Hacker News Reader

Basically what I'm saying is that being against State privileged gay marriage doesn't have to be anti-gay. It can be anti-State.

While I think this is a perfectly rational position, I'm dubious that it's a very good basis for opposing gay marriage rights.

I've noticed that libertarians and leftists both tend toward a passionate hatred of compromise and "half-measures," and this reasoning strikes me as one of those cases. If you really don't think the State should be involved in marriage at all, then you don't want the state recognizing gay marriage because you don't want it to recognize any marriage. But on a practical level, that's not going to happen any time soon. Extending gay marriage rights arguably reduces the State's ability to dictate who can and can't be married and thus increases individual freedom. Isn't that clearly preferable from a libertarian standpoint?

I clarified in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7461745

But to succinctly answer your question; no I don't think it is unequivocally libertarian. But it depends on who you talk to.

> I've noticed that libertarians and leftists both tend toward a passionate hatred of compromise and "half-measures," and this reasoning strikes me as one of those cases.

You mean compromise with respect to the expansion of the State. This is usually the distinction between a moderate and a radical.

> I'm dubious that it's a very good basis for opposing gay marriage rights.

Here's the problem: you're presupposing that marriage is a right.

I appreciate that marriage (along with a myriad of other things) is listed as a right in the UDHR, but that really isn't why gays---or others like polyamorous cohabitants---want marriage in the first place. They want it because of State granted privileges bestowed upon married couples. Those aren't rights.

Unfortunately, some of those privileges restrict the rights of all unmarried persons. Particularly with respect to hospital visitation. Everyone---including unmarried people---should be allowed to control such things about their lives.

Other privileges include tax breaks and the like. I won't go down that road...

With that said, you're basically telling me that I oppose something that I don't think even exists in the first place. To me, rights are much more fundamental than constructs like marriage.

The problem is that the debate is framed in terms of gay marriage. One's position against marriage in general can subsume one's position on gay marriage. But the lynch mob lacks perspective and can only imagine that being against gay marriage means being against gays.

Once you finally recognize that, "oh gee whiz, yeah, being against marriage in general is cool, but still, you aren't pragmatic enough for me."

OK. Now we're done. Before I was a bigot. But now I'm just not being pragmatic. That isn't a lynchable offense. So, we good now? (Not talking to you specifically, but in general.)

Disclaimer: I don't vote and don't contribute to any political causes/campaigns because there are none that exclusively support voluntary interaction. If someone put a gun to my head and told me to vote, I'd vote in favor of more egalitarian laws every time.

Sorry for being a windbag, but in this kind of topic, it's just way too easy to take short responses that aren't precise in bad faith.

> One's position against marriage in general can subsume one's position on gay marriage.

This makes no sense to me. When gay marriage is legal in all 50 states, the total number of extant marriages will increase by no more than a few percent. It seems, at the least, incredibly churlish to me to want to deny gay people the right to marry the consenting single adult of their choice just because you think it's unfair that marriage carries privileges. In short, your beef is mostly with straight people, but you're willing to take it out on the gays anyway, just because they're politically weaker. I can't see this as a principled stance.

And for the record, I agree that some of said privileges should be available to single people as well, like control over hospital visitation. I just think this is a completely orthogonal issue to gay marriage.

Respectfully, I think you've completely missed my point. Here's what tipped me off:

> In short, your beef is mostly with straight people

No. It's very much not with straight people. It's with the State. The State is the one suppressing people (not just gays) by giving special privileges to a preferred class of people.

> but you're willing to take it out on the gays anyway, just because they're politically weaker.

Uh, no, I'm not... This is exactly why I don't vote and don't contribute to political campaigns.

> And for the record, I agree that some of said privileges should be available to single people as well, like control over hospital visitation. I just think this is a completely orthogonal issue to gay marriage.

Then you haven't appreciated what it means to be against the State's involvement with marriage.

Against State privileged marriage => against all forms of State privileged marriage.

Once again, my point remains the same: being against State privileged marriage (and therefore State privileged gay marriage) does not make one a bigot. This runs contrary to what the lynch mob would like to assume.

>> In short, your beef is mostly with straight people

> No. It's very much not with straight people. It's with the State.

But the State is made of people. And most of the people who support, and benefit from, those special privileges are straight.

> I don't vote and don't contribute to political campaigns.

Okay -- I can understand neutrality. I just can't see your argument as supporting a position of active opposition to gay marriage.

> you haven't appreciated what it means to be against the State's involvement with marriage

Well, I was indicating that I didn't completely disagree with you about it. I certainly don't completely agree, either.

> being against State privileged marriage (and therefore State privileged gay marriage) does not make one a bigot

No. But opposing gay marriage more than you oppose straight marriage does.

Eich donated to Prop. 8. There's no way this makes sense as an expression of uniform opposition to all State-privileged marriage.

I think chipotle_coyote put it very well. Allowing gay marriage reduces the State's involvement in marriage. Presumably the number of actual marriages will increase slightly, but that is because a restriction on them has been removed.

> But the State is made of people. And most of the people who support, and benefit from, those special privileges are straight.

Governments have a monopoly on the use of legitimized coercion. Individuals don't.

The biggest trick governments have ever pulled is convincing everyone that the people is the same as the State. Sorry, but I don't buy it.

> I just can't see your argument as supporting a position of active opposition to gay marriage.

I don't know how to make this any simpler: Opposition of State privileged marriage implies opposition of State privileged gay marriage.

> No. But opposing gay marriage more than you oppose straight marriage does.

Nowhere have I implied or advocated this. The very crux of my argument is that you don't oppose or support one form of State privileged marriage over another.

> Eich donated to Prop. 8. There's no way this makes sense as an expression of uniform opposition to all State-privileged marriage.

The balance of probability supports this conclusion, but it is by no means guaranteed. This is precisely what my argument shows.

> I think chipotle_coyote put it very well. Allowing gay marriage reduces the State's involvement in marriage. Presumably the number of actual marriages will increase slightly, but that is because a restriction on them has been removed.

From the point of view of someone who is against State privileged marriage, this is ass backwards. It's not removing restrictions---it's granting privilege to a larger class of people (at the expense of those without that privilege).

You can rephrase this stuff however you want, but it doesn't change the very simple fact that being against State privileged marriage---and therefore State privileged gay marriage---doesn't make you bigot.

> From the point of view of someone who is against State privileged marriage, this is ass backwards. It's not removing restrictions---it's granting privilege to a larger class of people (at the expense of those without that privilege).

This is a cynical and short-sighted view.

It is cynical because it sees civil rights as a zero-sum game.

It is short-sighted for a closely related reason. Most opponents of gay marriage don't even want to draw a distinction between the religious institution of marriage and the civil institution. In their minds, marriage is divinely ordained, and its earthly recognition in the law is completely natural. "The family" -- meaning their particular conception of what families should be -- is all but sacred.

The gay marriage movement chips away at this belief system in several ways. First, it gives people reason to distinguish between religious and civil marriage; to see that whatever their personal religious beliefs may be, the law is about civil marriage. Also, it presents a picture of marriage as a human creation, rather than divinely ordained. It brings people into contact with unfamiliar family structures. And it makes ideas acceptable or at least debatable that previously were generally rejected. You can see this already with the debate over poly marriage.

In short, if you want to start a singles' rights movement, you should support gay marriage, because emotionally it is moving society in the direction you want, even if it is not yet doing that structurally.

I don't know why you're talking to me about divinity and sacred families. Its relevance eludes me.

You still haven't really addressed my central point, which is that one can be against gay marriage without being anti-gay.

> This is a cynical and short-sighted view. It is cynical because it sees civil rights as a zero-sum game.

I'm not talking about civil rights. You are. I've consistently used the phrase State privileged marriage. I use that instead of just "marriage" to specifically mark privileges that are given to some and held back from others. This isn't zero-sum. People who can check all the boxes get a marriage license plus special privileges. Nobody else can.

> In short, if you want to start a singles' rights movement

Now you're taking my comments in bad faith. Singles' rights? What is that? Do singles have special rights that other people don't have?

Sure, singles lose out on State privileged marriage. But so do couples that aren't married. And so do polyamorous cohabitants.

Ah, but that doesn't paint me as a selfish asshole, so it's not as catchy of an insult. I get it now.

> because emotionally it is moving society in the direction you want, even if it is not yet doing that structurally.

No. I would like society to move in the direction where it doesn't have to exude unquantifiable amounts of effort just to get government to permit them to associate in any way they want.

Your direction is just more of the same: "Oh government, can you pretty please let us make decisions for ourselves?"

I think you've done a pretty good job of painting yourself as a selfish asshole, and trying to paint yourself as the victim is less ingenuous.

The intersection of people I've met who actively fund and promote laws to deny gay people the right to marry and the people I've met who actively fund and promote laws to remove government from all marriage has been exactly zero people. I would love to be proven wrong about that, and I'm not saying your argument is incorrect, but I have personally only seen that argument used as an excuse to deny gay people the rights already given to heterosexual people.

You're most likely to find such people among principled libertarians. By their very nature they:

    1) Don't care what consenting individuals do.
    2) Want the power and influence of the State reduced.

Some of us are reasonably pragmatic and acknowledge that the State isn't going away any time soon. Therefore, we prefer that the State be as egalitarian as possible.

Others are less tolerable of pragmatism and do not support any expansion of State power. This has absolutely nothing to do with sexual orientation and is easily applied consistently.

Moreover, libertarians are very unlikely to even acknowledge marriage as a right. It's only meaningful in our society as a "right" precisely because governments grant special privileges to married couples. This discriminates against ALL unmarried people---not just gays.

If governments weren't involved in marriage, ALL of this would be a non-issue. People could choose to celebrate or signify their union in whichever manner they choose. To an anti-State ideologue, claiming that "well governments are involved so you might as just give them more power" is just a non-starter.

I get that participating in a lynch mob can be fun. But my only point here is that there are legitimate arguments for the other side that don't require bigotry. (Since other commenters were claiming this to be impossible.) This is an inconvenient fact for a lynch mob acting on limited information.

The important part of my comment was "actively fund[ing] and promot[ing] laws". I have no major problem with the argument that the state should be out of marriages entirely. That seems fully reasonable (at least to the extent I've thought about it).

My problem is that no one is actually trying to remove government from all marriages, as this argument would seem to imply. This argument is only used to defend removing gay rights, as with Prop 8.

http://www.webpronews.com/oklahoma-state-rep-wants-to-ban-al...

As with many of my preferred policies, I am sickened by the other people who support it. They do exist though, and they are in office.

Thanks for the link! I had not seen that before. I'd like to give the "get the government out of all marriage" position some more thought. As with any new position, I'm sure that will lead to quite a few questions and personal snags. Since you seem to believe in that, and I'm sure have thought about it more deeply than I have, I'd love to be able to field you some questions after a day or two if you wouldn't mind!

To be completely honest: I don't believe anyone has that position in good faith.

I certainly know people who do. But then again, I travel in voluntaryist circles, so I'm predisposed to exactly the kind of people who might have that position. There aren't many.

I oppose all marriage, but I am willing to be pragmatic about this, and will vote for both legislation that liberalizes marriage and legislation that bans it.

Sure, and that's a rational, coherent viewpoint that doesn't require you to want to keep gays as lesser citizens. The viewpoint espoused by burntsushi requires it. I don't care if you think the state institution of marriage should be abolished--I even kind of agree--but if your idea of "holding the line" is "nah, fuck those people", you have jank in your worldview and I suspect very much I can identify it.

> The viewpoint espoused by burntsushi requires it.

I don't hold that viewpoint. I was merely demonstrating that one can be against gay marriage without being anti-gay.

> "nah, fuck those people"

Uh, no. I'm not doing it to those people. Government is.

Virtually every law regulating social behaviors (whether it's created or repealed) requires oppressing some class of people. In the case of State privileged marriage, it oppresses everyone who can't or won't marry but still want benefits only available to married persons.

Yes, you are saying "these people should not have the same rights as these other people."

You can, and given your posting I am sure will, continue to represent otherwise. You are unconvincing, and somebody who votes, or donates money, in the method of your stated position is an asshole. Because making the perfect the enemy of the good and ignoring that you hurt people in the process is wrong.

Well, you're just wrong about that. I'm personally aware of people who do.