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Rau
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You misunderstand. I am saying that a same sex relationship that is sexual, or non sexual, is equivalent from the States perspective. Either way, they only amount to arrangements for asset sharing, mutability care, etc.
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buffalo
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Rau
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You miss the point! The Church recognises the first marriage!
We don’t generally define different things by the same word! Sometimes we may, when there is reason to encompass a set of different members. Eg. “Spouse” to capture both husbands and wives when that’s convenient. “Partners” to capture the special other in a relevant context, etc. These words are an added feature of the language for convenience, but they don’t render the more specific variations obsolete, or indistinguishable. We don’t compel the word “husband” to henceforth mean spouse!
What is your favourite colour? Should that have the same name as my favourite colour, as the former has the same significance to you as mine has to me, even when they are different ?
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Rau
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That was about the most polite debate on this subject I’ve ever heard!
But why oh why does US law provide for joint tax filing! How unfair to everyone who is not married!! It would be so much more logicial to hold the tax breaks for when there are children. That would be beyond criticism by anyone (I’d hope…).
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Oreoracle
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You said that they recognize civil marriages. I pointed out that they actually only recognize a subset of civil marriages. You seem to be conceding that this is the case.
So now for the slippery slope: Since the Church apparently doesn’t consider itself bound to accept all civil marriages, why not just separate the two types of marriage entirely? Only Catholics are going to want a Church-approved marriage anyway.
Also, it really isn’t clear that they accept the first marriage. Marriages are often annulled on the basis that the couple didn’t understand all of the obligations entailed by marriage. The Church can therefore argue that, on a theological level, the marriage never really happened because there wasn’t informed consent. If Catholics can fail to understand obligations, then it goes without saying that many non-Catholics would be in the same boat. Thus many first civil marriages won’t be valid in the Church’s eyes.
I agree entirely. There is a reason to encompass the different forms of marriage; they are, as you admit, the same from the State’s perspective. Their main goal is to help with the pooling of resources. So why make the distinction in a context in which it is irrelevant?
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Rau
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What
I said no such thing. I said the exact opposite! The State has a considerable interest in marriages, which are the vehicle through which the Society builds itself. I don’t get married to pool resources with my brother, or business partner, or whatever! The State has minimal interest in same sex relationships, but may agree to meet their request for a legal framework for asset sharing and so on.And by the way, the word “marriage” is not owned by the State, unlike say, “401k”. Marriage existed and had meaning long prior.
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Oreoracle
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My apologies. I thought that was what you meant by this:What
I agree with your quote above. The only difference is that I am going further in saying that the government should grant these relationships a legal status that would protect gay couples’ rights to share their assets as they like.
Frankly whether or not you want to call that legal status “marriage” is neither here nor there as far as I’m concerned. If the issue is a nominal one, it strikes me as trivial. Names are just conventions.
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Prodigal_Son
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Nope.
Words affect actions. If we lost a word for the concept “honesty”, fewer people would learn how to be honest.
Read Plato’s Cratylus.
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buffalo
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Since marriage is not a right, the government (we, the people) appreciate the fact solid intact families with a mother and father in the home benefit the common good.
In general, we treat babies with disdain by allowing abortion. Yet people would want the one’s who get through the abortion trap to be encouraged? I see an issue here.
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Oreoracle
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Evidence?
Well of course Plato would advocate a position like that. He afforded quite a lot to names. In fact, if we take his philosophy at face value, there must have been the Platonic Form of a laptop floating around in the universe somewhere, spending the millennia biding its time until it became useful. After all, without a Form to compare something to, I couldn’t make the claim that any particular laptop is bad–I need an idealized laptop to exist to do that!Read Plato’s Cratylus.
Interestingly enough, if we had never devised the word “laptop” and instead just referred to them as computers, then Platonic philosophy wouldn’t have anticipated the Form of Laptop to exist, as only the Form of Computer would be necessary. Imagine that! It’s almost like these things that he posited didn’t have any existence independent of their use, like…what are they called? Conventions!
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glendab
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As a sidebar, I’m wondering if you had Thomas Jefferson Ben Franklin John Jay and John Adams together in a room today and could show them that SSM is the natural outcome of the document they penned to govern us all those years ago, if they would agree that SSM rights and taxes is what they meant? Can anyone find an argument in favor of SSM in the Federalist Papers?
Glenda
Glenda
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Rau
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On that we agree. These relationships need not involve gay persons by the way. A couple of ageing sisters might find value in them too.
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Rau
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Sorry, I don’t follow that at all. There are no mothers and fathers till they have babies . There are no additional costs that the community might like to help with until there are babies. I don’t see logic in offering tax breaks to people because they are married. I see logic in the community sharing its taxes with those bringing up the next generation (and subject to a means test).
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Prodigal_Son
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Well, it’s obvious, for example, that a language that didn’t have a word for “guilt” would not have the same notion of criminal justice that we have. The idea that language affects thought has been a staple of contemporary anthropology, a staple of modern philosophy of language, and a staple of all “postmodern” thought.
Or some very straightforward examples can be found at blog.ted.com/2013/02/19/5-examples-of-how-the-languages-we-speak-can-affect-the-way-we-think/
Almost everything you say about Plato here is false – though these are common misconceptions. There is no form of a laptop, and one does not need such a form to evaluate a laptop as a bad laptop. There are no Forms of artifacts. When Plato talks about the “form of a bed”, for example, this is not a Platonic Form, since Plato agrees with you, Oreo, that the nature of a bed (or a laptop) is conventional. There are no standards of correct naming pertaining to beds or laptops, in the Cratylus.Interestingly enough, if we had never devised the word “laptop” and instead just referred to them as computers, then Platonic philosophy wouldn’t have anticipated the Form of Laptop to exist, as only the Form of Computer would be necessary. Imagine that! It’s almost like these things that he posited didn’t have any existence independent of their use, like…what are they called? Conventions!
There are, however, standards of correctness pertaining to things like beauty or happiness or (as becomes apparent in Plato’s Laws) marriage. This is not completely unproblematic, of course, since the names for these things only attach to them conventionally. But if we fix up Plato’s theory of reference, which was a mess, the point he was trying to make was that certain things are not “up to us”. What name we give to trees is entirely conventional, but it would be wrong for us to use the word for trees (whatever it is) to apply equally well to tubas. There are ways of dividing up the world that are irrational.
(Note that I think there IS (on Plato’s view) a form of a tree, since trees are a natural kind. But if you like, I could just as well say that "the name we give to gravity is conventional, but it would be wrong for us to say that the word for gravity applies equally well to centrifugal force.)
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glendab
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Hello Prodigal.
Glenda
Actually I think his point is valid. Plato and many of his day thought that there had to be an Ideal form of everything from which each thing took is nature and the Perfect was well, perfect. It doesn’t hold up today to us because we are Christian and believe in something else. But what it shows is that the thought of a thing comes before it creation in the mind of man and the words describing it come after. This can be successfully compared to “In the beginning was the Word…” etc. of St. John. The are valid correlational conventions. So don’t be so quick to dismiss Prodigal’s analogy.
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Prodigal_Son
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Hi Glenda,
I think you meant to type “Oreoacle’s analogy”, not “Prodigal’s analogy”. If so, I see what you’re saying. But…
(1) Both I and Plato agree that the thing comes first, and the name comes after. (This is one of the points Plato establishes in the Cratylus.) So we’re all on the same page here, and I agree that this resonates with the book of Genesis.
(2) Plato did not believe that there must be an ideal Form of everything. That is a false interpretation of his writings.
(3) The perfect is Perfect. Christians believe that too.
To be clear, I’m a scholar that specializes on Plato. So I’m not just making things up, when I say what his opinions about language are.
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Rau
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I hope noone is moved toward marriage by the promise of a joint tax return!If you really want a financial motivation to marry - offer a “sign-on” bonus
[Do you really want to do this…?]And then if / when the kids come, provide some “family assistance” tax breaks.
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Oreoracle
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This is not obvious. For example, in another thread, I am lamenting the fact that there is no word in English for “believing on the basis of evidence”. Notice that the absence of the word doesn’t inhibit me from describing the concept.
But even if you were right that beliefs and language use are related, it may very well be the other way around. Perhaps people lack a word because their beliefs don’t necessitate it, rather than believing what they do because of the lack of a word. The former makes much more sense to me. If a society didn’t have the policy of “innocent until proven guilty”, but instead held the opposite, its language would reflect that shift in priorities.
You go on to say that there are irrational ways of categorizing objects, such as pairing tubas with trees (after chewing this over, it occurred to me that the surfaces of tubas are at least homeomorphic to the surfaces of trees
). Supposing that we could agree on a definition of “rational”, this seems conceited to me. You’re basically saying that you have the clairvoyance to know that it will never become useful to categorize objects in a certain fashion.
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Prodigirl
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Please take an honest, impartial (if at ALL possible) look at the laws that are being passed all over the United States right now with regard to religion and contraception. The Hobby Lobby has just won a decision which was based upon a federal law that grants sweeping protections to religious persons and corporations. In spite of it, Hobby Lobby allows its employees to put their own 401(k) retirement dollars into companies that manufacture contraceptives, investing in merchants of the sins which they claim to abhor. Some strong religious backbone, huh? And yet it sweeps across this nation as law, hypocrisy and sanctimony all balled up into one, diminishing the choices ordained by free will that was supposedly granted to EVERYONE by the ONE AND ONLY CREATOR.
As of April 2014, 17 states have not yet either formally repealed their laws against sexual activity among consenting adults, or else revised them to accurately reflect their true scope in the aftermath of Lawrence v. Texas. You want illegal and ridiculous? Here:
foxnews.com/story/2008/04/18/foxsexpert-us-sex-laws-amusing-to-just-plain-silly/ Or try this: io9.com/a-map-of-the-weirdest-sex-laws-in-the-united-states-1485053434 Don’t think there are no ego-driven law enforcement officers just salivating to make their reputations on a bust, however ludicrous.
American fundamentalist Christianity is ALL OVER the abortion issue. I have no gripe about what people believe. But this is a nation which counts among its credits separation of church and state. When a man or woman picks up a gun and shoots an abortionist in the name of Jesus, what does that tell you? When the Texas state legislature lies and cheats ON THE FLOOR OF THE SENATE, disallowing testimony by hundreds of people on issues of reproductive choice because a) they’re men, and b) they’re “God-fearing Christians”, it certainly does not invite me to look any further into that particular brand or representation of “religion.”
Come on, you can’t really claim you don’t see this???
It matters not one whit what I would like the Catholic Church to teach. She will go on teaching as she has for two millennia , with every suggestion of reform or inclusion or updating to be summarily dismissed because DOGMA. I do freely express myself, in spite of the chatter in my head which tells me it’s a dangerous practice. I list myself as Catholic, but only because I have been told, and I have read, that once Catholic, always Catholic - yet another example of being robbed of choice.
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