Greg Krehbiel
31 for 31
by Greg Krehbiel on 4 November 2009
“Gay marriage has now lost in every single state — 31 in all — in which it has been put to a popular vote.”
Maine Voters Reject Gay Marriage Law
2009-11-04 » Greg Krehbiel
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Re: 31 for 31
4 November 2009 @ 3:43 pm
But in a democracy, should the majority be allowed to deny civil rights to a minority by popular election?
4 November 2009 @ 3:52 pm
The problem with your question is that it’s somewhat circular. Who decides what is a “civil right”?
4 November 2009 @ 3:57 pm
Denying civil rights to a minority by popular election is only POSSIBLE in a democracy.
I’m not giving you that gay “marriage” is a civil right. Gays are able to marry anyone they want of the opposite sex, just like everybody else.
Would it be a civil right to marry your mother if you were sterilized? How about your cat?
4 November 2009 @ 6:51 pm
That’s beside the point. Principles of constitutional democracy require that the majority rules, but that minorities are protected.
4 November 2009 @ 7:00 pm
It is the TAX BREAKS that are at the heart of the issue, as well as the protection of several laws.
Anonymous is right that a gay person can marry whoever they want. No one will jail them or reindoctrinate them. They are free to choose whom they marry and when.
The Problem is that they then would need further protection of their agreement in order to establish things like “who gets to decide about my partner’s health care if they are incapacitated?” Or being able to get housing without prejudice because of not being a heterosexual couple. Other matters, like getting “in” on a partner’s health care plan as a couple and such are not civil rights issues.
I assure you I would still marry my husband even if there were no tax or legal benefits.
4 November 2009 @ 7:43 pm
Deb, you are right about that.
I remember a polygamist on a daytime talk show once who asserted that he was not breaking the law, because the law says that you can have only one marriage license and he only had one of those. His response to the obvious “but then you are not married” argument was that if he were driving and got pulled over for speeding, he could not claim that he was not driving simply because he did not have a driver’s license.
But that was not what Anonymous said. He said that gays are permitted to marry someone of the opposite sex, just like everybody else, which reminds me of the Reverend Lovejoy’s statement that in America, we are free to worship Jesus Christ in any way we want.
It should be noted that the state of Virginia, which some day must face the 20th century, was so apoplectic over the prospect that gays might have used contract law to make arrangements for inheritance, hospital visitation, etc, that they outlawed any contract between two people of the same sex. It would have made it unlawful for me to buy a used car from a man in Virginia.
The strange thing to me is that while the whole issue demonstrably affects almost no one, people are eager to deny rights to others. In Idaho (I think) a poll showed that even those people who acknowledged that gay marriage would not negatively affect them in any way were opposed to it.
It would be like me trying to outlaw Budweiser. As long as I don’t drink it, it doesn’t hurt me, so why should I care?
4 November 2009 @ 8:08 pm
Ah a good plan. We can OUTLAW coffee, and then I won’t have to smell that AWFUL SMELL!
4 November 2009 @ 9:18 pm
I used to have a 7th Day Adventist as a neighbor. He was convinced that there was a plot by those “Sunday worshipers” to force everyone to worship on Sunday.
But if the majority can vote to deny the rights of a minority, that’s not such a crazy sounding idea.
BTW, did you know that you don’t have a constitutional right not to be framed for a crime you didn’t commit?
4 November 2009 @ 10:11 pm
I agree with those who say gays are already free to marry who they wish, but all the opportunities that heteros receive with marriage are just that – opportunities, not rights.
That said, I think legally denying gay marriage is hypocritical. As long as birth control is both legal and endorsed, marriage will not be a reproduction topic. So why bother with any further restrictions…
4 November 2009 @ 11:05 pm
If marriage is not about reproduction and the regulation of families, it’s meaningless. It’s just an arbitrary arrangement between any number of people who wish to create a specially sanctioned kinship relationship. If it’s not for the support of families, it applies to any combination of persons for whatever reasons they deem fit.
Perhaps this is similar to Greg’s feeling about Government-run Education. Maybe the Government should just get out of the Marriage licensing business altogether, because marriage has traditionally been sanctioned by religious communities.
Of course, when the basic unit of social cohesion is completely undermined, when children are raised so confused about gender roles and sexual relationships that they are unable to relate to anyone as adults, I guess we’ll just say “woops! that didn’t work, did it?”. Oh, no we won’t, because we’ll be too confused to see what went wrong. The few who might tell us what we are doing wrong will be silenced as hate-speaking bigots.
See Pope Paul VI warnings in Humanae Vitae about what would happen with widespread contraception for a taste of this sort of prescience. You have to be blind not to see that he was right. http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=28718
4 November 2009 @ 11:59 pm
Pigweed — the funny thing about your argument is that it’s the same as the argument you get from Catholic apologists about birth control. That is — if you accept birth control (i.e., the intentional separation of procreation from sex), you have to accept homosexuality, bestiality, etc.
My problem with that argument is that it’s an all or none argument, and I think marriage and sexuality is more like an onion — with layers.
Obviously our sexual drive is naturally heterosexual and designed to make babies in the context of a stable family structure where children will be welcomed and nurtured.
But I reject the idea that you either accept or reject that whole package. A married man and woman who decide that a particular sex act shouldn’t make a baby this particular month is not the same as a wild sex orgy. There are gradations between.
Of course it’s always hard to decide to draw the line in one place and not another. But it’s entirely reasonable to say that heterosexual relationships are more in keeping with our nature and with good public order than homosexual relationships — no matter what you say about procreation and all that.
5 November 2009 @ 2:48 am
Greg, I agree that the married who “manage” fertility is not the same thing as a wild sex orgy. But it doesn’t help to compare those two activities as a snapshot in time. Instead, look at the continuum.
Before there is a marriage, there is an unmarried man and an unmarried woman who are being taught that sex, marriage, and kids are not related (birth control, etc). So finally they do get married, but five years later they decide to get divorced. One of them joins a sex orgy.
Certainly there are countless “sound” marriages with birth control, but that is not counter-evidence. You need to count several generations of marriages with birth-control, and plot the rate of divorce and unwed pregnancies. When you see the horrible upward trends, *that* is the reality of birth control.
In effect, marriage has become little more than a decision to go on a date. And if it is just a dating experience, why limit it to heterosexuals? I am not offering Catholic foresight, I’m documenting secular hindsight. If birth control didn’t exist, there would not have been 33 states contemplating the “gay marriage” topic today.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it is neither sensible nor possible to banish birth control. It even saves lives. However, its long-term symptoms pose a very “Twelve Monkeys” prospect for the future.
5 November 2009 @ 8:31 am
I think the whole birth control line of thinking is a kinda weak argument against homosexual marriage, guys…O_o
In fact, the conventions of marriage – for instance that the children born to the marriage are the financial responsibility of the couple no matter who the biological father is – and similar legal conventions are all in need of a fine tooth comb if we are going to start redefining marriage. (This applies to plyogamy as well…)
As usual, in these cases of the law following along behind moral decay, it is the children who will lose the most.
5 November 2009 @ 11:43 am
kdeb: The whole “birth control line of thinking” is not a weak argument against but rather a strong argument for homosexual marriage.
5 November 2009 @ 11:52 am
I think kdeb’s point (and I agree with her) is that the birth control argument is weak from start to finish and has little to do with homosexual marriage.
The larger issue is easy divorce, which has done far more to make marriage seem like a long date than birth control could ever do.
5 November 2009 @ 12:22 pm
It’s all part of the same tree. Once people disconnect the sex act with procreation, marriage becomes contingent (divorce), gay “marriage” is acceptable (marriage is meaningless), etc.
The Christian life is demanding. Used to be, adultery was an act, Christ points out you are culpable for adultery in your heart, also. Similarly, immorality used to be fornication, but now it’s also what’s in your heart surrounding marital practices.
Either the Church has teaching authority or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, then where do you get moral authority? Through Reason alone like Dawkins?
5 November 2009 @ 12:30 pm
I simply don’t buy the argument re: contraception. Evangelicals use contraception and don’t believe in gay marriage.
5 November 2009 @ 12:37 pm
Evangelicals may not believe in gay marriage, but it may be just distaste for Gays and unwillingness to give them any “rights”.
Just because someone hasn’t slipped all the way down a slippery slope doesn’t mean there’s not a slippery slope to fall down.
5 November 2009 @ 12:57 pm
So if their reasons aren’t the same yours, it must just be bigotry? C’mon.
5 November 2009 @ 1:05 pm
I didn’t say it “must” be bigotry, I gave it as a potential reason.
Look, saying that A doesn’t cause B because A didn’t lead directly to B in a specific case is saying that the two situations are equivalent in every respect. Do you really believe this?
As an example: Prostitution leads to HIV infections. No, that’s not true because these women who are involved in prostitution have no HIV. Could be there’s no HIV anywhere among the population cited, but it doesn’t deny the fact that one leads to the other.
5 November 2009 @ 1:10 pm
If we are speaking as people of faith, then we must first admit that the slippery slope is what we are all on, if we speak in regards to our propensity for being wrong.
Anonymous, you are really making Catholic beliefs look like a general distaste for other believers, an issue which is even more directly addressed than any homophobic concerns in Scripture.
I don’t find that your way of expressing yourself does honor to the faith you seem to defend.
5 November 2009 @ 1:25 pm
You’re right that a specific counter-example doesn’t mean the pattern might not be generally true. But what if there are four or five counter-examples? How many counter-examples does it take to question the assertion?
The asserted relationship (acceptance of contraception leads down a slippery slope to acceptance of homosexuality) isn’t proven empirically. It’s just a theory. And I’m skeptical of theories that assume that people act rationally, as if beliefs are all lined up in order in the brain and as you change one it ripples its way through the other beliefs. I’m even more skeptical that anybody knows what all those reasons are.
People seem quite willing and able to believe things that seem contradictory. Maybe they are being inconsistent, or maybe there’s a deeper reason that the arm-chair philosopher doesn’t get.
For example, when it comes to RC views on contraception, the idea that we must respect the dual purpose of bonding and babies is a relatively recent thing — at least in terms of emphasis. The “bonding” part wasn’t that much a part of the discussion 50 years ago.
RC philosophers started to see the need for another angle that helped explain the whole concept better. “Bonding and babies” is better than just “babies.”
My point is that an analysis from 1940 that focused mostly on the procreation side of things wouldn’t have seen issues that somebody in 1990 might see. There were other factors that weren’t being taken into account.
In the same way, Evangelicals may resist homosexual marriage for a reason that’s completely outside the contraception framework.
5 November 2009 @ 2:02 pm
I’m really not that motivated to research it that much, but I think your “recent angle” on the bonding functions of marriage is just your own perception here.
I think you’ll find that the Four Good of Marriage is very old in RC thought and this goes all the way back to Genesis. God saw that it was not good that man should be alone and made for him a helpmate, not a procreation partner, but a helpmate.
Perhaps the bonding aspect got more emphasized more recently in response to various modern pressures on marriage.
5 November 2009 @ 2:07 pm
You may be right. My point is simply that it’s notoriously difficult to analyze these sorts of things or to reduce them to a simple equation.
For example, just as a wild conjecture, Evangelicals may have an insight into / instinct for masculinity that makes them oppose homosexual marriage.
Or maybe (more likely) it’s simply their regard for Scripture, which is quite clear on homosexuality and not very clear at all on contraception.
So the alleged “slippery slope” has lots of hand holds and ridges and shelves and such on the way down.
5 November 2009 @ 2:10 pm
What justifications any individual group have for upholding this part or that part of the Natural Law is of little importance. I believe that widespread contraception helps to undermine marriage in a number of ways. I believe all of Paul VI predictions in Humanae Vitae on this matter have come to pass.
5 November 2009 @ 2:16 pm
They may have. I haven’t checked recently. But even if they have, that doesn’t mean they happened for the reasons he says. Some other influence may have caused them.
For example, lots of crackpots predicted the economic mess we’re in. That doesn’t necessarily justify their rational.
5 November 2009 @ 3:20 pm
True. Even his predictions may have given people license to do it. After all, he SAID it would happen so we might as well do what we want anyway, right?
5 November 2009 @ 3:32 pm
I wasn’t thinking that, but it’s an interesting idea.
Kinda like, “if people don’t take communion on the tongue they’ll learn to despise the priesthood,” then the bishops say you don’t have to take communion on the tongue, so we despise them.
(Not me, of course. Just people.)
5 November 2009 @ 7:52 pm
For the record, a slippery slope argument is not necessarily a logical fallacy, but it is a fallacy if you can’t show that one thing actually does lead to the next.