Senate Homosexuality: the Thread

Your response and the fact that other people liked it indicate how far gone marriage is in society.

 

No, that's not what the person in the article was saying. He was saying that it would become more commonplace if marriage stopped being view as a procreative bond. Which he then went on to clarify that Americans stopped viewing marriage as a procreative bond fifty years ago.

Divorce and infidelity are not good things. When you make a promise in marriage, you say "for better or for worse". "As long as I'm happy" is not what people vow to.

 

Why not?

This is a serious question.

 

Well, I guess my mother should have stayed with my drug-addict no good father and raised me in that environment because OZK's religion thinks so.

 

Because it isn't that view. I've never said that a woman's only purpose is to have children. Saying that the creation of progeny and their upbringing is fundamental to the institution of marriage is a very different thing from saying that a woman has no value beyond that of an incubator of human beings. It's a view I've never expressed and I vehemently disagree with it.

Separating from an abusive partner can be a good thing, but it's not always the answer to problems in a marriage. Before you overreact and say, "OZK said that women have to stay with abusive husbands!", realize that I am merely acknowledging that every situation is unique. I don't see a problem separating from a partner if their presence is dangerous to you or your children. If your partner has thoroughly turned his or her back on the marriage, that is unfortunate and sad. However, that is a divorce where someone is at fault. Someone has broken the marriage bond through their actions, or abandoned it. No fault divorce trivializes divorce into merely a more legally messy break-up.

I do recognize that people are often much happier divorced, and I've made that comment on the boards before. However, marriage is about making another person as fully a member of your family as a parent or a child, but more intimately. Ending that relationship, destroying what was vowed to be a lifetime bond, even if it makes you unhappy, is not part of the package. If you want to enter into a reproductive union with someone that stipulates that you reserve the right to leave if you are ever unhappy without judgment from others, that's not marriage.

Murder has also been going on since the dawn of time, but that's no reason to condone it or throw up our hands and give up. Many kings in Europe were extraordinarily chaste and faithful to their wives, and it's offensive that you've impugned nearly all of them. The Church has never condoned male infidelity, and neither have I. However, we must ask ourselves sociologically why it was considered not as big a deal for a man to be promiscuous. The answer is simple and biological: strict social controls developed around women's sexuality because before the advent of hormonal contraceptives and effective barrier methods, a woman was the one pregnant, and it was much easier for the biological father to shirk his duty to the child and its mother.

Finally, that comment made it clear that it was mocking the idea that the author would consider an increase in divorce and infidelity to be a good thing

I know very personally and directly of marriages involving physical abuse, adultery, sexual abuse, prison time, and other factors that the couples worked out. Not everyone is determined and not everyone is truly repentant of severe mistakes that they make. Divorce has devastating effects on children, it increases poverty, it violates important vows that the couple have made to each other. As Frank Underwood says, the nature of promises is that they are immune to circumstances. I'm not saying that everyone who is in a bad marriage is obligated to stick it through. However, the very attitude that you are espousing about marriage is exactly why most people do not see a problem with homosexual marriage. Marriage, to them, is about personal fulfillment of two people, not about creating a new family bond which will then go on to literally create a new family.

Every single married person I've spoken to tells me that marriage is not easy and that there are days that they wake up and they wish for nothing more than not to be married to the person they are next to. Everyone has problems, and people can work it out. Proof of that? People used to work it out most of the time. 5% divorce rate in 1960.

 

Gotta say, I'm proud of my state for the time being. Being 12th is certainly better than being last.

 

Soon. Just gotta be positive and optimistic.

 

i explained the reason for more severe social controls for women. I did not endorse the double standard. It's like me saying, "We invaded Iraq because we believed Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons." That's not an endorsement of the Iraq War. It's merely stating the putative reason.

 

Just skimming this, OZK a few things seem to stick out. One, you haven't really addressed the structural barriers that kept divorce rates artificially low. Increased socioeconomic opportunities for women and expanded legal protections for spouses was always going to allow a number of people who were otherwise "trapped" in bad circumstances to leave. How many of those are there?

Also, I'm sort of confused at your conflating legal and religious marriage. Why is being permanently separated better than just getting a formal divorce? Even if you want to go by the most stringent interpretations, insofar as I'm aware there was always the option of simply divorcing legally but not engaging in romantic relationships thereafter, recognizing that you were still "actually" married to your original partner, and therefore re-marriage or sexual activity wasn't condonable. But you seem hesitant to embrace even that standard. Similarly, why the focus on having the divorce litigated in court? So long as the person has a good reason for it, why do they have to present that information to a court of law and meet the evidence standards to qualify for a divorce that has fault assigned? If a no-fault divorce is easier, cheaper and more convenient, shouldn't they avail themselves of that option? Am I misreading you, or do you have some objection here?

 

The thing is that marriage has and will continue to change in terms of the meaning which people attach to it. OZK seems fixated with this concept of marriage as being a "procreative bond" but that in itself is problematic because the social imperative to "procreate" has and continues to be driven by the social norms of the day. Many people seem to lament the decline of "traditional" marriage, but what does that even mean? It depends on how far back in time you want to go.

If you go back a couple of centuries 'traditional marriage' served both legal/secular and religious functions - on the one hand, marriage and procreation were essential prerequisites to the transfer and inheritance of property/wealth from one generation to another. A person with property or an estate simply had to produce an heir in order for the estate to pass generationally. As children born out of wedlock could not inherit, marriage was therefore a legal transaction and was conducted as such. Negotiations to conclude a favourable marriage were conducted very much in the same way as we would negotiate the purchase of a financial asset today. There was a due diligence period (ascertaining virginity and fertility), conclusion of a pre-contract, a deposit was taken, a formal contract was signed and a closing. Upon conclusion of the marriage, the wife became the property of her husband and ceased to be a legal person in her own right. Love and companionship had nothing to do with it.

Religion got involved because it was a necessary component to solemnising a legally binding marriage contract and also because procreation was seen as being 'sacred'. The religious function of marriage related to the bond between the couple and God, a covenant. The secular/legal and religious functions of marriage were therefore coupled and intertwined because that was nature of society in those days.

Of course all that has now changed. The religious and legal functions of marriage are now well and truly uncoupled. In countries like the US, you can leave your estate to anyone you want. Children born out of wedlock may still inherit. Nobody walks around nowadays lamenting the lack of an heir. Times have changed. The social imperative to "procreate" is no longer attached to securing the transfer of property and wealth and therefore is no longer attached to the concept of marriage. Marriages are no longer conducted like financial transactions. Marriages are no longer arranged between parents without consulting the parties to the marriage. Women no longer become the legal property of the husband.

People are free to procreate just for the joy and happiness of bringing children into the world. The decision to marry and to procreate are no longer mutually inclusive.

Therefore, this concept of marriage being a 'procreative bond' is complete nonsense except for purely religious imperatives. For those people who believe marriage is a necessary prerequisite for procreation because procreation itself is sacred and is part of a relationship the person has with God or whatever, then that is fine. I respect that position. Religious people are still free to marry and solemnise their relationships on these religious grounds.

But for those of us who do not hold religious beliefs, marriage means whatever we want it to mean. We are not bound by these traditional ideas of marriage being a 'procreative bond' because times have changed. The 'traditional' concept of marriage has changed so fundamentally over the ages that there is no longer any justifiable reason to cling to certain definitions which relate to the gender of the parties to the marriage. The social, historical and normative imperatives which gave rise to the 'traditional' gender based definition of marriage no longer exist.

 

I am all for increased commitment within marriage. SSM does not preclude such a commitment, as many people would have us believe.

This is my biggest gripe with the anti-ssm side: they're going after an imagined threat to marriage while completely ingnoring factors that are actually known to risk higher divorce rates. People under the age of 24 have the highest divorce rate of all other age groups - why aren't they proposing an ammendment to limit marriage to people at least 25 years old? Why aren't they pushing for longer engagements to make sure the couple is serious and ready for marriage? Why aren't they swarming chapels in Vegas to protest quickie marriages?

They don't care what heterosexuals do to destroy the sanctity of marriage, only the gay people. Depending on what research you listen to, gay people are only 5% of the population. Why are they so concerned about this group and not pouring time and money into issues effecting the other 95%?

This is why I believe anti-ssm people are prejudiced - they don't really care enough about making marriage stronger; they only care enough about keeping it away from the gays.

 

Listening to the MN Senate debate SSM and a specific ammendment regarding religious exemptions. Those of you that have been part of this thread for a long time might appreciate that there was a half hour long discussion on wedding photographers

That ammendment (to allow business owners to deny services to same sex couples) was defeated.

 

Good for Minnesota!

In international news, Brazil has now legalized gay marriage nationwide (it was already legal in some states there), taking effect tomorrow.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/w...l-removes-a-barrier-to-same-sex-marriage.html

 

Yup really proud of my state right now. This is great news.

 

A sad reminder that we have a long way to go in this struggle. A gay man was murdered blocks from the symbolic Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village last night after a man screamed homophobic slurs at him then shot him dead.

 

And on the same day France signed it's SSM act into law too.

 

Thankfully it comes in the midst of one of the most progressive couple of months in gay rights history (possibly only after Stonewall and MA legalizing unless I'm forgetting one) but it's a sharp reminder.

 

You gotta love responsible gun owners.