Fin Fang Foom On Gay Marriage

I'm tired of hearing how anyone who is against gay marriage is a bigot who's denying homos their "civil rights".

(How about THAT for a topic sentence?)

Those among you who have a fetish for the "M word" need to shut the fuck up before you screw everything up for the rest of us.

I am not for gay marriage. I'm for civil unions. Is there really a difference, ultimately, between those two? For the most part, probably not. My problem with gay "marriage" is that you're redefining what the word has meant for millennia - a union between people of the opposite sex. Once you redefine the word, then it can mean anything, if enough loudmouths want it so.

Think about this..........

How about three people getting married?

Most would say (including homos): "NO! Marriage is between TWO people!" Oh really? Says who? Those "throuples" can turn your arguments right back on you - "How dare you tell me that three people can't be in a loving and committed relationship? How dare you deny us our civil rights just because of your ignorance - just because YOU don't want to live in a loving and committed relationship with two other people! How does three people living in a loving and committed relationship diminish or threaten your relationship? We throuples want OUR CIVIL RIGHTS TOO!!!"

With that in mind......how about four people living in a loving and committed relationship? How about five? Six? Seven? How about an entire community living together in Oregon? Can't all of them be married - living together in a loving and committed relationship?

If a "loving and committed relationship" is the criteria, why not Miss Murkle and her cat Fluffy? She loves her cat and, by all appearances, Fluffy loves her. Who are we to JUDGE what the two of them feel for each other? If we can change the meaning of the word "marriage" why not have it mean a union between the Miss Murkles and Fluffies of the world? No one would be hurt, really, would they? So why not say that anyone and anything can be joined in marriage?

I'll tell you why.............

Words have meanings. And the word "marriage" has a meaning that all the caterwauling by the Gay Left (redundant) isn't going to change. Americans are NOT going to allow the word to be redefined - so get over it!

Instead, we need to push for Civil Unions. Americans are much for comfortable with that terminology - including my mother. THAT we can achieve. However, if we let the gay loudmouth marriage fetishists have their way, they're going to wreck it for all of us.

And you know who you are.

Civilly yours,

FFF

You forgot the person/animal thing. You really need to read what Rove sends you thoroughly before you regurgitate it.

> My problem with gay "marriage" is

>that you're redefining what the word has meant for millennia -

>a union between people of the opposite sex. Once you redefine

>the word, then it can mean anything, if enough loudmouths want

>it so.

The traditional meaning of marriage as it has existed for millenia has ALREADY been "re-defined" in multiple ways.

With "traditional marriage," once you were married, it was "till death do us part" - not "till we get a little tired of each other and are ready for replacements." When it came to marriage as it has existed for millenia, there were no such things as "third wives" or "step-children" or no-fault divorces and ditching your old wife to marry your young, pretty secretary or old and infertile couples marrying or people shacking up and fucking before marriage.

Those rules are just as central to "traditional marriage" as the man-woman rule, but they have all been dispensed with.

Straight people have dispensed with ALL of the elements of traditional marriage which restricted their desires. The ONLY one they want to keep is the only one which doesn't restrict them - the one that says that if you're a man, you can only marry a woman. That's the only rule of traditional marriage which they want to keep because it's the only one they have no desire to violate.

The notion that opponents of gay marriage merely want to preserve the "traditional definition of marriage as it existed for millenia" is the biggest crock of shit ever. What passes for "marriage" in America today bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to traditional marriage.

The millenia-old, traditional definition of marriage no longer exists because straight people have completely dismantled it to free themselves of its restrictions.

There may be valid reasons to oppose gay marriage, but the need to preserve the "traditional definition of marriage" sure as hell isn't one of them. By definition, you can't "preserve" that which has already been completely destroyed.

[a href=http://www.dominionpost.com/a/news/2004/08/17/ae/]We need a Constitutional amendment[/a]

>Words have meanings. And the word "marriage" has a meaning

>that all the caterwauling by the Gay Left (redundant) isn't

>going to change. Americans are NOT going to allow the word to

>be redefined - so get over it!

Don't be so sure about that.

It's happening in Canada - over 85% of the population live in provinces/territories that recognize gay marriage and consider it legal. And within the year it will be a federal law encompasing everyone.

Canadians are not that different from Americans. We live only a few feet away from your northern border and we are for the most part of the sam European stock as you are.

Having said that, I must admit we don't have as many religious fanatics as you have, who, in my opinion are the biggest cause of homophobia in the USA. And you have a double digit IQ leader who can whip them up into a frenzy.

Hey, Doug -- I usually agree with much of what you write, but on this I can't: "With "traditional marriage," once you were married, it was "till death do us part" - not "till we get a little tired of each other and are ready for replacements." When it came to marriage as it has existed for millenia, there were no such things as "third wives" or "step-children" or no-fault divorces and ditching your old wife to marry your young, pretty secretary or old and infertile couples marrying or people shacking up and fucking before marriage. Those rules are just as central to "traditional marriage" as the man-woman rule, but they have all been dispensed with."

By "traditional marriage" you probably mean "what was around in the last few centuries in western culture until the last 50 years or so". In fact, the roots of our marital culture are not quite as simple as our current debate (on both sides) might assume.

Arguably the two most important sources of Western culture (leaving aside the Germanic peoples and their curious pre-Christian customs) are the classical culture of Rome and the Jewish world of the Old Covenant.

In fact, each of these has a big divergence from what you say above. Wife-ditching was pretty much the rule for those who could get away with it. They both had no-fault divorce policies that would leave most of us breathless. In Rome all you had to do to get a divorce was publicly announce the intention. Both men and women could do it, and women could take the property they brought to the marriage with them, and if they were getting divorced because the husband had lost it, there would be a bigtime lawsuit and his family would have to make up the difference. But people partner-swapped all the time. Even the most cursory reading of the Old Testament reveals how strange Jewish marriage customs would have been to us. Polygamy all over the place, divorce by written note, levirite marriage (impregnating your dead brother's wife if she had not borne children). In addition, both cultures accepted as entirely normal married men having concubines, using prostitutes (if you could afford them), and of course, sex with one's slaves was the norm for men. Not exactly the picture of what the no-divorce monogamists are painting as traditional.

It may be objected that Christianity changed all that. Well, to some extent. Jesus' attitude about divorce seems clear (Matthew 5: 31ff.): no divorce except for adultery. On closer inspection this seems really to be a clarification of grounds for divorce, moving it from no-fault to event-generated. It also mercifully changed the penalty of death by stoning for adulterous women. When St. Paul says that a bishop should be the husband of one wife (1 Timothy 3:2) it might be read in a way to imply that such a (Christian) person might, presumably because of social status, have more than one marital commitment, of whatever type. Certainly St. Paul tries to bring marriage into a status of spiritual significance which it seems not to have had at that point, and his efforts show that it must have been a struggle to achieve the one-man-one-wife ideal in the early Church, and he by no means speaks for all of the church, but just his part of it. This of course leaves aside the question of the all-out endorsement of the single state as superior to marriage by both Jesus and Paul, which most of the superior-normalcy-of-marriage crowd leave silently to the side.

I have no wish to bore you further with more, but suffice it to say that Christianity explicity tolerated multiple relationships by men until the 12th century or so, requiring recognition and support of children born out of wedlock, to the point of recognizing bastards as successors to their father's position if there was no legitimate son to inherit (William the Conqueror being the most famous). A great book on the 12th century change in the culture's attitude on marriage is Georges Duby, "The Knight, the Lady and the Priest". The Catholic Church has always had a generous annulment policy for reasons other than adultery, permitting serial polygamy (as in the cases of both Ted Kennedy and John Kerry), and Reformation Protestantism was surprisingly generous in the matter of divorce, moving from the "pretend" position of annulment to calling divorce by its name and allowing remarriage. For the classic Protestant statement on this issue, see chapter 24 of the (English Calvinist) Westminster Confession of 1646, which is the origin of a lot of the language now being used in this debate: http://www.reformed.org/documents/westminster_conf_of_faith.html

Well, end of history lecture. My point is that the path to the current ideal of marriage is a long and windy one, and that the current clarity about marriage, from which you rightly note that we have now departed, is fairly recent. The case for "traditional (heterosexual) marriage" is not as clear historically as some people would like to make it.

The real issue here of course is homosexual marriage, which has a very small history in our culture (John Boswell's books on this stretch the evidence as far as it can go, and a little farther). That there is very little or no precendent for gay marriage is the issue, and that is why the case for it has to be based simply on equality of rights before the law, as in Canada. I think it is a mistake to equate homosexual with heterosexual marriage and force it on people. It is something genuinely new, and I think we should accept that and create a new social category with a new name for it: official, legal civil gay unions (more than the halfway-house of civil unions now permitted in some places) which do not have to be called marriage, but are marriage from every other point of view.

Marriage vs Marriage

People did all kinds of weird things back in the 12th Century, but then again, they did all kinds of weird things back in the second half of the 20th Century -- like enforcing laws against interracial marriage. The fact is that it takes a generation or two to change public attitudes, and there will always be a minority, like FFF, who have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.

The issue is the separation of the church definition of marriage, from the state definition of marriage. Canadian gay couples aren't suing for the right to have a ceremony inside a Catholic church. The superstitious can have whatever definition of marriage they want, within their own circle. But civil law has moved the enforcement of marriage laws out of the church courts, and into the same courts that enforce contracts and child-protection laws. That legal system should not be dominated by religious belief.

Would someone who is for gay marriage please address my argument regarding three, four, five, six, etc. people being allowed to marry?

I would like to hear a compelling reason why 18 people in a loving and committed relationship should not be allowed to marry. And if not 18, what is your maximum number and why should your maximum number not be one more?

Patiently yours,

FFF

It's a moot issue. There aren't two people on the planet who'd marry a charmer like you, let alone 18, so nobody cares.

>I would like to hear a compelling reason why 18 people in a

>loving and committed relationship should not be allowed to

>marry.

The idea of a communal society has been around for centuries. See, for example, the Rapp settlement in New Harmony, Indiana, and Economy, Pennsylvania. They became very wealthy while practicing group marriage.

American soldiers are fighting and dying in Iraq to protect a government that has legalized polygamy. There is no compelling reason to prohibit it among Muslims, nor is there any compelling reason to prohibit what consenting adults do anywhere else in the world.

In the United States, opposition to polygamy was part of a greater dislike for Mormons. Recently, though, the Bush administration for political reasons has overlooked the mass welfare fraud practiced in polygamous communities of Utah and Arizona, despite widespread interstate conspiracies to commit child abuse and other crimes.

Bush buddy Orrin Hatch said when he was in the neighborhood that he was not going to "sit here and judge anybody just because they live differently than me." The Log Cabin Republicans ought to work on this guy, to become a gay rights advocate as well.

>>I would like to hear a compelling reason why 18 people in a

>>loving and committed relationship should not be allowed to

>>marry.

>

>The idea of a communal society has been around for centuries.

>See, for example, the Rapp settlement in New Harmony, Indiana,

>and Economy, Pennsylvania. They became very wealthy while

>practicing group marriage.

>

>American soldiers are fighting and dying in Iraq to protect a

>government that has legalized polygamy. There is no

>compelling reason to prohibit it among Muslims, nor is there

>any compelling reason to prohibit what consenting adults do

>anywhere else in the world.

>

>In the United States, opposition to polygamy was part of a

>greater dislike for Mormons. Recently, though, the Bush

>administration for political reasons has overlooked the mass

>welfare fraud practiced in polygamous communities of Utah and

>Arizona, despite widespread interstate conspiracies to commit

>child abuse and other crimes.

>

>Bush buddy Orrin Hatch said when he was in the neighborhood

>that he was not going to "sit here and judge anybody just

>because they live differently than me." The Log Cabin

>Republicans ought to work on this guy, to become a gay rights

>advocate as well.

riveting

however, you never answered my question.

Is asking some of you to come down off of your soapboxes long enough to actually ANSWER A QUESTION too much to ask?

Wearily yours,

FFF

Fang, hon, this isn't a quiz show, and people aren't here to answer your politically loaded ridiculous hypothetical questions. They're here to read about escorts and, incidentally, weigh in on other subjects from time to time.

In this case, though, Ignoto answered your question. Try reading his most recent post carefully.

>Is asking some of you to come down off of your soapboxes long

>enough to actually ANSWER A QUESTION too much to ask?

You made a lot of points in your initial point, and didn't just ask one question. My response was directed to one of the points you did make (that reserving marriage for opposite-sex couples only was necessary to preserve millennia-old traditional marriage).

With regard to the question to which you are now demanding an answer - why shouldn't polygomy or community-marriages be permitted if same-sex marriages are - I believe there are 5 possible answers:

(1) Traditional marriage - which has entailed one man and one woman and not mulitple partners -- has worked well to provide stability and prosperity to socities, and we should therefore keep it as is (although, as I said, this argument is quite unpersuasive given that so many of the rules of traditional marriage are routinely violated or have been outright discarded).

(2) The purpose of marriage is to provide stability and order to the society. Two-partner couples are more stable and orderly than multiple-partner couples because there is more intimicy, less jealously, less competitiveness, more of a union. Two-partner couples therefore serve these societal interests better than multiple-partner couples.

(3) Aside from being more stable and orderly, the highest degree of love and intimiacy is possible only in two-partner relationships and not in multiple-partner relationships, where the love and attention and loyalty and intimicy is divided between multiple parties rather than focused on one person.

(4) The primary purpose of marriage is to provide the ideal model for raising children. Most child psychologists - and most social science statistics - prove rather conclusively that children prosper most in two-parent homes. A multiple-partner couple would be, at best, extremely confusing and divisive model for raising children.

(5) Since the state distributes benefits and societal resources based on marriage, it is unfair for multiple-partner couples to receive increased resources over two-partner couples.

One can certainly debate whether any or all of these are persuasive reasons for confining marriage to two-partner couples, but these are the arguments of which I am aware for doing so. One can certainly argue, with great logical consistency, that marriage should be open to same-sex couples without having to advocate the recognitin of multiple-partner marriages.

>A

>Wearily yours,

>

>FFF

>Fang, hon, this isn't a quiz show, and people aren't here to

>answer your politically loaded ridiculous hypothetical

>questions.

Anyone who refuses to answer the question he asked - or who is incapable of doing so - has no business advocating for gay marriage. If you can't argue why traditional marriage rules should be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry without making arguments as to why that won't lead to the complete disintegration of all restrictions on the institution of marriage - including the restriction that you can only have 2 partners, but not 10 partners, marry - then you're just incapable of responding to one of the most legitimate and pervasive objections to same-sex marriage.

In other words, it makes you a completely useless idiot who is arguing for a position that you're incapable of defending.

They're here to read about escorts and,

>incidentally, weigh in on other subjects from time to time.

You're in no position to speak for other people as to why they come to this site. There is a section here reserved for politics and religion, and it's one in which you participate rather extensively.

You come here and advocate for gay marriage. You spew your trite little liberal slogans here constantly. But then when someone raises an argument that you can't answer, you pitifully evade the question by claiming that you're not here to do what you spend lots of time doing - arguing about politics in this forum - and then pathetically and falsely claim that you're only here to talk about dirty third world bathhouses.

The problem is, all you're capable of doing is parrotting the first-level cliches of liberal thought. Your brain isn't capable of advancing beyond that and answering questions that you haven't heard before, nor are you capable of taking questions you can't answer and re-evaluating your position as a result.

You should really just admit your limitations and you won't appear quite as foolish as you do now. Coming to this forum and spitting out one liberal political cliche after the next, but then running away when you can't answer objections to those cliches by claiming that you're not here to talk about politics is, I would say, about as pitiful as it gets.

One of my points appears to have been a little too "nuanced" for most of you here. When I referred to the "traditional marriage" definition being the same over the millennia, I was careful not to say it was between only two people. I said/inferred that it HAS only been between men and women. I know all about polygamy so we don't need to travel down that well-worn road.

One of my points was basically:

Marriage has always been something that has been entered into between those of the opposite sex and we should leave that alone and create our own "institution", ergo Civil Unions, which can be newly defined. There are too many in the gay community who are self-appointed victims who feel that they need everyone's validation. By co-opting "traditional" marriage, they're trying to force the majority to say "you're ok, you're a good person". Personally, I don't need straight society's validation - however, I do want the same rights as everyone else and the BEST way to achieve that is by Civil Unions and not harping on and on about gay marriage, which will ultimately crash and burn.

But won't alot of the bloody shirt victims be happy to trumpet the continuation of their victimhood?

Fearlessly yours,

FFF