Criminy wrote:
Gbaji wrote:
Of course I do. My point is that we exclude them for reasons other than not viewing them as "full human". Ari's argument was basically that by not granting legal marriage to gay couples, we are treating them as less than fully human. But if that were true, then it would be true for all sets of people we don't allow to qualify for marriage. Which would mean first cousins, siblings, groups of more than 2, etc.
No, we don't give marriage licenses to first cousins, siblings, etc because of the health risks that are involved when they reproduce.
So *not* because they aren't fully human, right? So there are legitimate reasons to restrict marriage that doesn't involve assuming that those who don't qualify aren't human. That's all I'm saying.
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If homosexuals want to reproduce they don't have that problem.
Same sex couples can't reproduce. We're talking about the couple, not two individuals. You get that the point of marriage is to treat them as a single legal unit, right? You can't have it both ways.
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While my wording wasn't extremely precise I was hoping you would be brighter than a parrot for once. Sure two women / men cannot produce children with just their partner but when you modern medicine (or a willing third) you can have a homosexual couple that has kids. Cousins don't have to worry about going that extra step due to obvious reasons. So you want to grant marriage licenses to couples who may / want to reproduce? Glad to see you are starting to understand our side.
Same sex
couples can't reproduce. You really aren't getting this. The individuals can, but nothing they do with their partner facilitate this. Reproduction is *never* a natural outcome of a same sex relationship. Which is kinda the whole point.
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Gbaji wrote:
There's only one quite obvious explanation for why we bother to exclude that group.
Don't suppose you could expand on that, what with it being so obvious. Partly because I am genuinely curious why.
Sigh.
Because neither group is part of the set of couples we want to encourage to marry and procreate. One, because we don't want them to procreate (siblings and first cousins), and the other because they *can't* procreate. You're making the mistake of starting at the benefits and asking "who would be benefited by this?". But if you start first by assuming that there is some social problem and marriage laws/licenses are the solution, then you should be able to noodle it out.
The problem is that heterosexual couples produce children. They produce them as a statistically unavoidable outcome of being couples. You have a sufficient number of heterosexual couples, and you will get some number of babies as a result. From a 15,000 foot level, you can't know which couples will reproduce, or when, but you can say that some number of them will. Some of them will get married. Some of them will not (marriage in this case just being the traditional social institution that's been around for ages). Those who don't marry, or those who enter into marriages which the state may not be able to enforce will likely result in single mothers raising children. Historically, social pressures and lack of mobility ensured that most sexually active couples got married and tended to stay married. With the rise of larger and more mobile modern middle and working classes, this became a problem. The state increasingly became involved in legal disputes over issues of marriage, divorce, property, paternity, etc and absent sufficient legally binding marriages, it was difficult to resolve them. Thus, It became in the state's interest to create a three party marriage contract with the state as a party, and then find ways to encourage couples to marry and to use that contract when they got married. In some cases, they applied those marriage laws even if the couple didn't officially file for it (common law marriage).
The point is that the problem being solved by state marriage laws is that of couples producing children out of wedlock. The benefits to marriage are intended to provide incentives for couples to marry, so that any children they produce after that point will be born within a legally binding marriage for which the state can control the terms and enforcement. That's the whole point to this. It's why the state would bother to create a marriage status in the first place. Otherwise, there's no reason for it.
The restrictions on who can qualify for that status flow logically from that purpose. If your purpose is to get couples who might otherwise produce children together to enter into a legally binding marriage, then you want to provide those benefits to just those couples who *may* produce children together. This automatically excludes same sex couples. While we can argue for more restrictions because some heterosexual couples may not be able to produce children, there is no rational argument for going the other way and extending those benefits to gay couples. Similarly, since we don't want siblings or other close relations to marry, we don't give them benefits either.
That's it. It's completely logical. It makes perfect sense. There's nothing about marriage and our marriage laws which doesn't fit within this context. Against this logical argument we have.... nothing. Just wild appeals to emotion. It's not about who we're discriminating against, but who it makes sense to provide the benefits for. We don't do it just for fun. We do it because there is a reason. We don't exclude gay couples from marriage benefits because we don't like them. We exclude them because [bl] they aren't the ones we need to encourage to marry[/b]. If they want to marry, they're free to do so. No one's stopping them. But the state issued marriage license and the laws and benefits associated with it are a legal construct created to address a specific problem which gay couples don't cause.
We have as much reason to provide those benefits to two random people walking down the street as we do to gay couples. Stop asking why we should deny them those benefits, but ask why we should provide them to them?