seigneur wrote:

=13pxI'm a bit sad about the irrelevant response. I quite explicitly said there is no causal relation between law about marriage and "proper marriage" (which was a term you brought up first, so I think we are in agreement as to its meaning).

Right, I know you did, but then you still talked about what the state should do, and it wasn't at all clear why that should be done, since, as you seem to now say, that can't actually do anything to marriage proper. You also spoke sometimes in ways that- at least one on way of reading it -seemed to suggest legal change does bear some direct causal relationship on natural proper marriage. This is what I'm mainly prodding you on, so I don't mean to be purposely irrelevant.

seigneur wrote:

=13pxI only said that it's *good* (you recognise that such a thing as *good* exists, don't you?) when the laws enshrine *proper marriage* as opposed to any old crap under the name "marriage" that the current legislature may put there.

It depends on what you mean by "enshrine". I think the proper end of the law is instructive, not merely stipulative (i.e. I think the job of the law is to educate the public, not merely to mirror what is.) To simply, for instance, either put a stipulative definition of marriage into law or to merely try and uphold traditional legal practice re marriage *in a context where that understanding  that would bring people to assent to that law has already broken down* is not properly educative, and might teach the wrong thing. That's basically my point.

seigneur wrote:

Now, sure enough, laws may be full of any old crap and some level of normalcy (natural-law normalcy, as distinguished from the current legislature's opinion of normalcy) would be retained in society regardless. However, such laws would be a sign that the government cares nothing about truth, reality, and relevance of its own doings. And that would be *bad*, don't you agree?

Yes, I do, sort of. We can talk about that in a bit.

Okay, so it's really clear to me now where we're going past oneanother. Let me address this after the next paragraph.

seigneur wrote:

So, there's no direct causal relation. What I am saying is that the content of laws provides an educational/corrective signal to society as to what is proper and what is not. You may disagree as to the degree of relevance of government in people's lives in terms of those signals, but I seriously think the relevance is there sure enough, particularly given that its corrective measures involve prison, confiscation of property, and such.

Okay, here's the problem. I assume a number of things. I can argue for them, but I take them as fairly obvious with some reflection.

1. Society at large has, in some sense that's not important to define at this very moment, lost a robust understanding of marriage: our general existential situation is one wherein the plurality of people still expect to, are expected to, and want to marry, but it's not at all clear why anyone should want to do this or how. We thus are regularly confused even about functioning marriages, enter and exist bad ones quickly, and have started to loose grip on why divorce might even be intrinsicly to be avoided after wanting greater than modest difficulty. Many people avoid marriage until late age and don't know what to do with it when they've gotten it.
2. In that situation, the traditional legal situation *is not* educative but really just a reminder to people that they don't know why anyone should want to do things this way.
2.a. Existing laws that don't seem to have any connection to experience do not function in an edificatory way and instead seem arbitrary oppression: e.g. "outdated", "oppressive", "insensitive", "stupid", etc
3. When non-educatory laws block desired action en masse, the response of most people who aren't subservient is not self-correction but revolt and reform.
4. The proper response to 3 is not simply to double down on existing laws, dimply reaffirming them or restating them more explicitly or more strongly.

After 4, I want to talk about the proper response, assuming you don't have objections so far.

Last edited by iwpoe (8/02/2015 8:33 am)

seigneur wrote:

"Double down" means to be doubly more emphatic about it?

It means 'to do it again' in some respect. The three doubling down options that cropped up in the last 20+ years in the US were:

1. The simple assertion of the constitutionality of traditional marriage.
2. The statutory federal law known as DOMA.
3. A proposed constitutional federal marriage amendment.

I do not think any of these could possibly resolve the problem because they do not help to make traditional marriage comprehensible again.

seigneur wrote:

Actually, I think the opposite. I said somewhere earlier that I am okay with doing away with the legal concept of marriage altogether, because what we are going towards makes no realistic sense. It makes no logical sense to keep such a legal term as "marriage" that doesn't mean what marriage properly means and the people don't seem to be doing anything with it anyway. So, it should be safe to do away with it.

There is no proper meaning of names themselves, and the term usage is only distressing insofar as you can't sort out more than one sense of the term at once in your mind. The contentious aspect was never the proper use of *the term* but rather whether there is or isn't one proper form of conducting one's life sexually such that it is always heterosexual.

seigneur wrote:

The idea with proper marriage, in terms of natural law, is to protect the procreative function of families.

Is this all you have to say in support of traditional marriage? Do your duty and reproduce the right way? Then you've lost already. They do not particularly care whether we reproduce or not. I for that matter don't care, and I think heterosexual marriage is proper.

If the truth of the fight against gay marriage was some anxiety about reproduction then they were simply right, and marriage is nothing but an obsolete concern.

Last edited by iwpoe (8/03/2015 1:08 pm)

DanielCC wrote:

Out of interest what is the intrinsic good in the procreative function?

Survival. When your tribe is close to dying out, you surely recognise the value of procreation. Similarly, plenty of countries, ethnicities, cultures, languages in the world perceive the threat to their survival as we speak.

Big nations of course don't see this point. They view matters from their own luxurious position. Edit: for example like iwpoe above

Last edited by seigneur (8/03/2015 6:44 pm)

That's an equivocation and a dead metaphor: *tribes* don't live and die; only their members do. I see the point of *our*, in the sense of the living's, not dying. I don't see the point of, say, the tradition of trick-or-treats not dying, just in the abstract. What's the intrinsic good of continuing the tribe?

I never met anyone who *actually* rested their whole position against gay marriage upon the fear of the end of reproduction.

Last edited by iwpoe (8/03/2015 7:28 pm)

seigneur wrote:

Sorry, DanielCC and iwpoe, but I don't understand how you think that the existential problem is not intrinsic enough. Can you say "It doesn't matter if I am alive or dead. It doesn't matter if everything I hold dear exists or not." with a straight face, in earnest?

Of course it matters if you or I are dead or alive, where did I say otherwise? But it doesn't matter to me whether there will be a generation N generations on from this one (though if there will be it might matter what happens to them*). Our moral duties are to actual people. Hence my asking you that question in the last post.

*To phrase that another way: 'If I had a child I ought to make sure they have a good education' but not 'I ought to have a child so they can have a good education'.

Last edited by DanielCC (8/04/2015 6:02 am)