Opposition to gay marriage has, over the past couple of decades, come under the more positive-sounding banner of Defense of Marriage (including, obviously the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act).
So once and for all, and I’m entirely serious about this, I’d like to hear from one person who sincerely feels his or her marriage is or was endangered by gays being allowed to marry. Because I just want to understand how that works.
I’m asking everybody to share and re-share this until we hear first-hand from somebody whose marriage actually needed defending.
© 2012 by Bill Bickel unless otherwise noted.
Of course it’s not individual marriages that are defended. It’s the sacredness of marriage as an institution. Which begs the question why government is involved in and grants benefits to marriage in the first place.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone’s actually claimed that his or her individual marriage is in actual danger. It’s just that by diluting and supposedly devaluing the concept of marriage (any further than it’s already been by heterosexuals), it makes the institution less powerful, less necessary, and less appealing.
That doesn’t make any sense at all. Gay people who want to get married are reinforcing the institution by asking to have it apply more of the time. What would weaken marriage would be to say that it is not applicable or unnecessary.
It makes perfect /sense/, it’s just not really /true/.
Say we opened up marriage to include all sorts of familial relationships — so adoptions become “marriages”, close friendships become “marriages”, etc. That would kind of dilute the meaning of the word “marriage”, wouldn’t it? It’d take some, or most, of the prestige and feeling of the concept of the institution out, and make people less inclined to bother with the marriage, right?
Similar to home ownership, the government sees a benefit to having married couples, so they provide incentives to encourage it. Married couples are seen as a more stable “pillar” of the community. I’ll leave the rant about whether or not those things are true any longer for another day.
Married couples may (or may not) provide a more stable pillar of the community, but then wouldn’t more married couples provide a larger pillar ? So then allowing same sex marriage would increase the size of the pillar ?
Also, even if you assume that the benefits for some reason only come from opposite-sex marriages, and not from same-sex marriages, it’s not clear to me why same-sex marriages would remove the benefits of opposite-sex marriages, unless lots of straight people would abandon their opposite-sex marriages to enter same-sex ones.
It’s time to separate the religious and legal concepts of marriage. I have no problem with civil unions- in fact I think they are a good idea for everyone. Marriage on the other hand should be treated just as the religious sacrament it is. Let each faith determine who can marry but let the political and legal process determine what benefits and obligations are conferred with a civil union.
That’s what we have now. Religious marriages are performed in churches, and no one is telling them who they can or can’t marry.
Civil marriages happen when one gets a license that is properly authorized and witnessed.
One can get either without the other. Often the license is signed by the person performing the religious wedding, but it isn’t required.
I just don’t buy the “sanctity of marriage” argument from people who aren’t pushing harder to criminalize adultery and make it harder to get divorced. Those are the things that trivialize marriage, not other people getting married.
Nice to see that it’s still true that people don’t notice privilege when they’re on the receiving end. This issue doesn’t even effect me, but at least I can see that I’m set up for benefits.
Marriage is written into law all over the place. from the tax code (where a married couple can sometimes get a tax break by filing jointly) to medical care (take a gander at the people who can request your medical records legally) to the enforcement of wills and testaments (guess what happens if your kids contest a will where you left your money to your civil partner). And without the force of law, there are other consequences as well: religious hospitals just love to kick out civil partners from sick rooms where spouses would be allowed to stay.
I once read that there were over 1,700 legal benefits to marriage…from the US federal government alone.
Bill, that’s precisely one of the changes I intend to make when they finally put me in charge: the government will recognize and authorize civil unions only — for any two adults — with all the rights and obligations now associated with marriage, and “marriage” will be a religious and social construct added on to that: your clergyperson can declare you married, or you can declare yourself married. Now granted, there will be people who will refuse to recognize a same-sex couple as “married,” but who cares they think?
Why only 2, Bill?
I’m just a traditionalist at heart.
Isn’t that the long-standing deal in France and some other countries? Wedding parties go to the town hall for a quick civil ceremony before proceeding to the church?
dbenson is absolutely correct. In nearly every other country in the world, the couple goes to a civil office to legally marry. Only afterwards, if they want some other ceremony do they go somewhere for a big splash-out. That “other ceremony” increasingly rarely takes place in a church, except for those of the RC persuasion. My sister “married” by the town clerk of Edam in the town hall. I’ve got a stepson who married a Japanese woman. After the civil procedure, several days later they had a formal ceremony at a Shinto Grand Shrine where they reported their union to all their ancestors and to Izanami and Izanagi (q.v.)
If you are opposed to Gay marriage, then don’t marry a homosexual. I haven’t got the faintest idea why Gay Marriage should threaten anyone else either individually or collectively. As for the sanctity of marriage, what on earth is sacred about rape within marriage violent/emotional/mental or financial abuse of a partner of either sex, infidelity? What is sacred about an individual forgetting their vows? Interesting how so many folk who object to gay marriage because it threatens the sanctity of the union have actualy profaned theirs.
I think you’re misunderstanding the question.
I don’t think people think they are defending “marriages”, as actual things — I think they think they’re defending “marriage”, as an abstract concept.
Lemme make a programming analogy, if I may. The following is pseudocode, not any particular programming language, but hopefully it gets the idea across:
Let’s say that there is a Class, Marriage(). Marriage() takes two arguments, one of type MAN, one of type WOMAN.
Class Marriage(man, woman) {
(stuff)
}
Now, MY marriage is an example of this:
myMarriage = new Marriage(Ian, Lis);
I want to redefine Class Marriage to take two arguments of type PERSON:
Class Marriage(person, person) {
}
Now, I don’t think that damages anything, because while “Ian” is of type “man” and “Lis” is of type “woman”, both “man” and “woman” are child classes of “person”, so “Ian” and “Lis” are ALSO both type “person”, so the original function call of myMarriage(Ian, Lis) is still valid. And I think everybody recognizes that.
The people who want to “defend marriage” are making two arguments, as I see it: first, the language specification specifies “Class Marriage (man, woman)”, so if we implement “Class Marriage (person, person)”, then we’re out of spec, and second, we’ve got so much code written already based on “Class Marriage (man, woman)” that we’re going to introduce bugs.
(Personally, I don’t find either of those arguments compelling — I don’t think there IS an external language specification other than what we create ourselves, and I think that we’re perfectly capable of debugging whatever issues come up as we go on.)
So, that’s how I perceive it: they’re trying to defend the abstract concept of “marriage”, not so much the individual instantiations of it. Those instantiations WILL be redefined to take two arguments of type PERSON, and that IS a change, and MIGHT have side effects, if people have written code that relies on Marriage.firstParty being of type MALE, and/or Marriage.secondParty being of type FEMALE.
Divorce is destroying the institution of marriage.
And 1/3 of all divorces now mention Facebook.
Facebook is destroying marriages faster than gays!