essential to marriage, it would be very simple to consider the “consummation” of marriage to be the birth of a couple’s first child. (I did run across a society where a man did not marry a woman until she had borne him children.) Instead, in Robert George’s paper “What Is Marriage?” it is sexual intercourse, strictly defined, that is the sine qua non for marriage.
It seems to me what opponents of same-sex marriage do is similar to what anthropologists do, except they devise a definition of marriage that includes everything they want to be in it, and excludes everything they don’t. The latter, it seems to me, includes not only same-sex marriage, but also polygamy, and I can’t see for the life of me how polygamous marriage can be excluded as a form of marriage. Also some seem to deduce that marriage is not only monogamous, but permanent, thereby in effect declaring about half the married people in the United States to be not married to their current spouses.
Maybe the question to answer before answering, “What is the definition of marriage?” is “What, exactly, is a definition?”
June 16th, 2011 | 6:14 pm
While in Argentina… the future of what’s to come in NY…
Argentina is about to have its first gay divorce, not quite a year after a groundbreaking demented law legalized homosexual “marriage.”
The divorce involves a female couple who had only been married since April 20. A whopping two-month-long “marriage!” (Hah)
And that’s not all, both women have reported in interviews that they have already gone back to other women that they had hooked up with before. The breakup is reportedly due to an alleged infidelity concerning the “marriage” of 46-year-old Angela and 25-year-old Vanesa. In pictures, Angela looks more like Vanessa’s grandmother.
Theirs is the first divorce since July 2010, when Argentina became the first Latin American nation to authorize gay marriage everywhere in the country. A ridiculous number of homosexuals in Argentina chose to get married, given that most of the homosexuals in the country have rejected marriage completely.
http://socimages.blogsome.com/
June 16th, 2011 | 6:32 pm
Boonton,
“So I’m not seeing any real contradiction here with SSM.”
The contradiction—I prefer to call it an incoherency—is that SSM doesn’t fit in with what marriage is by its nature and always has been historically. It’s an incompatibility (rather than a contradiction). The incompatibility is basic—SSM is fundamentally different from traditional marriage.
“In this sense for marriage writ large SSM seems like a big yawn.”
Why? The examples you give show what I mean when I said on a previous thread that you are too (merely) sociological in your thinking. Or I might say—to paraphrase Euthyphro’s Dilemma—that your answer to the question, “Is marriage useful because we value it, or do we value it because it’s useful?” is “We value it because it’s useful”–and this, in my view, is the wrong answer.
My own answer is that marriage is useful because we value it. (My thanks to a former professor of mine for long ago putting the dilemma to me in terms of value/utility, although he used the example of monogamy rather than marriage.) I think it’s a profound mistake to see everything *primarily* in terms of “what works,” especially something as vital as marriage.
And anyway, an incoherent (and untrue-to-reality) type of marriage, such as SSM, is bound to not work very well. Or so we have to assume.
“We are better balanced on two legs than hopping around on one. Two people together [in marriage] better balance out their advantages and disadvantages.”
So, being an aging bachelor or a widow is like having one leg? Too much!!!
June 16th, 2011 | 7:12 pm
Dblade,
My turn to apologize for missing your comment.
“The problem with your argument is that the creation myth says its physical.The spiritual act iis based on the physical creation.”
I’m not sure I’m following you here, but the second account presents itself as a kind of just-so story, concluding by following the rib story with this statement, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.”
The question on the writer’s mind is why children leave their families to start their own, and the answer is that they are not whole, they are lonely, and their longing is so strong that it is as if they were seeking the rest of their body. That feeling is as strong in gays as it is in straights. They seek completion in someone else.
Christians once believed that gays could simply turn away from their sin and marry a member of the opposite sex, but we now know that is not true. They seek completion in another just as we do, which is why gay Christians seek one person and not a legion, and it’s why they can be nurtured in the church just as we are, to pursue faithful lives.
While it’s clear that the Bible describes homosexuality as a sin, it only made sense to describe it that way if we expected gays to set aside sin and marry the opposite sex. And it only made sense to describe it as sin if we can see the fruits of sin the way we can see the fruits of sin in fornication, theft, etc. These sins destroy lives, but homosexuality in and of itself doesn’t. Promiscuous homosexuality is destructive, but so is promiscuous heterosexuality. In both cases, promiscuity is the sin, not sexuality.
June 16th, 2011 | 7:48 pm
David, it was founded by a Catholic, is staffed by them, and deals with issues in a specifically Catholic way. But in a more general sense, this is a venue not hostile to religion, where the religious aren’t automatically pounced on for believing in one.
Also for your personal faith, no offense man. but I have followed your posts, and you’ve pretty much come down on the secular side of almost every single argument made. What does it even mean to be a Christian for you?
I’m not even sure what it means for Michael. It’s more pertinent than you think to the article, because SSM simply will not win the faithful if they see the people that follow it pretty much put Jesus on a typical Atlantic Magazine worldview. It’s the same for conservatism, too: when preachers become mini-rush limbaughs.
Boonton:
Ease up, tiger. This is a net forum where people from all walks of life debate things. If you are concerned about SSM people needing better argumentation, hey: make your own.
Seriously though, look at what was behind acceptance of many things: books. Inherit the Wind, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Justine. Art is war, and it plays a lot more of a part than you think. SSM isn’t even debated on TV or questioned in books not released by a partisan publisher. people are more likely to vote based on Will and Grace rather than carefully considered arguments.
June 16th, 2011 | 10:19 pm
Dblade,
First Things was founded and edited by a Lutheran. Neuhaus later became Roman Catholic. Editors for the journal include Reformed like Joe Carter. It even had a Methodist on the editorial board before the Iraq war, Stanley Hauerwas.
In his description of what he wanted for the journal, Neuhaus explained that he wanted people to express their “prejudices” (his word) and that he wanted people of many faiths and even of no faith to participate in conversations that he believed belonged on the public square.
As for what being Christian means to me, I don’t know that it’s possible for me to think about anything outside of how I think as a Christian. What still surprises me about many of the posters on these threads is that their commentary and evidence is more public policy than Christian reflection on experience. While it is all very interesting, I’m far more interested in what is happening inside actual Christian congregations. That’s where faith lives and is nurtured. One reason I left the Roman church is that I didn’t like the closeted lives gays lived there. It wasn’t honest, at least for me.
I value David’s and Boonton’s posts because they are respectful, inquisitive, reasoned, and often bring fresh data and arguments into play. While apparently unchurched, David is clearly seeking and thinking through what faith he has. I wouldn’t describe Boonton that way, but he’s plainly respects that religion has a voice in the public square as Neuhaus believed it should. If you’ve been reading long enough to remember liberals like Papalinton and Brettongarcia, then you’ll appreciate the value of having liberal interlocutors who aren’t trolls. I don’t see them “pouncing” on people of faith. I don’t see them attacking faith itself but asking hard and fair questions about why faith should lead to particular stands they disagree with. It’s the stands and not the faith they want to argue with. The site’s been more stimulating since they joined the conversation.
June 17th, 2011 | 12:08 am
Michael, hate to say it, but that’s redefining the book according to what the modern secular world says. If the modern secular world pushes for polyamory rights, chances are your church will be saying the same thing. I think its saner just to reject it rather than try to hollow it out, but hey.
The thing about boonton is nothing like that. The original point is that if I tried to do this in an atheist blog (and I have) Its nothing like this. This is why Christians feel a “circle the wagons mentality.” The point got mislaid over time.
As for what it means to be a christian, its important:
“But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always [be] ready to [give] a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear;”
probably why i’m pushing this so much on you, but with you and dave your only hope is to discover that, because over time accepting secular rationales doesn’t stay still. It spreads.
June 17th, 2011 | 12:52 am
Dblade,
Your last post seems hastily written. I’m having difficulty following it, but I’ll respond to what I think I hear you saying.
I don’t see how I’m redefining the book. Our church is responding pastorally to what is in the pews. There are gay people in the congregation, and we have prayed and studied and argued long and hard for decades about what to do about that. Our decision to become a reconciling congregation took years to make. Our thinking has been Christian, not secular. There are plenty of secular values we reject. I’m not sure why other Christians have to assume that our thinking is secular rather than inquiring into what kind of prayer and study led to those conclusions.
I’m not quite sure what your quarrel with Boonton is. It sounds like you’d simply prefer that he leave the site. I would understand that if he were obnoxious, but he’s not. Longwinded perhaps!
I think we do sanctify the Lord in our hearts. And I’m not sure why you would think we don’t. We’re there every week, doing the things Christians do. What I hear from David, and I hope he’ll correct me if I’m wrong, are secular rationales, but you won’t hear one from me, and you won’t hear one in my church.
June 17th, 2011 | 2:32 am
Michael PS
Bear with me as I try to keep this all straight:
Well, yes there is. Jean and Marie can agree that Jean will acknowledge any future child of Marie as his, but Jean cannot agree that Jean’s brother will not dispute the child’s paternity in an inheritance claim, if Jean dies.
Except that in the US Jean would automatically inherit anything from Marie if she should die (if they are married) and/or Marie and Jean can write a will leaving all to Marie’s child thereby cutting Jean’s brother out entirely.
Similarly, a PACS does not create a legal duty of (sexual) fidelity, so Jean, despite the agreement to acknowledge Marie’s children, would have no delictal claim against Marie’s paramour.
From what I’ve read it sounds like couples create their own contract in a PACS. In that case they can write a contract calling for fidelity and putting forth a penalty for failure just as in the US premarital agreements can be written that extract higher ‘prices’ for infidelity.
Alessandra
Argentina has 1st gay divorce since law approved…
She has one data point. So far so good. Keep going, when you hit 1,000 or so we can start doing some analysis….
Interestingly I was chatting with a guy tonight who is engaged to get married. His fiance’s first marriage only last 3 months. So I guess we can conclude that heterosexual marriages last 50% longer than gay ones? Anyway…
While in Argentina… the future of what’s to come in NY…
Don’t worry. Rudy Guiliani, Donald Trump and others have helped ease New Yorkers to the shocking fact that some marriages end in divorce. If gay divorce is the biggest problem we’ve got, well I say count our blessings.
David
It seems to me this kind of argument brings us back to the question raised by “my side” a million times now, and that is, if procreation is essential to marriage, why can people who are unable to procreate permitted to marry?
Almost as important people we positively *don’t* want to procreate are permitted to get married. Look at the very old. I recall the unease many felt when there was reports that fertility treatments had helped a 60 something Italian woman get pregnant and give birth. How about those with a history of child abuse and neglect who have had their kids taken from them? They too are allowed to marry. If marriage is ‘about procreation’ then it would seem those who shouldn’t be procreating should be barred specifically from marriage.
Ken
Why? The examples you give show what I mean when I said on a previous thread that you are too (merely) sociological in your thinking. Or I might say—to paraphrase Euthyphro’s Dilemma—that your answer to the question, “Is marriage useful because we value it, or do we value it because it’s useful?” is “We value it because it’s useful”–and this, in my view, is the wrong answer.
Actually I was thinking using your ‘writ large’ idea since SSM has no marginal impact on marriage’s overall procreativity (or might even increase marriage’s procreativity) ‘allowing’ a SSM is no different than ‘allowing’ any individual (writ small) marriage that has no procreative intent or possibilities.
And anyway, an incoherent (and untrue-to-reality) type of marriage, such as SSM, is bound to not work very well. Or so we have to assume.
This, though, would appear to be a ‘writ small’ problem. If SSM can’t work then those who suffer will be those who want to do it. While people like Alessandra seem to think that the ‘first gay divorce’ is some earth shattering event, to me it seems…well quite the non-event.
So, being an aging bachelor or a widow is like having one leg? Too much!!!
Maybe I think about this too much since I’m helping take care of an aging father-in-law but yes it is. When someone’s 80 yr old father dies, they worry about ‘who will take care of’ their 79 yr old widowed mother and its not unusual for widows and widowers not to live very long after their partner’s death (if we are talking about the elderly here).
Now the fact is nearly half will die widows or widowers (unless you and your wife go down in a plane crash or horrible auto accident together, it’s unlikely that you’ll both die at the same time). The fact is also that there are aging bachelors or widows who make out just fine and are totally independent and active till their very last days. But for most people I think on balance going into old age with a partner is better than without and while I’m not going to look it up I suspect there’s plenty of studies and stats that bear that out.
Michael
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.”
It’s interesting that the person who spoke that ‘one flesh’ statement totally neglected to mention children and procreation. Did no one inform him of the learned work of the commentators on this blog and Joe Carter?
Dblade
I can’t speak for ‘atheist blogs’ or sites and how you may or may not have been treated there. Internet debate can get rather rough and heated but I do think many SSM advocates do try to make the best arguments they can and do try to address the counter arguments from the anti-SSM camp rather than just riding over them with name calling or cheap shots. But people are only people. Some people are immature and just aren’t capable of doing better than the ‘cheap shot’, other people are just jerks, and sometimes even the best of people have their bad days. If you think I treated you unfairly then by all means point it out but I’m not very patient with the ‘hypothetical victimization’ rap that many on the right seem to enjoy.
That is where someone asserts something like “If I went to X and said Y I’d be attacked unfairly”. what’s rather insideous about this is that
1. You didn’t go to X, say Y, and get unfairly attacked….so you’re pleading for sympathy as a victim without actually doing the work of enduring victimization.
2. It tars innocent people. If you went on Salon, said X, and Biff attacks you unfairly…well Biff’s a jerk. But the problem with hypothetical victimization is that it isn’t about calling Biff out for being a jerk but making everyone who disagrees with you seem like some agent in treating you unfairly.
June 17th, 2011 | 3:10 am
David Nichol
To say that marriage is orientated to family formation and, hence, to procreation, is not to say that the infertile should be excluded.
Bear in mind that legislation should be clear, simple and certain. To say that nature has limited fertility to opposite-sex couples is true objectively. Anyone who understands the word “sex” can see, at once, that this must be true. It is an analytical proposition, like “all bachelors are unmarried,” or, if you will, a tautology.
By contrast, to say that a particular opposite-couple are infertile is true, if it is true, only subjectively, for it depends on particular causes, peculiar to them, such as age, pathology, the desire not to procreate, so their infertility can only be determined empirically.
The former is a sound basis for legislation, whilst the second is a doubtful one, especially given the progress of medical science in the field of assisted fertility. More importantly, it would involve burdensome and intrusive enquiries and examinations (the cost of which would have to be born by someone), whose results might well be less than certain.
Thus, the situation of same-sex and opposite-sex couples, in regard to fertility is not analogous.
June 17th, 2011 | 6:38 am
Michael said:
I don’t see how I’m redefining the book. Our church is responding pastorally to what is in the pews.
============
The way you and your church are responding is fundamentally based on liberal dogmas, namely:
1) homosexuality is a “born with” or genetically determined condition – false.
2) there are no aspects of human sexuality which are unchanging – false
3) homosexuality should be normalized – false
4) God did not intend for men to marry women and vice-versa – false
5) the claim that to speak out against traditional marriage at the same time that you collude with every act of harassment and violence perpetrated by homosexuals, not to mention porn, by abetting it all with silence, is a Christian attitude to life – False. Not only false, but repugnant and un-Christian.
6) “Christians once believed that gays could simply turn away from their sin and marry a member of the opposite sex, but we now know that is not true.” – False.
The problem is stated in a strawman fashion. Homosexuality usually is a profound developmental problem (including culture), just as anorexia or pedophilia or gambling addiction.
Understanding why a particular individual developed any of these problems is key to helping them resolve it.
To resolve such problems internally in each individual’s mind (and not merely changing external behavior), a combination of actions are necessary, usually including long-term therapy.
Evidently if a pedophile, for example, refrains or is refrained by others from acting out his pedophilia, that is a good thing, but if he only changes external behavior, but continues to have a completely deformed *mind* concerning sexuality, his behavioral change is only a solution as it concerns his environment, nothing more. It’s internally that the problem also needs to be solved. The same for people with a homosexual problem.
7) “I’m not sure why other Christians have to assume that our thinking is secular rather than inquiring into what kind of prayer and study led to those conclusions. ”
Because the core basis for your arguments above is exactly the same of what we find stated at Salon, the Daily Kos, Pelosi, Andrew Sullivan, etc.
You repeat over and over again the dogmatic liberal assertions that homosexuality is innate, that it should be normalized, and anyone who disagrees with you is stupid (have you forgotten your comments to this effect on another recent thread already? A wonderful example of your brand of “Christianity”)
It seems your “studying” about homosexuality revolved greatly (perhaps exclusively) in reading about liberal materials on homosexuality and nothing else.
I can only fathom that this “studying” was mainly directed by people with a homosexual problem who would have hated to investigate the causes of their homosexuality problem, much less of how to resolve it. Apparently that’s your position too.
The result is that your church has opted for ignorance, for irresponsibility, and for a most hypocritical stance about the fact that you are blatantly ignoring the book, trampling over it, really. At least you could admit it.
You said one of the reasons you left the Roman church was you didn’t like the closeted lives gays lived there.
I would prefer that they didn’t lie all the time too, not only in the Church. But they just don’t have the character for it. It’s similar for all the other closeted porn users, adulterers, etc.
Thus there is no justification for any church to now think that normalizing any closeted problem is a solution to it, and even more ludicrously, claiming that this would be a Christian-based solution.
June 17th, 2011 | 8:35 am
Alessandra –
Gotcha beat. How about one that didn’t make it three days?
On January 3, 2004, [Britney] Spears married childhood friend Jason Allen Alexander at The Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas, Nevada. The marriage was annulled 55 hours later, stating that Spears “lacked understanding of her actions”.
The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’.
June 17th, 2011 | 9:11 am
Ray Ingles
June 17th, 2011 | 8:35 am
Alessandra –
A whopping two-month-long “marriage!” (Hah)
Gotcha beat. How about one that didn’t make it three days?
On January 3, 2004, [Britney] Spears married childhood friend Jason Allen Alexander at The Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas, Nevada. The marriage was annulled 55 hours later, stating that Spears “lacked understanding of her actions”.
The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’.
=======
But that doesn’t make the anecdote false! Nor can you know how representative it is. Only if countries start keeping data on marriage/divorce for the same individuals will we know.
What is also interesting is that you and all these people above (the women with a homosexual problem, the celebrities with a promiscuity problem) share the same views about homosexuality!
If you want *data* about Argentina, however, you need to compute how many Argentinean homosexuals got married in the last year. I’ve never seen a more dismal number: less than half of a percent.
That means all the other ones, the overwhelming, whopping majority of homosexuals, hate the idea of getting married, have chosen not to do so, now that they can.
They think marriage is so irrelevant, offers no benefits, or that marriage is incompatible with their lifestyles. Now what kind of lifestyle is incompatible with marriage?
If the marriage benefits that homosexual activists claim are so important for homosexuals had any relevance at all, you would think that more than 1% of homosexuals would have gotten married, in all countries where SSM has been legalized. But they haven’t. Approximately 99% of homosexuals hates the idea.
What an interesting abyss exists between the propaganda by homosexualists like yourself and reality.
June 17th, 2011 | 11:12 am
Alessandra’s position seems clear to me. There should not be gay marriage because there should not be gay people. I think it is pretty much the position of many people who argue against same-sex marriage.
June 17th, 2011 | 11:41 am
Alessandra –
So, you posted an anecdote that you know is of uncertain relevance. Well, uh… there you go.
June 17th, 2011 | 12:34 pm
David Nickol,
A definition tells us what a thing is; the essence of the thing also tells us what it is, though in a less conclusory way. The definition ultimately depends on the essence, which is grasped by reflection on the thing and its characteristics (forget about Platonic essence, which nowadays is easy to caricature; this is Aristotelian essence). Definition and essence are opposite sides of the same coin.
Proponents of SSM often criticize the definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. They say that a “mere” definition can’t tell us what marriage truly is, especially since marriage is (we are told) an “evolving” institution. Liberals’ nominalism is showing. They don’t see that definition mirrors real essence. A definition may be incomplete or even wrong, of course. But nothing has been shown to be wrong or incomplete about the definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Proponents of SSM are merely wishing it’s wrong. Ideology rather than reason is what’s driving them. How else can you explain why they never seem to get around to showing precisely how opposite-sex and same-sex couples are similarly situated. If marriage presupposes procreation, and only opposite-sex couples have an intrinsic capacity to procreate, how can same-sex and opposite-sex couples *possibly* be similarly situated?
When the supporters of SSM take off the ideological blinders, they will see that the social-embeddedness of marriage does not mean marriage is ever-evolving in the sense of being socially constructed. Marriage is too closely tied to human nature and the objective (biological) complementarity of the sexes to be essentially a social construct. Even if sexual morality has evolved in the gay-friendly (and adultery-friendly and divorce-friendly and promiscuity-friendly) way that liberals think it has, the nature of marriage remains unchanged. The nature of marriage, or what it is essentially, is not affected by transitory (as opposed to permanent) changes in human behavior. And anyway, the “sexual revolution” is at most a change in individual behavior, and not a change in basic human behavior or human nature (in which case it *would* affect the nature of marriage, depending on which changes occurred).
I think this answers both of your impressionistic points (and partly the ones in Boonton’s latest reply). You are really saying that the *nature* of marriage is different from what it was, or what is has been in the past hundred generations. Forgive me if I say the burden of proof is on you, and forgive me, too, if I say that liberals believe the incredible—they believe, as you do, that changing the nature of marriage is as easy, morally speaking, as changing your clothes (nod to C.S. Lewis).
Am I right in thinking you are a nominalist? If the supporters of SSM believe that there are no natures, just names or nominal essences, they should say so. It will be a great clarifying moment in the debate about SSM.
Three quick points in reply to some points you make. First, sterile and aged heterosexual couples are rightly permitted to marry because they have an intrinsic capacity to procreate—an ideal capacity, or lifespan-optimal capacity in regard to the functioning of their reproductive organs. Except in a sophistical sense, same-sex couples do not have an ideal capacity to procreate. Second, anthropology is a social science, and it shares in the limits of the social sciences. Only limited truths can be found in the social sciences apart from philosophical reflection (think “natural law”). Third, Robert George’s view of sexuality and marriage is very complicated, but I doubt he would call sexual relations the sine qua non of marriage.
June 17th, 2011 | 2:17 pm
Also for your personal faith, no offense man. but I have followed your posts, and you’ve pretty much come down on the secular side of almost every single argument made. What does it even mean to be a Christian for you?
Dblade,
We’re discussing marriage in general and same-sex marriage in particular. While I suppose it’s flattering in an odd kind of way when people want to discuss me, I am not the topic. If there’s a thread titled “What Does It Mean to Me to Be a Christian,” I might have something to say. But the issue here actually began with me saying I did not take literally the story of Adam and Eve. You elaborated briefly on what you thought the story of Adam and Eve meant, and then said, “[I]f you don’t believe that, why worry about Christian answers to this at all? Just say the book is rubbish and leave it at that.”
The point is, I am not obliged to either accept your interpretations of the Bible or dismiss it as rubbish.
June 17th, 2011 | 2:21 pm
Ray Ingles
June 17th, 2011 | 11:41 am
Alessandra –
Nor can you know how representative it is.
So, you posted an anecdote that you know is of uncertain relevance. Well, uh… there you go.
==========
Can comments only state statistical data to be valid? Most of your comments are completely useless then.
You don’t think these women made a complete joke of their getting “married?” Is that how you act in life? Or are you more in line with Britney Spears? Doesn’t it bother you when people treat marriage like trash?
It’s your strawman that I claimed that all homosexual “marriages” were lasting two months like this one.
June 17th, 2011 | 2:27 pm
David Nickol
June 17th, 2011 | 11:12 am
Alessandra’s position seems clear to me. There should not be gay marriage because there should not be gay people. I think it is pretty much the position of many people who argue against same-sex marriage.
=======
Given that you use problematic vocabulary above, let me restate what I think, for clarity purposes.
There’s no such thing as anyone being born a homosexual. It’s a complex developmental and cultural problem.
There’s nothing good about a person having a homosexual problem.
I believe we should invest in understanding what causes homosexuality and helping people resolve their homosexuality problem. Then they can live out a beautiful, healthy, wholesome, ethical heterosexuality as we are intended to do so.
And, consequently, the question of SSM (and just about any other “homosexual rights” question) is completely moot.
June 17th, 2011 | 2:52 pm
Ray Ingles
June 17th, 2011 | 11:41 am
Alessandra – “What an interesting abyss exists between the propaganda by homosexualists like yourself and reality.”
Wow. It’s been a while since anyone applied a new adjective to me. I’m curious about the definition of the term, though –
===========
What is your ideological position concerning homosexuality?
June 17th, 2011 | 3:20 pm
Liberals’ nominalism is showing. They don’t see that definition mirrors real essence. A definition may be incomplete or even wrong, of course. But nothing has been shown to be wrong or incomplete about the definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
Ken Z.,
The philosophical discussion regarding the definition of marriage is fascinating, and I wish I knew enough to get into it more deeply. I am doing some reading that will no doubt help eventually. But truthfully, I don’t think it is all that relevant. What we are discussing is civil marriage, and I don’t think there has ever been a requirement that civil marriage must conform to any particular philosophical definition of marriage.
I’ll take a slight detour here to make a point. In the debates on abortion, the definition of person is often a major issue. However, in US law, corporations are legal persons, with some of the same rights as natural persons. Now, clearly a corporation can’t be a person like you and me or an unborn child. But there is no requirement that says civil government can’t recognize a corporation as a legal person because philosophically a corporation can’t be a person. So I don’t see why there need be a requirement that civil government can’t institute civil same-sex marriage even if philosophically, two persons of the same gender can’t marry.
It seems to me that there are numerous ways in which civil marriage does not conform to “philosophical marriage,” and particularly to various religiously influenced understandings of what marriage is. In the United States, marriage laws vary from state to state. “Philosophical marriage” (assuming it actually exists) cannot vary from state to state. Many argue that marriage is lifelong and indissoluble, but all 50 states have divorce laws. And no state prohibits remarriage after a valid divorce. While you don’t believe it, Robert George (along with Sherif Girgis and Ryan Anderson) does indeed consider sexual intercourse the sine qua non of “philosophical marriage.”
No sexual intercourse, no marriage. However, only a few state laws require a marriage to be consummated to be valid. Some states may allow marriages that have not been consummated to be annulled, but generally there is a time limit, after which non-consummation is no longer grounds for an annulment.
So even if there is a “thing” called marriage that exists independently from any merely human conceptions of what marriage is, I don’t see that legislatures are bound to write civil laws to conform to it. And if a definition of marriage exists apart from what human beings say about marriage, legislatures also cannot “change the definition of marriage.” They can write civil laws that are not in conformity with the definition of marriage, but they have no power whatsoever to change the definition.
By including the words “permanent and exclusive” in his definition of marriage, George seems to be saying that polygamous marriage is not marriage. It seems to me a particular weakness in his definition, since it appears to me that virtually any discussion of marriage recognizes polygamous marriage as a form of marriage. Even the old online Catholic Encyclopedia appears to accept both polygamy and divorce as not being contrary to the purpose of marriage:
What Girgis, George, and Anderson seem to me to be doing is taking their current understanding of Catholic marriage and attempting to make it into an allegedly timeless, definitive prescript for what marriage always was and always must be. Even if they are right (which I don’t concede), there is still no reason, in my opinion, why that would stand in the way of same-sex marriage. They do argue that civil marriage is hanging by a thread, and approving same-sex marriage would cut that thread. But I find that argument to be unconvincing, since if marriage is what they claim it is, the thread between “philosophical marriage” and civil marriage was cut long ago.
June 17th, 2011 | 3:36 pm
Then they can live out a beautiful, healthy, wholesome, ethical heterosexuality as we are intended to do so.
Alessandra,
How many “natural born” heterosexuals do that? Divorce rate: 50%.
Out of wedlock birth rate: 40%
Rate of abortion to live birth: 223.8/1000
Rapes per year: 89,000
June 17th, 2011 | 3:44 pm
Michael PS
By contrast, to say that a particular opposite-couple are infertile is true, if it is true, only subjectively, for it depends on particular causes, peculiar to them, such as age, pathology, the desire not to procreate, so their infertility can only be determined empirically.
I think you’re misusing the definition of subjectivity here. It’s a question of fact. Granted in some cases the fact of whether or not a couple is infertile may be debatable but in many cases it is not. A woman who has had a hysterectomy, for example, is no less infertile than any SSM couple.
More importantly, it would involve burdensome and intrusive enquiries and examinations (the cost of which would have to be born by someone), whose results might well be less than certain.
Well it depends. What about the case of Tony Randall who married and had a baby in his late 70′s. Quite a few people raised the point that its harmful to create a child who would probably never know his father or know his father only as a very old and very sick man. A similiar issue is raised by the story from a few years ago of the Italian woman in her 60′s who had a child with the help of fertility treatments. It’s quite easy to see gov’t creating a policy that targets a small subset of people who probably shouldn’t be procreating and bar them from marriage without subjecting every married couple to a barrage of state mandated fertility tests before allowing them to marry.
June 17th, 2011 | 5:02 pm
David Nickol
June 17th, 2011 | 3:36 pm
Then they can live out a beautiful, healthy, wholesome, ethical heterosexuality as we are intended to do so.
Alessandra,
How many “natural born” heterosexuals do that? Divorce rate: 50%.
Out of wedlock birth rate: 40%
Rate of abortion to live birth: 223.8/1000
Rapes per year: 89,000
==========
I don’t get your point.
What do these numbers have to do with solving the problem of homosexuality in society?
Are you saying that humans are supposed to rape each other?
June 17th, 2011 | 6:41 pm
Alessandra –
So far as I’m concerned, homosexuality and NASCAR have a lot in common – I don’t grasp the attraction, but a lot of people seem to enjoy them. As long as they aren’t hurting others, I fail to see why I should care – indeed, why it should be anyone else’s business.
Read here and here for some idea.
June 17th, 2011 | 7:14 pm
David Nickol,
I don’t accept the distinction between “philosophic” marriage and civil law marriage. More on that below.
Even if you are right about Robert George believing that sex is the sine qua non of marriage (which I doubt), I don’t know what that has to do with the points I’ve been making about SSM. We want to know about the connection between marriage and procreation, not marriage and sex. (That procreation requires sex is trivially true.)
If Robert George is saying polygamous marriage is not marriage, I would reply that it’s marriage but not a desirable form of marriage, whereas homosexual marriage is indeed not marriage (and not capable of being real marriage), whatever the positive law may say. (The abortion issue, by the way, has no analogy here.)
“So, even if there is a ‘thing’ called marriage that exists independently from any merely human conception of what marriage is, I don’t see that legislatures are bound to write civil laws to conform to it.”
This sounds like nihilism, or maybe anarchism. The legislature certainly has an interest in patterning its decisions on real states of affairs, as opposed to imaginary ones. Moreover, while legislatures can’t change the objective definition of marriage, they can legislate it out of existence in the civil domain. Positive law may diverge from natural law, the morality of the community, and even common sense.
Your last paragraph puts the cart before the horse—the cart of civil law and the horse of marriage reality (as in the nature of marriage). If George, et. al., are right about what marriage is, then, contrary to what you suggest, the law should recognize marriage in that way. I agree with the George, et. al., idea of what marriage is–the union of a man and a woman–but I get to that conclusion by a very different route.
“There is no requirement that says government can’t recognize a corporation as a legal person because philosophically a corporation can’t be a person. So I don’t see why there need be a requirement that civil government can’t institute civil same-sex marriage even if philosophically, two persons of the same gender can’t [genuinely be married].”
Then you regard SSM as a legal fiction? That is what corporate personhood is. At least corporate personhood is a coherent idea in that corporations are analogous to persons in certain ways. But SSM is not coherent in that same-sex couples lack an ideal, much less an actual, capacity to procreate, a capacity presupposed by the very institution of marriage. If SSM is, as you are implying, a legal fiction, it’s an unusually tenuous one.
June 17th, 2011 | 8:36 pm
So far as I’m concerned, homosexuality and NASCAR have a lot in common – I don’t grasp the attraction, but a lot of people seem to enjoy them. As long as they aren’t hurting others, I fail to see why I should care – indeed, why it should be anyone else’s business.
I agree.
That is why gays should be granted the rights they legitimately need to live in peace.
But freedom cuts both ways, and so do rights. Gays are not asking for merely the ability to live and let live; they are asking for laws designed to interfere with other peoples’ rights and freedoms.
It’s our business because they want to make it our business. They want to change the rules that define how we categorize married couples, and how we categorize families/kinship, and they want to make it a crime for people to find their behavior inappropriate.
Therefore, they should support why they feel they’re entitled to what they want.
So please – tell us – I can understand why gays feel they are entitled to those benefits of marriage suitable to a “life partnership” –
But why should types of couples who are inherently non-procreative be granted recognition as procreative couples, including presumptions of paternity and financial incentives for founding a family together?
Gay marriage does harm.
Motherless children experience grief; gays pressure their motherless children to pretend that they feel no grief. That’s harm.
They put their children on YouTube, in videos where the kids “witness” for their parents – kids saying that having “two daddies” or “two mommies” is just as good as having real parents. That’s harm.
They force people to lie. That’s harm.
Honesty is valuable.
Real families are valuable.
What gays are doing relies on confusion and dishonesty. Everyone has a right to be what they really are – they can’t help it. But gays want to obfuscate that into some people having a blank-check right to do whatever they want – an argument that can’t be made without use of dishonesty.
June 18th, 2011 | 4:36 am
Ray Ingles
June 17th, 2011 | 6:41 pm
Alessandra –
What is your ideological position concerning homosexuality?
So far as I’m concerned, homosexuality and NASCAR have a lot in common – I don’t grasp the attraction, but a lot of people seem to enjoy them. As long as they aren’t hurting others, I fail to see why I should care – indeed, why it should be anyone else’s business.
==========
And when they do hurt others, what do you care? What have you ever done about it? Can you give a concrete example?
June 18th, 2011 | 11:14 am
Blake has yet to explain to us how SSM would harm children, existing married couples, society in general, kittens or puppies. He complains about dishonesty yet refuses to honestly address the fact that he refuses to support his assertions with either facts or logic.
June 18th, 2011 | 12:24 pm
Blake has yet to explain to us how SSM would harm children
If gays are right, being forced to live a lie is harmful.
Being forced to pretend that having “two daddies” is the same as/as good as having a relationship with both parents is more than just one lie: the child is expected to not experience a type of grief that is normal for motherless children, as well as the more routine lies – pretending that men and women are interchangeable (which science has proven to be untrue in at least three ways significant to a child’s relationship with his or her same- and other-sex parent).
In fact, the child is expected to “witness” on behalf of his parents’ political agenda.
If you go to YouTube you can find many such videos, where parents put their children on video “testifying” on their behalf – demonstrating that the gay lobby is actively involved in pressuring children to feel a particular way, and also incidentally demonstrating that they’re not particularly concerned with how using their children as political activism ‘props’ will affect their children’s long-term interest – I know I sure wouldn’t like my parents making sure that every Google search that anyone ever did on me came up with my gay parents’ agenda, but these kids apparently exist primarily to make sure their parents’ needs are met, eh? Rather than vice versa.
If there is nothing wrong with living a lie, and the sexes are interchangeable, then same-sex marriage is not necessary: simply date the correct gender to begin with.
Remember: you’re the one who believes what sex he or she is does not matter as long as s/he is “loving”.
June 18th, 2011 | 12:33 pm
Here is another way gay marriage hurts kids.
All human beings have a basic human right to be free from exploitation.
Freedom from exploitation includes, among other things, that if one is a dependent, any and all guardians must make decisions with the dependent’s well-being and interests in mind.
Gay marriage removes the existing protections that currently serve to ensure that custody decisions are made with the child’s well-being in mind – and, further, it does this with the express intention of replacing the child’s interest as the first and primary consideration, with the parents’ interests.
Adoption is currently the only exception to the rule “families are defined by biology”, and adoption is defined by two rules, both of which must be presided over by a judge.
The first burden of proof being whether it is in a child’s best interest to sever a child’s relationship with his biological parent. Remember that all fifty states have decreed that a child has a right to a relationship with both biological parents, unless it is demonstrably in the child’s best interest to sever that relationship – as determined by a judge. This is the first burden of proof that gay marriage does away with – legitimizing the act of falsifying paternity in full knowledge that the motive is not the child’s best interests, but the parents’.
The second burden of proof is whether the adoption itself is in the child’s best interests.
To the extent that “gay rights” have taken hold, it has been at the expense of the idea that a child’s best interest is supposed to be paramount – based on the explicit argument that gay rights “trump” a child’s rights.
Gays rely on a number of arguments, all of which are designed to avoid or obfuscate the question of the child’s interests. The best they can say is that being raised by gay pairs has so far not been demonstrated to do harm (with even that statement being very generously interpreted, since by some interpretations the existing evidence does in fact demonstrate harm – but, of course, how shall “harm” be defined?)
Gay marriage is about deliberately confusing legal categories – biological parent, adoptive parent, and stepparent – so that gays can find a way to create a family, despite the fact that, if we were acting in the child’s best interest, no child would ever be forced to accept a “second” mommy or daddy; that “second” mommy or daddy should rightfully be recognized as, at best, the child’s stepparent.
June 18th, 2011 | 1:09 pm
Blake –
So you’d object to this and this?
Well, expand them, I guess. Note that they don’t propose to take any such rights away from you and yours.
Er… there’s been some institutional policies that have bordered on that, but that’s their right, generally speaking. There’s a lot of smoke over ‘hate-speech’ legislation, but not so much fire. And, yet again, I point to Westboro’s rights being upheld – if they can do what they do and say what they say, what exactly are you worried about doing or saying? (Need I add, “specifics, please”?)
I’ve asked you to provide evidence that such kids have to ‘pretend’, but none was forthcoming. It seems the main support for that was your vigorous assertion of it.
So, let’s turn it around. What evidence would persuade you that a particular kid wasn’t pretending?
June 18th, 2011 | 1:20 pm
Alessandra –
Hardly, but if they don’t, that does limit the kind of points they can make. If your point was something like, “Some gay people can behave as badly about marriage as some straight people do,” then – mission accomplished! On the other hand, if your point was something like “the majority of gay people will behave this way”, then you need more than one anecdote.
Well, so far as I can see existing laws are adequate to address whatever harms a gay person might cause, so I don’t see a need to lobby for more laws along those lines.
I’m not a law enforcement officer, nor have I ever been selected for a jury in a case with a gay defendant, nor have I been a witness to a crime that a gay person has committed (are you talking traffic accidents or what?), so my citizen’s arrest and/or court-related activities have been negligible.
If there is harm that I’m witnessing and not recognizing, I’m afraid you’re going to have to convince me of your point of view. Evidence is helpful, I’ve found, when setting out on such a project.
June 18th, 2011 | 1:35 pm
Boonton
June 18th, 2011 | 11:14 am
Blake has yet to explain to us how SSM would harm children, existing married couples, society in general, kittens or puppies. He complains about dishonesty yet refuses to honestly address the fact that he refuses to support his assertions with either facts or logic.
============
He doesn’t need to repeat the explanation, I already posted it at least in two or three threads. And you weren’t able to refute it.
June 18th, 2011 | 2:20 pm
Booton
In my subjective-objective distinction, I was paraphrasing Mirkovic, a jurist who supports SSM, by the way, when he says of the traditional argument, which he outlines very fairly:
“Even today, in 2011, in commenting on the decision 2010-92 QPC, some authors consider that marriage is based on human reproduction – “In regard to marriage, persons of different sex, and the persons of the same sex are not in the same situation because marriage includes the perspective of procreation. With regard to procreation, either natural or imitated in the case of adoption, the first may indeed procreate (or make as if they had procreated), while the latter cannot. If some male-female couples do not breed, it is for reasons of their own, subjective [c'est pour des raisons qui leur sont propres, subjectives] (advanced age, pathological infertility, choice not to have children), same-sex couples cannot procreate together due to objective incapacity [en raison d'une incapacité objective]. The difference in situation justifies the difference in treatment, namely access to marriage. (…)”– A. Mirkovic, « Le mariage, c’est un homme et une femme », JCPG, n°6, 7 février 2011, p.134 [Myt translation]
By “subjective” he means personal, belonging to them as individuals, not as a category or class. Perhaps, the American usage is different, in which case, I apologize for misleading you, but the above extract should make the meaning clear enough.
June 18th, 2011 | 4:05 pm
Ray Ingles
June 18th, 2011 | 1:20 pm
Alessandra – Can comments only state statistical data to be valid?
Hardly, but if they don’t, that does limit the kind of points they can make.
If your point was something like, “Some gay people can behave as badly about marriage as some straight people do,” then – mission accomplished! On the other hand, if your point was something like “the majority of gay people will behave this way”, then you need more than one anecdote.
========
My point was to show just what a joke these women made out of marriage. I don’t think the example limited this point at all.
Does that bother you (people making a total circus out of a marriage)? Apparently not.
“If your point was something like, “Some gay people can behave as badly about marriage as some straight people do,” then – mission accomplished!”
It appears that’s the point you are desperate to make, with just one anecdotal example.
‘On the other hand, if your point was something like “the majority of gay people will behave this way”, then you need more than one anecdote. ‘
I wasn’t trying to make this point.
As I said, and you haven’t presented any data to refute it, around 1-3% of people having a homosexual problem even wanted to get married once it was legalized in respective countries around the world.
There is an abyss in attitudes and behavior towards marriage if we compare heteroseuxals and homosexuals in countries where SSM has been legalized.
Your claim that homosexuals “are just like” heterosexuals regarding marriage is completely false.
June 18th, 2011 | 4:59 pm
Alessandra: And when they do hurt others, what do you care? What have you ever done about it? Can you give a concrete example?
Ray Ingles: Well, so far as I can see existing laws are adequate to address whatever harms a gay person might cause, so I don’t see a need to lobby for more laws along those lines.
============
So am I to understand that you’ve never done anything in your life to bring attention to or to aide to solve a single violence problem where a homosexual was the perpetrator? In your opinion, all such violence, harassment, and other harmful problems are all being adequately addressed?
Does that go for heterosexuals as well? Do you believe every violence problem in the world is being marvelously resolved as we speak and all the laws are working adequately?
Because… here you are spending your time trying to change a law to impose homosexual marriage, and not working to solve some other much more serious problem.
I have to say that yours is such a typical profile of people who want to normalize homosexuality.
========
Ray Ingles:
If there is harm that I’m witnessing and not recognizing, I’m afraid you’re going to have to convince me of your point of view. Evidence is helpful, I’ve found, when setting out on such a project.
==========
Unfortunately for people who are intent on ignoring reality and evidence, the latter is irrelevant, I’m afraid.
If the day comes where you decide to acquire a conscience and you’re even mildly interested in dealing with violence and other such serious problems perpetrated by homosexuals, let us know.
In the mean time, you can continue congratulating yourself with what I am sure you think are your great attitudes on the issue.
June 18th, 2011 | 5:02 pm
to Mods:
sorry, don’t know why my post was posted twice.
this is the correct one:
Alessandra
June 18th, 2011 | 4:59 pm
========
the first similar one can be deleted (at 4:45 pm)
June 18th, 2011 | 5:26 pm
Gays should not be granted the right to found a family for the same reason incestuous couples should not: because there is a legitimate objection to the way they intend to found a family (or, to put it another way, because they are incapable of founding a family in a way that does not conflict with the interests, well-being, and rights, of the child(ren), the family unit, and/or society)
June 18th, 2011 | 6:43 pm
Apropos my two previous comments, a distinction should be made between the core of marriage and its periphery. At its core, marriage is essentially a procreational institution. At its periphery, marriage is not anything *essentially* but consists of “accidents” (in Aristotle’s sense) that accrue to the institution of marriage but do not define it. The periphery can be “tampered” with without necessarily doing any great harm, but not the core.
That’s the problem with SSM. SSM says, in effect, that marriage at its core is not essentially procreational. This subversive redefinition of marriage gravely damages the whole institution.
Liberals are in denial about this because they yearn to overcome the “hierarchy” and “patriarchy” of marriage, and they are aware that same-sex marriage is the most direct way to do it. Liberals look to SSM to break down “unjust” natural norms and pave the way for justice-seeking social construction (with themselves as the enlightened overseers). Unlike Marxists, liberals won’t use cruelty as a tool. But they will certainly use coercion, which is why they are so impatient for the government to get moving on “marriage equality.”
It’s easy to see why liberals are dissatisfied with civil unions. Civil unions won’t do nearly as much to break down natural norms and longstanding societal values, nor will they pave the way for social construction. Civil unions are benighted in their own way.
Where is Jonathan Swift when we need him?
June 19th, 2011 | 1:27 am
Blake: What gays are doing relies on confusion and dishonesty. Everyone has a right to be what they really are – they can’t help it. But gays want to obfuscate that into some people having a blank-check right to do whatever they want – an argument that can’t be made without use of dishonesty.
===========
The dishonesty starts at a deeper root level, and in that sense, it’s not that you are purposefully being dishonest, but you are spreading misinformation.
There is no such thing as a “gay” person. They weren’t born that way and that’s not what they really are. That’s equal to saying that a person with an anorexic problem should have a right to be anorexic simply because they developed the problem in the first place. Questioning why this person developed anorexia is then equal to “interfering with their right to be anorexic.”
This is the rhetoric found in liberal ideology about homosexuality and its harmful.
For liberals, the quest for denial of the profound psychological and emotional problems that deformed their psychology into homosexuality is absolute.
Most people with a homosexual problem are all too happy, in fact, they become fanatical liberals, because liberalism presents them with this very sought after lie.
“But gays want to obfuscate that into some people having a blank-check right to do whatever they want – an argument that can’t be made without use of dishonesty.”
They do as much harm to adults as they do to children, aside from the harm they do in society spreading all these lies about the causes and dynamics of homosexuality.
So your concern about the harm related to children is curious, given that homosexuals as a group (taking all of them, but not saying they are all alike) perpetrate significant numbers of crimes and harmful behaviors towards adults. Why is your only concern with the harm that befalls children?
You can’t seriously expect to endorse people whose entire understanding of reality is based on a self-serving lie, and then think they aren’t going to do whatever they want, no matter how harmful, and always find some excuse for it. Moreover, you are feeding into their lies and their logic of entitlement to do anything they want and never answer for any of the harm they do.
Have you ever seen a homosexual group speak out against S&M? They are completely fine with people having a completely vicious, deformed mind about sexuality, which takes pleasure in torturing others. This is not a problem for homosexuals (along with most liberals). They endorse it completely.
Have you ever seen a homosexual group speak out about homosexual pornography? They endorse and approve of every cultural material that degrades human beings in a sexual context. Have you ever seen a homosexual group speak out about how much homosexuals sexually harass others? Never.
How can you expect such people to care about any harm that is done to children?
It is for these reasons that I believe homosexual marriage will be legalized in the US. A great number of Americans are too ignorant to be able to criticize the deluge of disinformation being spread about the causes and nature of homosexuality. Secondly, a majority of Americans is extremely selfish and irresponsible when it comes to dealing with sexuality issues.
The ones who don’t outright endorse violence and degeneration in issues of sexuality and relationships support it with their silence and inaction. They turn their backs on the victims, they aren’t bothered by the profoundly ineffective justice system, they really don’t care about investing in preventing measures, they are insensitive to the profound emotional and psychological harm that widespread lack of ethics in sexuality and relationship attitudes and behaviors cause in individuals.
A great many Americans are all too content to tell themselves that there are no problems in the US concerning adult sexuality, and, even if there, why should they lobby or act to improve the situation? They basically are indifferent and negligent on all accounts.
Thus many Americans have an attitude which disregards society completely and everything is decided on a self-servicing, egotistic basis.
Obviously this includes a profound disregard about the welfare of children, but the problem is certainly not restrained to minors. It is not any different concerning the indifference to the harm done to adults.
For a time, I was a bit puzzled as to why American culture developed this weird split, displaying such a complete disregard to harm done to adults regarding sexuality, at the same time that they show some interest when it involves children.
I believe part of the reason is that criticizing the issue of harm related to children makes Americans feel good because, for those who don’t practice it themselves, they can exactly mentally separate themselves from the ones who do and feel morally superior.
If they start looking, however, at how much harm is done to adults, and how much they are involved directly or indirectly in the systemic dynamics that sustain sexual violence and other such behaviors in society, they would be forced to realize that they are not such good people as they love to tell themselves. So, the easiest way is simply not to let conscience even surface.
It will take a long time to dismantle the lie that homosexuality is something inborn and that the demands made by people with a homosexual problem are valid. All laws in the US will be changed to sustain the lie that homosexuality is inborn. Before the transformation is finished, however, we will witness an increasingly repressive system towards anyone who exposes the lie. The very concept that homosexuality is a developmental problem will be branded “hate speech.” No better way to enforce a lie in society than with censorship.
In addition, the low levels of education in the US will continue, and people will get most of their bearings about sexuality from the media (including the most ignorant and disoriented celebrities like Gaga). The media is dominated by people spreading the “inborn homosexuality” myth, along with all other kinds of harmful and irresponsible sexuality and relationship attitudes, and that will only become more intense in the future to come.
All churches could play a vital part in fighting against such destructive changes in society. I believe they need to play a much more active role in educating their own members, and then encouraging people to take action to fight against such a destructive, dehumanized, self-serving recipe for society.
June 19th, 2011 | 5:46 am
Ken Z
“Civil unions are benighted in their own way.”
Civil Unions are a mere mechanism which allows the parties to do, by one recorded agreement, what they could otherwise do piecemeal by means of a number of separate legal transactions. In that light, they can be seen as an alternative to unregulated cohabitation, rather than to marriage. It is worth noting that, in France, for example, over 90% of civil unions are between opposite-sex couples.
Even in the case of unregulated cohabitation, it has proved impossible for the law to adopt the robust stance of Napoléon: “They want nothing to do with the law and the law wants nothing to do with them”
June 19th, 2011 | 12:03 pm
Being forced to pretend that having “two daddies” is the same as/as good as having a relationship with both parents is more than just one lie: the child is expected to not experience a type of grief that is normal for motherless children, as well as the more routine lies…
This has nothing to do with SSM but rather how different sex couples carry out their responsibilities to their kids. Whether or not a child is taught to call two men ‘daddies’ has no more to do with SSM than a child who calls his daddy’s new girlfriend ‘a new mommy’.
Allessandra
He doesn’t need to repeat the explanation, I already posted it at least in two or three threads. And you weren’t able to refute it.
No you didn’t. You post your assertions as if you were etching them on stone tablets from the top of Mt. Sinai and your one attempt at posting actual information was to note that somewhere in South America a lesbian couple broke up.
My point was to show just what a joke these women made out of marriage. I don’t think the example limited this point at all.
Does that bother you (people making a total circus out of a marriage)? Apparently not.
As I pointed out I recently meet a person who is engaged to marry a woman whose first marriage lasted just 3 months. A bit like the story cited, she caught him in affairs both right before and right after the wedding and after he bailed out on counseling she asked him what he wanted to do, he said he didn’t want to be married and that was the end of it. Was she making a joke out of marriage? I don’t think so. I think they both realized they didn’t have a viable marriage and put the thing out of its miseary.
I think someone like you should welcome the story. Wouldn’t you rather see gay couples try marriage, realize it isn’t the answer and then avoid it? This seems like the total opposite of what Blake is asserting, namely that gay couples will engage in life long conspiracies to steal children from their bio-parents….you’re now implying that most gay couples won’t be able to hold together long enough to even make it to a wedding….or a few months beyond it.
So the anti-SSM marriage arguments here are basically “A” and at the same time “Not A”……ohhh and also they are also the epitome of well reasoned logic.
Michael PS
By “subjective” he means personal, belonging to them as individuals, not as a category or class. Perhaps, the American usage is different, in which case, I apologize for misleading you, but the above extract should make the meaning clear enough.
Ahh how subtle language can be…even if we are both speaking the same one. But to me it seems like you’re just cherry picking categories. When a 70 yr old woman marries a 75 yr old man, you say that couple falls in a ‘procreative category’ because they are ‘male-female’. But they aren’t in the procreative category of ‘fertile couples’ meaning within the age range of viable procreation.
It seems to me this reasoning can be deployed to go whereever the person wants it to go, which is a problem IMO with a lot of the ‘definition based’ anti-SSM arguments here. Those making the arguments aren’t mastered by the logic but are masters of the logic, they can ‘turn them on just enough’ to ban SSM but keep them ‘dimmed’ beyond that so they carry no additional implications.
KenZ
Apropos my two previous comments, a distinction should be made between the core of marriage and its periphery. At its core, marriage is essentially a procreational institution.
Why, then, has this not been a traditional understanding of marriage? For example, procreation is NOT mentioned in traditional marriage vows. Inability to consummate a marriage is grounds for annulment but not infertility (in other words,inability to have sex is grounds for voiding a marriage contract but not inability to have a child). Procreation was not mentioned in Jesus’s comments on marriage in the Bible where he described as a natural inclination of male and female to bond together (in which case procreation is a side effect of attraction, not its ‘core’). Likewise its inexplicable that marriage is traditionally defined as a life long contract if the ‘core purpose’ is procreation. If that’s the ‘core purpose’ then elderly women should not be allowed to marry and men, after their oldest children become of age, should see their marriage’s dissolved so they are free to hook up again with a younger wife to take another shot at procreation.
I think you’re arguments are more applicable to a religious case against SSM and most religions set a higher bar to marriage than the civil law, whose bar is set much lower in a diverse and pluralistic society. Remember the civil standard of marriage is low enough for a drunken couple in a night out in Las Vegas to get hitched….something few churches or priests would allow. It seems rather implausible that society’s ‘need for procreation’ mandates allowing such hook up marriages but will collapse into mass infertility if a tiny percentages of civil marriage happened to be made up the most sincere same sex couples.
This is why I say the procreation argument is a little bit too logical for its own good. It may fit in some alternative universe where humans hate sex and need to be coaxed into it by the state or else procreation will grind to a halt. That is simply not the nature of humans who, if anything, need to control and limit procreation rather than push it.
Liberals are in denial about this because they yearn to overcome the “hierarchy” and “patriarchy” of marriage, and they are aware that same-sex marriage is the most direct way to do it. Liberals look to SSM to break down “unjust” natural norms and pave the way for justice-seeking social construction (with themselves as the enlightened overseers).
That’s already been accomplished. Marriage in all developed countries are not patriarchial. There are no gender roles hence SSM can’t do anything to ‘overcome’ gender based ‘hierarchy’ in different sex marriage. Such hierarchy hasn’t existed in law for nearly a century. If such hierarchy is cultural, well the fact is there simply are not enough gay people to alter the ‘culture’ of the typical marriage in the country.
It’s easy to see why liberals are dissatisfied with civil unions.
Civil unions still suffer from the problem of inequality and I think you shouldn’t be carping about liberal dissatisfication with them as it is the right that has taken them off the table by using almost all proposed ‘defense of marriage acts/bills/amendment/etc.’ to not only attack SSM but throw up numerous barriers to any type of civil union compromise or alternative. Michael PS’s comments on French law are interesting because it demonstrates a road not taken by people like KenZ because they insisted on placating the Blake’s and Allessandra’s in their coalition.
June 19th, 2011 | 1:48 pm
Civil unions are unequal because gay unions are not equal to marriage: they are eligible for “life partnership” benefits…but…still waiting as to why they are eligible for the right to get the benefits meant for those founding a family together? Are you going to answer those criticisms, or just hide behind more of that ‘Blake and Alessandra and Ken Z are in the wrong clique, ewww, they’ve got cooties” ad hominem junk, like someone who doesn’t have the goods?
June 19th, 2011 | 1:49 pm
Gay marriage is similar to incestuous marriage: the reason it is not subsidized by the state is because it is not a healthy family unit, and it violates the rights, well-being, and/or interests of of (a) the offspring of the unit, (b) the larger family, and/or (c) the community.
June 20th, 2011 | 4:54 am
Allessandra: He doesn’t need to repeat the explanation, I already posted it at least in two or three threads. And you weren’t able to refute it.
Bontoon:
No you didn’t. You post your assertions as if you were etching them on stone tablets from the top of Mt. Sinai and your one attempt at posting actual information was to note that somewhere in South America a lesbian couple broke up.
=======
You haven’t refuted a single a point I made in the paragraph above.
If you have any arguments or data that even comes close to refuting my arguments, you would do well to post them.
I’ll be waiting to continue the debate.
Feel free to insist on not addressing what I wrote, if you can’t refute it in any way though.
June 20th, 2011 | 5:42 am
The NY Times had a profile of a “family” comprised of three adults plus one toddler this weekend.
It’s one allegedly heterosexual woman, a homosexual who was the sperm donor to the woman’s child, and the homosexual partner of the sperm donor.
The Times says, in fact, that this configuration comprises two families: the woman + the homosexual sperm donor + the child, and the homosexual sperm donor + his equally disoriented homosexual partner.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/nyregion/an-american-family-mom-sperm-donor-lover-child.html
“Such is the hiccupping fluidity of the family in the modern world. Six years running now, according to census data, more households consist of the unmarried than the married. More people seem to be deciding that the contours of the traditional nuclear family do not work for them, spawning a profusion of cobbled-together networks in need of nomenclature. Unrelated parents living together, sharing chores and child-rearing. Friends who occupy separate homes but rely on each other for holidays, health care proxies, financial support. ”
+
“And so here on Plaza Street, four people are testing the fuzzy boundaries of an age-old institution, knowing there is no single answer to what defines family or what defines love.”
And that explains why perhaps:
Griffin (the boy), now almost 3, calls Mr. Russell “Uncle George” (his sperm donor dad) and Mr. Nimmons “Dave” (the dad’s disoriented partner).
At some point, Ms. Einhorn (the mother) intends to tell her son the truth.
But for now lying to her son about who his biological father is does not present a problem to any them. Liberals are all for the children, you might say.
“Mr. Russell worries about that moment. He never wanted to be a parent; he saw the sperm donation as a favor to a friend. He did not attend the birth or Griffin’s first birthday party. His four sisters were trying to figure out whether they were aunts. ”
And that’s the wonderful “father” he is to Griffin, whom he babysits a couple of nights per week. At first, Mr Russel was so much allergic to and rejected the boy so completely, that he would only “babysit” Griffin after the boy had gone to sleep, so that he could avoid all contact and reject him completely.
Obviously, being the NY Times, they did not do society the favor of asking Mr Russel why he has such a deformed mind about children and parenthood, and god forbid if we start delving into Mr Russel’s psychology and find out his deformed fatherhood dynamics are tied at much more profound levels and roots to why he developed such a disoriented and dysfunctional sexuality, incapable of relating to women as any man is intended to do so by nature.
‘“I certainly don’t want to be the child’s parent,” he said. Then: “What can I say, it’s lovely to hold a child in your arms.” ‘
However, by the selected quotes in the article, we get a glimpse that it’s the mother who is pushing Mr Russel to spend time with the boy, and to take on a father role that he certainly resented profoundly at first. One could ask how will this develop and how impacted Griffin will be by it in the future, especially when the time comes these adults decide to drop the truth on Griffin like a small bomb.
Furthermore:
‘Mr. Russell has a deep playlist of anxieties. He is uneasy in public places (“I have a nervous system like an air-traffic controller”); begins days feeling dread (“I used to say I crawled up to self-esteem”); and feels the need to audibly criticize movies while in theaters. He is disorganized: he did not use a wallet until he was 45, because he found it hard to arrange.
He loses keys, phones, everything. He’ll neglect to insert coffee in the coffee maker and brew hot water. He left the stove on; forgot to baby-sit for Griffin. He is not shy about seeking help: “I’ve been going to therapy since God was a child. I think I actually counseled Freud.” ‘
=======
Clearly he is someone struggling with a host of deep psychological problems. Among his many problems, will liberals ever question what formative and adult experiences contributed to and produced his homosexual problem?
That question must never be asked, the answer must never be known, much less should any of his sexuality problems be resolved.
Given that for liberals the reasons for marriage are as flaky as can be, maybe their next move would be to argue that Mr Russel could half-marry the mother, and half-marry his disoriented homosexual partner. It is a grand opportunity for liberals to hail in a new concept: the half-marriage.
June 20th, 2011 | 8:00 am
Booton
Thank you for your thoughtful response
My point was that same-sex couples are a readily identifiable class; after all, a person’s sex is recorded in the Civil Register, whereas “infertile couples,” do not really constitute a class at all. That is what the jurists mean by calling their infertility “subjective” or individual. Such individuals may be suffering from a range of pathologies, or they may be too old, or it may simply be a question of volition. Some of these conditions may appear to be irremediable, whereas others are plainly not. Besides, some conditions that, in the past, were irremediable are now treatable and it would be a bold legislator who attempted to anticipate such advances.
Further, Mirkovic raises the question of “imitated procreation.” In France, this idea has long been at the centre of discussion about same-sex joint plenary adoption: an infertile, opposite-sex couple can “make as if they have procreated” [« faire comme s'ils avaient procréé »] In other words, they present to the child, and to the wider community, the model of the natural (procreative) family, which, some experts assert, makes the establishment of the parental bond between the adopters and the adopted child possible or, at least, easier and spares adopted children the additional difficulty of having to integrate into a family, however, loving that is perceived as “non-standard.”
Now, I have repeatedly stressed that the state’s interest in marriage is not to promote procreation, but to establish filiation, the vital link between generations, and that it seeks to ensure, as far as possible in a free and democratic society, that the legal, social and biological aspects of paternity coincide. This concern is equally applicable to the fictional filiation [filiation fictive] of adoption; the biological bond is lacking, enhancing the importance of the social and psychological factors, which the juridical bond validates. This also applies to assisted reproduction, using donated gametes. Similar considerations would apply to surrogate gestation in those jurisdictions that permit such arrangements; in France, they are excluded by the general rule that only things in commerce can be the subject of an agreement and trading in people is a crime.
The mere fact that there is a sense of artificiality in discussing SSM, without considering these related questions illustrates the central role of filiation in republican marriage.
June 20th, 2011 | 8:23 am
Blake
Civil unions are unequal because gay unions are not equal to marriage: they are eligible for “life partnership” benefits…but…still waiting as to why they are eligible for the right to get the benefits meant for those founding a family together?
Children conceived in civil unions are treated no different in terms of paternity than children conceived in marriage. Your question is simply in an improper form. In effect civil unions do little more than create a ‘marriage-lite’ which is then open to heterosexual couples as well as gay ones thereby leaving the inequality issue out there just as much as if an ‘alternative’ to interracial marriage bans in the 60′s was ‘civil unions’.
As I pointed out, I think France has done well presenting an alternative to SSM. But here in the US its the anti-SSM crowd that has most effectively taken civil unions off the table by using their ‘defense of marriage bans’ to attack them almost as much as to attack SSM. Since your side seeks to use the law as a weapon against gays, it’s most sensible for them to distrust an attempt to create a type of ‘marriage ghetto’ just for them. I would predict that if you did have mass civil unions in the US, the anti-SSM crowd would actually go to work to make them more unequal to marriage by adding new and increased benefits to marriage while specifically excluding them from civil unions.
As Dave pointed out, there’s a lot of “gays just shouldn’t exist’ feeling among the anti-SSM crowd and more than a few seem to be under the impression if they can make them not exist in law that will carry thrue to reality.
Gay marriage is similar to incestuous marriage:
I think that like polygamy incestuous marriages present actual direct problems to present day different sex marriages and families. As I pointed out to I think pentamom, polygamy ‘alters the game’ in even marriages where no one is interested in polygamy. Likewise incestuous marriage would alter the structure of different sex marriages. Would a mother be able to focus on raising her daughter if she knew someday she might displace her as her husband’s wife?
SSM is remarkably disimiliar to incestuous and polygamous marriages in that the only DSM they might effect would be a heterosexual marriage where one partner only married someone of the opposite sex because they didn’t have marrying someone of the same sex as a legal option. Such marriages might be effected by legalized SSM, but then I can’t believe they are anything other than a trivial percentage of them and you’re not going to tell me a marriage where one partner itches for a gay relationship is a healthy one to begin with.
June 20th, 2011 | 8:25 am
Alessandra –
It saddens me, but freedom is the right to be wrong. If people don’t have the opportunity to make mistakes, the world would be a terrible place. A Christian should understand that, no?
Well, sure I haven’t presented any data to refute that figure. You haven’t presented any data to support it, despite my asking you to (June 17th, 2011 | 11:41 am). You presented a figure with no source and no way to verify it.
That’s funny. You’re using double-quotes there, as though you were quoting my exact words.
And yet, I don’t recall making any such statement, and the only place those words show up on this page is in your words. If I did say that, it shouldn’t be too hard for you produce the full quote. All comments here have a date and time associated with them; if you can’t manage a hyperlink, then the date and time should be sufficient.
Maybe you’re confusing me with someone else. Or, just perhaps, you’re arguing with what you wish I’d written rather than what I’ve actually said.
June 20th, 2011 | 9:24 am
Alessandra –
I didn’t say things were perfect. But there’s a limit to what humans can do, and there are tradeoffs in any situation. Laws that are too draconian can be as bad as no laws at all. (E.g. 800,000 people incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses? Really?)
Violence is violence, whatever the motive. If I suffer violence, I don’t particularly care if the perpetrator was homosexual or heterosexual – I want the violence stopped, I want the malefactor imprisoned, etc. (Are you endorsing the principles of ‘hate speech’ legislation, just with your choice of targets?)
I’m discussing an issue with you and others, sure. Does that mean that’s the only thing I do with my life? (Is this really the only thing you do? Yikes.)
Wait, why should I limit my concerns to only homosexuals? Are you saying heterosexuals never engage in violence? I mean, according to all the stats, homosexuals are a distinct minority. Just from a priority perspective, one would assume that tackling heterosexuals first would be more productive…
But, of course, that’s a false dilemma, built on top of an unstated assertion. I’ve seen no justification for the idea that one cannot address violence generally instead of taking it group-by-group. And secondly, I’ve seen no evidence that homosexuals as a group are particularly prone to violence. (Well, carrying it out, anyway. Being victims, on the other hand…)
June 20th, 2011 | 11:11 am
Michael PS
My point was that same-sex couples are a readily identifiable class; after all, a person’s sex is recorded in the Civil Register, whereas “infertile couples,” do not really constitute a class at all.
I would imagine their ages would likewise be recorded in the Civil Register so what would the difficulty be in barring marraige for females over 65 yrs old and requiring them to go through PACS?
Just an illustration of how the US differs here, there is no central register in the US. Individual births are recorded in the towns where they happen with the states keeping backup data. Marriages likewise are so stored. If you ever engaged in genelogical research, such as to find a person’s birth parents, you’d be amazed at how easy it is to loose track of someone. Social Security in the US does issue numbers and while it used to be the fact many people didn’t bother to get numbers until they started working, nowadays you need an infant to have an SSI number in order to deduct him on your taxes. Still there are plenty of people born who aren’t registered with SSI and hence don’t appear on ‘the grid’. The US is a land of diverse and fragmented databases.
Alyssandra
The NY Times had a profile of a “family” comprised of three adults plus one toddler this weekend. …
Like Blake you cite articles that refute your own points then stomp you feet and demand to know why I don’t demonstrate your errors.
This article concerns people in NY. Guess what? NY doesn’t have SSM and in fact explicitly rejected SSM in the past, whether it will continue to do so remains to be seen. So everything that your article describes takes place in a world without SSM.
You haven’t refuted a single a point I made in the paragraph above.
If I could get you to the point where you were capable of making a single, coherent, valid point I’d be entitled to a medal.
June 20th, 2011 | 12:11 pm
Ray,
I’m discussing an issue with you and others, sure. Does that mean that’s the only thing I do with my life? (Is this really the only thing you do? Yikes.)
========
I’m just trying to understand your profile and ideology better.
You said about homosexuality: “As long as they (homosexuals) aren’t hurting others, I fail to see why I should care.”
Than I asked you in what way you cared when homosexuals did hurt others and you replied “Well, so far as I can see existing laws are adequate to address whatever harms a gay person might cause, so I don’t see a need to lobby for more laws along those lines.”
Obviously, you’re very satisfied with all situations of violence perpetrated by homosexuals, because not only do you think everything is being well addressed by laws, but also that there’s nothing else you should do to highlight the issues, discuss them, or take any action. At least that’s what you answered when asked a direct question about what you had done in the past.
Alessandra: “Because… here you are spending your time trying to change a law to impose homosexual marriage, and not working to solve some other much more serious problem.”
Ray: “I’m discussing an issue with you and others, sure. Does that mean that’s the only thing I do with my life? ”
Well, you certainly didn’t answer the question directly. I asked you what you had done in the past about any issue whatsoever involving violence perpetrated by homosexuals, and your answer indicated you had done nothing. Please feel free to provide any clear information if that’s not the case.
Alessandra: ” If the day comes where you decide to acquire a conscience and you’re even mildly interested in dealing with violence and other such serious problems perpetrated by homosexuals, let us know.”
Ray: “Wait, why should I limit my concerns to only homosexuals? ”
What concern is that? So far, the only thing you have stated is that you’re so “concerned” about these violence issues that you do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Doesn’t seem like concern to me. And yet, here you are showing a lot of concern about imposing a law about homosexual marriage.
Ray: “I mean, according to all the stats, homosexuals are a distinct minority. Just from a priority perspective, one would assume that tackling heterosexuals first would be more productive”
Let me see if I understand your logic. Society should try to stop heterosexuals from abusing kids, but leave a free reign to homosexuals to torture children because there are more heterosexuals in society?
There are more Chinese than Americans. Should we focus on preventing Chinese from abusing kids and do nothing for American children who are being raped, beaten, and victimized?
Is that what you call productive and moral and just?
I agree that the philosophy that you display is exactly what people with a homosexual or bisexual problem want. They want free reign to commit any crime, debase any person, and always make an excuse for themselves crying minority status. Furthermore, they want everybody to brush these issues aside and concentrate on “marriage.”
Ray:”I’ve seen no justification for the idea that one cannot address violence generally instead of taking it group-by-group.”
Well, I haven’t seen any justification as to why you spend time and energy discussing about homosexual “marriage,” but not about issues where homosexuals are perpetrating violence.
I’ve also seen no justification as to why one person can’t address an issue that affects a particular group as well as generally. Unless, of course, if they wanted to sustain a mantle of lies about the violence perpetrated by that particular group.
Furthermore, since groups are not treated the same in the media, some groups hide the violence they perpetrate much more than others. While one approach is to address violence in general, another one is to address it specifically as each group’s configuration requires.
“And secondly, I’ve seen no evidence that homosexuals as a group are particularly prone to violence. (Well, carrying it out, anyway”
Well, you don’t find that kind of evidence by watching Sex in the City, porn, or whatever “gay rights” magazine you love to read.
“I didn’t say things were perfect. But there’s a limit to what humans can do, ”
Yet there’s no limit to the excuses humans can make for themselves when they don’t have a conscience.
June 20th, 2011 | 12:29 pm
Boonton,
True, procreation is not mentioned in traditional marriage vows. But marriage vows concern marriage writ small, which is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about marriage writ large (which, by the way, does NOT mean the aggregate of all marriages, as you or Ray Ingles or David Nickol implied somewhere)–that is to say, the institution of marriage. The institution of marriage *presupposes* the fact of procreation. It’s precisely because procreation is the core element (not just the “purpose”) of marriage that sterile and aged couples are allowed to marry. These couples have an intrinsic capacity to procreate–in their case, an ideal capacity rather than an actual capacity. (Michael keeps misunderstanding this, simplifying it into something it is not by regarding the idea of an intrinsic capacity to procreate as if the word “intrinsic” did no work–in other words, as merely stating a trivial truth about the procreative actual capacity of opposite-sex couples.) Your other paragraphs evince a similar misunderstanding of my argument, only worse.
On the hierarchy and patriarchy of marriage, and why it should be wiped away by enlightened people, read a “mainstream” progressive scholar like Robin West, and you’ll see what I mean.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Advocates of SSM who regard gender as a social construct are fooling themselves. Likewise, people who deny the significance of an ontological division between male and female in Genesis are fooling themselves. (Yes, there is ontology in the book of Genesis—“male and female created He them,” and so forth.) This is similar to the ontological gap, in chemistry and biology, between the organic and the inorganic. Just as no compound of chemical elements can lead to life—this, by the way, is a metaphysical and not just empirical truth—so is no “compound” of male and male, or female and female, able to lead to marriage. In the idea of marriage, the genus—as with civil unions—is relational commitment, and the specific difference–unlike in the case of civil unions–is procreationality (or procreativity, although that term is less exact). In the same way, the genus of humans and wolves is “animal,” and the specific difference of humans but not wolves is “rational.”
To colloquially sum up a rather “Aristotelian” paragraph: Marriage without opposite-sexness is like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Opposite-sexness is an inherent part of what marriage is, just as the Prince of Denmark is an inherent part of what Hamlet is.
At the end of the day, it’s easy to see why liberals have not shown clearly or convincingly why civil marriage should be fundamentally altered so as to include marriages of same-sex couples. In bizarrely assuming that SSM is inevitable, liberals are treating this as a case of “heads I win, tails you lose.” Tradition and reason beg to differ. On this one, reason and tradition are marching in lockstep.
June 20th, 2011 | 12:33 pm
Booton
I merely meant there was some official record that determines the matter, without the need of testimony, thus indicating the simplicity of the requirement
The infertile cannot be easily determined; there are at least two cases in India of women giving birth in their 70s, both in 2008. In the UK a 66-year old woman carried her daughter-in-law’s child to term.
Again, this takes no account of Merkovic’s case of “imitated procreation.”
June 20th, 2011 | 12:51 pm
Ken Z
I never said opposite-sex couples have the capacity to procreate; I said same-sex couples lack it. That is, of course a tautology, implicit in the meaning of the words “same sex.”
I also said that, in the language of the jurists, their incapacity was objective, unlike the “subjective” (=individual, personal, peculiar to an individual) infertility of some opposite-sex couples, which is why the one is a proper subject for the legislator and the other is not.
June 20th, 2011 | 2:19 pm
Michael PS,
I wasn’t referring to you (Michael PS) but rather to Michael (*minus* the PS). I regret the misunderstanding–all the more so since I have found your comments to be illuminating and wonderfully in accord with a proper view of things.
June 20th, 2011 | 2:20 pm
Ken Z
True, procreation is not mentioned in traditional marriage vows. But marriage vows concern marriage writ small, which is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about marriage writ large
Except Jesus seemed to be talking about marriage writ large and he neglected to mention procreation. Likewise marriage vows, at least traditional ones, are not custom tailored to a particular union but are very broad (i.e. sickness and health, for richer or poorer, etc.). so we cover just about every conceivable situation but we are still too ‘writ small’ to mention procreation? Likewise Paul’s views on marriage seemed ‘writ large’ in that he wasn’t talking about a specific class of married couples but marriage’s purpose in his eyes (namely for people to avoid getting themselves dammed for lust….not meeting the ‘need’ for procreating a new generation of people)
It still seems like your ‘writ large/small’ distinction is a bit too funny….you can expand it to deny SSM but too easily shrink it to avoid any other type of ban.
.Advocates of SSM who regard gender as a social construct are fooling themselves.
Point but I don’t take gender to be a ‘social construct’ in the sense that gender doesn’t matter. As a matter of fact, if gender is a ‘social construct’ then you’d have a good argument against SSM on the grounds that there’s no particular reason to assume gays can only be attracted to their own gender to begin with.
At the end of the day, it’s easy to see why liberals have not shown clearly or convincingly why civil marriage should be fundamentally altered so as to include marriages of same-sex couples.
More to the point, conservatives haven’t shown why SSM is a fundmanetal alteration of marriage, esp. at the civil rather than religious level. Nor have they shown why its the state’s duty to enforce philosophical ideas and ideals of marriage rather than just to be the bookkeeper to individual’s in their attempt to carry out the duties imposed by a marriage contract.
Michael PS
The infertile cannot be easily determined; there are at least two cases in India of women giving birth in their 70s, both in 2008. In the UK a 66-year old woman carried her daughter-in-law’s child to term.
The UK example would be problematic for your case and esp. Blake’s misreading. Assuming the 66 yr old woman was herself married then would her husband be the father or her son? I think it’s clear in cases of ‘unorthodox’ procreation some type of ‘testimony’ and decision making will have to be done thereby reinforcing my point that the paternity issue is one of pragmatism rather than some grand ‘right of marriage’.
In the case of the woman in her 70′s giving birth, if true, doesn’t discount the fact that society could quite easily deem such acts of procreation pretty misguided just as an adoption agency would be justified in having qualms about allowing a 70 yr old woman with no other family adopt a newborn baby.
More importantly, you’ve cited with approval looking to ‘social evolution’ rather than ‘revolution’ as a guide to legal reasoning. How does society view marriages of 70 yr olds? In general it views it quite positively except in cases where there seems to be some element of fraud or abuse (i.e. the dottering old rich man who is seducied by a vampish 20-30 yr old woman). How does society view procreation by 70 yr olds? I would say quite critically. If it happens rarely as a fluke or perhaps as some offbeat experimenting with fertility treatment that maybe one thing but I think most would agree its problematic at the very least.
This then leads to the question of why people seem to naturally inclined to approve of the application of an institution whose purpose is procreation with couples who, at the same time, society naturally is inclined to disapprove of procreating? One answer may be that society should become more critical of non-procreating marriages like the two 70 yr olds who find themselves late in life. A more reasonable answer IMO is that marriage’s purpose is NOT procreation.
June 20th, 2011 | 4:34 pm
Boonton,
“It still seems like your ‘writ large/small’ distinction is a bit too funny….you can expand it to deny SSM but too easily shrink it to avoid any other type of ban.”
Not so. It’s not arbitrary. It’s just a way of accounting for the institution of marriage, which subsumes the whole set of individual marriages (marriage writ small) but is not reducible to it. The institution of marriage is what we need to explain. Commitment can’t explain it, but procreation can. Your real beef should be with the idea of an intrinsic capacity to procreate. You should claim that it’s ad hoc–some liberals will gladly seize on that. But I think they are easily refuted if they try to justify that assertion. Which is not to say they won’t be able to make hay out of it.
Try to think of philosophy in terms of what’s there, and how we know what’s there. Don’t value-relativize everything or make it all a matter of someone’s opinion.
Marriage reality stands athwart marriage equality yelling “Stop!”