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Comment by cubano | Hacker News Reader

here goes nothing...

Have you ever even thought to consider that maybe there was once a really good reason why marriage was defined as a union between a man and a woman?

You know, all those thousands of years before antibiotics were invented in the 1950's, when childbirth was very dangerous, and surviving childhood was only a 4 in 5 shot?

Not to mention the hard-scrabble fact that families needed unpaid workers to work the farm to survive?

Civilization needed babies, and lots of them, to keep things moving along. Promoting a lifelong union between people who couldn't naturally have children just wouldn't even make sense in that world, since for most of human history, that was the very reason for marriage.

Now...flame on! I needed some downvote cred anyway...

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I am not downvoting you or flaming you, as you are trying to engage in a debate, not being "needlessly negative".

However, that's a rubbish argument ... (Slight flaming then)

raising children is a good argument for stable marriage, irrespective of sexuality, and history is full of non typical arrangements (raised by grandparents, adoptive parents, neighbours etc)

Homosexuality has been more or less socially acceptable at different times as well (from nearly compulsory in Sparta or Ancient Greece to well he is the king, so we may as well)

No, the case against gay marriage has always been the case against dissent and the case for obedience to a central authority. It seems there are "social norms" at the case by case level and those at the official lip service level. A society that has less dissonance between those in my opinion has less tolerance for dissonance between other stances (like superstition vs science).

I am not downvoting you or flaming you, as you are trying to engage in a debate, not being "needlessly negative".

I appreciate that...without honest discussion this whole site is suspect, IMHO.

I am all for homosexuality if that is your thing!

But I'm sticking to my guns...for most of human history it was impossible for a man to have a child with a man, or a women with a women. That is a simple fact.

The idea marriage wasn't a social construct with the primary purpose of creating a situation that would optimize the creating AND caring of offspring seems just as factual to me.

Now of course, one can parse the whole of history and find exceptions and all that...that's fine, great in fact!

And yes, there is no doubt in the Judeo-Christian framework, obedience meant control, but I believe in this case you are totally throwing out the real biological basis with the bullshit one.

Defined by who? when? The problem with the argument you have presented is it lacks any kind of historical accuracy.

There are plenty of records dating back centuries to millennia which encode a whole Smörgåsbord of unions man and woman, man and women, man and man and the rarer cases woman and woman and woman and men and probably more that I have missed.

Humans did not just congregate somewhere in 10,000 BC and declare marriage is a union between a man and woman. Nor did they declare exactly what marriage was or the roles and responsibilities of the people involved and indeed today we can see some remnants of that - the concept of marrying for love verses an arranged marriage for example.

Really? In the Judeo-christian framework? Which, like-it-or-not, has to be considered the base reference for the definition of marriage.

Without trying to escalate anything, could you please show me the references for that?

> Really? In the Judeo-christian framework? Which, like-it-or-not, has to be considered the base reference for the definition of marriage.

Why? Marriage was around a long long time before Christianity or even Judaism. There were hue portions of the world which that framework didn't touch for centuries after it's conception. Even if we were to restrict our view to those polygamy still dominates large parts of their history - which is far from the view of "traditional" marriage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage#History_of_marriage is well cited, and links to other, more in depth articles concerning Greek History, Chinese History and others where "traditional" marriage was far from the norm (and around for much, much longer).

Why? Because the reality is that this country, the US, was totally and completely founded on the Judeo-Christian principles and is baked into the DNA of the founding documents.

One of the more interesting facts about the colonization of North America is that, without exception, the only colonies that survived were the ones founded with deep religious convictions. Quite a powerful coincidence, no doubt.

There were 100's of attempts, but yet this fact holds up, so claiming now that we should pretend, in the US, that none of that effected anything is very odd to me.

And let's not conflate the issue here...I am not saying I am such a troglodyte that I oppose gay unions, what I was trying to say is that, if you step back dispassionately and reason a bit, you can actually see some logic in what the church was attempting to promote, albeit in a very self-serving way.

Even if we were to restrict our view to those polygamy still dominates large parts of their history - which is far from the view of "traditional" marriage.

Yes, but once again, not from the than-and-now-culturally-dominant religion, but from offshoots whom may of simply used the issue as a marketing tactic to get noticed.

> Really? In the Judeo-christian framework? Which, like-it-or-not, has to be considered the base reference for the definition of marriage.

Not sure why that would be the case, given that the USA, at least, was founded by a bunch of enlightenment fans, the products of a time when the christian church's credibility was foundering.

> Without trying to escalate anything, could you please show me the references for that?

However since you asked about christianity in particular:: http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

Not sure why that would be the case, given that the USA, at least, was founded by a bunch of enlightenment fans, the products of a time when the christian church's credibility was foundering.

Nope...simply wrong.

All (not some) of the successful colonial group of North America were fundamentalists who were facing persecution from the Church of England for not agreeing with King Henry VIII.

Most were, of course, protestants who were simply following the lead of Luther and "rolling there own" version of Religion that they created due to some inspired readings of the Bible, which was of course now available in their language due to the printing press.

Henry was long dead before England colonized North America. Of course there was no Enlightenment "movement" (for lack of a better term) at that time so I thought it would be obvious that I was talking about the USA, i.e. late 18th century (1760s - 1780s) where indeed, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau et al were far more influential among the power structure than the book of Leviticus.

Which you can trivially confirm for yourself by a cursory glance at, for example, the Federalist papers, writings of Franklin, Jefferson et al.

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