Marriage equality, and the SCotUS

[Ginger_Warrior]

It isn't a good concern to have in a logical discussion at all, since the claim you are making is unfalsifiable and thus cannot possibly be reasoned against.

 

As for the second part of your sentence, is emotional irrationality really the most appropriate basis on which to define the laws that govern our societies?

[sees_all1]

It isn't a good concern to have in a logical discussion at all, since the claim you are making is unfalsifiable and thus cannot possibly be reasoned against.

 

As for the second part of your sentence, is emotional irrationality really the most appropriate basis on which to define the laws that govern our societies?

If I quote the Family Research Counsel, you would have the exact same concerns. And I would agree the concerns would be justified.

As far as emotions in politics, pretty much every public agenda is pushed through emotion. When do we have gun control debates? Only after school shootings.

[Ginger_Warrior]

And look how calm and well-reasoned the gun control row has turned out.

 

What a model example to cite for the use of emotion in sound decision-making.

[Range_This11]

If that is the crux of the author's argument--and that article is a few statistics with a lot of conservative opinion interpretation--then I fail to see how it is a compelling case against gay marriage, though I'm not sure that's what you're trying to get at. Wouldn't two earners, homosexual or not, be beneficial to a child's economic well-being?

It's not a compelling case against homosexual marriage, it's the case for traditional families. My point is that over the past 100 years, laws have been passed to give incentives for married people to stick together in order to strengthen families. The underlying assumption is that one parent will work, and the other parent will stay at home with the kids raising them. The laws make it easier for families to live under a single income.

 

The point is that there are civil unions which grant homosexual couples many of the same protection as marriage, but not all of them. Homosexuals want "marriage" because they want all the benefits of marriage; I'm arguing that these benefits of marriage aren't really applicable to homosexual couples because they can't procreate. When these laws were passed giving bonuses to marriage, they had the intent of helping and protecting children by keeping their parents together. They weren't passed trying to make two classes of people.

 

Another thing that is irksome is the fact that pretty much everywhere in the U.S. recognizes civil unions, which is the same thing as marriage without the heterosexual part. There are still benefits civil unions don't receive that marriages do, but that's because marriage is meant for procreation and raising families, and civil unions are meant for people that are devoted to one another.

A simple counterpoint to the "marriage is for procreation" argument is that there are plenty of young couples that have the inability to procreate, yet we allow them to marry. Many couples (including a couple in my family) have been trying for over 10 years without luck. They are still married legally and enjoy all the benefits. Are you prepared to implement a test for those types of couples?

 

You are absolutely right that traditionally the marriage has been for procreation. However, our social mores about sex and marriage have changed drastically not just in the last 10 years, but in the last two centuries. Up until the early 20th century, the primary occupation of Americans was farming. My great grandfather was one of 17 brothers and sisters. So, the argument that traditional marriage was based on procreation is correct. In the 21st century, though, the average American has no need for 17 children and even the farmer has no need for that many. Marriage has evolved from a pragmatic practice (exchange of property, creation of children for work) to an emotional practice. We emphasize love and commitment in our vows, not who gets how many cows.

 

In fact, I would argue that homosexual marriage is a great asset to America and the world. There are over 7 billion people on this planet and we are depleting our resources. If we continue to procreate, we increase our population exponentially. Eventually we are going to run out of food and water. Thousands, if not millions, of children in America and across the world need homes and families. Now, you may argue that homosexual couples can still adopt without traditional marriage and that when DOMA was created, the intent was not to create another class of citizens. I would agree with you, but the social landscape of America has changed drastically. It is absolutely imperative that our laws reflect these changes. Excluding homosexual couples from marriage violates the equal protection clause, and you know that.

[Quyneax]

If you say that gay people want to marry for the benefits, you really are belittling their love. It's not a nice thing to do. For most people, marriage has that extra special feeling of 'forever' and 'the ultimate commitment'. They want to go that extra step. Regardless of divorce rates :P.

 

Either way, legal benefits are not relevant to what marriage is. Benefits can be changed. If you feel that benefits for couples are there to benefit children, raise child support and lower couples tax breaks. In the case of the United States, it would help the children to do something about teen pregnancy, obesity, quality of education and indeed discrimination by race and sexuality as well.

 

If you look at who is allowed to marry, there is the following guideline, which is universal in the western world: "Only any two consenting individuals".

 

Consenting already means that those below the age we consider sufficient to make these kind of decisions are not allowed to marry - children. It also precludes animals.

 

A second guideline is also common, which is "only any one consenting man and any one consenting woman". But this guideline discriminates by sex. That puts it on the same level as "only any two individuals, both of the same skin colour" and "only any two individuals, both of the same height/age/religion/favourite food". That level is called 'unreasonably limited'. It is the level you ought to avoid - it hurts people more than it helps.

[Omar]

If you say that gay people want to marry for the benefits, you really are belittling their love. It's not a nice thing to do. For most people, marriage has that extra special feeling of 'forever' and 'the ultimate commitment'. They want to go that extra step. Regardless of divorce rates :P.

 

Either way, legal benefits are not relevant to what marriage is. Benefits can be changed. If you feel that benefits for couples are there to benefit children, raise child support and lower couples tax breaks. In the case of the United States, it would help the children to do something about teen pregnancy, obesity, quality of education and indeed discrimination by race and sexuality as well.

 

If you look at who is allowed to marry, there is the following guideline, which is universal in the western world: "Only any two consenting individuals".

 

Consenting already means that those below the age we consider sufficient to make these kind of decisions are not allowed to marry - children. It also precludes animals.

 

A second guideline is also common, which is "only any one consenting man and any one consenting woman". But this guideline discriminates by sex. That puts it on the same level as "only any two individuals, both of the same skin colour" and "only any two individuals, both of the same height/age/religion/favourite food". That level is called 'unreasonably limited'. It is the level you ought to avoid - it hurts people more than it helps.

If you get the fiscal side of the issue sorted, there's no reason for the government to worry about defining marriage anymore--not that it was ever a fruitful pursuit; marriage is a concept we have created, so the accurate definition is the one we give it. If you want to define marriage as being between a man and a woman, that's fine, but it doesn't mean the homosexual equivalent should be banned.

I think Ring_World hit the nail right on the head: prima facie, marriage isn't something that needs to be defined by government, but if it decides to make "married people" a special interest group, then the definition starts to matter, because financial incentives are in play. So if you're really (really?) going to blame someone for belittling their love, blame the government for bringing money into it.

[Quyneax]

The goverment doesn't define marriage, people do (people also make governments). It was defined a bunch of times from take-any-couple-of-thousand years ago to now, in different traditions and codes of law, and now we have our current definition which is basically the love, commitment, forever and official part* (with the note that forever is up for negotiation). I think that if you take one of those away, it's not a marriage anymore, that is, the following are not marriages:

• Officially forever committed, but no love - a business contract.
  
• Officially forever in love, but not committed - this doesn't exist as a separate thing, but it's basically a very loose open marriage where you don't even have to communicate, e.g. you fall in love, get married, then go on your merry way and sleep with whoever and never meet again, but you keep loving. Personally I feel it's not 100% the same as marriage, but okay, it's not really an issue.
  
• Officially commited and in love, but only temporary - practically the case with marriage of course, but the vows do say 'forever' - if you don't vow that, you don't get married afaik. Maybe with the 'write your own vows' deal? This is definitely a shaky part of the definition :P.
  
• Forever committed and in love, but not official - serious relationships (before marriage if applicable).

 

Now there is a trend that 'official' means you create something which can be reviewed as required to prove that you did get married. Witnesses, license and stuff. That's where the goverment comes in. The goverment keeps track of marriages, because they're bunch of people we appointed to keep track of a bunch of things, take care of some stuff we can't be bothered to do ourselves, such as upkeep on our individual two-mile stretches of highway, or more importantly, dikes. Similarly, we want them to keep track of marriage - at least, I think it rather helps when determining whether someone is married or not, which helps with the commitment part. Honestly I don't see the government doing anything we don't want here.

 

When you start adding more things to marriage, such as tax breaks, you can ask whether that's what we really want - do we want specifically people who marry to have more money? Personally I don't think it's a bad thing - it will help people with little money to enjoy marriage, maybe go out a bit more? There will be people who marry for money, but that doesn't have to be a problem. I don't think it is a problem right now anyway. Anyway that's all really far away from the matter of same-sex marriage.

 

 

So basically, @Omar: no idea what you're on about.

 

 

 

@Ring_World: There is no marriage but the official marriage etc. as per my definition above. I don't think governments in principle recognize marriages that were not officially made known to them. There may be some special cases for Mormons or w/e but you can't just get a priest/mullah/rabbi/reverend/pastafarian to bless you and expect that to be enough - you have to tell someone who keeps track (hi government).

 

You would get married because you want to go from 'forever committed and in love' to 'officially forever committed and in love'. Official - that's the difference.

 

I look at being married as a state, that state makes people happy, therefore denying a couple that state must have a reason. Denying can only be done at the transition to official. The reason to deny would be that one of the three things required pre-marriage is missing (love, commitment, forever). So when someone wants to categorically deny the state of marriage to a group, you start to suspect they question the capability to have 'love', 'commitment' and/or 'forever' in that group. I am assuming here that the people who are allowed to marry include anyone who can consent. The idea being that you do not deny anyone (consenting) marriage in principle, but that you do not make things that don't become marriage once made official, official.

 

If you add more requirements to the definition, you can exclude more people based on them not fitting it. Ex. the ability to have children, or the ability for one partner to lift the other over their head (this would be highly amusing for a short while), or that the partners must be of different sex. Ultimately, it's up to the people to decide what is marriage. The people have already decided that discrimination by sex, race, religion, sexuality etc. are wrong (therefore forbidden), so I think that for not-being-hypocrytic's sake, they will decide that the definition of marriage does not include a clause about any of those things - which it doesn't, in a bunch of places. The US is one of the next to decide.

 

 

 

*Note that we are able to understand what gay marriage is, that is, we can read that phrase and extrapolate a lot of things from there, such as the expected behaviour between partners, that the're probably living/sleeping/'sleeping' together etcetera. For the dictionary definition, sex/gender doesn't come into it - but there is a clear default to heterosexuality - you usually have to specify gay marriage separately. Probably because that's less common. Not an argument, please don't reply, just a funny note (I major in language, ok).

[Quyneax]

But if you have all the different organizations, who's going to say which are official and which aren't? Would all marriages still be the same? Could you really speak of being 'officially married' if you could just found your own organization and do the paperwork yourself? That wouldn't satisfy the public-ness of officiality at all.

 

You still want to know who is already married and who isn't. That can only be (conveniently) done if at least one person keeps a database of all marriages, with a search function please. If you have all these different places marrying people, there will be overview websites etc., which take the same role as the government does now, except that they'll always be behind on the facts (due to new organizations spawning as well as inter-organizational lag), trying to make money off it as well, and there will be much less democratic control over it. I keep my marriage out of the hands of advertisers tyvm :P.

[Omar]

(people also make governments)

Nope. Democracy is mob rule. If people decided what marriage is, then why would you need the government to do it? Why are we even having this argument? By now people would be calling whatever they think marriage is "marriage". The people is not the government. The government is a handful of people with guns.

 

• Officially forever committed, but no love - a business contract.
  
• Officially forever in love, but not committed - this doesn't exist as a separate thing, but it's basically a very loose open marriage where you don't even have to communicate, e.g. you fall in love, get married, then go on your merry way and sleep with whoever and never meet again, but you keep loving. Personally I feel it's not 100% the same as marriage, but okay, it's not really an issue.
  
• Officially commited and in love, but only temporary - practically the case with marriage of course, but the vows do say 'forever' - if you don't vow that, you don't get married afaik. Maybe with the 'write your own vows' deal? This is definitely a shaky part of the definition :P.
  
• Forever committed and in love, but not official - serious relationships (before marriage if applicable).
  

Now there is a trend that 'official' means you create something which can be reviewed as required to prove that you did get married. Witnesses, license and stuff. That's where the goverment comes in. The goverment keeps track of marriages, because they're bunch of people we appointed to keep track of a bunch of things, take care of some stuff we can't be bothered to do ourselves, such as upkeep on our individual two-mile stretches of highway, or more importantly, dikes. Similarly, we want them to keep track of marriage - at least, I think it rather helps when determining whether someone is married or not, which helps with the commitment part. Honestly I don't see the government doing anything we don't want here.

 

When you start adding more things to marriage, such as tax breaks, you can ask whether that's what we really want - do we want specifically people who marry to have more money? Personally I don't think it's a bad thing - it will help people with little money to enjoy marriage, maybe go out a bit more? There will be people who marry for money, but that doesn't have to be a problem. I don't think it is a problem right now anyway. Anyway that's all really far away from the matter of same-sex marriage.

 

 

So basically, @Omar: no idea what you're on about.

My point is that you don't need a monopoly on the initiation of force to define marriage. A government isn't simply an organism we use to do what we all want to do; it does what we all want to do, but can't individually, or at least that's what The Social Contract says; it realizes the intersection of the will of every individual, and in exchange every individual gives up his right to not do what he asked the government to do (obviously, or else he is refusing to have his desires realized, which contradictory). Marriage doesn't fall under this, so there's no reason why government should define it to begin with.

When, however, the people that make up the government decide to give those who are married a financial benefit, only then do you need the definition to come from the government. Remove the financial benefit, and you can have any kind of marriage you want.

The financial benefit doesn't pass Rousseau's definition. If everyone wanted married people to have more money, you wouldn't have to threaten people with jail time if they evade taxes in order to collect that money. It would then be called charity, not public policy. So that part is illegitimate, and the power the government arrogates itself (I have never given a bunch of people with guns authority to do this!) to define marriage because of this is equally illegitimate.

 

 

[Edit] To expand on RW's post:

[Omar]

That's excellent.

[Edit] Welp he removed the quote.

[sees_all1]

A simple counterpoint to the "marriage is for procreation" argument is that there are plenty of young couples that have the inability to procreate, yet we allow them to marry. Many couples (including a couple in my family) have been trying for over 10 years without luck. They are still married legally and enjoy all the benefits. Are you prepared to implement a test for those types of couples?

Nope, and there doesn't need to be. Just because a heterosexual married couple cannot procreate at a single instance in time doesn't mean they'll be unable to procreate in the future, unlike homosexuals which by definition cannot procreate.

 

Here's another interesting article I found.

http://www.businessi...arriage-2012-11

[Kaphias]

Sees_All does it really matter? Homosexual couples can have sex, can live together, can share property, can do all the aspects of marriage - many of which violate your morality codes. Why do you object to them being legally married? Or would you outlaw gay sex too if it was up for a vote

This is why these threads get pointless when they get of this length- we start going in circles.

[Furah]

Why does procreation have anything to do with marriage? Saying that people who are never able to have kids shouldn't get married treat marriage like the ultimate goal of it is to have sex for the purpose of having a child. I don't get the appeal of marriage in the first place, but that's for another thread. On the topic, why the hell is it still called marriage. Marriage is a religious ideal, which has no place being used in government. Civil union should be the only thing recognised by the state, while marriage is what you call the ceremony you have in church, if you chose to do it that way.

 

I believe that everybody-- regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc-- should have the right to experience the pain and suffering of marriage just like everybody else.

What about polygamy, or people marrying animals? (Not asking you in particular, just putting it out there, asking where we draw the line)

 

Animals, children, and inanimate objects are unable to give consent. This is why one cannot and should not be able to marry, or have sex with, any of those things. Animals, because they lack the ability to comprehend or properly convey their opinions, children because they lack the ability to comprehend and are still developing their brains, and inanimate objects because they are in no way living or able to say I do.

[Tim]

and inanimate objects because they are in no way living or able to say I do.

 

I love lamp.

[Ginger_Warrior]

A simple counterpoint to the "marriage is for procreation" argument is that there are plenty of young couples that have the inability to procreate, yet we allow them to marry. Many couples (including a couple in my family) have been trying for over 10 years without luck. They are still married legally and enjoy all the benefits. Are you prepared to implement a test for those types of couples?

Nope, and there doesn't need to be. Just because a heterosexual married couple cannot procreate at a single instance in time doesn't mean they'll be unable to procreate in the future, unlike homosexuals which by definition cannot procreate.

I'm reasonably sure that a heterosexual woman who's had a bilateral oophorectomy or a hysterectomy will fall under the definition of "cannot procreate" equally as much as a homosexual couple will. Perhaps more so, even, than a lesbian couple where one spouse is bisexual.

[sees_all1]

A simple counterpoint to the "marriage is for procreation" argument is that there are plenty of young couples that have the inability to procreate, yet we allow them to marry. Many couples (including a couple in my family) have been trying for over 10 years without luck. They are still married legally and enjoy all the benefits. Are you prepared to implement a test for those types of couples?

Nope, and there doesn't need to be. Just because a heterosexual married couple cannot procreate at a single instance in time doesn't mean they'll be unable to procreate in the future, unlike homosexuals which by definition cannot procreate.

I'm reasonably sure that a heterosexual woman who's had a bilateral oophorectomy or a hysterectomy will fall under the definition of "cannot procreate" equally as much as a homosexual couple will. Perhaps more so, even, than a lesbian couple where one spouse is bisexual.

Alright, sterile people shouldn't get married because they'd be missing the point of marriage. Should the government screen for sterility? No. It's not in the government's interest nor the people's interest to have the government thoroughly and invasively examine their genitals before issuing marriage licenses.

Reserving marriage for heterosexual couples doesn't require the government to screen for sterility.

[Ember]

Alright, sterile people shouldn't get married because they'd be missing the point of marriage. Should the government screen for sterility? No. It's not in the government's interest nor the people's interest to have the government thoroughly and invasively examine their genitals before issuing marriage licenses.

Reserving marriage for heterosexual couples doesn't require the government to screen for sterility.

But the government should examine the genitals thoroughly enough to determine that they are complementary, even if they don't necessarily work? Never mind that there's no point in them being complementary if one or both is functionally impaired.

[Omar]

Sees, would you be cool with gay marriage if the benefits destined to couples who procreate were abolished?

[sees_all1]

Sees, would you be cool with gay marriage if the benefits destined to couples who procreate were abolished?

If there were no government benefits associated with marriage, there wouldn't be an issue of "equality" and I believe there wouldn't be a debate.

[nine naked men]

Sees, would you be cool with gay marriage if the benefits destined to couples who procreate were abolished?

If there were no government benefits associated with marriage, there wouldn't be an issue of "equality" and I believe there wouldn't be a debate.

 

pffffhahahahaha

[Ginger_Warrior]

Weak answer. Very weak answer.

[sees_all1]

Weak answer. Very weak answer.

I can't imagine a movement spending so much time, effort, and money on something so frivolous as the definition of a single word. Are homosexuals so insecure they need their deepest relationships validated by common language? :rolleyes:

[Ginger_Warrior]

Let homosexuals be the judge of that. I'm sure they don't need you to speak for them on how strongly they feel about this. Who are you to decide how much effort they'd put into fighting for marriage rights, if there were no financial benefit to it?

 

Just assume that they would for argument's sake, and answer the question that was put to you.

[Giordano]

Prejudice against homosexuals exists, surely you cannot deny this fact.

 

Once the government recognize this, the prejudice will wane: just like it did to women and colored people. Social movements must start change, if you're waiting for it to happen "naturally" this is as naturally as social reform gets.

[sees_all1]

Prejudice against homosexuals exists, surely you cannot deny this fact.

 

Once the government recognize this, the prejudice will wane: just like it did to women and colored people. Social movements must start change, if you're waiting for it to happen "naturally" this is as naturally as social reform gets.

Racism and sexism still exists. People like to argue that you can't legislate morality, but I think it's even crazier to try to legislate respect.