Are there any non-religious anti-gay-marriage arguments?
Currently, marriage consists of a default package of contractual rights given from one partner to another (e.g. default will, medical proxy) and I have no problem extending this to gays. In fact, this part of marriage can already be pieced together with a few legal documents.
Marriage also consists of laws which force single people to subsidize married couples, for instance the non-working spouse of a worker gets SS benefits that neither spouse paid for. Gay marriage supporters are in the unique position of thinking about this issue and recognizing the unfairness of it. But rather than advocating for fairness, they simply want to be allowed to join the favored class. I'll draw an analogy to the civil rights: think of an Asian American in 1960 saying "I'm not against Jim Crow, I just want Asians to be classified as White rather than Colored."
As a single person, I'm in the same boat as gay couples. Gay marriage supporters want to throw me overboard in order to join the favored group, forcing me to subsidize a slightly larger group of people. Why should I do anything but oppose that?
Marriage fairness (i.e., no subsidies), I'll get behind. Gay marriage, no.
[edit: I thought my last line was clear enough, but from the responses it apparently was not. I favor ending marriage, or at least ending the subsidies for it. I also favor ending the penalties for it, which apply in certain circumstances.]
As a single person, I'm in the same boat as gay couples.
Gay marriage supporters want to throw me overboard in
order to join the favored group, forcing me to subsidize
a slightly larger group of people. Why should I do
anything but oppose that?
Gays aren't given this option. If they want the subsidies, they have to marry someone they aren't attracted to.
I fail to see what the difference is, apart perhaps from the magnitude of the desires. In either case, one must go against one's preferences to get a subsidy.
I humbly invite you to go seek out a handful of people who identify as gay or lesbian and ask them why they feel like they should be allowed the right to marry, regardless of their intention to actually do so.
It shouldn't be very hard in the NYC area to find a handful.
Some people are in fact asexual, and prefer no sex. Others may prefer not to be married, even if they do wish to have sex with people of the opposite gender.
These are both preferences; what makes them less deserving of protection than a preference for gay marriage over straight marriage?
I'm all for eliminating marriage subsidies, but let's take it one step at a time and recognize that there are literally millions of people in the United States who are being discriminated against by the state.
Saying that gay and lesbian individuals shouldn't be extended the rights enjoyed by the rest of the adult population of the United States because the entire institution is unfair misses the point.
First, remove the discrimination against one of, if not the most discriminated upon groups, gay people.
Second, remove subsidized marriage.
Since the second is a much larger hill to climb, let's be decent human beings and support the first in the interim.
If yes, then you would have to amend your reasons for being against gay marriage.
If no, then first you're not really against gay marriage, just against marriage in general. But by opposing just gay marriage you're being selective which is discrimination i.e. you want to deny gay couples the same rights that are given to non-gays. Whether you like those rights or not is irrelevant - they're already given and accepted by society.
Incidentally, gay marriage activists also favor discrimination against the single. I didn't want to start a fight pitting one unfavored group against another, the gay marriage activists did. Now that the fight is on, I'm obviously going to support my team. But I'd much rather join with gays and fight for fairness rather than against additional discrimination.
Ah. Have you talked to any outspoken pro-gay-marriage people, AKA activists? Like, all of the people in these threads who are telling you "yes, of course we're against marriage subsidies too, but pragmatically that has to be a future goal"?
You are not on a "team". You are making political statements (and probably actions, if you vote, canvass, or engage otherwise in the political process) that have real-life consequences for individuals with widely varying views.
"The Gay Marriage Activists" do not have weekly meetings that end with unanimous votes about how they hope the federal government supports tax cuts and special legal rights for married couples for ever and ever.
Maybe you just haven't quite explained it right yet, but I'm getting a strong fishy smell from what seems to be an argument that you'd "much rather join with gays and fight for fairness" -- except that you found out (somehow?) they all disagree with you on an issue that's, well, important but currently pretty irrelevant given widespread cultural norms.
From my post: "Marriage fairness (i.e., no subsidies), I'll get behind. Gay marriage, no." In case that wasn't clear enough, I completely support eliminating all subsidies for marriage, and view gay marriage as a minor sideshow to the real issue. (See also my edit.)
I only single out gay marriage supporters because they are being jerks about the issue. Instead of pushing for fairness, they push for unfairness in their favor. Most people ignorantly accept the status quo, having never thought about the issue.
Gay marriage activists are not ignorant. They have thought things through, recognize that it is unfair, oppose the status quo, and still favor an unfair system. "I'm not against corruption, I just want the opportunity to participate in it." Why should I support them?
"I'm against selling alcohol to asians, because people who drink cause harm to themselves and to the society, for which I, as a non drinker, have to pay with my taxes. Reforming alcohol laws - that I'll get behind. Selling alcohol to asians, no. Asians are not ignorant. They have thought things through, recognize that it's unfair and still favor an unfair system. Why should I support them?"
In that hypothetical scenario I would be missing the same big point that you're missing: equality is much more important. Equality is about treating everybody (be it a good or bad treatment) the same. The opposite is discrimination. Your dislike of marriage in general does not justify in any way discriminating against gays by denying them marriage.
Suppose I reversed things. I want to allow single people to stop subsidizing married straight couples, but still require gays couples to pay subsidies. Would you favor that? Somehow, I doubt it.
He's implying that non-drinkers are being financially discriminated against in a way analogous to single people regarding marriage financial benefits. Regardless if it's subsidies for drinking, as you mentioned, or otherwise the non-drinkers are being burdened.
What it comes down to is which is worse: A specific group being denied a right or a burden which that particular right imposes on the population that does not participate in it. Where you're running into trouble, in my opinion of course, is conflating these two issues together. Gay marriage and your problems with the financial aspects of marriage aren't an either/or thing, they're a completely different battle. Based on your comments I believe that the subsidy issue aside you really have no problems with gay marriage itself. So be happy that some people got more rights and gear yourself up for the separate subsidies battle.
Regardless, thanks for taking the time to single-handedly take up an unpopular opinion here.
Regarding the rest of your arguments, I suppose they work assuming an extremely weak social contract. Or at least, in my opinion it would require a very weak one. It's hard question to test in relation to marriage since marriage is a legally sanctioned relationship in all countries, but i am most certainly not well read on this topic.
According to the CBO, 51% of married couples received a marriage bonus, and only 42% paid a marriage tax. In total, $32.9B was paid in marriage bonuses, and $28.8B was paid in marriage penalties. Data is from 1993, sorry, a quick google search couldn't find anything better.
http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=7&type=0
Note that in 2004, Bush eliminated the marriage penalty for everyone besides the rich, so I expect the numbers are more skewed now.
For any given income, a couple filing jointly with that total income pays less than a single person with that income, because the joint tax tables are lower than the single tax tables at any given income level. The so-called marriage tax is simply an artifact of the fact that we have a progressive rate structure, so that if both spouses work, their combined income is in a higher marginal bracket, which in the case where both have full time jobs can be enough to overcome the tax break they get from filing jointly.
But again, maybe you actually have the data that shows that single people subsidize married people.
One way to handle this is to separate out the economy into single vs married economies. Effectively different tax pools. Although I suspect the burden of single parent households on the single tax pool would be pretty weighty... especially if you get rid of child credits.
Gay's don't want to join the favored class and neither do I. The only difference between myself and a gay person is the strength of our desires and the existence of desirable substitutes.
People mary because they are in love and they want to assert that loving relationship in the society and with government. What comes with that is a rich array of benefits and obligations. Most of the benefits (like the right to vist your spouse in the hospital) only have value if you actually care about your spouse.
So yes, technically gays can do fraudulent, non-gay marriage with a random person, but don't use it as an argument for discrimination by denying the marriage with people you actually want to marry (for a host of reasons that have nothing to do with the financial windfall you claim to exist).
Also, if there really is such a financial benefit to getting married, how come we don't have an epidemic of fake marriages? Your basic claim of financial benefit to marriage is not supported by observable facts.
Who are you in this analogy? The only thing I can come up with is not flattering.
(Admittedly, it's a confusing analogy if you are unfamiliar with US history.)
A better approach (from a conservative/libertarian side) is to just ask the question why government is defining marriage in the first place.
I was really surprised that to get married in New York, the officiant pretty much has to be a judge, the town clerk, or a religious representative of an "official" religion with an established place of worship. Seems awfully unfair that atheists have fewer options than members of popular religions. What possible interest does the state have in vetting wedding officiants anyway?
As to unfairness, maybe it would be unfair if it would be a trouble to find an officiant that is not a religious representative. The way I see it is that allowing religious representatives to perform a wedding ceremony as accepting societal reality that many people are religious and are more comfortable when wedding is performed by a religious representative but in no way it constitutes harm to non-religious people.
In other words, if someone is for gay marriage, then on what grounds can they forbid polygamous or incestuous relationships or incestuous relationships?
Of course, this assumes that these other less popular alternative lifestyles should be forbidden as well.
Examples: -Inter-racial marriage was once illegal in the US. Now it's not.
-Marriage was used as a tool to forge alliances between royal families in Europe. Now it's not.
-In Europe, it was once common for a bride's family to pay a dowry as a part of the marriage agreement. Now it's not.
My point is that elements of our collective cultures evolve all the time. The concept of marriage exists to serve culture that it's a part of, not the other way around.
It's discrimination because non-gays can marry and gays cannot.
This does not apply to polygamous or incestuous relationships. Those are not recognized by law, but they are denied to everyone equally.
Also, "union between a man and a woman" does cover incest so clearly that's not the definition used by courts when deciding who can marry. Your premise is flawed and even if it wasn't, you're just trying to confound completely separate issues.
Again, it's about discrimination.
However, the law discriminates against polygamous relationships based on the number of people involved and incestuous relationships based solely on who their relatives are.
The argument is, why is discrimination against gender bad, but discrimination against relatives is ok. If two brothers want to get married, why should that relationship be denied by the law?
Same logic applies to incestuous marriage, although this would be more extreme since there are very strong taboos against it (not throughout all history, though, e.g. in Ancient Egypt pharaohs mostly married their sisters).
You're arguing a straw-man.
+1 You spelled bestiality correctly.
Seriously, I'm not joking.
It is a valid point when arguing against gay marriage to point to the "slippery slope" of bestiality. But it is also a valid point to state that there's really no good reason to make marrying a chicken illegal. Fundamentally, I believe most opposition to gay marriage is based upon disgust. And I'm confident the same is true for marrying a chicken. Disgust is hardly an adequate justification.
1. Torture the definition of "equal". As if a law specifically designed to cover a specific relationship between a "man and a woman" is somehow invalid, whereas laws that cover specific relationships between a "lawyer and client" or "doctor and patient" or "parent and child" or "employer and employee" or "clergyman and worshipper" or 1000s and 1000s of others are never considered unconstitution.
2. Appeal to emotion. Ie, domestic partners can't automatically visit each other in the hospital when one is incapacitated, etc.
[citation needed]
Accepting that for the sake of argument — suppose I'm sterile, then. Or I just don't plan on having any kids. Do I still have a right to all the benefits that heterosexual couples obtain from legally recognized marriage? If so, then on what basis are those rights granted to me, but not to my gay neighbors next door? (I'm seriously curious whether you'll say no, sterile couples don't deserve those rights, or whether you'll just engage in more special pleading toward the prescribed end of denying marriage rights to gay couples.)
But back in reality, those of my friends who've gotten married already had many reasons for doing so, and "giving protections to the woman who bears a greater liability in childbearing" certainly wasn't at the top of their lists.
And dismissing discussion of crucial benefits such as the right to visit your husband or wife in the hospital as "appeals to emotion" is nothing short of absurd.
That is maybe one practical purpose of marriage, but it's not the legal basis, and there's a lot more to it from a societal perspective.
I think the lawyer/client and doctor/patient argument is interesting, but feels a little hollow, because people are in a position to choose to become doctors, lawyers, clients, and patients freely. There is no inherent discrimination in those relationships. Would you expect a special class of legal relationships between a black man and a white woman? I wouldn't.
Got a cite for that? If protection of childbearing women were such a great concern, wouldn't we expect societies to have historically provided much more protection to children born by non-married women, too? Yet historically when the Lord diddled the maid, neither the maid nor her bastard received any protection at all. Why single out married women to receive protection?
It seems far more likely to me that marriage was to provide a stable framework upon which to build a predictable system of inheritance of land. When the Lord dies, you really want to have a clear transfer of ownership, for the good of the estate and the commoners who depend on it.
It seems to me perfectly reasonable to assert that there will be unknown consequences to screwing with a system that has worked reasonably well.
The last time marriage was tinkered with back in the 60s, no fault divorce and alimony as normal were tacked on. Infidelity was also decriminalized. I find it very easy to believe millions of broken homes and fatherless children were a direct consequence. The social consequences in lower socio-economic strata have been severe in a way that educated people generally don't comprehend.
In conclusion, the conservative impulse to "conserve" social institutions that have a long track record of success is not fundamentally religious. It comes from the same place as environmentalism: don't go screwing with complex systems you probably don't fully understand.
The reason we don't apply this idea (except to things we already disagree with) is because it's completely illogical. Caution is one thing, but simply dismissing every idea that could have "unknown consequences" is a great way to make sure that literally nothing gets done. It is certainly not rational. It is, in a word, FUD.
At any rate, saying America's current implementation of marriage is a social institution going back through all of history and geography is just plain weird. Even in the modern age, marriage means very different things to different cultures, and that's ignoring all the "marriage" constructs that have existed in the past. Outlawing polygamy was a greater offense to the history of marriage than allowing gays to marry.
A couple recent articles by Robin Hanson about polygamy cover similar terrain in interesting ways. The arguments, particularly in the second article, more or less break it down to the problems of utilitarianism.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/polygamy-hypocrisy.htm...
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/hypergamy-and-polygamy...
But one of the reasons for this ruling was that it was shown in the court-room that children do as well when raised by a same-sex couple as by a heterosexual one. It then follows that recognizing those couples would be even better for those families.
I'm sure it's harder for young gay people to have straight parents than for young straight people to have gay parents, yet nobody ever worries about that scenario.
We have thousand of years of experience with a variety of institutions that share the name "marriage" but aren't very similar to each other. The current institution that bears that name has arguably only been around for about forty years, most recently being re-written by the sexual revolution and the increasing social acceptance of divorcing and re-marrying. Considering how flexible we as a society have become with respect to gender roles, this change is hardly "radical" by comparison.
It would be accurate to say we've had experience with many different kinds of heterosexual marriage, but once you're lumping in, say, 16th century English marriage laws and customs with 21st century Californian ones, gender starts to look like a minor detail.
We talk about "marriage" as if it's a simple, single idea, but historically, it's been applied to a wide range activities.
Let's be clear here: compulsory gay marriage would be radical. Allowing gay people to marry is not.
However, "Allowing a tiny sliver of the population to enjoy the same privileges and responsibilities as the rest of us?" can be a radical change. For example, it's exactly what happened when we abolished slavery.
I'm not trying to equalize slavery with gay marriage, just to point out that something that fits your criteria can be considered a radical change.
As to gay marriage rights, given that a majority of US population is against it (as was proved in California, one of the most progressive states, with Prop 8), the fact that courts suppressed Prop 8 is pretty radical. It pushes the equality goalpost a little bit further.
Repliers: don't bother citing the contradictory NOM study. If you believe anything they have to say, there is no room for conversation between us. The study hinges on an argument from Tony Perkins' Family Research Council, which is about as biased as any organization can be.
But IMHO this isn't hacker news and will pretty quickly get nasty.
edit: Also for same reasons as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1576226
And you seem strangely preoccupied with semantics. If marriage and civil partnership meant the same thing, what would be the point of having a distinction?
Sure, give them the same rights if you like, but just call it a 'civil partnership'.
If it was just about the rights, then I'd expect people to be happy with that. But it seems to be more about forcing an opinion onto others, which I disagree with.
Shall we use 'marriage' to also cover the union of a man to a horse? man to a table? man to a child? They have civil rights too!
(In the same way, I'd even describe your reason as 'religious, just there are no gods and churches and other deities involved'. We are also used to call fanboy disputes between the text editors or operating systems as religious wars. And it's a very good description.)
I'd be happy calling my argument 'historical'. I don't like changing things that have served us well for centuries.
Point is; the argument really did just boil down to your summary - there was no actual argument just lots of folded arms and grumbling.
This trade-off point is my main counter argument. Specifically, this means that gay marriage can have drawbacks for the society, e.g. (i) as others point out, the same logic (consenting adults, personal rights, etc.) can be used to argue for polygamy and other forms of relationships that are outside current society's norms; (ii) it may have adverse affects on the couples children.
A law that would forbid wearing a burqa as a societal trade-off would apply to everyone equally hence it wouldn't be discrimination. Even though it would affect the most people of a certain religion, it would also apply to secular burqa wearers.
The main issue with a law that forbids gays to marry, and the reason it's discrimination, is that it denies them a right that everyone else has.
Whether polygamy is legal or not has nothing to do with it. The law forbids a specific behavior (polygamy) and it applies to everyone so is not discriminatory. Constitutionally, it's in the same league as a law that forbids smoking in public places or, for that matter, killing people.
So you're left with only one potential argument: that gay marriage causes specific, societal harm that is not caused by non-gay marriage. I would like to see a solid proof of that. "It may have" is not one.
There is an agenda there...