Jeremy Taylor wrote:

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.

I suggest that the role of the organised state is in direct correlation with the state of the family. The cohesion of the (extended) family has been demolished, atomised, so the government correspondingly can take a firm lead in the matters that could otherwise well be handled by the family.

On the side of pro-gays, I have seen plenty of ultra-feminist/hedonist statements to the effect that family at its very heart, parents in particular, are patriarchal, oppressive (to children and women), working contrary to freedom and happiness (of children and women). As if the govt were somehow more caring...

Well, I do think that the left-liberal core often does represent where the left is going. We have seen this process again and again. It is maybe not the most extreme fringe (those who think all sex is rape, want all women to be lesbians, or to make men entirely obsolete, or what have you). But the militant hardcore of university campuses will likely have a growing influence on left-liberalism.

Trigger warnings, microagressions, no platforms, boycotting Israel and even more endless navel-gazing about identity politics are spreading from unis to the likes of Salon, the Huffington Post, Jezebel, and from there to the Guardian and its broadcasting wings like the BBC and ABC. 

The former Australian PM, Julia Gillard, didn't want SSM because she thought marriage was an obsolete vestige of patriachal oppression. There was barely a whisper against this in Australian media, except from SSM marriage activists. On the other hand, the current PM is a Catholic and the mildest of social conservatives, and he is constantly attacked for being a sexist, reactionary, and the so on. I would advise Americans to look to the left in Europe and the rest of the West. That is where the American left will likely end up. ​

iwpoe wrote:

seigneur wrote:

On the side of pro-gays, I have seen plenty of ultra-feminist/hedonist statements to the effect that family at its very heart, parents in particular, are patriarchal, oppressive (to children and women), working contrary to freedom and happiness (of children and women). As if the govt were somehow more caring...

I don't understand why many people start here with the fringe as a guide for what the movement's ultimate aims and expected direction will be. I can listen on the radio every day to Alex Jones speaking literal non-sense, and anybody with understanding knows that he can't possibly represent the actual aims and purpose of the various conservative causes he'll throw himself behind. Ultra-feminists are loud loons, and the liberal left core doesn't want to replace the family with the state.

No, not taking it as a guide. Just that when I debated actual people on this topic, the speedy resort to undeniable irrationality was so astonishing as to be noteworthy.

I agree that "the liberal left core doesn't want to replace the family with the state". However, if "the liberal left core" includes the cause of represented by the LGBT movement, then they are in the business of marginalising the status of family. I sincerely wish the liberal left core had no such association.

In my view, the acknowledgement of the autonomous self-worth of family by the government/law is one of the important guarantees against the excesses of government. Here "family" defined as the traditional, "nuclear", natural (natural-law) family, i.e. parents and their children. Marriage was traditionally the legal concept specifically intended to protect this kind of family. A number of countries (in Europe) have it directly in their constitutions.

iwpoe wrote:

seigneur wrote:

I agree that "the liberal left core doesn't want to replace the family with the state". However, if "the liberal left core" includes the cause of represented by the LGBT movement, then they are in the business of marginalising the status of family. I sincerely wish the liberal left core had no such association.

Why? Be cause you need marriage liscenses issued by the state only to heterosexuals to have families? The family is a natural unit (as are proper marriages, for that matter). It doesn't require state support in the first place, let alone state support to the exclusion of all other kinds of support.

The idea that you need the family robustly supported by the law-code and/or the constitution of the state is a modern concession already, halfway down the road to conceding them as legal constructions.

All true, but inasmuch as I see a connection between the government overreaching to private territory and one of those territories being the family, I see it as a Good Thing if the government officially recognises and makes efforts to protect the natural unit known as the family or, as a minimum, that which we both call "proper marriage". Because, when the government legally recognises those things, it will be clear to everyone what the values of the government are. And it will be clear to everyone when the values change, as they have been drastically changing in the "civilised" West this century.

It's a Good Thing when the express values of the government are in harmony with the Good, isn't it? At least I think you agree that it would be a good thing to know what the values of your government are. Laws are good to have as a form of expression of the values of the government, even when we don't agree with the laws. (I'd even say that especially when we don't agree with the laws.)

So, I was not saying that official recognition would somehow cause families and proper marriages to be. Rather, official recognition would be a signal by the government that it values the natural procreative continuity of society. If the government doesn't value the self-reproductive capacity of the people over which the government presides, if it doesn't care for the survival of the people in this sense, then it is kind of doubtful if the government really has much respect for the people at all, isn't it?

It's a matter of biological fact that only heterosexual couples can procreate. Human species do not procreate by any other means than by heterosexual couples and legal definition is irrelevant to this fact. However, by changing the legal definition of marriage to include same-sex couples, the government signals that they have no special attention to the biological fact. By changing the definition, the government ceases to provide special protection for the continuity of the society as a matter of biological fact.

In gay logic, somehow "equal rights" trump the survival of the society. At this point of the argument, gay proponents retort with something like "yeah, as if the world were not overpopulated already", ignoring the fact that there are nation-states with their own unique culture and language, the continuity of which is directly dependent on the self-reproductive capacity of the people. Gay laws in such countries (e.g. basically all countries in Europe east and south of Austria) would be a direct threat to survival. The "civilised" West is effectively telling those people to voluntarily die off because it's a no-no these days to offend gay sensibilities...

Last edited by seigneur (8/02/2015 4:55 am)

seigneur wrote:

All true, but inasmuch as I see a connection between the government overreaching to private territory and one of those territories being the family, I see it as a Good Thing if the government officially recognizes and makes efforts to protect the natural unit known as the family or, as a minimum, that which we both call "proper marriage". Because, when the government legally recognizes those things, it will be clear to everyone what the values of the government are. And it will be clear to everyone when the values change, as they have been drastically changing in the "civilized" West this century.

I think it's a doubled-edged sword. I reject the contemporary conservative sharp line between the public and the private sphere, but I don't think that's the relevant distinction in this case anyway. Simply speaking, I don't think the state or the private sphere *can* causally intrude on the family in any intrinsic way because it's a matter of human nature.

What I think both the state, in the form of bad laws, and the "private sphere", in the form of false opinions, can do is confuse people discursively about their own natures, such that they have a harder time living in accords with what they are (since our lives essentially involve a reasoning-discursive component), as bad heath policy and opinions can never make it such that we aren't the kinds of things that are by our essence either healthy or sick or things that have to eat but can lead us to eat badly to a certain extent or to keep our health badly.

In this case, what I think, for instance, a marriage amendment, threatened to to was to confuse people into thinking that "marriage" was a stipulative definition of the law- merely a statute, which simply is just another form of the problem that you think homosexuality is creating through homosexual marriages, which is namely the false idea that marriage, as in proper marriage, isn't an intrinsic human good that most of us should follow if we are to to become the kinds of things we are.

Now, I don't ultimately think that this problem of homosexual marriage will obscure our understanding of marriage *any worse* than it already was, but given where we were, merely stipulating in law the traditional arrangement that many people had already come to understand as perhaps an arbitrary arrangement anyway would not fix the confusion but further confirm to many that the institution is just a matter of what we write down on paper.

What was truly necessary was reeducation over a long time, either in the family or in the schools, or both or elsewhere. The legal battle over definion and "protecting" marriage was a red herring.

seigneur wrote:

It's a Good Thing when the express values of the government are in harmony with the Good, isn't it? At least I think you agree that it would be a good thing to know what the values of your government are.

I don't know what values are supposed to be, and I think it would take the act of God to make the laws such that they mirrored the Good.

But my objection was rather in reverse. You've been *given* the family and marriage by nature. What are you trying to do is reconstitute them as law-code, which seems both itself dangerous and not a solution to our actual social problem.

seigneur wrote:

So, I was not saying that official recognition would somehow cause families and proper marriages to be. Rather, official recognition would be a signal by the government that it values the natural procreative continuity of society. If the government doesn't value the self-reproductive capacity of the people over which the government resides, if it doesn't care for the survival of the people in this sense, then it is kind of doubtful if the government really has much respect for the people at all, isn't it?

So what? I don't know what that even actually means never mind what it's supposed to do. That a group of elders might, for instance, carve on some tablets 'one should learn to be free' is is no help to me if I'm utterly confused about what that means.

Let's say, by the presence of one more Bush appointee, the SCOTUS had managed to avert the ruling or that the congress had managed some kind of marriage amendment. How would that have actually fixed the problem? It looks to me like it would have simple conceded that marriage is a matter of definition and announced that what was important was that good Christians got to do the defining. That's certainly how your opponents would have read it, and they would have spent another many decades fighting your stolen stipulative victory.

seigneur wrote:

It's a matter of biological fact that only heterosexual couples can procreate. Human species do not procreate by any other means than by heterosexual couples and legal definition is irrelevant to this fact. However, by changing the legal definition of marriage to include same-sex couples, the government signals that they have no special attention to the biological fact. By changing the definition, the government ceases to provide special protection for the continuity of the society.

You've yourself never given a good reason for me to think that such needs in this case "special protection". I think it does- in order to get us out of the general emotive confusions and malaise we're now in -but I personally think you need to provide an actually relevant political programme to do this- probably an educative one, which conservatism has spent half a century gutting... oopse (in the name of preventing "overreach", no less)... rather than taking the reigns of the edification of the young.

seigneur wrote:

In gay logic, somehow "equal rights" trump the survival of the entire.

So you think that people will... stop breeding now?

seigneur wrote:

At this point of the argument, gay proponents retort with something like "yeah, as if the world were not overpopulated already", ignoring the fact that there are nation-states with their own unique culture and language, the continuity of which is directly dependent on the self-reproductive capacity of the people. Gay laws in such countries (e.g. basically all countries in Europe east and south of Austria) would be a direct threat to survival. The "civilised" West is effectively telling those people to voluntarily die off because it's a no-no these days to offend gay sensibilities...

The actual threat is personal license and our particular kind of economy, which seems unavoidable in the modern West as its going and the clear drive towards family planning and maximization of resources on some few children that drives.

Homosexual marriage is a side-show to that, not the main event. This is why conservatism wasted it's time.

In fact, the real reason conservatism wasted its time is actually highly evident: it has taken the pill too, and thinks marriage is a realm of private joy-seeking, rather than, as in classical society, a duty a man has to himself, his family, and to the whole people. This is the same reason it never fought back against divorce in any substantial way, despite making a lot of noise, and effectively neutered birth control limitation as a matter of personal religious conscious on the part of the people who supply the medication.