Sorry perhaps I should have been clearer. I think there is something wrong about "marrying" multiple people at the same time.
What you want to do in your own home is up to you.
Well I'd say to abolish marriage would be a big mistake for society. For me the main function of marriage is to provide the optimum situation for bringing up kids, as well as promoting monogamy and faithfulness which are IMHO good for society.
I think hijacking the word to mean other things muddies and confuses things for society, when there's actually an opportunity to use a new word to mean marriage between a same sex couple.
...provide the optimum situation for bringing up kids...
The fact that roughly 50% of marriages end in divorce (at least in the U.S.) makes whether or not marriages create said optimum situation the decision of a rounding error, more or less.
Also: As I understand it, marriage used to mean something more akin to ownership, before women got more equal rights. So the definition has already changed once. If that change was ok, why is another change not ok?
For me, marriage is something more personal - something a couple does because they want to let each other, and the rest of the world, know they're committed.
To be fair, I guess I can't say for sure what I think about whether marriage is important to kids until I have some of my own.
This is the fundamental conflict here. Liberals look at marriage and see something people do to be happy. Telling some people they can't marry and be happy is just mean! They fail to see the deeper consequences of messing with tradition.
Yes, I think that's exactly right. To elaborate, I see the attitude of not wanting to mess with tradition as being the same attitude that used to make people say "if God wanted us to fly he would have given us wings".
Perhaps messing with tradition is risky, as was trying to fly. But I'm ok with that.
It devalues real marriage. The consequences will be much the same as past developments that devalued marriage as an institution and an oath, for examples no-fault divorce and much public welfare. One can reasonably anticipate more out of wedlock births and more divorce.
Honestly that seems more like a function of a church than a government. But, how does using that word to talk about other arrangements promote monogamy / faithfulness? I mean less than half the people getting married today in the US are going to stay that way for the rest of their life and in many of those that don't get divorced one or both partners are going to get some on the side so I don't think the word really does much at this point.
PS: A lot of people stay married to the end because one spouse kills the other is that a benefit?
I wouldn't go that far. That may be the party line of the day but in my mind, it's clear that a child benefits best from having 1 female parent and 1 male parent, who are committed to raising that child within a stable family environment.
Yes this means I consider same sex families and single parent families "sub optimal". No, I would not suggest for a second that having a child requires "optimal" conditions.
I grew up in basically a single parent family. There are a lot of things I know I would have been able to benefit from (that I've learned and am learning along the way) had this not been the case.
We need to stop pretending that every different way of raising a child somehow produces the same results. At the same time we need to realize nobody is able to provide the optimal conditions all of the time.
I'm really looking for evidence, or even compelling anecdotes, for why this "kids need men and women" concept is valid. What does a kid get from a male parent that they can't get from a female parent?
Note that seventeen comments after you make this case, when I concede some obscure point about the value of men or women in parenting, I'm just going to come back at you and say that this is really just evidence that we should ban divorce, like Ireland once did. What it has to do with gay marriage, I don't know.
However much we lack strong heterosexual families, we're more awash in mediocre heterosexual families, and far more disturbed by unplanned single-parent families. You will have a hard time saying that a child will do better in a loving two-parent gay family than in the median family in the US.
Is it possible that children will, for a variety of reasons, some of then intrinsic and some of them extrinsic (such as societal pressure against homosexual parents --- the same arguments that might be marshalled against racially diverse couples), do marginally better in the Ozzie and Harriet family of the '50s than in the Ozzie and Ozzie family of the '020s. I concede the last point you just made, up front. But that argument doesn't preclude my argument, which is that availability of loving gay couples to raise wanted children will be a net benefit for society and for children.
You will have a hard time saying that a child will do better in a loving two-parent gay family than in the median family in the US.
Which is why I'm specifically not saying that. In fact, this is what I said: No, I would not suggest for a second that having a child requires "optimal" conditions.
Much of "influence of fathers" stuff is really talking about the implications of living in:
* single parent homes
* poor single parent homes
* poor and middle-class single parent homes where the single parent works full-time and has less influence over their children
* poor single parents homes in cultures that overtly disrespect fatherhood and implicitly promote weak family structures
I grant you immediately that it's not optimal to be raised in single-parent households --- with the obvious caveat that you have to control for income, culture, setting, and atypically excellent parents that pull it off anyways.
It looks like you & I agree more than we disagree.
Well, I'm a male parent in a stable, conventionally-married Catholic two-parent family. Do my kids get value from being raised by Erin? Yes. For one thing, they eat yogurt; for another thing, they can dress themselves. Do they get value from me? Yes. For instance, I am good at making pancakes.
Is there some huge man-woman socio-cultural hoo-hah I'm missing about what our relationship imparts on our children that would be dramatically different if I was replaced with an equally loving woman? Perhaps the pancakes would become crepes (though I'm good at that too). The whole of western civilization shudders.
There might be a real argument you have to make, axod, but you have to actually make it. Innuendo doesn't cut it.
Look into how badly boys do at school when there teachers are female - or how badly girls do when their teachers are men. The evidence is that neither do well in those circumstances.
Women and men are very very very different thank goodness. If you're missing out on either of them, you're missing out on a complete other world.
Erm. So you believe the only difference between women and men is their genitalia? What planet are you from? You've never seen any evidence of their thought processes being different, their completely different logic, social skills, spacial awareness etc?
I'm sorry but if you believe that you're blind, or really haven't lived.
Your statement sums up what is wrong with the political correctness/equality mob. Men and women are not equal. They will never be. Thank goodness. Celebrate the differences. Embrace them. Don't just blindly pretend they don't exist.
You were asked for evidence for an assertion you made that boys behave worse in classes with female teachers, and that girls behave worse in classes with male teachers. Put up or shut up, axod.
"A study of 25,000 pupils by Stanford University economist Thomas Dee found children did 4% better in tests when their teachers were of the same sex"
"In general, girls learned more with female teachers and boys with male teachers"
"A large fraction of boys' dramatic underperformance in reading is linked to the fact that their reading teachers are overwhelmingly female," Dee concludes.
There are a large number of similar studies with similar results.
Think you might be able to do better than one "controversial" study published by the conservative Hoover Institution by a visiting Swarthmore associate professor, an unpublished survey taken by a private consultancy in the UK, and an opinion poll in the UK?
That's not an argument; it's just circumstantial ad hominem. I could advance my argument against you the same way by saying you sound awfully threatened by women and gay people.
The claim you're citing is surprising not only because it defies conventional wisdom (which it does), but also implies that whole of the American educational system is built on an easily-corrected inefficiency. Why can't you marshall better evidence for your extraordinary claim? Why don't you have a better source than an untenured Swarthmore professor writing in a journal with dubious peer review?
When you or axod give me a relevant significant non-physical way that men and women are different, I'll address it. I chose to address the specific, relevant, wrong point he offered as an alternative.
one needs a legal binding contract for these things? i mean seriously. this is adult stuff, if "the law" is the only thing preventing you from sleeping around, then you aren't mature enough to be in the kind of relationship that requires it.
and as far as kids are concerned. i highly doubt a legally binding marriage of two people who don't want to be together being forced into raising a kid would create an optimum situation. if they want to be together, they will be. and if they don't, moving on is far healthier.
"if "the law" is the only thing preventing you from sleeping around, then you aren't mature enough to be in the kind of relationship that requires it."
Right. And the majority of grown adults are not.
Also I think it's a good idea to make breaking up a family hard.
It was illegal as recently as the 70s in many places. I think it was pretty much everywhere in the 50s. The cops would throw you in the slammer for "carrying on with a married woman."
> I guess I'm not seeing what impact marriage has on society as a whole
Are you blind? You haven't noticed that it's ghetto shit-hole everywhere in modern world that stable two parent families aren't the norm? Marriage in its traditional form is an institution arrived at through a Darwinian process of cultural selection. It has been proven by time to be the best way to further a society. Messing with it is extremely dangerous.
Cultural conservatism is much like environmentalism. You just don't want to go blindly messing around with complex natural systems. The consequences are usually bad.
I upmodded you, though I completely disagree with what you just said.
For starters, monogamy in highly socially stratified societies is a very rare social phenomenon. You might want to check out "The Moral Animal" for some discussion of this. The line I remember: "socially stratified monogamous cultures are the true freaks of nature" (paraphrasing here, but I'm close).
However, they do tend to be the norm among highly prosperous and free societies, which takes us to your second point...
Haven't you noticed the strong correlation between wealth and freedom and gay rights? Look who is for gay marriage and who is against it. Genentech, Google, and Apple were were very high profile donors against Prop 8. This isn't just a San Francisco leftist coalition - we're talking the biggest, heaviest hitters in the most innovative fields in America.
I agree with you that Scandanavian countries are lauded a bit too much by the left... but let's compare these economies (where gay rights are supported strongly) with the cultural and economic environment in regions where they are not... oh, say, Afghanistan?
Even in the US, the regions that support gay marriage tend to be attracting the best companies with their top notch workforce. They companies come to them, not the other way around. The regions that don't are still wondering what low skilled factory they're going to be able to attract to replace the textile mill that closed in the seventies.
Some people compare gay rights with slavery (which I think is a bit of a stretch) and argue that though the majority of the population thought slavery was ok back then, it didn't make it right. That's certainly true, but one must also realize that the "wealthy and free" were big supporters of slavery.
The point is, being wealthy and free does not give one a more "correct" opinion than one who is not.
And I don't see a strong correlation between "wealth and freedom and gay rights". I see a strong correlation between gay rights and political image.
> strong correlation between wealth and freedom and gay rights
The upper classes carry themselves on with bourgeois family traditions whatever the legal environment. They don't personally see the disastrous consequences of family breakdown because their families remain whole, so they don't give a second thought to liberalizing laws. In poorer areas, the breakdown of family values is a real pressing issue. People see the social catastrophe around them and recognize the further threats.
Wealthier areas are more socially liberal because it's personally irrelevant to them. The areas are wealthy usually because of strongly bourgeois family traditions. Poorer areas are usually more socially fragile.
I assure you that families break down in upper class environments. I went to a very expensive episcopal school, and when I was making plans to play tennis with a classmate, he asked "should I call you at your mom's house or your dad's house?" I told him they lived in the same house. "Really?" he said. The assumption was that they were divorced. In one grade, 22 of 26 students were from divorced households.
Now, that doesn't mean you're wrong about the social catastrophe that the failure of marriage brings in poor areas - just because wealthy episcopalians get divorced all the time doesn't mean they experience financial disaster when they do. They're well off enough that they can just split into two (or three or four) different households and still have enough to pay the mortgage, fix the car, buy clothes, and take nice vacations.
But I will definitely disagree that they are wealthy because of strongly bourgeois family traditions. Man, that's the last phrase I would use to describe these people.
For the record, I was in the 10% of the class that lived across town, and didn't come from a family with that kind of money - though I would certainly not describe myself as deprived or from a social class that feared financial catastrophe.
By the way - I'm genuinely interested in hearing why you think that gay marriage would be a threat to marriage in poorer areas. I do agree with you that families are important and should be protected - but why from gays? That one doesn't really make sense to me. It seems like poverty, layoffs, long shifts, poor schools, and so forth threaten families. Adultery and constant conflict (I'm not talking about the truly criminal violence, just the way people can be constantly fighting) can also obviously wreck a marriage - though I think that's often a symptom of the things I listed above.
Gays getting married? Seems like the last thing I'd worry about. This is why the anti prop-8 crowd is so frustrated to see the Catholic, Mormon, and Evangelical churches so actively working to ban gay marriage. It's like: people are hurting, and this is where you put your resources?
1. You seem to have settled on a root cause ghetto shit-holes being the lack of social and cultural bonding rituals between one member of each gender. Generally, I look at cultures like that and see things like oppressive governments, lack of stable, productive economies, and the absence of anything resembling education causing strife? I haven't seen anything to suggest that oppression comes from the lack of observing ritualistic pair-bonds. Perhaps you have data to prove me wrong?
2. Marriage is not a natural system. Nor is culture, except for the tendency for humans to form them. That they manifest at all seems to be a product of human nature; how they manifest seems much more based on environment and random variation. Otherwise, our culture would be indistinguishable from that of everyone elses. Or are you suggesting that we are still in the process of cultural selection, and ours will inevitably prevail?
For most of human history people married who their parents told them to. Calling what we do now traditional marriage is silly because it's been changing fairly rapidly over time. Look at marriage in nortic countries and you will see a large separation between having kids and getting married yet they are doing better than most of Europe and the US on most measurements of heath, happiness and economic growth.
Looking back it's hard to extrapolate the value of "traditional family values" because we have a lower crime rate, better educated population, and a better economy now than we did back with they where more common.
> because it's been changing fairly rapidly over time
No, it's been changing fairly rapidly for less than 100 years, and usually with serious unforeseen consequences.
> Look at marriage in nortic countries
I'm tired of hearing about nordic countries. First, they aren't nearly as great as the pom-pom crowd thinks. If you do an apples to apples comparison of middle class whites in northern US states to nordic countries, they're really not so fantastic. And there is plenty of hand-wringing about social degradation in Sweden. They're, what, one generation in to their shift away from more conservative arrangements? Give it time and you'll see problems.
No, it's been changing fairly rapidly for less than 100 years, and usually with serious unforeseen consequences.
Woman's rights have been on the rise for much longer than 100 years. (I hear they can vote, own property, and even work in the theater.)
I used to be a crime to have sex outside of marriage but that's been on the decline for a long time.
There used to be limits on who could marrie based on class and or race lines. (Duke's don't get hitched with just anyone you know.)
Dowery's used to be common but now it's mostly just the wives family paying for more of the wedding. (This trend has been going on for a while.)
Divorce was introduced by one of the Henry's (he killed most of his other wives but their was one he liked.)
I could go on but most of these trends are a lot older than 100 years. One of the few things that does not really seem to change is infidelity. Genetic tests have shown that married women tend to have about ~20% of their kids from someone other than their husband. This does not seem to have changed much over time.
PS: Nordic marriage traditions go all the way back to the vikings, but they don't look much like "Christian" family values.
people should have every right in the world to define their relationship to each other in any manner they like.
the law should simply allow simplification of contract terms should they be required (custody, assets, etc).
the idea that "marriage" is a set legal method that is rigid and unyielding to change is retarded. the concept is so ridiculously outmoded. society and culture have moved on, it's time for "marriage" to get with the program
> WTF do you care what three forty year old people do in their own home
Have you read ANYTHING about these polygamous communities? They produce cast off boys and a trickle of 15 year old girls fleeing rape by 50 year old men. I would argue these are long term consequences of polygamy itself, not features of communities that happen to practice it.
I read your argument as: insular religious extremists do bad things! Therefore, we should also deny thinking and responsible adults freedom to live as they please.
If anything, the lesson is that making something illegal pushes it underground, which makes it harder to protect those that may suffer from it in addition to punishing those that would gain from it. This is a lesson demonstrated over and over again -- there are even comments about it in the Tao Te Ching.
