1. Thanks So Much, Lovely To Be Here.
Hi! This is neat — although I’ve been a blogger for a long time (soooo long!), I don’t think I’ve ever been promoted from commenter to guest blogger before.
I’d like to thank Family Scholars Blog for letting me use their platform for a few months. I think it shows that the folks running the show here are sincerely devoted to the ideal of civil debate. I’ll do my best to repay their trust in me by sneering at their arguments, questioning their intelligence, and maligning their motives at every opportunity. Er, wait, that can’t be right. Let me check my notes… oh, here it is. I’m going to repay their trust by trying to blog honestly, criticize substantively, and hopefully we’ll all end up modeling what civil debate should look like. There we go!
I plan to blog on many issues here over the next few months, but the one topic I expect to return to again and again is marriage equality. So let’s get started.
2. The Explosive Growth of support for Same-Sex Marriage
Same-sex marriage is a consistent loser in the voting booth, and most politicians still run from SSM like a mouse from the world’s biggest cat. So why do I say explosive growth? Because for same-sex marriage to be seriously discussed — and to consistently receive 30-40% support (and growing!) in the voting booth — represents an amazing increase in support for gay marriage within my lifetime.
SSM isn’t winning many votes, but the trends are on SSM’s side. This can’t be a cheerful graph for any opponent of marriage equality to consider:
Disapproval and approval of SSM goes up or down from month to month. But over the course of the last two decades, the trend overwhelmingly favors SSM (and the future looks even better when one looks at the results broken down by age group).
I’d love to believe that this trend is caused by the intelligence, eloquence and — let’s face it — wonderful grooming of me and thousands of other folks who have been arguing in favor of marriage equality. But alas, I really don’t think that’s what’s going on. The trend in favor of gay marriage began long before the arguments for gay marriage were well-developed or widely heard.
So what had happened before the late 1980s to bring this about?
The two strongest arguments against legal equality for same-sex couples — also called same-sex marriage, or SSM, and popularly called gay marriage — had to die out (or at least, be confined to deathbeds) before SSM could even be plausibly talked about.
3. The Argument That Gay People Are Morally Disgusting
The first argument that had to die, was the belief that homosexuality is morally disgusting. Until the gay rights movement ran this pernicious belief out of town, it was not possible to respectably discuss same sex marriage in mainstream American society, except as a boogieman. Indeed, same-sex love was formally criminalized, and many bars that catered to the lesbian and gay community routinely suffered police raids and abuse. Calling for same sex marriage would have been like calling for equal respect for rapists and murderers.
There are, of course, still too many Americans who think that homosexuality is inherently, morally disgusting, and that gay[*] people are simply sick. But that is no longer a respectable view in mainstream American politics. Even politicians who oppose SSM are at great pains to explain that they’ve got nothing at all against gay people.
When gay people were morally gross, opposition to SSM was the unspoken default position throughout society. No one needed to explain why gay couples shouldn’t be mixed with marriage, any more than we need to explain why we shouldn’t mix cake batter with cat hair. Gay marriage was almost unthinkable.
Once gay activists defeated the belief in the inherent immorality of being gay, however, all sorts of previously unthinkable thoughts began to be thunk. For most young Americans today, saying that being gay is immoral makes no more sense than saying the color blue is immoral.
4. Separate Spheres
The second argument that had to die was the ideology of separate spheres. To quote a tenth-grade classroom handout, separate spheres was “a set of ideas, originating in the early 19th century. These beliefs assigned to women and men distinctive and virtually opposite duties, functions, personal characteristics, and legitimate spheres of activity.”
If women had to raise the children, take care of the house, and feed the hubby while men had to go out, produce in the world and bring home the bacon, then it didn’t make any sense to say that two women or two men could get married. If two women get married, then who will earn the money? If two men get married, would they have to hire a woman to change the diapers and cook dinner?
Separate spheres wasn’t just an informal ideology (an ideology that, it should be mentioned, was never applied to poor women or to women of color in the same way, since it was mainly middle-class white women who were expected to be able to achieve “true womanhood”). It was also reflected in the economy and in law. When I was born, for example, newspaper “help wanted” ads were still divided into two sections — women’s jobs and men’s jobs. (The men’s jobs, generally speaking, came with higher pay and prestige).
Earlier than that, separate spheres in marriage were legally enforced with coverture laws. From wikipedia‘s description of coverture:
As it has been pithily expressed, husband and wife were one person as far as the law was concerned, and that person was the husband. A married woman could not own property, sign legal documents or enter into a contract, obtain an education against her husband’s wishes, or keep a salary for herself. If a wife was permitted to work, under the laws of coverture she was required to relinquish her wages to her husband.
But just as the gay rights movement destroyed the belief that gays were morally deficient, the women’s rights movement (later called feminism) gradually destroyed separate spheres ideology. Coverture laws were undone, in piecemeal fashion, by the Married Women’s Property Laws of the mid to late 19th century. Women entered the workplace in increasing numbers (helped along by World War 2), and laws against discrimination eliminated the most overt sexl discrimination in employment, although covert sex discrimination still goes on.
Meanwhile, the figure of the househusband began appearing in popular culture, in movies like Kramer vs Kramer and Mr. Mom, and TV shows like My Two Dads. The numbers of stay-at-home Dads, while small, nearly tripled from 1987 to 2007.
If women can work and men can raise children, then the other major argument against same-sex marriage stops making sense. Women and men aren’t confined to separate spheres; it’s not impossible for two women or two men to become a family and raise children.
Of course, a descendant of separate spheres ideology is still part of the SSM debate today. It’s common to hear SSM opponents argue that children need to be raised by a father and a mother. But the argument carries much less force, and makes less intuitive sense, than it did a century ago. And (as I’ll discuss in a future post), the social science does not support the belief that children raised by same-sex couples are harmed or deprived.
5. A Stool With One Leg
Consider the arguments against SSM to be a standard, three-legged stool.
One leg of the stool is the belief that gay people are too morally disgusting to be included in marriage or anything else decent. That leg has been cut off completely (at least, in mainstream discourse).
One leg is the belief that women are gruesomely harmed by having to interact with the world and earn a living, while men are morally and mentally incapable of taking care of home and children. This leg, if it is hanging on at all, is hanging on by a splinter.
A third leg remains. This is the leg that says that heterosexual marriages will, in some extremely hard to explain manner, be terribly harmed if same-sex couples can legally marry. And as even opponents of SSM sometimes admit, this leg of the stool is, for many Americans, neither simple nor intuitive.
Let’s face it — with only that third leg holding the stool up, the case against SSM is, well, wobbly. I don’t think it’ll bear a lot of weight for very long.
But my point is, the greatest barriers to SSM fell for reasons that had nothing to do with the SSM debate. The moral disgust for gay people was, itself, morally disgusting, and nearly everyone — even most prominent SSM opponents — agrees that our culture is much improved with this stool leg gone. Separate spheres ideology was sexist and unfair and grievously harmed many women, and virtually no one today wants a return to coverture or “male and female” want ads.
These two large and inescapable trends — gay rights, and women’s rights — were, nearly everyone agrees, of enormous benefit to society. Bringing SSM into mainstream debate was, frankly, sort of a side effect. But it’s a side effect I for one am very glad of.
[*] I’m using the term “gay” to include lesbians, gay men, and bisexual people of all sexes.
Categories: Marriage
[...] guest-blogging on Family Scholars Blog for the next three months. No, really, I am. Really. Anyway, here's my first post. It's also cross-posted on "TADA"; the usual arguments against SSM should be expressed on FSB or on [...]
An awesome post, thanks!
A lot of really good, simple points. Breaking down barriers one mis-understanding at a time.
Barry, I think you point out well an important social/ideological identity: feminism = same-sex marriage. Perhaps feminism should be qualified here as “radical feminism” but the formula still works nonetheless. As feminists seek to destroy all normative social meanings around gender, it is but a small step to Judge Vaughn Walker’s statement that “gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage”.
Darel, is the idea that women and men ought to be equal under the law feminism or radical feminism?
I don’t agree that feminism leads to same-sex marriage, any more than the Civil Rights movement led to women’s rights. Or was it that Women’s Suffrage led to Civil Rights?
In his essay, The Great Disruption, Francis Fukuyama identifies feminism as one of the important liberation movements of the last 50 years, along with the gay rights movement and a couple of others. He doesn’t cast one as leading the other, but he sees them all reflecting an impulse towards individual freedom, and against previously established social norms.
Read the whole thing. Look for this line: Both the left and the right participated in the effort to free the individual from restrictive rules, but their points of emphasis tended to be different.
Returning to topic (sort of), I’d argue that feminism is necessary but not sufficient for SSM, for the reasons discussed in my post. It’s difficult to imagine that we’d now be talking about SSM if feminism hadn’t radically changed the way we think about sex and gender.
Darel, as Peter pointed out, I’m not sure that you’re clear on what “radical feminism” is. In any case, I’d say that what you’re talking about is just regular feminism, by and large.
I’d say that the movement towards individual freedom is necessary for SSM. Feminism is a part of that broader movement. In as much as feminism challenged rigid gender roles, then yes, feminism is part of what leads us to consider SSM. Sorry if my previous comment seemed to reject that idea.
I have argued that divorce reform helped pave the way for SSM, but I’m not sure that I would argue that it’s necessary for SSM.
Civil Rights, women’s suffrage, feminism, divorce reform, gay rights, and SSM are all part of a broad push for individual liberty over previously established norms.
I don’t think we’re going back to the old norms. The challenge is to figure out the new norms. I think there’s opportunity to shape the new norms.
There is a fourth leg that has grown while you weren’t looking, the costs of same-sex procreation to the environment and to taxpayers and other areas of research and medicine. And a fifth leg could be the unnecessary risks to the child being created. And the third leg (the harm to hetero marriage) can bear lots of weight, because equating the right to use modified or substitute gametes to the right to use the couple’s own genes effectively completely negates the right to use the hetero couple’s right to use their own genes. If a right is equated with a different right, the original right loses its claim as right, it gets subsumed into and satisfied by the other right. In other words, if a same-sex marriage is denied the right to use its own gametes, or if it is only allowed to use modified gametes, then that could happen to hetero marriages too, and hetero marriages couldn’t complain about not being allowed to use their own genes.
So we’re back up to three solid legs. Now even the second leg can be put back, because now that we’ve established that people must cooperate with someone of the other sex to reproduce due to complementary genetic impringing, and now that the carbon footprint of feminism is becoming clear, it makes sense to optimize each sex into complementary roles and increase single earner families.
And maybe even that first leg can be put back too, because now that we realize the goal is sustainability and natural rights and equality, and that gay rights and feminism leads to ART and genetic engineering and Transhumanism and other totally non-sustainable uses of energy we can’t afford, we really don’t want to encourage people to be gay and want to increase whatever influences people to be straight, which includes moral disapproval of homosexuality as a behavior that leads people to demand Transhumanism and genetic engineering.
So, the stool has five legs now, but now that it is secure, it becomes possible to accept Civil Unions for gay couples as long as marriage is preserved as conception rights as reserved for a man and a woman.
There is a fourth leg that has grown while you weren’t looking, the costs of same-sex procreation to the environment and to taxpayers and other areas of research and medicine.
I would argue that this is a non sequitur. It may sound like an argument against same-sex marriage, but is in fact completely independent of SSM. Same-sex procreation can, and does, occur independent of marriage, and the right to use your own genes (vs. someone else’s genes) for procreation is completely separate from marriage rights.
It’s like arguing (for example) that two men co-signing a lease for an apartment will harm hetero marriage. Whether it’s true or not, the co-signing of leases is a right that is completely separate from the right to marry. Whether same-sex procreation has environmental effects (or effects to “areas of research and medicine”) or not, that is just as unrelated to the right to marry as the co-signing of leases.
That sentence does not make sense. Perhaps you did not phrase it as you intended?
Good to see you taking another shot at civil discourse on the SSM issue, Barry. That was a well-written introductory blogpost.
I don’t think you have discussed the two strongest arguments against the SSM idea.
But I hope you will take a shot at providing the two strongest arguments in favor of the SSM idea by first explaining that idea as distinctive from the rest of the large nonmarriage category of relationshps and arrangements.
Cheerio,
Chairm Ohn
Thanks for the good post, Barry. My main puzzlement with what you say concerns your argument on “separate spheres.” I have heard this argument many times from SSM advocates, and it constantly leaves me scratching my head.
I am an opponent of SSM, and I promise you, I could care less about the issue of separate spheres one way or the other. I have spent many hours thinking as hard as I can about the issue of SSM, and the topic of separate spheres has had absolutely zero influence on my thinking one way or the other. In fact, I don’t know any opponents of SSM who ever bring up the topic, or ever show any evidence that it is influencing their thinking at all.
The issue I care about is embodiment — the fact that every child is of man and woman born. Spheres, roles, feminism, traditionalism — all of that sociology, while interesting, is not the point for me at all. Yet your post suggests that somehow you believe that, for me and others who believe as I do, that it IS the point, or at least one of the main points. It isn’t.
Also, meant to say: I agree with you almost completely on your first argument, on the morality of homosexuality.
Peter and Barry,
I think a mainstream liberal feminism does not necessarily lead to same-sex marriage as it does not seek to destroy the meaning of gender in all arenas, only “public” ones such as the state and the market. That certainly helps SSM along, however, and is very different from the brand of feminism traveling under the label “maternalist” back in the 1920s-40s.
What I am calling “radical” feminism, on the other hand — a creature largely originating in the 1970s — does seek to at the very least destabilize the very concept of gender and in many cases to destroy it altogether.
“Equality under the law” is a difficult one to parse. It all depends on what one means by the term “equal”. “Equivalent” after all is not the same as “identical”.
On the whole I don’t like arguments which appeal to a generalized “impulse” toward something for their explanatory punch. Fukuyama is showing his Hegelian stripes. He might as well just say “Weltgeist” and get it over with.
Darel
Barry- you’re a talented writer. I really enjoyed this post and am so glad you’re on board here. Can’t wait for your writing to come.
I used to be a militant feminist. Militant. You should have seen me at rallies. The Patriarch was the cause of all the world’s woes for me.
My misandry was all consuming. Then I started to read about misogyny and tried to make sense of it from a male perspective.
In short, I’ve discovered that a broad inability for men and women to cooperate successfully and *raise their children in an environment where this mutual respect and cooperation is visible* is the primary source of both misogyny and misandry.
if you’re a girl, your dad becomes your first representative of the male species. if your’e a boy, your mom becomes the first representative of the female species. and it affects how you interact with “others” for years and years and years, if not your entire life.
also- for anyone who has worked in a restaurant…
Remember “marrying” ketchups?
At the end of every shift, as a waitress I would have to “marry” ketchups. This required mixing two or more used and low ketchup bottles into ONE full ketchup bottle.
To marry the ketchup was to MIX the ketchup.
If gays marry, does that not mean we are *mixing* them into one, full, new… being?
Sorry there’s an extra “the right to” in there.
As to the supposed non-sequitor, it’s true that it is an argument against allowing or declaring a right to same-sex procreation, but arguments against allowing a couple the right to procreate are arguments against allowing them to marry.
To marry the ketchup was to MIX the ketchup.
If gays marry, does that not mean we are *mixing* them into one, full, new… being?
“Mix into a new being” of course is what “miscegenate” means: to mix their genes into one new human being. And remember what “anti-miscegenation” laws prohibited? Marriage. They weren’t separate rights and they still aren’t.
David:
David, with all due respect, I think perhaps you didn’t understand my post.
I wasn’t talking about what current opponents of SSM believe. I was talking about historic changes that had to occur in society before SSM could even be seriously discussed. One of those changes was the end (or at least, vast reduction) of separate spheres ideology.
Obviously, most or all of that happened well before you started debating about SSM. So I’m not talking about the views that you, or other current-day SSM opponents, hold. I’m talking about the history that brought us all — SSM proponents and opponents alike — to the present day.
If this is true, then in theory someone should be able to demonstrate it with quantitative evidence. For instance, the martial conflict of parents questions Elizabeth used in her divorce study, could be combined with questions designed to measure misogyny (which have already been developed and used in some studies).
If you’re correct, then people who grew up in conflict-heavy and/or divorced families should be measurably more misogynistic than people who grew up in conflict-light, nondivorced families.
Barry: On separate spheres: OK, I accept, now that you make it so clear, that you aren’t talking about what opponents of SSM hold to be important. That’s a good clarification for me.
But the whole point you are making here still seems almost entirely –beside the point. For three reasons:
No. 1, as we now agree, for those who oppose SSM, this issue means nothing.
No. 2, if we are in fact searching for those recent historical changes in the marriage institution that make it today more possible to consider SSM, I don’t think that “the decline of separate spheres ideology” would even makes the top ten. I think nearly everyone’s top ten list, for example, would include: the divorce revolution; the out-of-wedlock childbearing revolution; and the general shift in society’s understanding of marriage, from a structured institution with defined public purposes to the name that we give to privately ordered love relationships.
In all of this, the decline of 1950s-style separate spheres is not much more than a footnote, at best, in my view. (Of course, from a purely polemical point of view, it’s much better for SSM advocates to single out and give exaggerated attention the decline of old-fashioned separate spheres ideology, which nearly everyone today (including those who oppose SSM) views as basically a good or at least benign development, while ignoring or de-emphasizing those other, much more causally important historical factors, which, it turns out, are much more ethically problematic and currently controversial, particularly as regards their now widely acknowledged hamful impact on children.)
No. 3, it seems to me that all this talk from SSM advocates regarding the decline of separate spheres, in today’s context of debating SSM, is at bottom just a fancy and not very clarifying way of alleging that men and women today are less different than they used to be. I promise, Barry, I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, but honestly, wouldn’t it be better just to cut through all the thick sociologese and say: “Gay marriage makes sense today because men and women are less differen than they used to be”? For it seems to me that that’s really the point that you and others are making. And it’s a true enough point, in as far as it goes.
But it’s point to which I’d reply (if you’ll accept this reformulation of your thesis as non-hostile): — Yes, that is likely true. Men and women are less different today than they used to be. Yet: — The sex difference is “less important than it used to be” in pretty much the same sense that the weather is “less important than it used to be.” After all, if you were living in a sod hut in western Kansas in the 1870s, the weather was a pretty damn big deal! It could and often did mean life or death. Whereas in Russell, Kansas, today, the weather doesn’t weigh quite as heavily on one’s daily life and on one’s prospects for survival.
So, “weather is not as important as it used to be.” Of course, that’s not quite the same as implying that “weather doesn’t matter any more” or that “there is no reason for people in western Kansas to know or care what season it is.” That would certainly be taking the point to a rediculous extreme. And that’s why (to conclude the analogy), yes, men and women are less different in some respects than they used to be; but no, that does NOT mean that it doesn’t matter any more whether one is a man or a woman, or a husband or a wife, or a mother or a father.
So I am still scratching my head, wondering why I keep hearing so much historical esoterica about “the decline of separate spheres ideology,” since as best as I can determine, it has next to nothing to do with the actual core issues within the SSM debate.
point for david.
I think Barry is a Postgenderist, if I am not mistaken. From wikipedia:
Postgenderism is a diverse social, political and cultural movement whose adherents affirm the voluntary elimination of gender in the human species through the application of advanced biotechnology and assistive reproductive technologies.
Advocates of postgenderism argue that the presence of gender roles, social stratification, and cogno-physical disparities and differences are generally to the detriment of individuals and society. Given the radical potential for advanced assistive reproductive options, postgenderists believe that sex for reproductive purposes will either become obsolete, or that all post-gendered humans will have the ability, if they so choose, to both carry a pregnancy to term and father a child, which, postgenderists believe, would have the effect of eliminating the need for definite genders in such a society.
Except attempting to reproduce with someone of the same sex would be unethical and should be prohibited, and the only ethical way to reproduce is by combining a man and a woman’s unmodified gametes. Barry wants everyone to think that postgenderism is inevitable and as uncontroversial as women working and voting, and opposing it means relegating women back into 19th century roles.
No, the real argument seems much simpler. Back when “marriage” meant an unequal relationship between a master and a subject who we could recognize by their gender, marriage between two people of the same sex seemed unthinkable. Now we can think of it. This means (at least in my view) that you need an argument against it. You need to explain why the American principles of equality before the law and the pursuit of happiness don’t require same-sex marriage.
Moreover, if people in the time of coverture could put their unconscious argument into words, it would probably have started from premises that society no longer accepts (see OP). Newer anti-SSM arguments don’t have quite as much inertia behind them and therefore need stronger logic and evidence. You can replace the old premise of inequality with a vague appeal to differences between men and women, but difference in itself does not logically prove what you need it to prove. And by specifying (for example) more concrete effects on hypothetical children, you bring the discussion into the realm of science. This does not bode well for marriage inequality, since science does not appear to support your claims. The public at large understands at least this much of the scientific method: when they see same-sex couples behaving in ways your theories did not lead them to expect, and when they see no evidence of the purported effect on children, and when they see their neighbors get married to people of the same sex with no apparent ill-effect, more and more of them reject your claims (as we particularly see in Massachusetts). So it really does seem in practice that the lack of open disgust at the existence of same-sex couples, the resulting erosion of the closet, and simple non-radical equality between the sexes, will suffice to remove all meaningful opposition to SSM in the long term.
We may be talking at cross purposes here, since I would never have thought of “out-of-wedlock childbearing” in this context and I don’t know what it has to do with SSM. If you think it weakens some particular authority in America that you think would otherwise stop SSM, such as a church — or an unthinking adherence to tradition in general that would make its adherents ignore the lack of any logical connection — that seems questionable. It may prove true but I don’t see the evidence right now and would not put it on my “top ten list”. The same goes for divorce, though I guess by reducing abusive marriages it might make marital union look more attractive for all people.
(The chief bar to man-dog marriages lies in the fact that dogs are not legally people. Not only does this prevent them from suing anyone, or giving legal consent, it makes the very idea seem ‘unthinkable’. If pet dogs get the right to vote and own property this would probably change.)
You can replace the old premise of inequality with a vague appeal to differences between men and women,
Well, I’m not making a vague appeal, I’m talking about a specific difference – men and women have complementary gametes. Even the DNA payload inside the gametes is different for men and women, so that when two haploid gametes join to make a new diploid embryo, one copy of a gene is “on”, and the other one is “off”. If both copies are on, or both off, then the embryo is going to have serious problems as it develops. The only way to join two people of the same sex would be to grow stem cell derived gametes and somehow develop them in the right environment to properly imprint them as if from the other sex.
but difference in itself does not logically prove what you need it to prove.
In this case it does, because it would be bad public policy to allow people to be created from experimental genetically modified gametes.
And by specifying (for example) more concrete effects on hypothetical children, you bring the discussion into the realm of science. This does not bode well for marriage inequality, since science does not appear to support your claims.
Science certainly supports my claim that same-sex procreation would require experimental genetic engineering and have a high risk of birth defects.
I would never have thought of “out-of-wedlock childbearing” in this context and I don’t know what it has to do with SSM.
Well, have you ever heard anyone complaining about “in-wedlock childbearing?” No, because the marriage makes conceiving a child together OK. SSM does the same thing, so we shouldn’t make it OK for same-sex couples to conceive a child together. We should prohibit it, and instead of marriage for same-sex couples, have CU’s defined as “marriage minus conception rights.”
John Howard,
Can you explain to me what you mean by “conception rights?” Where are these rights found in marriage law, and why do you think they would be applied to conception that involves genetic engineering?
I guess it depends how we define a “right to procreation,” which is not currently a well-defined right. The status quo is that same-sex couples have the right to procreate, as do mixed-sex couples, whether they are married or not. So, currently, the right to procreation is completely separate from the right to marry. If you are arguing that same-sex couples should be barred from procreating (an argument I would consider eugenicist), then you are advocating a change to the status quo.
That’s a non sequitur as far as Ampersand’s original post, because he was describing the historical changes leading up to this moment. You’re saying we need to go back and “fix history,” which is not a direct response to a “here is where we are now” post.
I agree with you that anti-miscegenation arguments and anti-SSM arguments are very similar.
Chris, if you aren’t prohibited from procreating with someone, you have conception rights with that person, aka, the right to marry that person, the right to have sex. If you are prohibited from procreating with someone (perhaps they are a sibling or married to someone else, or are children, or non-consenting) then you don’t have conception rights with that person. Every person also has “conception rights” in the sense that everyone has an equal right to procreate with the person of their choice (if that person is eligible and consenting to procreate with you of course).
And Phil, the right to procreate refers to the right to combine your genes and make offspring together. You’re right that the status quo is that same-sex couples are allowed to procreate together because there is no law against them doing it and many people think it’d be OK for them to try it and wrong to prohibit them, but there is no right to do it found in history and the fact is the only ethical way to do it is with a man and a woman, because of the evolutionary natural fact of sexual epigenetic imprinting.
I’m still not following, John. Presumably…if such technologies existed and were legal, and people wanted to access them…they would do so married or single.
Of course, and as long as it is legal to try to procreate with someone of the same sex, then same sex marriage should be legal as well. My point is that there is no right to try to combine genes of two people of the same sex and any attempt to do so should not be legal. It’s not just this or that technology that should not be legal, but any attempt to conceive offspring with someone of the same sex. That conflicts with marriage which always approves of the couple conceiving offspring together, it is never given to couples that are prohibited from procreating together. Even if it was just genetic engineering technology that was prohibited, it would still mean that people were not allowed to conceive with people of the same sex, which would create different rights depending on the sex of the person you wanted to partner with. Only with someone of the other sex would you have the right to procreate. Different rights should have different names. Marriage should continue to protect and affirm the couple’s right to create offspring.
Looks like this will be my last comment in this thread. I noticed David started another thread to focus on the “separate spheres” discussion, thanks David for letting this one continue to this point. I’m still hoping we’ll take on the subject of whether we should approve of people conceiving children with someone of the same sex, perhaps in a thread devoted to that?
John, I don’t mean to engage in an ad hominem attack, but when I read that, I felt as though you were throwing some meaningless jargon into the mix here.
Not wanting to seem (or be) uninformed, I did a Google search for “epigenetic imprinting,” which, as far as I can tell, refers to the way that non-inherited factors (such as environmental factors) can affect the way DNA is “switched on or off” in genes, such that the expression of the genes is different from what might be considered the “recipe” of the DNA.
It wasn’t clear to me how this relates to same-sex marriage specifically, so I did a Google search for “sexual epigenetic imprinting.” This returned two hits. Both of them were blog comments written by you.
I don’t think it’s unfair for me to assert that if you are the only person in the history of the world who has ever used the phrase “sexual epigenetic imprinting,” then it is far from an “evolutionary natural fact.” To me, it seems much closer to “some made-up crap that a lay person with an incomplete understanding of evolutionary biology tosses around in debates.”
Can you point me toward any published research by a credible expert that discusses “epigenetic imprinting” specifically as it relates to same-sex couples?
As far as I can tell, your issue is that same-sex married couples might one day want to use technology that DOES NOT CURRENTLY EXIST to create a child. That is like arguing that we must not allow the elderly to marry because they might one day want to use time machines to go back and overpopulate the world.