The Hate-Filled Totalitarian Gay Lobby!

The tax code may be based on tradition in this case but there is no doubt it can be used as a political tool and a way to influence behaviors.

Giving tax deductions for marriage, children, house ownership etc is a direct way for the government to encourage those activitivies.

Separating the institution of marriage from the societal recognition of couple based, long term relationships between committed adults (ie. civil unions) makes perfect sense to me.

Civil Union = government defined entity to ensure civil rights and equal treatment of all citizens

Marriage = religious defined entity

 

I hope that was sarcasm?

 

Slightly off topic but I think it is ironic that the groups that support these tax breaks argue against social engineering.

 

I don't get it either. Is it that legal benefits should be taken away from all marriages?

 

Or given to all single people. Adding to discrimination does not take away from discrimination. Well, maybe it does but increasing the numbers that benefit from it doesn't make it right.

 

I was corrected on this the other day. The term "lifestyle" is derogatory when the word Gay is put in front of it.

There isn't much else to disagree with in your post. I suspect that at the individual level there are some people that want to get married for "love" and some that want to get married for benefits. I don't have any reason to believe that same sex marriage would be any different.

 

"Traditional marriage" is a nonstarter. Traditional marriage was developed to provide a source of domestic slave labor for men.

The question is, what is marriage now? Why does it exist as a legal institution? I have my ideas as to why, and I've expressed them more than once on these boards. Marriage does not exist to pair people up for procreation. It hasn't served that purpose since around the time birth control became widely available and effective.

Marriage doesn't exist so society can approve of other people's love. Nobody in the history of love has ever felt so in love with someone that he needed to sign a contractual agreement with that person. The rights and responsibilities of civil marriage exist for a reason.

 

Point being, "Traditional" marriage is just another way of saying "marriage as defined by the religious right", not some admirable ideal.

 

Yes, this is where the opponents of gay marriage have not been forthright in their arguments in the various gay marriage lawsuits. When asked to identify the purposes for "traditional marriage" as a legal institution, it is impossible to ignore that legal marriage reflects the pervasive and long standing discrimination against women. Trying to spin it as being some type of equal and romantic legal partnership is revisionist history and plainly not accurate.

 

I would substitute in "was" and then you are correct. It seems pretty obvious to me that we are heading in a direction that the religious right will not like but will have to accept.

 

How can we ignore the whole tying men down thing though? Up till now, and probably still, it's always been in a woman's best interest to have a devoted partner so she's not left alone with a baby. Marriage has been for the purpose of keeping the man there, and that's at least as much in the woman's interest as the man's. It's also keeping the peace, where people are theoretically supposed to stop competing to tempt or drag away your partner.

 

Not really though. Marriage was invented by male-dominated society, not as a collaboration between men and women. Does a woman really need a devoted partner? If she has a network of other women to help her care for the children, she won't be left alone with the baby. If she has the power to earn income and the right to control it, then she doesn't need to depend on a man for her own survival. Patriarchy created a situation in which women were dependent upon men economically, making marriage the only viable survival option for most women.

The essence of marriage, historically, is the need to assure paternal bloodlines. You always know who the mother of the child is. A woman can sleep with as many men as she likes, yet always be sure that her offspring are actually hers and that her genetic line is continuing. Men like to spread their seed around to increase chances of keeping their line going, but they can never be sure if it's working. Marriage is (was) a very convenient way for men to guarantee the continuation of their genetic line. Concepts like virginity, chastity, and monogamy arose to serve men's need to know whose child was whose, to be sure they were reproducing, and to be sure the inheritance went to their real sons.

So when I talked about slave labor, I did not just mean general domestic tasks, I meant it as a pun as well. Wives were slave labor labor. Get it?

The point being that marriage did not arise as a way for two people to express their love, or a way for society to guarantee the perpetuation of the species (people get on pretty well with that aim regardless). It didn't come about to create stable families in which to raise children, and it didn't come about to make people have to approve of other people's sexual preferences or love choices or whatever. It arose as a convenient system for men to dominate women, and as crazypete mentioned, it also had the added benefit of cementing political allegiances, strengthening the power and influence of the church, yadda yadda yadda.

It's a blatant lie when gay marriage opponents claim that traditional marriage is between one man and one woman. It's a lie (or an ignorant misconception at the least) to claim that traditional marriage was intended to promote procreation. Those claims simply are not true historically.

Marriage has been a lot of things in a lot of places and time periods. The question to ponder now is what marriage is and should be today. Harking back to some notion of tradition is pointless and, frankly, dishonest.

 

A better question is, does a person need a devoted partner, to which the answer is, yes!

That's idiotic.

Other women won't care for a child's father should. Why should they... it's not their child. The fact that some men are shit-heads doesn't change that because so are some women. I'm not trying to be nasty but you're just confirming how little you know about people and, well... about life, when you make ludicrous sweeping generalisations like these comments.

Having said that I agree that marriage is a red herring and totally irrelevant. That's the case today and it's probably always been the case, 'patriarchal society' or not.

 

You are totally misunderstanding what I wrote.

I was talking about the genesis of marriage as a social, cultural, religious, and legal institution. The idea was proposed that marriage, at its origin, benefited women by guaranteeing them help in raising children. Prehistorical societies were generally tribal, and women most certainly did share the child-rearing duties communally. In many societies they still do. So it is simply false to say that women, before marriage arose, were left alone with their babies, or that if marriage had not been invented they would be left alone with their babies. Just not true.

 

Well, fair enough in those terms. I agree that marriage is an irrelevance in the modern age I suppose and, on that basis alone, there's no reason why gays shouldn't be allowed to do it if they want.

 

I would definitely not say that marriage is irrelevant in the modern world. What I would say is that the reasons for its relevance have changed drastically and fundamentally.

 

Selective breeding (especially among the upper classes), the acquisition of property and/or power, and social pressure. I'm sure I left something out. Love?