CA Supreme Court OKs Gay Marriage

I found this Slate article - www.slate.com/id/2191504/ - one of the better on the subject.

The problem I have, that the article encapsulates well, is the "slippery slope". After you drop the one man/woman requirement, you pretty much drop everything because there's no logical way to accept gay marriage and disallow polygamy or marrying your cousin. Part of the reason I favor keeping a "traditional" approach to marriage is that there's no way to establish what most would consider sane limits on other approaches to marriage.

Because, according to what I think true love is, it has to be entirely and indivisibly devoted to one person. You can't have that in a polygamous unit. If your definition of true love is different, then maybe you can consider polygamy.

From the legal point of view, a civil union with the full legal benefits of marriage that has more than two people is very open to exploitation. So for legal reasons you have to cap the number of people in a marriage (or legal equivalent) at two. Again, it's a possible argument for removing marriage from the state.

As for gay marriage being equivalent to marrying your dog, I think that sort of view is pretty dehumanizing towards gays. Dogs and other animals can't marry because they can't experience human emotions. Saying that gay marriage could lead to interspecies marriage implies that gays can't experience can't experience those emotions, and I think that's a very dangerous and false assumption.

Advocates of polygamy will argue that your definition of "love" is very limited, and that larger love can come out of plural relationships. They'll also argue that it's no less "unnatural" than two people of the same sex.

On the "dog" issue, get ready for this as "animal rights" movements continue to move forward to defining animals as legally indistinguishable from people. People are already making these arguments, and someone's eventually going to challenge current laws, and the test case will not be someone who loves their cat Moopsie.

The other option which is coming involves AI. At some point, artificial intelligence is going to hit the point where people are going to argue that they have legitimate relationships with computers. The same questions are going to apply.

As for Bando's comment on incest, the article makes the point that birth defects aren't significantly higher and that we allow people to marry who are almost certain carriers for nasty diseases, and we allow marriage between couples who are older, where the childbirth risk is significant. What's the legit reason against this?

It seems to me that there are two options - either get government out of marriage entirely, or simply limit it to a man and a woman. Anything beyond that and the floodgates open.
I think that the one man/one woman thing has enough societal benefits as a bedrock of Western society to it to make it defensible.

But according to your reasoning, isn't man/woman marriage just as arbitrary? You make a lot of arguments for getting the government out of marriage, but you seem to think these same arguments apply to keeping the privileged status of opposite sex unions. This doesn't make any sense, unless you think the entire logical artifice that exists entirely to privilege m/f unions should apply across the board.

My point is that we don't need such a logical construction. Society can do what makes sense now (allowing same-sex couples to marry) and can deal with other scenarios as they arise further down the road. In our history, sometimes societal norms have become more tolerant (gays today, interracial marriage in the previous generation). Sometimes they have not become more tolerant (incest is even more shunned today than in the past). Rather than worrying about hypothetical scenarios, we should let future people make their own decisions on these issues as they arise. The prospect of future bogeymen is not an excuse to avoid doing the right thing now.

What about part human and part something else?

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article3964693.ece

If I could marry a mermaid, I would.

I refuse to recognize the "sanctity" in anything that played a role in the short-lived celebrity of Darva Conger and Rick Rockwell.

But wait...if a person can marry an inanimate object, could we just have "Who Wants to Marry a Million Dollars?"

Very interesting discussion here, everyone.

Here are my thoughts.

I think the slippery slope really can be avoided between a couple's marriage (same or different sex) and plural marriage (inclusive of polyandry, which is almost non-existent). And I don't think you have to get down into the soft factors of love, jealousy, etc. to explain. Both plural and couple marriage have been around for some time, but only couple marriage has been widely adopted and administered by states/countries. We in Western society have had the Church and now states/nations that have sanctioned and promoted couples marriage for centuries -- it is a complicated process but we now collectively have a lot of experience on the ins and outs. Going from different to same-sex couple marriage is not all that different, and most policies/procedures can easily be imported from one brand to another (divorce, taxation, child support, powers of attorney, etc.). So, I think you can very easily support same-sex marriage or civil unions without feeling that you must then allow for plural marriage.

I don't see why you can't advocate for government recognition of both same-sex and plural marriage simultaneously (freedom of association arguments could be made here), but I would argue that you needn't support both when you only see the wisdom in one. Now, I think if you wanted to try to argue that states should allow for plural marriages based on already existing partnership structures (business partnerships, LLCs, etc.), then OK. But I don't think plural marriage advocates can ride on the coattails of same-sex marriage proponents. And, comparing animal-human "marriage" to any sort of marriage is a stretch people. Let's stay on task.

And on the whole incest thing in that Slate article, from what I've read, it isn't that incest is so bad because of what can occur genetically. The taboo on incest stems more from our collective reasoning that it is better to marry outside a family for (a) a child's emotional development and (b) as a mechanism for promoting peace between different groups of people (marriages as tokens of truce/partnership between factions/tribes/clans).

And Cam, if all Mermaids looked like Darryl Hannah circa 1984's "Splash" I'm sure you'd have many people agreeing with you.

Yet, you just wait until wizard cats rule the nation
kecute.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/cats-on-couch.jpg