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’m not sure this is any more valid than Eric’s position. For the record, men generally go to some effort to avoid seeing each other’s dicks. Or being seen. There are lots of reasons for separate restrooms that are probably going to succumb to change over time.
Erik,
Erik, based on your other responses, I’m surprised you think that gay couples can actually engage in sexual relations. Doesn’t the word “sex” have a traditional meaning?? Are you pulling a Clinton here?!?
But at least we are moving to a stage where we no longer regard gender as absolutely binary.
Gendered pronouns are a problem though. I’d love to think the future, pronouns might not be gendered. Then knowing a person’s gender would be essential before you can even talking grammatically.
Not that gender isn’t important, but it’s not as important as language makes it.
The country of Amazons?
Seriously, you realise that something like “a country of homosexuals” necessarily entails child-snatching from neighbouring countries or strictly regulated sexual (ab)use of neighbouring populations, because homosexuals cannot breed by themselves, don’t you? To put it more bluntly, you are saying inherently self-contradictory things and expecting me to take you seriously.
My first language does not have grammatical genders. Your feminist perspective is utterly foreign on multiple levels.
Humans can a lot of things. Clinton was able to pull a Clinton. Amazing what humans are capable of. Things will begin make more sense when you think about things in terms of what is proper, right, healthy, and such.
I think it’s rather difficult to tease out what is genetic and what is developmental and what is learned. Some things I think are learned but not taught. It is my badly evidenced belief that humans have a genetically based incest taboo. We tend not to be attracted to people we associate with as children. Siblings, friends. I could be reading too much National Geographic, but isn’t it true that some island cultures separate boys and girls prior to puberty? is it possible that in a small population, it is necessary to impose this separation to avoid the incest taboo?
There are small towns where kids attending the same elementary school almost never marry each other, despite the inconvenience of having to leave town to find a mate.
My point — if I have one — is that sexual behavior is complicated, and I oppose any attempt by government to mandate or interfere. I have similar anti-busybody opinions in other areas of human behavior. But I don’t want to hijack the thread.
You seriously believe that people who are homosexual by preference never have children?
Eric, answer the question. Can you name a country or society where heterosexual relations — as such — have been outlawed, or where people wishing to marry people of the opposite sex have been executed or imprisoned for being deviant?
It’s all about power, even the institution of marriage and the regulation of “normal” sex. For the most part, it’s been power of men over women, but it’s also power of men over other men. Rarely the power of women.
The answer is in the inherent self-contradictions of your question. If homosexuals are able to make laws, then they are (ab)using power like everybody else, so your question does not make sense. If there be a country where heterosexuals make a law against themselves, then they are self-destructive and this doesn’t make sense either.
Anyway, the continuity of the population of any country strictly depends on heterosexual fertility – because there’s no other kind of fertility, it’s how nature works – , so the fact that heterosexual couples have been given special status everywhere you look is actually perfectly natural, based on common sense, not on some evil power as you imply.
Well, I wouldn’t know about what men do about avoiding seeing each other’s dicks. But it is certainly true that urinals take up less space, and that traditionally, women are supposed to be protected from seeing dicks.
One thing you have to do when designing institutional buildings is to figure out whether you need separate bathrooms or not, and if you need to get a lot of people through in a short space of time (theatre intervals, say) you need far more space for the women’s than the mens. And there’s a big taboo against having women share a space with urinals – far less sharing a space with cubicles.
Although there are weird things about having a corner, or a screen, so you can’t see the actual toilet from the shared lobby.
Please clear this up. If heterosexuals make laws against homosexuals, they are abusing power?
Am I reading this correctly?
Well fwiw agree.
First Do No Harm.
Things will begin make more sense when you think about things in terms of what is proper, right, healthy, and such.
Erik, what you mean here, of course, is that you think things will clear up for me when I think about them in terms of what YOU think is proper, right healthy and such. The thing is, I’d have to have a pretty severe head injury for that to happen. Maybe if I ate some glue or something.
You’ve evaded the question though–Can gays actually have SEX in your view?
non sequitur.
There is no shortage of heterosexual couples, Eric, and allowing gay people to marr won’t reduce their number. And the fact that gay people have children means that it doesn’t even reduce the number of children.
Not that underfertility is the world’s problem right now.
Erik,
What’s sad is your refusal to directly answer questions about your bigotry.
If you don’t like my phrasing, try this one: On what possible rational basis would you deny that these men and their children are a family?
There’s no avoiding them. I’ve seen one or two in this very thread.
You started by saying something like “sexual mores are about power” and you explicitly excluded homosexuals from such mores, thus implying that it’s only heterosexuals who use power. This is false and incoherent in so many ways that I don’t know where to start. Most obviously, those who use power are always a tiny minority of the population, so power has nothing to do with sexuality per se. Everybody is sexual one way or another, but hardly anyone of us wields any significant power. Then, historically there have been homosexual kings and generals and congressmen and whatever, so the use of power is obviously not limited to heterosexuals. And lastly, restrictions on public sexuality – e.g. related to the traditional definition of marriage – do not stem from any “sexual mores”. Mores change, but marriage has consistently revolved around the concrete physiological fact that only heterosexuals produce offspring, which in turn provides continuity to the tribe or nation, so these traditions are easily explained by plain common sense survival instead of power, discrimination, injustice, ill will or wickedness.
Your dilettante Freudianism has been duly noted and dismissed.
Where to start. True, there’s no shortage of heterosexual couples, but there’s a huge shortage of stability of the couples. Things like fidelity and adultery – entailed by the traditional concept of marriage – have no meaning to people these days. Why is fidelity and stability of couples important, you may ask? Because it provides a safe and cozy environment for children to grow in. Why is safe and cozy environment for children important, you may ask? Because children are particularly vulnerable when they are not being taken care of. Children are most naturally and obviously the duty of their own biological parents and it so happens that only heterosexual couples can biologically produce children, so all this – stability, fidelity, marriage and parenthood – is particularly important to ensure for heterosexual couples, to indicate to them that society attends to their parental functions.
In case of homosexual couples, none of these considerations make sense at all. They cannot have children in the relevant sense, so any special care to ensure the fidelity of homosexual couples doesn’t matter. Instead, when homosexual couples are normalised, it sends a public signal that heterosexual couples have no special significance in society, and this in turn implies that children’s natural growth environment – the biological family – has no special significance either. Yet I’m sure you didn’t mean any harm to innocent children. The natural way to not end up with such implications is to affirm the traditional meaning of marriage and family, providing heterosexual couples with a public status that homosexual couples cannot meaningfully ask for.
As to your answer to my question meanwhile, I noticed that you and others preferred B – transgenders should use the traditional restrooms, i.e. they should accommodate to the current status quo. Now, why couldn’t homosexuals similarly live in peace with the traditional definition of marriage? Everybody, both homosexuals and heterosexuals equally, are born as a result of heterosexual act exclusively. This is how nature works and the traditional definition of marriage marks how nature works. Why did they have to neuter this concept so that it has no connection any more to how nature works? Why was it necessary to change everybody else’s perception of marriage instead of accepting the status quo, particularly when the status quo makes sense physiologically?
A rather loaded question. My point is that there’s a difference between stepparents and biological parents, stepchildren and biological children. Do you deny the difference?
Because of people like you, phrases like “biological family”, “nuclear family”, and “core family” have been invented to underscore what plain “family” used to mean. Grownups should not behave as if they didn’t know the meaning of such words.
From the context it should be evident that I meant healthy, proper and right as distinguished from what people simply *can* do. The problem is precisely that they *can* do absolutely anything, but there are improper and unhealthy things that they *shouldn’t* do. You may have a different opinion here, but to me these things are objectively deducible, not a matter of opinion.
Of course they *can*. People *can* have sex with pretty much anything. As I said, some considerations of proper conduct and health will help people gain some sensible perspective. You are evidently not interested in such perspective, and this is bad. For example, people *can* shoot each other too. Two consenting adults can agree to eat each other. If you see things only in terms of *can*, then you have no basis to deduce why such conduct is improper or even if it is improper. This is where you stand.
That way of phrasing things suggests that fidelity and stability are instrumental goods only, for the sake of child-rearing, which is the only intrinsic good you seem to recognize here. In the absence of that intrinsic good, the other goods — being merely instrumental — lose their normative grip.
But that seems quite badly mistaken to me. The correct view is that heterosexual couples enjoy many intrinsic goods of committed relationships — a life of shared projects, dreams, hopes, and failures; growing old together; having someone with whom the I-Thou relation is fully realized; and the intrinsic good of raising a child together. Homosexual couples can enjoy all of these intrinsic goods — the last one if they adopt.
Turning all of the intrinsic goods of a committed relationship into instrumental goods for the sake of having a child seems to really miss out on the phenomenology of love and commitment. Heterosexual couples don’t take on a lifetime of shared projects for the sake of having children together; we take on a lifetime of shared projects and then see if having a child together is going to be among those projects.
I also think it is a bit odd for someone who insists on the theistic claim that human life essentially involves a transcendence of biology to pin their argument for marriage on a fact of human biology. But that’s just me.
No, you’ve entirely missewd my point, erik. What I want to know is why you consider any activity between two males SEX. After all, it can be no more ‘traditional’ or ‘proper’ than a marriage between two males. I don’t see why you should even understand the expression, being all ultr-lexy the way you claim to be. The fact the you think people can have SEX ‘with anything’ makes crystal clear how insincere your posts have been about marriage, which you claim can only occur between men and women. That’s the traditional view of SEX too. Now do you get it?
Eric, you continue avoiding my question. Have gays ever passed laws forbidding heterosexual intercourse? Have gays ever imprisoned or executed heterosexuals for the crime of being heterosexual? Bonus question: Do you believe gays never have children? Do you believe they never raise children?
I regard a “legal marriage” as that relationship implicitly defined by the entire body of relevant laws, rules, regulations, and legal precedents that cover it and govern it. All of this being not necessarily the same thing as “holy matrimony” as determined by any church or religious faith.
It seems clear to me that Erik’s idea of marriage matches the “holy matrimony” of his particular religious faith, and that this sectarian idea is quite distinct from legal marriage, which is more a matter of dealing with child custody, inheritance, property rights, divorce settlements, tax returns, court testimony, visitation rights and all that. Legal marriage has little to do with lifelong, or with commitment, or even with love. People commit legal marriage for other (and very different) reasons all the time. And of course, the definition of legal marriage changes, at least incrementally, with every new law, regulation, or court decision.
Erik:
“Instead, when homosexual couples are normalised, it sends a public signal that heterosexual couples have no special significance in society, and this in turn implies that children’s natural growth environment – the biological family – has no special significance either. ”
Yes, this might well be the case. As studies are done, at least from what I’ve read so far, they are coming to the following consistent conclusions:
1) Children do best, by most reasonable metrics, when they are raised by two caring parents – parents who want and love them.
2) The sexes of the parents doesn’t seem to make much difference.
3) Whether the parents are married doesn’t seem to make much difference either.
Because current laws make adoption more challenging for unmarried people, this latest change promises to be of great benefit to a large number of children. Whether or not they match your notion of a healthy family, they are surely healthier than people who wish to adopt, and children who need to be adopted, both being denied.
Well, just when things were starting to cool off.
More fuel for the fire:
Marriage and The Matrix
Any books around here we can burn? I feel a need to burn some books!
Mung,
You do better at quoting Feser than you do at explaining exactly why he is so exercised.
After all, pair-bonding has been a common human practice since man was definably man. This has been as true of gays and lesbians as of heterosexuals – both have commonly and historically paired off into long lasting, monogamous committed relationships. There’s nothing new there.
What’s new is that these relationships are being extended legal recognition. But as a longtime married person, I can tell you that in ordinary day to day life, this legal recognition is largely invisible. Yes, it can become visible at the margins – certain sorts of legal or medical problems – but for the most part, these are infrequent and the legal status is moot. Extending legal recognition is, for practical purposes, not a strong influence on a relationship.
Yet Feser is going into dire straits of existential angst, having serious apoplexy at the very idea. Why? In all his philosphical exposition, he never really makes any sort of case that he or anyone else will be impacted by the fact that some relationships (between people he’ll never meet) have altered legal status. Their partnership status remains unchanged.
Flint, to me the point is the position people who attempt to argue the “illogic” of same sex marriage are bound to find themselves in, and I think this thread demonstrates Feser’s point. One needs to read the whole article, not just the ‘racy bits’ I quote mined.
Aww, Mung, I knew you were going to break my heart. I’m deeply disappointed in your enthusiasm for the bigoted-about-everything Fesser.
Funny how Fesser’s view of “natural law” happens to coincide exactly with what gives him a boner being naturally good and what kills his boner being naturally bad.
Fesser is a genuine shitwad — he can’t help being one, since he’s chosen to be a rightwing Catholic — but you certainly could have chosen not to post his shit with such approval.
Here’s an example of Fesser being a totally incompetent philosopher as well as being a viciously-bigoted Catholic about sex:
Fuck him sideways, he’s an evil bastard.
HIm and his ilk have ruined more people’s lives than any other force for evil in human history.
Mung,
I read Feser’s entire article, and the whole is little better than the parts you quoted.
How about doing an OP on it? It would be fun to pick apart.
Where to start, indeed.
OK, in no particular order:
I find the poverty of your view of marriage extraordinary. Read those marriage vows again – no mention of children. Sure, children, both biologically and traditionally, may be the reason that as a species we like to pair-bond. But just as sex is enjoyable whether or not children are the intention, so a pair-bond is something desirable for many, whether or not children are the intention. Indeed I’d argue that a marriage contracted simply to have children would be doomed to failure. The motivation for most people to marry is to have a partnership that will last for life. Sure, it’s good for children too. But lack of children in no way undermines the value of that lifelong partnership.
They can have children in the only relevant sense, which is as part of their family.
Pray tell what special care ensures the fidelity of heterosexual couples? Other than the marriage vows themselves? Which are precisely what is at issue?
The same would, on your reasoning, apply to elderly couples. If you want families with children to have special significance, you have carved marriage at the wrong joints.
Well, it doesn’t. Children do as well raised by biological as non-biological parents. And in the case of gay couples, often the child is the biological offspring of one of them anyway. Same with heterosexual couples.
OK, tell me what this “status” thing is that is jeopardised by gay marriage, and not by marriage between elderly heterosexual couples, or by heterosexual couples that have no intention of having children, or by marriage between heterosexual divorcees, or by forced marriages, or polygamous marriages, or marriages involving a child bride, bearing in mind that one reason that many gay couples marry is precisely so that they can raise a family.
Your objection makes no sense.
It’s precisely that traditional definition they want. And there’s no reason why they shouldn’t have it: the opportunity to make those exact same vows to the lifelong partner of their choice. Just as there is no reason why someone who identifies as female shouldn’t use the same restrooms as everyone else who identifies as female.
Nope. Never heard of IVF? Never heard of donor insemination?
Being natural isn’t the same as being right. It is probably natural for men to be more promiscuous than women. Doesn’t make it right (or wrong, necessarily, but it does make marriage problematic sometimes). Murder is probably natural too, for that matter.
Same reason as it was necessary to change everybody’s perception of marriage when couverture was abolished: Justice. Even though it made sense “physiologically”, I guess, to many. Biologically even.
I see KN made my points far more eloquently. Good to know philosophy is useful for something 🙂
Heh. Amanda Marcotte must have read my comment:
ETA Oops, just saw I made mine in response to KN posting the same thing!
geez, I’m getting old…
Yes, it’s mistaken. Namely, your reading is mistaken.
Marriage is multifaceted, where the multiple facets are interdependent and irreducible. The main aspect of it is the couple, for whom fidelity should be absolutely central, thus intrinsic, not instrumental to anything else. However, the couple is not everything. Marriage itself is for the sake of the family, and from the point of view of the family, fidelity of the parents serves also their children.
Now, children are an irreducible part of the family. You cannot call a couple meaningfully a family – they are a couple. A couple with children can be a family. And all this is part and parcel of what “marriage” entails. Take anything away from this and we are not talking about the same thing. Don’t be a silly reductionist like everybody else.
I did. The sentence with “signal”. You think public signals broadcast by the authorities are not important? Then the whole LGBT campaign versus traditional marriage debacle is not important…
So, children come and go, therefore they can be ignored. Point taken.
Seriously, if children are not part and parcel of what marriage entails, then we are not talking about the same thing. However, if children are part and parcel of what marriage entails, then it’s unforgivable for you to argue them into non-existence here. It’s true that marriage vows “go beyond” and “transcend” children, but they never disregard children.
For example, you mentioned something about inheriting earlier. Is this suddenly not an essential point in your argumentation about “benefits” of marriage? If it is, then you cannot say what you just said here.
This is a pretty neat tactic: Take a sample that is not representative and offer it as if it were representative. You could just as well pick up a bunch of three-legged dogs and argue that dogs can be three-legged just fine, there’s nothing missing. Sorry, but there is a leg missing.
And I know that you will never acknowledge this point, but by your logic a fast runner is non-different from a slow runner, a professional gynecologist is none better than a first-year student, wolf is the same as sheep, etc. The world does not work this way. Man is different from woman and the difference has a bunch of inevitable real-life consequences that cannot be glossed over no matter how you try. It’s unscientific, irrational, and utterly surreal to try to ignore this.
Erik,
Yes. Parents are the ones who love and raise their children, regardless of genetic relationship.
Do you think that a heterosexual couple with adopted children is not a family? A remarried widow, her children, and her new spouse? Are these all defective in some way in your view?
Erik,
It’s too bad that your desire to feel special is thwarted by other people having equal protection under the law.
My marriage has special significance to me, and that’s not changed one bit by anyone else choosing to marry. If you can only feel special if other people are denied the same rights you have, that’s your reaction and you’re responsible for it.
Erik, your analysis is a mess.
First of all, yes, a childless marriage is a family. My husband is a “family member” of mine.
Secondly, a childless marriage is just as much a marriage as one with children.
Thirdly, spouses inherit, not just offspring.
Fourthly, gay couples have children.
Fifthly, to say that a marriage can exist without children is not to ignore children any more than to say that a marriage with one child is to ignore siblings.
Sixthly, a marriage between people past child-bearing is just as “representative” of marriage as any other. It’s an example of marriage.
Finally, your analysis seems entirely predicated on the idea that any marriage that is without the biological children of both partners is “defective”. That is both absurd and offensive.
I note that you consistently ignore my comments about traditional marriage vows, which are about commitment to love and cherish each other “for better or worse” “till do us part”. Not about either sex or children. If there is any “core” to traditional marriage it is surely those vows, voluntarily made between two people who want to commit themselves to love each other for life.
I tend to glaze over at all the philosophical and theological babble. The issue is people telling other people what to do.
Priests had the whip for thousand of years. They allied themselves with politicians and bullies. They became bullies. Now they have lost the power to tell others what they can and cannot do, and they are whining about it.
Tough. I do not take moral instruction from child rapists and enablers of child abusers.
petrushka,
Do you think people should be ably to smoke crack freely in Trafalger square, and urinate on the gates of Buckingham Palace, then drive drunk to Sheffield?
If you are against letting them do so, aren’t you trying to tell others what to do for your own sake?
Those things have consequences for other people. How does two people of the same sex getting married change anything for anyone else?
Yes, it would make me feel better if you were to seek help for your obvious issues. So I guess you are correct.
OMagain,
Some people don’t like to see gays kissing in public, some people don’t like to see people smoking crack.
Why are your needs so special?
Yay Phoodoo is back.
phoodoo,
In my part of the world, air-kissing is the standard greeting between men related by family or who are very good friends. I was taken aback being so embraced the first time it happened to me. Seems the most natural thing to do these days.
And an any case, the reason we don’t let people get drunk and drive to Sheffield is that they might kill someone on the way.
Elizabeth,
Why don’t you let them smoke crack in Trafalgar Square?
Elizabeth,
Lots of activities people do might kill someone else.
Yes, or harm them, which is why we have laws to limit those activities.
And the relevance of this to gay people marrying is…?
Elizabeth,
No you don’t have laws which prevent people from doing things that kill others. You have laws which prevent people from doing “some” things that might kill others, while other activities continued to be allowed.
Now, why shouldn’t people be allowed to smoke crack in Trafalgar, if the principle (that Petrushka advocates) is let people do what they want?
Do you want a serious discussion about whether restrictions on arguably victim-free activities like recreational rug use are ethically or pragmatically justifiable? Seems that would be a topic for another thread.
ETA as indeed would recreational drug use be off-topic!
Have you ever masturbated? ever in your life?
Smoke pot? Maybe. Are people allowed to drink wine or beer in public?
Exactly how is driving drunk comparable to getting laid in private with a non- church approved person?