Asymmetrical Information

And what I have yet to understand is why anyone really cares that Gary and Stephen wanted to get married in the first place.

For the same reason that the women's suffrage movement was important, even if no one really cares whether or not Kate votes in any given election.

Here's another one: A woman's right to choose is an important issue, but few people would want to hear about Kate's abortion (if she were ever to have one).

Try to see the forest, Kate.

E. Rey, you miss my point.

Why should I care if Gary and Stephen want to get married in the first place? Their marriage will have no effect on me and will make them happy, why should it bother me? I don't understand why anyone has any problem with Gay marriage. That was my point.

On the other hand Sufferage has a huge effect on society as a whole. After all, you're talking about getting and additional 51% of the population to vote, and if you believe that women have inferior minds, then it's going to have a very negative effect on you.

Abortion is another one where, even though it won't effect you personally if I go get an abortion, I can see why someone might have an objection. If you think life begins at conception then how can you not be against abortion. Kind of like the way I might feel if the law was something like stabing anyone over the age of 75 to death is okay because they're going to die soon anyway. I'm fairly sure I'd be against stabbing people over the age of 75 to death. While I certainly think Abortion is my business and no one elses, I can certainly see why people might take issue with abortion.

Kate:

Yes, I missed your point. Sorry.

E. Ray - The question is why should society care. That is, while in college I had a lot of roommates. I was very close to some of them, closer than I was to some members of my family. Should society have special rules for how such roommates organize their financial affairs or governing who gets the TV when one roommate moves out? Should society go further and require the employer of one roommate to provide medical insurance for the other roommate? If not, why not?

Should society adopt such rules for same sex marriages? If the answer is yes, but no to roommates, why? I don't think that the fact two people are having sex should qualify them for additional societal benefits.

Here's how I break down this very difficult question: Society has a vested interest in promoting long-term heterosexual marriages. Such marriages have been shown to produce lots of benefits to society. Because of this interest in promoting long-term heterosexual marriages, I think society ought to provide special rules that benefit such relationships.

I don't think society has any such interest in promoting long-term homosexual marriages. When such unions break up (whether by death or separation), I am sure that there is a lot of grief. I just don't see why society needs to be involved, any more than it is involved with college roommates.

David,

If college roommates want those benefits, they need only get married. Except, of course, if they are gay. Why?

Do you like society-based arguments? Fine, because many of the ones that apply to hetero marriages would also apply to gay marriages. I think that point has been made very well by Sullivan and others.

David, I think the one of the main factors distinguishing your relationship with your roommates is that you and your roommates had no explicit agreement or rational expectation to stay together "until death do you part". Everyone knew it was a temporary arrangement and sooner or later you'd be moving on.

It is an interesting point though, and I can see cases where it might apply, such as ederly siblings living together and financially and emotionally dependent on each other. Legally, why should they not be treated as equivalent to a married couple?

Okay, why does society have an interest in long term heterosexual relationships and not long term homosexual relationships. You say specifically:

"I don't think that the fact two people are having sex should qualify them for additional societal benefits."

So then why have marriage at all?

You say you don't see what society's interest is in promoting homosexual unions. How about Homosexuals have children and maybe we should encourage the parents of children to be in stable, committed marriages.

Wouldn't it be better if they could just do what they want. If two men want to marry, what effect does it have on you. You don't want the JP to get the extra 50 bucks? You keep thinking about all the poor T&E lawyers who currently specialize in making sure homosexual unions are legally protected from intestate succession and how they;ll be put out of work? Or maybe the idea of two men being in love just gives you the willies.

That's a pretty sad reason to deny someone something.

Either marriage is an institution defined by a clear set of criterion, or it is another meaningless word subject to redefinition by relativists. Traditionally a marriage is a union between a man and a woman who, whatever arguments you accept for the origin of man, are clearly design to biologically interlock.

(Or, as a more crass-mouthed acquaintance of high school days long past chose to express it, the hole on the back of a man was self-evidently not 'intended' for another man to come along and get stuck on. Whatever.)

But, if the definition of marriage can be reduced to a loving relationship between two people whatever their gender, (a) what purpose is served by redefining it that way and (b) where to next?

Suppose, for example, that three people enjoy an intimate relationship. What criterion that permits gay marriage would officially deny these three people the privilege of officially sanctioned union?

Suppose a group of fifteen people....

Nah, I won't go there. Point being, either marriage is defensible as a male-female union on the basis of some higher-order morality and/or certain biological conditions, or we can handily disintegrate it by playing word games.

Kate - I did not say same sex relationships give me the willies. (They don't.) I said I could see why society had an interest in promoting stable heterosexual marriages and that I did not see the same interest in promoting same sex marriages. Do you see such an interest? Then 'splain it to me.

Some may argue that society has not interest in promoting traditional marriages. I don't want to argue that here (but will, if others want to). I'll just point out that through tax breaks and special rules designed to make it somewhat difficult to dissolve a marriage, society does promote traditional marriage. I take it as a given that some societal interest justifies such preferences. Now, another group wants to claim the same benefits. Fine. Justify why same sex marriages should have a claim on society's resources.

And it is clearly the claim on resources that this argument is about. Several churchs in the US will marry gay couples -- so friends and family can come to celebrate the union. But that's not sufficient. No, gays want government's blessing because of the benefits -- resources -- such a blessing would entail.

David,

Ok...I'm going to bite on that dangling minnow:

I don't think marriage should be the domain of the state at all. Marriage should be a voluntary contractual obligation, and if that's between man and woman, man and man, man and woman and woman and man and woman, fine with me.

The only concrete benefit that the state bestows upon a legal spouse is immunity from testifying against the other spouse in criminal charges. At least that's the only one that I'm aware of. Otherwise, every other aspect of marriage could be handled quite nicely in civil contract.

Several of my acquaintances have been having an ongoing discussion of the economic benefits of plural marriages. Unfortunately, and in my opinion unnecessarily, many states expressly forbid such entities. As an example: Arizona State Constitution, Article 20 section 2 "Polygamous or plural marriages, or polygamous co-habitation, are forever prohibited within this state."

mmmmm...that minnow was a little salty, but overall quite tasty...oh...hey...what's this hook doing in my mouth? ;)

Um, I'm sorry, what tax benefits? Actually getting married gives a two career couple major tax liabilities (or at least has in the past, We'll see how the tax cuts shake out). In fact there are very few benefits I can see to getting married. I can't imagine why anyone would want to do it (I certainly won't do it again. I love my Husband and would never leave him, but if he dies before me and I end up in love with someone else, I'm living in sin). I just don't see what society has to do with this.

Everyone should have the right to marry one person at a time in a civil cerimony sactioned by the state. It makes everything fair and equitable. A marriage is a contract that the two people involved will take responsibility for each other for a lifetime (or atleast, if this promise can not be kept, extracting ones self will be expensive and emotionally painful).

But everyone should have the opportunity to marry whomever they want. Marriage is more symbolic than anything else. It's significance is most important to the individuals taking the vows. I still don't understand what possible purpose society has in intentionally saying, "Hey you, you're not doing the falling-in-love-thing the way we think you should, so you don't get to stand up and proclaim your love. You don't get to go to the hospital and say "I'm family" without lying. We won't even allow you to pay MORE in taxes, raise a child without having one of you pay HUGE expenses to legally adopt the child. We know you're going to do it anyway and we could make it easy, but we disapprove."

Society disapproves of many things which are legal and sanctioned and happen. Whether Gary and Stephen want to stand up in a room and proclaim their love is none of society's business. Just like if Bob Mormon wants to have 15 sister-wives, as long as he is only civilly married to one of them...society should not care. None of Society's business.

Mormons haven't practiced polygamy in over a century. However, the problem with the polygamists living in various parts of Utah and Arizona is that they tend to break laws when they pick up their wives, like incest and statuatory rape. Normally marriage might not be a concern of society, but when people are forcing their 12-year-old nieces into a marriage, then it is.

Kate:

But by your reasoning, why should society care that Bob Mormon is only civilly married to 1? Why deny him? Surely he loves his other 15 wives, and surely they need the ability to be insured on his health policy, etc......

Personally, I'm of 2 minds about it. 1) I don't care, doesn't bother me, so what. I don't believe that the people ardently against it are making a good case. 2) Well, it will have some serious costs that current proponents are completely missing/ignoring. Insurance and health care costs are pretty big ones.

This rapidly decends into anecdotal arguments ("Well, I've got homosexual friends, and they...") but the point that Mr Mouse makes above holds true. If you redefine "marriage" such that it no longer means a man and woman, then the word quickly becomes useless as a real descriptor, and where do you draw the line then?

Addison

Nate: I don't think marriage should be the domain of the state at all. Marriage should be a voluntary contractual obligation. . .

Those two statements are incompatible. Contracts are, by definition, the domain of the state.

Kate: Actually getting married gives a two career couple major tax liabilities. . .

That's just a function of the law not catching up to reality quickly enough. It's a great boon for "traditional" marriages with one stay-at-home spouse. It will be interesting to see how the new law shakes out.

James, you overstate the interest of our state in contracts. It enforces them, but is (usually) not involved in the content of contracts. Nate is advocating the same attitude towards marriage: state involvement in setup and dissolution, but not in content.

Kate: No one is saying society should (or does) prevent gays from standing up and proclaiming their love. (Society just won't give them a marriage license.) A gay couple can still have a church wedding and do all the proclaiming they want or they can perform a non-religious ceremony of their own choosing and design. A gay man can easily gain access to a hospital treating his partner; the couple just needs to complete a form granting each other such rights. By executing a will, same sex couples can leave their property upon death to their "spouse". So, society does not prevent gay couples from doing anything.

What society (except in some places like San Francisco) has not, yet, chosen to do is to bestow the same financial benefits on gay couples as it does on married heterosexual couples. These benefits may come from the tax law (unless both partners earn about the same amount, it is almost always cheaper to file jointly than to file as two singles) or in requirements imposed on third parties, such as employers. My point is that recognizing gay marriages would have a financial cost. My question is what interest does society have in promoting gay marriages such that society should subsidize such arrangements?

For the sake of this discussion I take it as a given that society subsidizes "regular" marriages because it has some rational interest in doing so. I also take it as a given that the subsidy is material or there would not be such an effort to extend the subsidy to gay couples. Again, since gays can “proclaim their love” without government sanction, I presume a primary reason for seeking this change is to grant gay couples the financial benefits previously reserved for married couples.

I agree with the bulk of David Walser’s last post and would just expound upon it by saying that the State’s main role in marriage (aside from enforcing the contract and the tax benefits) is that it essentially creates a standardized contract which encompasses other issues such as inheritance is a person dies intestate. Without such a contract, people usually have to address these issues seperately and married people enjoy a convenience in that there is already a default provision in the law for married people.

AFAIK there is usually nothing preventing you (for those of you think that marriage is strictly a private thing and the State should only enforce the contract) from drafting similar contracts encompassing most of the things that married people get (e.g. inheritence rights in the event of death, etc.). Married people arguably just have it easier in that there is a standardized contract that addresses a lot of these issues that non-married people would have to address themselves.

The challenge for proponents of homosexual unions is that they have to prove why it is that these unions should receive similar benefits of privileges (we aren’t really talking about rights). Most people would probably agree that there is a social benefit to marriage (we have examples of what happens when someone tries to abolish it) but so far no one has really made a persuasive argument that there is anything comparably beneficial in creating a standardized contract for homosexual unions and granting them comparable privileges.

we aren’t really talking about rights

This is part of why I have no position on gay marriage: I can't decide if marriage is a right or a privilege. On the one hand, it doesn't seem like it's in the same category as freedom of the press or religion, or the right to vote. On the other hand, if I lived in a country that disallowed marriage, I'd feel like my rights (or something) were being trampled on.

"The challenge for proponents of homosexual unions is that they have to prove why it is that these unions should receive similar benefits of privileges (we aren’t really talking about rights). Most people would probably agree that there is a social benefit to marriage (we have examples of what happens when someone tries to abolish it) but so far no one has really made a persuasive argument that there is anything comparably beneficial in creating a standardized contract for homosexual unions and granting them comparable privileges."

Winner of "the biggest load of wingnut bullshit of the day" award.

And there's plenty of competion here...

Katherine wrote:

This is part of why I have no position on gay marriage: I can't decide if marriage is a right or a privilege. On the one hand, it doesn't seem like it's in the same category as freedom of the press or religion, or the right to vote. On the other hand, if I lived in a country that disallowed marriage, I'd feel like my rights (or something) were being trampled on.

I think Katherine’s views are probably not that uncommon for a lot of people who tend to be “neutral” on the subject or at least don’t have strong views one way or the other.

The ability to enter into a voluntary contract with a willing party who is able to form a contract for a legal purpose is certainly a right. But when we’re talking about making something a marriage we are talking about a standardized form of contract that covers things such as property ownership, inheritance, making medical decisions, etc. – which can be dealt with in separate contracts.

The difference seems to be (putting aside the religious and emotional ramifications which are outside the political IMNHO), that for the purpose of law, married people receive a “privilege” that non-married people do not in that they get a standardized contract that addresses these other issues without having to make the effort to set up a contract for each one (which they can still do to change the statutory defaults).

Hey dave, I have this policy of assuming that the party who dismisses an opposed point of view using the least reasoned argument and the greatest amount of shrillness is the one is losing.

Give me a reason to think otherwise?

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