The biggest social problem in the U.S. today is the crime and academic achievement gap between blacks and whites. The academic achievement gap (several grade levels and 200 SAT points (old system)) distorts our pedagogy, academic hiring and admissions, and employment standards in the public and private sectors (see the recent New Haven firefighters reverse discrimination case); it triggers huge and to date wholly ineffective government programs to try to close the gap (e.g., Head Start, No Child Left Behind). Black males commit homicide at ten times the rate of white males; in New York City, a representative locality, any violent crime is 13 times more likely to be committed by a black perp than by a white one. This crime gap results in depressed urban economies, huge incarceration costs, and the unjust demonization of the police as racist for merely going after criminals and of inner-city employers who worry about black thieves coming into their stores.
One overpowering cause of black social failure is the breakdown of marriage in the black community. Nationally, the black illegitimacy rate is 71%; in some inner city areas, it is closer to 90%. When boys grow up without any expectation that they will have to marry the mother of their children, they fail to learn the most basic lesson of personal responsibility. A community without the marriage norm is teetering on the edge of civilizational collapse, if it has not already fallen into the abyss. Fatherless black boys, who themselves experience no pressure to become marriageable mates as they grow up, end up joining gangs, dropping out of school, and embracing a “street” lifestyle in the absence of any male authority in the home.
If the black illegitimacy rate were not nearly three times the rate of whites’, I would have few qualms about gay marriage. Or if someone can guarantee that widespread gay marriage would not further erode the expectation among blacks that marriage is the proper context for raising children, I would also not worry. But no one can make that guarantee.
Why might it further depress the black marriage rate? There is a logical reason and a visceral reason. First, it sends the signal that marriage is simply about numbers: it is an institution that binds two (for the moment) people who are in love. It erases completely the significance that marriage is THE context in which the children of biological parents should be raised. And there are undoubtedly many other subtle meanings and effects of gay marriage that we cannot even imagine at the moment—which institutional shift is something that conservatives should be most attuned to.
As for the visceral reason: It is no secret that resistance to homosexuality is highest among the black population (though probably other ethnic minorities are close contenders). I fear that it will be harder than usual to persuade black men of the obligation to marry the mother of their children if the inevitable media saturation coverage associates marriage with homosexuals. Is the availability of homosexual marriage a valid reason to shun the institution? No, but that doesn’t make the reaction any less likely.
What are the chances that gay marriage would further doom marriage among blacks? I don’t know. Again, if someone can persuade me that the chances are zero, then I would be much more sanguine. But anything more than zero, I am reluctant to risk.
Is it fair to those gays who want to marry that their desires should be thwarted for the sake of black boys? Maybe not. And as has been pointed out many times before, it is exclusively heterosexuals who have eroded the institution of marriage through easy divorce, increasing rates of single-parenting, “blended” families, and co-habitation. But just because marriage is already in bad shape, for reasons wholly unrelated to gay marriage, doesn’t mean that gay marriage won’t weaken it further.
Black failure is at present a greater social problem in my view than whether gays who already have the right of civil unions have the right to marry as well. For similar reasons, I have always been appalled at the campaign by gay rights groups to shut down inner city Boy Scout organizations if they don’t toe the line on gay rights. A Scout troop may be the only hope that a black 11-year-old in Brooklyn has to learn self-discipline and deferred gratification. That black kid’s life chances are a lot bleaker than any gay white Eagle scout leader.
I agree with Andrew and David Hume that gay marriage is inevitable, given the clout of the gay lobby and the power of the modern non-discrimination principle. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t have consequences beyond what we can possibly foretell and which conservatives should be attuned to.
Awww crap it posted before I was finished.
Anyway they could argue (and probably did) “Who knows what social change letting women vote will cause.”
And they would have been right. But does anyone want to go back?
Dear Mrs. Mac Donald ! I have recently bought and read the old book (first published in 1984) by Charles Murray “Losing Ground”. I was overwhelmed, how clearly he makes the case, that it is the welfare system of “The Great Society”, which lead to the demise of marriage institute in minority community. Does the gay marriage (which I have no opinion about) question is really so important for the fate of minority families?
Respectfully, Florida resident.
It seems everyone is of the opinion that gay marriage is inevitable.
Given the quality of the arguments posited against gay marriage so far, I think that’s a very safe bet.
>>> What she could do instead is attempt to gather evidence from what we might consider small scale experiments. For example Massachusetts has allowed gay marriage since 2005. Since that time, what has happened to black views about marriage? Has the rate of marriage among blacks in MA declined? Can we find any correlation whatsoever from which we might further investigate the relationship between gay marriage and marriage among blacks?
Good enough ideas. Ms. MacDonald is simply suggesting an idea for consideration, not submitting a dissertation to a peer-reviewed journal.
>>> Sadly, she doesn’t bother with this. Nor does she propose a different method for testing her idea prospectively. She simply creates an illogical specter that bad stuff *could* happen, and submits that as sufficient rationale for avoiding gay marriage entirely.
No, she’s just adding to the discussion a speculative but interesting idea regarding one of the myriad complexities associated with the super-duper complicated relationship between families, groups, individuals, and one particular social institution, which we are apparently about to start tinkering with in a fundamentally new way.
Saying, “You might not like the long-term consequences, like, for example…” is not the same as saying, “I have proven that it will be an unmitigated disaster.”
There is if I may say so a little too much eagerness to categorically dismiss an idea, rather than either challenge it, or (God Forbid!) take it seriously for five seconds.
For what it’s worth, it seems to me a bit of a stretch that gay marriage would inhibit macho black men from getting married (those that are still interested…), but it IS … interesting … and is based on at least a consideration of one particular social dynamic.
Less of a stretch is the logical (as opposed to the “visceral”) argument that gay marriage changes marriage in such a way that its function as a family-structuring, child-protecting institution will be compromised.
” For what it’s worth, it seems to me a bit of a stretch that gay marriage would inhibit macho black men from getting married (those that are still interested…), but it IS … interesting … and is based on at least a consideration of one particular social dynamic.”
Actually it’s not in the least bit interesting except to visualize McDonald doing acrobatics. Even you yourself say its a stretch. If the best and brightest of secular right (im honoring McDonald here) cannot come up with anything better than this then the contra SSM argument will just become religious. I really would welcome good secular arguments against gay marriage. This one is not even worthy of a high school paper.
Formulate a decent argument. Saying that we are tinkering with something and that is necessarily bad, is not a decent argument.
And shes NOT ‘simply suggesting an idea for consideration’ Her whole tone is one of taking a stand in favor of some possibility that has no evidence and therefore no merit that most of us here can see.
Gay males don’t contribute to the illegitimacy problem, at least so far as they’re consistently homosexual. Allowing them to get married should help to insure this result, since treating their status as valid means less pressure on them to play the macho straight-male role which doesn’t come naturally to them. So it should help to reduce illegitimacy rates, I’d think.
The gay marriage argument is over. It will take a while to unwind the state-constitutional amendments that passed in about 20 states over the last five years, but within 20-30 years at the outside gay marriage will be the law of the land, federally and in all of the states.
Why is this? It’s because traditionalist conservatives, whether religious or secular, made a pretty startling mistake: when confronting the desire of gays enjoy all (or even any) of the benefits that the conservatives themselves claim to flow from marriage, the conservatives just said “no,” and maybe added “yuck,” with manifest and complete disregard for the well-being of gays. This response was never going to be sufficient.
There are solid conservative reasons for being skeptical and wary of gay marriage. Gay marriage *is* an innovation. Like most innovations it *may* have unintended consequences (in fact, like most innovations, it probably will). Those unintended consequences, or at least some of them, *might* be negative. The conservative, a student of the French and Russian Revolutions, and of Atlee-Bevanism, among other episodes, knows better than to implement grand innovations straight away, even if the innovations arise with the best of intentions, because things can go horribly wrong.
All of this creates a solid presumption against full-bore introduction of something like gay marriage, lest things go unexpectedly and terribly wrong. But it creates nothing more than a presumption, and only a presumption against decisive innovation. It provides no support whatever for refusing to do *anything* to improve the lives or increase the stability and happiness and inclusion of gay people and gay relationships. If conservatives had been true to the prudential principle (to perhaps coin a term) they would have said: “Look. We ourselves have sanctified and celebrated the virtues and glories of marriage. We wholly understand why you would want access to these benefits — and to the material, legal benefits and obligations that attend the civil side of marriage — for your own relationships. But we have concerns. They are [the concerns that underlie the prudential principle]. But we also acknowledge that you are human beings, and that your happiness and stability, &c., are not valueless to us in our deliberations. We will therefore look at the attributes and benefits of marriage and consider which we think we can extend to gay unions without undermining traditional marriage. Those we can grant now, which will address some of your concerns *and* demonstrate our good faith. Then we will wait a while, and see. If it appears that taking this first step does have some negative unintended consequences, then we might have to step back — or at least go no further. If, however, no material, negative unintended consequences arise from this first step, we will take another,” and so on. This would have been the good faith, careful, conservative, serious response.
Instead, conservatives acted like asses. They made the prudential principle argument, but pretended that it justified not even having to take into consideration — ever — the well-being of gays and their relationships and their claims to access to the civil advantages of marriage. And they shut the door on any good-faith, evolutionary or experimental steps to test whether their theories about unintended consequences were valid or not. (Imagine Derb’s disgust if, say, the Intelligent Design crowd posited their theory of a divine creator and then attempted to forbid any experiments designed to test their claims.)
It was this inflexibility and facial unwillingness to count gay people in the equation at all that lost the battle for conservatives. It demonstrated bad faith, and locked conservatives into making ridiculous arguments, like the ones against granting de jure hospital visitation rights and emergency medical decision-making power to gay couples. Yes, one can get a legal power of attorney. But does one travel with it all the time? Is that plausible? If it *is* plausible (i.e., if there’s no real value to the automatic arrangement) then why is it granted to (straight) married couples? Obviously there *is* some intrinsic value to the automatic arrangement. Why then enforce such a ridiculous inconvenience against gay couples, when the automatic arrangement can so easily be extended, except as a (pretty crude) expression of animus? Similarly, what about social security benefits? Surely it will increase the expense to the fisc, but surely as well a gay couple has been paying the same social-security tax as their married peers. Can it make any sense — and can it conceivably be just — to deny the survivor benefit to the surviving member of a gay couple? (And note here that we’re talking about *surviving spouse* benefits, not benefits to or about children. If the attributes of marriage are designed expressly and overarchingly to create child-rearing institutions, why do these survivor benefits exist at all for couples whose children are grown?)
If conservatives had been reasonable in early days, they could almost certainly have achieved a gradual extension of marriage-like benefits and responsibilities. I still think the eventual end of the process would have been gay marriage, because my personal guess is that the unintended-consequences claims made in this arena are massively overblown or straightforwardly incoherent. But I could be wrong, and there was a chance for a measured, slow roll-out that would have allowed those theories to be tested, and the process to be arrested and reversed if the claims proved correct. But that moment has passed. As a result, not only is the conservative position going to lose categorically, and lose the chance to test their theories when there was a chance to do something about them, but in the end conservatives are going to look like knuckle-dragging bigots in the history books.
Shep! beautifully said!
But I would add that the roll out of increased acceptance of Gays has been very slow and reasonably cautious. It only looks sudden to conservatives unable or unwilling to see when change has become inevitable and even desirable. But then to a big extent that is a risk of being a conservative.
Good analysis, Shep. Incidentally this was the position that Canada and Scandinavian countries took with very modest domestic partnerships in the 1980s, civil unions in the 1990s and finally marriage in the 2000s.
I think though that you are being too generous to conservatives. Conservatives aggressively fought basic humanitarian measures like the hospital visitation laws. They fought the decriminalization of private homosexual acts – so presumably we could all have been investigated and arrested back then just for writing publicly as we are now, for engaging in free speech and assembly. At an extreme, some Republicans tried to write laws that would make it legal for an emergency room doctor to deny medical care to gay trauma victims. They tried to stop suicide-prevention programs for gay teens, while tacitly condoning bullying and assault. The casual tone of Derb’s essays or Troost’s cold social Darwinism are all the more bone-chilling when they casually imply it was okay to arrest all gay people without any consideration for the lives that were destroyed, as if they had some right to decide which people’s lives and freedom were worthy of protection and which could be thrown away. Conservatives, or whatever we should call them, simply refused to share the country with the gays. We have to see them for what they really are.
Thanks, ppnl. I did go on a bit, though, didn’t I?
I’m not sure if I agree with you about the speed of the roll out. In the grand scheme of things, both society and law are moving pretty rapidly indeed. I can’t think of any mainstream figures who were openly gay (much less accepted as such) when I was a kid in the late ’70s and through the ’80s, excepting only Rock Hudson (who certainly didn’t come out voluntarily). (Of course, there were people that everyone knew about — Paul Lynde, Richard Simmons, Liberace — but people knew because they so aggressively fit the condescending and demeaning stereotypes that society had for gays.) When the idea of gay marriage was first mooted (or at least when I first heard of the concept) in conjunction with (I think) a law suit out in Hawaii, the idea seemed patently ludicrous. Within the last decade, two dudes kissing briefly during prime time represented a cataclysm that required a national conversation and weeks of hyperventilation, and gay sex was still a felony in a handful of states. Within a very few years of now, conversely, somewhere between a third and half of the Republic will almost certainly have gay marriage or all-but-name civil unions. In at least some professions and in at least some significant number of locales, there is essentially no stigma or danger attached to “coming out.” That strikes me as a pretty significant set of developments in a startlingly short period of Grand Time. However, it no doubt feels glacial to those who have a vested interest in seeing the process concluded and who are living through it.
The reason Republicans behaved like bigots rather than prudent conservatives was their Faustian pact with the religious right, for whom the very existence of gay people was an affront. This is nothing new, of course, but what is disappointing is the corrosive effect this has had on the broader conservative movement as evidenced by the Derbyshire and Mac Donald attempts to rationalise opposition to marriage equality.
Thanks, Danilo. I wonder, though, if perhaps you’re not painting with an aggressively overbroad brush. First, surely not anything like *all* conservatives (or even anything like most of them) did any of the things you listed above. Nor are the opponents of gay-friendly developments all conservatives: witness ex-Mayor Marion Barry’s vote today against D.C.’s recognition of out-of-state SSMs. Nor I think would any of the authors of this site support any of the positions you catalogue. Nor would any of the anti-gay initiatives you cite, even had they been enacted, have resulted (in the United States, anyway) in abrogation of First Amendment Speech and Assembly protections.
There is, it strikes me, no meaningful difference between developing and employing globalizing, overwrought and inaccurate stereotypes against gays and developing and employing globalizing, overwrought and inaccurate stereotypes against conservatives. And there is, it strikes me, as much obligation to treat individual conservatives (or anything else) as individual, unique, thinking and feeling humans beings to be treated with dignity, as to treat individual gay people with the same respect.
Shep
Blacks had to wait for 150 years for something approaching equality. By comparison gay rights have been overnight. But would you have really wished to delay it 150 years?
I have seen the slow change in attitude toward Gays over my entire lifetime. I cannot see any advantage in making it slower.
JohnC —
What’s wrong with trying to rationalize a position? A bigot doesn’t rationalize: he just sticks with his prejudice and doesn’t worry about it. To rationalize a position is to put a position to the test of reason, or at least to explore the underlying premises of the position. It turns out to be a very useful exercise. I personally think, for instance, that Derb’s kinda brave (given PC norms) and interesting attempt to rationalize his objection to SSM, assisted by Heather MacD. above, has provided an extremely useful forum in which to determine that there really are no (non-animus, non-“yuck”) secular-right objections to legal recognition of same-sex couples outside of the prudential concerns that I babbled on about above. I suspect that others reading these posts will, on the whole, move however incrementally toward a similar conclusion. I even suspect that the more Heather thinks about her assertion above (that one minority can be denied a much-desired positive good that doesn’t interfere with the rights of others, on the off chance that a different minority might be tangentially harmed by its own idiosyncratic and visceral response to the granting of the right to the first group), the less it’s going to please her. Surely most conservatives are opposed to affirmative-action quotas. I very much suspect (but don’t know) that Heather is. But one cannot at the same time oppose “reverse racism” discrimination and endorse, or even contemplate, the sort of group-spoils-based thinking Heather has articulated here.
Isn’t all of this quite useful?
ppnl —
I wasn’t per se arguing that I wanted things to go more slowly — I was just noting how quickly they have been moving, in the grand scheme of things. I *do* wish, for all parties involved, that both the right and the left on this issue had been more rational. For instance: imagine that when DOMA passed in 1996, it also included a provision explicitly granting federal recognition for the purposes of some specific federal benefits of marriage (e.g., filing taxes jointly, social security survivor benefits, and the spousal testimony immunity privilege) to any same-sex couples that entered into same-sex marriages or civil unions if any states should elect to establish such entities. Then the slow, gentle experimentation that I was talking about above could have proceeded. By now, we’d have nearly 15 years of evidence as to whether those concessions had wrought any harm on the broader society. The result, I suspect, would have been that no coherent objections to extending further benefits could now be raised, and the issue would have been settled more-or-less scientifically (trial-and-error experimentation) rather than becoming what it has become, an inevitable four-decade-long (before it’s all done) battle in the culture war, with massive amounts of energy and vitriol being poured in, at the margins, to the question of *what to call* the partnership of same-sex couples.
Shep, I think the debate has certainly been useful, which is why I have taken time to participate. It has certainly made clear the poverty of opposition to marriage equality once religion is removed from the equation.
But I don’t understand rationlise to mean “exploring the underlying premise of a position” but rather the more conventional definition: namely, constructing a justification for a decision that was originally arrived at through a different mental process.
Finally, on the speed of change: in a couple of posts in the first of these threads I made some comparisons between the battle over miscegenation and the current marriage equality struggle. It seems to me the timescales are remarkably similar if you consider the 1948 California desicion as the starting point, Loving v Virginia in 1967 as the decisive victory, and Alabama’s 2000 referendum as the termination.
The religious conservatives are correct in pointing out these social issues. However, they must give up the dream of their religious ideology having influence over those who want nothing to do with it.>
The issue isn’t religious conservatives, it’s a person; Jesus Christ. He is the issue and always will be. If someone has a problem with Jesus, there is nowhere else to go. If you are speaking of religion or an ism, then, you’re right, people won’t buy it. It is clear homosexuality is sin, like many others, and God condemns it, so repent, that’s it.
This country is based on what Montesquieu called “principles that do not change” Montesquieu and the Founding Fathers said these principles are a part of The Laws of Nature. Once these principles change: murder, theft, etc. We will have no country. It was morality, not economy, the framers were most concerned with.
@Our Founding Truth
Don’t recall Jesus ever mentioning homosexuality. But the problem is that the political ideologies of the religious right are all various flavours of Dominionism ie they fervently believe they have a duty to impose “Christian values” on a secular state through its political institutions. I cannot mind read the intent of “framers” who have been dead for 200 years, but what they wrote would seem to indicate that they believed religion is a matter for consenting adults in private.
Slow as I am, I finally realized what this is all about. Gays don’t care about marriage. They care about humiliating tradtionalists, about punking and beating them down. The ongoing vilification of Carrie Prejean is the first widespread example of this.
Respect is lost on all socialists, which now officially includes homosexuals. It’s time to throw down the glove.
Not many people have a “problem with Jesus”, OFT, but rather followers who claim to speak on his behalf.
“The gay marriage argument is over.”
You may be correct. That is the way it looks in Utah. But the Church won. Maybe in 20 or 30 years that will all change but based on what I see, there will be create a great deal of ill will on both sides for many years to come.
John C —
You said: “But I don’t understand rationlise to mean ‘exploring the underlying premise of a position’ but rather the more conventional definition: namely, constructing a justification for a decision that was originally arrived at through a different mental process.”
Fair enough — rationalizing does have that working-backward connotation. But how much does the direction of the effort practically matter? A gut reaction is reached; one wonders, “why do I feel this way,” or “how did I arrive at this conclusion,” and then tries to form a rational and acceptable explanation. If one can, then the gut-instinct is confirmed (or, more darkly perhaps, what has initially begun from bad motives turns out to have an entirely rational and coherent foundation). If one can’t, then either one must abandon the position, or accept (explicitly or implicitly) one’s irrational bigotry and settle down in it. Either way, it’s a good exercise — and if a valid justification for a position *is* available and identified, it won’t matter if the initial position arose out of gut instinct or even animus or some other unpleasant motive force.
Thrasymachus
“Respect is lost on all socialists, which now officially includes homosexuals. It’s time to throw down the glove.”
Conservatives labeled people who wanted to grant voting rights to women “socialists” as well. How did that work out?
Putting the “socialists” label on everything you don’t like is really getting old. And it hurts legitimate arguments against actual socialism.
Wow, this is quite an argument. I’ve re-read it to make sure it actually appeared in public, and yes, it did! We’re not hallucinating!
Suppose, from an abundance of charity, that we assume the validity of the argument: African Americans will be even less inclined to marry if marriage gets all gay’d up.
Shouldn’t we consider the other types of people that black people stereotypically dislike and ban their marriages too? Aren’t we compelled to do so, given that The Crisis of the Black Family is the biggest social problem of them all?
– Mexicans
– Korean grocers
– the LAPD (if not all police)
– Country music artists
– KKK members
– Republicans / Libertarians
– People who shush them when they talk back to the screen at movie theaters
– White dudes who think they can play basketball
– Elvis fans who fail to appreciate the extent of Elvis’s borrowing from African American performers
And so on. No doubt I’ve neglected numerous stereotypes here.
Awesome.
@Shep
I don’t mean to categorize “all conservatives” as cruel or sociopathic towards gays. Indeed if we define “conservatives” as people with a pragmatic temperament and a natural skepticism towards radical change, it seems to exclude adopting creative and invasive forms of cruelty. Derbyshire said in his first essay, “no thoughtful, humane person wishes any harm to homosexuals” I assume by “harm” he meant physical assault rather than arrest, imprisonment, loss of custody of children, and confiscation of property, which happened to gays in the UK and US during the mid 20th century, up to 1967 in the UK and up to the 2000s in some US states. And yet there is a refusal to remember the facts: “I don’t see much wrong with the mid-20th-century dispensation, based as it was on the great and splendid Anglo-Saxon principle of minding your own business… Gay marriage proponents make much of the cruelty and injustices of the past.” And finally “For all anyone knows we might be proscribing homosexual behavior again in 50 years. Or we might have cured it — the Cochran/Ewald pathogenic theory of homosexuality has never been refuted, so far as I know”.
The UK, the US, Germany and some other countries certainly did not mind their own business; the State devoted significant police resources to spying on, finding and prosecuting people believed to be gay (only gay males in the UK) and Germany sent them to the death camps. In the US and UK thousands of people lost their freedom, careers, and property. This doesn’t mean that all conservatives who endorsed these policies were cruel or mean-spirited. Hannah Arendt proposed the concept of the “banality of evil”, the idea that “the great evils in history were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.” On the other hand, it takes effort to carry out investigations of gay people’s relationships and arrest and imprison innocuous people. Why did they do it? Why did some “conservatives” support it? Many other conservative countries had ancient religious laws against homosexuality on the books but were somehow unable to overcome the natural human aversion to implementing them with the required ruthlessness. The Ottoman Empire in over 500 years did not prosecute or execute one gay man. Today Morocco and Lebanon tolerate extensive gay nightlife and couples living together, although officially homosexuality is illegal. Why were the UK until the 1960s, and several US states until the 2000s, so much worse than the Ottoman Empire, Morocco and Lebanon, or many other Christian countries for that matter? This is what makes me doubt the “banality of evil” hypothesis with regards to those conservative individuals who endorsed prosecuting gays and denying them hospital visitation, proposing laws to deny them medical care, etc. Certainly one cannot apply that thesis to the Religious Right. The individual conservatives who, given the choice, opted to promote and defend the most extreme anti-gay policies, and the individual “conservatives” who proposed the radical initiatives I mentioned, must have had highly homophobic motives. I hope that a new modern conservative movement will ask these individual “conservatives” (whatever we want to call them) to explain their motives, to apologize to the gays who were imprisoned or lost their property or biological children under these policies, and just clearly distance conservatism from these policies and initiatives. There are many kinds of conservatives good and bad and these distinctions are really very important.
Shep
“Fair enough — rationalizing does have that working-backward connotation.”
But that working-backwards is absolute poison to any process of reasoning. It usually causes people to just make crap up. Others, especially the less intelligent then are driven to defend that total crap to the death. Then you have a destructive and stupid culture war over made up crap.
You can be suspicious of change without the need to rationalize. You can pace change to watch for bad outcomes without being a knuckle dragging bigot. But if you react instinctively, invent silly rationalizations for that instinct and then politically cater to the real knuckle dragging bigots then we will have a new culture war every few decades. And history will continue to see conservatives as knuckle dragging bigots.
And thats a shame because there is real value in being suspicious of change.
@Shep
The problem is that because rationalisations mask the real motives and driving force of a position, it becomes almost impossible to actually resolve a difference. This is not just about Heather. Many elected Republicans, I’m sure, feel they must be seen to oppose marriage equality because of electoral concerns about a backlash from the religous right. But since they can hardly admit this calculation, we are forced to deal with a string of phoney arguments. Worse, it deflects attention from the real problem that the Republicans must confront — namely, finding a new political strategy post-Rovian culture wars.
I would like to see Heather tackle head-on the question of how the Republican Party should go about initiating divorce proceedings from the religious right and rebuild the party of Lincoln — and put marriage equality in that context. That could be a really interesting discussion.
Danilo —
I agree with all of that. Whoever endorsed those positions — liberal, conservative; left, right; whatever — endorsed some pretty contemptible positions. And I agree with you that I think Derb is just wrong about how pleasant the “mid-20th-Century dispensation” really was; I suspect that he didn’t really pay much attention to how gays were treated, and so just doesn’t get what was genuinely going on then, or how profoundly limiting and threatening that “dispensation” really was for those on the dispensed-with side. (Of course, Derb can defend himself, so there’s no need for me to speculate one way or the other.)
The point I was making is that there is a little bit of a pox-on-both-their-houses aspect to the whole gay-marriage/civil-unions debate. So many of the zealots on the anti-gay side interpolate ridiculous shady motives to those seeking additional civil rights for gay people (witness Thrasymachus above, “discovering” the real motives of gay marriage supporters and declaring (himself to be a master of reasoned discussion by declaring) all gays to be socialists); meanwhile, many of the zealots on the gay-marriage side label anyone who disagrees with them, even so far as to endorse only civil unions rather than marriage (i.e., who disagree with them only about a *word*) intolerant, hateful bigots.
It’s ridiculous. Sometimes it’s like watching the Redskins play the Cowboys: you just wish both sides could lose.
ppnl & John C —
It’s an interesting question. I guess my feeling is that people who have gut reactions or instinctual or semi-thought-out responses (i.e., all of us; everyone has gut reactions to things) are to be congratulated for trying to explain and ground their feelings/instincts/reactions rather than just accepting them. What may result are dumb/bad/venal/incomplete/incoherent justifications, but then those justifications can be logically reviewed and found wanting, and the serious thinker in good faith will have to either come up with better justifications for the position or abandon the position. This is preferable to people who just go with their guts and don’t undertake the examination or attempt to justify their positions. If someone “feels” that same-sex attraction/behavior is “wrong,” and just stops at that, there’s not even any way to engage that person.
Moreover, I suspect that lots of people much of the time sort of fumble toward a position or fall into it, or gradually realize that they think they believe something about something they haven’t thought much about — entirely in good faith — and have to do some backward-reconstruction of the reasons for their position; then maybe shift it a little, or maybe not … I’m just not certain how linear the average thought process always is. So if backing-and-filling contaminates an opinion, I suspect that many of us are repositories of mostly contaminated opinions.
(I don’t think I expressed the above very well at all. Hopefully you get what I’m driving at.)
JohnC:Don’t recall Jesus ever mentioning homosexuality.
Most non-Christians say the same thing. Jesus affirmed the Law in Mat 5:17-18.
I cannot mind read the intent of “framers” who have been dead for 200 years, but what they wrote would seem to indicate that they believed religion is a matter for consenting adults in private.>
That isn’t what they wrote. The First Amendment refers to a National Church like the Church of England, who they were fighting against. Most of the States mandated Christianity.
You should all remember the real experts on Natural Law were the Founding Fathers, and they executed homosexuals, why? Read the Bible. Homosexuality was the final straw to God, then He destroyed those civilizations.
Ergo:Not many people have a “problem with Jesus”, OFT, but rather followers who claim to speak on his behalf.
Then why don’t they read the Scriptures for themselves? What are they afraid of, death? What lies on the other side? If people don’t read it themselves, Jesus said to tell the Gospel to people.
“By an inevitable chain of cause and effect, Providence punishes National Sins by National Calamities.”
-George Mason, Father of the Bill of Rights
Oh, silly me! No more prawns or pork (that should fix the swine flu problem), and we can go back to stoning people and, with the full backing of the Founding Fathers, executing sodomites (deals with gay marriage problem rather neatly).
I think your posting on the wrong web site, buddy.
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@ Our Founding Truth
Keep talking theocracy 🙂 Talibangelicals are a walking advertisement for our side
Heterosexual marriage has very little to do with providing an environment for raising children. The human species is heterosexually polygynous, and the natural male mating population is much smaller than the natural female mating population. Today’s homo sapien is the products of about twice as many female as male ancestors and this ratio has been falling. Heterosexual marriage fulfills a compelling societal interest in reducing the amount of sexual competition required to attract females that takes place in a polygynous environment.
I don’t really care much one way or the other about homosexual marriage, but it does not serve any compelling social interest in the way that heterosexual marriage serves. However, it is a small example of how social policy is no longer being used to serve societal interests, but to make specific groups and individuals feel good.
No compelling interest Asher? So gay and lesbian Americans can go to hell, we have no right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Fine, I want all my US taxes back and I will give up my stinkin’ citizenship once and for all.
Do you even oomprehend what compelling social interest means? When the state recognizes the relationship of two people it is an affirmative endorsement, it is the state saying “we like what you’re doing, and we think it’s so swell we want more of it”. Heterosexual marriage takes one woman and one man simultaneously off the sexual competition market, and reduces the amount of time young men need to expend oompeting for mates. That is a compelling interest because it has positive benefits beyond the the two specific individuals.
The fact that the state doesn’t endorse your personal romantic arrangements does not mean they are telling you to go to hell. What a bizarre claim: otherwise you are promoted and endorsed or you are being told to go to hell. That’s about as rigid an example of black-and-white thinking as you can get. And you want your taxes back? Are you saying you get no benefits from infrastructure, and protection of your life and property? You’re saying that none of that protection matters, and that the only criteria is whether or not the state officially endorses your private romantic arrangements? You’re a weirdo.
BTW, I’m a total atheist, and this is a stone-cold sober assessment of what makes good social policy.
third line should have read:
” either you are promoted and endorsed or you are being told to go to hell”
Asher —
Ok. If the primary social good of marriage is reducing the amount of time that a young male spends securing a mate, isn’t that in itself a reason to extend marriage to same-sex partners? If the gay people involved are guys, then letting them get married reduces the amount of time that *two* guys spend securing a mate, not just one. (Meanwhile, why are we not concerned/pleased by the reduced time the woman in the straight marriage context spends getting a mate?)
One male SSM takes two males out of the pool, one female SSM takes out two females; the proportion of males to females stays the same. And it doesn’t matter, because gays and lesbians are not part of the heterosexual pool anyway.
Asher, you are willfully blind to the legal and personal ramifications of not being allowed to marry. You are pretending that this is about social endorsement. I am telling you that many lives have been financially and personally ruined by the absence of gay marriage. Either you are stunningly ignorant of gay and lesbian legal issues (read all our threads) or you are lying.
Sorry that I forgot I am supposed to design my life to serve state interests. Silly me, I thought that in a democracy the state was supposed to serve the people (including minorities) rather than engage in social engineering and pretend sexual minorities don’t exist. The people serve the state, that’s why America is a dictatorship.
Shep-
No, because it will do no such thing among homosexuals. The reason it has this effect with heterosexual is not because of differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals but because of differences between men and women. Men have a much higher rate of natural promiscuity than females, and I suspect it’s somewhere between four and five to one. This means that a natural human heterosexuality consists of 20 to 25 percent of the males having sexual access to all the females (although that probably varies by ethnicity). So, what do you do with that other 75 percent of the males who have no access to sex? Marriage addresses this by taking one man off of the market for every woman taken off the market.
Homosexual marriage would almost certainly not affect homosexual mating patterns one bit. Again, my concern is not with homosexual marriage per se, but with the fact that social policy, today, is rampantly being used not to advance societal interests but to make specific groups and individuals feel subjectively good about themselves.
@Asher
“homosexual marriage … is a small example of how social policy is no longer being used to serve societal interests, but to make specific groups and individuals feel good.”
SSM is no more about “social policy” (or social engineering) than was abolishing miscegenation laws. This is a human rights issue.
That is not to say there won’t be social consequences, though your thinking on this, Asher, would seem to be even more exotic than Ms Mac Donald’s. But taking your premise at face value, the introduction of marriage equality would have, at worst, a neutral effect on sexual competition. So I don’t quite see the point of your post.
Danilo, you’re already giving the game away by pushing for gay marriage. Again, marriage is affirmative endorsement, it is the state taking affirmative action to positively address your personal arrangements. No one is telling you how you have to live your life, but the fact taht you read it this way gives away your magical, religious-like devotion to the state.
No one’s “pretending” taht marriage is about social endorsement, it *is* social endorsement, and that’s its fact of being. That *is* what it *is*. Millions of single people go through their lives without ever having the state endorsement of marriage. How have their lives been destroyed by not having such endorsement?
No, in a democracy state policies are supposed to serve general social interests, not the interests of any particular group or individual. Now you can make the argument that endorsing same-sex marriage has no detrimental effect on society, and that is a good argument. But gay marriage serves to advance no general social interest, that is patently obvious.
The state refraining from endorsement of your personal arrangements is not the same thing as the state telling you how you have to live your life. Good god, man, you have such a rigid black-and-white way of addressing things.
Asher —
Ok. I see where you’re going with the argument. But a few further questions: (1) if marriage does nothing to rein in men from their natural promiscuity, then how does it work to avoid the same quarter-of-the-guys-getting-all-the-chicks problem: why wouldn’t the hot guys just cheat from inside their marraiges? And if, conversely, marriage does have a positive effect on decreasing promiscuity in men, why wouldn’t it have a similar effect on decreasing promiscuity in gay male couples? And wouldn’t that be a positive good?
(2) With regard to your broader concern, “that social policy, today, is rampantly being used not to advance societal interests but to make specific groups and individuals feel subjectively good about themselves.” If we were to accept, arguendo, that a certain legal change were to have no effect whatever (no externalities, good or bad) *except* to make some specific group feel subjectively better about themselves, then wouldn’t that be (again, all things being equal), reason enough to make the legal change?
Asher, granting that you’re right about the purpose of marriage, why doesn’t fairness require us to extend the same rights to same-sex couples? Heterosexuality isn’t a disability, and heterosexuals don’t deserve to be compensated for these natural human heterosexual tendencies you’re talking about. Perhaps we have to have heterosexual marriage in order to hold society together, but by doing so we give heterosexuals advantages that we don’t give homosexuals, and that’s unjust.
What you’re arguing for is very much like race-based affirmative action. Perhaps society has an interest in giving certain minorities advantages when it comes to college admissions. But that’s quite unfair to those non-preferred individuals who have also had poor upbringings, etc. It’s hard to justify race-based affirmative action when income- or class- based types are on the table, because even though there doesn’t seem to be a compelling governmental interest in getting slightly more poor white people into good schools, fairness seems to demand it.
You just don’t get it Asher. We are not talking about single people, we are talking about established couples who punished on the level of taxation, inheritance, immigration rights, next-of-kin status, hospital visitation, alimony, and thousands of other protections (despite paying into the system) because YOU have some aesthetic problem.
I left the US because I couldn’t get immigration benefits for my partner even if we married in Massachussetts. If we had been a straight couple, he would have gotten the benefit automatically.
The state-neutral position is to allow gays and straights to marry, and each person can think whatever he wants. Do you honestly think South African or Hungarian society endorse homosexuality more than Americans do, just because gay couples have more rights in those countries than they do in America? Get real..
Asher.
Two points that I would like to make to counter yours:
Many (i really think _most_) gays are closeted and married. This cant be good for society because the resultant unhappy marriage would cause children to suffer.
Also, if being gay is hereditary (good possibility) wouldn’t there be less chance that it gets passed on if those closeted gays don’t marry? Then wouldn’t promoting homosexual marriage be a good thing for society?
The above aassumes that u dont believe that homosexuality is a choice.
@JohnC
Actually, all marriage is, definitionally, social policy, anything the state does is de facto social policy. My general objection is to the rampant misuse of social policy for things that do not advance general social interests. And, no, I do not have some universal, timeless right to have the state endorse my relationship with a woman from another ethnicity, either.* I recently read that there is somewhere around 700 to 800 thousand more married asian females in the US than there are married asian males. This means that non-asian males are poaching asian females, leaving lots of asian males mateless.
If this were a majority asian population I would find it entirely understandable for the asian majority to attempt to restrict mating between asian females and non-asian males. That would be prudent social policy, because it would, at least theoretically, advance a general social interest. Note, that it still would not be the state telling people how to live their lives but simply withholding state endorsement of personal arrangements.
Yes, homosexual marraige is a bauble, it would have very little effect on homosexual mating patterns. In fact, when the state policy changes to begin endorsing same sex mating you see a little spike to celebrate policy changes and then gays actually end up using that endorsement sparingly. It is overwhelmingly about psychological fulfillment and the feelings of power derived from imposing one’s will onto the surrounding environment (yes, everyone does that).
The problem with gay marriage is that it is just another encroachment of social policy that serves not general social interest. Look at the language you use: human rights. You are saying that you have a right to have someone affirmatively endorse your personal living arrangements.
* As an aside I do think that black male-white female sex tends to have an overall slightly damaging effect on American society. It greatly reduces the marriageability of black females and, thus, increases fatherlessness in the black community. It also increase the competition for white females, and tends to produce a lower-IQ and more criminal population. Why? Because white men and black women don’t have anywhere near the sexual attraction for each other as the other combination, so it ends up being a zero sum game where black men take mating opportunities away from white men. Since black men, on average, have lower IQs and are more criminally prone than are white men, this tends to have that effect on those two measures. That being said, anti-miscegination laws are not very effective when marriage is no longer the norm.
Why does this site attract so many social Darwinist, authoritarian eugenics types (notice I am avoiding the N-word here)? Just when I thought the Christies were freaky… At least they are not making it up as they go along
@Asher
“You are saying that you have a right to have someone affirmatively endorse your personal living arrangements.”
No, what we are saying is that we have the right to liberty and the pursuit if happiness, as well as the right to be free from discrimination and to enjoy equal treatment under the law.
@Asher
“No, in a democracy state policies are supposed to serve general social interests, not the interests of any particular group or individual.”
If we were to accept this premise, why then does civil marriage serve the interests of only one particular group (heterosexuals), instead of all of society (heterosexuals and homosexuals)?