Civil marriage is a legal contract between two persons. Same-sex marriage acknowledges that the two persons in a civil marriage are legally equal, and things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.
SSM will not lead to legal polygamy because 2 is not equal to three. The thousands of laws that apply to married couples can apply to any *couple*, but they cannot be readily translated to sets of 3, 4, or more. The issue is a red herring.
Similarly, the issue of "man+dog" is a red herring, because dogs cannot enter into contracts.
So why do people keep dragging in these up herrings? IMHO it's because truly traditional marriage (from 1919 back to the dawn of time) is *not* a contract between legal equals. It's an arrangement between a person with full human and legal rights (the "man") and a person with less than complete rights (the "wife"). Once a woman has the same legal rights as a man -- the right to own property, to sue for divorce, to vote, whatever -- old-fashioned, traditional is already dead. SSM is just the nail in the coffin, making explicit what had been only implied, and *that*'s why traditionalists feel it undermines their marriage -- because it does, because any demonstration that married people are legally equal partners undermines tradition.
People who bring up Man+Dog are revealing that to them marriage isn't a contract, it's a sex license. You can only imagine replacing a woman with a dog if the woman was not truly a human being in the first place.
Polygamy is also a red herring, because traditional polygamy, like other traditional marriages, is *not* a contract between equals. Historically, the line between traditional marriage and polygamy has been a fine one, because a man (a fully-featured legal person) can have limited contracts with a number of partial legal persons (women).
When marriage becomes a fully reciprocal contract between 2 complete people, it's much harder to extend that to 3 people or more. Who gets to make medical decisions? Who's the default heir? There's no legal precedent or structure to deal with these issues, to see how they would work in practice -- and given how many hundreds of years and millions of lawyers it's taken to develop the marriage law we have, I don't expect to see legal polygamy any time soon.
Spot on, Dr. Science. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the defense of "traditional marriage" (as if there were such a thing) is really just a foil for the continuation of patriarchy.
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Wow, I just checked back to see if the old thread had died, and what do I find! Thank you, Tony. BTW, the pronoun used for me is "she", not "he".
"A Walker" -- Who cares if two is not equal to three? -- The law. In law, there are about 1400 legal benefits to marriage, and the vast majority of those rights presume that the marriage is between two (2) persons only. As I have argued elsewhere, our current marriage law is *barely* able to deal with the complexities that arise when a marriage has only two partners, and that despite hundreds of years of experience dealing with traditional (inegalitarian) two-partner marriages. Egalitarian multipartner marriages simply do not fit into the legal structures we have, so there is no practical basis for making them legal as yet. I guess there would have to be at least 50-100 years' experience with custom-made polyamorous contracts before legal mavens could even think of making a standard poly marriage contract -- there simply isn't enough experience with how these things tend to work out. So no, "Your Name", I don't think there's anything wrong *in principle* with poly marriages -- but law is all about practice, practicality, and precedent, and that doesn't exist yet and might not for centuries.
Marriage has always been tied to sex because the act of sex for heterosexuals is what launches the long-term project of raising families---the enterprise being contracted.
Here is where I put on my Actual Evolutionary Biologist™ hat and disagree. Most mammals do not have any arrangment like marriage, and yet they manage to have sex and rear offspring perfectly well.
Consider the case of Jacob, in the Book of Genesis. Jacob loves only one woman, is married to two women, and has legitimate children with four women.
What makes his relationships with Leah and Rachel "marriage"? It's not love, and it's not having sex or children. What sets marriage apart is *in-laws*, and this IMScientificO is one of the things that makes human marriage unique. Indeed, if you look at what happens to Jacob, it seems that his first marriage is really a contract with Laban, who is able to swap Leah for Rachel and hold Jacob to it.
Marriage is a social and economic arrangment which usually incorporates sex and reproduction, but which is clearly necessary for neither. For societies with property, marriage is crucial for determining inheritance, and if you look at that list of "marriage rights" you'll see that most of them are about economic or medical decisions. "Being able to have licit sex" is *not* on that list, however psychologically or religiously important it seems. And the same-sex couples and their allies (like me) aren't fighting for the right to an imaginary sex license, but for equal access to those 1400 real, legal rights of marriage.
A version of this comment with embedded links seems to be in moderation, so at the risk of double-posting:
Wow, I just checked back to see if the old thread had died, and what do I find! Thank you, Tony. BTW, the pronoun used for me is "she", not "he".
"A Walker" -- Who cares if two is not equal to three? -- The law. In law, there are about 1400 legal benefits to marriage, and the vast majority of those rights presume that the marriage is between two (2) persons only. As I ">have argued elsewhere (link above), our current marriage law is *barely* able to deal with the complexities that arise when a marriage has only two partners, and that despite hundreds of years of experience dealing with traditional (inegalitarian) two-partner marriages. Egalitarian multipartner marriages simply do not fit into the legal structures we have, so there is no practical basis for making them legal as yet. I guess there would have to be at least 50-100 years' experience with custom-made polyamorous contracts before legal mavens could even think of making a standard poly marriage contract -- there simply isn't enough experience with how these things tend to work out. So no, "Your Name", I don't think there's anything wrong *in principle* with poly marriages -- but law is all about practice, practicality, and precedent, and that doesn't exist yet and might not for centuries.
Marriage has always been tied to sex because the act of sex for heterosexuals is what launches the long-term project of raising families---the enterprise being contracted.
Here is where I put on my Actual Evolutionary Biologist™ hat and disagree. Most mammals do not have any arrangment like marriage, and yet they manage to have sex and rear offspring perfectly well.
Consider the case of Jacob, in the Book of Genesis. Jacob loves only one woman, is married to two women, and has legitimate children with four women.
What makes his relationships with Leah and Rachel "marriage"? It's not love, and it's not having sex or children. What sets marriage apart is *in-laws*, and this IMScientificO is one of the things that makes human marriage unique. Indeed, if you look at what happens to Jacob, it seems that his first marriage is really a contract with Laban, who is able to swap Leah for Rachel and hold Jacob to it.
Marriage is a social and economic arrangment which usually incorporates sex and reproduction, but which is clearly necessary for neither. For societies with property, marriage is crucial for determining inheritance, and if you look at that list of "marriage rights" you'll see that most of them are about economic or medical decisions. "Being able to have licit sex" is *not* on that list, however psychologically or religiously important it seems. And the same-sex couples and their allies (like me) aren't fighting for the right to an imaginary sex license, but for equal access to those 1400 real, legal rights of marriage.
Dr. Science: In law, there are about 1400 legal benefits to marriage, and the vast majority of those rights presume that the marriage is between two (2) persons only
A Walker: But who cares to defend laws based on nothing more than sheer bias and bigotry?
Dr. Science: our current marriage law is *barely* able to deal with the complexities that arise when a marriage has only two partners...multipartner marriages simply do not fit into the legal structures we have
A Walker: I will label this the bureaucracy trumps equal rights argument. Can you imagine gays accepting an argument that they shouldn't be allowed to marry simply because of red tape?
Dr. Science: Most mammals do not have any arrangment like marriage, and yet they manage to have sex and rear offspring perfectly well.
A Walker: Humans have different child-rearing situations than other mammals. The project of child-rearing for humans is long-term and legally binding due to the necessary care of both physiological and educational needs.
Dr. Science: Marriage is a social and economic arrangment which usually incorporates sex and reproduction, but which is clearly necessary for neither.
A Walker: The social and economic duties and rights derive from the sexual reproductive act, for that act produces children to whom the parents are responsible in the eyes of society. The real legal rights that exist for marriage do so because marriage is a mini-society of infants, dependents and spouses that have grave economic risk when one partner breaches the contract.
Dr. Science,
Apologies for making the (admittedly patriarchal) jump and referring to you as 'he'.
And apologies that my previous post came in as 'Your Name'--I did try to enter my name, but it didn't take on the website for some reason.
I do still question whether the 'real' reason for opposing SSM boils down to feeling threatened by equal-partner marriage (I still suspect it has more to do with discomfort with homosexuality, and an honest belief that Scripture forbids it), but I find your perspective to be food for a lot of thought, so thanks.
Lets be honest here the only reason we do not have polygamy today is a religious arguement. But what is that arguement based on?
In the old testment and new testament polygamy was a common practice so what happend to it?
Roman law dictated that a man could only take one wife. This was in large part to protect the official family line and see to the functionablity of inheritence.
Where possible the Christian church would not conflict with Roman law except on core beliefs. Lets not forget that Paul was a Roman citizen who had personal belifes in not even getting married.
I think the main problem with polygamy today is all the nut jobs running around forcing kids into it. People forget about the consenting adults side.
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