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 :).
I don’t see a VJ essay as an antic. I’m not sure what to call it, but antic doesn’t come to mind. If he desecrates people’s posts, that would be antics..
Let’s suppose so.
If evidence in your sense mattered to you, this paragraph would be impossible. Because there’s zero evidence of me relying on the authority of my parents or any book or clergy. So, you managed to completely nullify your earlier statement that you comport with facts. I only relied on some historical and conceptual continuity – as did all those who invoked the concept of Change.
You see, when you say one thing and then do the opposite, it’s the definition of hypocrisy – should be even in your world. So, even in your world, you fail your own standard.
Since I never brought up a book, much less a “holy Book”, then what you are saying about me is flatly false. Turning to what you say about your own position, it’s inconsistent, because you have no definition of “benefit” and “harm”, unless you mean “feels good to me” and “feels bad to me”. For example, just seconds ago you rejected everything that our parents can teach, so by “benefit” you don’t mean what’s inherited from our parents. Instead, by “benefit” you seem to mean the ability to reject everything taught by parents, but this, I’m sure you can see, harms our parents, so your position is inconsistent, self-contradictory and didn’t merit the attention I spent on it here.
I see. This would indeed be a privilege distinctly for heterosexuals, but aren’t we talking some outlandish hypothetical here? Where I live, anybody who tells he is the patient’s friend – and the patient recognises it to be so – is permitted a visit. I have no idea what planet you people are from.
Okay, let’s keep this in mind.
Stop right there. So, it doesn’t matter if the sexual orientation is real or perceived? So, when it evidently doesn’t even matter to you if sexual orientation is a real thing (i.e. evidence doesn’t matter), it also logically shouldn’t matter to you what is legislated about it, if anything at all. It shouldn’t matter to you whether legislation about sexual orientation makes sense, benefits or harms anyone, because it doesn’t matter if sexual orientation is real or perceived.
Now, since your case against “heterosexual privilege” explicitly ignores whether sexual orientation (heterosexuality or homosexuality) is real or perceived, you are talking about a fiction. You are fighting against a figment of your own mind that nobody else has any reason to share.
In real life, real sexual orientation matters. Laws that enshrine fictions can only make things better in terms of short-term perception for those hooked on the particular fiction, not in long term and not in reality.
To recall what you said earlier about primary goods – intelligence, imagination, health, civil and political rights, liberties, income and wealth, the social bases of self-respect – all this can apply only inasmuch as the person in question, along with his self-identity, is real. If his self-identity is “perceived”, he is deluded and lacks, for a start, intelligence, and I think it’s a good idea to share intelligence with him so he could establish his real self-identity. But this is something you reject from the get-go.
Your case was interesting until you laid it out properly. Dismissed.
It’s not all that long, and says very little. Here is my precis:
It is short and says very little when you leave out everyone VJ quoted. Eeveryone that VJ quotes makes more succinct points than VJ. That includes Jerry Coyne.
Vincent’s main point seem to be that gay people who marry are not monogamous. He cites no evidence to support this.
The whole protest resounds to the scraping of barrels.
I particularly like the first one. Like no one was called a bigot for opposing gay marriage PRIOR to legalization. It’s not the law the makes the bigotry, it’s the nastiness. And that can exist in pretty much every sort of legal environment.
I’m confused. Is VJ saying straight married people are monogamous? Where I live I see lots of brown and tan people. Where did they come from?
I suspect VJ might not like the results of universal genetic testing.
Vincent wrote:
So he seems to be at odds with some here.
And if that’s what he thinks the defining feature of marriage is (and I would tend to agree that it is) then there is simply no case for withholding it from any pair of consenting adults.
He is, as always, at odds with himself – he says something and then basically retracts it in the next paragraph. I didn’t care to read further. It was interesting as long as it consisted of other people’s quotes.
So, patriarchs were not married? (If I cared, I would ask the same from Torley and watch him wiggle.)
Who are these “patriarchs” of whom you speak?
Historical dudes. Like Ottoman rulers 😀
I promised myself that I wouldn’t respond to any more of your silly posts, but as this turns on one of my pet peeves, I can’t resist making one quick comment.
You here confuse truth and evidence for it: (“So, you managed to completely nullify your earlier statement that you comport with facts.”) The utterer of a truth may have little or no evidence for the remark. I have never suggested otherwise: in my post, I was just explaining to you what evidence consists in and noting that I think having it when one makes a statement is important. So, whether I had good, bad, or no evidence at all for my interpretation of what you understand evidence to be is not dispositive as to the truth or falsity of my remark. You say my evidence for it was no good. That may be right as rain. But if you would like me to withdraw it, you’ll have to suggest some reason for me or anybody to think that it’s false. I based it on your posts (what else can I go on?), and this last one doesn’t give any reason for believing that its false. That is, to holler “You don’t know that!” isn’t a reason for not believing something. And your claim that I had insufficient evidence to support it was a form of hypocrisy is just a confusion of truth and evidence as well as a misunderstanding of what “hypocrisy” means. The fact that I may not have enough to satisfy you ought not to suggest that evidence doesn’t matter to me. Sometimes one has to just use what one has, even if one would like more.
All that aside, while you HAVE told us what you mean by “Truth” and how much you care about it, I have had to infer what you mean by “Evidence” from other remarks, since you haven’t told us that explicitly (AFAIK), so please do so now to avoid any further misunderstandings!
On the planet I’m from, I used to help out in small ways with the ACTUP folks. One day, a guy I knew a bit came over and asked if I would do him a favor and take a message to someone in the hospital. Being new at this and not knowing much, I asked why. He said that his partner was dying of AIDS, and though they had been together for 6 years, his family wouldn’t let “that fag” come to the hospital to visit. But since I was a respectable looking grad student straight boy, I could say I had been in a class with him and probably get in for a visit. Asking those parents to let me visit without breaking down or punching them in the face was an act I am proud of, because it was damned hard. It is really unpleasant even now to remember how that felt.
That’s the planet I’m from — a planet in which a dying man can’t say good-bye to his partner because of the small-mindedness and intolerance of his family. What planet are you from?
As for your other point: apparently on your planet no one is ever fired for looking too effeminate or too butch. Must be nice, being on your planet, where how people perceive you makes no difference to how you are treated, and how you are treated by others makes no difference to how you see yourself. Please send me the galactic coordinates so I can come and visit.
So you are saying that the Patriarchs of Constantinople (of whichever flavor, you’re being curiously vague) were in general not monogamous?
You learn something new every day.
I am quite confident that you were in fact referencing the lack of monogamy of Abram and Jacob. But given what a massive own goal those particular tales are for your “traditional marriage is invariant” position, I quite understand your efforts to distance yourself from that comment…
🙂 Indeed.
I see that you are not interested in the answer to my actual question.
As to “traditional marriage is invariant”, I never said this. I said there are defining characteristics and those characteristics, being defining, don’t change, because this is what defining means. The rest of the characteristics are secondary and ultimately irrelevant.
And I am much more acutely aware of history than Torley, so I haven’t even for a second said that marriage is monogamous, historically and traditionally. It’s only monogamous ideally and currently. Monogamy is not the essential defining characteristic.
Jayzuz, you’re a dumb ass. We’re from planet Earth and on planet Earth we can read the history of what has happened in the US (including previous legal discrimination that kept “civil union” partner’s from their dying partners hospital room, solely due to anti-gay bigotry.) Why, some of us are even from the US and were thus directly affected by the previous status of marriage inequality, and now by the new status of marriage equality.
Since you’re not from the US, and not effected, what the hell are you doing here ranting and raving about how wrong we are? Go away. Go back to whatever planet you come from, safe in the knowledge that whatever we do about same-sex marriage, it cannot possibly touch your life in any way.
And this is your real-life example how a *hospital* didn’t let him see his partner? Seriously, I thought better of you. Now I am adjusting my assessment.
The planet is Earth, but English is fourth language for me, so I have no clue what you mean by “effeminate” and “butch”. People get fired regardless of looks, regardless how they do their job, etc. In capitalism, we are at the mercy of the markets.
They are your distinctions, caps and all. It’s your job to figure out what you mean by them. You are adding arrogance to your hypocrisy by failing to define your own terms, while at the same time expecting me to understand them and adhere to them. If you knew how to observe yourself, I would not have to be saying this.
The point is that the hospital would have had the legal authority to override the wishes of the family if the relationship were legally recognized. Thanks to the SCOTUS ruling, it will no longer matter how small-minded, intolerant, or judgmental a person’s family is. I thought that was perfectly obvious from the account I gave.
But if sexual orientation were a protected status, like race, gender, and disability, that wouldn’t be the case.
Besides which, as you might have previously gathered, I’m not exactly a fan of capitalism.
Don’t be more of a total dumb ass than you have to be, Erik.
Of course the reality of sexual orientation doesn’t matter to the person performing acts of discrimination against a person whom they perceive to be homosexual, nor to the person (consciously or unconsciously) treating with favor a person whom they perceive as heterosexual
Do you think for one moment that the bigot questions his prospective victim “You look like a fag. Do you have sex with men? Cuz if you say you’re really a fag, I’m gonna smash yer face in”? When you get beat up for looking gay, it cannot possibly matter if you really are gay, or not really gay but just happen to look like it in some people’s perception.
It cannot possibly matter, legally or morally, whether people are giving you undeserved favorable treatment because you really are a straight or because they merely perceive you to be a straight (when you really aren’t). What matters is their conduct, and that’s what KN correctly described in the term “heterosexual privilege”.
Fer chrissake, if you’re so ignorant of basic terms, then shut up about this whole issue until you’ve gone away and learned something. Come back if you ever get enough basic education to not burden the discussion with your painfully stupid claims.
One thing that should be obvious by now is that we have to explain everything very carefully. We are about half a globe apart, and in terms of conceptual frameworks even more than that.
So, let’s be clear here. You are saying that “if the relationship were legally recognized” the guy would have had the right to visit his partner despite the family’s objections. In your story, you gave only one guy’s point of view and you express your uncritical acceptance of it. You explicitly don’t give a damn about what the family thinks and you say nothing about what the supposed partner thinks.
My assessment of the story: Hopelessly one-sided, dismissed. As a journalist, you would be a very bad one. I don’t see anything here even remotely to do with “heterosexual privilege”. There was a family against a friend of their son. Isn’t it actually parents’ duty to keep an eye on the circle of friends of their children? Guess how you made yourself look right now as a parent…
Erik,
Fortunately I’m not even pretending to be a journalist. Heck, on TSZ I don’t even deploy all my chops as a professional philosopher.
And while we’re descending to the level of personal barbs, you’re not doing a great job of empathizing with human beings different from yourself.
Let me put it this way. Suppose your lover and life-partner were a Jewish woman, and that she were in the hospital dying of cancer. You want to be with her in her final days. But you happen to live in a country that doesn’t recognize interfaith relationships as having the legal status of marriages, which means that as her life-partner, neither your preferences nor hers count for much. Instead, power of attorney reverts to her family, and they refuse to let “that goy” anywhere near their daughter. Hence your partner dies without you even having had a chance to say goodbye to her.
Does that example do anything at all for you?
Not when the child[ren] is actually a grown adult being victimized not by their friend or partner or lover but rather by their homophobic imposing and threatening parents and other family members blocking the door.
Guess how you make yourself look with every word you continue to spew in defense of haters while denying any decent compassion towards the dying.
Erik, go on. Do go on and on with your hatred. If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horribly warning.
There are always two sides to any story and I took a far more objective and fair view than you. So, yes, I can empathise so well that I don’t run over people’s feelings by uncritically siding with a display of emotions. In your world maybe my attitude doesn’t count as empathy, but in my world, rational evaluation educates and thus drastically improves empathy.
It’s a pretty strong story. My assessment: Sorry state of affairs.
But, remembering our topic, nothing of “heterosexual privilege” here either.
No you didn’t. You might perceive yourself as more objective and fair, but we’re not dumb; we can actually perceive reality here. You’re far less objective and far less fair, as demonstrated by all the evidence you yourself have provided. Too bad for you.
It’s an analogy, Erik.
There’s a reason it doesn’t mention “heterosexual privilege” directly, because it’s an analogy.
It’s using an analogous example which KN hoped would get through to your human empathy if you ever had any.
Horrible warning, Erik, you’re just a horrible warning.
No you didn’t. You might perceive yourself as more objective and fair, but we’re not dumb; we can actually perceive reality here. You’re far less objective and far less fair., as demonstrated by all the evidence you yourself have provided. Too bad for you.
It’s an analogy, Erik.
There’s a reason it doesn’t mention “heterosexual privilege” directly, because it’s an analogy.
It’s using an analogous example which KN hoped would get through to your human empathy if you ever had any.
Horrible warning, Erik, you’re just a horrible warning.
Erik, I absolutely don’t expect you to adhere to any plain meaning of any term. That’s not really your thing. I was hoping you’d tell us what YOU mean by “evidence,” but I guess you won’t do that either.
KN, I hope you realize that this terminally ill woman couldn’t really be anybody’s wife if she could no longer bear children. So, I mean, what’s the big deal?
No, it is not. If my parents prevented my husband from visiting me in hospital that would a violation of both my rights and his. It would certainly not be their “duty” to do so, no matter how much they disapproved of him.
And the fact that we are married makes that clear in law.
Which is the whole damn point.
Thank you, Elizabeth.
Hi, newton.
I accept your amendments to my list. Also, I agree about the dangers of “separate but equal.” Dunno whether that was also Obama’s road or if he was just following the votes. (Actually, in this case, I think there’s a close and legitimate connection between the two.)
Okay. Marriage is the point. Except that in KN’s story they were not married. So it’s not the only point.
Well, if they had not been able to marry, then they wouldn’t have been married even if they’d wanted to be. But if they had been able, then they could have been, and so had the visiting rights that accrued.
Which is why the right to be married to your life-partner of choice should not be withheld on the grounds of the gender of your partner.
The point of the analogy is the two people are married de facto, in terms of a joint existential commitment to a life of shared projects, but that they aren’t married de jure, which means that their joint existential commitment isn’t legally recognized.
One might object that marriage de facto is not a joint existential commitment to shared life-projects but Something Else. In response, I would say that, whatever marriage has been historically and traditionally, that is indeed what marriage does mean for the majority of First World people today. So same-sex marriage is the culmination of a much larger and longer change in the conception of love, intimacy, equality, gender, power, desire, etc that has been underway for the second half of the 20th century. It is far less radical than it appears.
And now we see social conservatives in the US, like Mike Huckabee, trying to turn the clock back on feminism and the sexual revolution in order to undermine the conceptual changes that made same-sex marriage appear to be a matter of equality under the law in the first place.
Maude, it’s so simple. Why do they just not get it?
Marriage equality is necessary because otherwise we get unnecessary tragedies like the hospitals cooperating with the homophobic birth-families to deny visitation rights to same-sex partners. It’s not as if KN’s specific example is the only time this has ever happened; it has been way too common in the US wherever gay marriage has been illegal.
It’s hateful to say, well, a gay couple should just suck it up and get over that kind of tragedy, because after all, they are “defective” and inherently un-marriageable.
But it’s never necessary to be so hateful to begin with. That’s a deliberate personal choice. The alternative is so simple: just get the point!
The point is: marriage equality must be made explicit in law to prevent harm to innocent people. There’s no alternative — except continued irrational prejudice, discrimination, hate and harm.
Simple.
That’s been the eye opener for me. My first thought was: well, surely conservatives can see that marriage had changed radically even since the 19th century, with the abolition of couverture, divorce, and indeed effective forms of fertility control, so why the fuss?
But it’s beginning to think they really do want to go back to the 19th century.
It doesn’t work like that. It works as a story of unhappy love, opposed by environment and circumstances, a la Snow White or Cinderella. Young people may declare their vows to each other and run away from their parents to be together. Does this make them married? Not so fast.
Your second story was similarly about oppressive circumstances. What does it prove? Is life *just* as per your own personal sentiments in every way you want? *Should* it be? Should chocolate-lovers get all the chocolate they want? Those who think they shouldn’t, are they “small-minded, intolerant, or judgmental” while chocolate-lovers are by contrast open-hearted and tolerant? Doesn’t it occur to you to look at the matter from the point of view of chocolate, i.e. what chocolate does to people’s stomachs?
See, your stories, both of them, lack the key element that would compel me to face, in addition to the conflict that you present, also your solution to the conflict. This element is either totally missing or you are aiming at something trivial like “don’t give them hard time, let them do as they wish” which is definitely NOT a solution.
Your stories didn’t tell me anything about how you define marriage, unless it’s something atrociously oversimplifying like “feels good, want more”. Your stories didn’t tell me anything about “heterosexual privilege”. But they gave me an honest picture of your biases and the level of your analytical skills. Thanks for this.
This reminded me a a long and relevant article The Real Reason Why Conservatives … Oppose the Gay Marriage Ruling; Amanda Marcotte, June 29 2015
And as you say, KN, we have the regressives trying to turn back the clock, sometimes explicitly, sometimes covertly:
Many many thanks to Amanda Marcotte for her wonderful essay.
Sorry, dudes, people around the world are increasingly choosing freedom, love, justice and equality for all. We’re not going back to your dark ages.
Hear hear.
Or, in some cases, back to the 18th century.
There’s an old question about a fish, swimming in the sea — is the fish aware of the sea.
Based on his recent posts, it looks as if Erik is swimming in a sea of heterosexual privilege, but is completely unable to see it. That privilege appears to be invisible to Erik.
Let’s concede for the sake of the argument that we are fish swimming in the sea of “heterosexual privilege”. If your analogy is true, then we cannot breathe and will die when we leave the sea. Or your analogy is totally off the mark and you may wish to attempt another.
Note that according to KN “heterosexual privilege” is *unjust* and getting out of it should be like liberation. Thus far there’s no clarity what “heterosexual privilege” is, much less if it’s unjust.
Moving some posts to guano.
It’s been a difficult thread this. Maybe time to move on?
I would like to point out that calling someone a “feckin’ idiot” is no more (and arguably less) offensive than calling them “defective”.
Please attempt to treat everyone here with some minimal degree respect.
Yeah, Neil. Plus which, how can it be a good analogy if “fish” begins with “f” and “heterosexual privilege” begins with “h”?! I mean the words don’t even have close to the same number of syllables either!
Sheesh, Neil!
I’m fine with that. I’m confident that the deeper philosophical disagreements between myself and Erik will arise in future conversations.
I looked at guano, and I was just curious: when did Gregory ever “respectfully disagree” with anybody?
Yep, prejudice in view here.
It makes them married when they go before a justice of the peace and get married, which they wish to do, but which is only possible where marriage is legal (and not arbitrarily denied on grounds of fertility, gender, etc.)
Yep, prejudice in view here.
Comparing getting married (regardless of gender) to getting an upset stomach. 🙁 Duh, silly you, don’t get gay-married and then you won’t have to worry about getting an upset stomach!
Yep, prejudice in view here.
Of course, NOT giving people a hard time IS a solution to those people being harmed when they have been illogically and hatefully given a hard time by bigots
Yep, prejudice in view here.
Too bad they didn’t give you even a shred of insight into your own biases, Erik.
I’m not ashamed and there’s no reason why I should be. I figured the odds of my comment above being sent to guano, and knew I could just repost it minus the parts I figure are most-likely not allowed. And ya’ know what Erik? My point still remains visible to everyone who doesn’t share your particular biases:
There is no rational, moral or legal reason to argue against the spread of marriage equality, equality which is a forwarding of the grandest traditions of humanity, of empathy for the love of others, and of a desire to extend freedoms which do no harm.
And as every single comment you have written in this thread makes visible, the only arguments which can be made against marriage equality require ignoring everything real people say in favor of the “traditional” fantasy in one man’s head, a fantasy world of “true marriage” where all marriage partners are required by law to be heterosexual, fertile, monogamous — but definitely not required to be loving, consenting, nor even adult (because those have not been inviolable parts of the 2000-year-old definition of “traditional marriage” which you think you are defending.).
Every single comment you have written in this thread makes visible that being against gay marriage requires determined ignorance, prior bias, and such bizarrely irrational prejudice that it appears sensible — to you, and you alone — to claim a loving couple is exactly the same as a three-legged dog. Every unbiased witness can see how odious that is. Too bad you don’t see that.
… whatever you are.