fucking prop 8

[playbynumbers]

first of all, you're lumping two separate issues together under the same banner. no one is trying to force any religious institutions to change their definitions of marriage and no one is trying to force those institutions to marry gays. the issue at hand lies solely with the government. the government issues "marriage licenses", which in effect is taking a religious tradition and making it a part of government policy. if the government simply changed their wording for ALL licenses given and labeled everything as a "civil union" instead of a "marriage", whether it has anything to do with a sacred religious contract or not, then i don't think we'd be in this heated battle.

 

quite right; actually i would prefer this (the last thing you said). and i'm not saying, or wasn't saying, that gays are going to try to force religions to marry them via lawsuits (though some radical activists have said this; but it's a fringe.)

 

 

 

As it is, the issue is that the government is using religious terminology to describe a secular governmental contract that rewards a contribution to the stability of a society, not that a minority desperately wants acceptance and validation.

 

not really. it's not pro-stability of society, it's pro-the rabid left-wing activists. seriously, no gay people cared about this 20 years ago (the first people proposing gay marriage were attacked as trying to 'change' queer culture into straight culture); it was a very small movement that has slowly bludgeoned everyone else into agreement.

 

 

 

 

so again, no one is asking churches to change their definition of marriage, only that the government give equal protection to all "unions", whether they're based in religion or not, as long as they serve the same general function in terms of benefit to the country.

 

again, i wasn't talking about this.

 

 

 

if you want to make the argument that gay unions wouldn't contribute the same things to society as straight unions, then by all means, go ahead and speak your mind. i personally can't see any difference in the contribution. your analogy to "marrying a tree" or whatever, as chen already pointed out, as well as me earlier in the thread, is moot because a man marrying a tree or a pig or a broom offers nothing to the stability of society and thus is not in the same category and only serves to muddy the issue at hand with propaganda.

 

good lord, people; i mentioned "a man might marry a horse!" as an example of FALSE rhetoric. the point is this; any number of human beings will be able to enter into a contract called 'marriage,' if this becomes settled law. polygamy will no longer be taboo; nothing will be taboo, on this front, anymore.

 

 

 

 

second, your continual assertion that gay marriages are simply "sexual arrangements" implies that heterosexual marriages are something other than that. by the points made in the articles you posted, the roots of marriage lie ultimately in sexual arrangements and control (or protection, if that makes you feel less dirty) of women. explain to me how heterosexual relationships and homosexual relationships differ on this front.

 

lol, dude, come on; heterosexual marriages are for procreation. the 'romantic' aspects are quite recent; romantic/courtly love used to be quite separate from childbearing, in fact (in heian japan and the high middle ages in the west).

 

 

 

 

third, you share the opinion that gay marriages will lead to the degradation of society in untold, unforeseeable ways and you hold up other supposed "left-wing" actions like birth control, the sexual revolution and feminism as examples and attribute several "problems" in society to these actions - high divorce rate, teen pregnancy, etc. i've always had a real problem with this line of thinking for several reasons that relate to the other topic of relativism and whatnot. you attribute "change" with "degradation" because in your line of belief there is a way that things "should be" and by implication there was once a way that "worked" that has now been degraded, leading us to the bad situation we're in today. the fact of the matter is that it's easy to take two things and draw a connection to them and say "this caused this" and while the sexual revolution may have played a part in the rise in teen pregnancy to say that one inevitably leads to the other is over simplifying the issue. the real problem here is the lack of course correction by our society when inevitable change occurs. the sexual revolution did not cause a rise in teen pregnancy, our inability to adjust our own actions in light of a new set of circumstances caused a rise in teen pregnancy. the reactionary response would of course be to say that the sexual revolution is to be blamed, but to me that's just as i said, a reactionary response. if you walk out into a rainstorm and get wet it's not the rainstorms fault for existing, it's your own fault for not being prepared and bringing an umbrella. change is inevitable and if people feel oppressed it's human nature to fight against that oppression, if unseen changes in paradigm occur as a result of the oppressed attempting to fight their oppression it does not mean that things were better off when they were oppressed, just that circumstances have changed and we should be prepared to adapt to those changes, not simply attempt to carry on business as usual.

 

i think it's a pretty direct causal relation; and we can't be 'prepared' for such a seismic shift in culture. also it's a silly freudian prejudice to say that anything other than the status quo is "oppression".

 

 

 

 

you're implying that before we had a system where we didn't have A problem and B problem that we now have (or that A and B have now become more problematic) and because of A change and B change, we're now left in a more questionable position than we were in before. this is a typical conservative view point that coincidentally enough is mostly held by people who weren't really effected by the problems that existed before A and B changes occurred. the fact is, pre-60s we had a set of problems that we attempted to correct that led to a different set of problems. to say that one set of problems was preferable to another simply because you believe that previous problems were easier to deal with completely negates the pain and hardship that countless individuals experienced under the previous paradigm. should some be forced into oppression simply because another group wants to be able to maintain their traditions that contributed to that oppression in the first place?

 

examples? ... i'm absolutely pro- the civil rights movement, obviously, and pro- most aspects of the feminist movement (though certainly not all). there were problems before the 1960s, some of which were solved; and there are new problems now. it's not as if the corrections caused the new problems; it's a whole different kettle of fish. and the fact that gays suddenly want to call themselves 'married' seems unrelated.

[lumpenprol]

dude, come on, i wasn't trolling. i did admit that i was being a little hasty on page two or three of this thread, but i've been quite rational since then, i think.

 

I think the whole set-up was a troll, in that from the get-go you connected the argument about gay marriage to the decline of western civ, for which you said watmm was the poster child, lol. Sure, you've been reasonable since then, but that's often how these things go - a jolt of something provocative to get the ball rolling, followed by more well-reasoned responses to keep things lubed up, and prevent having to do a full about-face. It's not like trolling is bad, we all do it, and philoso-trolling is more enjoyable than a weed troll for sure.

 

this is 100% correct, sure. it's one of the downsides of capitalism (perhaps THE downside); you're in good company, as nietzsche and heidegger have both pointed this out (i'm sorry to keep mentioning 19th-20th century philosophers, it's just that i'm writing my dissertation on them).

 

ok, well I guess we just draw different conclusions? Even if gay marriage somehow threatens traditional hetero marriage (which I don't agree it does), I don't feel heartbroken over the decline in power of the institution of marriage. Watching cookie-cutter weddings - as I recently did in a park here, where couple after couple took turns posing in the same places in the same positions (by the lake, on the grass, etc) - causes me more "moral" unease than the prospect of gays tying the knot. It seems pretty clear that the institution of marriage is going to survive just fine, both as a symbol of real meaning for some, and as a commercialized event not unlike Christmas.

 

It's not the Decline of Western Civilization that is bothering me so much, as that it is declining in the wrong ways! A McDonalds and Starbucks recently displace a couple of the local red-light shops - clearly a sign that something is deeply wrong with the world today.

 

 

[playbynumbers]

dude, come on, i wasn't trolling. i did admit that i was being a little hasty on page two or three of this thread, but i've been quite rational since then, i think.

 

I think the whole set-up was a troll, in that from the get-go you connected the argument about gay marriage to the decline of western civ, for which you said watmm was the poster child, lol. Sure, you've been reasonable since then, but that's often how these things go - a jolt of something provocative to get the ball rolling, followed by more well-reasoned responses to keep things lubed up, and prevent having to do a full about-face. It's not like trolling is bad, we all do it, and philoso-trolling is more enjoyable than a weed troll for sure.

 

lol, philoso-trolling indeed. i guess i define trolling differently ... anyway, i was honestly just hoping to post the link and then not say anything more, i didn't really want to get sucked in to an elaborate defense of the position, which (as i've said) i'm mostly lukewarm about. and it wasn't some sort of calculated trolling when i was annoyed with the responses; i was genuinely annoyed with the responses, and am often generally annoyed with the mindset of people on watmm, though not so much in this thread.

 

 

 

 

 

ok, well I guess we just draw different conclusions? Even if gay marriage somehow threatens traditional hetero marriage (which I don't agree it does), I don't feel heartbroken over the decline in power of the institution of marriage. Watching cookie-cutter weddings - as I recently did in a park here, where couple after couple took turns posing in the same places in the same positions (by the lake, on the grass, etc) - causes me more "moral" unease than the prospect of gays tying the knot. It seems pretty clear that the institution of marriage is going to survive just fine, both as a symbol of real meaning for some, and as a commercialized event not unlike Christmas.

 

i am semi-heartbroken over the collapse of marriage as an institution, just as i'm fully-heartbroken at all kinds of other things that postmodernism and late capitalism have done to western culture. i agree with your diagnosis but i lament it, where you seem fine with it; we're both annoyed by cookie-cutter weddings, but i guess only i'm 'annoyed' by gay marriage. except i'm not, really; each individual gay marriage, i really have no problem with, it's just the damage that the institution of it will do (to the law, among other things); gays can call it marriage all they want, but just don't make the government call it that ...

[doorjamb]

each individual gay marriage, i really have no problem with, it's just the damage that the institution of it will do (to the law, among other things)

 

please elaborate

 

edit: sorry if you're getting tired of explaining yourself but I've read the whole thread (but not the article) and I still don't follow your logic

[playbynumbers]

sure; i've put it in my own words many times in this thread, and so won't repeat that, but here's a good selection of quotations from people who are scholars/experts on the topic (and have thought about it somewhat more than i have):

 

 

 

 

The social recognition of committed heterosexual bonding has been a constant for thousands of years. No-one of a conservative inclination wants to mess lightly with that. Counter-arguments like “so was slavery” are unconvincing, as the occasional slights suffered by homosexual couples are microscopic by comparison with the injustice of human beings buying and selling other human beings. Gay marriage proponents make much of the cruelty and injustices of the past. I must say, though, being old enough to remember some of that past, I am unimpressed. I was in college in the early 1960s. There were homosexual students, and nobody minded them. They seemed perfectly happy. Certainly they were not ”beaten and brutalized”; and if they had been, I assume the ordinary laws of assault and battery would have come into play. I can recall even further back, known homosexual couples keeping house together in my provincial English home town in the 1950s. People made jokes about it, but nobody bothered them — though sodomy was illegal in England at the time! I don’t think private consensual acts should be illegal; but that aside, I don’t see much wrong with the mid-20th-century dispensation, based as it was on the great and splendid Anglo-Saxon principle of minding your own business.

 

There really is a slippery slope here. Once marriage has been redefined to include homosexual pairings, what grounds will there be to oppose futher redefinition — to encompass people who want to marry their ponies, their sisters, or their soccer team? Are all private contractual relations for cohabitation to be rendered equal, or are some to be privileged over others, as has been customary in all times and places? If the latter, what is wrong with heterosexual pairing as the privileged status, sanctified as it is by custom and popular feeling?

 

If you have a cognitively-challenged underclass, as every large nation has, you need some anchoring institutions for them to aspire to; and those institutions should have some continuity and stability. Heterosexual marriage is a key such institution. In a society in which nobody had an IQ below 120, homosexual marriage might be plausible. In the actual societies we have, other considerations kick in.

 

Human nature exists, and has fixed characteristics. We are not infinitely malleable. Human society and human institutions need to ”fit” human nature, or at least not go too brazenly against the grain of it. Homophobia seems to be a rooted condition in us. It has been present always and everywhere, if only minimally (and unfairly — there has always been a double standard here) in disdain for “the man who plays the part of a woman.” There has never, anywhere, at any level of civilization, been a society that approved egalitarian (i.e. same age, same status) homosexual bonding. This tells us something about human nature — something it might be wisest (and would certainly be conservative-est) to leave alone.

 

There is a thinness in the arguments for gay marriage that leaves one thinking the proponents are not so much for something as against something. How many times have you heard that gay marriage is necessary so that gay people will not be hindered in visiting a hospitalized partner? But if hospitals have such rules — a thing I find hard to believe in this PC-whipped age — the rules can be changed, by legislation if necessary. What need to overturn a millennial institution for such trivial ends?

 

No thoughtful, humane person wishes any harm to homosexuals; and if harm is done, it can and should be punished under long-standing laws. Let people live and love as they want. Human nature is what it is, though, and no-one of a conservative outlook can take lightly an attempt to carry out a radical overhaul of a key human institution, in a direction pointed directly at widespread (though I think normally mild) human emotions of disdain and disgust.

 

(John Derbyshire)

 

 

***

 

 

... my views appear to be unreason itself. But as MacIntyre has shown, the Enlightenment project has failed: they cannot establish from reason any compelling case for why their view should be privileged. To me, it looks like dangerous unreason: a radical willingness to tear down ancient structures (because if you can radically redefine marriage based on human desire, nothing is solid ... does gay marriage serve to incorporate same-sex couples into the moral order, or does it, in ways that may not be easily apparent, radically undermine the foundation of our moral order? I keep saying that gay marriage is only the logical extension of a change that overtook our society after the Second World War, specifically in the Sixties, led by heterosexuals. The next logical step is legalized polygamy, or a more generalized and bourgeoisified version of whatever you call the anarchy they have in the inner city. But the social radicalizers would never admit this, and may not see it themselves. Then again, if you had said back in the Sixties and Seventies that abandoning traditional standards of marriage and sexual relations would lead to gay marriage, few people would have believed you. Ideas have consequences, as traditionalists know.

 

As soon as homosexuality receives constitutionally protected status equivalent to race, then "it will be very hard to be a public Christian." By which he meant to voice support, no matter how muted, for traditional Christian teaching on homosexuality and marriage. To do so would be to set yourself up for hostile work environment challenges, including dismissal from your job, and generally all the legal sanctions that now apply to people who openly express racist views.

 

(Rod Dreher)

 

 

 

 

***

 

The last are never clearly defined, but in practice they turn out to include all attitudes and distinctions that affect the order of social life but cannot be brought fully in line with market or bureaucratic principles, and so from the standpoint of those principles are simply irrational. "Discrimination and intolerance" are thus held to include those attitudes, habits, and ties--sex roles, historical loyalties, authoritative cultural understandings, religious commitments and teachings--on which independent, informal, traditional, and nonmarket institutions and arrangements normally rely in order to function and endure.

 

Because such arrangements operate on principles that are regarded as irrational, and because they are difficult to supervise and control in the interest of rationality and equal freedom, they have no place in advanced liberal society and are edged out as the social order progresses. The normal functioning of the institutions of liberal society has precisely that effect. Social-welfare programs reduce the need for institutions and ties other than the state bureaucracy and various market and contractual arrangements, while "inclusiveness" abolishes the relation between the workings of society and any specific religious, cultural, or sexual standards. Only rational formal institutions remain functional and authoritative. What were once traditional social institutions with definite form, function, and authority become personal pursuits that each can make of what he wishes so long as all others remain free to participate or abstain as they will. Marriage and family are replaced by "relationships" and "living together"; religion becomes a freeform pursuit of individual fulfillment; and inherited culture becomes an optional consumer good, a matter of personal style or group assertiveness.

 

Such tendencies make it impossible to deal reasonably on their own terms with issues of identity, such as sex, kinship, ethnicity, and religion. Those distinctions play no role in the liberal understanding of rational social functioning, so they are understood as pure principles of irrational opposition and hatred: absolute, unbridgeable, and impossible to reconcile with a peaceful, just, and efficient social order. The consequence is that they must effectively be abolished--trivialized, conceptually dissolved, canceled through reverse discrimination, or kept from entering into thought at all.

 

Under the regime of liberalism, the way in which people have traditionally understood themselves and others now can have no bearing on their relations to each other, at least to the extent that those relations have substantive consequences. Who you are can have no connection to how things are with you, except to the extent that "who you are" refers to your relation to institutions liberalism accepts as authoritative. A man and woman have to be the same, but a Harvard and state-university graduate can be different. The result is the forcible imposition on everyone of a wholly abstract and radically depersonalized order that abolishes the connections and distinctions by which human beings have always lived in favor of more formal ones such as wealth, education, and bureaucratic position. Factually considered, that new order is unequal and unfree, but it is able to pass itself off as an indisputable application of neutral principles to which no sane and moral person could possibly object.

 

 

Advanced liberalism has become an immensely powerful social reality. Liberal standards for human rights and government procedures are widely viewed as universally obligatory, at least in principle, and no competitor has comparable general appeal as a way of organizing social life. The technically rational organization of the world to give each of us as much as possible of what he wants is quite generally accepted as the correct guiding ideal for politics and social morality. Pluralism, the fight against discrimination, and an ethic of "caring" are accepted as political, social, and moral imperatives. And administrative and therapeutic intervention in all aspects of social life is considered the self-evident means of vindicating them. Such views are especially strong in the societies that have been enduringly successful in modern times, and among the intelligent, well-educated, and well-placed, most of whom believe them a matter of simple justice and rationality and can conceive of no other legitimate outlook. Concerns about self-government, moral traditions, and inherited loyalties do not carry anything close to the same weight. To make a serious issue of such concerns is regarded as a sign of ignorance or psychological or moral defect.

 

In spite of serious chronic problems that no one knows how to attack--extraordinarily low natality, rising costs of social-welfare programs, growing immigrant populations that do not assimilate--basic change seems unthinkable. No matter how pressing the problem, only analyses and solutions compatible with liberal positions are allowed in the public square. Almost all serious discussion is carried on through academic and other institutions that are fully integrated with the ruling order, and in any case antidiscrimination rules make wholehearted subscription to principles such as inclusiveness the only way to avoid legal and public relations problems that would make institutional life impossible. Genuine political discussion disappears. What pass as battles between liberals and conservatives are almost always disputes between different stages or tendencies within liberalism itself.

 

So dominant is liberalism that it becomes invisible. Judges feel free to read it into the law without historical or textual warrant because it seems so obviously right. To oppose it in any basic way is to act incomprehensibly, in a way explicable, it is thought, only by reference to irrationality, ignorance, or evil. The whole of the nonliberal past is comprehensively blackened. Traditional ways are presented as the simple negation of unquestionable goods liberalism favors. Obvious declines in civility, morality, and cultural achievement are ignored, denied, or redefined as advances. Violence is said to be the fault of the persistence of sex roles, war of religion, theft of social inequality, suicide of stereotyping. Destruction of sex and historical community as ordering principles--and thus of settled family arrangements and cultural forms--is presented as a supremely desirable goal. The clear connection among the decline of traditional habits, standards, and social ties; the disintegration of institutions like the family; and other forms of personal and social disorder is ignored or treated as beside the point.

 

Many people find something deeply oppressive about the resulting situation, but no one really knows what to say about it. Some complain about those general restrictions, like political correctness, which make honest and productive discussion of public affairs impossible. Others have more concrete and personal objections. Parents are alarmed by the indoctrination of their children. Many people complain about affirmative action, massive and uncontrolled immigration, and the abolition of the family as a distinct social institution publicly recognized as fundamental and prior to the state. Still others have the uneasy sense that the world to which they are attached and which defines who they are is being taken from them.

 

Nonetheless, these victims and their complaints get no respect and little media coverage. Their discontent remains inarticulate and obscure. People feel stifled, but cannot say just how. They make jokes or sarcastic comments, but when challenged have trouble explaining and defending themselves. The disappearance of common understandings that enable serious thought and action to be carried on by nonexperts and outside formal bureaucratic structures has made it hard even to think about the issues coherently. The result is a system of puzzled compliance. However ineffective the schools become, educators feel compelled to inculcate multicultural platitudes rather than to promote substantive learning. No matter how silly people find celebrations of "diversity," they become ever more frequent and surround themselves ever more insistently with happy talk.

 

(Maggie Gallagher)

 

[playbynumbers]

also, while reading these passages again, i realized that for most readers, your premises will be totally different and so the argument just wouldn't work. you can't "prove" first principles ... and so, maybe our first principles are just different. and if we're being consequentialist about it, then let me just say, i think that the principles of liberalism are going to cause a lot more problems (and already have) than people often assume

[awepittance]

i feel sorry for Kcinsu's thread

[playbynumbers]

lol, well, this is the nature of watmm

[awepittance]

it's probably a good idea after you write your dissertation on philosophers you take a break from academia for a while.

[kcinsu]

I've quite enjoyed it. I certainly have read, thought about, and taken seriously, the anti-marriage view point while reading this discussion... but it just doesn't convince me. I feel that the human race has a long history of social evolution ahead of it... assuming it doesn't destroy itself with war (and if anyone says gay marriage will lead to the causes of war, Ill just say go fuck yourself). At the very least, I think people are acknowledging that our current system isn't working... in the grand scheme of things... and that it's better to take the risk to push boundaries and change traditions, than it is to stay stagnant in a system that you feel isn't tapping the potential the human race can live up to.

 

 

 

 

 

[playbynumbers]

it's probably a good idea after you write your dissertation on philosophers you take a break from academia for a while.

 

 

 

lol wait, what?

[encey]

yes, we've used the human construct of science to investigate the underlying chemistry of objects, substances, etc. around us, but our ability to perceive those objects does not rely on that construct - it's enhanced by them, but they aren't required. whether you know the molecular bonds that exists to create water or not, you can still conceptualize, recognize and categorize water, you can see it, feel it and verify that other creatures and objects feel it and see it as well.

I agree. My focus on scientific understanding in particular has led you to misunderstand my point. I didn't only mean to say, as you helpfully put it,

2. can we conceive/think about/understand/know about water independent to our beliefs that water is the bonding of hydrogen and oxygen? yes. we did for millions of years before chemistry was invented.

I meant the more general point that any meaningful perception or thought we have about water has to come by way of some concept or another, expressed through some human language or another; and this can include sophisticated theoretical concepts like 'molecule' and everyday concepts like 'liquid,' 'wet' or whatever.

 

in order for your logic to hold true in terms of absolute morality, there would need to be some sort of "element" (for lack of a better word) or "force" of "right" and "wrong" out there that would separate it from human thought processes, something that has an effect on more than just us, something that would exist whether or not we were here to observe it. just as water exists and is verifiable even without our knowledge of what makes it work, so should morality.

This is the line of thought that grue and I are trying to dissuade you from. You are suggesting that the only way moral facts could be 'objective' or 'absolute' is if they could exist independently of human beings and their thoughts, desires, judgments, preferences, values, etc.

 

We are suggesting that facts can both (a) be 'objective' in the sense that they are true or false independent of what particular people believe about them and (b) depend on the existence, concepts or languages of human beings for both (i) these facts' own existence and/or (ii) these facts' accessibility to us in perception and thought.

 

So when you say to grue that

you're talking about something different - factual right and wrong, not moral right and wrong. morality is based on value judgment whereas fact is based on observation and common agreement on the prevalence of the observed

This is part of what is in dispute. You are claiming that judgments involving values like (morally) 'good' or 'bad,' 'right' or 'wrong' can only be considered 'true' or 'false' based on the consensus of a community and could never be true independently of that consensus, in the way that the Earth's being round was a true fact even when everybody agreed it was flat.

 

Grue and I, in contrast, are claiming that we should at least consider the possibility that moral judgments, just like scientific or empirical judgments, might be true or false independently of human consensus, even if those facts depend for their existence and intelligibility on the social practices of human beings.

[eh Speedy]

love the gays, and i've fought right along side them during the Prop 8 thing but sometimes the activist types go just a little overboard w/ the boycotting of stuff.

 

take this example. so we just had a Chick-Fil-A open up in town after many years of not having one. i'm excited because it's good. so after some protest they're talking about it and i mention i'm going right over there. the organizer girls are like "Well Chick-Fil-A is closed on Sundays for 'God and family'. That means Chick-Fil-A supports traditional values. Those are Yes on 8 voters so you won't see me over there."

 

and i'm like, you know that's bullshit right? i mean if they had found out Chick-Fil-A was donating money to the Yes on 8 camp then that would be something, but they're refusing to patronize the place on the assumption that these people are a block of Yes on 8 voters. bullshit. discrimination begets discrimination.

[Guest boo]

chick-fil-a? lol

 

boycotted by lesbians? lol

 

 

i know i should have said damn near something or other

 

edit: i should have said nothing