I’m afraid I didn’t have time to read much of the commentary today. I do plan to go back and skim the commentary from this week later on. Since this will be my last commentary response, let me encourage you to send any burning questions I haven’t answered to me directly at dalecarp@umn.edu.
I do have a couple of quick responses.
First, thanks to the commentator who pointed out that all this talk about gays and gay couples as “non-procreative” or “sterile” is actually a bit misleading. Many gay people have biological children through various means. It’s especially common among lesbians, who have an easier time with artificial insemination than gay men do with hiring surrogates. Plus, of course, gay people raise their biological children from prior marriages. They will be raising these children no matter what we decide about gay marriage.
Second, a commentator brought up an essay by Stanley Kurtz purporting to show that “gay marriage” has led to a number of social pathologies in Scandinavia, including more out-of-wedlock births. Stanley Kurtz, “The End of Marriage in Scandinavia,” Weekly Standard (February 2, 2004). This thesis has been carefully rebutted in M. V. Lee Badgett, Will Providing Marriage Rights to Same-Sex Couples Undermine Heterosexual Marriages? Evidence From Scandinavia and the Netherlands, Discussion Paper (Council on Contemporary Families and Institute for Gay and Lesbian Studies, July 2004), and in William N. Eskridge, Darren R. Spedale, and Hans Ytterberg, “Nordic Bliss? Scandinavian Registered Partnerships and the Same-Sex Marriage Debate,” Issues in Legal Scholarship (available at www.bepress.com/ils/iss5/art4/).
http://volokh.com/posts/1131065231.shtml#35025
and
http://volokh.com/posts/1131065231.shtml#35102
Also, Badgett's rebuttal has major flaws in it. If we want to discuss it in detail, it may prove quite burdensome to do so in a comment thread. I find that light skimming by SSMers usually leads to thier use of misrepresentations of what Kurtz has actually written on the subject.
In a nutshell, Mr Carpenter, what is the fatal flaw in what you think Kurtz has said on the subject?
It is misleading to confuse the social institution of adoption with the social institution of marriage.
Two persons of the same sex cannot form a fertile twosome. Dependance on third party procreation demonstrates that the unisexed combo must pre-arrange childbearing to such an extent that they wander on the outer edges of the law and trespass on the blurred lines between the physically disabled and the physically healthy but socially self-disabled. That blurred line is also occupied by single persons (also a unisexed scenario) and couples past or on the brink of the end of their childbearing age.
It is a confusion of categories to claim that the elderly who become infertile, or the disabled who have lost a capability, are in the same situation as two men or two women who could procreate with their opposite sex. There is a difference both in kind and in degree of sterility.
Lets not forget, this is the 21st century. The future is now, for better or worse.
I'd ban it. Now.
For what it is worth, I just came across some statistics on the number of civil unions (only Swedish citizens are counted) in the last ten years (1995-2004):
Total number of men in civil unions: 2,314 (of which 15 % have dissolved their unions)
Total number of women in civil unions: 1,688 (of which 19 % have dissolved their unions)
Total number of persons in civil unions: 4,007 (of which 17 % have dissolved their unions)
(For reference, the Swedish population above the age of 17 is about 7 million.)
Two remarks:
i) Swedish male couples seem more inclined to enter into civil unions than Swedish female couples; and they also divorce to a smaller degree.
ii) The dissolution rate seems quite low. Perhaps extending marriage rights to gays can teach straight people not to divorce as much?
It is true that marriage fulfils many roles in society. One of the most important is providing a stable environment for child rearing. This, however, is not why marriage exists.
Marriage is how society keeps the demon of sexuality under control. All human passions are powerful, and all human passions when carried to extremes are demonic in the sense that they become destructive and anti-social in their extremes.
Sex is a particularly powerful passion and one very likely to be carried to extremes if it is not regulated by cultural mores. Marriage is that set of mores which a culture uses to regulate human sexuality. It allows sufficient sexual activity to provide for procreation while keeping that activity under strict bounds.
The opponents of Gay Marriage oppose it because they see it as another step towards sexual license and excess. They see it as a triumph in the deregulation of human sexuality and its increasing pervasiveness in our culture.
They class it with pornography, orgies, and promiscuity.
Once they reach this feeling, they then invent what are essentially rationalizations to oppose it. Thus the arguments about marriage being for procreation.
They may be very thoughtful and intelligent rationalizations, but they are false because they define marriage as what they want it to be in order to oppose gay marriage.
It appears to me that as marriage is the institution which society uses to keep heterosexual behavior under control it will serve a similar purpose in keeping homosexual behaviors under control.
Thus those wishing to limit sexual promiscuity, the spread of Aids and other STDs, orgies, pornography, and the excesses of human sexuality in general, have, logically but not emotionally, a vested interested in promoting Gay Marriage.
The cultural norm for homosexuals should be a stable monogamous one on one relationship and it is in societies interest to endorse and promote this. Thus it is in the best interests of society to legalize and promote same sex marriage for those persons who are sexuality oriented towards same sex relationships.
I agree that this issue has rarely been the focus of these discussions, although Dale did touch on it when proposing the practical and ethical benefits of encouraging monogamy among gay couples.
That is a rationalization for a "use condoms" campaign rather than the SSM campaign.
Would SSM enact a requirement that two persons of the same sex engage in some specifically risky behavior concerning their sexual organs?
If not, then, does Mr Carpenter's imagination appy here as well? That is, the state must enact a regime that looks over the shoulders of SSM couples as they go about their private relations. If there is no such requirement, and no enforcement of "safer sex", then, the preferential status can not be because of the "use a condom" rationale.
So you insist on a right for people to create people however they want, or just a right of people of the same sex to attempt procreation. Have you thought much about why you would oppose a ban on principle?
Two women could only have girls, and presumably, lesbian girls. That is troubling, no? Two men would have to use a surrogate or an artificial womb. That is troubling too, no? It would be terrificly unsafe, with some problems not surfacing for years and years. We need to ban it now, for practical reasons as well as principled ones.
South Korea will have to be brought into line with the rest of the world. The rest of the world is adamntly opposed to cloning and genetic engineering becuase they see it as eugenics and imperialism. The UN easily passed a cloning ban, and would surely pass a ban on non male-female procreation. Without government money and support, and with heavy criminal punishment for attempting it, this research will not happen, and kids can know that when they grow up, they will have to choose a person of the other sex if they want to procreate with the person they love. Dangling this possibility in front of them is cruel, for even with all the funding in the world, it still will probably not be possible. If they haven't done it yet, there must be some problem with it that might prove insurmountable.
Efforts to encourage monogamy provide an independent mechanism for reducing the spread of STDs. Obviously, encouraging the use of condoms would also have that effect, but this is not an either-or situation: in the name of reducing the spread of STDs, we could both encourage monogamy and encourage the use of condoms.
And obviously, efforts to encourage monogamy need not involve actual police enforcement of monogamy. Indeed, the only effective regulation of sexual behavior is going to be self-regulation, so the mechanisms in question need to be persuasive, nor coercive. State-recognized marriage is in part a way of trying to persuade people to be monogamous, and the same rationale applies to gay people.
How does Mr Carpenter's argument about "no requirement to procreate" then apply to the lack of a requirement to engage is such sexualized behavior? No requirement, no justification, goes the SSM argumentation.
I think the general view would be that marriage serves many purposes, one of which is to encourage monogamy. Encouraging monogamy in turn serves many purposes, one of which is to reduce the spread of STDs. So, reducing the spread of STDs is only one small part within a part of the purpose of marriage, but it is a part nonetheless. In that sense it is probably only notable as a relatively straightforward and concrete example of how society at large benefits from state encouragement of marriage.
As for the parallel with procreation, I think the idea is not quite that "no requirement" = "no justification". Dale has not suggested that the desire to encourage procreation has played no part in justifying the state's role in encouraging marriage (indeed, he thinks such a claim is obviously wrong).
Rather, the point is that the current lack of a procreation requirement suggests that the purposes of marriage can be served without such a requirement--indeed, even the pro-procreative purposes can be served without a procreation requirement. So, the fact that gay marriages would not include a procreation requirement does not suggest that they would not serve the purposes of marriage. Indeed, they may well serve the pro-procreative purposes of marriage.
Similarly, the current lack of requirements with respect to risky sex does not imply that marriage does not serve the purpose of discouraging risky sex. So again, the fact that gay marriages would not include requirements with rspect to risky sex does not imply that such marriages would not serve the purpose of discouraging risky sex.
Did you think they were going away?
Compared with the truly important problems of our time (the potential dangers of modern
technologies, global debt, hunger in the Third World, overpopulation, certain new and incurable
diseases terrorism, gay marrage[is], after all, a sideshow.
"Heterosexuals changed marriage, not gays and lesbians,None of these measures is going to change the fact that marriage no longer plays the same central economic and political role that it used to. ... People see it as more of a option.
34% of the live births in th U.S. in 2004 were from UN-married women...
34 percent — think Bush is doing a good job ensuring high ethics in government, which is slightly lower than President Clinton's standing when he left office.
The bigger fool theory holds for any pure value transaction, When a commodity with a universal value is traded then, no matter how the situation is interpreted, either the seller or the buyer has made a mistake.
Less we forget:
Oliver North was tried and convicted by a jury in May 1989 of altering and destroying documents, accepting an illegal gratuity and aiding and abetting in the obstruction of Congress.
Daubert v Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc has made our judicial system significantly less fair and more politically conservative. Daubert functions in its application as a strategic initiative that significantly moves America in a conservative direction, in the moral and political spheres, as well as in the legal sphere.
First, thanks to the commentator who pointed out that all this talk about gays and gay couples as “non-procreative” or “sterile” is actually a bit misleading. Many gay people have biological children through various means.
Are you perchance referring to Law Studene Kate? Appellate Junkie was also convinced by her argument because your attempt to margionalize procreation turned into a "rhetorical trainwreck"? I see you have taken his advice, but it was not very good advice. Any port in a storm?
It’s especially common among lesbians, who have an easier time with artificial insemination than gay men do with hiring surrogates.
This has two problems. First it re-affirms how ss"m" suffers from the same problems you point out in polygamy. That the redundancy of the multiple spouces creates jealousy and strife. We've already seen in the courts where surrogates have fought to keep children, or the cases where the mother was fighting for custody because the husband ran off with the surrogate.
The second problem was articulated well by Prof J David Velleman of NYU.
Plus, of course, gay people raise their biological children from prior marriages. They will be raising these children no matter what we decide about gay marriage.
Except that re-marriage does not seem to be a benefit for the children at all. Statistically step-parent households are identical to single-parent households. Except in step-parent households there is a higher risk of molestation, and the children are more promiscuous. The evidence is not in your favor in this assertion.
Also, you have yet to argue (especially from the platform of homosexual households with children being the product of a divorce which is by far the leading cause) why only romantic couples should qualify for "marriage".
Badgett's arguments are pretty non-sensical. Badgett notes how the trends Kurtz identifies have been much deeper into history than ss"m", but Kurtz met that burden in the beginning when he pointed out how the base of the trend was the welfarizing of co-habitation (which is your central theme). As your own arguments show (but Badgett seems to be unable to see) ss"m" is only an extension of that welfare policy, and as Kurtz predicts does contribute to the out of wedlock birthrate.
Kurtz research stands, especially with your help. What doesn't follow then is why you expect to see the benefits that you claim will happen.
In short, shell-game procreation is fraud.
If one's purpose is to increase monogamy, then marriage might be the means.
If one's purpose is to provide stable homes for kids, then marriage might be the means.
If one's purpose is to increase mutually supportive relationships, then marriage might be the means.
What we see in these discussions is that many people have different purposes, and each wants to use marriage as the means to foster their favorite purpose. And this is exactly what we see in reality. Different people get married for different purposes. They are using marriage as a means to achieve their particular, and by no means universal, purpose.
For the record:
I do endorse Law Student’s Kate’s preference for debating (a) the import gay couples having children over (b) the significance of infertile heterosexual couples. By which I mean one perspective is more likely to produce a meaningful conversation.
The rhetorical train wreck to which I referred in passing was a characterization of the fruitless, meandering, and pointlessly prickly commentary that ensued in that thread.
In some non-existent political vacuum (and perhaps in a constitutional analysis), debating the significance of infertile heterosexual couples might also shed some light on the issue. To have the discussion here is to pretend that the body politic is capable of the time travel.
It was not a comment on whatever inherit merit Carpenter’s argument may posses.
Mmmm Hmmm.
Technically you are the authority of your own comments. But I posit that had Carpenter made a case, if his argument had merit it wouldn't have resulted in a train wreck. His attempt was a train wreck.
I’m not sure why it’s only in a “technical” sense, but, yes, I know what prompted me to write that. Given that I choose not to elaborate in the post you cited, I’m not terribly surprised that you (or anyone else) might have read different meanings into it. In an obtuse way, that was my point.
That’s not my view of how (largely) unregulated discourse on this particular point usually develops. I happen to appreciate the logical foundation for the proposition, even if it cannot by itself establish the case for SSM.
The ensuing train wreck (which I’ve watched in morbid fascination more times than I can count) seems inevitable to me because it somehow evokes flights of fancy from participants on all of the five or six sides to this debate.
I’ve never come to a conclusion as to why, but I’ve stopped doubting the outcome. In popular discourse, the implications of these couples marrying for non-procreative reasons seems to mean everything and nothing and even something else all at once.
The logic was a train wreck, and you can quote me on that.
The distinction required between sterile couples and same-sex couples was evident. His arbitrarily chosen criteria does not hold up to the slightest scrunity. As he sets up two programs to ensure that sterile couples would be excluded from marriage (which as noted in the link above is oppressive to the handicapped) and appeals to his own ignorance to make the argument, e.g. if he cannot think any other reason these programs are not already implemented, then the one he foists must be it. This, btw, entirely contrary to the Burkean deference to tradition he himself proports to follow.
In short, lets play a game. What argument do you think he made in that article (the one against standard procreative argument) that was logical?
Just jump right in there.
Kind of blows Dale and Eugene's notion out of the water that incestuous and polyamorous relationships should be kept out of it then, doesn't it? What purpose would that serve?
Just because SSM has no stated purpose, as far as anyone has shown, does not mean that marriage has no public purpose in elevating the conjugal relationship (mating and integration of man and woman).
If the conclusion of SSMers is that marriage is all-purpose, or no-purpose, then, might make it more clear why they are susceptible to the feeling that SSM and marriage are the same thing and that making distinctions is invidiuous discrimination.
But the challenge still stands for Mr Carpenter and other SSMers. The public purpose of preferential status for the unisexed relationship? Please try not to piggback on marriage for your response. Stand SSM on its own two feet.