ay marriage is a very controversial issue in the US and much of the rest of the world, but I honestly don't see why anyone cares. Who cares if two women or two men want to get married? How does that affect you in any way, shape, or form?

In various blog posts I've discussed the issue and gone over the main objections to it, so read on if you want more opinion. That's why you're here, after all.

More recent items are added on top of this page.

March 6, 2004

This editorial from the great sci fi writer Orson Scott Card shows that he's pretty much an idiot, socially.  Even if you agree with him and are against gay marriage, you can't help but think his reasoning for it and his explanations are just utter nonsense and foolishness.  The whole thing is so bad that I'm almost moved to wonder if it's meant as sarcasm, sort of along the lines of Jonathon Swift's A Modest Proposal. He is strongly against any changes in law to allow marriage to include anything other than male/female pairs, and explains why at great length.

This first quote starts off with him saying why courts and judges are wrong to make changes to the law.

By declaring that homosexual couples are denied their constitutional rights by being forbidden to "marry," it is treading on the same ground.

Do you want to know whose constitutional rights are being violated? Everybody's. Because no constitution in the United States has ever granted the courts the right to make vast, sweeping changes in the law to reform society.

Regardless of their opinion of homosexual "marriage," every American who believes in democracy should be outraged that any court should take it upon itself to dictate such a social innovation without recourse to democratic process.

Well, let's see, social changes by the courts would include such things as abortion rights, female suffrage, school desegregation, anti-discrimination laws, laws prohibiting child labor, and so on. Pretty much the whole point of the courts, when it comes to social issues, is to advance individual and minority group freedoms and protections when they're being oppressed by the majority. And there's simply no way an educated, intelligent man such as Card doesn't know this.

His reasoning only improves further down the line, which is where you begin to wonder if he's joking, or what.

In the first place, no law in any state in the United States now or ever has forbidden homosexuals to marry. The law has never asked that a man prove his heterosexuality in order to marry a woman, or a woman hers in order to marry a man.

Any homosexual man who can persuade a woman to take him as her husband can avail himself of all the rights of husbandhood under the law. And, in fact, many homosexual men have done precisely that, without any legal prejudice at all.

Ditto with lesbian women. Many have married men and borne children. And while a fair number of such marriages in recent years have ended in divorce, there are many that have not.

So it is a flat lie to say that homosexuals are deprived of any civil right pertaining to marriage. To get those civil rights, all homosexuals have to do is find someone of the opposite sex willing to join them in marriage.

So by his logic, a loveless, farce of a marriage between a gay man and a gay woman, executed solely for legal and tax reasons, would be just fine. But he's opposed to marriage between two men or two women who are deeply in love and who want to spend the rest of their lives together and raise children together, etc.  Interesting "logic."

I have to confess that I didn't read the whole thing to see if he was putting in winks and nods of sarcasm later on, since I just lost interest.  He goes on and on and on about the decline of American society, the loss of married families, the problems for single mothers raising children without a father figure.  I don't see how any of that has anything to do with gay marriage though.  He's certainly not saying that an unhappy and necessarily adulterous marriage between a gay man and a gay woman is better for raising kids than a gay marriage, is he?  So what's his point then?  It has nothing to do with his opening, "Gays can get married if they want." argument, and actually undermines it.

He eventually takes his swing at explaining the "de-legitimizing marriage" meme that the conservatives are still trying to reanimate, but it still makes no sense to me.  Since I've never seen any objective logic in it, I keep wondering if anyone really believes this, or if it's just the best they can do to defend marriage as an exclusively heterosexual option without saying that gays make them unhappy.

Let me put it another way. The sex life of the people around me is none of my business; the homosexuality of some of my friends and associates has made no barrier between us, and as far as I know, my heterosexuality hasn't bothered them. That's what tolerance looks like.

But homosexual "marriage" is an act of intolerance. It is an attempt to eliminate any special preference for marriage in society -- to erase the protected status of marriage in the constant balancing act between civilization and individual reproduction.

So if my friends insist on calling what they do "marriage," they are not turning their relationship into what my wife and I have created, because no court has the power to change what their relationship actually is.

Instead they are attempting to strike a death blow against the well-earned protected status of our, and every other, real marriage.

They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won't be married. They'll just be playing dress-up in their parents' clothes.

This is just lunacy.  How does anyone else being married affect your own marriage in any way? Plenty of men/women are in loveless marriages.  Does that make you not love your own wife, Orson? How is denying homosexual marriage not "intolerance" against homosexuals?

He gets nuttier:

If America becomes a place where the laws of the nation declare that marriage no longer exists -- which is what the Massachusetts decision actually does -- then our allegiance to America will become zero. We will transfer our allegiance to a society that does protect marriage.

We will teach our children to have no loyalty to the culture of the American elite, and will instead teach them to be loyal to a competing culture that upholds the family. Whether we home school our kids or not, we will withdraw them at an early age from any sense of belonging to contemporary American culture.

We're already far down that road. Already most parents regard schools -- an institution of the state that most directly touches our children -- as the enemy, even though we like and trust the individual teachers -- because we perceive, correctly, that schools are being legally obligated to brainwash our children to despise the values that keep civilization alive.

And if marriage itself ceases to exist as a legally distinct social union with protection from the government, then why in the world should we trust that government enough to let it have authority over our children?

Pretty much what the South said back in the 1860s, when those Northern bastards tried to take their slaves away from them, eh? And then in the years after that, we know how well "separate but equal" worked out, when it came to the rights of the minorities.

If you get through the whole thing, there's a link to a letter the paper received in reply to Card, and then a long reply by Card to the letter, but I didn't think either of them really advanced the debate much. It is enough to at least prove that Card really believes what he's written here, and that he's not just doing it as a joke or satire or something.

February 26, 2004

In other news near and dear to the hearts of conservative Christians, Bush has come out in support of an Anti-Gay Marriage Constitutional Amendment.  I would say something about this, but I don't really have much to say.  As I posted a couple of weeks ago, I don't see any logical reasons to oppose gay marriage.  The only arguments against it, other than those based in bigotry, are that it "de-legitimizes" heterosexual marriage.  But since there's been zero credible evidence of that presented, there's nothing to argue against.

Just going hypothetically, even if there were evidence that divorce rates increased once gay marriage was legalized, so what?  Divorce rates increased once television was in every house in America.  Is anyone trying to ban TVs for that reason?  I'd bet that couples who get married before they're both 21 get divorced and leave children with one parent far more often than couples who get married after 25, when they're adults with a little common sense and life experience. Does that mean we should outlaw marriages between couples who aren't at least 25, or only allow them if one or both partners are sterile?

There's just no logic to the issue, so I don't see what to debate. You can't win people over from faith with logic; if the history of religion on earth doesn't prove that, then nothing will.

As for the amendment itself and Bush's support for it, I think it's written in intentionally vague form (when it comes to allowing/not allowing states to perform civil unions) so that future courts can nit pick at it and turn and overturn laws deriving from it.  And I think Bush's endorsement of it is based on whatever his campaign advisors told him to do, and is purely cynical and pandering to his hard right Christian base of support.  The amendment has almost no chance of passing, certainly not in less than several years (given that 2/3 of the states have to ratify it individually) so it's really something he's just proposing now, to take the heat off of the quagmire in Iraq, his AWOL National Guard issues, the gathering momentum of John Kerry's Democratic Primary wins, etc. CalPundit elaborates on that point pretty well in this post.

February 10, 2004

Yesterday's long discussion on Gay Marriage went over with hardly a comment, but that's sort of to be expected at this point.  I remember long ago (nearly 2 years, at this point) when I was planning my blog, and eagerly rubbing my hands together at the thought of the chaos I'd sew by upsetting people with my very frank discussions of controversial topics.  So I posted about abortion and capital punishment and patriotism and religion, all from my relatively non-mainstream POV, and waited for the outrage to appear.  And it virtually never did.  I've gotten far more vitriolic emails from young and relatively clueless fans of various rock bands than I have ever gotten about any issue in politics, religion, society, etc.  Perhaps it's something I'm doing wrong, or perhaps the way I present the material seems fair enough that no one is too offended, or perhaps the readers who stick around for a while see how I'll talk about anything and be honest about it, and there's no desire to argue or fight about it with me, since I'm not a flaming demagogue who twists the truth to his own purposes.

Though that sounds sort of fun, now that I think about it.

Anyway, there were two quick comments on the subject, one in an aside in an email about something else, from a reader who said he agreed with me and that I summed up the issue well, and this one, from a gay reader who chose to out himself to me last year.  Not that his being gay really matters in terms of his comment, but I thought I'd just point it out in advance.  Which is ironic, when you see what he was commenting about.

I said the indented black part, and his comment follows:

For me, so long as a civil union conferred the same benefits in terms of tax breaks, health care coverage, right to not testify against your mate, etc, I don't see any real difference between that and a marriage, other than purely symbolic one.

Because on forms you will have "civil union" along with "married" and "single" and if only gays can have civil unions, then it's identifying them as being gay on any official form they have to fill in.

Which is a good point, and not something I'd thought about.  Of course it's not entirely true, I mean there must be some straight couples out there who got a civil union, rather than married... I just don't know of any.

And anyway, what's to be worried about letting the government know that you're gay?  It's not like anything bad could happen because of it. *cough*

He also pointed out something else I didn't mention in yesterday's blog.  That there's nothing to keep a gay couple from throwing a big wedding-like party to celebrate their civil union, and that in fact many do.  And I'd imagine that they probably call it a "wedding" on the invitations and when talking about it to friends, even if technically it's not one, when it comes to the actual legal arrangement being entered into.

Homosexuals have so much to teach us all.

February 9, 2004

Prompted by all of the recent news about it in the US, mostly propelled by the conservatives who are agitating for an anti-gay marriage amendment to be added to the US Constitution, here's my take on the subject.

Personally, I don't see any problem with it.  Marriage or Civil Union, whatever.  People do better in long term monogamous relationships, are better parents, stick together and have happier lives, etc.  Plus they've got more purchasing power, they get financial boosts in terms of tax breaks and hospital visiting privileges, health insurance benefits from one or the other's job, and so on. I'm actually not that big a booster of gay marriage, since I don't have a very high opinion of marriage.  So many people get married and keep on cheating, don't respect or really love each other, just stay together since a divorce would be expensive, etc.  Why subject gays to that sort of bullshit? True, some people really see it as a sacred (in the non-Biblical sense) institution and respect it and take it very seriously, but for all of them there are plenty of others who use it as a convenience, who cheat, who get married and divorced at the drop of a hat, and so on.

For me, so long as a civil union conferred the same benefits in terms of tax breaks, health care coverage, right to not testify against your mate, etc, I don't see any real difference between that and a marriage, other than purely symbolic one. But of course it's precisely that symbolism and romance that straights now have that what gays want, since they're being unfairly and arbitrarily denied it now. And I can see their point.

For example, Malaya and I talk about being together for the rest of our lives, and that we'll get married, someday.  We (she, mostly) talk about where we'd do it, what type of ceremony, who we'd invite, what we'd wear, what sort of punch and pie we'd serve, etc. We never debate the legal ramifications, or fantasize about our future joint tax filing status, or the other such stuff that makes up the real meat of a wedding, beneath the candy coating of lace and flowers and white tablecloths.  

So even though the legal ramifications of a civil union might be identical to a marriage, what's the fun in that? The civil union is boring; it's like buying a car or signing an apartment lease, rather than going through the whole love and flowers and wedding dress and banquet hall rental ordeal.  And I think that sort of ceremony helps tie people together, and puts a formal end to their days of dating and being together for convenience, rather than because they have an obligation to do so.

Basically, marriage is (or at least it should be) a solemn vow and legal agreement between two people who are in love.  The wedding and flowers and ceremony are just the ritual and celebration that have come to be more or less inextricably-attached to the whole marriage concept. And if two men or two women want to enter into that sort of agreement, rather than a man or a woman, why not let them?

Well, ask a conservative and you'll probably hear something like this:

"Gay's can't have children."

Sure they can; they can adopt or use a surrogate parent, and if they're lesbians all they need is a sperm donor, either in frozen turkey baster form, or real live male friend form. It's their child just as much as an adopted child is, and more so, since it's genetically one of theirs, and legally the other's stepchild. Or something like that. And if children is a requirement for marriage, that's going to be a problem for a lot of MF matches. Lots of MF couples don't have kids, or get married when they're too old to have kids, or have infertility problems that require them to do the exact same things gay couples have to do to have kids. So are those MF marriages null and void if they can't conceive their own children, naturally?

Even worse, what about sex change operations? It's perfectly legal for a man or a woman to get their gender reassigned, legally become the opposite sex, and then marry someone of their birth sex.  They can't have kids, at least not physically, but that's not considered "gay marriage" (though it probably should be). And that's okay, but two people of the same gender aren't?

Another argument is tradition, as if that's something we should honor.  Tradition allowed slavery and genocide and prevented women or non-whites having any civil rights.  So we're picking and choosing our traditions, are we?  Also, find an argument against gay marriage that can't also be applied to interracial marriage? After all, race-mixing was once illegal, and while there's still some taint on it for many people (especially for white/black marriage) it's mostly accepted, and growing more so every day, even if some people (generally the same ones who oppose gay marriage) disapprove of it.

The most mainstream argument against gay marriage is one that carefully skirts the whole, "I just hate fags." issue, and it's one that you hear made repeatedly by conservative intellectuals. I've never been able to see the essence of it, though. They say that allowing legal gay marriage will somehow "de-legitimize" heterosexual marriage.  Whatever that means. While this is, again, identical to the old arguments against interracial marriage, it just has never made any sense to me. It's from the Santorum school of logic, where if you allow gays to marry, then straights who are married no longer feel so bound by their bonds.  Congressman Santorum legendarily extended this "logic" to cover gay sex, incest, and bestiality, which I found equally perplexing.

How does letting people different than you do something you've been doing all along make your doing it any different?  Did men stop voting and give up on democracy once women were allowed to vote?  Would men all go pee sitting down if women grew a labia that allowed them to use urinals? It's just a nonsense argument, as far as I can see, and I'm usually pretty good at seeing other people's points of view, even if I strongly disagree with them.

An example of this argument that I tripped over tonight while viewing a site linked to from the very long comments thread on the Calpundit post about Dubya's latest AWOL info (see above) is found on AdamYoshida.com.  I'm not recommending the site, since I don't find his writing very interesting or illuminating.  He's one of those people who are intelligent and write well grammatically, but never actually say anything or make any real point.  I'm sure it's clear to them, in their head, but other people read it and come away with a "What was he just talking about?" reaction.

I'm only linking to it since after I wrote most of this post, I was reading the CalPundit thread on Dubya, saw Adam flaming away, followed his link back to his site, skimmed over his incoherent rebuttals, looked for some posts on other things to see if he made any good points or wrote any better, and found this one on gay marriage, which I only took note of and waded through since I'd just been writing about it myself.  His post on the subject can be found here, and while he goes on and on (almost as long as I do) and says a number of things at the start that I completely agree with, he then takes an odd turn and reaches an anti-gay marriage conclusion that is the sort of "intellectual and non homophobic" reasoning.  It's reasoning that I find logically indefensible.

Here's the start of his post: 

Let’s get something straight: marriage, and the privileges that come with it, have absolutely nothing to do with “love”. The core of the argument for gay marriage is predicated upon this concept that it is immoral to deny “two people who love eachother” the “right” to marry. Marriage, and the various rights and responsibilities that come with it, is meant to serve an actual societal function: providing for stable families which are capable of having and raising other children.

He sets up several straw men here (putting "right" in quotes, and making a very weak argument for the other side) but I agree with his initial comments, as they somewhat reflect my own, made several paragraphs ago and hours before I read his post on the subject. Marriage has nothing to do with love; that's just the window dressing and the romance. However I think his argument that it's all about rearing children and providing stable families is ridiculous. Most of the time it's better for kids to grow up with two parents (a mommy and a daddy?) than with a single parent, but that's a very debatable concept.  Lots of fathers and some mothers are abusive, drunk, in jail, etc, and their kids are probably a lot better off without them around.  The argument then is that those people should never have gotten married, and never had kids, but if your argument requires a time machine, it's not much of an argument.

There are also millions of kids who are born bastards, who never know their fathers at all, or who grow up with a step father or parent.  Would society be better if everyone got married and stayed married and had kids while married and raised them with love and compassion?  Of course, but that argument requires both a time machine and a magic wand, so it's equally invalid.

You can't make an argument by picking the small percent of perfect, wonderful, happy marriages, and use their kids for your winning example, while ignoring all of the other data that's inconvenient and that doesn't fit your preconditions. That's Ann Coulter quality logic there, and it's simply not ready for the adult table.

Adam continues for a while on that theme, before turning to the argument for gay marriage, as he defines it.

If you believe that marriage is merely an “affirmation of love”, or something along similar lines, then the case for gay marriage makes perfect sense. Who are you (or the state) to, “tell people that they may not love another”? If you believe that marriage is merely a way of expressing love, then the only reason to oppose gay marriage is opposition to homosexuality itself which, of course, is a verboten “homophobic” notion according to the modern establishment.

The people who are pushing for gay marriage feel that the institution is social in character. Marriage, as they see it, legitimizes a relationship. They are so determined to reach this end, of inhibiting any claim that gay relationships are not the equal of straight relationships, that they are seeking to, in essence, hijack the institution for their own purposes.

So gays and people who support gay marriage just want to legitimize their love.  Which is okay, but shouldn't be done with marriage, since that's a sacred contract that can only be between a man and a woman. And if gays are allowed to use the same type of marriage as the rest of us... what?  This is where the whole argument falls completely apart.  There's simply zero evidence or proof that allowing gay marriage will do anything.  People who oppose it say that it will cause this or that problem, but they have no evidence or argument beyond "Because I say so." to back it up. Go analyze societal trends, such as divorce, in countries that allowed gay marriage and show us some stats.

The whole argument is ridiculously easy to ridicule too. "So... why are you so insecure in your sexuality and marriage, sir?"

What does gay marriage have to do with straight marriage? What would it change about how you feel about your husband/wife?  I'm not married, yet, but I can't think of any way it would affect me at all.  I think polygamy and arranged marriages are obscene, but do they make me not want to get married or stay married myself? Of course not; what do they have to do with my (hypothetical) marriage? It's a ludicrous concept.

Men in many countries around the world can take 4 or more wives.  Lots of countries and societies have arranged marriages as a matter of course, often betrothing children, just to lock up a potential partner while they are still available.  Lots of people expect the wife in a marriage to be a virtual slave to her husband. All of these things are abominations, in my eye, but I don't take them as any sort of reflection on marriage as an institution.  Unreformed Mormons in Utah have 5 wives, all of them arranged and consumated while the girls were under the age of 14.  So does that make the rest of us want to go rape 14 year old girls, or marry them, or get a divorce from our wives/husbands?  Of course not.

Besides, what about gays who want to have children?  Lesbians can obviously have a lot of kids, more than a single straight woman, if they were foolish enough to want that many of the little creatures.  True, it wouldn't be 50% their genetic material and 50% their partner's genetic material, but so what?  If you object to that then you must object to surrogate mothers, sperm banks, adoption, etc.  All things that are entirely commonplace and acceptable for MF marriages to take advantage of. MM gay marriages would obviously have a bit more difficulty reproducing, but that's what adoption and surrogate mothers are for.

One who opposed it could certainly argue that gay parents aren't as good at raising children as hetero parents would be, but that's like the other argument.  Provide some proof.  Do some studies and surveys. Just saying it because you want it to be true is meaningless. And anyway, it's not as if tons of MF marriages aren't farces, turning out abused, angry, rotten children. There are good and bad kids coming from single parents.  So why wouldn't gay parents be just as good and bad as straight ones? In fact why wouldn't they be better, on average, since they had to work a lot harder to actually get the kids in the first place?

How many straight couples have kids by accident, or in a desperate bid to stay together, or who get married in the first place while they're both cheating and not happy, just because the woman gets pregnant?  And then get divorced, leaving the kids in a poor situation, lacking one parent, lacking enough financial support, etc? You're telling me that two under-educated 16 y/o's who were too stupid to use a condom are going to be good parents and the cornerstone of society, but two intelligent, well-educated, well-off, working gay men or women are unfit for that role, or a marriage to legitimize their life long bond?

And anyway, it's similar to the anti-abortionists who claim to be so concerned with children, and then give nothing to charity, don't adopt, and don't support social services, but if you're do damn worried about kids and society, wouldn't a Constitutional Amendment forbidding adultery and divorce by parents who have children under the age of 18 make a lot more sense?

It would, if any of their arguments about the betterment of society weren't just flimsy excuses.

Basically, the anti-gay marriage argument boils down to this series of hypocritical and illogical points.

• Straights who want to get married are doing it to form a pair bond meant for reproduction, and that's the cornerstone and foundation of our modern society.
• This ignores/disregards:
  • Straight but childless marriages.
  • Gay couples who have or will have kids.
  • And all straight marriages that:
    • End in divorce while the kids are still young.
    • Turn out rotten kids.
    • Are between bad parents.

The ultimate logic seems to be:

• "Straight marriage is the way we should pair bond and reproduce, but gays who want kids can't do it, and straights who marry but don't have kids don't count, and we're not going to mention straights who aren't good parents."

And that's just not a passable argument, at least not by any objective adult standard.

I'd respect them more if they just did the bible defense, and said something like, "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, and therefore gays shouldn't marry or raise children since it's morally wrong."

I would not agree with that for any number of reasons, but at least it would be a consistent, internally-logical argument, if you accept their popular interpretation of the bible.  However since they realize that that's a sure losing argument, based as it is upon ancient religious codes and prejudice, they are instead trying to popularize and defend this weak, half-assed, straw man, hypocritical, homophobic tiptoeing, bullshit about "de-legitimizing" marriage.

In belated conclusion, I've yet to see any legitimate argument against gay marriage, other than the religiously-inspired one that is entirely predicated on faith rather than logic, and as such can't be argued.

However, I'm not a big fan of granting credit to arguments based on what someone thinks an old book says, or doing something now just because it's always been done that way.  We've thrown off most historical forms of oppression: slavery is gone, laws against mixed marriage are gone, most laws against racial or sexual discrimination are gone, most laws against being homosexual are gone... this is just the next one on the list, and people who oppose gay marriage are pretty clearly following in the footsteps of people who opposed civil rights, equal rights, women's vote, etc.  And they're on the wrong side of history.

At least until some future world wide calamity destroys civilization, driving us back into a new Dark Ages of autocratic theocracies, (such as most of the Arab world suffers under) and all of the modern, liberal, freedoms most of us have come to know and expect vanish.  And that wouldn't be a whole lot of fun.

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