Ever since the gay marriage SCOTUS ruling, a lot more pro-polygamist voices have been speaking out through the media, using the argument of the right of consenting adults in attempt to solidify their argument. I am personally not very receptive to the idea, as that leaves a high risk of abuse and neglect in my mind. What about you? How do you stand on polygamy?
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Serious Legalization of Polygamy
- Thread starter Alfalfa
- Start date
Cresselia~~
Junichi Masuda likes this!!
Cons:
Women are known to be jealous of each other, and throughout history, have put all sorts of different herbal poison into their rival's drinks or food. The preferred wife often also physically abuse the other wives/ concubines.
Pros:
1. More women can get married into a rich guy's family.
2. Human physiology suggests that humans are adapted to polygamy, alike most other mammals, so it's supposed to be more natural.
Apparently, most Muslim countries still legalize polygamy, as they have always been.
The British took a huge effort to convert Hong Kong people from polygamy to only one wife per man.
It was one of those rare things the Brits did to upset the population.
The Brits only succeeded in doing so in 1971, which wasn't that long ago.
The public reacted very negatively to this new law back in those days.
I actually don't know which side to support, to be honest. My opinion is that, whilst it's nothing new, I wouldn't want to marry a guy who wants more than one wife.
But I don't think I care about what other people do.
Alike homosexual marriage, I don't think I care what they do, unless the couple are Christians.
Women are known to be jealous of each other, and throughout history, have put all sorts of different herbal poison into their rival's drinks or food. The preferred wife often also physically abuse the other wives/ concubines.
Pros:
1. More women can get married into a rich guy's family.
2. Human physiology suggests that humans are adapted to polygamy, alike most other mammals, so it's supposed to be more natural.
Apparently, most Muslim countries still legalize polygamy, as they have always been.
The British took a huge effort to convert Hong Kong people from polygamy to only one wife per man.
It was one of those rare things the Brits did to upset the population.
The Brits only succeeded in doing so in 1971, which wasn't that long ago.
The public reacted very negatively to this new law back in those days.
I actually don't know which side to support, to be honest. My opinion is that, whilst it's nothing new, I wouldn't want to marry a guy who wants more than one wife.
But I don't think I care about what other people do.
Alike homosexual marriage, I don't think I care what they do, unless the couple are Christians.
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MikeDawg
Banned deucer.
Polygamy is illegal? I don't see why. Let people do what they want. It isn't like incest where there are reproduction complications (though a ban on incestuous reproduction seems more appropriate). If somebody wants 3 husbands and those 3 husbands are fine with it (don't let the balls touch and no homo), then I don't see an issue.
You are addressing polygamy as though there are no potential consequences. Do you realize how deeply rooted marriage is into law? Legalizing polygamy would require rewriting several laws on marriage, especially on inheritance, that would take several years to re-write. All just to legalize polygamy? Describe to me how that is worth such a strenuous effort.
You can't be seriously using logistical costs as a factor on a debate determined by fundamental rights.
To clarify, I am using logistical costs as a side effect of honoring this "right", not as a reason for keeping it illegal, though it should be stated that such a legal conversion would be very tedious to make (essentially, I admit I should not have argued using the tip of the iceberg). There are more centralizing factors, such as whether or not polygamy opens up additional risks of neglect between spouses, the effects of polygamy on a family, etc..... you are right, the premiere reason I gave should not be the central reason, but when you are talking about converting monogamist societies into polygamist ones, there are several risks and issues that have to be worked out upon making such conversion.
Personally, I don't think it's up to the government to decide what consenting adults can and can't do. Honestly, why should we care if three or more adults want to marry each other, as long as all of them consent to it?
And why should we care about having to rewrite laws? And how is "making monogamist societies polygamous" a valid argument by any stretch of the imagination? This would have absolutely no effect on monogamous couples; if people want to be monogamous, they still can. "Risk of neglect between spouses?" Yeah, that's a good point... Except that still happens with two-people marriages. If there is any spousal neglect going on, that's not my responsibility; it's whoever is neglecting who is responsible. The same applies to couples, and a man who is neglectful is just as likely to neglect two spouses as he is to neglect one.
As another note, speaking as a bisexual person, I honestly don't think I can expect myself to have just one partner unless they can somehow magically switch between male and female at will. I honestly feel like monogamy is an inherently monosexist institution in this regard as it seems unfair to expect bisexuals to be monogamous. Note that I do not claim to speak for all bisexuals; I only claim to speak for myself. A bisexual person can choose to be monogamous but I don't think it's fair to just automatically expect them to be and/or condemn them due to being perceived as non-monogamous. There are monogamous bisexuals (I wouldn't even claim polyamory is the majority among us) and polyamorous monosexuals, so polygamy can still be argued from a monosexual perspective; I'm just putting my own perspective out there.
And why should we care about having to rewrite laws? And how is "making monogamist societies polygamous" a valid argument by any stretch of the imagination? This would have absolutely no effect on monogamous couples; if people want to be monogamous, they still can. "Risk of neglect between spouses?" Yeah, that's a good point... Except that still happens with two-people marriages. If there is any spousal neglect going on, that's not my responsibility; it's whoever is neglecting who is responsible. The same applies to couples, and a man who is neglectful is just as likely to neglect two spouses as he is to neglect one.
As another note, speaking as a bisexual person, I honestly don't think I can expect myself to have just one partner unless they can somehow magically switch between male and female at will. I honestly feel like monogamy is an inherently monosexist institution in this regard as it seems unfair to expect bisexuals to be monogamous. Note that I do not claim to speak for all bisexuals; I only claim to speak for myself. A bisexual person can choose to be monogamous but I don't think it's fair to just automatically expect them to be and/or condemn them due to being perceived as non-monogamous. There are monogamous bisexuals (I wouldn't even claim polyamory is the majority among us) and polyamorous monosexuals, so polygamy can still be argued from a monosexual perspective; I'm just putting my own perspective out there.
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Well marriage is, as far as any government is concerned, a legal contract. So of course they have the authority to regulate it however they wish, so long as the regulation serves a legitimate government interest more than it infringes on individual liberties. Secondly, it does absolutely nothing to restrict what "consenting adults can and can't do." There are plenty of people living in the US in polygamous relationships. There is no law criminalizing sexual (or non-sexual) relations with more than one other person. And there certainly is no law against cohabitation with many other people. But the government has no imperative to look at that and say that it is a marriage, if there are valid reasons not to.
So the question all boils down to "what is that governmental interest." The answer is pretty clear. While it is possible that 3+ people all with great knowledge of the legal system and all highly intelligent and capable of conflict resolution wanted to marry each other (Suppose they're all lawyers, Alito joked in the gay marriage oral argument), yeah it'd probably work fine and there'd be little governmental interest in preventing them from doing so. But that's just not the case for the history of polygamy in the US, which has been really abusive of women and children.
So the question all boils down to "what is that governmental interest." The answer is pretty clear. While it is possible that 3+ people all with great knowledge of the legal system and all highly intelligent and capable of conflict resolution wanted to marry each other (Suppose they're all lawyers, Alito joked in the gay marriage oral argument), yeah it'd probably work fine and there'd be little governmental interest in preventing them from doing so. But that's just not the case for the history of polygamy in the US, which has been really abusive of women and children.
Are we really to consider abuse as an argument against polygamy? The problem here is, momogamous marriages have also historically been abusive to women. Did you know women being able to initiate divorce is a recent concept? Forced marriages historically? Forced marriage could also cover much of why polygamy was historically abusive.
Point being, domestic abuse and forced marriage are separate issues, and, especially since domestic abuse doesn't even require marriage to occur, do not present compelling reasons to criminalize polygamy. Ergo, there is a compelling government interest in forbidding forced marriage and domestic abuse, but these issues should not be lumped in with any sort of marriage involving consenting individuals.
PS: Do note I made a distinction between polygamy (being married to two or more people at once) and polyamory (having two or more sexual partners with the consent of everyone involved) in my post. The issue here is if they should be allowed to wed, not if people should be allowed to have multiple partners (which I assume we already agree on.) In which case, why is marriage something they shouldn't have? All we'd be doing is granting them the same right as monogamous couples to a lifetime of sexless suburban drudgery.
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Simple legal answer: the government has no reasonable interest in keeping gays from marrying. The government has PLENTY of interest in keeping people from taking multiple spouses.
In all reality, there probably shouldn't be laws against marrying multiple spouses. Strangely enough, studies show that, even as the US people become more and more liberal in their sexual thinking and what they would try, polygamy still gets very little support. People are very stuck in a monogamist culture.
In all reality, there probably shouldn't be laws against marrying multiple spouses. Strangely enough, studies show that, even as the US people become more and more liberal in their sexual thinking and what they would try, polygamy still gets very little support. People are very stuck in a monogamist culture.
My great-grandfather was a bigamist and I have to say he neglected a few of his kids. I can see polygamy being a lot worse.
I don't see a problem if all adults are completely consenting throughout the entirety of the marriage, but the majority of the time this will not be the case and can lead to plenty of issues.
I don't see a problem if all adults are completely consenting throughout the entirety of the marriage, but the majority of the time this will not be the case and can lead to plenty of issues.
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I believe it should be legal but not encouraged, some men truly can't be monogamous and can support larger families and some women don't mind sharing their husband. Who are we to stereotype it or to tell people not to do something completely harmless? In communities where it's still allowed, they still occupy single digits or even less of total marriages.
In the US and other countries yes it might be a legal hassle, but you have also states where someone gets HALF the wealth just by divorcing so you got bigger issues at hand.
In the US and other countries yes it might be a legal hassle, but you have also states where someone gets HALF the wealth just by divorcing so you got bigger issues at hand.
I personally do not believe that marriage should be defined in law at all, be it religious or secular, homosexual or heterosexual, mono-amorous or poly-amorous. This is one of the reasons I was opposed to the legalising of homosexual marriage - it concedes far too much. If you are a homosexual who wishes to get married, do you really want to say that your right to marry is granted to you by the Government? If I wished to marry, then as far as I am concerned I would have the right to do so whether or not the State says that I may. It has got nothing to do with them. Just get Government out of the whole marriage business altogether.
I think the polygamy question does raise an interesting issue, however. When debating the gay marriage issue with friends, I pointed out that what is really happening is that a defining characteristic of marriage is being done away with (namely, that it be uniquely the prerogative of heterosexuals), and that, if this happens, then there is no reason why any of the other defining characteristics of marriage should not be done away with as well. They were advocating a view of marriage whereby two people (regardless of gender) who love each other enter into a life-long committed relationship of love. To which my response was "why should it be only two people?" Of course they dismissed this as ridiculous, and yet here we are discussing it.
If three people wanted to marry one another, why should they not? You may say that it violates the definition of marriage, but the advocate of gay marriage cannot consistently make this argument, because we have already set the precedent that marriage can be made into whatever we want it to be, and we can call upon the Government to use legislation as the mechanism by which this is accomplished. The same may be said of incestuous marriage. The main reason why people are opposed to incest is the danger of in-breeding. But in-breeding is only a problem in heterosexual situations, and wouldn't be a problem in many cases. Why should two brothers not get married, for example? It is only a matter of time before incestuous folk become grafted into the so-called LGBTQ "community". I am calling it now.
To be clear, I do not condone homosexual marriage, incestuous relationships or polygamy. I am merely pointing out the necessary consequences of the gay-rights logic. To those who do support such things, I would ask: does the concept of "marriage" have any defining characteristics? That is to say, does it have any features such that, if they were removed, it would cease to be marriage? If the answer is "no", then it is surely a meaningless concept, and people should have no reason to want it for themselves. And if the answer is "yes", then what are these characteristics? And who has the authority to define them?
One final thought: many people like to equate "gay marriage" with "marriage equality", as though now that homosexual marriage is legal we have marriage equality. But we don't. Marriage is not equal until everyone can do it. This is what I find hypocritical among gay-rights advocates. When they speak of "equality", what they really mean is "equality for me and my minority, but not for others". It has been well said that what homosexuals want is not equal rights, but uber-rights.
I think the polygamy question does raise an interesting issue, however. When debating the gay marriage issue with friends, I pointed out that what is really happening is that a defining characteristic of marriage is being done away with (namely, that it be uniquely the prerogative of heterosexuals), and that, if this happens, then there is no reason why any of the other defining characteristics of marriage should not be done away with as well. They were advocating a view of marriage whereby two people (regardless of gender) who love each other enter into a life-long committed relationship of love. To which my response was "why should it be only two people?" Of course they dismissed this as ridiculous, and yet here we are discussing it.
If three people wanted to marry one another, why should they not? You may say that it violates the definition of marriage, but the advocate of gay marriage cannot consistently make this argument, because we have already set the precedent that marriage can be made into whatever we want it to be, and we can call upon the Government to use legislation as the mechanism by which this is accomplished. The same may be said of incestuous marriage. The main reason why people are opposed to incest is the danger of in-breeding. But in-breeding is only a problem in heterosexual situations, and wouldn't be a problem in many cases. Why should two brothers not get married, for example? It is only a matter of time before incestuous folk become grafted into the so-called LGBTQ "community". I am calling it now.
To be clear, I do not condone homosexual marriage, incestuous relationships or polygamy. I am merely pointing out the necessary consequences of the gay-rights logic. To those who do support such things, I would ask: does the concept of "marriage" have any defining characteristics? That is to say, does it have any features such that, if they were removed, it would cease to be marriage? If the answer is "no", then it is surely a meaningless concept, and people should have no reason to want it for themselves. And if the answer is "yes", then what are these characteristics? And who has the authority to define them?
One final thought: many people like to equate "gay marriage" with "marriage equality", as though now that homosexual marriage is legal we have marriage equality. But we don't. Marriage is not equal until everyone can do it. This is what I find hypocritical among gay-rights advocates. When they speak of "equality", what they really mean is "equality for me and my minority, but not for others". It has been well said that what homosexuals want is not equal rights, but uber-rights.
as millenials grow up i don't think there would be many that would condone polygamy. with a relationship culture that shuns "cheating" and with both girls and boys known to physically fight and even kill each other in extreme cases over relational issues having a polygamous society, as has been stated, would cause far more problems than it would "solve". there are few religions that "allow" men to have multiple wives, much less women to have multiple husbands. and accept it or not, people driven by religious beliefs can get pretty fucking crazy, just look at the middle east. the paranoia experienced by young couples over whether their partner is "cheating" may disappear over time but that hardly invalidates the feeling of distrust partners are likely to feel, which doesn't result in a healthy relationship for any parties. it's also important to look at the logistical issues of this: which spouse would you live with? if you had say 3 spouses and you all lived in the same house that's just a recipe for disaster. what if you wanted to divorce one of your spouses? do you still have to pay child welfare, and who takes possession of the child? if you do bring it to live with you and another spouse there's going to very likely be aminosity.
the reason marriage is encoded in law is not because the government cares (or should care) who you choose to spend your life with, but due to the often messy circumstances surrounding divorce and inheritance. if there were no laws to govern this, people would just be duking it out on the streets.
this is something that could happen in the future, but it'd require a complete change of mentality which isn't going to happen in this generation or the next.
the reason marriage is encoded in law is not because the government cares (or should care) who you choose to spend your life with, but due to the often messy circumstances surrounding divorce and inheritance. if there were no laws to govern this, people would just be duking it out on the streets.
this is something that could happen in the future, but it'd require a complete change of mentality which isn't going to happen in this generation or the next.
Saz-Chan's post is total nonsense and I cbf dissecting it
For my own perspective when it comes to relationships, I think that as long as everyone involved is giving informed consent and it's not affecting other people then it's all good and the law should recognise it.
Idk why you characterise cheating as a millenial thing, like it's been frowned upon for centuries and is definitely nothing new. If anything growing up in a culture that is progressively more tolerant to non-conventional relationships would have the opposite effect. Anyhow, equating cheating with polygamy is a really flawed assumption imo because it's simply not true. Cheating involves initiating a relationship usually without the partner's knowledge, or at the very least without their consent. By contrast, any sensible implementation of polygamy would require all individuals involved to sign off on it, so that shoots down those two characteristics of cheating. The whole point of legalising polygamy should be to accomodate polyamorous relationships, where these things are generally discussed and agreed upon. The religion argument is something where I see where you're coming from, but I don't think is supported by what can be observed in the world. For one, in many countries (most of the west I think) religiousness is declining, and second we're already seeing progress as gay marriage is gaining more widespread acceptance despite also being forbidden by many religions. I also just wanna point out that you characterise having a family with multiple spouses living in the same house as being a recipe for disaster, but you fail to explain why outside the prospect of divorce, where you raise a number of valid questions but ultimately don't address more general cases
For my own perspective when it comes to relationships, I think that as long as everyone involved is giving informed consent and it's not affecting other people then it's all good and the law should recognise it.
it's more of a millenial thing since in the past women had few of the rights that males did, so it wasn't as frowned upon if the male dumped his wife without reason and took another. but now cheating comes with the shaming of social media, it's just generally a bigger deal than it was in the past. and it doesn't matter if you're divorced or not, if you have 3 spouses, which one are going to live with?
i agree it wouldn't be as big of an issue if all parties are fully aware of what's going on but there's still things that should be regulated by law, such as how often at a minimum you're required to spend with each spouse etc
I just don't think this idea would be very popular as is, not to mention the logistical issues will take a ton of time to sort out which is why I said I could see it happening at some point, just not in the near future.
Respectfully, I don't believe that it is helpful to say "it shouldn't happen, because society isn't ready for it yet". I think this is pretty wishy-washy. Either we believe that the law can be used as the mechanism by which the definition of marriage can be chopped and changed in accordance with our whims, for the sake of any minority who feels oppressed, or we don't. I, for one, don't. I also think that polyamory as a supposed "sexual orientation" is a nonsense, since it really does render the notion of "cheating" meaningless. The law does not need to define (let alone radically re-define) marriage in order to have sensible divorce and inheritance laws. A legal concept of civil partnership does the job just as well, but apparently this wasn't good enough.
Obviously it is difficult to respond to rebuttals of me that aren't actually made, so there isn't much for me to say. I would point out again, though, that once you establish the precedent that a defining characteristic of marriage can be done away with by means of law, simply to meet the pressures of a particular socio-cultural agenda (whether it be the gay-rights movement, or poly-amory) this raises the question as to what the non-negotiables of marriage actually are. If its uniquely heterosexual nature is negotiable, and its uniquely mono-amorous nature is negotiable also, conservatives like me are inclined to ask: "What is left? And whatever is left, how long will that remain?" The reason I think that the slippery slope argument is pertinent is because many of those who previously were campaigning for homosexual marriage laughed off the idea that this would open up the floodgates for polygamy. But the very fact that we are having this conversation proves them wrong.
I'll mostly talk about gay rights because your points seems to be the same for both gay marriage and polygamy. In your reply to Dominatio you imply that being gay is just a trend ("whims"). This is not true, it's not really a choice and gay people aren't going to go away anytime soon. Furthermore you seem to characterise the gay rights movement as being driven by some "other" seeking to manipulate society as a whole according to goals that are fundamentally different from our own. Again, not really the case as for gay people being attracted to the same sex is literally the only difference between them and hetero people. They still want to find a partner to love, settle down with and maybe (probably) raise a family and they want their relationship to be meaningful. Another point is that you treat the convnetional definition of marriage as something fundamental, when I'd argue that that's the wrong way around. Being gay isn't a choice and I'm pretty sure there are biological traits to which it can be linked, while marriage is a prime example of a social construct. For someone who's gay, that's fundamental to who they are, while we can define what marriage means in whatever way we please. You can see this in other cultures, with polygamy being a prime example, as there are other cultures that do allow for polygamy (whether you think those cultures are "good" is an entirely separate matter), which demonstrates that it's not fundamental but instead something we define.
I just want to address slippery slope. Firstly, I've not heard anyone discuss polygamy in relation to the whole gay rights thing. It doesn't really get talked about much in general I think. But the issue I have with the slippery slope argument is that once the existing standard is changed it kinda gives up on a principled approach to the concept as a whole. I can't speak for everyone but for me this isn't the case, I specified where I draw the line in my above post.
To clarify, what I identified as a "whim" is not homosexuality itself. Of course I agree that the experience of same-sex attraction is not something individuals choose for themselves. My point is that the institution of marriage is one that is much more venerable and entrenched in history, tradition, culture and language than is the gay rights movement, or anything of this kind. What I identify as a "whim" is the notion that marriage be changed, not naturally but by contrivance, simply because of whatever minority happens to want "equal rights" at that moment. Uniquely heterosexual marriage wasn't good enough for homosexuals, so marriage had to be changed to accommodate them. Now uniquely mono-amorous marriage isn't good enough for poly-amorous people, so the suggestion is that marriage now be changed to accommodate them. Yesterday it was the homosexuals, today it is the poly-amorous, tomorrow it may well be the incestuous or the bestial. And at each stage, marriage must be radically re-defined to accommodate. This is what I mean by "whims". Whether or not people choose to be gay is besides the point; the question is whether the mere fact of same-sex attraction allows individuals to make demands of the rest of society. The institution into which my parents entered 30 years ago is now of a different nature than it was at the time, so says the law. As a conservative and a libertarian, who is committed to limited government, this makes me bristle. It seems as though progressives are very keen on the idea that the State gets to grant them the right to get married. I would see homosexuals liberated by taking the State out of the equation.
Your second point, about society being manipulated by some "other", I didn't quite understand. I'm not sure which of my words this was corresponding to.
Regarding your describing marriage as merely a social construct, I would point out that this is not uncontroversial. For the Christian, marriage has been instituted by God. Now, whatever you make of this personally, if the legislature were to define marriage in such a way that treated marriage as a social construct and not a divine institution, they would be defining marriage in a decidedly non-Christian way. This will make some members of society happy, and others not. Conversely, if the legislature were to define marriage in such a way that excluded homosexuals, and did so on religious grounds, then they would be taking a decidedly non-secular approach, and put the rest of society's noses out of joint. The libertarian solution is simply to take the State legislature out of the equation.
Moreover, even if we understand marriage as a social construct, this does not mean that it does not have a definitive meaning with which society and government should not meddle. Fundamentally, my objection to the legalising of gay marriage is that it constitutes a contrived change to natural language. It is one thing for language to change naturally over time, but quite another for it to be altered, of a sudden, by means of a piece of legislation, to conform to the wants of a given minority.
And it seems that you have basically conceded my point - that, if we establish the precedent that the uniquely heterosexual nature of marriage can be done away with, then any aspect of marriage can be done away with too. This being the case, I think that conservatively-minded persons like myself are well within our rights to see "marriage equality" as a fundamental de-valuing of marriage. Just think about it in general terms: take a concept, analyse what its defining characteristics are, and then remove or alter them one by one. Do you still have the same thing? Clearly not. Now take account of the fact that it is the law that is implementing this very phenomenon in the case of marriage, and it starts looking very sinister indeed.
Or so it seems to me.
I'm sorry, but I don't understand what your response to the slippery slope argument is. Maybe you could re-phrase.
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Saz Chan >^-^<
The redefinition of marriage to include non-heterosexual relationships was not an "all-of-a-sudden change". It was a milestone that was essentially the culmination of decades of work by gay rights group to procure equal rights for homosexual relationships. The only thing that is instantaneous is that in one moment, it was illegal to marry, and the next, it was legal. To frame it as some blasé decision with no precedent and no reasoning is both inaccurate and insulting.
Your fundamental argument is that expanding rights is devaluing rights. This is pretty ridiculous. The change in what rights we offer to which people is a constant flow and I [hopefully] think you wouldn't apply that same argument to things like the extension of the right to vote to black people / women, or more directly the opening of marriage to interracial couples. Does that devalue marriage? Marriage is not a fundamental definition. It has changed many, many times over the last couple of hundred years, and may change in the future. There is nothing to be kept pure, and no reason to attempt to do so.
The redefinition of marriage to include non-heterosexual relationships was not an "all-of-a-sudden change". It was a milestone that was essentially the culmination of decades of work by gay rights group to procure equal rights for homosexual relationships. The only thing that is instantaneous is that in one moment, it was illegal to marry, and the next, it was legal. To frame it as some blasé decision with no precedent and no reasoning is both inaccurate and insulting.
Your fundamental argument is that expanding rights is devaluing rights. This is pretty ridiculous. The change in what rights we offer to which people is a constant flow and I [hopefully] think you wouldn't apply that same argument to things like the extension of the right to vote to black people / women, or more directly the opening of marriage to interracial couples. Does that devalue marriage? Marriage is not a fundamental definition. It has changed many, many times over the last couple of hundred years, and may change in the future. There is nothing to be kept pure, and no reason to attempt to do so.
Ash Borer
I've heard they're short of room in hell
Yeah I don't buy that. Marriage's purpose is clear; it heavily encourages reproduction and parental responsibility. If you pair everyone off, they're going to start reproducing at rates that far exceed a polygamous society, and the science is in on this; children raised by both of their biological parents do a lot better by pretty much every metric on average. Apply basic Darwinian principles and you'll see that societies that didn't have a strong marriage tradition were probably comparatively weaker and died off.
When you disrupt marriage and what it entails, you disrupt the society's mechanism for encouraging reproduction and raising its young. I'm not against legalizing gay marriage at all, and I'll hear arguments in favour of polygamy. But, as a proponent of these changes, you have to understand and accept the responsibility that there might be repercussions and we can't know them. Don't pretend that conservatism is inherently unwise.
On the contrary, the source of the contrivance was not just the change in the law, but the very gay rights movement itself. Insofar as this cultural phenomenon was campaigning for a re-definition of marriage, they were campaigning for a contrived change in natural language. Put it this way: had the gay rights movement never existed, would marriage have been re-defined to include homosexuals? Clearly not. It is only as a result of pressure from a minority that achieved influence that this re-definition took place. Even without getting the law involved, this is still a contrivance, and I find this sinister.
And I would dispute the idea that homosexuals achieved "equal rights". What they in fact did was move the goalposts. Imagine two football (soccer for my American friends) games taking place adjacent to one another, one is the boys' game and the other is the girls' game, and the two are separated out by a series of boundary markers. Let's say that the girls wish to join the boys' game and be a part of it, but the boys say that they may never join the boys' game. What are the boys really saying here? Are they oppressing the girls? No - the reality of the situation, disappointing as it may be for the girls, is that the girls really can never join the boys' game, because then it would cease to be the boys' game. It is not a matter of rights or oppression, but of definition. It has to do with the nature of the game itself. If the girls were to remove the boundary markers so as to create one big game, it is tempting to see this as an act of equality, but it really isn't. The game has fundamentally altered in nature. The number of people who are taking part, as well what manner of people they are, has changed, and the game cannot remain unaffected by such changes. Now imagine that the boys' game is a tradition that goes back centuries, where the girls' game is much newer and has only recently gained popularity. Do you see the analogy? In my view, what you would call "marriage equality" (which, as I pointed out above, is actually not what we have) actually has very little to do with rights. It has everything to do with the integrity of the concept of marriage itself. Homosexuals have not achieved what they wanted to achieve, for what they now have is not truly "marriage", just as the girls never really did join the boys' game.
My argument is not that expanding rights devalues rights. My argument is that artificially expanding the definition of a concept devalues that concept, and changes it into some other manner of thing. Do you deny this? Can a given thing have all of its defining characteristics removed, and yet remain what it is? No, it loses its integrity. And those who have already entered into traditional marital union are victims of this. This isn't "marriage equality" - not even close. Marriage may well have evolved in some ways, and exhibit variation from one culture to another, but I think that people exaggerate these differences. It is certainly an exaggeration to say that it has changed "many, many times" in two centuries. And again, I would distinguish between language's changing naturally over time through natural usage, and its changing by contrivance due to some special interest group. There really is no comparison between the two things.
Let's say that you are right, and there is no "purity" in the concept of marriage. If marriage has no defining characteristics whatsoever, without which marriage would not be what it is, then what do you mean when you use the word "marriage"? Why is it such a great victory for homosexuals that they may now partake of some concept that has no definitional features, and may be something entirely different in another 200 years' time? What manner of victory is this, really? And what reason would they have to want it? You may say that they simply want "equal rights", but as I have pointed out, this is to misunderstand the nature of the problem.
I shall close with the dignified wisdom of Monty Python. This harkens back to a saner age, when liberals could still make fun of themselves:
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lmao what the victory is that now i can have healthcare rights and joint tax rights and the ability to see my partner when they're sick in the hospital or dying etc etc etc. that's why it's a victory.
also, here's the transcript of a video regarding how marriage has changed over time.
Hello friends! I've just traded my seven year old daughter for a goat.
You see, I've been living, as we all do, in accordance with traditional marriage rules going back thousands of years. That's why I've been girding my loins to stone any bride who isn't a virgin, going dates on ghosts, and why I was recently fired for kissing my wife in public...just as it's been for thousands of years.
But wait, what was marriage traditionally? What is the real definition of traditional marriage? Well, I'm glad you asked. Let's go back 4,000 years to Mesopotamia where the laws around marriage were close to the laws around slavery. As with slavery, Hammurabi's code specified how wives should be paid for, who owned the children, and even the terms for getting a refund on your spouse. So that's a nice tradition.
But then the Bible had to come along and redefine everything. Traditional marriage in the Bible is pretty polygamous. Abraham had three wives (or at least two wives and a slave he had sex with). Caleb had five. David had 18. Moses: Just two. And King Solomon had 1,000 wives (although to be fair, 300 were concubines). The Bible's rules about marriage are very clear: Rape victims must marry their rapists; if a woman's husband dies, she has to marry his brother even if he's already married to somebody else; interracial marriage is strictly forbidden; and if you marry a woman who turns out to not be a virgin, you have to stone her to death. Really, the whole Old Testament makes marriage seem like it's more trouble than it's worth, which probably explains the advice in 1 Cor 7:28 which is essentially "dude just never get married."
In ancient Rome, it was considered gross for husbands and wives to be in love. According to the Stoic Seneca, nothing is more impure than loving one's wife as if she was a mistress. And Plutarch called it disgraceful when a senator was caught kissing his wife in public. He was removed from office over the scandal.
So that's what traditional marriage looked like...except maybe not, because it kept changing.
Early church officials were pretty opposed to marriage. St Jerome wrote around the year 400, "We must never be in the bondage of wedlock for as often as I render my wife her due, I cannot pray." Jerome surrounded himself with a circle of women who had taken a vow of virginity and wrote letters to them about what they should wear.
Around 500, Emperor Justinian redefined marriage again with the Corpus Juris. Under those rules, fathers could give away their daughters when they turned seven; Christians couldn't marry Jews; and a husband was allowed to beat his wife, but if he did, he had to pay her afterwards.
So that was traditional marriage...for a while, until it changed again.
Around the 13th century, the Catholic Church decided to get into the wedding business and made marriage a sacrament. Pope Alexander redefined marriage to be an agreement between spouses instead of their parents.
But it still wasn't great for women.
In the 15th century, Bernard of Siena told parishioners to cool it with all the wife beating and they should treat their wives with as much mercy as they would a chicken or a pig. And Martin Luther wrote that he gave his wife a box on the ear whenever she was "saucy."
Ok, so traditional marriage was basically treating women like a punching bag. Actually no, it was much worse.
In 1736, jurist Sir Matthew Hale wrote in [The History of the Pleas of the Crown," that a husband cannot be guilty of raping his wife since a wife had given up herself in this kind to her husband which she cannot retract.
By the 1700s, marriage had been redefined over and over and over. But the one thing it had almost never been was something you do with somebody you love. The advice in the 1700s was to marry someone you could learn to tolerate, thereby anticipating the Kramdens by several centuries.
If you wanted to get married in colonial America, all you had to do is say you were married...as long as you were white. Slaves still had to get permission from their masters. As for women, the very being and legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, wrote William Blackstone. The very being, Blackstone literally thought women ceased to be when they marry...tradition! Former slaves were finally able to marry after the Civil War. And in the late 1800s, South Carolina became the first state to rule that men were no longer allowed to beat their wives. It wasn't until 1920 -- less than a hundred years ago -- that wife beating was outlawed nationwide. These changes were radical redefinitions of traditional marriage, and they were redefinitions for the better. As a society improves and the people in the society improve, those people improve marriage.
It was in the 1920s that people started marrying more for love than for property. The term for it at the time was "love marriage" and people were fascinated by this new idea that you could be in love with the person you marry and you might not be allowed to beat them up. This was all coinciding with suffrage, improved economic mobility, and a stronger society in general, so it was no surprise that marriage grew stronger as well. And yet, there was still resistance. Conservatives at the time said this new definition of marriage would completely destroy the institution by the end of the 20 century.
And there were still more changes coming.
It wasn't until 1967 that the Supreme Court overturned bans on interracial marriage in Loving v Virginia. At the time, states justified those interracial marriage bans by claiming that they were, you guessed it, "traditional." They also claimed the Bible justified the bans and that interracial marriage was an attack on religious freedom. One judge even wrote, "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."
In 1971, the Supreme Court overturned laws dictating that when a husband and wife have a legal dispute, males must be preferred to females. The young attorney who argued that case, by the way, was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who may understand better than anyone else on the Supreme Court why it's OK, and sometimes necessary, for marriage to change.
It wasn't until 1979 that states got rid of head and master laws which said that a husband can do whatever he wants with his wife's property. And until 1993 -- 1993! -- it was legal for a man to rape his wife in some states. If you want to be technical, outlawing spousal rape was a radical redefinition of marriage going back thousands of years. Because remember, marriage is one man and one woman, enslaved, not in love, polygamous, married to a rapist or your brother in law, or never married, with a seven year old girl, beaten as you would a chicken or a pig whenever she's saucy, barely tolerated with no being or legal existence, and definitely not a different ethnicity. And we didn't even talk about non-Western cultures where marriage has developed in even more definitions.
Look, marriage has been a lot of things. But when you get down to it, it has always been an agreement between people. And as people strive to improve themselves -- to become a more fair and just society -- the marriages that they formed improved with them.
So today, you might only have one spouse. You might even be in love and you might be a union of equals. These are experimental changes to the traditions of marriage. It wasn't long ago that women were treated like property and people of color weren't even considered human. As society learned from those mistakes, people updated the rules of marriage.
Even more recently, LGBTs were thought of as dangerous perverts unable to form real relationships. And now, people are changing marriage again as we realize the fundamentals of same-sex marriage are the same as straight relationships. Letting same-sex couples get married is actually completely traditional. It's part of the tradition of constantly improving the institution of marriage.
Well fuck, Kitten Milk posted before me. This is more in response to saz chan
You keep insisting that it's just a matter of definition, but seem to be wilfully ignoring the fact that it IS a matter of rights and oppression, because there are very real consequences for the minorities affected. They are not separable in this case.
Your analogy of the two soccer games is also pretty terrible because they're still playing soccer. There's still two goals, one ball and you have to kick the ball into the opposite goal. Literally every characteristic of soccer remains present, it's just that everyone gets to play together. Calling it entirely different in your analogy is picking a very specific naming convention and quibbling over that. Just in general, you seem to have taken the slippery slope fallacy to an extreme, as you're basically saying that if there is any deviation from your ideal of marriage, then the entire concept becomes meaningless. First, it's clear that your ideal of marriage is far from universal, with many different variations existing. In that context, preference of one ideal over the other can never be arbitrarily assumed, but instead must be justified. Second, it's just a ridiculous line of reasoning. It's like if a ship had a hole in its hull which you had to fix- do you just patch it up or do you disassemble the entire ship? But let's indulge the idea that a small modification to something renders it entirely different- isn't this just a dispute over names? Furthermore, if we had to choose between two customs, one of which is "traditional marriage", the other is "progressive marriage", with the two being completely identical but the latter including more people (such as gay ppl) where "traditional" doesn't, why would we choose the "traditional" option?
You keep insisting that it's just a matter of definition, but seem to be wilfully ignoring the fact that it IS a matter of rights and oppression, because there are very real consequences for the minorities affected. They are not separable in this case.
Your analogy of the two soccer games is also pretty terrible because they're still playing soccer. There's still two goals, one ball and you have to kick the ball into the opposite goal. Literally every characteristic of soccer remains present, it's just that everyone gets to play together. Calling it entirely different in your analogy is picking a very specific naming convention and quibbling over that. Just in general, you seem to have taken the slippery slope fallacy to an extreme, as you're basically saying that if there is any deviation from your ideal of marriage, then the entire concept becomes meaningless. First, it's clear that your ideal of marriage is far from universal, with many different variations existing. In that context, preference of one ideal over the other can never be arbitrarily assumed, but instead must be justified. Second, it's just a ridiculous line of reasoning. It's like if a ship had a hole in its hull which you had to fix- do you just patch it up or do you disassemble the entire ship? But let's indulge the idea that a small modification to something renders it entirely different- isn't this just a dispute over names? Furthermore, if we had to choose between two customs, one of which is "traditional marriage", the other is "progressive marriage", with the two being completely identical but the latter including more people (such as gay ppl) where "traditional" doesn't, why would we choose the "traditional" option?
As I pointed out above, you do not need to have the law define, let alone radically re-define, marriage in order to have identical healthcare or tax rights. These are secular issues and, as such, they should pertain to secular institutions, which marriage is not. Civil partnership does the job perfectly well.
As I also mentioned, I have no problem with acknowledging that marriage exhibits some degree of variation from one culture to the next. However, I would point out that, in all of the examples you listed, the one constant is that marriage remains uniquely heterosexual. This is why I always find it curious that anyone should make the argument you are making, since marriage, for all of its supposed diversity, pivots upon the central hinge of heterosexuality. And should we read of some obscure and ancient culture of which this is not the case, I would have to ask - why on earth would we want to model ourselves after them?
There are obviously a lot of details in the transcript you have provided, many of which are rather wide of the mark as far as what I am actually arguing, so I will just bring out one or two high points.
First, many of your examples of marriage undergoing re-definition rest on a confusion. We must distinguish between the definition of marriage, and traditions or laws which pertain to marriage; a distinction which renders much of what you present irrelevant. For example, in a Roman culture in which it is unlawful for a husband to kiss his wife in public, this is a prohibition that pertains to marriage, not a definitional feature of marriage itself. They do not cease to be married if they do this. They remain married, but act criminally. So what such a prohibition is doing is not defining marriage, so much as curbing forms of behaviour that are deemed distasteful for spouses. If such a law were repealed, the definition of marriage would not have changed. No more, or fewer, people would be allowed to get married. For this reason, such an example has little bearing on the present discussion.
This is true of almost all of the examples you provide. It is not definitional of marriage that a husband be able to rape his wife. When this law was repealled, as it was in my country as well as in America, this did not open up the definition of marriage such that more people had the right to get married than ever before. Just so with wife-beating: legitimate or not, this has no bearing on the definition of marriage, and how many people, or what manner of people, are permitted to partake of it. There really is almost no analogy at all between these changes, and the issue of gay marriage. Legalising gay marriage involves removing a central aspect of marriage so as to broaden the number of people who may enter into it. Almost all of what you presented is simply nothing like this.
Indeed, there is a great deal of polygamy in the Old Testament, however I would point out that this is not treated as reflecting the created order as God intended it. Notice that polygamy is attested in the Bible only after the Fall and the entrance of sin into the world. Prior to this, when Adam was considered just and upright, the principle was that a man should leave his father and mother, and be joined with his one wife. Jesus later reiterates this principle in Matthew 19. So it is not so simple as to say that the Bible condones polygamy. The God of the Bible permits polygamy as an accommodation to human hardness of heart, as he does with divorce under the Mosaic law, but there is a clear preference towards monogamy, both in the teaching of Jesus as well as in the Pauline epistles. I think you somewhat misrepresent what Paul’s point is in 1 Cor. 7:28, as well as Jerome’s commentary thereon. I can go into more detail on this if you require, having read both the Pauline corpus and much of Jerome in the original Greek and Latin, respectively.
The second thing I would point out is that my position is not that the Government needs to work hard to preserve traditional marriage. Rather, my position is that it is not the Government’s place to define marriage on behalf of the rest of society, regardless of how well-meaning its intentions are. For the life of me, I haven’t the faintest idea why progressives are so desperate to preserve the notion that their right to marry is granted to them by the State. I see no reason why it should have anything to do with them. So even if your examples of changes in law really did constitute re-definitions of marriage (which, as I have explained, they do not), I would say the same thing of them as I do now: where does the Government come off telling me whether or not I may get married? I would be 100% with you in denying the Government the authority to deny interracial couples the right to get married, for example. Though, we would perhaps do so for different reasons. You presumably would do so because you see it as the responsibility of the State to enforce progress, whereas I would do so because the State does not have the right to dictate who may or may not be married.
In taking the position you do, you concede three things that I think are very problematic: 1. You grant to the Government the authority to determine, by means of law, whether or not you have the right to get married, and what that marriage means; 2. You grant to the Government the authority to use the law as the means of bringing about contrived changes in natural language, which is an extremely dangerous precedent; and 3. You have a bankrupt definition of marriage, since on your account, it has absolutely no defining characteristics, without which it would not be what it is. To say that “marriage has been a lot of things” simply commits a fallacy of equivocation. If you are saying that the concept of “marriage” has no non-negotiables, such that any and every aspect of it can be done away with, then in what sense are we talking about the same thing? Can we really say that two concepts, that have no features whatsoever in common, are both the same manner of thing? I don’t see how this is supposed to work.
It is indeed a matter of definition, as I have already explained. The inherent limitations of analogies notwithstanding, there is nothing wrong with the analogy I gave. The girls cannot join the boys’ soccer game, lest it cease to be the boys’ soccer game. The game has two defining characteristics: that it is a soccer game, and that only boys are playing it. If the girls join, it retains one of its defining features, and loses the other. This is a precise analogue to the gay marriage situation.
Your argument as to why my analogy is “pretty terrible” is actually quite telling as to the weakness of your position. Notice what you said: “There's still two goals, one ball and you have to kick the ball into the opposite goal. Literally every characteristic of soccer remains present”. It sounds to me as though what you’re saying is that soccer is identifiable as soccer on the basis of its characteristics. This is where the slippery slope argument puts in work: let’s say that someone proposed that the game be played without a goal, without a ball, and that the object of the game is entirely different. Is it still soccer? No, it has become another game entirely.
A slippery slope argument is not the same thing as a slippery slope fallacy. A slippery slope argument is nothing more than a call to consistency: if you commit yourself to x, then you are committed to all of the logical consequences of x. There is nothing inherently fallacious in that form of reasoning. If you commit yourself to the idea that marriage has no defining characteristics, such that any aspect of marriage may be altered by contrivance, then no aspect of marriage is safe from revision. That being the case, marriage becomes a bankrupt concept.
The analogy with the ship does not work, since it is not definitional of a ship that it not have a hole in its hull. No law has been passed dictating that for a ship to be a ship it must not have a hole. The analogy also assumes that there is something wrong with marriage as it currently exists, something that needs to be fixed. But, this is precisely what I am disputing, and so really this ends up being a circular argument.
It is not my argument that a small modification to something renders it entirely different. It is my argument that the removal of a defining characteristic of a thing renders it entirely different, as well as opening up the possibility that yet more of it may be changed in the same way. Of course the nature of the thing has changed, just like a soccer game that has had its ball and goal removed.
You are absolutely right that we are engaged in a dispute over names. Language is important. The question of whether or not the Government has the authority to legislate upon language is important. But if you wish to say that “just names” are not important, then riddle me this: why, then, was the homosexual community not content with civil partnership? Why should civil partnership not simply be altered so as to reflect all of the same benefits as marriage? The reason is that homosexuals wanted the name “marriage”. So I do not think you are in a position to trivialise names, as this is very much out-of-step with the reasoning that motivated so-called “marriage equality” in the first place.
The dichotomy you present between “traditional marriage” and “progressive marriage” is a false one, since it assumes that the State must define marriage in one way or another. But this is precisely what I am resisting. One of the reasons why I am opposed to a progressivist political philosophy in general is because, practically, progress always means enforced progress. Progress is ushered in by means of law, and therefore foisted upon people. I choose neither. Just get the Government out of it and leave individuals to lead their lives in freedom. I really don't know why this is such an unpalatable notion to you.
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