iwpoe wrote:

Etzelnik wrote:

iwpoe wrote:

Well, we need such laws against gay marriage because eventually my brother or sister might be tempted into it, even though it is a manifest wrong.

This is where people get choleric and start posting in all caps "BEING GAY ISN'T A CHOICE DUMMY!"
 

But being gay-married and sodomy for that matter, are. The histrionic insistence about the lack of choice in wanting to sleep with one's own gender doesn't seem particularly helpful.

=13pxCase illustration: I am unconsciously drawn to both (1) good literature and (2) to steal and eat small food items at the grocery store. 1 is permissible, even laudable, and 2 is a crime that's rarely punished. I think everyone would acknowledge that the fact of these desires being unconscious does not make a difference between the one being permissible and the other not and certainly cannot help us to decide that 2 should be just as good as 1.

Best case, the insistence that homosexual desire is unconscious, in larger context, is really meant to illustrate how difficult the lives of these people are, since romantic relationships are a core human need and they cannot find themselves wanting opposite-sex partners.

 
I hope you don't really think I need this rundown...

I, for one, am glad you guys write "to the audience."  Very helpful for beginners!

Last edited by joewaked (7/28/2015 12:10 pm)

seigneur wrote:

To the contrary, it tears the rest of society down to the unserious level where homosexuals are. This should also be easily comprehensible.

This idea is confusing to me because the natural law perspective that's usually evoked in these arguments against homosexual marriage presupposes a deep and inherent disproportionality between marriage and so-called same-sex "marriage".

Doesn't the usual account always evoke a premise that goes something like:

M: Heterosexual marriage is a natural state that the legal institution of marriage merely recognizes and codifies.

How can the expansion of the *legal institution* of marriage (L-marriage) possibly weaken the natural state of marriage (N-marriage)? If you think that N-marriage needs L-marriage to include only N-marriages aren't you siding with your opponents who implicitly presuppose that there is no N-marriage, that all marriage is L-marriage and an institutional construction of society? But if you side with them on that point, then the entire idea of defending heterosexual marriage on the grounds of its inherent quality collapses.

Last edited by iwpoe (7/29/2015 11:24 am)

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

Well, there is clearly a distinction between marriage as an ideal in itself and how society and individuals view that ideal and try to live up to it. It is an interesting question what natural law has to say about how far such important norms can be suppressed by a society and for how long, but it is clear they can be to some degree.

I'd like to know a lot more than the vague sentiment that there's 'some kind of threat' that has passed for mainstream conservative politics in it's 22+ year march to failure on this issue. Now that we've failed, perhaps actual thought on this matter is possible.

Does N-Marriage even exist as distinct from L-Marriage?
Is N-Marriage entirely superseded by L-Marriage once L-Marriage comes on the scene?
Is N-Marriage importantly constrained or changed by L-Marriage? If so, how?
Can people have an N-Marriage even if they aren't in an L-Marriage?

Assuming that there is N-Marriage, L-Marriage seems to be able to do 3 quantitative things with respect to it:
1. L-Marriage can match N-Marriage (all people and only people qualified for N-Marriage qualify for L-Marriage).
2. L-Marriage can be more restrictive than N-Marriage (by either [a] qualifying some subset of those eligible from N-Marriage, [b] qualifying some set of people other than those eligible for N-Marriage, [c] some combination of a and c).
3. L-Marriage can be less restrictive than N-Marriage (All people qualified for N-Marriage plus additional people who aren't qualified for N-Marriage are qualified for L-Marriage).

Which of these is harmful? In what way?

Do qualitative differences also matter? e.g. Are incestuous marriages more harmful to N-Marriage than homosexual marriages, etc?

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

I also disagree many homosexuals are that interested in having their unions recognized. They are certainly interested in having homosexuality endorsed - that is significant motivation for the whole SSM movement - but not so much their unions. After all, in the modern West, who worries about having their marriage seen as serious any more. Many don't even bother marrying.

This doesn't match my experience, though a significant minority of the LBGT conglomerate are not sure or not interested in being married but still support it. However, it doesn't follow from your not wanting to have a recognized union for yourself that you don't support it for others (presumably priests want heterosexual marriage, even though they won't do it themselves, because they want the recognition of heterosexual unions). Also, it's very hard to see what manner of "endorsement" gay marriage is ultimately supposed to be *except* for the recognition of same-sex unions. If the state had created an institution called gay marriage to which no couples could actually belong or which had no substantive legal effect except the name "marriage" it seems that no one would consider that a victory.

But anyway, I needn't rely on anecdote and analysis alone. Pew polled on the topic in 2013 concluding:

PewResearchCenter wrote:

The survey finds that 16% of LGBT adults—mostly bisexuals in opposite-sex relationships—are currently married, compared with about half of adults in the general public. Overall, a total of 60% of LGBT respondents are either married or would like to marry one day, while 27% say they are not currently sure if they want to marry someday. As for the general public, a similar question on a 2010 Pew Research survey found that 76% of adults were either currently married or thought they wanted to get married, and 13% said they were not sure.

See: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/06/SDT_LGBT-Americans_06-2013.pdf & http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/06/13/a-survey-of-lgbt-americans/

While there clearly is a difference between LGBT people and the population at large, the disparity hardly merits cynicism about their intentions (indeed, 76% of the population wanting marriage or being married hardly merits outright cynicism about marriage in general), and the +14% difference in the portion of people "not currently sure" might reflect differences in outlook about marriage itself, but it could also reflect the state of marriage for LGBT people in 2013, which was clearly less certain than it is now.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

The discussion over natural and legal marriages you mention seems to be the hoary one over the role of natural as opposed to positive law.

Sure, but that discussion has, in my lifetime, never been a core one (either politically, or, for that matter in my admittedly deficient evangelical protestant education). And if one thinks that a change in L-Marriage is important re N-Marriage (and that does seem to be a core claim) then that seems to be a core topic. When I went looking for answers in more sophisticated (and usually Catholic) discussion, they weren't to be found in any clear way.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

It is not a new topic within the natural law tradition. Orestes Brownson discussed the role of natural law to positive law in America, relative to contemporaneous debates over slavery.

In his The American Republic or elsewhere?

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

(though I have learnt long ago you shouldn't trust such polls and surveys, even reputable ones, until you have painstakingly investigated them yourself: cf. Peter Hitchens's The Cameron Delusion)

Fair concern, but the polling was what I had, and it's meant to support both an anecdotal experience and an analysis. It would be nice if philosophically adroit polls were regularly performed on topics of concern coupled by detailed qualitative research on the poll-group, but that's neither sufficiently cheap nor sufficiently digestible to come about in our present intellectual climate.

That said, I did review the data as I have it, and Pew has done some follow up:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/26/half-of-unmarried-lgbt-americans-say-they-would-like-to-wed/

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

I'm not sure why a vague committment they might wish to get married in the future shows that homosexuals are especally interested in the unions per se, rather than in the more abstract idea of equality and their status  (and to a lesser, but not insignificant degree, thumbing their nose at opponents).

I mean, when I was in my teens to my early 20s, my vague commitment to wanting to get married at some point in the future reflected actual interest in getting married. That obviously doesn't follow with logical necessity, but it does seem to me to be the most charitable reading of people who say they'd like to get married that they mean 'I'd like to get married', rather than some more abstract 'I'd like to be looked at just as well as married people without getting married.'

Unless you just mean you think that they'd like to get officially married because that's higher status than what they could do up until just now, which seems to me to be a genuine desire to get married.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

I don't doubt a sizeable minority wants a few of the rights traditionally given to such unions - like visitation and inheritace rights - but marriage itself is not a priority.

N-Marriage? But that's what's under dispute- that N-Marriage is anything. I disagree with them, but they don't see it because they aren't heterosexual and don't bother to consider their own emotional and life dynamics very closely.

Maybe you mean something else. I think that, despite your cynicism to the contrary, state licensed marriage does still mean something more to most couples than long term cohabitation. It certainly did in my case- we had nothing much, so what was I worried about protecting? -and in the case of all my married mellinial friends, despite their general lack of religious observance or upbringing. The people who didn't marry after awhile were either clearly not serious or in a couple of cases had certain abstract reservations. It is clearly a mark of commitment for most couples.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

After all, it is not even as if most homosexuals are willing to submit themselves even to the rigours that contemporary heterosexuals do in their long-term relationships, like fidelity.

Well, I agree with you on this score, but I think *this* is precisely the point where they fall into error not evidence of their lack of interest in union. After all, how many young heterosexual girls are seduced into the idea that if they can just get him to say 'I do' (rather than getting his or her head right or finding a better man) that he'll finally feel more committed?

First, again, just anecdotally, many homosexuals are regularly distressed about infidelity in their relationships, including sometimes even the perpetrator of the infidelity. Sometimes the relationship is an openly polyamorious situation but most homosexual relationships are under the presumption of monogamy and known infidelity is usually considered at least a threat to the relationship if not a deal-breaker outright. Even when polyamory is negotiated (as it frequently is, given low expectations) this hardly makes the couples feel more satisfied: the sense of inadequacy is often still there, especially if one partner is more interested in new partners than the other, even if the agreement to sleep around blunts the sense of betrayal.

I simply think that many of them think (as many straight couples do) that if we just get married that will fix the sense we have that things aren't serious enough, except that in the homosexual case there is both an until now legal barrier and an unacknowledged natural barrier to alleviating that problem. That's were I get on the train: I think that the fight for gay marriage is a solution to alienation that just won't wash because it's a fight against human nature itself. I think that ideally we would be in a society that supported a life in accords with human nature, and I think that, at best, something like same-sex-marriage can only ever be some kind of legal fiction which amounts to nothing but social encouragement to staying with one partner as long as possible. But I think that this is where the core of the error is: self-delusion about the promise of homosexual "marriages". I do not think that there is here a mere desire to wrench positive law away from natural law as much as possible (even if that's the incidental end). Most people can't even think hard enough to make the distinction, never mind to consciously engage in a political programm to that end.