Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to The Inconvenient Question, revisited

OK, I'll bite
Fox — (archived)

One problem with justifying gay marriage by declaring that religious, cultural, and traditional barriers against it are arbitrary and subjective,

. . . and they are . . .

is that the proponents have a very hard time when asked where the marriage lines should be drawn, without resorting to arbitrary and subjective religious, cultural, and traditional barriers. Try it yourself--it's fun.

Cool - I haven't had this kind of fun in days, at least. Keep in mind that the opinions about to be expressed are mine alone, and ought not to be - though I know they will be - used with the usual tar-brush to paint any number of other people.

As I understand it, legal restrictions on who may marry fall into three basic categories: gender, number, and consanguinity (that is, closeness of relation). There may be others, dealing with the mental and/or physical health of the applicants for a marriage license - but see immediately below.

The last catagory is the easiest to address without resort to "religious, cultural, and traditional" excuses. There are scientifically-validated public health reasons for state consaguinity laws. Those laws do little to prevent incest outside of marriage, especaily incestual rape, but that's not the point of discussion.

I'll leave gender for last, since it's the simplest. The number of people in a marriage - that is, the number acceptable to society - is a concept that has gone through a lot of evolution. As far as I know, there are still polygamous and polyandrous societies on the planet. As we all know, the so-called "Judeao-Christian" scripture (especially the "Judeao-" part) upon which our society is allegedly founded preserves instances of multiple-partner marriages. The idea of pooling the resources of many people to the common end of homemaking and child-rearing has a lot of attraction. I don't happen to believe it can work very often, if at all, and I wouldn't enter into one myself, but I also don't find it objectionable prima facie (maybe I read just enough Heinlein . . .). There's no doubt it would open a messy can of legalistic worms when it comes time to settle a divorce or an estate within a multiple marriage, but I don't believe legal expediency is legitimate grounds to ban it.

That leaves gender. And what else it leaves is "religious, cultural, and traditional" excuses, only, for banning marriage between members of the same gender. What Lee and Ed have expelled through their nether orifices about "the meaning of marriage" is, as has been stated elsewhere in this thread (and in the real world), a matter of legal semantics. The real meaning of marriage is in the shared emotional context of the people who wish to be married.

The real meaning of this debate should be about providing equal protection under the law to all those who are already married every other way but de jure. That includes responsibilities as well as rights, and protections for each, and for any children (adopted or otherwise), in case of subsequent divorce or inevitable death.

You may try to obfuscate and distract with your invocation of the "slippery slope", Tom, but that doesn't win your side of the debate any points.

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