Same sex marriage is a constitutional right for all USAians, regardless of the homophobic, religiously-motivated bigotry in 14 state legislatures.
Chief Justice Kennedy writing the 5-4 decision:
“The right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of a person,
… under the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment, couples of the same sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty.
.. The Court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry,
… [They] ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. </blockquote>
And Antonin Scalia displays his usual regressive Catholic assholishness: <blockquote>The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic,
Suck it, Popey-boy.
HT: Chris Clarke, image, and Ophelia Benson
Edit: Should have been Justice Kennedy, not Chief justice Kennedy. Thanks for the reminder, Kantian Naturalist :).
My own sense is that while that seems to be the case for the posters at this site (at least based on a large number of comments in this thread), it’s probably not generalizable to the populace at large–or at least it’s not obviously so generalizable. Whoever made that comment should therefore, IMHO, probably revise it accordingly.
Oh, Gregory, shame on you. Shame on you stealing Dawkins’ quote about evolution. Shame on you for using it without attribution while editing it to make it appear that it supports your spurious argument about marriage.
If I were in charge here, I’d ban you for doing that.
I sincerely hope that you ban yourself, since obviously continued contact with TSZ is not good for your morals.
Matters of fact and of science are not decided by popular opinion. Does this make it a theocracy?
Of course, I know that rabble will do to things whatever bad it can. This was my general point all along. The other point being that there’s nothing progressive about this “evolution”.
As far as I am aware, I sent the corresponding request.
Sorry, Erik, but what constitutes a “marriage” and whether one ought to be allowed to marry llamas in this or that jurisdiction is not a scientific fact. It’s a legal matter.
But don’t despair! As it is NOT a scientific matter, a theocracy can put things right where you’d like them!
walto,
What Erik wants to be the case is that meanings are fixed and unchangeable, regardless of what anyone thinks words mean. That’s the whole point of his talking about three-legged dogs and what not. And that’s just what essences are in the pre-Enlightenment worldview that Erik seems to find comforting: a mysterious (by modern lights) fusion of concept and object.
Remember, Erik. Unlike scientists, you don’t care about truth–only Truth (i.e., consistency with (whichever) Gospel(s) you endorse (and interpreted as you like)). So you definitely need a theocracy to put things right.
Well, he wants to pick some particular meaning he likes and fix that one, anyhow. But that’s not how either languages or laws work.
Gregory stole that quote from Richard Dawkins, about evolution.
— Richard Dawkins, as quoted by Josh Gilder in a review of PBS’s “Evolution” series.
Gregory has just done something unforgivable.
Of course, you’re right that he shouldn’t misattribute the remark, but, to be fair, that quote isn’t wildly different from some of the comments made here. In any case, I myself think that, with the emendations outlined above, it’s pretty apt.
The more I read this kind of stuff, the more the pointlessness of the discussion is brought home to me. I mean, if somebody says to you that what he means by ‘truth’ is consistency with the “Good Book”; and what he means by “marriage” is something that simply cannot obtain between any but a single fertile male and a single fertile woman (i.e, someone under 50) ; and what he means by “dog” is something that can’t have lost a leg; you start to realize you’re not actually dealing with a person with whom you can have a rational conversation.
It’s a peculiarly Mormon thing. And not just Mormon, but a particular offshoot of Mormonism descended from the great polygynous families who made the harrowing journey from the American midwest to the shore of the Great Salt Lake, and founded the isolated state of Utah.
Mormon polygyny is mostly contained in the empty western states (Utah, Colorado, Montana, Idaho) — and because the doctrine of polygyny was officially repudiated by the Mormon elders as a condition of US statehood, they don’t export it to other countries when they export their Mormon missionaries. You’d probably never hear of it if you don’t live in the US west, although clearly it’s going to make the news more, if folks are going to try to make a court case now.
Funny that so many christians want to slam us for “destroying marriage” when it’s their own christian brethren who want to revert to the biblical definition of marriage: one man plus as many women as he can wangle.
I doubt it matters to Erik how either languages or laws really work — he’s got Reality and Reason and Truth on his side. Why bother taking the time to understand contemporary jurisprudence or linguistics when you already know that the pre-Enlightenment philosophical paradigm is basically correct?
You don’t see it in Europe because gay laws implemented in Europe have not been so messy. The stupidity of legal precedents correlates perfectly with the stupidity of the lawmakers and judges.
More like a case in point against those here who claimed marriage was still monogamous and not changing. Such as Lizzie and KN.
Precisely, if I were an Aristotelian. But I’m not.
The point of my analogy was to exemplify the distinction of essential and accidental, or central and peripheral, or relevant and irrelevant properties. This should be understandable even to modern people, because all analysis of anything crucially relies on this.
Now, each thing in this world, being an aggregate, is changeable and nothing is immutable. Things can change and obviously also marriage has changed. However, throughout all this change there’s something essential about it which did not change – this is precisely how we know it was *marriage* that was changing. So, my point here has been to pinpoint the core characteristics and to show that “same-sex marriage” is not merely a change of (the concept of) marriage, not an evolution or devolution of it, but a change of topic, an oxymoron, a self-contradiction.
Everybody here, including you, is proving my point by being unable to analyse the concept in any meaningful way, to identify what’s essential to it and what’s not. We have seen people say they have the right to define the word any way they like. We have seen people say that three-legged dogs have all the rights of four-legged dogs, including the rights they cannot exercise by definition. Etc.
There’s an additional nuance to change, both to conceptual change and to material change. When something changes, things around it also change. Change doesn’t occur without affecting anything else. Change needs space to occur, and change changes that space, its context or environment.
Marriage is the social institution to officially recognise families. When marriage is redefined so that it’s divorcible from families, then the concept of family will also inevitably be affected, namely the sense of protection and cohesion provided to family by society will lose focus and disintegrate. This is not a prophecy – broken families have been a steadily increasing trend along with the decline of the institution of marriage. Families consist of parents and their children. They are the concrete people who lose out.
Yep. It’s apt.
Gregory could have quoted pretty much anything I’ve said in this thread, and then he wouldn’t have had to fudge about who said it and “emend” the quote to make it look like it meant what he wants it to mean.
Hell, I’d be happy to give Gregory what he wants, if he would just agree to fuck off out of here afterwards.
I’ll give him a new quote directly from me that matches Dawkins and then he can scurry back to his den to complain about me being “intolerant” “triumphalist” and “bright”.
I’m not the one who’s done something to be ashamed of, Gregory is. I’m proud. I don’t call myself “bright” but I certainly am smarter than I need to be. If I’m “triumphalist” it’s because I have been part of a genuine triumph of the human spirit in the face of ingrained discrimination and irrational bigotry. I’m “intolerant” of tyranny, and that’s a virtue, not a fault.
Funny, it was a hero of the rightwing who said “tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue” but when we object to the tyranny of the would-be theocrats, suddenly “intolerance” is an insult they throw at us.
I’ll forgive him anyway. But I do hope that he will learn from this.
Oh, Erik. ‘Marriage’ is not now and has never been a natural kind term. That’s just one more thing confused about your ‘dog’ analogy.
Your posts are just one load of bullshit piled on top of another. It’s almost at Guinness Book height at this point.
I first heard of the idea of legalized civil unions, around 20 years ago. It seemed reasonable at that time.
It also seemed reasonable for the LGBT community to insist that all of the laws about marriage be changed to laws about civil union, before they could consider this.
So, to those who still think it should be civil unions — you have had 20 years to change all of those laws. And you haven’t even started. If you don’t like the way this decision went, then blame yourselves.
^^ This.
Thirded.
So simple.
This is what I had in mind when I said hoist. Civil marriage did not have to be entangled with religious sacraments. Churches enjoyed having political power, and now that power is deserting them.
Perhaps if they prayed on it, god would smite the heathens, or something.
Googled “France polygamy” and it turns out there is a problem here with immigrants from North Africa where polygamy, I understand, is the cultural norm in several post French colonial countries. Polygamy is illegal in France (demeaning to women) but there are many immigrant polygamous families where “wives” are acquired in the home country, moved to France and kept out of sight, except for claiming benefits – at least that is the story put out in the press.
Yes, that seems to be how it works. Although difficult to tease out from the low-key but endemic racism against Magrehbians in France, women seem to end up as domestic slaves rather than wives with any kind of real equality.
The “naturopaths” here wouldn’t have any trouble with THAT, I don’t think. “Weaker sex” and all that. The whole idea that women can own property is nothing but a relatively recent abomination of earlier True reflections of “natural law and philosophy” on their enlightened view.
hotshoe says
And Muslim and Sub Saharan as well. In fact it’s a thing for lots of folks on the winning side of demography. It might not be a thing in Europe this week but it will be and very soon.
Of course by that time homosexual marriage will no longer be the flavor of the month and lots of other sexual liberties will be no longer in fashon in majority society.
Demography giveth and Demography taketh away
Meanwhile the truth of marriage will remain unchanged as it always has.
ain’t evolution grand
peace
Yes indeed. But instead the defenders of heterosexual privilege spent all that time doing everything they could to make sure that civil unions were not legally equivalent to marriage.
They didn’t have to do that — they could have made civil unions legally equivalent to marriage, which is all that the de-institutionalization of heterosexual privilege required of them. They chose not to, and now they are reaping the consequences of their moral failure.
Yep. Just like in your bible, unchanged as it always has been.
One man with as many women as he can grab.
Ain’t religion grand.
Idiots.
So, now we also have the statement “marriage is not natural (but everybody has a natural right to it anyway)”.
I have to ask again because I didn’t see the answer yet: What is “heterosexual privilege” and why is it unjust?
Not from me, you don’t. I think “natural rights” are a fiction. Your views about “natural marriage” aren’t even good fiction, though. Decent fiction makes the occasional gesture toward coherence and consistency. In your case, the history is wrong, the reasoning is bad, the jurisprudence is confused, the so-called science is nonsensical. You’ve got all the bases covered, bro.
hotshoe
I’m not exactly sure why the preservation of the text of the Bible is relevant here but Yes I guess like that.
By all scholarly accounts the text we have today has been repeatedly demonstrated to be unchanged from the original manuscripts. So that as far as we can know we can say that what we have is today what was written down originally .
Even skeptics concede this point while pointing out that of course we can never know for certain
quote:
“For practical reasons, New Testament scholars proceed as if we do actually know what Mark wrote, or Paul, or the author of 1 Peter. And if I had to guess, my guess would be that in most cases we can probably get close to what the author wrote. But the dim reality is that we really don’t have any way to know for sure.”
end quote:
Bart Ehrman
This remarkable preservation continues to be displayed every time a new scrap of papyrus is unearthed. Like all scientific conclusions this one is tentative. There will always be the possibility somewhere out there is the ever elusive evidence that scripture has been corrupted.
However if I were you I would not hold out much hope that a lost homosexual gospel will come along to alter the definition of marriage. I think you are pretty much stuck with what you got
peace
Thirded.
So simple.
I’m gonna buck my peers and vote Nay on this one. I don’t see why it should have been the responsibility of the religious kooks (can I call them that?) to pass those laws. I take it their preference order was this:
Best: Nothing (Pangloss was ruling)
Second: Civil Unions (but it ain’t my prob)
Third: Change to marriage laws (world coming to an end)
Lesbians and gays who were interested in improved benefits, along with the Obamas and Horns (and maybe Patricks who care a lot about disentangling?) should have gotten that stuff through, but they didn’t care enough to push for the half-way measures.
So, as often happens maximalism won the day, rather than compromise. But I don’t think it’s fair to blame that on the kook population.
So we got something like “marriage is not natural and rights are a fiction.. therefore everybody has a right to marriage..” This is close to winner now.
I love your paraphrases, Erik–they’re as absurd as everything else you post. Do you have an advanced degree in nonsensical writing or something? That stuff can’t come easy.
ETA: Not that you’ll get this, Erik, but I’ll explain anyhow (I mean, what the hell.) Those who don’t believe in natural rights think that civil rights (the only “rights” that there are) have to be conferred by some government authority. And that’s what the Decision did–it conferred a civil right, an authority to do something within the law. That’s it.
Only in your world does that require that marriage be a natural kind (which it isn’t) that happens to be consistent with gay partnerhood. (And would it be, if marriage WERE actually a natural kind? Nobody but you either knows or cares what the answer might be to that ridiculous question.) The point is that nobody thinks that any such silliness is required for the granting of this authority except those with entirely theocratic views of law and governance.
Gregory,
Elizabeth, before this thread is closed, could you at least answer this question:
Which specific book was that?
Thanks.
Well, if you actually produced a critique, rather than a series of loaded questions and unsupported surmises about what my position actually is, I might take your comments more seriously.
It’s hard not to “evade” something as unfocussed as your “points”, Gregory. It would be like not evading fog.
As I said, Gregory, our marriage vows, like most people’s, were to each other. There is nothing “evasive” about that statement – it is a simple statement of fact.
I didn’t say “holy matrimony”, Gregory. I said “marriage”. Many people have secular marriages, and, like religious marriages, they consist of a promise between two adults to each other, for life. For those marrying in a religious ceremony there are other aspects as well. But the idea that all marriages are religious is obviously false. Therefore the idea that all marriages must conform to some religious template is also false.
As I have told you a great many times, Gregory, yes. Are you insinuating that I have been lying? I have been absolutely explicit about that.
Before God as witness, yes. As I have already said.
Yes. As I have already told you, he was a catholic. And you can work that out, because I’ve also told you it was a catholic wedding, and I wasn’t. Stop accusing me of “evading” and simultaneously ignoring all the answers I’ve already given you.
Because we both believed in God, my husband was a catholic, and I was sympathetic to the beliefs of the catholic church, although not yet sure I was ready to join the church.
Again with the snide insinuations. No, not “so easy”, Gregory. I had believed in God from the age of three, and was to continue to believe in God for another three decades after our marriage.
I was a Christian. I was not yet a catholic.
No, I had already been baptised as an infant. The catholic church recognises baptism by other religious denominations. It does not recognise confirmation though, so I had to do that again.
I no longer have the same understanding of what constitutes “holy” as I did then.
Dennett’s Freedom Evolves.
Wow, seems supereragatory to me to answer all those very personal questions. You’re really open about this stuff, Lizzie. FWIW, I’m sure I would have provided Gregory…uh…somewhat…um.. different “responses” to a bunch of questions of that nature.
I think the exact same thing of everything you say – absurd and nonsensical. You even give a fine example immediately.
Then the authority simply did something trivial – declared a decision. That’s it. So what? Why should we react? How should we react? Should we be pro or contra or indifferent? And why? All this is missing here. Your statement is equivalent to “News broadcasters broadcast news.” Indeed, they do. So what?
For the record, when I said “natural right” above, I slipped (for a number of reasons – English is far from my first language). I meant to say “right” as per your probable concept system, but I couldn’t find the proper adjective. Now you have beautifully confirmed that you indeed do not believe in any rights at all, regardless of adjectives or lack thereof. To you, a “right” is being exercised when judges announce a judicial decision, whatever the decision. This is so trivial that one can break the jaws yawning at it.
We barely inhabit the same planet. In my world, laws can be good or bad even when coming from the constitutionally designated authority, just like a good writer, generally writing good books, can suddenly write a bad book. Bad laws, such as those that don’t describe reality as it is or that fail to fulfil their stated purpose or that have adverse repercussions in society, can be proven to be bad, it can be shown what kind of amendments would improve them, and anyone rational can show it, not just the designated authority.* The fact that the law was passed by the authority designated to pass laws is not the tell-all measure of its quality. The perception of wrongness and inappropriateness exists because there is a standard** that the authority didn’t live up to.
* For example a hypothetical law that sets out to protect the wellbeing of dogs, but inadvertently stipulates that three-legged dogs are intrinsically the same as four-legged dogs. So, when an owner cuts a leg from his dog, he can cite this law and say that his dog is intrinsically the same as four-legged dogs, nothing intrinsic was lost by cutting a leg. Gay marriage laws make an error similar to this, as they stipulate equality or sameness where there objectively cannot be any, and they disregard the consequences.
** Unwritten and therefore arguable, but not non-existent. If it were non-existent, it would not be arguable.
Because there’s nothing I’m ashamed of, although Gregory seems to think I should be.
Walto
I’m gonna buck my peers and vote Nay on this one. I don’t see why it should have been the responsibility of the religious kooks (can I call them that?) to pass those laws. I take it their preference order was this:
Best: Nothing (Pangloss was ruling)
Second: Civil Unions (but it ain’t my prob)
It was more like
Best: status quo
Second: ban civil unions and ssm to maintain status quo
There is ample evidence of states banning civil unions.
Lesbians and gays who were interested in improved benefits, along with the Obamas and Horns (and maybe Patricks who care a lot about disentangling?) should have gotten that stuff through, but they didn’t care enough to push for the half-way measures.
I think they rightly figured out ,just as those who pushed for desegregation , “separate but equal ” doesn’t work especially when politicians decide what is equal.
I find ironic that, at the same time I’m defending marriage equality here against people who appeal to “natural philosophy”, I’m also embroiled in a lengthy conversation on Facebook in which I’m defending a heavily naturalized version of moral realism. The person I’m arguing with has my epistemological, religious, and political sensibilities — which is why she’s opposed to moral realism. The devotees of natural philosophy have given moral realism a bad name.
I have seen this statement of your position earlier. I have not seen any defense of it. I have not seen any defense of “marriage equality” from you and no argument for why “heterosexual privilege” is unjust and no clarification what “heterosexual privilege” even is.
Erik:
So, when an owner cuts a leg from his dog, he can cite this law and say that his dog is intrinsically the same as four-legged dogs, nothing intrinsic was lost by cutting a leg.
True, except to the dog . Just as people who have one leg can be married or are you against that too?
As I said earlier, but which perhaps you missed:
To elaborate: there are many different kinds of privilege, but the basic idea is this:
A person is privileged if they are, or are perceived to be, part of a social group that faces few (if any) obstacles in access to primary goods, including both natural primary goods (intelligence, imagination, health, etc.) and social primary goods (including civil and political rights, liberties, income and wealth, the social bases of self-respect, etc.).
One can get a pretty good picture of how privilege works by reading “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack“, which is about racial privilege written by a white feminist. And, for those of you who play or have played video games, there’s this nice analogy: Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is (i.e. being a straight white male is playing the game of life in Easy Mode).
Heterosexual privilege, then, is when someone’s real or perceived sexual orientation influences his or her ease of access to natural and social primary goods, such as the right to visit one’s dying lover in a hospital or enjoy the tax benefits that heterosexual couples enjoy.
Now, marriage equality is a small step in the general de-institutionalization of heterosexual privilege, since there are many other examples in the US. (For example, sexual orientation is not a protected class, so one can be fired simply for being, or being perceived as, gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered.) And heterosexual privilege interacts in very complex and subtle ways with white privilege, male privilege, cis-gendered privilege, and so on.
What a load of Gregex.
There are a couple of things I heartily agree with in your recent post directed at me, Erik. Here they are:
That we inhabit different planets is clear from the fact that in my world, truth–in the sense of comporting with the facts–is important. And the evidence we have for such truths is important. Finally, that the arguments we use to deduce our conclusions from what evidence we have not be fallacious is important.
You have told us that what is important to you is, rather Truth (note the capital “T”), which is a matter of comporting not with facts but with some favored interpretation of a book you like. Similarly, evidence for you is a matter of consistency with instruction from your parents and/or your clergy, and, perhaps also a function of what makes you feel good. Reasoning is a matter of what would be approved of by the clergy or or some prior Bookman whose views you might consult.
So ours are indeed wildly different planets: your big T truth, big E Evidence and big R Reasoning are items that don’t seem to me to have the slightest importance (except maybe the feeling good part, but as I said in a prior post, one should not infer the wrong things from those experiences).
Secondly, for me too there are good and bad laws. The good ones are the ones that benefit the most citizens and the bad ones are those that harm the most citizens. For you, again, what makes a law good is its comporting with what you take one or another “holy Book” to mean. That’s why your view is entirely theocratic.
As I said before, “Different strokes,” but in my truth- (small ‘t’) important world, it’s good to call a spade a spade. And you, my friend, are a theocrat in my world–even if you’re some much nicer-sounding thing in your own.
You’re also nicer than I am.
Wow. I was going to point this analogy out to you, as a demonstration of the utter vacuousness of your position, but you somehow think that this supports your position. Just wow. A law that protects “dogs” (unqualfied) also applies to dogs with any number of legs, notwithstanding the fact that the archetypical dog has four legs. That you cannot see this is frankly hilarious.
As walto noted, we (you vs. reality-based humans) do inhabit different universes. For the reasons he described.
Wow.
Yes, the universe of admitting there is an archetypal dog while denying there are objective facts about dogs. wow indeed.
And yet you like Hobbes.
Mung,
I don’t agree with Hobbes about much. Smart guy though, and I think (though I could be wrong), the first to put the satisfaction-of-desire theory of well-being.
Friends, rejoice! Finally, after so much patient waiting, we have the definitive treatment of marriage equality from our friends at Uncommon Descent: Gay marriage and the loss of civility by, of course, Vincent Torley. It promises to be a fascinating read.
Do not use turn this site into as a peanut gallery for observing the antics on other boards.
Kantian Naturalist,
I think you misspelled “long” there.