Davka

Debate Starts: At Debaters' Convenience

Kohai vs. Achwienichtig

Same-Sex Marriage Should be Legal in the USA

The debate will be informal and open-ended, with a maximum of 1000 words per post, and a maximum of one week between posts. Achwienichtig is arguing from a "devil's advocate" position.

The debate can be found here.

Saramago

:eating_popcorn:


I really can't think of any argument "against", except ABR-based Moral Claims and, closely related but equally weak, Tradition. Interested to see what Achwienichtig comes up with. And cheer Kohai's position.

Jarhyn

Well, there is one secular argument that I can think of: that marriage itself is a social ill and that extending it to gays makes it that much harder to deinstitutionalize it. Rather there should be other more appropriate mechanisms to assist people in the way marriage currently does.

Marriage confers benefits that other types of relationships also deserve to have access to, but marriage is a bad way of going about it. For those one trusts for personal medical manners, there should be a legally established and easily entered arrangement to give better than default family visitation and/or decision making rights. Same for finances, and inheritance. Power of attourney is difficult and problematic. And what about those who wish to arbitrarily declare codependency for insurance, but the relationship is not necessarily sexual? I should by all rights be able to stick with my sister, brother, or parent(s) in a platonic relationship, and allow have my insurance extend to a limited non-zero number of those individuals. These are goals and public goods that are impossible as long as marriage remains the stop-gap of choice.

Guest46854

This^^^

Jarhyn

This post is more an open stream of thought, so it may be disjointed and kind of confusing or inconsistent. BE WARNED!

So I read over my post up there again. Originally I put it out there as a kind of Devil's advocate kind of thing; before writing it, even before re-reading it, I was operating under the conclusion that getting gay marriage allowed should be a priority. Without trying to cling to opinions that very well may be malformed, It would be a good idea to reexamine IF in fact giving gays the right to marry would in fact threaten the potential to secularize and decentralize the benefits provided by marriage.

I already figured it can be renamed in all applicable codes to some secular thing such as "domestic partnership contract", and take out all that nonsense about priests or other religious individuals doing it. Justify the removal under the "no religious tests..." portion from the constitution(s), along with the first amendment protection from religion. Then the fight for any additional changes or flexibility in the form of such a contract wouldn't seem so problematic. It would also allow a relatively painless battle to allow "limited domestic partnership contracts": contracts designed to allow such individuals limited rights in a less at-will manner than a power of attorney.

The only other problem I can see is that our current marriages see a number of benefits that may or may not be abusable if it is offered to larger groups, namely larger group contracts and giving testimony: gangs and other criminal groups could in fact contract members in, and then nobody in such a gang could be compelled to give testimony... I don't know of any particularly good ways to solve this problem.

Metaphor

It woud not. Eliminating the state-created benefits of marriage is currently in the unthinkable range of the Overton window. Allowing gays to marry is somewhere between radical and acceptable.

Also, the effect may be the opposite of what you imagined: allowing gays to marry could shift the emphasis even further away from a religiously-owned and managed institution to a state-created and managed secular institution.

Even if gay marriage did delay the abolition of the secular marriage concept, this benefit (a diffuse benefit, generally spread) would need to be measured against the harm created by excluding gays (the state benefits of marriage being denied to gays is a very real, continuing personal harm).

State leniency in not being compelled to testify against your spouse is not "abusable". It is already abuse. That the state can make you testify against your sibling, parent, or child, whilst allowing you the 'right' to not be compelled to testify against your spouse is breathtakingly absurd.

Jarhyn

Not really. Mostly this is conjecture over something that has has never been done on such a scale, and it's not really possible to know what will happen until it has already come to pass. At some point we need to recognize the patterns of our mistakes and preempt them; if we cannot do that, we will run into this same issue in 10-20 years again particularly when robots and polygamous unions come up.

To be clear, I am not saying eliminate the benefits of marriage, I'm saying we need to reevaluate the structure and situations under which they are offered.

We know rationally what the structure of domestic partnerships should take, so there is a very good argument that we should quit beating around the bush and fix the problem. The US is infamous for letting stop-gaps become permanent solutions (We still use the old english measurement units!), and this is one situation where a stop-gap is unacceptable, and particularly so for ME because I AM a polygamist and wish to have access to a polygamous domestic partnership. I don't want to wait another 30 years for it, as it's causing ME real harm NOW. Gays are being selfish and shortsighted for wanting GAY marriage, and not seeking a rational reboot of domestic partnership laws in one swing.

Well, that last part certainly crossed my mind: that there is a fundamental problem with giving certain moral objections while denying others on an arbitrary basis. Being compelled to SUPPORT a law (rather than to just merely obey) that runs counter to your morals seems problematic; I'll admit I haven't explored this line of thought very thoroughly, and this may not be the best thread in which to explore it. There are other problems too, such as immigration and naturalization through various forms of domestic partnership, and ways that these may be abusive or abused.

Metaphor

"Robot" marriages won't come up in 20 years time; I can safely say that in neither of our lifetimes would a robot be capable of consenting to a marriage.

Polygamy is a fundamentally different issue and it the Overton window for polygamy is pretty solidly in the unthinkable region.

Notwithstanding that, arguments for gay marriage are arguments for gay marriage, not arguments for polygamy.

To be clear, I am not saying eliminate the benefits of marriage, I'm saying we need to reevaluate the structure and situations under which they are offered.

Gay marriage is not a town that we are passing through on the slow train to legal recognition of polyamorous relationships. It's a fundamentally different beast.

That's absurd—YOU'VE not even made an argument supporting state recognition of polyamory, and you might as well have said the individuals wanting anti-miscegenation rules abolished were selfish bastards. Polyamory would involve a fundamental rethinking of income taxes and health insurance for one, and the idea that it would somehow arrive faster if gays were not allowed to be married until then is, in fact, the selfish part.

(I do agree though that marriage laws favour the sexual over the asexual, and do nothing to recognise other domestic arrangements. For example, if I lived with my sister in old age, we would not be able to pool our income (and thus potentially lower our tax bill) whereas if we were not related, the law would probably treat us as a de facto couple and allow us to do so.

Well, this was actually a point not against the idea of legal recognition of polyamory, but rather an argument pointing out the absurdity of the spousal testimony law. The fact that polyamory would force a re-think of this eye-bleedingly absurd law is a point in polyamory's favour, not a strike against it!

Jarhyn

I find your entire post ridiculously and grossly ill informed, and here's why:

Polygamy is a valid relationship structure, just as is homosexuality and heterosexuality: all participants are equally consenting to the arrangement. It is not damaging to a child to be raised by any arbitrary number of adults; I myself was raised by four adults: two parents and two grandparents living in the same house. Sure there are issues in deciding how far or how much health insurance will extend across the sum total of members in that relationship, this is not an issue without a solution, and it is certainly not an argument against the rights of individuals to contract each other as co-dependent family members.

All the arguments for gay marriage may be made for polygamous marriages. In math terms, if all members of a set are equal, the sets themselves are equal. Really as you say, the only issue is the Overton window, which is not to say that polygamous marriage is incorrect, merely that the public is by in large incorrect. The correctness or incorrectness of the population should not be a factor in determining what the law SHOULD be.

To that extent gay marriage IS just a town that the slow train is passing through on the way to "rationally accepting all manner of consensual adult relationships for the purposes of resource pooling". I do in fact think that those who wanted anti-miscegenation laws repealed were short-sighted selfish bastards, but then again they couldn't have really seen a pattern emerging yet. WE CAN.

I also disagree that robot marriages will be outside of our lifetimes. We already have machines that actually understand concepts and information, it is only a *short* matter of time before they start to become self-aware. Again, time frame is not the point here, the point is that by doing this piecemeal we GUARANTEE to exclude valid relationships at some point in time.

Finally, I am of the opinion that all consensual adult relationships ought be allowed; It's merely the production of offspring for various types that I find should be prohibited*.

Metaphor

And don't want to address each point?


First of all, I object to YOUR use of the word polygamy when you should be using polyamory. The 'gamy' part of polygamy specifically excludes women with multiple male spouses, and unless you think the law should allow polygamy but not polyandry, your doing yourself a disservice with your language use.

I don't know what you're talking about—I didn't imply anything of the kind.

I didn't say it wasn't. In fact, if legal recognition of polyamory ushers in universal health care in places that don't have it, so much the better.

No, they can't, just as they can't be made to force legal recognition of a man marrying his motorbike. It's this kind of rhetorical nonsense (that allowing gay marriage is a logical slippery slope to men marrying motorbikes and children) that is damaging.

I didn't say polyamory was incorrect, merely that legal acceptance of gay marriage is no barrier to legal acceptance of polyamory and in fact may speed it rather than hinder it.

I think you are grossly overestimating the rate of technological change, but that's another debate.

They're already 'allowed' in the same way gay relationships are already allowed—certainly the government can't take away or offer extras to relationships that have nothing to do with the government (like the non government-provided benefits of cohabiting.)

I agree that the government needs to move away from the 'marriage' concept to a model that provides the same shortcuts and state-created benefits to other domestic arrangements. Gay marriage is neither a selfish nor a short-sighted barrier to this.