I mean, if one supported the 55 mph speed limit on the grounds that it reduced the number of accidents and dependence on foreign oil, that doesn’t mean one should necessarily have supported a speed limit of 0 mph, which would really have cut down on accidents and oil consumption.

However, in this case it’s certainly odd to have a sudden interest in the virtues of bio-parenting to emerge in a general corner of opinion (I do not know if Elizabeth shared these other views, but then she’s not the only bio-parent advocate) that for so long has been advocating adoption as the alternative to abortion.

They’d be on stronger grounds if they expressed a concern that children should be raised by both a woman and a man rather than by one sex alone. But the number of children raised by single parents vastly exceeds the number raised by gays, and some of those causes of single parenting should have anybody concerned about this issue up in arms.

In particular, the lengthy deployment of the military in Iraq is causing great numbers of effectively single parents, and that’s even not counting the troops who don’t come back at all.

We also have the interesting fact that prohibiting gay marriage isn’t preventing gays from raising children.

Simon - I agree. But one should be able to explain why one favors the 60mph limit and not the 10mph limit. If one can’t explain why the distinction between the two, then one’s argument is lacking.

By the way, I think it’s possible you have the “May” and “May Not” in your above table reversed. Unless I’m REALLY not understanding your argument. :)

If we have a constructivist view, then there is no particular reason to reject (or accept) homogamy; if people want to do it and get utility thereby, they should do it, otherwise not. I gather that people want to do it, so in constructivist-world, there’s no need for further discussion.

If we embrace the essentialist view, then there is similarly no discussion. Marriage is by essential definition the union of a man and a woman, the end. It doesn’t matter if you want to do it or not or what the social matrix says or does; fish don’t fly.

So the conflict seems to be between people who have a constructivist view and people who have an essentialist view. The discussion always bogs down and gets nowhere, because no logical argument that a constructivist makes changes the philosophical impossibility of SSM to an essentialist. All the logical arguments made by essentialists rely in the end on a bedrock appeal to a perceived reality in which the essentialist position is necessarily true; no constructivist is moved by such arguments.

About the only time a conversion is made, it’s of someone who doesn’t have a firm anchor in either philosophical approach. A weak essentialist who never really bought the crux of the matter will be persuaded by the happy experience of her gay friends that SSM is OK; a waffling constructivist comes around to the notion that some things are built-in and immutable, and reluctantly concludes that SSM doesn’t fly. (That’s me.) These are marginal conversions, however; they are available to only a sliver of the population.

Constructivists cannot convince essentialists, and essentialists cannot persuade constructivists. The only peaceful solution is exile or segregation.

There is really no other explanation for Elizabeth’s blessing of a legal scheme that allows marriages we absolutely know to be harmful to children, and blesses those marriages in every state in the union, as long as they are opposite-sex; yet points to nonexistent evidence of ‘harm’ to say that same-sex couples may not marry.

It’s kind of you to give Elizabeth the benefit of the doubt, Amp, but I don’t see any point in crediting her for her mushy insistence that she “understands” what same-sex couples want out of marriage. She’s still insisting that their civil rights be sacrificed purely for her to preseve the warm, fuzzy feeling that a Mars-and-Venus worldview bestows upon her.

Of course, if Elizabeth *does* support returning to coverture, abolishing all no-fault divorce, and so on, I owe her an apology.

The problem with this is I have never heard a good argument for WHY marriage is “essentially” the union of a man and a woman. Especially not an argument that has any place in the discussion of a government-sanctioned licensing process. “Because it just is,” is at best a weak argument. Even the language in the Bible on the subject is sketchy, and this is a book written almost 2000 years ago, so I’m not sure why we continue to use it as a measure of how to live modern lives.

But then, as you may have guessed, I fall into your category of constructivists. :)

Speaking of drawing lines, I think the table will show up properly if you get rid of all those <br /> tags in it–dunno about your browser, but mine assumes that any line breaks inside a table must be inside a cell, which must be inside a row, and inserts extra cells and rows accordingly.

Speaking of drawing lines, I think the table will show up properly if you get rid of all those <br /> tags in it–dunno about your browser, but mine assumes that any line breaks inside a table must be inside a cell, which must be inside a row, and inserts extra cells and rows accordingly.

On the space before the table, what Q. Pheevr said. After the lead-in sentence, the code includes currently includes eight “br” tags — each one adding a single-spaced line.

However, I’ll take a stab at it anyway. Hubris, thy name is Bob.

Marriage is an institution that evolved to protect the vulnerable members of human society: pregnant women and children. In the primitive state, pregnant women and/or young children are not independently viable social units. They require additional support. That support could come from a larger community, but such communities require social capital that might not always be available. The resource that is always available is horny males. Marriage creates incentives for horny males to modify their behavior and to become individually supportive of women and children instead of exploitative. The institution evolved through prehistory and history, always attempting to create good incentives for males to align their behavior with the family instead of the individual.

Marriage evolved with male:female duality as its central theme, not from intentional discrimination, but for reasons of biology. Gay people have reproduced throughout history, but always in the context of male:female; there were no test tubes in the Paleolithic era. Thus, the existence of homosexual attraction and its mainstreaming into the institution of male:female pairing are both part of the evolutionary history of marriage.

Male:female is essential, therefore, because until the present time, male:male or female:female bonding partnerships were nonviable in terms of propagating the species, and thus did not signify in the evolutionary process. Only the survivors signify, and historically the only survivors have been male:female and the product thereof. Marriage evolved as a bonding between males and females, and thus as it stands, it is essentially a male:female institution.

I also like Simon’s point regarding the “biological father/mother” thing coming from folks who hold up adoption as a great option. I’ve often wondered about that.

I *do* happen to think adoption can be a good option for everyone involved, but then, I don’t put much stock in the bio-mom / bio-dad bit.

Sara.

I’ve never seen any reliable report of historical gay marriage. Please provide cite. I hope you’re not talking about Boswell. His work is interesting but hardly shows SSM; even if it did, those relationships would be part of the dead branch of marriage’s evolutionary tree, because the tradition he studied died out.

As for the purpose of marriage - well, it is true that avoiding the expenditure of time and energy on offspring not one’s own is sometimes part of male reproductive strategy, but not always: I’m currently raising two kids to whom I have no biological tie, despite being married to their mother. In any event, marriage provides no protection in this arena, so providing that protection cannot be marriage’s function. A woman can be impregnated by multiple males whether she’s married or not.

Ah, but under marriage laws, the children born of the marriage are presumed to be the husband’s. I agree with bean; marriage evolved to protect men. And their stuff. After all, originally the wife and kids were considered the property of the husband, and with coverture, the woman essentially entered a legal non-existence similar to that of a child. Unfortunately, since for most of history there were few other options for women, it was marriage, the convent or their parents’ home. Marriage at least conferred some status and worldliness.

The key word, though, is “evolved.” Marriage has not been static over the years, it has evolved and changed, something the anti-SSM forces conveniently refuse to acknowledge.

One thing I haven’t seen in either Amp’s response or the comments is a response to Elizabeth’s fundamentally flawed premise: that marriage is for families with children. That’s just wrong. Marriage is a legal bond between adults; that children born to that marriage receive some benefits does not change the basic fact that marriage, in and of itself, does not exist for the benefit of children.

Nor I. Oregon had a couple of notorious cases of “traditional” men murdering their wives and children just in the last year or two. Who knows how many less sensational cases of abuse and murder never even make the paper or the six o’clock news ? There is nothing that grants inherent virtue/superiority to the patriarchal model of mating and childrearing. To suggest that anything does strikes me as both clueless and collossially arrogant.

There is ample evidence of a long-standing practice of female-female marriages amongst the Nuer tribe (Sudan/Kenya) that involved sexual relations. A google search should turn up a bit more on this. I’ve seen suggestions that there were/are many other African tribes with woman-woman marriages, although the Nuer seem to come up the most often.

Indeed, Anthropologists have presented a wealth of historical evidence of same-sex marriage from various cultures around the world. If you haven’t examined it and found it lacking, you should probably be pretty cautious about assuming it doesn’t exist.

Of course, if very recent history counts as history, it exists in much of Canada and Europe, and they seem to be surviving.

Another note: if you view marriage in evolutionary terms, the evidence is pretty clear it’s evolving in western culture to include SSM. Essentialist and evolutionary views of marriage don’t exactly go together, since evolution implies change and growth, as we’re currently seeing.