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Comment by glesica | Hacker News Reader

> Why not allow 12 year olds to marry as a consititutional right?

Marriage is a legal contract. 12 year olds can't enter into legal contracts (alone). Therefore, 12 year olds can't get married. This also takes care of pedophiles marrying children.

Gay people are born gay. So this is different from polygamy. Animals can't enter into legal contracts. So this is different from bestiality.

As an aside, my girlfriend just pointed out to me that it is hard to justify laws against incest (two adult relatives). Maybe we shouldn't have such laws.

The best way, in my opinion, to look at this issue is to see marriage not as some kind of weird lovey-dovey thing, but to see it as what it is, a legal contract that has special consideration in many areas of the law and society.

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>As an aside, my girlfriend just pointed out to me that it is hard to justify laws against incest (two adult relatives). Maybe we shouldn't have such laws.

I don't think we should have them. We only have them because its "eeeewwwww." Social taboo. Cousin marriage is legal in most of the east coast, including in my state and cousin marriage wasn't taboo historically.

In non-cousin marriage states it would be hard to enforce such a ban anyways. Do you have to prove you aren't related when you get your license? Who is going to find out? Who is going to care? Is the IRS going to challenge you? Is your employer going to find out your spouse is actually your cousin, know that is illegal in the state you got married in, and then deny your spouse benefits because your marriage wasn't technically legal? Probably not.

"Genetic problems" is compelling in some ways (but probably overblown) but you can have sex without marriage and marriage without sex and have sex without children (especially in the case of same-sex sex, post menopause sex, sex with someone who had their gonads removed, sex with inter-sexed persons... I can go on...)

I would also say it is your choice to have children with genetic problems - I mean we don't actually outlaw it. If two people were carriers of a terrible disease we don't punish the parents for knowingly taking that risk. We don't punish parents who have children much later in life (children born to parents of advanced age have a higher chance of a few diseases such as Down's Syndrome.)

The reason we have these laws is nobody has challenged them in court yet and is not likely to because not to many people want to marry their sister enough to file a federal lawsuit and I'm not aware of too many people who were arrested for incest (regardless if they were practicing it or not).

Legislatures can pass any laws they want. It can only be challenged by judicial review after said law is passed.

I'm free with people having "Timmeh" children as long as I as a taxpayer don't need to pay for their choosing to have compromised children.

Having a child is always a genetic lottery. At what point does some somewhat advanced probability of some disease become "choosing to have compromised children"?

Gay people do not have to be born gay, even if the radical majority tend to be.

There is nothing that prevents a person from deciding they want to experiment sexually, or completely alter their sexual identity, at any given time.

It would be a form of bigotry to proclaim that straight people can't choose to be gay of their own free will, and vice versa. It would imply we're not in control of our own sexuality, and that we lack free will.

And this is not a support of the bigots that proclaim that being gay is always a choice and that gay people should just stop pretending and change their minds --- those people were always in the wrong, their argument was always vile. Sticking to the: gay people are all born gay, premise, is a defeatist response to that bigotry, it's a very very poor defense when a defense is not needed at all.

The proper position is: if I want to be straight or gay, it is my choice, period. If I'm born gay, that's fine; if I'm born gay and want to be straight, that's fine; if I'm born gay and only want to be gay, that's fine. And so on.

That's arguable - folks are notoriously incapable of controlling their sexuality, to the point its reasonable to postulate free will has nothing to do with it.

It may be a moot point though, i've always felt that it's a gray area - not black or white.

Eg, i could feel/claim to be entirely straight. But if i have a drunken experience in college, perhaps i realize that i enjoyed it a bit. Did i change? Or was i never "100% straight" to begin with?

Who's to say that you can't even be wrong about your own sexuality? We're wrong about things all the time, even within our own minds. Is sexuality any different? I doubt it.

The idea that you're born straight or gay appears to be created by a desire to separate humanity. You're in one camp, they're in another, and with that separation you can judge them differently.

Interesting how it all comes about though. We're complex creatures in everything we do, it seems.

> The proper position is: if I want to be straight or gay, it is my choice, period. If I'm born gay, that's fine; if I'm born gay and want to be straight, that's fine; if I'm born gay and only want to be gay, that's fine. And so on.

I agree completely. I always thought that the biological argument was a red herring meant mostly to sway those that couldn't be swayed anyways (those that thought gay impulses were aberrant). The moral argument remains the same whether someone is born gay or choses to become gay.

I am not sure I can buy into the "it's a choice" camp.

If you were a avid meat enthusiast, you owned your own meat smoker, held barbeques on the weekend, and your license plate said "3atmeat". if you woke up one morning and said, "You know what? Imma be a vegetarian" there is something disingenuous about that. Even if you decide that the treatment of animals by the meat industry is cruel, and you chose to abstain for ethical reasons, if a perfectly cooked and seasoned steak was presented to you, you would probably salivate.

Now, instead, if you found yourself never really enjoying meat, and found that dining without meat was more pleasant to you, then it would seem you were always a vegetarian, or at least have vegetarian leanings. and did not realize it.

EDIT: with respect to the person below: to be clear I am not saying that being gay is necessarily genetic. Perhaps neurological, but my claim is that you cannot fight against what feels natural without some repercussion

I think you missed his point. The point is, it doesn't matter whether it's a choice or not. It's not bad in either case.

Agreed.

Although, I'm a vegetarian and I'm salivating at the thought of a perfectly cooked and seasoned steak. :)

It's first time I encounter someone sharing this sentiment too.

I'm so tired of hearing 'they're born this way' argument. It just sounds like if it was a choice, it would be totally ok to persecute them.

> Gay people do not have to be born gay, even if the radical majority tend to be.

I thought about noting that "most" gay people are born gay, but I didn't. It doesn't really matter for my argument, provided that at least some gay people are born gay. The point is that you can't equate polygamy and gay marriage because polygamists make a conscious choice to be polygamists, they aren't born that way.

I would actually be fine with polygamy (I think the correct term is actually polyamory), but it is a commonly used argument against gay marriage because most people are against it or find it uncomfortable, and it has a pretty ugly history in some areas. I was trying to refute the "slippery slope" class of arguments against gay marriage, so I gave a refutation for that one.

> Marriage is a legal contract. 12 year olds can't enter into legal contracts (alone). Therefore, 12 year olds can't get married.

Marriage is a formal relationship between two people of the opposite sex. Two men or two women are of the same sex. Therefore two men or two woman cannot marry.

You can do anything, if you redefine the meaning of everything.

Strawman.

There's nothing about marriage that necessitates restricting it to members of opposite sexes. It is however a contract, which requires restricting it to persons that are capable of consent. Exclusion conflicts the basic premise of equal rights so the exclusion has to have valid reasons other than "because that's how we defined it".

A more interesting question would be why it's restricted to natural persons and why it is restricted to two persons.

> There's nothing about marriage that necessitates restricting it to members of opposite sexes.

There's nothing about contracts that necessitate restricting them to persons capable of consent, if you decide to define contracts not to require consent anymore.

If you feel free to redefine the nature of marriage, surely you can also feel free to redefine the nature of contracts.

Contracts, by their nature, require consent. If there isn't consent, then there literally isn't a contract. Do you and I have a contract saying that you'll give me all your money? Without consent, we might. I'll be expecting a check from you within a week.

Marriage, by its nature, as seen by the government (that is an important qualification), requires nothing more than two consenting individuals. In the eyes of the government, marriage is nothing but a contract between two people. If your religion wants to define it some other way, that's fine with me. But from the standpoint of our government, the way your religion defines it makes no difference, nor should it.

I would actually be perfectly fine with renaming the legal institution of "marriage". It would actually be better if no one could get "legally" "married". Just call it a civil union. If you want to have a religious ceremony, great, but all the government would recognize is a civil union contract. However, most people don't agree with me, so we're stuck calling it marriage even though it has nothing to do with religious traditions.

> Contracts, by their nature, require consent. If there isn't consent, then there literally isn't a contract.

'Marriages, by their nature, require a man and woman. If there aren't a man and woman, then there literally isn't a contract.'

You're not arguing: you're just asserting. One surely could have a piece of paper legally called a 'contract' which states that I owe you money, but to which I have no consented. The fact that it's not what you & I and the law today would call a contract would be irrelevant if the law changed tomorrow.

Heck, we have a constitutional amendment forbidding involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime, and yet we have a draft and people can be forced to work for others. Words have lost their meaning.

> Marriage, by its nature, as seen by the government (that is an important qualification), requires nothing more than two consenting individuals.

As of today, in this country, that's true. A few days ago, it wasn't. Anything can mean anything once words stop meaning anything.

> I would actually be perfectly fine with renaming the legal institution of "marriage". It would actually be better if no one could get "legally" "married". Just call it a civil union.

That's what I've advocated for. And it shouldn't be limited to two people having sex with one another, either. If a fraternity wish to form a temporary civil union in order to secure health insurance or ownership of their home, let them. Why does the government care who's having sex with whom, if that sex cannot create children?

> As of today, in this country, that's true. A few days ago, it wasn't. Anything can mean anything once words stop meaning anything.

No, it was never true. What about marriage makes it specifically require a man and a woman? There was never anything in the government definition of marriage that meant that it required a man and a woman. There was never any requirement to have children, or even to be able to have children. The only reason "marriage" required a man and a woman is that laws had been passed to make it so.

In other words, you could take every word written on marriage in the legal code and apply it, without alternation other than fixing the pronouns, to a same-sex marriage. Marriage didn't change, it just became available to more people.

> What about marriage makes it specifically require a man and a woman?

Is that a serious question? What do you think marriage is, State recognition that two people want to have sex exclusively? Why does it even make sense to have State recognition of a sexual relationship? It really doesn't.

Now, I don't think it makes particular sense to have the State recognise sexual relationships which may produce children, because there's no real need for it too: modern paternity testing can easily solve the actual problem civil marriage addresses.

As for the rest, why should those civil benefits be limited to people in a sexual relationship? Why should I be able to put my brother on my insurance? Why shouldn't a fraternity be able to form a civil union if they wish?

What possible benefits does civil marriage confer that should be restricted to two people who have sex, but not restricted to two people who might produce children?

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