Time for the 2012 Election Season to Start

[IJ]

Certainly social engineering may have unintended consequences. But I am less convinced about unforeseeable consequences. Because boys and girls aren't identical, treating them as such isn't a brilliant idea. Because giving people who don't work or act fatherly financial assistance could readily encourage bad habits, it is no shock that work and marriages habits could be negatively affected by government aid.

However, I fail to see how gay marriage is going to ruin marriage. If a gay marriage fails, that is a union that probably would have been LESS successful without marriage equality. No harm introduced. And why would a straight couple fail to get married or fall apart because some gay people got married too? Are we suggesting that allowing gay people to marry takes the shine off marriage? That straight people will lose interest if maybe 2-3% of men and fewer women who are LGB exercise a new right to marry? Are we saying that marriage is viewed as special and exclusive, like owning a porsche, and this effect would be lost if a tiny fraction of the country were permitted to have it too--as if Porsche sales would drop if % ownership increased? Really speculative since we're saying Porsche access would go from 98 to 100%. Do gays sully the whole experience, then? As if all the whites dropped out of the country club when one black person was admitted. Oh, say it ain't so...

Beyond that, how would marriage equality destroy straight marriage and Gairriage would not? Do we think those straights whose marriages would dissolve if gays got married would really be induced to stick it out if an identical, alternately named, gay institution were used instead of marriage equality? I find that pretty speculative. So if we're worried that encouraging stable long term gay unions will affect straights, we ought to step out and say no DP's no CU's and no legal approximations of Marriage. And that's something most Americans disagree with, because it's a sketchy argument, and really unfair and unjust.

Beyond THAT we have to again remind ourselves that boy=girl education and social programs DID something to all those students and all those poor families. Gay marriage will affect only a tiny fraction of the homes and only those that opt in and would tend to encourage, not discourage responsibility. Stretching the outcomes of those programs to suggest a risk to gay marriage would be like me saying marriage inequality is a modern day holocaust--faulty logic, and it would get jumped over immediately by folk like JR if it came from me.

I'll tell you what's a lot LESS speculative about the dissolution of marriages:

1) Insta-access to marriage for ill conceived and brief relationships (the Britney Spears effect) DOES make a mockery of marriage. It DOES reduce the value of the institution.

2) Ready access to divorce (no fault) and minimal consequences of divorce mean there is little reason to stick together. Mandatory counseling? Waiting period? Other consequences? Naw, those are just for abortion.

3) People clamoring for a product or institution generally increases it's perceived value. I would NOT be surprised if the institution of marriage were held in a bit higher regard because tens of thousands of gays demanded it saying it was valuable, and many straights opposed them believing the institution was too precious (too precious for what I still don't know).

So what do we see? A bunch of conservatives and religious figures spending millions to ensure that marriage is constructed as a durable, serious, gnerally life long institution by limiting divorce and making applicants weight their choice more? Granting more benefits and prestige to marriage? Fighting the constant depiction of debaucherous cheap sex all over the TV and radio? NO. NOT A PEEP (unless we're not talking about marriage and only about broader "decency" when you get a small dose of resistance to easy sex culture). That would be the rational way to prop up marriage. INSTEAD, everyone is focused on speculating about the possible harm of gay marriage and excluding some from participating. That to me says preju--er, traditional discomfort with same sex couples, not concern about the institution.

The real traditional, conservative approach to marriage would be to EXPECT and ENCOURAGE gay and straight people to regard intimacy as precious and save it for long term, committed relationships, especially hard to dissolve, lifelong unions devoted to the rearing of kids and other facets of responsible citizenship. Telling gay people they can't marry encourages a shallow and sex focused culture, on the other hand.

So Bill, how does the effect of programs with forseeable side effects applied widely tell us about the effect of programs which utilize a well known intervention in a tiny fraction of the society, and why aren't marriage advocates seeking to do more concrete and immediate things to shore up marriage instead of piling on the gays? All those Prop 8 millions could have gone a long way to shore up marriage, and I don't think a penny would have been spent without the gay threat rearing its head.

[TSDguy]

cxt, your posts are a text version of abstract expressionism.

[IJ]

Minor addendum: if the concern is that wedding halls and tuxedo people might get slammed for not serving gay couples, it's worth pointing out that the state validation of marriage makes no difference. Gay people can already request the entire range of wedding services, and do, and if there was a big mess about people refusing and getting in trouble, we'd have heard about it already.

It's similar to the complaint that gay marriage will result in kids getting educated on gay marriage in schools. Marriage was legal without that being a problem in CA, and blocking marriage hardly makes it less of a social issue that will come up in class.

[cxt]

IJ

Kinda why I put "some" in quotation marks......a "big mess" as you put it?.......Probably not...haven't really researched it...but I'm only aware or 2 cases of what I was talking about--1 here in the States and 1 in Canada.

Less a concern and more of another "are people considering the ramifications?" kind of thing in keeping with Bill's "unintended consequences" post.

What else might be lurking about that people are not thinking thu?

I keep hearing various folks talking about how that if marriage is more broadly defined it quite possible could open up all kinds of anti-discrimation lawsuits over people's religion-----not sure that I believe that.....but its certainly worth exploring.

BTW I don't your "failing" to see how "gay marriage is going to ruin marriage"........I don't think there is anything too see. (yes that is a poor attempt at humor on my part.)
I don't think that "gay marriage" is going to "ruin" stright marriage....that was always a really weak argument for the talking heads of several groups to make....IMO
What someone else does or does not do should have zero effect on how you treat your spouse and behave in your marriage.

[TSDguy]

It's a beautiful marriage of the emotional concepts of abstract expressionism and the form and aesthetics of Italian futurism.

[fivedragons]