Jeremy Taylor wrote:

I am not sure what you mean about marriage itself being changed by laws. Surely the issue is individuals and society ceasing to properly understand what marriage is, rather than changing the nature of marriage itself, at least to the natural lawyer.

The political fight over gay marriage was, my whole life, cast as some kind of fight over protecting marriage or the sanctity of marriage as such. If the truth is a failure to understand marriage- which is all I've ever been able to make sense of -then this cannot properly speaking be a threat to marriage as such, and the political approach that was defended up until, well, last month, was confusing and wrong.

Surely time should have been spent on the value, goodness, and proper understanding of heterosexual marriages rather than fretting about harm that was to be done to marriage as such.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

Yes, I simply am dubious about the import of asking people whether one day they might like to get married.

Well, I took you to be claiming that they simply wanted the abstract right to it, not to actually do it. But then you would expect most to want the right but not express desire to marry. Numbers would have to bear this out, but I don't have any since they've only been able to marry since last month. We'll probably need five years or more to know what proportion *actually* marry.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

On promiscuity, I would presume that it is widely accepted amongst homosexuals and that open relationships are broadly popular. As far as the statistics I have seen, whatever their truth, long term fidelity is negligible amongst at least male homosexuals. I have often heard homosexuals refer to the restrictions of one sexual partner for your whole life, the distinction between love and sex, and that kind of thing. I would hazard a guess that most of those worrying about fidelity are middle aged, and even then the rigour of heterosexual relationships (even today) is not there. I will certainly admit male homosexuals are far worse in this regard than female ones, but the latter are still closer to male homosexuals than heterosexuals from what I have seen.

The perception of how good this situation is, is *mixed*, heavily mixed, and indeed rather depressing for many people, but it shouldn't be thought that because that's a norm that that's how gay people ultimately want to live. Gays who sleep around do so because they aren't satisfied, and gays that don't are unhappy when their partners do. That's the case however they try to dress it up in "arrangements" or distinctions between love and sex (both of which ought to be familiar as even less effective halfway houses in heterosexual relationships).

I mean consider how they respond to the Pew survey on motivations for "marriage":

Pew Reserach Center wrote:

In the 2013 survey, 84% of LGBT adults said love was a very important reason to get married; in a survey of the general public that year, 88% shared that view. By wide margins [71 & 70% for LGBT respondents and 76 & 81% for the general public respectively], companionship and lifelong commitment were the next-most important reasons for LGBT adults, as well as for U.S. adults overall.

(http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/26/half-of-unmarried-lgbt-americans-say-they-would-like-to-wed/) That fact that they haven't been able to maintain a "lifelong commitment" is no evidence that they don't strongly desire to do so.

I think that the gay community is caught between an impossible mix of an ideal of personal freedom and a desire for personal happiness parallel to the one in heterosexual communities that prevents us from doing anything about the divorce problem. No one wants to be in a situation where they face divorce, but no one wants to make mandatory any of the hard decisions that have to go along with making a marriage last. So you're stuck in a situation where nobody does anything that isn't facile. I think the thought is something like "If we get more freedom to be together how we like then we'll have better relationships that last."

It's akin to the fallacious reasoning that "If I have more freedom to divorce then I'll be better able to find the *right* person for me."

Last edited by iwpoe (7/30/2015 8:08 am)

seigneur wrote:

But you can only properly claim that conservatives (or natural law theorists) fail to understand the truth about marriage, if you yourself know the truth about marriage.

No no. You misunderstand me. I agree with you. I think they more or less know the truth about marriage.

I just think that the political battle they usually supported was vastly mishandled and misarticulated. I'm upset that this massive political effort that was a topic of every political election for a decade, despite proper intentions, has resulted in a tremendous cultural, legal, and political failure on the part of conservatives, which has only done damage to the Church and the real possibility of faith amongst many young people. There are scores of people in my generation who won't even consider Christianity *simply* over the political handling of this issue. That's why Pope Francis has had to do all this reframing PR work. It's obvious that things went poorly on all fronts.

The only place I think this battle was helpful was in the reinvigoration of traditional perspectives on ethics, but that certainly was not what we got in politics.

seigneur wrote:

But (part of) the issue is that marriage as such just is "heterosexual marriage", while "homosexual marriage" is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron.

We don't disagree, but it's cumbersome to have to constantly make the distinction when this audience understands that.

I've marked the distinction before- just recently distinguishing between natural marriage ("N-Marriage") and marriage by law ("L-Marriage").

seigneur wrote:

You can legally grant to squares the "right" to be acknowledged as circles in the name of equal treatment or such, but what sense does it make? It's like granting rights of pregnancy to men.

You certainly can do both of those things. The first would be a legal fiction (something recognized in name only, as, for instance, the personhood of corporations) and the latter would be an empty right (something possible but never practiced).

It might make sense to do these things in an appropiate social context: for instance one wherein large portions of the male population felt oppressed and unrecognized for lack of such a codified "right". If I was a despot and my people were so stupid as to ask for such a right as male pregnancy I would surely grant it to them as a harmless boon.

seigneur wrote:

Meanwhile, there's an evident indirect harm to circles given such legislation. Namely, people will be unable to make the proper distinction between circles and squares; there will be confusion about what circularity properly entails. This will not really change the truth about circularity, but there will be an obvious shockwave of educational damage across the population.

You think that this happened two months ago? And not 22+ years ago when this fight started? It's not the law that did the problem but rather the problem that led to the law.

The core things I assert are:

1. That the battle over gay marriage was a bungled effort that aimed to "protect" something that was already highly damaged: namely a full, functional, and rational understanding of inter-sex relationships. "Defending" a "traditional" notion of "marriage" or it's so-called "sanctity" is a fool's errand when even most heterosexuals has clearly long lost any thought out bearing on marriage, traditional or not, and when many had even longer ceased to consider it a sacrament. The former was a political tactic that framed the issue such as to bring an increasingly insular group to polls for short-term gains, and the latter was hardly a step removed from pandering to evangelicals and Catholics. The past 22+ years should have consisted of a sustained cultural effort to reinvigorate a proper understanding of loving inter-sex relationships, not over protecting a venerable but mere legal symbol of proper understanding. If you had to organize this around a legal effort, it would have been preferable, and no more politically disastrous, to fight for tighter restrictions on divorce. One might at least have something to show for that effort.

2. That this legal challenge is not necessarily all bad, since now homosexuals have no further excuse, and since they mounted an effort for equality in terms of an institution like marriage, which will constantly remind them of their own inadequacies.

A corollary to 2 is that I do not think that gay marriage will result in much further confusion for heterosexuals, since, frankly, homosexual relationships are no more satisfying than even the loose heterosexual relationships of today and likely cannot be. If on some outside chance they do become attractive it would only be by some concerted willful effort on the part of homosexuals to overcome the promiscuous culture that has prevailed in the gay community to different degrees since the 70s, which would be a positive, not a negative influence for heterosexuals, since at the very lest someone needs to convince us to suck it up and stick with it.

Last edited by iwpoe (7/30/2015 2:18 pm)

That is one approach: state marriage isn't essential to marriage proper. The state's only remaining functional role is the assurance of child welfare in the event of dissolution, and even that functions with no reference to marriage. I think that any positive political campaign would have to begin with showing greater satisfaction within a certain way of living, which Christians in my country have simply not managed to convincingly show. So, for Christians, I think that this problem divests itself into a greater problem of pastoral care. For other reflective people, I think it would revolve around careful personal attention to those parts of the present sexual norm that are actually unsatisfying. Lack of freedom and tolerance will not be the answer for anyone with long term self-awareness. It was hardly plausible in the 60s when we went down this route, and the evidence of the immediate senses apply now.

Last edited by iwpoe (7/30/2015 4:26 pm)

I confess that sometimes when in a bitter mood I often wish civil law would wash its hands of all questions of marriage altogether – no legal ramifications, no law-suits, no divorce settlements, no citizenship opportunities – in short no way to profit from the whole affair.
 

I would probably agree, if the state could be radically decentralised and limited. At the moment, the strong social and cultural role of the Western state means it unfortunately matters which family arrangements it supports.