In my post yesterday about gay marriage, I said that no one had yet made a coherent and compelling argument for why gay marriage will harm traditional marriages at all. A commenter named jazzhouse thinks he's come up with such an argument and I thought I'd move it up here to answer it so it doesn't get lost in the comments. Suffice to say that it is nowhere near compelling; some of it, in fact, is quite ridiculous. jazzhouse wrote:
As you know all modern nation-states thrive for five elemental characteristics/responsibilities -- clearly defined and defendable borders, a common language, functioning institutions, a cultural/religious/historical awareness, and a sustainable and growing population. These five things are justifiably and historically perceived by most scholars as necessary for the continuation and prosperity of nation-states.
I don't necessarily agree with all of these, other than obviously the first one. There are many examples of nations without a single common language. Switzerland, for example, has 4 official languages and they seem to get along just fine. The "functioning institutions" requirement seems rather vague and redundant - a nation is little more than a collection of institutions, so of course they have to function in order to function. The fourth requirement is extremely vague, to the point of being meaningless, at least as stated here (I certainly agree that nations need a more or less cohesive culture, or at least the means for the various sub-cultures to co-exist peacefully, but the phrase you put together really has no obvious meaning; perhaps you could elaborate on what you mean). As for a sustainable and growing population, I see no reason why a steady, but not growing, population would be any less conducive to a nation than a growing one. Indeed, some nations are destroyed specifically because of overpopulation within their defined borders. That's simply a matter of circumstance. But regardless of those objections to your list, I don't think you've made anything approaching a compelling argument for why gay marriage will actually hurt any of those things anyway. Let's take a look at your argument and see why.
1. A majority of the culture is opposed to gay marriage for moral and historical reasons.
And therefore...what? Cultural attitudes, particularly toward minorities, change over time. A mere 40 or 50 years ago, a majority of the culture was opposed to allowing interracial marriage as well, and also for "moral and historical reasons" (very bad ones, of course). A majority of the culture was against civil rights for blacks for well over a century and that continued even after the end of slavery. A majority of the culture was against allowing women the right to vote for over a century as well. Today, those things are so obvious to us that we can scarcely believe that our forefathers were opposed to them. Our culture has changed dramatically since its founding and all in essentially the same direction - extending the promises of freedom and equality to groups previously left out from its protection. We've done it for women, for blacks, for American Indians, for minority religions, for immigrant groups. And now we're in the process of doing the same thing for gays, and with the same result. Today we can hardly believe that just a few generations ago it was normal to spew anti-Irish and anti-Catholic hatred and refuse to hire them or see them as equals under the law; a generation from now, two at the most, we will view today's anti-gay bias in exactly the same way.
2. The primary purpose for the institution of marriage is to produce children, which sustain and grow the nation's population.
And therefore...what? Gays are going to be gay regardless of whether they can get married, so legalizing gay marriage has no effect at all on how many children are born. If anything, allowing gays to get married might allow for the birth of more children, not less, because with the financial and legal protections, and cultural mainstreaming effect as well, from marriage, a few more of them than otherwise would have, may decide to have children themselves (through artificial insemination, for example). I would bet, in fact, that you will see more gays having children after gay marriage than you did before. At the very least, however, there is no argument to be made that gay marriage will lead to fewer children because, whether they can get married or not, they're still going to be gay. Gay marriage doesn't create more gay people, for crying out loud, and a small percentage of the population has always been gay and is always going to be gay. They aren't reproducing regardless of whether their relationships are recognized.
3. No functioning laws or institutions exist in the United States to monitor and universally record gay marriage.
You're kidding, right? This seems to you to be a compelling argument? Why can't gay marriages be recorded the same way straight marriages are recorded, by the county and state governments? You don't need any new institutions to do this. There will be a few legal changes required, of course, like provisions for non-genetic parentage, but those are already being increasingly required by the courts (and rightfully so). Social changes bring about the need for new laws every day in this country and there's nothing particularly difficult about this one. We already have a wide variety of laws covering the benefits and responsibilities of marriage, including divorce, custody, visitation and so on. Those laws apply equally to gay marriages as they do to straight marriages, with perhaps a few minor tweaks. I hardly think the need for a few changes to accomodate them will bring down the republic.
Ed, this argument is coherent and compelling -- it's even simple. Respond to it if you can... and please, keep emotion and morality out of your response.
This argument is not the leat bit compelling. It's silly and trite and vague and, in most cases, flat out illogical. But thanks for trying.
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That's odd, he asks you to keep your morality out of it, but cites the majority's morality as a reason against gay marriage.
Interesting. This is what I'm always trying to get the anti-gay marriage people to do, and it seems impossible for them to divorce themselves from their ideas about morality. I guess these ideas are so fundamental to their outlook they can't see them as anything but universal truth.
A growing population is pretty much a necessity if you want continual economic growth. Places in Europe and especially Japan have major problems related to their slowed birth rates. But like you said, gay marriage will have 0 effect on this.
It seems obvious where jazzyhouse's arguments (and others like him) will lead. They will, in fact, argue that homosexuality is lifestyle based and therefore gay marriage does make people gay (leading to the problems he laid out). Science is debunking these misconceptions at larger and larger pace, so I think this debate will start to look more like the evolution debate. The rejection of scientific evidence.
Yeah, those aren't too good. He may retort and say that there is "evidence" that gays raising children "turns them gay", which will ultimately negate and turn back any "benefits" of the marriage, but then that isn't really true.
Furthermore, as far as I understood it, the institution of marriage was instated so that families and rival kingdoms could tighten bonds among each other. Your daughter marries my son, poof, we have a truce! Even beyond that, each person's individual reasons why they enter marriage in the first place is entirely up to them. As long as it isn't noticeably harmful to either of the participants(abusive), I don't care why people get married, and neither should anyone else.
Other really bad arguments I hear 'round campus:
- There is simply nothing natural about gay sex.
I really fail to see why this would be an issue, because there's simply nothing NATURAL about many of the tools we have created and used, what makes this different?
- Gays earn more money on average, so that would completely change the marketing of this country.
... I honestly don't understand how dumb someone has to be to say stuff like this.
The part where he begs the question is my favorite.
"We can't have legal gay marriage because no laws exist to monitor and record gay marriage!"
Stunning.
It would seem, however, that other people do care why couples marry. I think the argument is really that we only allow anyone to get married to give incentives to forming stable nuclear families/having children. And obviously the idea is that homosexual can't do this because:
(a)they can't have children -- this is patently untrue
(b)they shouldn't have children -- this is too fraught for me to really address in this comment, but I don't buy it at all
Honestly, anyone who wants to incentivize the nuclear family should love gay marriage -- you're getting more people to get together in stable couples and acquire children in any of various ways. This should be Good, especially if you think the nuclear family is Good to begin with.
Boy, I am a lousy blog promoter. I write my own URL wrong in comments.
But I figured you'd want the real one because we gave you a priiiiize.
Ed--I must commend you for the restraint you've shown. Jazzhouse's arguments are utterly unconvincing maybe even delusional.
The primary purpose of marriage is to produce children? How can people make that argument without laughing. Is a marriage any less special in the eyes of God if there are no children in it? Has there ever been a legal requirement that people plan to have children if they get married? And even if gays were allowed to marry, why would that reduce the number the children created by heterosexual couples? Should a married couple without children be offended by jazzhouse's statements?
No way to record these marriages? This argument is completely, utterly and totally wrong. I am flabbargasted that anyone would make this argument. I would have been be less surprised if I had found a heard of elephants in my front yard when I awoke this morning.
Simply absurd.
I'll take a page out of Kent Hovind's book and offer a $250,000 prize to anyone who can come up with a compelling argument as to why gay marriage should be outlawed, and I won't even list any crazy caveats to make that more difficult than it already is! It's quite simple: By "compelling argument" I mean any argument that would require me to respond with something more than "Uh... No." Fire away!
jazzhouse asks Ed not to use morality in his response to the anti-gay marriage argument, but the entire bevy of arguments against full marriage equality, including jazzhouse's (just look at his first one), are based on nothing but morality, and a narrowly defined morality at that.
Even the belief that marriage is primarily for the basis of procreation is a moral belief. Certainly procreation occurs (more and more frequently, in fact) outside of that institution, and occassionally those within the institution choose not to have children, or adopt them if unable to have biological offspring. Yet the benefits of marriage to a stable society, which I believe are based on the couple's promise of mutual responsibility for each other and any children that might result, occur even in those marriages that do not include any children.
Our Founding Fathers, in their perhaps-not-infinite-but-still-admirable wisdom, not only added the freedom of religion to the First Amendment, but explicity rejected any religious litmus test for office. They understood, both through personal experience and their understanding of the violent nature of European history since the Reformation, that choice of religion tells you nothing about the character and/or abilities of someone to contribute positively to their society. They understood that good and decent men came from all backgrounds, and it was only right (or moral, if you will) that they all be given the chance to prove themselves and be of service.
As Ed has previously posted, the burgeoning evangelical movement of the early 19th century was more than happy to embrace this separation of church and state because it meant the end of the state-sponsored persecution and bigotry against those who chose the evangelical "lifestyle."
Yet the entire argument against the full participation of gays and lesbians in society, whether it be against equal employment or equal marriage rights, is based on some religions moral disapproval of same-sex people and their relationships. As Ed has pointed out, our culture does change and currently we have a small but sizeable minority of faiths that explicity accept the morality of same-sex relationships. Even more importantly, we have a growing percentage of the population, especially those who know gay and lesbian people relatively well, who have changed their own personal morality to accept gay and lesbian people fully.
It is no more correct to prejudge the capabilities of an Evangelical to hold political office than it is to assume no same-sex relationships can provide the benefits to society of those between opposite genders. In fact, the reverse is true - we have dozens of examples of publicly known same-sex couples (think of the family that Rosie O'Donnel featured when she fought against the anti-gay Florida adoption law) who have long-lasting, positive relationships. We also have examples of fly-by-night relationships that don't seem to be based on anything solid (think Ellen DeGeneres and the girlfriend she dumped to be with Portia DeRossi - typical Hollywood bed-hopping there), but neither can be used as the basis for judging all such relationships.
"2. The primary purpose for the institution of marriage is to produce children, which sustain and grow the nation's population."
This one always particularly bugs me because I was 51 when I got married and my husband was 55. Trust me, the cupboard is bare childbirth-wise.
The reason to get married is so you can legally know who is and isn't a member of your family. That makes a big difference when it comes to inheritance and other benefits. That's why gays need to marry. Of course they could shack up but the house/business/bank account they built together should go to a surviving spouse, not some non-participating cousin. It's simple justice.
But justice is the LAST thing the Christianists care about. Their entire argument against gay marriage boils down to "eeew" and that's not good enough to strip tax-paying Americans of their civil liberties.
First you have to prove any marriage is special to any God. Thats a faith position. And the entire 'eyes of God' statement has always struck me as blatantly anthropomorphic.
In reality all marriages are equal and do perform a variety of important societal tasks. I think one could argue that the marriage contract is one of the most powerful in society.
All the more reason all individuals should be able to make use of it if the so choose.
He didn't even begin to answer your challenge - he just changed the question. In no way does he answer how gay marriage would harm hetero marriage. And the argument he makes for why nations should oppose gay marriage is ridiculous.
...a generation from now, two at the most, we will view today's anti-gay bias in exactly the same way.
Let's hope so. But it's also possible that today's tolerance for gays will, from the future, seem as awful & backward as yesteryear's tolerance for horse carcasses in city streets or the stench of people who bathe only once a year. It all depends on who wins the battle in the present.
Gay marriage doesn't create more gay people, for crying out loud...
Clearly, the opposite assumption is implicit in the argument. I'm not even sure it's an incorrect assumption: it's quite possible that increased tolerance for gays will encourage more homosexuals to come out of the closet. I don't see how it has nation-wrecking consequences, however.
Chance--I am not advocating that marriage is special to any God(s) or gods(s). Instead, I made that argument because many of the people that are anti-gay marriage seem to advance the pro-creation argument and the 'special to God' argument simultaneously.
These arguments simply don't hold up to scrutiny and agree with your conclusion.
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so legalizing gay marriage has no effect at all on how many children are born.
How very wrong you are sir! The government has a very limited number of marriages it can hand out (shortages due to the war in Iraq, of course), so it MUST limit them to those than create children! How else do suggest children be created? Some science fiction experiment that does NOT involve marriage? I'd like to see you try!
Ed, this argument is coherent and compelling -- it's even simple. Respond to it if you can... and please, keep logic and language out of your response.
And just how would gay marriage interfere with any of the five alleged pillars of civilization? They never seem o provide much evidence, do they.
the government has a limited amount of marriages it can hand out?
never mind.
what's scary is people that can't tell these are not compelling arguments.
--rk
Matthew writes, "A growing population is pretty much a necessity if you want continual economic growth."
Not so. Nations whose population growth has essentially stopped still experience economic growth, like Japan whose population growth rate of 0.02% is pretty nigh zero, and whose GDP grew 2.7% last year. Other examples include the Czech Republic (population growth -0.06%, GDP growth 6.0%) and Germany (population growth -0.02%, GDP growth 0.9%). All these numbers are from the CIA World Factbook.
From the perspective of how well it serves its people, an economy [i]must[/i] grow faster than the population, otherwise people on average are no better off for their efforts. There might be other reasons to desire a growing population, of course. But it's not required for economic growth.
I smell fear...
I think maybe The Schwa might be joshing a bit.
A growing population is pretty much a necessity if you want continual economic growth. Places in Europe and especially Japan have major problems related to their slowed birth rates.
Honestly, I think this point is going to be as vital in the mid-future as the transition away from fossil fuels. I personally think that a slow, long-term worldwide decline in population would be greatly beneficial for quality of life and the environment as a whole. The problem is that the economy we've created is built almost entirely on growth.
I think we're going to need to examine ways of developing a "decending" economy that allows for negative population growth without falling into recession or depression. Would it be possible for people to simply work less if there's less jobs that need filling? Can the economy move from a wholesale production of new goods to a system of redistributing and recycling surplus goods and property as the number of people who use them decline? Can it be done in a way that dosen't cause another Great Depression?
I don't know the answers to these, but I do think they're questions worth asking.
I must admit that I find this argument to be outright delusional. Are they trying to pretend that homosexuality in (non-human) nature doesn't exist? The evidence to the contrary would appear to be fairly widespread. Has anybody bothered to complie a list of all the species that have been known to practice homosexuality?
Has anybody bothered to complie a list of all the species that have been known to practice homosexuality?
Yes, actually - Bruce Bagemihl in Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. Mind you, there's problems with that book, such as his tendency to over-interpret the data, and the loopy non-Darwinian theory he prefers; but what it's good for is a really comprehensive compilation of references to primary literature on sexual behavior in many species.
Pew Center found in a poll taken in march that opposition to legalizing gay marriage is only 51%, down from 64% in 2004. Heck, we might not have to wait another generation after all, at this pace.
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=273
First you have to prove any marriage is special to any God. Thats a faith position.
It's the good old argument a fortiori. If you assume the existence of a judgmental God, the arguments against gay marriage fall apart anyway. So if gay marriage is allowable under those circumstances, it should be all the more acceptable if you remove the limiting assumption.
Others have stated this already, but it bears repeating: static population or population decline is not a problem by itself, neither for a nation state nor for the society (two different things, after all).
For a nation to become wealthier, you need economic growth, but that growth is reative to population growth - what matters, essentially, is growth per capita. So a country with high population growth will need much higher economic growth rate to match a country with low population growth. In fact, for a declining population you could have zero growth and still have a healthy per capita growth making the society wealthier.
The problem with population decline is mostly in the rate of change. If your institutions (from kindergardens to old-folks homes) are adapted for a certain growth rate (and thus a certain proportion of age cohorts), a large change will mean a mismatch that can be painful to correct. Neither people not institutions are freely interchangeable; you can't just take surplus grammar school teachers and set them to work in assisted living facilities after all. Of course, you'd have the exact same problems again if/when the birthrate sharply picks up again, but in reverse.
Also note that there is no intrinsic reason for Italy or Japan to continue having this low birthrate indefinitely (and do note that catholic Italy has lower birthrate than largely secular Japan - the common thread is social conservatism, not religion). There's been some pretty persuasive studies that the reason is largely economic. The family net value of children has decreased, while the value of having working parents have increased along with the cost of bringing up children.
It is notable that it is in socially conservative rich countries that the birthrate is low. In the Scandinavian countries the wide availability of things like paid parental leave and day care services have cut the cost of having children and made it much easier for both parents to continue having a career, and so the birthrate is a lot higher. I suspect that as these countries come to terms with things like single parenting and two-career households, the birthrate will pick up again.
Is there possibly some way the NSF could fund research to determine if there is some way that women can bear children without getting married?
For fun, let's shoot down the five "criteria for a nation state", one by one.
1) Clearly defined and defendable borders.
I see problems here with "clearly defined" and with "defendable". The former criterion can often be controversial. For example, the Kuril islands represented a sticking point of the WWII settlement between Japan and the Soviet Union/Russia for decades. Then there's Cyprus. Do nations involved in conflicted areas not have clearly defined borders? I would say so.
As for "defendable", that cannot reasonably be required as part of a definition for a nation. Is Canada a nation? Can Canada defend its border against a hypothetical US attack?
Is the Vatican City a nation? Most international institutions would say yes. There is little pretense that the Vatican has a "defendable" border.
2) A common language.
Multi-lingual states are out. For example, Switzerland, or India. Or Canada (again! failing the test!) I guess Belgium's out, since neither Flemish nor French would satisfy this criterion. In parts of the US, Spanish is completely dominant. (Remember Puerto Rico?)
I think one might say many nations have a common language. Many do not.
3) Functional institutions.
This is too vague to be worth worrying about.
4) cultural/religious/historical awareness
Like Kurdistan! The Kurds have more of a cultural awareness than Iraq does. Of course, they don't have borders.
I don't think the US historically has had a "religious awareness". Certainly not as a nationalized idea (indeed, the First Amendment prohibits that idea). I don't know where this idea is supposed to go.
5) A sustainable and growing population
Well, "sustainable" and "growing" may well be at tension with each other. See China. Ireland in the 19th century certainly didn't have either: half the country emigrated!
I can see arguing that a nation-state should be aiming for a "sustainable" population. But in a world with finite resources, it seems silly to require "growing" as part of the definition. The Earth already suffers badly from overpopulation of the human species. Let's not hardwire this phenomenon.
As for the commenter who remarked that Western Europe and Japan were having difficulties with declining growth rates: from what I can see, the standards of living in both areas are just fine, and certainly are much higher than the parts of the world with the most rapidly growing populations. I would much rather live in a nation that had achieved a level of emotional maturity about its population size.
RickD said:
Agreed! And I think "emotional maturity" is a good way to put it. I can't tell you how many times I've read (religious) conservative blog posts "proving" that secularism is the end of civilization through the lack of population growth in Europe. These populations are not in free fall, despite what such posts would have you believe. It becomes obvious quickly, though, that the real problem such people have with Europe's lack of growth is that it is being taken over by brown people...and the current immigration debate in the US gives them a great opportunity to freak out about that here too. cf John Gibson.
Jazzhouse almost has an argument, but doesn't know how to put it in words. I think he would agree with the following argument (which I do not personally endorse):
1. Rates of homosexuality in a population are definitely related to culture. Consider ancient Sparta or Athens, where the rate was quite near 100% for two distinct periods in life (just after puberty and later, after a "regular" family had been established). Anthropology is full of such examples.
2. Marriage is, in fact, defined by the state for the purpose of raising children, contrary to the protests of may of the other posters. Were it not the best environment for raising children, there would be little reason for the state to care how families organized themselves except for providing for orderly estate laws so the ownership of property would be clear. A law which discriminates on the basis of class (tax law, child custody, etc) must bear a rational relationship to the good being sought, and courts have uniformly defended family-based discrimination on the child-rearing argument. So yes, civil marriage is principally about child-rearing, although it may confer many other ancillary benefits, and may be granted to couples despite the impossibility of bearing children (but not of rearing them).
I think after the "nation state" garbage has been cleared away, Jazzhouse had something like this in mind. Two problems:
First, from an anthropolgical perspective, groups have adopted homosexuality precisely to avoid having too many children. As various posters have pointed out, in a modern society, this need not be the case.
Exclusive homosexuality is entirely a modern invention. At the moment, the prejudice is against having children (gays with children are derisively called "breeders" in many subcultures today) but this is subject to change, and largely shaped by the fact that gays have been denied the structural stability that heterosexual couples assume, even if they do not choose to marry.
Second, if the logic is that children are better off being raised in a family setting, why does it follow that we should strictly define that setting? Many families are better off unmarried for tax purposes right now; where's the logic there?
So Jazzhouse wanted to argue (correctly) that cultural acceptance will encourage more people to adopt gay or bisexual lifestyles, and that, to this point, these are not the lifestyles that various governments have chosen to support as child-rearing vehicles. He totally fails to demonstrate why this development should portend the end of civilization, which of course was the qed. Point Mr Brayton.
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Now you've gone and changed his argument. The wingnut argument against homosexual marriage is the silly idea that homosexuals can't have children (a very good lesbian friend of mine is out looking for a sperm donor even as I write this). Child rearing is quite another matter. Homosexuals can rear children quite well. However, production (even if the wingnuts were right that homosexuals can't produce children) is not necessary for rearing. Even sterile people can rear adopted children. The Jazzhouses of the world, of course, are just as opposed to gay adoption as gay marriage, maybe moreso.
Actually, I believe the root of the wingnut argument against homosexual marriage isn't that they can't have children, it is that homosexuals would have to have sex out of wedlock (or inseminate artifically) to have children. That's what this is all about -- prudery.
If it were about production, the most efficient mechanism would be rampant promiscuity, not marriage. If it were about rearing, gay adoption (and hence gay marriage) would be acceptable. This is just another case of Pauline prudery trampling the tolerant teachings of Jesus.
You know, I pondered long and hard about the conservative claim that gay marriage would somehow harm or diminish the "institution" of marriage. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what that could possibly mean. For the longest time I thought it was just a scare tactic - a doomsday prediction meant to get people to react out of reflex rather than thought.
It finally hit me though: What if homosexuality were a choice? Moreover, what if it was a wrong choice? Of course to a religious conservative that is exactly what homosexuality is. So then in that context it makes perfect sense to talk about devaluing marriage, if you are allowing people to marry without requiring them to make the right choices.
I've found this to be a useful insight because it helps me to reframe the debate. You can point out that when they say "devaluing marriage" what they really mean is "homosexuality is an immoral choice." Very often this will dispel the argument in the minds of those who aren't completely immersed in right-wing Christian dogma, and so have enough uncorrupted brain cells to realize that of course it isn't a choice.