Real social taboos cost you hits in the blogosphere. The persistent reduction in hit count every time I touched the subject of gay marriage finally twigged me to the fact that secular marriage has an entire set of cultural taboos associated with it and if you touch them, people run away. Your hit counts drop. Try analyzing why you have secular marriage at all and people suddenly turn dense, obtuse, and conflate religious with secular marriage at every opportunity. No fear, I won’t go into it in this post. This is more of a meta commentary.
Gay marriage advocates have skillfully deployed those taboos to achieve what they want, a change in public consensus regarding marriage that is playing out in the slow motion avalanche in favor of gay marriage. They are winning in large part because nobody wants to discuss to consensus what is secular marriage for. It’s too icky.
Once secular marriage’s split from religious marriage norms becomes large enough, courageous believers are going to dive into the ick and explain it, in great detail. There will be Catholics, Muslims, Jews as well as others explaining what they haven’t had to explain before because of the prior consensus that, if not perfect, was at least close enough to their beliefs to be acceptable. Social conservatives who look like your grandparents will be talking about sex, about dominance, about female and male emotional frailties that generally only come up in rare “moment of clarity” fashion for most people. It will be the biggest orgy of social transgressiveness to happen in decades and the traditional tribes of social transgressiveness are going to be running for the door with their ears plugged up crying out “la-la-la I can’t hear you” in an absolutely clarifying display of hypocrisy.
I can’t wait.
If religion is not involved what is the problem with gay marriage? It recognizes a tax shelter and some other rules that couples of opposite sexes have enjoyed for a long time.
I guess that having to admit there are perfectly fine gay relationships is a big part the problem for your anti progressive lot.
The truth of course is that religious prejudice is the problem.
Yes, but the bigger problem are the progressives themselves who are bringing upon us the approaching financial catastrophes in Japan, Europe, and the US.
What I find hilarious are all the people busy claiming that “government has no business involved in marriage”, a categorically ludicrous notion on just about every possible level.
Marriage is not the bedroom. Marriage is a CONTRACT, and it is not only not solely between the two parties involved, it has societal ramifications in terms of what other people are expected to do in regards to it, not the least of which is the tax and benefit arena. It even comes down to the simple fact of whether or not two people are *expected* to be ABLE to sleep together in semi-public accommodations, i.e., a hotel or B&B — While any hotel may, and often does not, care if two people are married, that is largely at the proprietor’s discretion. For the most part any motel or other is socially obligated to allow two people to cohabitate in a room if they are married. The same is not true of unmarried individuals.
So marriage is mostly NOT about the bedroom, it’s about the contractual obligations of SOCIETY to the couple as well as the two in the couple.
And, along with “to provide for the common defense”, it’s pretty much an undisputed given that it is governments job to clarify, interpret, and otherwise deal with CONTRACTS.
So it’s just flat-out bufu obvious that government DOES have an innate, natural, and fully expected hand in the institution of marriage, in terms of those contractual expectations.
Yet somehow idiots on both sides seem to imagine otherwise, and continually ignore this self-evident fact even after it’s been pointed out to them.
Historically, I’m somewhat in favor of leniency on the matter — especially in the “Cool Hand Luke” sense of the term: “Sometimes I lean one way, sometimes the other”.
However, after seeing how that lesbian couple sodomized the Hawaiian B&B owner for being honest and polite about it, well, I’m completely anti-gay until gays learn how to behave like civilized people and not turn some minor, harmless difference of opinion into a massive legal case just because they can. That’s not what the laws are there for, to bludgeon anyone who simply disagrees with you. That’s not proper behavior in a polite society. If there’s no harm, then there’s no call to turn it into a “Federal” — or “State” — case.
P.S., I think the Chik-Fil-A incident more than amply showed that our society is not as pro-gay as is often painted. I suspect that the resentment of people to gay abuse of their given powers is building, and it’s going to hit them hard before long. They’re going to find a lot of negative forces arrayed against them, reversing the gains they’ve made in the last four decades quite a bit. Perhaps they’ll be chastised a bit about abusing the power society grants them.
I somewhat doubt it, but perhaps…
When did the state get involved in formally recognizing marriages as an institution regulated primarily by civil, rather than ecclesiastical, law? The present routine of getting a marriage license etc – when did that start?
Has anybody ever run across an economic analysis of why the taboo against homosexuality has decreased in various societies? It wasn’t that long ago most places that most people farmed and relied on the family unit for, among other things, a “retirement” where you children or grandchildren took care of you. In that context, I suppose the prospect of losing part of your “social safety net” due to a child’s sexual disinterests might go a long way toward explaining the taboo against homosexuality.
Modern Capitalistic economies have allowed people to provide for their old age without necessarily leaning on their family (or Government). Could be that as much as anything has caused society to become more accepting of homosexuality.
“If religion is not involved what is the problem with gay marriage? It recognizes a tax shelter and some other rules that couples of opposite sexes have enjoyed for a long time.”
What is the problem with civil unions ? They are not acceptable to gays because… SHUT UP !
It is all about power and the AIDS epidemic gave the gay males a huge PR boost due to pity with no reflection about how the disease spread so rapidly.
If they over reach, and I think they are very capable of it, the tide may turn. I don’t personally care but I see the pressure to punish religions for their traditional reservation about homosexuality.
Yeah the Gays are pretty much convincing me to be anti-Gay.
I find their activists and media to be unforgivably obscene, obnoxious and insulting to others, and they are utterly intolerant.
They don’t wield even the illusion of power well.
And it’s not about equality, it’s about privilege. Considering what these young men gave up to get it, I’m almost inclined to grant it out of pity.
It’s hard for a non-elite male to make it these days, and this is a path to status, as it has been for women forever. I can understand the bitterness.
Ok, focus. Start by asking why do we have secular (not religious) marriage in the first place. What constitutionally valid reason do we pay for a clerk to maintain a registry and then hand out goodies and penalties in various combinations? It is only once you have:
1. Identified what are all these laws (believe it or not nobody has in the US)
2. Reverse engineered why the previous laws were passed down to constitutionally valid reasons
can you even start the discussion of responsibly modifying the laws to add a new category that passes the same test.
Instead we have an organic creation of such complexity that nobody can even figure out all the relevant laws or at least nobody has done the task of compiling all of them, yet we have people who confidently say what the principles are, when they’ve never been voted on, just inherited and tweaked for centuries without ever getting at the fundamentals and that we can do something as radical as change the sex of the participants to include homosexual unions as one more blind tweak.
It’s not really about the gays though. That’s just one round of this. It’s that we went off the rails decades ago. Marriage satisfaction is down. Divorce is up. Women are less happy even as they have more rights. Something deep in the structure of our society has come loose and blind tweaking isn’t going to cut it. Thus the predicted entry of the socially transgressive cultural conservatives and all the frank talk complete with ick that is going to come with them.
” . . . secular marriage . . . too icky . . . ”
If I didn’t experience strong and very pleasurable sensations when I participate as the male in a heterosexual physical consummation with a woman, then my resulting lack of interest in such events might well cause me to consider an explicit description of such events to be icky.
If I were gay, I’d probably not be too taken with hetero porn.
Face it: sex without any resulting physical pleasure becomes . . . icky. Boring and icky.
But the chance that I would ever avoid pleasurable-to-me behavior simply because it was icky to you . . . . well, celluloid cat, asbestos dog, Hell . . . you remember the old line.
Bobby B – I note that you didn’t actually answer the question. You’re sliding right off the taboo and into more comfortable topics, like how good sex of a type you like feels for you. In 2013 America this is not taboo. Why do men not get to cash in their IRAs without a wifely OK, but wives can do it without the husband’s signature and how does that play out in cases of two men and two women being spouses, now that’s something nobody wants to touch. It’s taboo. Why should it be taboo (or as I put it, icky)?
TML:
If, by “icky”, you were referring to qualified account regulations, then I misunderstood your argument.
I apologize. Where I’m from, we’d say “boring” instead of “icky”, as in “people don’t discuss how secular marriage is simply a construct to provide one of the foundational definition sections of our statute-and-regulation-based system of law (the alteration of which simultaneously alters tens of thousands of legal relationships and duties and requirements under the law) – they don’t discuss this because it’s boring to most of them.”
See, I thought I was seeing an iteration of my brother-in-law’s considered position, announced loudly at the bar to me and his boss and a few co-workers, that it was “gross!” and “unnatural!” (which are closer in meaning here to “icky” than is “boring”).
Turns out that he really didn’t know that his boss was gay. Until right then. It got awkward.
“When did the state get involved in formally recognizing marriages as an institution regulated primarily by civil, rather than ecclesiastical, law? The present routine of getting a marriage license etc – when did that start?”
When? About the time that the marriage had to be approved by the tribal chief. So back somewhere in the mists of prehistoric times. The “powers that be” have ALWAYS had a say in marriage. Why? Refer to IGotBupkus’s cogent post on the matter.
When did marriage licensing start? In Massachusetts, it started in 1639. So no, this isn’t exactly a new development.
I guess my question could have been more accurate. Let’s limit it to English Common Law (and therefore American courts, too).
Yes the State has long been in the business of licensing marriages, but I’m assuming that up to a point, the ecclesiastical (or Equity) courts handled it. Approved the match (marriage bans and so on) and then performed the ceremony. Then at some point it primarily became a matter for the Civil courts (courts of Law) to approve the match before the ceremony. I was wondering about that transition.