John Fund on getting the government out of marriage
Both sides operate from the shaky premise that government must be the arbiter of this dispute. Columnist Andrew Sullivan, a crusader for gay marriage, has written that “marriage is a formal, public institution that only the government can grant.” But that’s not so. Marriage predates government. Marriage scholar Lawrence Stone has noted that in the Middle Ages it was “treated as a private contract between two families . . . For those without property, it was a private contract between two individuals enforced by the community sense of what was right.” Indeed, marriage wasn’t even regulated by law in Britain until the Marriage Acts of 1754 and 1835. Common-law unions in early America were long recognized before each state imposed a one-size-fits-all set of marriage laws.
The Founding Fathers avoided creating government-approved religions so as to avoid Europe’s history of church-based wars. Depoliticizing religion has mostly proven to be a good template for defusing conflict by keeping it largely in the private sphere.
*****
Note Nina Tottenberg’s snotty dismissiveness of Krauthammer, “Oh it’ll never happen.”
Yep, and the assaults on smokers would never lead to the government trying to legislate your diet either.
Never happen!
And mine. Well, Facebook and the Ron Paul Revolution’s:
And:
I saw one yesterday that was this: >
Succinct, I thought.
Which is why government can’t change the definition by fiat. End of story.
Meet the Gay Police State
What JHoward said.
“Which is why government can’t change the definition by fiat.”
I do not grant the government the right to make definitions in this area. Certainly not the federal government.
You sound like the wife of a guy I know. His brother and sister-in-law eloped, and this guy’s wife doesn’t consider her husband’s brother legitimately married, because it wasn’t a “real” church wedding.
I hope I’ve made all the relationships clear, by the way.
“I do not grant the government the right to make definitions in this area”
what if the fed gov’t adopts the existing definition?
I think there are legitimate state interests in upholding the (Western civilizational)traditional definition of marriage; even if political correctness and multi-cultural relativism have led the state to conclude that there aren’t.
i like Mr. Howard’s second one the best
I do not grant the government the right to make definitions in this area.
How would we characterize the theoretical condition assumed by the Founders and Framers to have been extant at the time of the establishment of our government? That is, how would they have put it? Wouldn’t we say (for them) something of this sort: that government has imposed upon it the considered opinions or choices of the sovereign people (thus “adopting”, as newrouter puts it, but, of necessity or by compulsion), which sovereigns do not cede to the government any power to go beyond what [definition or condition] the people may impose?
I leave aside for now any trace of the implications of this position, desiring first to grasp whether it is correct or not.
“You sound like the wife of a guy I know. ”
Not at all. It’s none of my business what people call their relationship, and none of the governments, either.
“what if the fed gov’t adopts the existing definition?”
What is their constitutional authority for making any definition?
So does that family in Detroit who expect their 24 year old son to marry his twelve year old cousin. –preferably without the inconvenience of having to return to the homeland for a few years in order to actually do it.
“That is, how would they have put it?”
My position (and I expect, theirs) would be that (since there is no explicit Constitutional grant of power in this area) it falls to the states or the people under the Tenth Amendment. Likely the people, since common-law marriage was widely recognized at the time.
“So does that family in Detroit who expect their 24 year old son to marry his twelve year old cousin.”
Marriage is a contract. Twelve year olds can’t enter into legally binding contracts.
Neither can dogs or sheep.
The Federal government doesn’t have to adopt or make anything. Simply acknowledge what is. Which, until yesterday, everybody understood enough to take for granted.
SBP, to the extent that the states are themselves understood to be creatures of the people and beholden to the sovereignty of the people prior to any acquisition of sovereignty unto themselves in relation to the newly established Federal government, it seems to me we needn’t distinguish the people’s sovereignty as to the States on the one hand and the Federal government on the other. Both sorts of government, State and Federal, that is, are ultimately accountable to the single original authority, i.e., the people.
Good luck holding that line.
it falls to the states or the people under the Tenth Amendment.
Yet on a theoretical understanding, wouldn’t the Tenth Amendment have come along very late in the case, since, again, as to the theory, the people’s understanding of this issue far pre-dates any establishment of government? I hope this isn’t too circular a presentation of the thing, but it does seem as though it’s fundamental to their thinking.
Why are you opposed to arranged marriages?
Bigot.
He snarked.
SBP
For years SSM advocates have dismissed any discussion of polygamy out-of-hand as fear-mongering-slippery-slope-it-will-never-happen.
Of course even Ted Olson couldn’t give a coherent answer on if so gay marriage why NOT polygamy?
Color me not shocked that NPR is casually discussing it
“People have a right to establish their families as long as they don’t harm others.”
See aids; epidemic.
And if we’re going to redefine marriage to a public declaration of who is regularly* having sexual relations with whom, we can’t leave out the kiddy diddlers. That just wouldn’t be fair
Just to tie it all together.
And from the Steyn piece Pablo linked in the Planned
Parenthood Infanticide thread, why it matters, and should matter, even to social liberal-tarians/fiscal conservatives:And if we’re going to redefine marriage to a public declaration of who is regularly* having sexual relations with whom, we can’t leave out the kiddy diddlers. That just wouldn’t be fair
Just to tie it all together.
And from the Steyn piece Pablo linked in the Planned
ParenthoodInfanticide thread, why it matters, and should matter, even to social liberal-tarians/fiscal conservatives:Fixed. Apologies to all for that.
Is ‘orientation’ merely being made to do euphemistic work replacing the simpler ‘desire’? Or is there more to it than that?
I would answer “yes.” To both questions.
Disregarding the first then, what is the “more to it” playing out in the second? I take it you’re not referring to some social science definitional purpose at play, rather, to the political agency involved?
Defining deviancy
downaway. The end result being, not the end of immorality, but the triumph of amorality.I’d quote Cecil B. DeMille’s narration from The Ten Commandments, the scene were the nation of Isreal worships the golden calf, subsitution the idolatry of the state for the golden calf. But honestly, I’m too lazy to go googling for it.
I believe the attempt is to desensitize people to the notion that having children as the object of your sexual desire is wrong. If it’s “just the way your are” then how can someone else judge you for it? It isn’t your fault, etc.
they make the rules and definitions we live by see the part about passing laws
1. Darleen’s graphic is brilliant.
2. Getting the gubmint out of marriage seems like a nifty libertarian way to cut the Gordian knot, but it isn’t. I explain why over at QandO.
If you get gubmint out of marriage, then you’ve effectively destroyed it.
Congratulations on torching your own house so your enemy doesn’t have to.
For years SSM advocates have dismissed any discussion of polygamy out-of-hand as fear-mongering-slippery-slope-it-will-never-happen.
That’s one possible (un)intended consequence of legitimizing SSM.
But when the Left is involved we should always watch the other hand. What other things regarding How Gender Is Perceived are they doing?
How about the MA thing about letting gender-confused kindergartners pretend to be of the opposite sex without telling the parents?
What about railing against “heteronormativity” in general and inventing ever more gender identity classifications such as cissexual?
What about removing the terms “mother” and “father” from birth certificates and replacing them with “Parent 1” and “Parent 2”?
What about raising genderless children: not letting anyone including the child know “which one they are” (despite the fact that kids figure it out at age 3)?
What about the ability to change the sex listed on your own birth certificate whenever you want, surgery or no surgery?
Do you see where this is heading? Right now, what they’re pushing is the idea that gender is fluid and subjective and who are you to insist that biology has a say?
How far away are they from insisting that the very act of presenting yourself as distinctively and solely male or female is bigoted and insulting and beyond the pale?
Out with personal pronouns such as “he” and “she”: in with “they,” thus making us all linguistic Gollums.
Take off those ruffles, girls. Don’t you dare grow out that facial hair, boys. What are we, savages?
What would be the effect of forcing everyone to be SNL’s Pat and Chris?
Extreme dehumanization is what. They’d be forbidding the expression of an extremely essential and profound part of our individuality: our sexual identity. Those poor souls whose sexual identity doesn’t gel normally are in continual torment throughout their lives.
Wouldn’t it be delicious to make everyone like that? What degree of coercion would it take to stop people from being men and women and to make them all IT, whether they like it or not?
SSM removes the category male/female from the bedrock social institution, one that has the force of law behind it. After that, it’s going to be much easier to eradicate Masculinity and Femininity from our cultural vocabulary and concepts.
Dystopia won’t be a strong enough word for it.
Yay us.
ok that took a sharp left turn into sillyville there at the end I think
fortunately for you ulcers are cause by special bacterias not from worrying about being turned into a ruffle-less dehumanized it-person
single sex loos, pikachu?
they have them at starbucks and starbucks lets you carry guns and they’ll even get you wired up on caffeine
ok that took a sharp left turn into sillyville there at the end I think
Because our society never goes there, does it.
We don’t have to assert that “it’s going to happen” to prove that “this is where they want to push us.”
Deicentra, the blogger Bookworm theorized what all of this messing with sexual identity is about:
“Those of us who came of age before the 1980s, when the Judeo-Christian, Western tradition, though battered, was still ascendant, view our sexuality as a private matter. We believe that our bodies are our own property, which means that we should not be touched or controlled sexually without our consent. A person raised with this worldview inevitably believes as well that his ability to control his body is the essence of his individuality. This physical individuality is the antithesis of slavery, which represents a person’s ultimate lack of control over his body.
– – – –
What’s interesting is that, because the Left expresses itself in terms of “freeing” people’s sexuality, many people miss the fact that it is every bit as sexually controlling in its own way as Islam is. This control comes about because the Left works assiduously to decouple sex from a person’s own sense of bodily privacy and, by extension, self-ownership. If a person has no sense of autonomy, that person is a ready-made cog for the statist machinery. ”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/sex_and_state_power.html
Ah, no. If you get contractual legality out of marriage, then you’ve effectively destroyed it. Further, if you relegate marriage as a contract to the States, you’ve saved it from the feds, that being the point of the banner above.
Which is to say, if you get government as it exists today to fuck around in same-sex hookups out of marriage, then you’ve effectively saved it, a consideration you can’t really express fully on a bumper sticker.
The last time I said something roughly like that I got raked over the coals. On that note, the other thing that makes me no friends is the reality that rights may be written by God — assuming we can define God which naturally we cannot, heaven help us — but they are dispensed by man.
Witness, say, Mao. A right existed under Mao but only in the abstract. To the point of absurdity, I’m sure some went around thinking at the time. Right? HA!
Which is to say that marriage is also defined by the instantaneous trend on any particular Tuesday and as such, takes us right back to State’s rights and rights under the local State. You can define marriage as hetero, traditional, social, contractual, or sacred, but as I didn’t get away saying the last time, you can’t really define it as anything when if it has more or less ceased to exist and these days it has all but done just that.
It has become as a denied right, an abstract.
Which is to say, save marriage by getting government — say again, Mao’s or Obama’s — out of it, the sentiment behind the banner above.
i just don’t see coercive depilations on the horizon
for one thing the islams and the sikhs would be aggrieved
plus what about movember
Didn’t it used to be the case way back in the heady founding days of this country about eight years ago that kicking the govt out of the gay bedroom was all first amendment and parade-worthy and patriotic and everything?
Here we are all these many years a decade later and now we get our religious reinforcement having our shabby public servants officially approve of our edgy same-sex hookups ’cause of the illusion that we can get free stuff *and* a stamp of approval at the same time.
Times change; times change. Is this what they mean by “progressive”?
As a friend says, only slaves have to ask their master if they can love someone.
I just don’t want to have to shield the children’s eyes from the Gay Pride Parades ever again.
Is that too much to ask?
“i just don’t see coercive depilations on the horizon”
oh lookee here
Meet the Gay Police State
link
Also, see Zombie’s Folsom Street Fair coverage.
“For years SSM advocates have dismissed any discussion of polygamy out-of-hand as fear-mongering-slippery-slope-it-will-never-happen.
Of course even Ted Olson couldn’t give a coherent answer on if so gay marriage why NOT polygamy?”
Well, it’s a perfectly valid question, to which my answer would be that I don’t give two shits about polygamy, as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult.
Seen it, Libby. *shudder*
If your eyes haven’t gone blind from those pictures, since there are hundreds, note the gay couple (parents, yet!) walking the twin daughters through the guys who are masturbating in public.
Fun for the whole family.
How is polygamy different from, say, serial divorce and remarriage?
I recognize that the Catholic Church and some others have religious problems with divorce, I mean in the eyes of the law.
Just how long an interval must elapse between one partner and the next before it stops being “polygamy” and becomes “monogamy”?
“If your eyes haven’t gone blind from those pictures, since there are hundreds,”
Comes to mind that I’ve seen similar hetero-oriented things in pictures of Mardi Gras and the Carnival in Rio.
“If you get gubmint out of marriage, then you’ve effectively destroyed it.”
Marriage existed long before it required a government license.
SBP
Somehow I’ve haven’t seen public sex taking place in full view of others at Mardi Gras or in any pics from Rio.
without a welfare state i wouldn’t either
I don’t give two shits about polygamy, as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult.
Thanks for the honesty at least. I find it a very problematic arrangement but there I do looking at benefit/cost to community & society.
Can’t have that!
yup the googles confirm there’s public sex at mardi gras
“Comes to mind that I’ve seen similar hetero-oriented things in pictures of Mardi Gras and the Carnival in Rio.”
Photos or it never happened.
legally?
oh my goodness
“Somehow I’ve haven’t seen public sex taking place in full view of others at Mardi Gras ”
It happens a lot. Google it. :-)
“yup the googles confirm there’s public sex at mardi gras
The police on the COPS episode arrested everyone they saw. Didn’t make any difference wrt gender.
“I find it a very problematic arrangement but there I do looking at benefit/cost to community & society.”
I find a lot of things that other people do problematic with respect to benefit/cost to society. That doesn’t mean the government has a right to stop them.
To take a recent (and small) example, I’m certain that drinking hogshead-sized cups of soda doesn’t do you any good. I still find Bloomberg reprehensible.
Further, if you relegate marriage as a contract to the States, you’ve saved it from the feds, that being the point of the banner above.
I thought that was the arrangement we had now. When you get married, you get a marriage license that is issued by the state where you marry. When you get divorced, you get a divorce according to the laws of the state in which you file the divorce.
Then with the Equal Protection clause, if you get married in Virginia and you move to Florida, you don’t have to get married again in Florida for it to be legal there.
Levin pointed out that Equal Protection would not compel Utah to honor an SSM that was performed in MA, because the marriage laws were so radically different in the two states.
Of course, that line will hold, just as all the other lines in the constitution have held.
Which is to say, save marriage by getting government — say again, Mao’s or Obama’s — out of it, the sentiment behind the banner above.
Ergo, “get the Fed out of Marriage,” not the “State” or the “Gubmint.” We do have a single term that would clarify your point.
mtv had a punk my mom where they had girls bring home a guy for dinner and they explained to mom how she was gonna become one of his sister wives
it was funny
One thing is clear to me: will we or no, we’re all (legal) positivists now.
SBP
No one is arrested at Folsom Street. Ever. These males can/do have sex in full view of cops.
Not so at Mardi Gras
“I find a lot of things that other people do problematic with respect to benefit/cost to society. That doesn’t mean the government has a right to stop them.”
What has been the cost to all societies in the world wrt AIDS?
Marriage pre-existed the government. Government has rendered it meaningless, according to the plan. Thank Saint Ronnie for staring that ball rolling.
Leigh, I can’t remember if it was that Zombie FSF pictorial or another San Francisco celebration he/she covered that featured a naked Jesus who performed for the crowd (which included kids/families). These events always seem to include reveling in their mockery of Jesus and Christianity, such as religious-themed dildos, etc. But taking your 2 yr old twins to a leather fetish celebration is just a parental choice, and don’t you dare question their two dads – saying that, in general, being raised in a traditional family may be healthier than the myriad of other configurations makes one a H8ter.
Last time I read anything wrt AIDS we were spending a factor 8 on research, compared to cancer.
SBP
If a bunch of adults want to create the Harrad Experiment in Libertine Acres planned community, that’s their business.
But I wouldn’t have the government arbitrate their contract as valid, especially in the welfare state that we currently have.
Live as you want, don’t look for government sanction and support.
They win, we lose. Beecause there won’t be a united us to oppose them.
Pablo
I guess part of the problem is how do you define “government”.
We mean Feds (then state/local) but even the ‘pre-gov’ stage the marriages were supported/controlled by the local village/group culture.
Certainly Tevye wasn’t running down to the local Russian registry for each of his daughters.
Yes, it is. But you need to get your stupid Jesus out of the public square and make room for the drag queens and the leatherboys.
Sodom meet Gomorrah. Cain meet Abel.*
to which my answer would be that I don’t give two shits about polygamy, as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult.
The children are involved but they don’t consent, just as they don’t in the case of SSM and single moms with donor fathers, and yet the kids bear the brunt of the ill effects of that precious adult “consent.”
Libertarianism says that it is not the proper role of government to police individual behavior, as long as that behavior doesn’t hurt anyone else. “Hurting anyone else” is easy to define in cases of homicide, theft, rape, assault, fraud, and so on, because the proximate cause of the hurt is easily identified, e.g., you busted into my house and took my stuff and shot my dog.
It gets really hard when the relationship between cause and effect is long-term and diffuse. Intelligent libertarians recognize that letting people be stupid about their own lives does carry a price that others pay, but the trade-off is worth it because of the increased individual liberty.
Polygamy has a cost, depending on how it’s practiced. The poligs in their little conclaves of the mountain west are nests of pathology: not just the inbreeding and sexual abuse, but also the fact that the boys who are deemed “unworthy” of having wives are unceremoniously kicked to the curb. The men aren’t wealthy enough to support such huge families, so every wife after the first receives state welfare as a “single mom.” They call it “milking the beast.”
My Mormon ancestors weren’t like that: the wives usually worked to support the family, often opening businesses or being otherwise employed, a practice that Brigham Young heartily encouraged. In fact, to solve the problem of insufficient doctors, BY sent plural wives and their children back East to medical school to become fully fledged doctors, not just midwives. (Interesting historical note: when Utah achieved statehood, one of the first people elected to the State legislature was a plural wife (married prior to the ban), who ran against her own husband on the opposite-party ticket. Also, when Utah joined the union in 1896, Utah women LOST the franchise and so became Suffragettes.)
Darleen, the problem is that they don’t just want to create the Harrad Experiment in Libertine Acres planned community. Not only must the state endorse it, they want the public schools to include it in their sex education as just another valid lifestyle choice, sue any business that doesn’t accommodate it, and ostracize anyone who dares male public statements against it, etc.
Personally? In re: marriage? The State of California. But there’s plenty of suck to go around. I’d sooner answer to the Catholics than the courts.
“If you get gubmint out of marriage, then you’ve effectively destroyed it.”
Marriage existed long before it required a government license.
You didn’t read my QandO comment, so I’ll post an excerpt:
Unless the entire society recognizes a marriage as legitimate, it doesn’t perform one of its primary functions, which is to ensure that the dependents are cared for when the man skips out, as men often do.
I’m certain that drinking hogshead-sized cups of soda doesn’t do you any good. I still find Bloomberg reprehensible.
Other people’s obesity is a public problem only because “we’re forced to pay for the dialysis.”
Solution: Make sure that those who make the mistakes also suffer the full brunt of the consequences.
Hence the obscenity of Obamacare.
Shorter me:
The gubmint issues marriage licenses because the gubmint is a universally recognized authority, just as Guinness is the recognized authority regarding world records and Underwriters Laboratories is the authority regarding electrical gadget safety.
So it’s about whether the state is the servant of the people or vice-versa, whether the state can dictate what’s legitimate or whether the people get to tell the state what’s legit.
Make sure that those who make the mistakes also suffer the full brunt of the consequences.
which is the big argument I get into with Libertarians over “let’s just legalize all drugs and the problem will go away”
Only AFTER you have dismantled the Welfare State. I ain’t working so someone can shoot heroin & watch soaps all day.
Guinness and UL can’t take your kids away from and charge you for the “service” because you happen to have a penis.
Whoa. From Bookworm’s column:
Islamic countries are one scary example of how the public perception of sexuality can distort and warp an entire civilization for millennia. In their case, it’s extreme segregation of the sexes and imputing absolute character judgments on other. They do it to “preserve morality,” because Allah created men as just and righteous, and Shaitan made women wicked temptresses who cause men to fall. Only when a woman subjects herself to a man can she enter into paradise.
We’re in danger of erring in the other extreme: obliterating masculinity and femininity in the name of fairness and equality.
Feets scoffs at such an eventuality, as he always does, but his skepticism won’t stop them from Going There. The Left will use any cudgel at hand to destroy their enemies and accrue absolute power. Bourgeois society and its “corrupt” values have long been the bete noir of the Left. Given that Family and Church (and local civic organizations and federalism and individuality and private property, oh, the list is long) stand in opposition to Centralized Power, those things must be destroyed.
SSM is a weapon to destroy the Left’s enemies, not a plea for compassion or justice.
Do not give them any quarter, no matter how reasonable their demands seem. SSM is a means to an end, as all of their other projects are, and the end is always the obliteration of the individual to support the collective, which they control.
apropos of everything and nothing:
JHoward wrote above.
To which I ask, what does love have to do with marriage?
Guinness and UL can’t take your kids away from and charge you for the “service” because you happen to have a penis.
The problem is not that the gubmint is in charge of issuing marriage licenses or that it adjudicates divorce. Maintaining contract law is the proper role of gubmint.
The problem is that judges are content to use the bench to push a purely political agenda (for the good of all) and that they refuse to recognize that women are perfectly capable of being lying, selfish, sociopathic harpies during a divorce proceeding.
SSM is a non-sequitur. It cannot and does not exist, any more than male abortion.
“My Mormon ancestors weren’t like that: the wives usually worked to support the family, often opening businesses or being otherwise employed”
Well, sure. Not all polygamists are like the “marry off the girls at 12” groups, even today.
I know one such group that’s been together for over 20 years, 2 men and 3 women. There are kids involved (adults now — I didn’t know them when they were little) who seem reasonably well adjusted. Did it cause the kids some problems growing up? Maybe, but so does serial divorce and remarriage, and that’s perfectly legal.
I get the sense that not everybody sleeps with everybody else, but I’ve never had much interest in finding out the details (none of my business, really). To an outsider they’d seem like a group of friends who all just happen to live in the same fourplex.
They’re not on welfare, either, except to the extent that several of them are employed by a state university (two professors and at least two who are employed by the university in non-faculty jobs).
To which I ask, what does love have to do with marriage?
Exactly. There’s no test for love or sexual attraction prior to issuing a marriage license. A lesbian can marry a gay man, two strangers can marry each other, and two people who hate each other can marry, as long as one party is male and the other female.
Right, but that’s not what it does. The first thing it does with the marriage contract is discard it. Then it substitutes its own notions of what’s best for the rights of everyone involved. Again, thank Saint Ronnie.
What we have now is a federal family management program that includes everything there is post-marriage. This nulls state-level liberty to an extreme. Think Title IV-D, the Welfare system, Social Security, VAWA, horseshit like Bush’s teen screen and DOMA, and especially the national divorce, custody, and support industries unified by the above, probably the number one violator of prior individual constitutional right there is.
Yes, you do get married and divorced at the state level. Everything in between and everything following the feds are involved in. Marriage? Post-Reagan it never really factored.
Again: That’s the point of demanding the government get out of marriage.
Excessively narrow. Get the federal State government out of marriage if you prefer. Get it out of the home, education, retirement, health, finance, housing, insurance, Big Business, globalism, the UN, and a million permutations if things not its business to be in.
You know this. Parsing the issue to have “government” defend the grotesquely demeaned because one person in a hundred sees it’s vestiges as sacred is borderline specious.
2 men and 3 women.
That’s polyamory, not polygamy.
Did it cause the kids some problems growing up? Maybe, but so does serial divorce and remarriage, and that’s perfectly legal.
Are you saying that the solution is to sanction polyamory or to condemn serial divorce and remarriage?
Because I’m more down with the latter than the former.
There are kids involved (adults now — I didn’t know them when they were little) who seem reasonably well adjusted.
I remember when the experts used to assure us that divorce didn’t hurt kids all that much: it was only the social stigma that caused the problem, not the divorce itself.
Just because people aren’t in prison or living out of dumpsters or pitching fits in public or behaving in obviously strange ways, it doesn’t mean No Harm Was Done. How many apparently normal families contain an extremely abusive parent?
I also remember when “we don’t need a piece of paper to prove our love” and when it was absurd to say that someday men would marry men.
Where the Left is involved, the slippery-slope argument is not a logical fallacy; it’s mandatory.
Also of objectifying all interpersonal relationships and interactions, as cranky alluded to above. Should that ever come about, future translators of Monty Python and the Holy Grail will answer the question “how do you know he’s a king?” thusly:
“He ain’t
got shit all over ‘imnever got to be on the bottom.”Seriously, folks, read the Bookworm piece for a run-down of how sexuality meshes all too well with state power when the boundaries are broken down, and especially for her recounting of what the Left’s various sexual projects have been. They might be less overt in their declarations, but don’t think for one minute that they’ve abandoned either the means or the end.
Especially you ‘feets. On the Left’s desire to degrade sexuality, you are far to accepting of their premises.
gay marriage is not something we encountered as we were sliding down a slope it’s actually at the top of the hill with the regular marriagings
slippery slopes are more like when your retrograde social views cause your little party to be unviable to where you keep putting fascists in your little white house and the fascists keep appointing fascists to the courts and using the bureaucratic machineries to ass-rape everyone’s freedoms
Libertarianism as I understand it and deploy the word says that it is not the proper role of government to police individual behavior when there are a few basic laws and a functional system of civil justice. Do not kill, steal, defraud, or willfully damage per a finding by a jury of your peers.
Marriage is a civil union entered into by consenting adults. As long as it does not involve federal endorsement, restriction, or benefit, or any unlawful equivalent at the local level, it goes but it goes as a matter of civil contract law only.
As for sheep and polygamists and gays, we have the Utahs, the SFs, and well, we have Utah and San Francisco to isolate themselves per the rest of our wiser alternatives everywhere else.
Until those fall too, which they damn nigh are, at which point the argument that traditional marriage is somehow dependent on federal constitutional ethic or code is still unsupportable.
I cannot grasp the need to have the feds define marriage so as to defend it. How that sword does not cut both ways escapes me.
Rejected as a faulty premise.
that’s the longest article every written dicentra
maybe after my pizza gets here i will do some skimmings
but it looks like a fevered harangue
*ever* written i mean
“Because I’m more down with the latter than the former.”
I’m a “until death do us part” kinda guy myself and didn’t get married until I was SURE about that. Unfortunately that’s exactly how it turned out, long before I thought it would.
However, I’m not saying that’s right for everyone. Obviously it doesn’t work well for many in the modern world (we could have a long discussion about that, too).
If these folks are covering up a psychological horrorshow they’re doing much a better job of it than most. Which could be true, of course — as you say, such things happen in “normal” families all too often.
Here’s the nub as I see it (also JHoward, I suspect — correct if wrong): if you cede to the government the right to determine whether or not you’re “married”, don’t be surprised when the government redefines “marriage” to suit itself.
Dicentra’s idea of third-party registration services might be feasible. We could use some competition in this area.
Already exists — and pre-dated at least this miserable government — in civil contracts. Just takes a functional justice system.
No, it’s a crock of shit.
dicentra are you cereal?
c’mon.
no Pablo that is just your opinion
whereas I deal in facts
and the fact is that gay marriage rulz and h8rs drulz
And the fascists love homo faux-marriage! You lose patriots! I win (what I do not know!) Suck it!
No you don’t. But I do. The fact is, you and Obama are on the same team. Ask him, he’ll tell you. Hell, if you ask nice enough, he’ll same sex marry you!
To be sure, a durable society may very well indeed require a normal tack in marriage — one man, one woman. My point is that by 2013 this is neither a durable society nor one interested in a normal marriage.
This once agreed to, then marriage as a legal structure has no more validity than a God-given negative right does, no matter where we think such things come from, how they got here, or how best to ensure them against assault or decay.
They are — all of them — the product of a force of law, the US Constitution included. They are all therefore temporary, which is why constitutions are written and agreed.
Should marriage be protected at the federal level as its traditional condition? As SBP says, if you cede to the government the right to determine whether or not you’re “married”, don’t be surprised when the government redefines “marriage” to suit itself.
Since this and not the marital status quo of a hundred years ago is the present American condition, the best way to protect marriage is to get the federal government State out of it. Or…pass an Amendment.
Wave your dick in the air like you just don’t care! OMG IS THAT KIM KARDASHIAN?!?!?! I GOTTA GO!!!!!
Or not, deviant.
hmmmph. I see some of you are bent on resisting the bandwagon effect.
I’ll check back later.
Do you actually have a dude that wants to marry you, ‘feets, or is this purely aspirational for you?
Tell it to Hitler.
Which is a fine reason to defend traditional marriage from them, JHo unhesitatingly agreed. But it’s tough without a constitutional backstop.
Observe the Second, for example. It is the final hill and here it is under full frontal assault in the middle of the day.
Maggie Gallagher is thus probably insufficient to defend the marriage hill.
oh look soledad obrien is in the house
Define “Hater”. It seems to me that you are trying to force me to accept your POV and that just makes you a bully.
Feet, Bookworm is a very sober, insightful blogger, lawyer, mother (within a traditional family), and life-long resident of Marin County, CA. You’re welcome to disagree with her, but nothing she’s written could ever be characterized as fevered.
If you don’t want to call SSM a slippery slope, how about we call it a trojan horse in the Left’s war or traditional families & religion? Here a a few choice quotes pulled from the comments over at Neo Neocon that shed some light on the purpose of getting SSM recognized:
Michelangelo Signorile, a prominent gay activist, urges people in same-sex relationships to “demand the right to marry not as a
“way of adhering to society’s moral codes but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution”. They should “fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely, because the most subversive action lesbians and gay men can undertake … is to transform the notion of ‘family’ entirely”.
Paula Ettelbrick is former legal director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and now executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. Ettelbrick stated,
“Being queer is more than setting up house, sleeping with a person of the same gender, and seeking state approval for doing so. … Being queer means pushing the parameters of sex, sexuality, and family, and in the process, transforming the very fabric of society. … We must keep our eyes on the goal …of radically reordering society’s views of reality.”
Mr. Libby surmising that food stamp is a secret kiddie diddle victim based on an analysis of his remarkably sophomoric poetry is definitely at least in the ballpark of fevered I think
Damnit. I had a long, (I think) thoughtful comment that got eaten by the aether when my internet connection dropped. The gist of it was to ask in response to comments made SBP, Pablo and JHoward, if we’re dissatisfied with the state of traditional marriage and the societal consequences of the hollowing out of the nuclear family, along with the concomittant rise of the “non-traditional” family, together with all the government apparatuses to maintain those non-trad social arrangements, does redefining marriage to include relationships never before deemed as such help to move things in the right direction, or does it merely serve to further define down deviancy?
Mr. Libby i can bring you tons of pull quotes about how hoochies have to submit to their husbands like little dogs but that’s not representative of marriage anymore than your pull quotes are
Every so often, you throw up a comment that reminds everyone why you like to babble about peanub butter, or whatever the hell it is you call it.
It’s because you really can’t play at this level.
OK, let’s return to basics. Homosexuality is deviant and is therefore unsuitable as a policy foundation.
Discuss.
what you got against islam bigot?
This is an example of what I meant when I said that we’re all legal positivists now.
hit ’em with darwin – the gayz be freaks of nature
*peabnut bubber*
This too.
homosexuals aren’t deviants they’re our kids and our brothers and sisters and our friends and our co-workers and they helped save America on 9/11 Mr. Pablo
let’s roll!
You still haven’t explained your bigotry, happy.
Jeffrey Dahmer was somebody’s son, and if he didn’t have siblings (I dunno) maybe he had cousins, or just a best friend. So blame society for making him the way he was.
Too bad about the kid in the freezer though.
Fucking idiot.
i’m not a bigot I am very tolerant I voted for like probably almost a hundred lifeydoodle anti-gay marriage people in my life
I should get a ribbon for how tolerant i am
you still have to earn your ribbon leigh, but I know you can do it
I believe in you
Mathmatically speaking, isn’t homosexuality the very definition of deviancy? Or is two to three percent of the general population not enough of a standard deviation?
I don’t know. If I was any good at math, I would have majored in engineering instead of history and political science.
Oh dear, Leigh, I apologize if my comment above came off as me calling you a H8ter – I was being sarcastic (just not very well, I guess). I don’t actually call people “haters” in real life, I’ve just have gotten so sick of having that slung in my general direction by the Dems, the media, etc. for being conservative, Christian, Republican, etc.
ask a hoochie
Mathmatically speaking, isn’t homosexuality the very definition of deviancy?
no. No it’s not.
Right in front of your eyes gay people are trying very hard to conform to the social norm of married committed relationships. What’s deviant are the people who say nonono you ones are not allowed to conform to social norms – we’re gonna throw every roadblock up against you that we can for so you can’t conform to social norms!
That’s just anti-social, is what that is.
but it looks like a fevered harangue…
..that quotes the Leftist vangard’s own words on the subject. If anyone is fevered, it’s the Left.
I have no idea why you perfectly understand the economic tyranny that the Left wishes to impose but refuse to recognize that they’re ALSO using sex, gender, and family to achieve total control over the populace.
Why would they set any limit whatsoever regarding the means to their end? When have they ever done that? Why would they NOT play on our natural American desire to be fair to increase their power over us?
I can’t escape the impression that you’re REALLY emotionally resistant to the idea that the social cons could have a POINT.
Quoth Steyn:
The sad part is that you always dismiss these lines of argumenation as “fevered” or “worrying too much” or bigoted or just plain wrong-headed.
You never present a cogent line of reasoning as to WHY it’s fevered.
That’s dumb ‘feets. It makes your opinion purely knee-jerk instead of reasoned.
Yeah, I know. Film at 11.
Oh, no Libby. I knew you were making a joke. We’re good. ; )
Happy is the one who is acting like a bully and pretending that he is better than the rest of us and therefore more righteous and not only that hipper than thou. I bet he has just oodles of friends who are devout Christians, too. I bet he also really, really secretly respects their views and only mocks their faith when he’s with his hip friends.
Thanks for linking that Bookworm piece. I like her stuff.
wow that Mark Steyn sure has my number
dicentra are you cereal?
Make the argument, ‘feets. Demonstrate that it is unlikely or impossible that FMD molested the child Obama, that he either did not have sufficient access to him or that he had such personal boundaries to avoid it.
Sexual molestation could very well have contributed to Obama’s super-hardened personality disorder.
Not going to assert that he was molested, but I can’t rule it out.
It’s the first time I’ve encountered that argument, too, but I’m not going to dismiss it out of hand because it’s so ugly or so strange or so unthinkable.
The right thinking have to think rightly in order to be well thought of.
I guess it’s a good thing for me that I never really cared what other people think.
Mr. Libby i can bring you tons of pull quotes about how hoochies have to submit to their husbands like little dogs but that’s not representative of marriage anymore than your pull quotes are
Libby’s pull quotes were to demonstrate what the Left intends to do to marriage and family and human sexuality, not to demonstrate How We Do Things Now.
MAJOR category error, ‘feets. Surely you can do better than that.
basing the molestation theory on the poetry and a dead link is kinda kooky I think di
maybe not fevered per se but not up to snuff as these things go
the social norm is 1 man + 1 woman = marriage
dicentra a couple random NY radicals do not steer the left
rich fascists like Soros and Bloomberg and et cetera have a firm firm hand on the reins now
the small fry have always had grandiose intentions
but they’re not the real players
homosexuals aren’t deviants they’re our kids and our brothers and sisters and our friends and our co-workers and they helped save America on 9/11 Mr. Pablo
The definition of “deviant” is not “someone who isn’t a kid or brother or sister or friend or co-worker or who did not help save American on 8/11.”
The definition of “deviant” is “something that deviates from the norm.”
Ergo, to insist that homosexuality is “not normal” is to defy basic math: a characteristic that only 1-3% of the population posesses is by definition a deviation from the norm.
I’d also like to point out that being left-handed is deviant. I am left-handed. With respect to handedness, I’m a deviant.
Being able to count all the toothpicks that just fell on the floor is also deviant, because almost no-one possesses this skill.
The question is whether being attracted to the same sex is harmful deviation (such as sociopathy, at one extreme) or being left-handed, which is utterly benign except when your language is LtR, in which case it is an inky mess.
So a couple of billionaires are steering the Left? I think it would take more people than that.
mr pikachu a cloward-piven on line 3
was thinking more deviation than deviant, truth be told. But in terms of social devancy, you can get back to me when you solve the biological deviancy.
And I would define anti-social as the miniscule minority expecting the overwhelming majority of society to accomadate itself to the preferences of the minority.
Especially since we’re talking about a minority of a minority.
dicentra a couple random NY radicals do not steer the left
rich fascists like Soros and Bloomberg and et cetera have a firm firm hand on the reins now
And Soros and Bloomberg have nothing to do with the random NY radicals?
Go look at the funding for the SSM advocacy groups and you’ll find Soros and Bloomberg’s fingerprints all over them.
Soros and Bloomberg want total control over society, too, and they have exactly no scruples against using the Left’s kooky/kinky proposals to do it.
Any weapon at hand.
I never considered such a question. The hollowing out of society — whether with government as an antagonist or accomplice hardly matters — cannot be reversed or even halted by redefining marriage.
To the point, defining marriage, at least to me, first involves getting government as the antagonist it is out of the home entirely. Which the banner above in part calls for.
All collective social programs, agencies, influences, reprogramming, and whatever have no place in the sovereign American citizen’s life. All of them are ultimately destructive to the individual. Not one shred of social influence by the US government as a program of change is anything but a failure.
“Homosexuality is deviant and is therefore unsuitable as a policy foundation.”
That dog won’t hunt.
I would bet just about every long-term commenter here is at least two standard deviations from the mean with respect to intelligence.
The United States was largely settled by political and religious deviants, too.
Yes. Yes it is. You could look it up.
You live in Oklahoma. Even if you thought the right thoughts, the right-thinking wouldn’t give a shit what you think.
Unless you worked at a college or university. Then you’d be a heroic modern day missionary to the benighted heathens who don’t know their own interests.
Also take a look at the Beyond Marriage (http://beyondmarriage.org/) manifesto, including the list of signatories.
Not one shred of social influence by the US government as a program of change is anything but a failure.
Help me out, here: Can you provide specific examples of LARGE societies that did not have an official or dominant religion that nevertheless sanctioned marriages that all of society recognized without the gubmint being the record-keeper in the who is married and who isn’t role?
Yup.
Until recently only governments or a major religion were capable of record-keeping on such a large scale.
That’s no longer the case.
Genius is a deviance worth following. Likes to fuck other men, not so much.
A question for a few I can think of is “which way?”
That struck me, in the sense of the biblical hardening of hearts. Also, in the unexamined life credo or in M. Scott Peck’s formulation on the pursuit of truth at any cost.
To a man, you either cave to the realization of your depravity or you continue indefinitely in your own hell of lostness. That Barry was some sort of Messiah is an indictment of the left with few intellectual peers.
leave us morons alone
If it matters, I was using your comment here as a jumping off point for the well known fact that the more government programs there are to help what were once called “broken” families and are now called “non-traditional families” the more such families are created.
All of this icky so-con stuff ties together for me, because to my mind it’s all related to the present state of society at large. And that state is a state of failure.
Bad premise, my good dicentra: Records-keeping is civil law, and in my formulation — made twice in this thread — an essential component of the “libertarian’s” skeletal system of law.
Government has virtually no competencies. Expecting it, by way of a simple, just society and a functional system of law and courts, to outlaw murder, theft, fraud, and willful damage seems a start. Naturally we’d prefer the son of a bitching piece of shit be beholden to any moron with a phone to his Rep and a whim about trains running on time and any lobby funded by the next Monsanto on the list and literally everything in between.
This isn’t a four-principle government we have. It’s a zoo of madness; a cesspool of tyranny by majority, special interest, and minority. It’s a hive of hundreds of thousands of prescriptions and proscriptions, nearly all of them arbitrary, some running to thousands of pages.
Maybe if the fucker could keep records we could see about giving it the power to try and operate meter maids. Maybe and…maybe.
See the post below yours. My disgust at each and every social government involvement knows no bounds. I could not agree with you more, and I’ve written quite a few comments about the positive feedback you describe.
including the list of signatories
They sound like a fun-loving bunch, don’t they? Yikes!
That’s kind of the point Darleen and others have been trying to make. The question then becomes, if we’re going to get Government out of the marriage business, who do we entrust it to? For example, if I form the Church of the Imitable Cole Porter and have a group ceremony where everyone chants the lyrics of Anything Goes, does that count as a polyamorous “marriage”?
Damnit, I meant Dicentra, apologies to her and Darleen (although I guess she would agree with Dicentra here).
You know, one of you ladies needs to change your handle to something else, or I’m going to start refering to you as Spinster and Grannie, respectively. [smirk]
this sounds about right
This isn’t a four-principle government we have. It’s a zoo of madness;
So what you’re saying is that THIS government (and the other festering social democracies) need to get the hell out of the way, not that there’s no legitimate function for government at all in the marriage thing.
OK, then, if a properly constrained gubmint is doing only record-keeping for marriages, does that mean that the record-keepers simply maintain whatever paperwork is handed to them, no questions asked?
If so, does that mean that as long as the paperwork is in order, it’s a legal marriage? So if two men or three women or a guy and his dog fill out the paperwork, it’s all good? The rest of us have to honor their arrangements?
If it were just the consenting adults living in their homes as they see fit, then fine. Do adoption agencies (public or private) get to refuse adoption applications from the guy and his dog?
What stops the guy and his dog from suing Catholic Charities and putting them out of business, to present a perfectly hypothetical situation?
You know, one of you ladies needs to change your handle to something else,
Yes, I know: both start with D, both have roughly the same number of letters, both of us are chicks.
No doubt I don’t keep all y’all straight, either, on the same grounds. Hell, I can’t tell the difference between two TV/movie characters if they have similar stature/hair color/hair style/ethnic background.
Look at CSI:Miami! Only the dude that dramatically sweeps off his shades is different from the rest. I haven’t the faintest idea how many male cast members they actually have.
Also, Eric Close. Eric Close looks like everyone else, and everyone looks like him.
Bad casting agencies! BAD!
i still get deniro and pacino mixed up sometimes
but that’s just cause I’m stupid
I answered that twice, once directly and once indirectly. How do you answer it?
Also, after seeing part of a rerun of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest this afternoon, I had the following thoughts:
1. There is NO way to remake that movie. Nobody but Nicholson could play McMurphy. Nobody but Louise Fletcher could be Nurse Ratched. And just TRY replacing Vincent Schiavelli, Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, or Philip Roth. Go ahead: I dare ya.
2. That particular hospital ward of crazies serves as the perfect metaphor for Liberal Fascism. Nurse Ratched is a first-class tyrant with a benign smile who held the balls of every man in that ward in her vice-like grip. (Read the novel: it’s clear that most men were there because they were emasculated by a harpy-woman. Except the Chief: he was just plain clazy.)
Everything Nurse Ratched does is the most reasonable thing, that which is most beneficial to all. She is never wrong, never loses her cool, and never cedes an ounce of control.
Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao: All tyrants of the Bad Father type. They controlled the population through punishment and fear of punishment. They were iron-fisted, miliatristic, overtly in control.
But Liberal Fascism is the Bad Mother: control of the population through guilt and dependence. The ward in the Cuckoo’s Nest is one analogy: Marie Barone in Everybody Loves Raymond is another. Ostensibly nurturing and caring, Marie Barone has every man in her life by the balls. When you please mom, you get cake; otherwise, you get none.
How do you answer it?
Your writing style sometimes confuses me (my bad, not yours). I can’t always fill in your elisions properly.
A constitutional amendment, then, which the people use to constrain the gubmint?
Yeah. Not holding my breath.
The worst people to be right in their predictions:
Mark Steyn
VDH
Glenn Beck
George Orwell
Ayn Rand
And these guys, whose declaration was issued in 1995, long before many of the issues it addresses were on the horizon.
The other problem with Kesey and the movie based on his book is that it turned the mentally ill into another noble savage that needed setting free. Like Iceman or some damn thing. And thus was the homeless problem born.
If only the attidutes of Democrat primary voters were similarly scrutinized.
But Liberal Fascism is the Bad Mother: control of the population through guilt and dependence.
Played for laughs in Bye-Bye Birdie where Dick Van Dyke was controlled by his mom…each time he’s move towards independence she’d beat her breast over how she sacrificed for him and had nothing else to live for, then fall to her knees and stick her head in the oven …
Somehow I found that a bit more chilling and not that funny.
“The question then becomes, if we’re going to get Government out of the marriage business, who do we entrust it to?”
How about the people involved, their families, and their religious leaders (if any)?
Marriage shouldn’t get you any government privileges, IMO.
Inheritance, custody of surviving minor children, etc. could be handled by a simple form that boils down to “this person is designated as the owner/custodian of everything I own/all my children should I die”. Whether that’s your spouse, a trusted relative, a good buddy, shouldn’t matter. It could grant your designee all of the rights and responsibilities that normally go to a surviving spouse by default. It’s none of the government’s (or society’s) business whether you pick that person because you’re having sex with them or just because they’re a responsible person.
Yes, you can do that with a will, but that’s a lot more expensive than standing up in front of an Elvis impersonator in Vegas.
I would like to see the legal, emotional, and religious aspects of marriage completely divorced from each other (no pun intended).
In real life you have to deal with confusing similarities of name and appearance, but there’s no excuse for it in fiction.
An SF series I read some time ago had characters named Torstensson and Thorstein. Torstensson was a real character (it was an alternate history dealie), but Thorstein was entirely fictional. It took a while to get them straight in my head.
does marriage receive any now?
SBP
And what if that form is never filled out? What default position should the government take?
“For example, if I form the Church of the Imitable Cole Porter and have a group ceremony where everyone chants the lyrics of Anything Goes, does that count as a polyamorous “marriage”?”
Why not? Similar things count as a heterosexual marriage now.
http://www.theelvisweddingchapel.com/
Valid according to all 50 states and the federal government. There are a dozen or two others listed in Google.
“And what if that form is never filled out? What default position should the government take?”
The same one they take now when someone dies intestate?
“does marriage receive any now?”
Yes. In most states your surviving spouse gets your stuff automatically, even if you don’t have a will (rules vary by state– for example, I think in some states some of your property goes to your kids, some to the spouse). They get to make medical decisions for you if you’re unconscious. They get custody of your kids without any legal bullshit.
yea legal shortcuts hardly privileges
if you look at marriage as a business whose product is the manufacture of children the legal and tax stuff all fits together. the divorce stuff is a different animal.
SBP
but that’s a bit of circular reasoning … the gov needs to have a default position of who is/isn’t “married” in order to dispense w/property or custody of kids yet somehow everyone can get married in whatever configuration.
Remember that pregnant “man”? S/He’s in the news because s/he was in AZ trying to get a divorce … judge there said, “I can’t since I don’t know if you were legally married or not.”
Some NBC news chick gushed on air that she was preggers and she & her girlfriend are looking forward to THEIR first child. Um, where there are three “parents” how is the law to untangle custody?
” the gov needs to have a default position of who is/isn’t “married” in order to dispense w/property or custody of kids yet somehow everyone can get married in whatever configuration.”
No, it isn’t.
You fill out the form -> the person who you name gets the goods and the kids.
You don’t -> your next of kin by birth gets them (or, in the case of the kids, the biological parent).
“yea legal shortcuts hardly privileges”
Spoken like someone who’s never had to make medical decisions for a loved one.
“No, it isn’t” refers to “circular reasoning”, which I meant to quote but apparently didn’t.
that’s a rather large assumption to make.
I can only conclude that libertarians are as idealistic( read: clueless) about human nature as socialists.
Two sides of the same unrealistic coin.
Even Elvis won’t marry Ted and Alice and Steve and June and Rob and Laura and Sam the Butcher and Mr. Whipple all to each other.
I respect your intellectual consistency, but I sincerely believe you won’t like the results of a marital free for all.
How about the people involved, their families, and their religious leaders (if any)?
Marriage shouldn’t get you any government privileges, IMO.
Inheritance, custody of surviving minor children, etc. could be handled by a simple form….It’s none of the government’s (or society’s) business whether you pick that person because you’re having sex with them or just because they’re a responsible person.
That’s nice. A guy agrees to marry a woman and have kids with her but then he leaves it all to his fishing buddy. Perfect.
The solution to this problem is not to “get the government out of it” or to make other arrangements or to rearrange one damn thing.
The solution is to tell them NO.
No, you can’t haz marriage, and you can sit there and throw a tantrum all you want but what you’re asking for is bad for society, including for any kids you might raise.
It’s wrong to publicly and legally obliterate the sexual component of the terms Husband and Wife or Mother and Father.
It’s dangerous to increase the incidence of donor parents–sperm or egg–to satisfy your insatiable desires at the expense of the next generation.
What they’re asking for is wrong.
The answer is NO.
gay people who want kids can and have proceeded in this venture whether they’re married or not
I don’t see why anyone would imagine there’s this huge reservoir of frustrated gay people wishing gay marriage would come to their state so they can finally have kids
Marriage shouldn’t get you any government privileges, IMO.
Damn right it should, or marriage ceases to function in a positive role in human society.
Marriage is the physical, spiritual, archetypal, social, and emotional union of the two cosmic complementarities.
It is a unique institution whose perversion perverts the rest of society. Perversions include some of the things the West has done, such as regard the women as the property of the husband.
Entering into marriage with someone of the opposite sex is one of the keys to becoming fully mature. Even a gay man who marries a woman will have to grow the hell up in ways that “marrying” a man will not, because women always make different demands on men than other men do—even the men they’re screwing.
The type of growing up that marriage demands of people is the type that is needed to resist the totalitarian temptation, if for no other reason that marriages raises stabler, happier children, who are not inclined to turn their lives over to the state in the hopes that it will fill the Big Empty.
If society fails to privilege male/female unions over all of the other kinds of relationships, including by giving it legal sanction and legal privilege, then marriage becomes meaningless relative to the rest of society.
Marriage is not a private matter; it is a social matter. It needs to be upheld and celebrated and legally sanctioned and taken extremely seriously, or it loses its ability to bless both the individual and society.
Again, the solution is just to say NO. No conditions, no alterations, no “civil unions” (but continue to draw up contracts for inheritance and medical decisions and whatnot, because the “civil union” is a Trojan Horse for SSM, and if we let that camel’s nose under the tent, it’s over).
No, no, and no.
gay people who want kids can and have proceeded in this venture whether they’re married or not
So have straight people. The results have been glorious.
“that’s a rather large assumption to make.”
If you had, you wouldn’t be trivializing the right to make those decisions on the spot as “hardly privileges”.
“A guy agrees to marry a woman and have kids with her but then he leaves it all to his fishing buddy.”
Presumably you wouldn’t marry anyone who did that. I wouldn’t. Why would anyone else?
“Marriage is the physical, spiritual, archetypal, social, and emotional union of the two cosmic complementarities.”
You can have any spiritual union you want. There’s no reason it has to be conflated with the legal aspects.
“Marriage is the physical, spiritual, archetypal, social, and emotional union of the two cosmic complementarities.”
Marriage can be all of that or none of it. It’s closer to none in most cases. I was lucky.
“Even Elvis won’t marry Ted and Alice and Steve and June and Rob and Laura and Sam the Butcher and Mr. Whipple all to each other.”
Wanna bet? My money says you can find one of those Elvis dudes will perform any ceremony you ask for, no matter who or how many. The State of Nevada won’t recognize it, but that’s a separate issue.
If we’re talking about Vegas, it’s probably worth mentioning that you can show up drunk and show your tits to Elvis but the actual aspect that’s binding is a marriage license.
You show up in person, sober. You have to be 18 or have parental consent. Have to be a man and a woman. Can’t be first cousins. Etc.
Vegas is a bit like going to a Justice of the Peace for the official act and then hiring entertainment at the party afterwards. In short, it’s about the same as anywhere else. They just became popular amongst the destination wedding folks because their specific laboratory of democracy moved the paperwork quicker and didn’t require a blood test.
“Marriage is the physical, spiritual, archetypal, social, and emotional union of the two cosmic complementarities.”
Marriage can be all of that or none of it. It’s closer to none in most cases. I was lucky.
That’s what Marriage is in general. That’s it’s function in human society. Even a marriage between two sociopaths is the physical, archetypal, and social union of the two cosmic complementarities.
You can have any spiritual union you want. There’s no reason it has to be conflated with the legal aspects.
Yes, there is a reason: it’s called social legitimacy.
Which. Marriage. Needs. To. Be. Beneficial. To. Society.
Your understanding of Marriage (NOT YOURS IN PARTICULAR) and society is so close to our degraded Hollywood/secular depiction of it that I despair.
“Get the government out of it” is NOT always the right answer. In this case it is not the right answer. Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s the right answer, but in this ONE FREAKING CASE it is not.
I’m tired and I’m going all caps. Time to log off.
I do think it’s worth noting the degradation of marriage and all the related aspects (out-of-wedlock births, serial marriages, terrible divorce laws and child custody issues, and a million other things I’m not mentioning).
I don’t think that doing something wrong on one hand is adequate justification for doing something else on the other though. Don’t see the logical connection.
Sure marriage has been abused and trashed. Not much follows from that as far as I can tell other than trying to identify when this began and rectifying the situation.
Certainly the long history of civil magistrates granting marriage licenses hasn’t caused these problems, they predate our nation. Specific things happened. We should address them.
No-fault divorce. This notion that men are inherently suspect for custody. A general acceptance of single adults trying to do what even two adults struggle with. And on and on.
Very specific things happened. (Including stuff involving Reagan, I guess, from Pablo’s comments.)
Okay, we’ll take it up another time. Or maybe just let it ride.
I’m still stinging about about newrouter’s characterization of marital rights as a mere “legal shortcut”, though.
I’m pretty sure there’s at least one person who is happy that I could deal with such things in a timely manner, though, given that she now has a rather important organ that’s in working order (at least I hope that’s the case; I was just given general information, not her actual identity).
bh: in the state where I got married, the church panoply was all part of the show, too (at least in the eyes of the state). What made us “married” was our signatures on the marriage certificate (a separate deal from the license in that jurisdicition).
There were an awful lot of English people married by the blacksmith in Gretna Green, Scotland back in the old day. Under Scottish law, you only had to be 14 (male) and 12 (female) years of age, and any citizen could perform and witness the marriage. The blacksmith just happened to have the first shop over the border.
Learning of this organ donation puts a smile on my face, SBP. That has to be a nice thing to have as part of the memory.
Towards the thread as a whole, I really do appreciate it when folks state their case in a friendly manner and you do so consistently. Cheers for that. It’s a Good and a Virtue as those English people might write after getting married by the blacksmith.
Reagan was the governor who signed the first no-fault divorce legislation into law bh.
What you’re calling “lucky” people used to call typical. You were lucky because there was still cultural capital for you and your wife to draw upon. The account is about drawn down. I worry that my kids, when they grow up, will have a much harder time getting lucky.
If we want to replenish our stores, we can’t shrug our shoulders at those who would redefine an immemorial institution for their own ends, hope for the best, and trust that others will get as lucky as we’ve been.
And SBP, I don’t think it was luck. I think you and your wife made your own luck, and that it was damn hard work sometimes. I’m genuinely sorry for loss.
Thanks, Ernst.
Reagan was the governor who signed the first no-fault divorce legislation into law bh.
True, Reagan drew on his own experience … he and his first wife agreed to divorce; no shouting, no affairs … nothing but mutual respect and an understanding that their marriage was over.
But the state wouldn’t let them divorce without one being the victim of the other. Reagan allowed himself to be named as being “cruel” to his wife.
It was all an adversarial kabuki theater rather than allowing simple divorce by mutual consent.
Years after it was passed, Reagan told his son Michael it was his greatest regret.
What stops them now? Nothing.
How about because The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name has become The Love That Won’t Shut Up?
That’s rich.
In America, Social Security has been robbed by politicians and government of an amount that equals the entire national debt. Medicare is upside down nearly one hundred trillion dollars. We owe for the prescription drug component alone another $20T. Medicine is being used to funnel us into 100% dependency and control.
Our government will soon play a part in our termination. It already decides nearly everything else.
Our federalized government school system coupled to a media engine and a national academy of sheer unmitigated bullshit propped up in an artificial bubble is churning out intellectual soylent green. Society has been indoctrinated to believe in a two party system, in representative government, in the institution of valid capitalism, and in real political choice as an alternative to, you know, a little too much debt and an unfortunately Democrat president but generally all around good man.
Our entire engine of commerce has been swamped to the gunnels and turned over to a global elite who together with their cronies in banking and other powerful corporations, are literally farming us. Our system of money is completely out of our control and is managed literally on a daily basis by masters by their policies and declarations. Each day it and they involve other currencies, other nations, other banks, and other peoples via central, directed, un-represented, policy.
Nearly our entire lives are steered for us. There is not one freedom we enjoy today that’s actually, objectively, verifiably unencumbered to the degree it can pass the dictionary test of liberty as it pertains to the original American structure. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the home. We do get that, don’t we?
For all intents and purposes we’re the USSA.
But, you know, libertarians don’t get human nature and marriage is an intact, conservative institution we need that same government to ensure from harm and encroachment.
That is rich.
I asked how you would pull this off, given our predicament. You suggested an Amendment, which I agree with. I just agree with it conditionally because I once thought the Constitution protected against John Roberts, or the Second — together with Heller and McDonald and others — protected against gun control.
In reply to this
you say
You are absolutely mistaken except for in the most fanciful abstract: In “two cosmic complementarities”, which is absolutely correct … and completely and utterly lost on your government, that being their entire point.
Your government is virtually your sworn enemy. It has ruined marriage, is has ruined the family, and it has sworn itself to begin to see to policies the aim of which is to tell you what you may speak, what you may do, what benefits of its you shall receive, how your race, creed, sex, and orientation shall impact your benefits package, and even when you shall pass away.
And this government shall impart privilege to your marriage because this government realizes that it is a God-given status and state? We should realize that the reason every Tom, Dick, and Harry wants in on the American Marriage Game is precisely because it has already been rendered such.
This is the religion of state, dicentra, and I know you of all people grasp that thoroughly.
Which is why your government hates it, wishes to alter it irredeemably — if it has not already, which I say it has to the point of abject fraud on all that is right, proper, just, and holy — and shall never, ever see to privileging you in it!
Why in the name of God we insist that this institution of sheer godlessness stop only at the point of observing the core of joint human sanctity where it may rarely exist between two people in a traditional and formerly holy union completely escapes me. Idealizing the nature of marriage does not produce a climate, a legal architecture, a mindset, a proper function, or a beneficial end result such an ideal as lofty as it must have to survive as such.
Yes, you must fight. But no, you shall not ever prevail and especially you shall not prevail in making your point to it. I am deeply sorry.
Your government despises you and your thinking. It shall not honor your ideals and it has shown you this time and again. Your insisting it shall in any practical, functional matter speaks to water already under that bridge.
Maybe it bears repeating:
Three paragraphs from the wiki:
Now let’s try that with a slight revision, substituting “progressivism” for each instance of religion and making some small edits:
Uncanny, isn’t it? It appears that just as religion is collective, Progressivism is religious, including the mind and spirit.
The organization is an inherently doubtful and dubious proposition. Segmenting and isolation short circuit what may have been rich, rounded, responsible individual human experience, accountability, and responsibility, and an unnaturally divided environment isolated from reality by design, in effect, induces an inevitable corruption of soul.
Previously Emile Cammaerts had observed that “the first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything”. Adding that Nihilism to an organization invariably has it opposing the relentless, individual pursuit of the Absolute as the key to mind, and from mind the fullness that switches on the soul. The opposite of enlightenment is the stultifying, collective human Hive … which seems to have found its contemporary argument, advocacy, and benefactory in, among other places, Progressivism.
Belief in the sacredness of Cammaert’s Anything remodeled by Progressivism is what best enables the hivemind inside the unhealthy collective organization. Read: central government.
If anyone can assert anything, then what stands between the “progressive” New Reality that is the inevitable, first effect of insisting that truth is subjective and therefore that anything goes, including to fashion the religious system that progressivism evidently is? Aside from waning traditional values tried by a corrupted society and found wanting, nothing much that I can see. Its path is free and clear.
There is a supreme irony to the Progressive movement’s long slow march through the Enlightenment’s institutions in order to assert that its own postmodern intellectual Nihilism is legitimate as an article of faith. After all how reliable is a platform that absolutely insists that there are no absolutes, and that enforces that obvious blunder in an increasingly unavoidable, intellectually-protected collective structure?
In the historical context the rebranded collectivism that is Progressivism is an endlessly variable and therefore renewable faith in a presumed but never acquired prosperity, faithfully cultivated and recultivated in the sterile soil of the political State. It has no intellectual checks and balances because it does not value objectivity.
Progressivism thereby gets to its own god with just a short hop. Like they’ve always been, the warm, syrupy confines of heaven on Earth are eternally but faithfully just out of reach.
I don’t have time to read all this this morning, so:
Happy Easter, y’all!
You know, the other day I was remarking to myself that I needed yet another article of evidence that Libertarianism is an act of public political masturbation.
Neither can the as-yet-unborn babies that a marriage can produce, who are by definition too young to consent to their parents’ marriage. This is what makes marriage not just a contract between consenting adults; it is between them and their children, too. Protecting the interest of those children is the only reason why government has a legitimate say in marriage at all. Otherwise, it could be an entirely private matter.
Someone has never been to a shopping mall.
Y’know what’s wrong with this place?
“Right wing echo chamber”
My point was (as I mentioned the coin thing) while socialists err in believing there is nothing government should not be involved in, Libertarians err in believing there is nothing government should be involved in. Both fail in practice because they fail to appreciate the fallen nature of man.
Both ideologies end in the same place if followed to their conclusion. Strong man rule over subjects.
Shorter thread: we, as a society, are well and truly and irredeemably fucked.
The only observation I can make is that, when it all collapses, we’ll very quickly be back to very basic human relations.
for the pikachu
link
link
***
Mary wished to say something sensible, but knew not how.
“While Mary is adjusting her ideas,” he continued, “let us return to Mr. Bingley.”
***
The “learned behavior” types who think man is a “blank slate” at birth and all behavior is cultural are already striking back in the NY Times. In their view, differences in mating behavior between males and females are all learned from cultural “norms.”
There are all sorts of idiots that never knew of the tragedy of David Reimer.
Right. There’re all riding with the Hells Angels.
“Libertarians err in believing there is nothing government should be involved in.”
Libertarian and anarchist are not synonyms.
“Someone has never been to a shopping mall.”
Contracts made by minors are voidable. Yes, even the ones made at shopping malls.
By the same token, Mill’s “one very simple principle” is not at all simple in practice.
Q. Is legislation or regulation with respect to marriage among the EXPLICITLY ENUMERATED powers of the federal government under the Constitution?
A. No, it is not.
Therefore: the federal government is not permitted to legislate or regulate in this area.
It doesn’t matter whether I (or anyone else) thinks that this would produce desirable social outcomes. That type of thinking is EXACTLY why we’re in the fix we’re in today.
I’m not sure why this is a difficult concept.
To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization
Both irrelevant and misleading. Among the enumerated powers of the federal government is to make rules for the government and establish uniform rules of naturalization. States remain unaffected by the way the federal government, by way of a duly passed law, defines marriage for purposes of granting either tax relief or benefits, or restricting social security benefits, insurance benefits for federal employees, etc. And therein seems to lie your concern. But that the sixteenth amendment and FDR came later and fucked everything up doesn’t negate the prior enumerated power.
I should also note, again, that DOMA protects Full Faith and Credit. Which has been settled law since the 1930s.
And finally, I’ll note that it doesn’t help the prospect of liberty when libertarians seek to find ways around process. If the Congress votes to overturn DOMA, that’s fine. If states vote to recognize ssm within that state, that’s also fine. Which makes legal attacks on Prop 8 especially obnoxious and pernicious: SSM advocates embrace state’s rights when NY or some other eastern state recognizes SSM. But when the voters of California reject it? They have no right to do so. Heads they win, tails you lose.
The courts have repeatedly upheld section 2 of DOMA, whereby the states aren’t forced under Full Faith and Credit to recognize same-sex unions from other states. Part and parcel of a federalist system, so long as no civil right is being violated, which it clearly isn’t. Of course, this protection all goes away if we’re told by federal courts that states don’t have the right to define marriage within that state. THAT would be an example of why we are where we are.
Seeing challenges to section 2 fall, the next legal challenge has been to go after Sec 3, wherein Congress voted to put into law for its own purposes what had been the law of the land since, well, the time of laws. Namely, that marriage was between men and women.
SCOTUS ruled against polygamy — which upheld the man/woman dynamic, simply increasing it. That case is essentially overturned if DOMA is overturned by the Courts, rather left up to the political process. Maybe not immediately, but bank on it. I’ve been saying this for years: the desire to expand the label of marriage is a desire to destroy the institution of marriage. This has nothing to do with equal rights or equal protection. I don’t give a fuck if a committed homosexual couple wants to join together for life. In fact, I applaud it. I object with calling it marriage for strictly legal reasons. Namely, the logical necessity of what follows should the COURT allow that marriage cannot be defined by the political process.
“Both irrelevant and misleading. Among the enumerated powers of the federal government is to make rules for the government and establish uniform rules of naturalization.”
I don’t recall any cases dealing with naturalization per se, though I might be wrong there. If there are any, then yes, the federal government has power in that area.
“SCOTUS ruled against polygamy.”
Wrongly, IMO.
To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States
The 16th Amendment grants the federal government the right to levy an income tax.
It does not grant the federal government the right to discriminate among taxpayers based on marital status.
“To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States”
That covers DC law, yes.
I am about 99.5% certain that if someone had suggested that the federal government be given the power to regulate marriage at the Constitutional Convention, that person would have been laughed at and/or shouted down.
Note that you aren’t allowed, in general, to practice law or medicine in another state unless you qualify under that state’s rules, “full faith and credit” or not.
But what if it had been suggested at the Convention that the Federal Government sould be utterly unresponsive to the demands of the States and the sovereign people of the States (and Federal Government) that the Federal government acknowledge and set down the forms and orders of marriage as understood by those sovereign peoples? Wouldn’t the delegates have thought it equally absurd that the government should not listen to those whom it serves?
*should be*, apologies
but discriminating based on income is ok?
There was a couple married in Canada who sought rights in WA. They were denied. The denial was upheld by the courts.
In fact, there have been many other cases. The left and SSM supporters have learned to get around such court rulings as they don like with “humanitarian parole”. Brought to you by Kerry and Janet Napolitano.
There are currently a number of cases pending that are based on section 3 of DOMA. If the court rules that equal protection must be granted, and that the federal government cannot define marriage for, say, other countries, we’ll have then overturned an enumerated power over naturalization.
For liberty!
Perhaps so, perhaps not. It’s a tautological question: if you don’t believe the Congress has the power to pass laws defining marriage, then you’d necessarily agree that they were acting unconstitutionally when they passed laws against plural marriage. It bears noting that that power was upheld unanimously by The Waite Court in Reynolds.
Without this ruling, I’m hard-pressed to think (at the moment, offhand) how sharia law in Muslim communities could be denied in the US under the first amendment. But maybe that’s also wrong, infringing as it does on the absolute liberty of Islamists to engage in religious practices built on a denial of liberty.
You won’t get an argument from me that the entire tax code is an abomination, but it is what it is. That we have a progressive income tax system at all is discriminatory.
Do away with that and problem solved.
It seems to me a bit of verbal sleight of hand has gone on in terms of how the debate has been framed. Supporters of same sex marriage pretend that the definition of marriage was arrived at positively i.e. –government (local, state, federal, doesn’t matter) sat down one day in the past and said marriage is X. They do this so as to argue that if government decided what marriage was before, it can decide something different, by fiat, now. Thus they would have government say marriage is X and/or Y, and assert that we should accept it. Or, if not accept it, acquiesce to it because, as SBP argued:
and it’s our own fault we don’t like it. (As an aside, this is pretty much the same guilt-tripping kind of argument that those who would hold up the messy state of modern heterosexual marriage as a rebuke to defenders of marriage traditionally understood make.)
The argument then shouldn’t be about what government can or can’t do, but about what Marriage IS.
Di probably already said something like that though. So, carry on.
I agree. Because there was no such thing as “same-sex marriage.”
The better scenario to consider is what would they have done if they’d have foreseen a desire for plural marriage or homosexual marriage — given that marriage was well established and defined in English Common Law dating back to King James. Would they have allowed the practice, provided it was not considered marriage? I mean, they were aware of homosexuality, certainly.
It’s worth noting that it was Jefferson who in a letter spoke of the distinction between religious beliefs and religious actions. To the latter, he allowed that “the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions” — which influenced the Court in Reynolds. That ruling — which you believe was wrong — is the ruling that determined that “to permit [certain religious action on a first amendment basis, in a hypothetical, human sacrifice] would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”
Again, you may believe that to be wrong; me, I’d disagree and say it’s both prudent and correct.
adopting the historical definition of marriage is not “regulating” it.
for example the fed gov’t adopting the metric system as the unit of measure is not “regulating” it.
i remember back when marriage was just between a man and a woman
And when politics was the sport of aristocrats, not snowbillies or uppity Negroes.
Because STAUNCH!
just sayin
I still remember it as being that way now, no matter what the courts decide.
A bit of expansion on Mill’s “One very simple principle”, from Roger Kimball.
and a “?” for a commonplace wtf.
Erick Ericksson make an uncharacteristic amount of sense on the topic: You Will Be Made to Care
Because of course you will.
Geez, who could have seen that relationship going sideways?
That there is worth a read regardless of one’s take on this particular issue.
May as well link it again.
I’ve said my piece on this.
Just don’t be upset when a later Congress decides to redefine “marriage” so that you have to have a same-sex partner to get any benefits, affirmative action style.
You read it here first.
So me and a buddy will “marry” and split the benefits with our real families.
Bonus: if we ever rob a place or whatnot and are caught, we don’t have to testify against each other!
Good Kimball piece. I usually attribute the modern liberal impulse to Rousseau, but I’ll now be more aware of Mill, who I know, but not in the way I know Rousseau, which is to say, easy to sum up simply by pointing to the prevailing notion of the noble savage, the inherent goodness and morality of the downtrodden. The hooker with a heart of gold. Klute. Jane Fonda, Barbara Streisand.
Mill takes more time.
Then you and your buddy will get to go through the same type of intensive grilling that gets visited on (say) an American PhD student who marries an international PhD student — to make sure that it’s not a “sham” marriage or some such horseshit.
It’s pretty intensive, because (naturally) we absolutely must prevent foreigners with engineering PhDs from living here. Meanwhile we give driver’s licenses to illegal aliens.
I never went through that, but have a number of friends who did.
I could be wrong here, but I don’t think so. If there’s a single instance of Congress grabbing a new legislative power that didn’t go wrong, it’s not coming to mind.
Just how intense will that “intensive grilling ” be? ‘Cause I have some chorizo-tico in the fridge that could use an “intensive grilling “.
This “intensive grilling ” will be brought to us by that leaner, meaner Libertarian government you keep referring too, I presume?
“i remember back when marriage was just between a man and a woman”
How was back in the good old days?
“This “intensive grilling ” will be brought to us by that leaner, meaner Libertarian government you keep referring too, I presume?”
No. It’ll be brought to you by the power-grabbing federal government that you support.
The leaner, meaner “Libertarian” federal government (that is, the ONE ACTUALLY AUTHORIZED BY THE CONSTITUTION) doesn’t have any regulatory power with respect to marriage. Thus, no intensive grilling nor any need for such.
Reading comprehension: look into it.
cranky-d nails it. No matter what our very-short-term ‘courts’ decide (this Republic can’t last forever, and likely we are in the waning moments thereof) Traditional Marriage will outlast it.
Because we have not only thousands of years of moral (read: God-given, if you are so inclined) tradition, but also the power of nullification. We can just speak of ‘traditional marriage’, and that shall forever be understood by all.
I’m fascinated by your icon, Darleen. As I interpret it, we have a child at the crux of (perhaps ?) a Christian cross; the two crossed elements being a man and a woman, the cross ( ? ) being the strength and true purpose of a Traditional Marriage.
The crux of the biscuit is the child; the child being what marriage is all about, really, no matter what niceties contract law bestows on couples via short-lived governments and their contracts.
The colors, though; what’s their significance?
link
Another argument that speaks of the long American cultural history of Traditional Marriage, and the dangers of tampering with…
Men on men, women on women; we can (and should) give them the contractual forms that allow them to bind together legally. But to turn over the importance that is (should be, once was, but isn’t today) given the structure and pupose of Marriage? No. I was married for 26 years; I’m one of the few who can say I kept my oath (’till death do us part). The meaning of that word and it’s purpose acquires so much more significance after all is said and done.
‘Traditional Marriage’ is the rock we can cling to; that shall always mean more than Leftists’ redefined words and besickening activities.
The red comes from the @HRC avatar. They say it represents love. The pink and the blue are clearly the male and the female.
Ahhh, thanks, Pablo. Yes, that’s a powerful countering icon. Because, children can’t be naturally born of same-sex marriages. Fundamental, that.
One of my brother’s FB friends had one of those icons that had a pair of Ampeg amps in place of the pink bars.
Which, I’m not sure what it was trying to say, but I thought it was funny anyway.
Indeed. While the “equality” symbol has two like things running in parallel, Darleen’s illustrates the intersection of two different things, and the fact that that intersection adds to humanity.
It’s very clever, perhaps even more so than intended.
donkeys included
Next symbol: the asterisk.
Have I mentioned how much trouble I got into when my lovely bride switched her FB avatar, and I commented on happy I was to live in a society where the supreme law of the land is based not on our founding documents, but rather upon social media trends?
The conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader.
“SCOTUS ruled against polygamy.”
Wrongly, IMO.
As the descendant of polygamists, I happen to agree with SCOTUS.
It’s one thing for the members of a covenant church–isolated off in the wilderness–to practice polygamy all by themselves. The practice was not predicated on lustful men taking advantage of the wimmens (though there were many accusations on that wise), it was about making sure that women were taken care of and that population increase could be maximized. Church leaders assisted in who got assigned to whom, and first wives had veto power over whether polygamy would be practiced at all, and also who would be added. Usually, only plural wives were permitted to petition for divorce: the men were expected to just deal with it.
If the general population were to adopt polygamy, God help us all, and I mean that literally. Our culture has such a degraded understanding of human sexuality and sexual relationships that polygamy (and polyamory) would result in Yet Another Slow-Motion Sociological Train Wreck, only magnified, because each unit that imploded would hurt a lot more people.
Given our luck with rolling back disastrous social policy or practice, I’m gonna say we need to back away from this one.
I agree. Because there was no such thing as “same-sex marriage.”
In 1789, the idea of SSM was as ludicrous and far-fetched as the obliteration of all gender identification: no “he or she, just they.”
Last time I checked, the absurdity of a proposition never stopped it from eventually being accepted. In fact, where the Left is involved, they insist on proposing absurd things—gradually sliding the Overton Window their way—until all there’s left is the SCOTUS decision, which they always end up winning by hook or by crook.
“As the descendant of polygamists, I happen to agree with SCOTUS.”
That’s certainly your right, but I’m not sure what ancestry has to do with it. Very likely all of us are descended from polygamists (formal or informal). Also slaves, slave-owners, murderers, murder victims, pirates, religious fanatics… I grant that you likely have more in-depth knowledge of polygamy as practiced by the early Mormon church, but I’m talking general cases here, not specific (I do know a little bit about it — I read the Arrington book many years ago and still have it on my shelves. I believe it is a well-regarded source, but if that’s wrong, tell me of a better one).
“Given our luck with rolling back disastrous social policy or practice”
That is precisely why I’m opposed to the federal government (the FEDERAL government) grabbing the power to codify marriage in any respect. Such powers, once granted, are never rolled back. That is how it ALWAYS proceeds. “Wouldn’t it be nice if the federal government had the power to (fix this thing I don’t like)?” Twenty years later, you’re wondering why DC is now micro-managing your life.
It doesn’t even have to go as far as the mandatory same-sex marriage I suggested above. What happens when Uncle Sugar decides that marriages performed by a particular church are no longer valid? Because, racism, sexism, whateverother-ism.
… was as ludicrous and far-fetched as the obliteration of all gender identification: no “he or she, just they.”
That affectation in writing drives me up the wall. One cannot write about an individual (in the abstract) without the he/she usage, either as I have written it or switching between she in one paragraph to he in the next. I have thrown caution to the wind and just use “he” and “his” as I was taught back in the Bronze Age when we were still using APA style prior to the MLA Nazis getting their claws into the English and Liberal Arts departments.
OT: What’s the over and under on the Left getting outraged about Obama’s pastor railing against traditional religious beliefs in his Easter homily, a la the outrage over Dr. Ben Carson’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast? My money is on “none”.
“when we were still using APA style prior to the MLA Nazis getting their claws into the English and Liberal Arts departments.”
APA style has gone batshit in recent years. Actually, almost all of the style guides have. They keep building ever-more elaborate ziggurats of rules about whether (e.g.) a particular comma should be in Italic or Roman font, even though the reasons why most of those rules were created in the first place largely no longer exist.
They should working on innovative citation methods, but they aren’t. We need semantic markup (“this is the author of the cited work”) not presentation-level markup (“you can tell that this is the author because it’s in this font”). Work is proceeding in that respect, but largely independent of the style guide people. They’ve built a fiefdom and by God they’re going to defend it.
I’m glad I’m not in academia any more.
Any rule-making body, from academic style guide committees, through homeowner’s associations, all the way up to the national legislature, begins as an effort to make rules to smooth the operation of the entity in question. Invariably, though, these bodies get captured by those who make Rules because they like to make Rules, and become a positive hindrance to said operation.
Eventually you have to scrap the whole thing and start from scratch.
I used to carp about Chicago style, (now relegated to the History departments, it seems) but, they are the sane ones out of the bunch, pain though it may be. Footnoting every page? Oy, when one had only an electric typewriter back in the day. At least you didn’t have to figure out which of the appendices the reference was in since it was right there at the bottom of the page.
Speaking of annoyances in styles, when did elaborate dedications become the norm? It used to be “To my beloved spouse, to whom I owe all things” or something along those lines. Now, it’s absolute pages and pages, down to the copyboy and office assistants. Gad!
Turabian wasn’t too insane the last time I looked at it, but that’s been a while.
References should be hyperlinks, either a direct link to an online copy of the cited work (best) or an ISSN/ISBN lookup service that lets you find the work from multiple sources (Amazon, multiple library lookup service like WorldCat, etc.).
You all do know about WorldCat, right? It’s awesome.
http://www.worldcat.org/
Nice!
Amen, brother. Haven’t looked at a style guide in years.
One of the perks of being an intentionalist is that I’m my own style guide, so long as I’m convinced you are understanding me clearly.
MLA Nazis, as SBP calls them, is all about senseless rule-making. It’s power wielded by people who otherwise don’t have much.
The book of MLA rules is poorly written. You wouldn’t think that anyone concerned with precise composition would come up with such a monstrosity, but I think the fact is that it’s a manual written by many, many people whose opinions don’t always dovetail neatly with each other, and who haven’t bothered to consult each other on what’s already been covered. As a result you get not a concise set of rules, but a hodgepodge of special cases, which you will be graded mercilessly against.
Fortunately my daughter’s community college has included a MLA wizard application in their list of links, so if she gets it wrong, all she has to do is tell them that their own app got it wrong for her. But that doesn’t always pan out.
Around my workplace we call that kind of thing empire-building. It fits.
You’re very clear. Even in the sentographs, which we need more of, by the way.
All of that MLA nonsense is just so foot/endnotes will be more consistent.
But it’s all-important, evidently.
It was me who call MLA Nazis.
MLA is a pos. I hate it. I hated learning it, since that was impossible what with all their revisions and updates which were designed to make you buy another style guide.
I’m glad for your daughter that there’s an app for that now.
Everybody should have a copy of the Orange Brick.
You never know when you’ll need a paperweight, step stool, wheel chock, doorstop, book prop.
You might even open it up once in a great while!
Also, footnotes are a convenience for the reader, endnotes are a convenience for the typesetter, parenthetical notes are no convenience at all.
You might even open it up once in a great while!
Heh. Not since 1979 or so.
but I’m not sure what ancestry has to do with it.
Why don’t you know? My polig ancestors were my great-great-grandparents. Just two “greats.” They were alive in the 20th century.
And they lived in the United States.
Very likely all of us are descended from polygamists
Your polygamist ancestors didn’t have to flee the United States to avoid being thrown in jail, nor were your polygamist ancestors denied the right to vote in the United States, nor were their children scooped up off the streets and forced to rat out their parents.
It feels like you’re being deliberately obtuse. What gives?
“The book of MLA rules is poorly written. ”
The last revision of the APA manual wasn’t even consistent with itself. They had to issue a lengthy set of errata and reedit the whole thing. I don’t know if that succeeded; it might well be impossible to create a work of any length that’s fully consistent. It’s freakin’ bizarre, is what it is.
“Your polygamist ancestors didn’t have to flee the United States to avoid being thrown in jail, nor were your polygamist ancestors denied the right to vote in the United States, nor were their children scooped up off the streets and forced to rat out their parents.”
All of which were consequences of allowing government to regulate marriage. Which is, you know, my whole point.
It can happen again. It won’t matter if you’re a polygamist — just belonging to a church with sufficiently “hatey” views could be enough to have your marriage declared null and void, perhaps criminal.
You don’t think so? Look at how Obamacare is playing out with the Catholic hospitals.
“It feels like you’re being deliberately obtuse. What gives?”
Sorry, I meant to address this.
No, I’m not being deliberately obtuse, and I’m sorry if I’m not making my point clearly enough.
1) The Constitution does not give the federal government any explicit authority to regulate marriage (except perhaps peripherally — naturalization rules and DC law have been mentioned).
2) Allowing the federal government to do ANYTHING that isn’t in the Constitution (even for the best of motives) has historically proven to be a mistake, EVERY SINGLE TIME.
3) Therefore, the DOMA is a bad idea, and likely unconstitutional.
It’s a plausible enough case of delimitation you make, SBP.
But it seems to me the problem on its face necessitates a minute examination of the antecedents, procedures, manners, speech, customs, carriage, habits, mores, (and so much beyond these) as to the life of the Founders and Framers and their fellows, the peoples they served, the peoples they would expect to be served in their own future, in order to make their republican intentions intelligible to us regarding the forms they set down as the architecture of the nation’s government.
And most especially so, given both the distance in time in combination with the absorption of intervening change in our own ways of thinking, change interfering in the extreme with our grasp of their world, to say nothing of our habitual choice to force on them the political categories of our own time (about which I endlessly complain) — force, that is, often unconsciously so little do we examine our own antecedents (sociology! culture! values! life-style! blahblahblah).
Take bigamy, for instance. Laws were long in place by the time of the Founding outlawing bigamy (the effects of which we might estimate to have been long since found to be an evil among the people who encountered and lived through incidents of bigamy, evils instigating in those people suffering them a demand requiring justice on such questions) and that brute fact meant the development — presumably, over a long span of time — of rules of order and proprieties intended to attain such justice.
Yet it’s difficult — if not impossible — to imagine a regime of justice which can operate without bothering to define what it is that regime of justice is operating on. And here, it seems to me, the Founders wouldn’t be the least troubled that in the administration of justice — one of the more central objects of government after all — one would have to have defined for government and for those whom government serves, just what these things, categories, entities on the order of “marriage”, precisely are.
There’s also Son of Citation Machine on the web: http://citationmachine.net/index2.php
sdferr: I see your point, but I’m not sure that the Framers would have agreed that this was a legitimate FEDERAL function. I’m fine with states making whatever laws they want in this area as long as I’m free to move to another state if I don’t like their laws.
Thomas “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” Jefferson would almost certainly have had a problem with it.
I don’t mean to drive the point in the interests of the Federal government, although we can easily see that some questions at law require rising through the appeals process up to the level of Federal Courts, but I do mean to drive us to examine the nitty-gritty republican operations of men and women, fleshy bloody sorts all, who conduct the works.
Thinking about what I’m getting at, and have been getting at since that first comment up there — ’cause it’s pretty clear t’ me that I don’t know what I’m getting at in the fullest sense, on account of what I’m getting at is so farking vast, in minor part, and I’m so farking inadequate, in major part — I come to this: that what goes on in this thread itself, in the fleshy truth, is politics, and in particular republican politics — people arguing in good faith over uncertain matters, which matters are of the utmost importance to the people doing the arguing — and that the meaning of the republican intentions I posed in that first comment are, at least for me, the first questions to be answered, only after which can republican resolutions drawn from the particular arguments over the particular questions like “what is marriage?” and “what role should government play in determining what is marriage?” be answered in a republican manner and be implemented in a legitimate republican government.
Or something along those lines.
It can happen again. It won’t matter if you’re a polygamist — just belonging to a church with sufficiently “hatey” views could be enough to have your marriage declared null and void, perhaps criminal.
Um, you just summed up all of LDS history until Utah statehood.
We had our First-Amendment rights blatantly violated over and over even before we started in with the polygamy.
In the 19th century, when there was no concept of “hate crime” or even “blasphemy.” There were no stupid SCOTUS rulings to screw up stare decisis or the ACLU or the Anti-Defamation league or any of the insane gubmint overreach we deal with today.
So it doesn’t really matter what’s on the paper unless people in charge have the integrity to respect the boundaries.
You can DOMA or un-DOMA all you want: they’ll run roughshod over us either way.
So might as well tell the lot of them to step off, right here, right now.
Thomas “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” Jefferson would almost certainly have had a problem with it.
What about if “it” encourages your daughters to dress and behave like sluts?
What if “it” uses lawfare to drive creches and crosses off public property, regardless of the intent of the symbols?
What if “it” poisons the lexicon in its typical Orwellian fashion?
None of them pick your pocket or break your leg. But they do ruin the Republic.
Sorry, Mr. Jefferson. You had no idea.
Thomas’s world was much larger than ours.
“Reading comprehension: look into it.”
Hah! That’s fat.
Hey, you’re a smart guy, you can fix this. No problem.
“None of them pick your pocket or break your leg.”
So who will be picking up the healthcare tab for feet’s significant other?
Ah, that’s right, we all will.
A Bing search found this:
http://tinyurl.com/brgvqw8
As they say at Ace: It’s old.
More Burke, less Mill.
He said cryptically.
Federalist 37, Concerning the Difficulties of the Convention in Devising a Proper Form of Government :
[…] Among the difficulties encountered by the convention, a very important one must have lain in combining the requisite stability and energy in government, with the inviolable attention due to liberty and to the republican form. Without substantially accomplishing this part of their undertaking, they would have very imperfectly fulfilled the object of their appointment, or the expectation of the public; yet that it could not be easily accomplished, will be denied by no one who is unwilling to betray his ignorance of the subject. Energy in government is essential to that security against external and internal danger, and to that prompt and salutary execution of the laws which enter into the very definition of good government. Stability in government is essential to national character and to the advantages annexed to it, as well as to that repose and confidence in the minds of the people, which are among the chief blessings of civil society. An irregular and mutable legislation is not more an evil in itself than it is odious to the people; and it may be pronounced with assurance that the people of this country, enlightened as they are with regard to the nature, and interested, as the great body of them are, in the effects of good government, will never be satisfied till some remedy be applied to the vicissitudes and uncertainties which characterize the State administrations. On comparing, however, these valuable ingredients with the vital principles of liberty, we must perceive at once the difficulty of mingling them together in their due proportions. The genius of republican liberty seems to demand on one side, not only that all power should be derived from the people, but that those intrusted with it should be kept in dependence on the people, by a short duration of their appointments; and that even during this short period the trust should be placed not in a few, but a number of hands. Stability, on the contrary, requires that the hands in which power is lodged should continue for a length of time the same. A frequent change of men will result from a frequent return of elections; and a frequent change of measures from a frequent change of men: whilst energy in government requires not only a certain duration of power, but the execution of it by a single hand. […]
The experience of ages, with the continued and combined labors of the most enlightened legislatures and jurists, has been equally unsuccessful in delineating the several objects and limits of different codes of laws and different tribunals of justice. The precise extent of the common law, and the statute law, the maritime law, the ecclesiastical law, the law of corporations, and other local laws and customs, remains still to be clearly and finally established in Great Britain, where accuracy in such subjects has been more industriously pursued than in any other part of the world. The jurisdiction of her several courts, general and local, of law, of equity, of admiralty, etc., is not less a source of frequent and intricate discussions, sufficiently denoting the indeterminate limits by which they are respectively circumscribed. All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications. Besides the obscurity arising from the complexity of objects, and the imperfection of the human faculties, the medium through which the conceptions of men are conveyed to each other adds a fresh embarrassment. The use of words is to express ideas. Perspicuity, therefore, requires not only that the ideas should be distinctly formed, but that they should be expressed by words distinctly and exclusively appropriate to them. But no language is so copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea, or so correct as not to include many equivocally denoting different ideas. Hence it must happen that however accurately objects may be discriminated in themselves, and however accurately the discrimination may be considered, the definition of them may be rendered inaccurate by the inaccuracy of the terms in which it is delivered. And this unavoidable inaccuracy must be greater or less, according to the complexity and novelty of the objects defined. When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated. […]