Posted on 12/04/2003 9:53:48 AM PST by ArGee
Now that the Massachusetts Supreme Court has ruled it unconstitutional (in that state) to deny marriage to homosexual partners there is a lot of noise about how politicians are reacting. Most of the nine dwarves have declared that they oppose homosexual "marriage" but support "civil unions" that look exactly the same on paper. (President Bush has stated that he supports a maintaining our traditional understanding of marriage without giving us any specifics.)
Does anybody remember the duck test? Civil unions are marriage. This is a semantic shell game. Now, don't get me wrong. I understand Democrats and their semantic shell games. They're caught because most Americans don't support homosexual marriage. But many, if not most, Americans support some kind of civil unions.
If I understand this, Americans are against homosexual marriage, but they are in favor of homosexuals being married in everything but name. Therefore the politicians have to follow the people they want to lead, and come out against homosexual marriage.
Can any FReeper help me understand what's in that name? What is it with marriage that makes it impossible to call a relationship involving sex, shared property, joint custody of children, inheritance rights, and shared benefits marriage?
Shalom.
Yes, and how long do you expect that to remain in law? If legislatures do not amend the law to reflect the biological absolute certainty of DNA, then someday a court that is accustomed to using DNA evidence to convict and to exonerate in the criminal field will surely make the leap to paternity.
Marriage is not about love, it is not about sex. It is about the environment we raise children.
Clearly, you would have had a lot more people agree with that statement fifty years ago than you do now. This thread was started by ArGee in an effort to understand why people say yes to civil union but no to gay marriage. I would submit that the child raising environment question is not felt as intensely by people who are comfortable with gay couples adopting children, as is legal in 47 states. Even two of the the others, allow single gay people to adopt kids. Only Florida is adamant about gay adoption being illegal.
In every marriage on some level the man is father and the woman is mother.
Well, I'll admit, in my situation, when my new wife and I bought a puppy, she started calling me "Dad" when referring to me while talking to the pup. However, I can't really see what it does for the society, as we had the pup spayed. Again, I would submit that in the extended family society that is way more traditional than the "dad, mom, kids" nuclear family, there were usually unmarried uncles and aunts that helped the family survive and prosper. Their lack of personal procreation freed them to help their reproductive siblings do a better job of passing on the family's genetic material, inherited wealth, and political power.
Homosexuals are extremely fundamentally different, their sole reason for existence is alternative sex.
I've seen you mention this a lot. If the purpose of this thread is to explore ways of getting folks in the mushy middle to take their reluctance to gay marriage, and transfer that reluctance to the disapproval of gay civil union, I'd suggest not focusing on sex acts. People in this middle ground don't want to think about gay sex, any more than most conservatives who oppose gay relationships do. If we keep pounding on the acts that are no longer criminalized, conservatives are going to be seen as the ones obsessed with sex, while the liberal media makes the story about love, committed monogamous relationships, and fairness. It's a surefire way to lose this battle.
I'm sure the left will bring up the "separate but equal" argument in the coming Massachusetts legislative battle. It may come about that a public opinion change is in the offing. Right now, I would explain the current cognitive dissonance as a reaction to the "suddenness" of the MA court decision. People on the left and the right have been following this issue for years, people who would really rather not think about it have ignored it. It takes time to morph the pig into the horse, six months might be enough time, I'm sure the MA court had that in mind.
Thanks for the discussion! You're an intelligent, thoughtful person, and bantering back and forth with you reminds me of late night debates back at the UW.
I've said it before, I'll say it again, don't confuse the 1996 DOMA vote in Congress, and the subsequent adoption of state DOMA's with what's going to happen in 2004. I'm sure that a lot of otherwise "no" votes were converted to "yes" votes based on the idea that the "yes" vote was symbolic, anyway. The DOMA was a sop to conservatives (the aforementioned Clinton surely used it as a device to get re-elected) during an election year, which everyone knew would have Constitutional problems eventually.
It was a safe vote for a moderate legislator, you could go to the conservatives and say you stood up for marriage, and you could go to the libs and say that it was meaningless, since the SCOTUS would rule that the Constitution trumped it. The fact that there is a Federal Marriage Amendment on the political table means that everyone knows the weaknesses of the DOMA. Do you really believe that people in 1996 were too shortsighted to see the debate we would be having just seven or eight years later? Some were counting on it! The moderates that would have voted against DOMA were buying time for homosexuality to become more accepted in American society, and the Lawrence vs. Texas SCOTUS decision is probably a sign that there was enough of a delay.
Opinion polls have shown that anti-gay sentiment is now lower than pro-gay tolerance. Of course, this is simply in the numbers of people who hold the opinions, right now, I'm more than willing to concede that the people who are against gay rights are far more motivated that the people who are gay-tolerant. But look for a FMA battle to raise the ire of the other side. The fight, then, is for the folks in the middle. Right now, the pro-gay side has the media on its side (they need something to sell papers, even they can see the coming debacle where Bush is going to blast Dean), and all I see conservatives raising is religion, tradition, and perversion. They'll have to come up with concrete ways that existing and potential heterosexual marriages will be adversely affected by the recognition of gay relationships, and I just don't see anything convincing on the horizon.
Or, get them ripped away from them in the courts. I've noticed that our society has seen fit to establish governmental entities that involve "support enforcement", but none to provide "visitation enforcement". Suffice it to say, there have been changes deleterious to the traditional institution of marriage, that were uncomfortable at first, but people in the middle got over them. I'm personally glad that a divorced President could be elected just a scant sixteen years after it was a campaign issue that Nelson Rockefeller had married a divorced woman. Surely, Hollywood divorces have gone from being shocking scandals, to simple entertainment.
The idea that a man cares which child is his appears to me to be inexplicable in any story that talks about marriage "evolving."
I didn't cite it as any justification for what is happening today. I was trying to explore an alternative theory as to why marriage arose in our society. The fact remains, enforced fidelity for women assures that a male is raising his own kids. Enforced fidelity for men only, does not have this consequence in females, they always know their kids are theirs. That's just biology. To overcome this, enforced fidelity for women is needed to give males the certainty they need, and making a woman property is an efficient way of doing this. Putting in religious laws against lusting after your neighbor's wife are part of this establishment of female fidelity for procreation purposes.
Don't get me wrong, I'm quite certain that fidelity gives strength to a society, at least if enough people practice it. Adding the value of fidelity to non-reproductive relationships is what the pro-gay marriage folks have going for them now. It's an idea that Mrs. Hunter112 is fond of, even though she and I are both out of the reproductive pool.
If men had it their way from the beginning of time, we'd have what we have now, which is a mess.
Well, 85 years ago, we men were the only ones (except in a few states) with the vote, and even then, managed to produce both wars and corrupt political systems. We also produced economic engines of prosperity, and a political system that are the envy of the world. It's pure speculation to figure what the country would have been like if either women had the vote from the time of the Constitution forward, or still didn't have it today. Either case, there are those of us who would have regarded either state as normal and natural as we regard women suffrage today.
I can't think of any explanation for marriage other than it is ordained of G-d. (That is not a reason to codify it into law.) Nothing else makes sense.
My take on it, is that it conferred benefits on the leader(s) of a society, and was therefore considered ordained by a higher power. Our present notions of separation of church and state would be completely incomprehensible, and utter madness to a pharoah, or a tribal chieftan, or a king of medieval times. The ruler simply decides what he wants (chances are, his father, the previous ruler, educated him about what to want) and the policy is adopted, the force of law is backed up by religion. Older societies had no practical secret police, but an all-knowing, all-seeing deity can act as an enforcement mechanism. It's all in the difference of how we see tradition establishing, in your view, it's handed down from the Divine, in mine, the idea of the Divine is used to whip people into compliance with that which benefits the rulers.
Women forced men into marriage so they could be protected during pregnancy? Get real. Women are weak and easy prey for men. I can see no pre-marital environment that would lead to marriage evolving. But it could be a problem in my imagination.
Try imagining this: The ruling chieftain of a Mesopotamian agricultural tribe knows the sacred knowledge that sex with a female equals offspring that resembles the man who had the sex, if he was indeed the only one. I submit that it's inherent that each man wants to pass on his own line. I believe it has obvious benefits, if you believe in evolution, and it has a powerful attraction for people who do not believe in evolution, too. Clearly, the patrilinear (father-line) nature of the "begats" in the Old Testament show that it was of vital importance to early people in that time and place, even without knowledge of the mechanics of genetics.
Now, with this knowledge, what do you do with it? You can try to procreate with all the women in the tribe, and thus risk the ire of the men in the tribe (who probably know or at least suspect the sacred knowledge, since they are farmers), or you can allow each able-bodied man a wife, to establish his own lineage. Of course, the fidelity rules only apply firmly to women, and have exceptions for the men when they beat their plowshares into swords for conquering new territory, and really, not much application at all to the leader, who gets his wife for the heirs to the throne, and his concubines (whose offspring are called bastards) for his own fun. So, why not adopt these rules, and make them sacred? It keeps your society functioning, with food from the farmers, and riches from the lands you need to conquer. If it provides any benefits to women (which I was not alleging, I think you read into that), then they are collateral. I know, it sounds like it comes straight from a "womyn's studies" class at Berkeley, but to me, it explains how men got the upper hand in dominating women.
I acknowledge a reversing of the trend twice, once after Lawrence vs. Texas, and once right after the MA decision. The general trend since the 1970's have been for greater acceptance of gays, and I consider these to be statistical "blips". The left has not gotten its side out fully on this. Wait until they do. Besides, even in MA, the epicenter of this decision, the polls that I've Goggled up from the MA papers show acceptance of the decision. You can argue that the polls are being manipulated, but after the initial shock of the decision is over, you'll see the thirty year trend resume.
Besides, ArGee started this thread to explore why majorities support civil union, yet oppose gay marriage. If the issue is framed as civil union, the middle can live with it.
momentum is currently on the side of stopping this.
At this point, I agree. But the other side has yet to mobilize. After Howard Dean gets enough votes for the Rat nomination, there will be funds freed up to go to this issue from the left. Count on it.
Where is phylis Shlafly when we need her.
Oh, if you go to the Eagle Forum, she's staunchly anti-gay marriage. But her example with the ERA proves that its easier to stop an amendment than to get one enacted.
-PJ
No it doesn't and I don't believe you. This statement seems to me to be a non sequitur given the topic of discussion. You may have been thinking that in your mind, but you stated it in this post indirectly (meaning in a post to another) in response to my initial claim that marriage was about procreation. Your genderless description also fits the current term "gayby," and I agree that you were perhaps being intentionally vague in order to entrap someone with a response that "proves your point," when it really doesn't.
-PJ
| 1660 The marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman form with each other an intimate communion of life and love, has been founded and endowed with its own special laws by the Creator. By its very nature it is ordered to the good of the couple, as well as to the generation and education of children. Christ the Lord raised marriage between the baptized to the dignity of a sacrament (cf. CIC, can. 1055 § 1; cf. GS 48 § 1). |
| 1625 The parties to a marriage covenant are a baptized man and woman, free to contract marriage, who freely express their consent; "to be free" means: - not being under constraint; - not impeded by any natural or ecclesiastical law. |
The problem with this argument is this:
The only reason homosexuality is accepted and "celebrated" today (Gay Pride parades down city streets replete with nudity, simulate and/or real humping, etc, gay-positive sex-ed in schools, gay friendly clubs in schools, and more too innumerable to get into here) is SOLELY because courts have shoved this down our collective throats. In other words, court mandate has pretty much gotten us where we are today. Popular opinion has followed the courts' rulings.
Considering how I have been hearing that this is "in the offing" for nearly a year now, I can't call this ruling sudden. But you may be right. This might be the reaction of people who "haven't really thought about it before now" and "don't really want to think about it now."
But your comments to longtermmommy are right. Marriage should be more than legalized permission to have sex, but it is long since it has been more, and it is long since anyone even cared about legal permission to have sex. Those who "haven't thought about it before now" must just not think. This is no overnight event. We have made this bed, one board, one screw, and one nail at a time. Nobody should be surprised when somebody adds the sheets and asks us to sleep in it.
Shalom.
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