From our favorite Right Wing Authoritarian, Barry Arrington:
6. A man’s body is designed to be complimentary with a woman’s body and vice versa. All of the confusion about whether same-sex relations are licit would be swept away in an instant if everyone acknowledged this obvious truth.
Is it possible to forgive a man in our modern world for saying such bigoted things? Isn’t Barry just as bad as his white christian forebearers who said that it was obvious that Africans were better off in slavery in America, in the protection of their careful owners? Obvious truth? Hmm, not like christians have a good record with the concept of truth …
Of course it IS NOT OBVIOUS that gendered bodies are “designed” to be “complimentary”. Jayzuz, Barry, talk about assuming your conclusion before you begin your argument.
But given his design delusion, is it possible that Barry could have any genuine question as to “whether same-sex relations are licit”– or is the only possible interpretation of his words that he is pushing his filthy anti-equality propaganda? Even though he must know better. After all, if his god Designer did indeed design us, then OBVIOUSLY it designed those of us humans who love/have romantic/sexual attraction to the same gender.
NB: I am not anywhere on the LBGTQ spectrum (well, no more so than the rest of you), so I’m not mad at Barry because he’s harming me personally. But, yeah, anti-gay hate is one of my hot-button issues, and I want to know how much to despise him for this particular example. Do I have to be a better christian than he is, and forgive him for being an arse because there is some relative-innocent interpretation of the nonsense he writes?
May I suggest Hanlon’s razor.
Thanks for the suggestion, Neil.
Certainly, stupidity fits Barry Arrington like a custom wetsuit.
But I can’t escape my conviction that this example of carefully-worded propaganda is malice aforethought. We know BA and his political associates are H8ters. Balance of probabilities: malice, or malice plus stupidity. But not mere stupidity alone.
IMNSHO.
I don’t think it’s hate. Not in the sense you mean. Nor is it stupidity or ignorance. It’s thoughtlessness — the inability to think from the perspective of someone else besides oneself.
Arendt remarks, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, that it was Eichmann’s thoughtlessness that made his evil so banal.
(One minor correction to be made, though: male and female bodies are complementary, not complimentary — though I’ve been complimentary to a few female bodies in my time. But from the biological fact of female-male complementarity, nothing of ethical relevance follows.)
Don’t these people realize that there’s more to life and human relations than sex?
On another note, in the preview window, the date is showing as July 28, 3992.
ETA: The year has now advanced to 6928!
There is???
Actually, sexuality is one of the most ubiquitous threads weaving human cultures together — there is probably more sex involved in human relationships than those of any other creature, with the possible exception of bonobos.
Small wonder that it has been so thoroughly mythologized, distorted, perverted, coopted, and misunderstood universally in human societies, and not just in a religious sense.
Apart from the desperate need to police the boundaries of sexual desire, what else does the Christian Right stand for? (I guess there’s also safeguarding Jerusalem for Christ’s return.)
Why are pro gay threads being made on a forum about origin issues?
I thought this was a origin forum!
Historic mankind, the true faith and most faiths, have always said homosexuality is immoral, unnatural, and profoundly anti-beautiful. A lot more has and could be said but I won’t.
only recently are bigger percentages saying homosexuality can be tolerated or winked at or agreed with as natural and okay.
The modern world lives under the same laws as the old world on right and wrong and good and evil.
Homosexuality is a sad thing for those people andfor society if they strive to normalize it with true mankinds true identity and inclinations.
there is no homosexuality in the animal kingdom by the way.
So evolutionists would have to argue its a primate adaptation for some advantage.
anyways please drop the gay preaching and crusading.
not the place eh!!
Robert Byers,
You thought wrong.
Wrong again – ever see a field full of cows on heat?
No, they wouldn’t. Adaptation is but a part of eviolution. It is not the Explanation Of Everything.
Just ignore all of these
Just to be contrarian, I perceive a streak of puritanism infesting politics in general. One doesn’t have to be of a particular wing to want to tell other people what to think and feel and do.
Sex is one of those sly biological urges that has all kinds of unfortunate consequences, and cries out for regulation by authority.
When I was a child, sex was something married people did to have children. In my youth it rather suddenly became something as consequential as having an occasional Pepsi. Both were fictions, but widely touted.
What seems to be happening now is a return to something like marriage, albeit informal and temporary. Nonetheless, some universities have formal rules codifying the kinds of contracts that must be negotiated before having sex.
petrushka,
Really? The mind boggles!
Nonetheless, some universities have formal rules codifying the kinds of contracts that must be negotiated before having sex.
Seriously? “If you would just sign where I have marked in pencil, I think we can proceed”
Hey Barry, it does not follow from the IS that males and females CAN proceate, that therefore they SHOULD marry and then procreate.
It also does not follow from the IS that two males or two females cannot proceate under normal circumstances, that therefore they should NOT marry or attempt to procreate through artificial methods.
Why is Barry Arrington so intensely stupid?
Well I thought there was. Heh.
Anyway, what I was getting at is that there are many reasons why two people might want to be together, apart from whether their bits fit together in complementary fashion.
Oral contracts. Not missionary.
On the contrary, humans are among the only creatures that make things for reasons other than reproduction.
As some of you know, I’m actually pretty friendly to teleology in biology, because I don’t see any way to naturalize intentionality without bringing teleology back into biology. The only question for me is how to naturalize teleology, or think about teleology as something other than mere magic.
(Varela has helped me with that a lot (“Life after Kant“) and so has Okrent’s Rational Animals. I also learned a lot from “Bio-agency and the problem of action” by Skewes & Hooker. I think that the prospects for ‘natural teleology’ are actually much, much better than Nagel seems to think in Mind and Cosmos, because there’s a vast literature in philosophy of biology that he simply neglects.)
Where Arrington’s argument breaks down is that he uses the term “design” to mean both “the purposiveness manifestly exhibited by living organisms” and “the intended purpose of that kind of living organism”. That’s equivocation, pure and simple. And if there’s any good argument that gets you from one concept to the other, I’m not aware of it.
That point is independent of the weaknesses in the natural law theory of morality, according to which “if one is a y, then one ought to x” because “x contributes to the fulfillment of the intended purposes of y”.
I agree with that.
I see homeostasis as being adequate to account for teleology, as I attempted to explain in a series of posts on my blog.
That seems basically right to me. Though one important part of the problem, it seems to me, is that living things persist at the border between order and chaos, and this requires both differentiating themselves from their environment and remaining in continuity with it.
At one point, I’d asked over at UD whether anything was necessary for life over and above an autocatalytic set of molecules enclosed within a semi-permeable membrane. Several of the commentators thought that there was but none at the time were able to elucidate just what it was that was missing.
Will take a look at your posts soon!
I have seen aplenty of cow love.
Yes all animals are willing to be bisexual. I think no animal is rejecting of sex with its own sex. Indeed all creatures can be found having sex with their own sex.
YET no creatures ONLY prefer their own sex. none would reject sex with thier opposite sex.
Never would this happen. Its nothing like human homosexuality where its a profound identity and where they reject completly the opposite sex.
Therefore being gay for humans is a identity issue and not a biological one however prompted, perhaps, by the makeup of the body.
So to say the animal kingdom has homosexual members must be proven. i say they don’t.
and it took me, oh, 18 seconds on the internet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals
“About 10% of rams (males) refuse to mate with ewes (females) but do readily mate with other rams.”
Robert, less fundy driblidge, more booky reading.
Richardthughes,
On the one hand, you’re perfectly right. On other hand, it doesn’t matter too much.
I say that because the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ is a Real Thing (if correctly understood, which it usually isn’t), so the fact that there’s a lot of homosexual behavior in non-human animals doesn’t tell us anything about whether or not heterosexual privilege should be de-institutionalized.
Any good argument for the de-institutionalization of heterosexual privilege is going to appeal to considerations of justice, fairness, equality, mutuality, and so on — notions that haven’t got anything to do the behavior of non-human animals.
I notice you don’t mention personal liberty. Perhaps you think of that being incorporated in some other virtue, but the concept that law doesn’t have any business regulating behavior that doesn’t cause harm, should be considered.
One could argue that promiscuous sex does cause harm, in several senses, both medical and in welfare expense, but that’s not the usual justification.
I didn’t mention personal liberty because, at least in the U.S. these days, the private conduct of consenting adults isn’t under serious threat (that I know of) — not since Lawrence vs. Texas. But yeah, we do need to remember that the Stonewall riots were not that long ago.
These days I’m more concerned with whether people in same-sex couples can have the right to visit their partners in hospitals or prisons, have Social Security or retirement benefits automatically transfer to the other partner if one of them dies, and so on. There are over a thousand federal laws and regulations pertaining to marriage.
I’ve noticed a good number of people in the South who are opposed to same-sex marriage on the mistaken grounds that domestic partnerships or civil unions grant same-sex couples the same legal benefits, just not sanctified by a church. That’s not the case, to the best of my knowledge.
When I point out to my students that heterosexual atheists can be married in a county courthouse and homosexual atheists cannot be, or that when the pastor says ‘by the power invested in me,’ he (or she) means ‘the power of the state government to perform marriages’, or that marriage is fundamentally a socio-political institution, then they begin to see that the line between church and state isn’t drawn between marriage and civil union, but between church-approved marriages and secular marriages. I use the distinction between ‘marriage as covenant’ and ‘marriage as contract’ to get this point across. In fact, I get surprisingly little resistance from my students on this point; even my most conservative Baptist students are, ‘that’s disgusting and immoral, but whatever’.
You don’t consider hospital visitation and marriage contracts to be private conduct?
I suppose contracts are enforced by law, but where does the government get the right to regulate the content of contracts (presuming they do not involve lawbreaking or harm to others)?
I had this same discussion regarding health care. If you grant the government the power to determine the content of health care contracts, you live with the pendulum swings of politics.
Doesn’t matter, IMO. “Separate but equal” is only OK, if those being treated “separately” are ok with it themselves.
The problem is that a religious ceremony has been “established” in civil law.
I see no reason why civil marriage cannot be separated from the religious ceremony. I would think that there could be some reasonable limits on who and how many can be covered as spouses by health insurance.
Granted. Most of the LGBT folks I’ve talked with over the years think that the ultimate goal is the de-institutionalization of heterosexual privilege. With regard to the debate over same-sex marriage, extending the legal benefits of marriage to same-sex couples is one way of achieving that goal.
A different way of achieving the same goal would be to attribute all of the legal benefits of marriage to civil unions, so that the ‘marriage’ becomes nothing more than a religious ceremony.
I take it that the former is politically more feasible, but in theory the latter would accomplish the same goal.
When summarizing Plessy v. Ferguson, Justice Brown said, “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” Civil union supporters are basically in the same camp. That realization led me to change my tune on this, and, I believe, Obama too.
One stumbling block is money. Spouses traditionally get benefits.
I know this may sound a bit off the wall, but governments are interested in population growth. Listen to governments of countries that are losing population.
Hell, listen to our own government. I forget who (perhaps Kerry) said the U.S. needs a steady flow of immigrants. I would think the reason is that the population of citizens is not replacing itself. Birth rates are down among established citizens.
It strikes me as a bit weird that one segment of educated people is lamenting population growth in Malthusian terms, and another is worried about the tax base.
So governments some time ago established incentives for reproduction, granting financial benefits for marrying and having children. Some of that is still in place.
IANAL, but I have been told that this route is a legal minefield, in terms of conflicting jurisdictions. Thus it is cleaner, from a drafting standpoint, to simply say “You are married” rather than “You have attained a status that is for all intents and purposes equivalent to marriage (as far as THIS jurisdiction is concerned).”
“Full faith and credit” arguments ensue…
Civil marriage already is separated from the religious ceremony. There is merely a temporal correlation, as noted above i.e. “by the powers vested in me…”
As I like to joke,
In the eyes of the Catholic Church, I am a married man.
In the eyes of the Government, I am a married man.
Just to different wives.
So if I ‘get busy’, it is either a sin or (hypothetically) a felony.
[Back to the topic]
I would suggest that it is up to individual denominations to coin a term that describes “married with the blessing of our religion”, as opposed to “merely married”.
Anyone for “Matrimony”?
I don’t mean to be difficult, but the term marriage has been associated with religion since before the scriptures were written down. (Okay, not in English.)
Civil union or partnership would be fine. If churches want to recognize gay or unconventional unions as marriage, that;s fine with me. Some already do.
This would be fine (with you). That would be fine (with you). Separate but equal was fine with the Justice that wrote Plessy v. Ferguson. The point is that what’s fine with either of you or with me for that matter doesn’t really matter.
Thank you for stressing this point. It’s all well and good for us straight folks to say what we’d be willing to tolerate, but what we’re willing to tolerate is at best utterly condescending. It’s up to LBGT folks to tell us what justice demands.
I think we agree. As religion and state have become less inextricably intertwined in the English-speaking world, the word “marriage” has become ambiguous, meaning both “legal marriage” and “religious marriage”. Hence the RCC and the IRS disagree about who is my spouse. All I am suggesting is that the ambiguity should be resolved in favor of the “legal” meaning; the various religions can call their various matrimonies whatever they wish – it won’t affect legality.
Nor vice versa.
The word “marriage” is ambiguous in this sentence. Substitute “matrimony” and we agree.
Its a great fact animals will have sex/orgasim with their own sex without and also the opposite sex. All of them.
They are all willing bisexuals.
Now if some claim is made about some creatures only having sex with thier own sex then it must be proven. now how would that be done except by mere watching. other reasons easily could kick in why they are avoiding the femalse.
They would all have sex with the opposite sex in right conditions.
Actually its not impossible there could be homosexual exlusive creatures as with peoples its also about some chemical problem. Even Jesus said this about eunuchs.
Yet homosexuality is largely a identity issue in humans and not biological however profound.
Naw. All critters will party with their opposites. Also with thier same sex. Its not about innate controls.
But Rich linked to a page which cites empirical evidence. All you have given is a (self-contradictory) line of ‘reasoning’. Why should anyone take your unsupported opinion seriously?
Robert Byers,
“About 10% of rams (males) refuse to mate with ewes (females) but do readily mate with other rams.”
Is it the reading or the understanding that you find hard?
I always have a chuckle at Robert’s refusal to accept any evidence contradictory to one of his hypotheses. Unless you watch the creature for the entirety of its life, you haven’t proven that it isn’t ‘bisexual’. And so he can continue to cleave to the biblical bullshit that this is a human ‘aberration’. And he’s back-pedalled somewhat – now it’s only ‘100% exclusive homosexuality’ that he would claim, erroneously, is absent outside the human species.
Non-exclusivity, of course, applies equally to human homosexual behaviour. Many homosexuals and transgenders have children, in the usual way, with people they fancied and/or loved. In fact I know a transgender who has a transgender son/daughter. This is one means by which homosexuality can remain in the population, to the extent that there is any genetic basis, despite its apparent reproductive maladaptiveness.
Of course, as KN points out, the reality or otherwise of non-human homosexual behaviour is not a guide to policy. But when people claim that it’s just sinful humans that do it, bullshit must be called.
Exactly. When this issue first came up, I thought about it a bit and declared, “Who cares about marriage? I certainly wouldn’t! It’s the rights that are important! Give the gay community those and they can tell the medievalists to go screw–just as I would! It’s just a dumb word, after all!” And I consulted my friends, a lesbian couple who told me they had no interest at all in getting married (why would they?), They’d lived together for 30 years in the house they owned together (I’d once owned it with them), and they just didn’t want any bullshit about insurance or visitation, etc. So it seemed obvious: fuck marriage.
But I noticed over time that the LBGT community didn’t see it that way. They kept pushing for the right to marry and seemed relatively uninterested in civil union laws that apparently gave gay couples exactly the same rights as married couples. “What are they, nuts? Are they all religious? Who cares about a word?” Eventually, I realized that it didn’t matter if they were nuts or religious or not. They didn’t want to be separate but (ostensibly) equal. So I re-read Plessy and then Brown v. Board of Ed. and I saw that I had been with the Plessy Court on this matter, and I was embarrassed. So, apparently, was Obama, who switched his own position (previously in favor of “Civil Unions”) a couple of months after I did.
In Ontario, we just elected a married, lesbian premier. I attend a gay marriage here more than 10 years ago.
So it is hard for me to see why there would be any controversy about the legality of LGBT marriage.
But I do have a theoretical question on the phrasing KN used.
In Ontario and Canada, the illegality of LGBT marriage was found to be against our Charter of Rights. It required that test as well as the LGBT community declaring that it violated those rights.
So is it enough for a community just to declare they should have some set of rights? Or does that community have to be found to have those rights by some court?
In the U.S. it used to be assumed that individuals had all rights except those forbidden by law, and the law was limited to areas enumerated in the constitution.
In fact, individual rights have always been at the mercy of legislatures. there can hardly be an abridgement of rights more severe than slavery.
All the Abrahamic religions have scripture that describes homosexuality as an abomination. I don’t see why anyone would wish to remain in such a tradition or try to accommodate themselves to such a tradition. Hence my suggestion that gay and transexual people simply abandon the word marriage.
I entirely agree with that, but again, it’s not really a matter of what you or I think people ought to be ok with. Maybe it’s ridiculous but…they want to be allowed to be married. If they don’t want to get married, like straights, they don’t have to.
And if polygamists say the same thing? Or sects that claim the age of consent for marriage is 12? Or sects that say men can end marriage arbitrarily and women cannot?
I agree with you and KN, but not simply because the LGBT community declares it has a right. Relying on a declaration by a community is not enough; it has to be supplemented by something to counter-act the examples I gave above.
I think that marriage is a commitment that applies to two consenting adults regardless of sexual orientation and this definition builds on the fact the Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that the law cannot discriminate on the basis of sex (at least in Canada).
And if the Charter did not say that, it would be morally wrong and it would be morally correct to act to change that Charter.
BruceS,
I think there’s something right about this. It’s not enough for a particular community to assert that it has a right to X. It has to make an appeal to values and norms generally shared by the society of which that community is a part.
In the case of same-sex marriage, the claim rests on the right to legal protection of the intrinsic goods of a permanent commitment to sexual intimacy and erotic attachment. Since the state recognizes that right for heterosexuals, and there is no relevant difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals with regard to the the intrinsic goods of a permanent commitment to sexual intimacy and erotic attachment, the state ought to extend those legal protections to same-sex couples.
There’s an outstanding (but long!) article by John Corvino, “Homosexuality and the PIB Argument” (PDF) all about this. “PIB” stands for “polygamy, incest, bestiality”, and Corvino takes a lot of time there to show what exactly is wrong with the standard argument, “if we sanction homosexuality, why not sanction polygamy, bestiality, and incest? It’s a slippery slope!” Corvino is directly responding to “the new natural lawyers” — the philosophers who are urging a return to ‘natural law theory’ . Since Arrington endorses natural law theory (as do StephenB and Kairosfocus at UD), it might be worth the time to look carefully at how Corvino argues against that position.
While I’m at it, I urge that we avoid accusing the apologists at UD of accepting divine command theory. Maybe some of them do, and that’s reprehensible, but most of them don’t. They endorse a natural law theory of morality, and that’s exactly why design theory is so important to them. It also illuminates their admiration for Aquinas, and why they are critical of Thomists who reject design theory.
I’d go so far as to say that we’re seeing here a familiar permutation in the right-wing agenda, in which arguments grounded in Catholic theology are co-opted political movements with deep roots in evangelical Protestantism. This already happened in opposition to abortion and homosexuality, and now it’s happening in the evolution of design theory.
This pdf link?
FIrst, he shows it’s not a “slippery slope”:
Secondly:
Further:
The only defense against these arguments requiring equal treatment under law is to falsely claim that homosexuality is inherently immoral and therefore inherently deserving of being treated unequally and being kept illegal ((anti-sodomy laws) or at minimum being denied the legal protection of marriage status.
Gotta keep them faggots in the gutter somehow. If you can’t beat them to death anymore – at least you can prevent them from normal functioning as members of our society with equal aspirations to steady partnership, a safe home with uncomplicated joint (spousal) tenancy, family life – make sure they know they will never be as good as you.
There is no way to see anti-gay-marriage sentiment as anything other than a perversion of decent humanity in service of a cheap desire to make oneself feel better by grinding someone else down. Only perverts indulge themselves in labeling homosexuals as “inherently disordered” just because the same-sex romantic response is to innies where one prefers outies, or vice versa. Only perverts – like Barry Arrington and his crew – care that much what’s inside the clothes of an adult with whom they can never have consensual sex.
As I’ve indicated previously, I don’t believe in “natural rights”: I’m a consequentialist with perhaps the most important good being something like “fulfillment of sensible desires.” So liberty is important to me, but I don’t make it an inviolable side-constraint to utility considerations, like Nozick does. What’s a “sensible desire”? Roughly, one whose ramifications are generally understood (e.g., are not the desire of a toddler for more candy) and which do not conflict with the satisfaction of other, perhaps more widely held desires over the long term. Anyhow my attitude toward all of these kinds of arrangements is that we should try to figure out whether allowing each is utility-increasing or not over the long term. I think it’s pretty clear that marriages of 10-year olds is not. I don’t have any clear sense about polygamy or polyandry. As a general rule, I think it’s good to let people vote (with as much actual info and as little biasing propaganda as possible around) and listen to the prognostications of “experts.” I.e., economists, actuaries, environmental scientists, sociologists, psychologists, etc. Then punt. The questions are hard, and as what KN says suggests, conflict with established norms are likely to cause trouble even when all else is equal. In sum, who the hell knows? Not me, certainly.
If you all honestly believed in the pure, undirected purposeless of evolution, then homosexual bigotry would just be a reasonable result of society favoring those that have the genes for homophobia. Sort of like some people don’t like the taste of bitter or have a fear of heights.
Where did this silly notion of all life being precious and individuals should have rights come from? I mean we lock up psychotics and give them drugs to stop it for their own good, why not the same for gays?
I mean, if you really did believe in true evolution-which of course no one does. I guess that’s why Coyne hates himself so much, because he knows its not really evolution’s fault.
phoodoo,
The fact that none of us actually believe what you believe that we should believe is not our problem.
Kantian,
No, but the fact that you don’t even know yourself what you believe is your problem.
The only rational conclusion of a worldview which says life has no purpose and was an accident, is that any notions of right and wrong are false illusions. Since accepting that is what the conclusion of this worldview would be is unacceptable to them, the philosophy of the materialist is hypocritical.
“Life only exists because the best combination of accidents survived. If the best combination of accidents ends up hating another combination of accidents, that combination is wrong and should not be tolerated.”
Its the worldview of a moron, but your side has to own it like it or not.