A non-religious argument against same sex marriage?

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hazmat said:
the definitions dont really matter. it didnt matter when marriage was defined as between a man and woman of the same race–that was “equal” too.
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Actually, that was not the anti-miscegenation racists’ definition. No one ever said that an interracial marriage was not marriage; some people just wanted it to be illegal. To assert otherwise is to rewrite history…
 
hazmat said:
they dont matter in the context of us law. if you define a marriage as one between men and women of the same race…
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But no one ever did that. As I said before, even when interracial marriage was illegal, it was still understood by everyone that it was a kind of marriage. That is, everyone had the same definition in their heads as to what the word marriage meant. They just disagreed over whether it should be illegal. I’m still going to stand by my assertion that same-sex marriage makes as much sense as marriage to an avocado.
no one can marry avocados right now. you’re talking about rights no one has. right now.
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If we had been having this discussion 100 years ago I could also say that no one has the right to marry someone of the same sex right now.
men can marry women–thats a reality right now, so women need to have that same right for things to be equal.
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Let me illustrate the fallacy of your logic another way. If I am a woman, then any man has the right to marry me. Or, if we allow same-sex marriage, then any person has the right to marry me. But there would still be one person to whom that right would be denied. Any guess as to who that person is? Answer: it is me! I cannot marry myself. So according to your logic I am being denied a right that everyone else has. Is that not unfair? I think you should start a campaign to allow same-person marriage. It makes as much sense as same-sex marriage.
 
hazmat said:
im not talking about websters dictionary definitions, fone.
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Neither am I.

Regardless of one’s views on marriage, it remains true that on an objective level, the comparison to anti-miscegenation laws is logically flawed. That doesn’t disprove gay marriage; you don’t lose the argument by admitting it. Not at all. 🙂

I’m just saying that interracial marriage bans were exactly that: bans (and unjust ones) on marriage for certain people. Defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman isn’t a ban on “gay marriage” but rather a participation in a social structure that finds the concept of marriage to be legally and socially inapplicable outside the context of an exclusive, lifelong union of partners capable of genital union.

This issue isn’t about homosexuality. Let me repeat: this issue isn’t about homosexuality. It’s about whether marriage by definition is anything more than a union of entities who love each other. If it’s all about love, then sex - of whatever variety - shouldn’t factor into the legal category at all, nor should exclusivity or permanence.
 
leaf, im talking about law. it wasnt regarded as a real marriage (e.g., kirby v. kirby). my argument has nothing to do with the fact that there are gay couples married today (referring to your 100 yrs ago comment). im not sure how you would distinguish between one who is married to themselves and one who is not, but sure, you could make that case.
 
hazmat said:
the definitions dont really matter. it didnt matter when marriage was defined as between a man and woman of the same race–that was “equal” too. you can define stuff any way you want to; but the fact that youve defined it so its inherently discriminatory probably wont impress a supreme court.
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Please, that’s nowhere near the same thing - being of a different race to your spouse is a superficial difference, being of a different gender to your spouse is a fundamental difference that changes the definition of marriage.
 
hazmat said:
their agenda is to uphold the constitution, whether you agree or not. i think they do a pretty good job. marrying men is not a new right. marrying women is not a new right. you can play the separate but equal game all you like.
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No, the current civil right is for men to marry women and for women to marry men. It’s only discriminatory if a man is forbidden from marrying a woman or vice versa.

If same-sex couples want to get ‘married’ they should call it something else ‘civil unions’ or whatever, because calling it marriage is completely silly and would not be understood as such in pretty much any culture from any period in history.

Plus it suggests same-sex marriages are the same as heterosexual marriages, which they clearly are not - hence calling them both the same terminology would be quite irrational
 
Let me illustrate the fallacy of your logic another way. If I am a woman, then any man has the right to marry me. Or, if we allow same-sex marriage, then any person has the right to marry me. But there would still be one person to whom that right would be denied. Any guess as to who that person is? Answer: it is me! I cannot marry myself. So according to your logic I am being denied a right that everyone else has. Is that not unfair? I think you should start a campaign to allow same-person marriage. It makes as much sense as same-sex marriage.
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Where do I sign up for this cause to finally have my right to marry myself! Its the 0.0000001% vs the other 99.9999999%!
 
razredge, its not so much about definitions or whether something is superficial. denying rights based on superficial criteria isnt a problem if its compatible with the us constitution.
 
hazmat said:
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bobcatholic, abstinence is not good either. haha.
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Even if the country were to prevent a slide down to the legalized same sex “marriage,’ there is no (longer) a law in effect that two men or two women are to abstain from acting out their ‘preferred’ way of expressing their love for their partners. They are absolutely free to associate in such manner! But then this is not what they really want with SS"M”, they want a public recognition of a private interest, serving no true social good.

The discrimination is not like it was against the black race whereby prohibition was on the basis of skin color that has nothing to do with the ability to enter a true marriage between sexes. Or against women who, if they work with their two hands and/or intellect, would be productive just as men in use of their two hands and/or intellect. The determining factor in advancing SS"M" is sexual behavior, neither an inherent physical quality like skin pigment or color of one’s eyes, nor of the ability to produce work that merits equal pay.

Further, the claim that SS’M’ is a civil right is wrong because:

*"The simple fact is that the civil right of equal treatment cannot constitute social reality by declaration. Civil rights protections function simply to assure every citizen equal treatment under the law depending on what the material dispute in law is all about. Law that is just must begin by properly recognizing and distinguishing identities and differences in reality in order to be able to give each its legal due.

One kind of social relationship that government recognizes, for example, is a free contract by which two or more parties agree to carry out a transaction or engage in some kind of activity. Let’s say you contract with me to paint your house. The law of contract does not define ahead of time what might be contracted; it simply clarifies the legal obligations of the contracting parties and the consequences if the contract is broken. Governments and lawyers and the law do not create the people, the house, the paint, and my desire to paint your house for a price that you want to pay. The point is that even in contract law, the law plays only a limited role in the relationship. The law encompasses the relationship only in a legal way.

If someone wants to argue that two people who have not in the past been recognized as marriage partners should now be recognized as marriage partners, one must demonstrate that marriage law (not civil rights law) has overlooked or misidentified something that it should not have overlooked or misidentified. For thousands of years, marriage law has concerned itself with a particular kind of enduring bond between a man and a woman that includes sexual intercourse—the kind of act that can (but does not always) lead to the woman’s pregnancy. A homosexual relationship, regardless of how enduring it is as a bond of loving commitment, does not and cannot include sexual intercourse leading to pregnancy. Thus it is not marriage.

The much disputed question of whether same-sex relationships are morally good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, is beside the point at this stage of legal consideration. The first question is about identity and difference. This is the material legal matter of properly recognizing and identifying what exists and distinguishing between marriages and auto clubs, between schools and banks, between friendships and multinational corporations. It has nothing to do with civil rights.

To recognize in law the distinct character of a marriage relationship, which entails sexual intercourse, involves no discrimination of a civil rights kind against those whose bonds do not include sexual intercourse. Those who choose to live together in life-long homosexual relationships; or brothers and sisters who live together and take care of one another; or two friends of the same sex who are not sexually involved but share life together in the same home—all of these may be free to live as they do, and they suffer no civil rights discrimination by not being identified as marriages. There is no civil rights discrimination against an eight-year-old youngster who is denied the right to enter into marriage. There is no civil rights discrimination being practiced against a youngster who is not allowed the identity of a college student because she is not qualified to enter college. There is no civil-rights discrimination involved when the law refuses to recognize my auto club as a church. A marriage and a homosexual relationship are two different kinds of relationships and it is a misuse of civil rights law to use that law to try to blot out the difference between two different kinds of things."*
Paragraphs quoted from James Skillen’s Public Justice Report, Same Sex Marriage is NOT a Civil Right.
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youre free to believe that, but im confident that the scotus will disagree with you.
 
hazmat said:
no one can marry avocados right now. youre talking about rights no one has. right now, men can marry women–thats a reality right now, so women need to have that same right for things to be equal. if a citizen was given the right to marry an avocado, then you could make a case for it being a civil right to marry an avocado, but not before then.
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Here’s the problem I see.

“If men have the right to marry women, then women need to have the same right to marry women to preserve equal protection of the law.”

That only holds true if you think the word marry has never had anything to do with the gender of those getting married. That the word marry is neutral to the genders. We can make silly [Edited to add: I’m not saying you’re making a silly statement 😉 ] statements about rights when we ignore the realities of gender:

“If women have the right to give birth to her child, then men need to have the same right to give birth to their children to preserve equal protection of the law.”

Giving birth can’t be divorced from it’s meaning which holds that only females (in the human world) do it. It’s not a right/function men have. Shoot, men don’t even have any abortion rights for that matter. You can’t rationally discuss a man’s right to give birth just as you can’t rationally discuss a female’s fundamental right to marry a female. “Marry” is not a legal term like “tax” or “vote” which are gender neutral terms. So you can construct sentences like “If men have the right to vote, then women need to have the same right to vote to preserve equal protection of the law,” and they have rational meaning.

So I don’t think you can sort out an equal protection argument like the one above until you sort out whether or not you think the word “marry” is gender neutral, so to speak.
 
theres no problem from my perspective. i dont know of any laws against men giving birth. if men could give birth, the state probably would not stop them. its not so much about what people can do, but what the government cannot.
 
hazmat said:
theres no problem from my perspective. i dont know of any laws against men giving birth. if men could give birth, the state probably would not stop them. its not so much about what people can do, but what the government cannot.
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The point is that it is quite irrational for the state to extend marriage to homosexual relationships, since same-sex marriage simply does not have the same features as heterosexual marriage and has never been historically understood as anything other than between a man and a woman (or more than one man/woman).

It would be as silly as changing the definition of the sky to include the sea as well.
 
hazmat said:
theres no problem from my perspective. i dont know of any laws against men giving birth.
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Of course not. Men can’t give birth. It’s silly to suggest such a thing.
hazmat said:
its not so much about what people can do, but what the government cannot.
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See, I think it’s about both.

(1) You have this truth that humans have a fundamental right to come together to form a unitive relationship to have babies which preserves a healthy jaunt into the future for humankind. (This is about what people can do).

(2) You also have governments distributing licenses to recognize marriages as distinguished from other human relationships and deserving of special treatment. This is a law that’s subject to things like Equal Protection and Due Process. (This is about what the government cannot do).

You will probably have a tough time convincing me that (1) is not true. I don’t see any way around this. Men and women have been going through this process forever. Selecting mates. Mating. Raising offspring. When I think that all people have a fundamental right to marry, this is what I think we have a fundamental right to do. With or without a government, men and women will marry. It’s a necessary component of a thriving human society. (I think the Supreme Court has agreed with me on this one. See Loving v Virginia (“Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.”). When the Supreme Court and I are talking about the fundamental right to marriage, we are talking about a natural right coming from the natural law. Why mention “our very existence and survival” if we are talking about any ol’ loving committed relationship?

So traditionally, our laws recognizing marriage have tried to conform to this understanding of the fundamental right to marry. From the angle you are looking at it, I guess the question is, if the government gets into the business of recognizing marriage, should they be bound by the Equal Protection clause or Due Process to include same-sex couples. I can see why some states have decided to extend the marriage licenses to same-sex couples—their citizens no longer care to have their civil laws regarding marriage tied to what the fundamental right to marriage is. Those states no longer hold unitive procreative unions out as something special the state should support or encourage. I would argue that a state that recognizes same-sex marriage still has two classes of marriage: only the majority of them have a fundamental right to marriage that is protected by Due Process. Opposite-sex couples, even when recognized by the state as married, don’t have the same Due Process rights.

I don’t yet find your Constitutional argument (gender discrimination against women) too compelling. Under Due Process agruments, I think the only fundamental right to marry is the one between men and women (fundamental to our very existence and survival). So it can’t be a denial of Due Process rights to not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Under Equal Protection, I think same-sex couples have their best arguments. But I’m not yet convinced that the state doesn’t have a rational or substantial interest in recognizing only marriage as traditionally defined. I think if you could convince me that the state has no interest in that, you could win me over.
 
ETA: to even get to whether or not the state has any interest in discriminating with their marriage laws, you’d have to get me to the point where I think there’s actual discrimination going on. And in that respect, like I said, I don’t agree that a gender is actually being discriminated against. I’m in line with the state courts that have concluded there is no actual gender discrimination. As they put it in Kentucky: the women are not being prevented from marrying by the statutes, “but rather by their own incompatibility of entering into marriage as that term is defined.” In other words, I don’t think women are being treated differently because of their gender, I think it’s probably better to think of things as gay people are being treated differently because of their sexual orientation.
 
If it is discriminatory to not allow same sex marriage then it would also be discriminatory to not allow multiple marriages. The argument for gay marriage is not that gays can not marry. Any gay person can marry someone of the opposite sex. Gays say they can not marry a member of the same sex. This is true. But non gays also can not marry someone of the same sex. The law is not discriminating against any class of people. It simply defines marriage as it truly is - the union of one man and one woman. As soon as you say what marriage is must be redefined to include any union any person wants then you have lost any grounds on which to prohibit multiple marriages. I dont expect courts to do the right thing because our judiciary is made up of largely incompetent jurists who are strangers to logic. Worse still many enjoy sowing chaos and destroying our culture.
 
exnihilo said:
If it is discriminatory to not allow same sex marriage then it would also be discriminatory to not allow multiple marriages. The argument for gay marriage is not that gays can not marry. Any gay person can marry someone of the opposite sex. Gays say they can not marry a member of the same sex. This is true. But non gays also can not marry someone of the same sex. The law is not discriminating against any class of people. It simply defines marriage as it truly is - the union of one man and one woman. As soon as you say what marriage is must be redefined to include any union any person wants then you have lost any grounds on which to prohibit multiple marriages. I dont expect courts to do the right thing because our judiciary is made up of largely incompetent jurists who are strangers to logic. Worse still many enjoy sowing chaos and destroying our culture.
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I think reality classifies people differently. Reality holds that only women and men marry. Reality discriminates between same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples. Only opposite-sex couples can have sex and produce offspring sharing their genetics. Biology “discriminates” in this way against people who aren’t attracted to the opposite sex.

When the state’s laws mirror this reality, I think I’m convinced that there can be no question that the state is also discriminating against people who aren’t attracted to the opposite sex. The state is saying, “We are handing out these incidental rights and obligations to only those couples that mirror marriage in the sense of marriage as a fundamental right. We will not issue these rights and obligations to couples that don’t.”
 
jeremiah, the constitution limits government power. getting into whats a “fundamental” isnt relevant to me. people would still marry n have kids without government. if the government is involved, then yes, it must treat citizens equally.

exnihilo, i covered multiple marriages earlier in this thread. its convenient to say you have no confidence in the courts when they tend to disagree with you. of course, something is wrong with them, and not you.
 
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