Is this somehow less harmful?
I don’t understand the harm in anyone having a family that they love. I don’t see how it matters if the parents are same sex or not.

And you would think that if we were being logical… oh, never mind. Logic doesn’t even enter the picture.

Why? Is it for religious belief reasons, or for other reasons?

Or is it that you just like making me do a double-take?

I’ve heard a conservative priest say they he wasn’t intrinsically against nontraditional families, he just felt traditional families were being eroded, and blamed nontraditional families like it was some kind of zero sum game. He refused to support policies that made it economically viable to be a single parent, because he wanted to force them to be in a traditional marriage. Same went for Same Sex Marriage. He wanted to encourage bisexuals to choose heterosexual marriage by reducing the viability of an alternative.

Very twisted response, but I think the concern that our families are more tenuous and our communities almost nonexistant is a valid one. What are ways that the underlying concerns can be addressed without resorting to conservative tactics?

I don’t really understand the depth of what is going on in America, and I actually approve of most of it, but I do recognize its radical nature. Give your opponents just a little break or sympathy

I really need to start using smileys more, in the blogosphere as in life. d8=

We already accept nonprocreative heterosexual marriages (senior citizens, infertile couples, consenusual contraceptive use). We already accept the equality of women and men. We already accept the interchangeablity of heterosexual gender roles in marriages (stay-at-home dads and breadwinner mothers). The conceptual leap from the combination of these is small.

The big leap is only for social conservatives that still bitterly resent some of these mainstream accepted practices (contraception, gender equality, nontraditional gender roles). Their opposition to same sex marriage is partly a proxy for these regressive views, even as it is partly a proxy for legitimate concerns of the erosion of the quality of family and community relationships.

Of course, the holes in this argument are first, that it remains to be shown that this “decay” associated with freedom really is a bad thing; or that, if so, that it’s worse than denying a class of people their civil rights; and, if so, whether it’s at all bad enough to justify that denial - which would require a mighty justification.

Thanks for the link.

I agree that “forming new families” is maybe one of the best reasons for marriage. “Forming new families”, however, really is an *attribute* of marriage. Likewise, “intimate”, “life long committment”, and so on, are attributes of marriage.

My pressing this distinction I hope does not come off as argumentative or esoteric, but what I am looking for is, what *is* marriage?

Marriage *is* a specific legal kinship relationship. It identifies one person as another’s spouse. The relationship is symmetric so at the same time the former also becomes the spouse of the latter. Does this answer your question?

I’ll propose a definition of marriage for the sake of argument. I don’t necessarily think this is best or that it is complete, and I’m sure to some it will sound overly philosophical or mawkish. None the less, it will do for the moment. “Marriage is a union of two lives lived as one which is recognized by society.”

This is similar to “specific legal kinship relationship”, but it has maybe an important distinction that the other lacks.

Actually your definition sounds fine to me for what underlies legal marriage. It also applies equally well to same-sex couples. Same-sex couples unite their lives to live as one and seek recognition by society.

I think I’d got for something like Marriage is an institution for the joining of formerly unrelated adults into a family. Note that I don’t consider children to be a necessary component of a family. And that I don’t object to marriages of two or more people. (And if you do object, then what word would you use to refer to polygamous marriages?)

It still needs work (there may be other institutions than marriage that also join unrelated adults into families, and I’d need to find a way to distinguish marriage from those), but I think it gets to the heart of the matter.