I believe that gay people are "equal" to everybody else, I believe that homosexuality is probably genetically determined. I still believe the notion of state-sanctioned gay marriage to be absurd. I think there are several fallacies in play here:

1) First of all, let us agree that what is at stake here is not a right "to marry" but a right to the "legal benefits" of marriage. This seems a subtle disctinction but it is important. Marriage is not bestowed by the state. I would not be less married to my wife is some county clerk somewhere had not filled up a piece of paper. People marry each other, and the state bestows on them certain legal benefits.

2) This distinction moves the discussion from the fuzzy and manipulative ground of "civil rights" into the realm of PUBLIC POLICY. There are certain reasons why society has an interest in promoting/fostering/rewarding long term relationships between males and females (do you disagree? Fine, then you should be pushing to save public money by abolishing civil marriage altogether...)

3) Once we start talking public policy, the case for gay marriage in my opinion falls apart. Why should society have any interest in promoting/fostering/rewarding long term relationships between pairs of people of the same sex? Why should my tax money be used to support people's private sentimental and sexual liaisons? Do they have to be sexual? Are long-term non-sexual friendships entitled to similar benefits? The whole concept makes no sense to me.

In summary, to me science is largely irrelevant to this discussion, and so are civil rights. I am still waiting for a public policy argument about why the state should have an interest in recognizing/promoting people's homosexual relationships, but I still have not got one.

The state should be promoting and endorsing long term, stable partnerships. Why do you think it should be Hetero or none? It should be all adult, consensual partnerships. Such partnerships build stability and prosperity. What needs to be abolished isn't the civil partnership, but the religious partnership. The State should not recognize any religious marriage. Seperation of church and state... dontcha know?

That's where we disagree: you view marriage primarily as a "adult, consensual partnerships." To me, that is such a generic notion as to make the whole idea of marriage essentially meaningless, and the social benefits highly questionable and non-quantifiable.

On the other hand, to think that the state shoud be forbidden from having policy instruments addressing specifically gender differentiation and the generation of children (i.e. what used to be called "marriage") strikes me as highly ideological.

In fact, I think it would be easy to collect lots of data that show that intact, heterosexual families with children play a completely different (and more crucial) social role than other kinds of "adult, consensual partnerships." To love "equality" does not require flying fearlessly in the face of reality.

As for the state recognizing religious marriage, I don't know what you are talking about. At least in the US, all the state does is to let ministers play a role in officiating civil marriages. The fact that, say, a religious sacrament was celebrated at the same time is NOT recognized by the state, and is in fact immaterial to civil law.

Lancellotti, it sounds like you are claiming that the only reason we as a society grant legal benefits to married couples is to promote procreation. Is that your argument? And if so, why don't we require people to have kids (or at least be knocked up) before marrying, to ensure that our benefits are appropriately targeted? Why don't we require people to swear to have kids within X number of years or their legal marriage will be dissolved? Why do we allow infertile people to marry? Or people past their childbearing years?

The benefits the state gains from all heterosexual marriages are the exact same benefits the state would gain from recognizing homosexual marriages--stable families putting down roots into the communities. This is even more so when you factor in allowing gay people to (gasp) adopt.

lancellotti:

I believe that gay people are "equal" to everybody else...

And not for nothing, lancellotti, but your use of the quotes around "equal" is somewhat telling.

jbs280:

we don't because all of the above are very impractical ideas. Public policy is a blunt instrument, benefits will never be distributed exactly according to the intentions of the policy makers, but that should not keep us from trying.

As for "equality," I am not sure what that "tells" you. What it tells me is that it is a politically loaded word that can be easily abused, as was abundantly demonstrated in recent European history.

I disagree--I think it would be very, very easy to ban infertile couples from marrying (after all, we clearly have no problem banning gays from marrying). Or requiring proof of fertility before marriage (many states require a blood test, after all). Or even including language in the marriage license that the couple at issue intends to have children. Hell, we could have written or amended the Defense of Marriage Act to refer to child-bearing heterosexual couples. Or, and here's a thought, we could let gay people marry if they plan to have kids through adoption or artificial insemination (we have no problem with heterosexual couples doing so). All of these things would be incredibly simple to do...and yet, no one is even proposing that we do them. Why is that? Because the argument that we limit marriage to heterosexual couples because legal marriage is in place to benefit those who procreate is an utter falsehood--it's a nice idea, but it doesn't hold up at all to rational examination. It's a smokescreen for people to hide behind because they can't quite admit to themselves that they just feel "icky" about homosexuals.

Get the state out of the marriage business. Couples and/or groups of consenting adults can memorialize their relationshinps as they see fit.

There's a difference between policies that "promote" and policies that "prohibit" or "enforce." You speak of heterosexual marriage as having, on balance, a more quantifiable and clear-cut economic and social benefit to society at large. You also say that allowing governments to both validate and enhance such partnerships promotes their creation and facilitates their success. True. I agree.

At the same time, there is a strong argument to be made that such social policies should never "enforce" nor "require" child-bearing. Simply put, civil benefits that accrue to heterosexual marriage simply create the conditions for success, but neither forbid the dissolution of these partnerships nor enforce their supposed policy goal, to wit, the children. Oh, the children. So in the end, while it is in the interest of those couples wishing to start a family to have their union recognized by the government, at the end of the day, that recognition imposes no positive procreative obligations on the couple. Still agreed? I think so.

So we've seen that the government is (rightly) willing to elevate freedom of choice within marital relationships over compulsion to support the greater good--in other words a society that invests in its material survival willingly but decreasingly is preferable to one that invests increasingly but by force. Therefore, enforcement of child-rearing shall play no role in laws governing marriage.

But what about prohibitions? For you, homosexual marriage, which by simple mechanics cannot, by itself, produce offspring, cannot fall within the stated policy goals of legally-recognized marriage. Therefore, the argument goes, it ought to be prohibited. Some take the argument a step further, and say that not only does homosexual marriage fail to meet the threshold policy requirement for legal marriage, it actively undermines the policy goal by (presumably) implying that children are not the true end of such legal partnerships. The result? Less babies.

The latter part of this argument fails somewhat miserably. I cannot adduce a single heterosexual married individual who has ever looked to the behavior of a homosexual couple as exemplars of normative procreative behavior. Outside of personal experience (which is weak, I know), I still await the day someone establishes a link between government-recognized marriage between homosexuals and a decrease in the willingness of heterosexual married couples to produce offspring. Good luck with that. Baby-making has been on the decline for a while now, a consequence, of a number of things, among them increased secularization, the decline of agrarianism, increased presence of women in the workforce, and an increase in marriages at more advanced ages. (On a sidenote, if anything has affected the real bottom line--that is, happy, stable, economically sound family units--it is divorce.) If homosexuals not marrying in California pursuant to Prop 8 is shown to increase baby production, I'll have to re-think my position.

On the other hand, the first part of the argument--that homosexual marriage simply doesn't fall within the policy goals of government-authorized marriage--is more compelling. Here, I would tend to fall within the camp that advocates a more expansive view of marriage. (And no, marriage in its current heterosexual incarnation is not representative of how marriages have been conducted throughout human history and therefore normative. See "Women--Property." Marriage is very much a fungible concept.) The reduction of marital partnerships to lines of production is fine for a formalistic argument about the survival of the species, or even, more to the point, of the society, but if reading the great books of the last three millennia (and being a human being) has taught me anything, it's that our species has a curious disregard for simple survival. We've also already seen that governments not only have an interest in legally recognizing heterosexual marriage, but also an interest in NOT DISSOLVING MARRIAGES THAT FAIL TO PRODUCE CHILDREN!!! Why ever would the government refrain from dissolving partnerhsips that fail to produce children? Could it be, perhaps, that the freedom to choose to have children is a superlative policy consideration? Could it also be that the human experience is enriched, enlivened and enhanced by the action of directing one's love towards another person for the duration of his/her life?

That's right, we're back in that nebulous territory of "happiness." And "love." In all seriousness, though, absent an argument that can conclusively show that homosexual marriage actively undermines the procreative ends of heterosexual marriage, and absent an argument that homosexual marriage prevents heterosexuals from their otherwise recognized liberties in the pursuit of happiness, what possible other interest does the government have in prohibiting this? Ought your policy goal to extend to the marriage of old couples past child-rearing age? How about the infertile? Should existing marriages be dissolved after the children have become economically self-sufficient? Or might there be, just maybe, just possibly, a common good coequal with the rearing of children, one that governments have an interest in promoting if governments value anything beyond their own survival? This may or may not be a quantifiable goal--I let others take me to task on that--but I think it is pretty damn compelling neverthess. I just can't buy the argument that gov't recognition of marriage cannot possibly promote both healthy partnerhips and effective baby production lines at the same time, and that both things aren't worthy of falling under the same title. But that's just me.

(Note: We haven't even touched the religious issue, which is, I think, far thornier for a lot of people than simple policy goals, unless you're talking about the benefits of conflating religion and economic policy goals.)

(Note 2: Other untouched areas: homosexual couples adopting children; the "normalization" of homosexuality; how religious liberty could be affected by homosexual marriage; since legal divorce has effectively gutted the permanency goal of marriage, should "marriage" fall strictly under the purview of religious institutions and "domestic partnerships" strictly under the purview of gov'ts? Probably.)

Marriage is a stabilizing force.

In the wild, many gay animal couples will adopt the orphans of the pack, tribe, flock, whatever.

Straight people are showing a remarkably lax attitude towards our children floundering in the foster care system.

Many gay couples would love to provide a loving and stable home for these children, but are barred by not being allowed to adopt or marry, thus destabilizing the relationship and leaving the children in a mentally detrimental situation.

We are currently in a baby boom, and the world is rather overpopulated as it is.

Maybe it's time to move past bronze age fertility ideas, which are harming our children, ourselves and our planet.

lancellotti:

let us agree that what is at stake here is not a right "to marry" but a right to the "legal benefits" of marriage.

Yes. And those benefits happen to be legally tied to the word marriage. Personally, I couldn't care less what they called it.

This seems a subtle disctinction but it is important. Marriage is not bestowed by the state. I would not be less married to my wife is some county clerk somewhere had not filled up a piece of paper. People marry each other, and the state bestows on them certain legal benefits.

lancellotti:

There are certain reasons why society has an interest in promoting/fostering/rewarding long term relationships between males and females (do you disagree?

And what reasons are these? I can think of many reasons, but none that do not also apply to same sex couples.

lancellotti:

Why should society have any interest in promoting/fostering/rewarding long term relationships between pairs of people of the same sex?

For the same reasons they are interested in promoting long term relationships between people of the opposite sex.

lancellotti:

Why should my tax money be used to support people's private sentimental and sexual liaisons?

In what manner does your tax money get spent on marriage? Most of the 1,049 federal rights associated with marriage have very little cost to them. Why should your tax dollars be used to support people's private and sentimental sexual liasons when they are of the opposite sex?

lancellotti:

Do they have to be sexual?

No. Sex is not a requirement for marriage.

lancellotti:

Are long-term non-sexual friendships entitled to similar benefits?

If they fill out the paperwork, certainly. I had a couple of friends who got married when we were in college because financial aid counts your parents' income until you are 25 or married. Their parents had no interest in supporting their college careers, but made enough money that they were not elligible for a lot of aid. As far as I know, they never even kissed much less had sex. After graduation, they divorced and went on their way.

lancellotti:

I am still waiting for a public policy argument about why the state should have an interest in recognizing/promoting people's homosexual relationships, but I still have not got one.

Either we abolish marriage altogether, because there is no good reason for it, or we extend it to all consenting adult couples because married couples benefit society.

lancellotti:

to think that the state shoud be forbidden from having policy instruments addressing specifically gender differentiation and the generation of children (i.e. what used to be called "marriage") strikes me as highly ideological.

Ah, but here is where you are wrong. Marriage isn't just about children, nor do many of the rights of marriage relate to children.

lancellotti:

In fact, I think it would be easy to collect lots of data that show that intact, heterosexual families with children play a completely different (and more crucial) social role than other kinds of "adult, consensual partnerships."

If it's easy, then produce it. In any case, there are plenty of married couples who can't or won't have children. There are plenty of married couples who are raising children that are not genetically related to one or both of the spouses. While a homosexual couple can not yet have children of their own, plenty of them are raising children. If marriage is strictly meant to stablize an adult relationship for the purpose of raising children, then the gender of the people involved shouldn't matter. All that should matter is whether they are raising chlidren together.

jbs280:

I disagree--I think it would be very, very easy to ban infertile couples from marrying (

All they'd have to do is make having a child the requirement for state sanctioned marriage. You show up with a kid who is the legal responsibility of one or both parties who desire to marry, then they can get married. No kid, no marriage. You wouldn't need to have any fancy blood tests or ask for intentions then.

pawntucket:

thanks for the thoughtful reply.

I agree with many of your points, but I remain unconvinced that the government should be in the business of promoting healthy relationships between people. And I did not suggest that the government should "prohibit" something. My point was about rewarding all kinds of committed adult relationships (why only homosexuals?) as if they had the same social value as gender-based potentially-procreative "marriage."

Having said that, it is clear that for many people, myself included, the gay marriage discussion is not just about public policy. It also about what models of relationships we want to give to our children. In this sense, gay marriage is not the real problem, since the real "gutting" of marriage took place some time ago. Indeed, I have to grant that the idea of gay marriage is philosophically perfectly consistent with the dominant conception of heterosexual marriage. However, my opinion is that this idea of marriage in inherently unstable. Either it will move back toward a more 'realistic' model, tied to biology and the needs of women and children, or it will keep evaporating into 'adult relationships' until the very notion of civil marriage will become so vague and generic as to be essentially meaningless. The second scenario seems more likely, but it will not come to pass without painful social tensions and with serious pain, especially for young people.

In this context I think it is important to be clear headed about what makes strict sense as public policy, rather than having shouting matches about out cultural disagreements.

Since this has been coming up a lot in threads here, I thought I'd share something I found on wikipedia. It's a full list of the rights and responsibilities of marriages in the US:

<link>

Note that only a portion of them directly relate to children.