Oh, and Amp — loved the cartoons. I mostly only knew you from the Ms. boards as someone who posted. Nice to see you less one dimensionally.

I love it!!!!!

Somebody ought to tell Mrs. Gallagher that the marrying couple stands under the chuppah. What a pathetic attempt to seem hip and inclusive.

There have been enough horror stories of abusive parental couples over the years that we can’t say that _a_ man and _a_ woman are the “ideal” environment for raising children. And couples who wish to adopt have to go through stringent screening. By the anti-SSM argument, this should all be swept aside in favor of “they’ve got one man and one woman, it must be good.”

In fact, a lot of the same conservative essentialists prate on, in different contexts, about how women have the nurturing gene and men don’t. This is nonsense, but let’s say it’s true. In which case two women might be a much better child-caring environment than only one woman and a man. Might alleviate some of that testosterone poisoning, too.

uh, mythago, the people “around the chuppa” are generally the family (and friends) of those under it, which is why you have to think beyond those groups to get a sense of the larger future…

Nor is parenthood essential to marriage. Even St. Augustine understood that (though he didn’t condone artificial means to forestall the possibility of children, he never doubted that the childless were as married as their child-full counterparts).

Nor is a heterosexual relationship essential to parenthood. People adopt. They use donor sperm. And so on.

Now, marriage is far more likely to support an emotional as well as financial bond between a child and both of his or her parents and is therefore a good thing. So if the issue is to protect children through the establishment of a presumed permanent bond between those who are the child’s “parents” . . . it should be inclusive.

But what you often find, of course, is that “traditional marriage” for opponents of SSM is a term that incorporates a whole host of objections to various trends, including assisted reproduction, adoption by single people, the use of contraception, and so on. So, whether in silence or sotto voce, these arguments have been “built in” to the opposition to SSM. Which makes arguing on straightforward grounds pretty well impossible.

You can see this host of objections at sites like FamilyScholars.com

The problem is that quite often, the arguments for legalzing SSM are exactly the same as the arguments for strengtening marrriage in general. After all, in many ways, promoting marriage is promoting marriage!

And like I told a pollster that called me the other night to get my views on SSM, “equal rights is equal rights.” :-)

Also, with this post I realize: you really like vests, don’t you?

That too! :0!

But she was implying that the future-people in question were the offpsring of the couple. If you don’t read it as referring to the children of the marriage, then as she writes it, marriage is about the future of everyone present EXCEPT the married couple.

how succinct and funny! Excellent!

Who knows? Maybe that IS what she means.

I’m only half kidding….

Occassionally, reading different rhetoric surrounding the whole debate, I get the impression that an opponent of SSM somehow sees marriage as a great sacrifice a couple makes for the benefit of socieiy. Never thinking of themselves, they bind themselves to some appropriate, respectable person with whom they can procreate and then produce off spring. All for the good of the fatherland, mind you.

Naturally, difficulties ensue. They quibble. But, selfless creatures that they are, they stay together for the kids — and remain together, quibbling long after the kids grow up. ( Gotta stay together for the grandkids?)

I always think: Boy! I’m glad I didn’t sacrifice for the sake of the fatherland! I married a great guy who I love. It’s been a lot of fun. Seems to have worked for lo these twenty years. I hope that for everyone.

The same slippery sloge arguments claiming pedophilia and incest will be next were made in the pre-loving years. The only difference between loving and SSM debate is that during the “Loving” era the slippery slope included “men marrying men”; “imagine the horror”. That is absurd — “no homosexual is going to want to get married because two people of the same race want to get married without committing a crime”.

Yeah…ew….

But of course, they’re not going admit that. They have to maintain the pretense that their position is principled and reasoned and well-intentioned. So what Tushnet and Gallagher do is to try to fashion an argument that will permit the various forms of non-traditional civil marriage they endorse (interracial marriage, interfaith marriage, marriage involving partners who are infertile or criminals or alcoholics or divorcees, etc.) while simultaneously excluding gay marriage. The fact that they are so spectacularly unsuccessful at finding such an argument betrays the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of their position, and explains why they increasingly fall back on uttering meaningless mantras like “gay marriage denies that children need a mother and a father” in their effort to keep their religious prejudices enshrined in civil law.