[Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy] What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defence

I really don't get the argument against gay marriage.

 

I may read some of the article later, but I'm significantly less tempted to do so after this passage. Why the hell is it so hard for opponents of gay marriage to understand that two adult men (or women) wanting to marry each other is not even remotely comparable to an adult human being wanting to "marry" an animal.

Here's a hint for debating this issue: if you come to the point where you're even thinking of bringing up bestiality, just STFU instead.

 

it's actually spelled defense.

 

The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy is published three times annually by the Harvard Society for Law & Public Policy, Inc., an organization of Harvard Law School students.

The Journal is one of the most widely circulated student-edited law reviews and the nation’s leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship.

Just because it has Harvard in its name does not make it credible. This is a conservative student publication.

 

yeah, by trumping up some weird-ass allusion to incest and bestiality.

Seriously, what is with people constrained by subjective moral frameworks relying on these frameworks being applied to others? No, the way marriage and relationships are structured now have not been crafted from time immemorial.

You draw the line at reasoned, informed consent and excessive harm to agents outside of the relationship. No, a dog, or a sock, or a rock, or a child cannot give you reasoned, informed consent, but a homosexual partner can. And until you bring scientific evidence that homosexual rearing of children or anything else harms agents excessively outside of their relationship, the second point will stand too.

don't assume that your moral opinions, formed in the basis of a limited subset of historical thought, has held, or will hold for centuries, especially if they are based on irrational thought patterns.

(and yes, if you want to get into how many cultures have treated sexuality historically, we can go there)

 

Nice of you to specify that it is from Harvard Journal but leave out that Ryan T Anderson (writer) researches and writes about marriage and religious liberty as the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society at The Heritage Foundation. Yeah, there is no bias here.

 

That's because it is invalid and asinine. Luckily, the people against it are powerless to do anything about it. Gay people will have full rights of marriage in this country. I love to see the religious right squirm on this issue.

 

yeah because marriage pre-dates recorded history but law does not.

 

What I'm taking away from these two posts is that the only way for an article to be "unbiased" and "credible" is for it to be written in a liberal publication and to reach conclusions with which you agree. Yeah, there is no bias here.

 

Well, yeah.

Since when have the conservatives been right about...anything?

Every major progress and achievement of humanity, regardless of fields, has been about proving the conservatives of the period wrong.

 

Fair enough to your point. On a sports forum, I tend to avoid reading legal briefs and rather see bullet points to someone's arguments. Maybe some sample bias of the other kind there.

That said, he didn't address the point head on. The defense you quoted is a flimsy house of cards. Beastial marriages really? Is that what the counter-argument has devolved to... Then what is your argument to the question if the author dances around it?

First off, marriage has not been a constant social construct over the millennia. The ideals the author favors could also be considered "revisionist" to the power plays, dowries, and political scheming marriages accomplished only a century before. To assume that his revisionist ideals form the bedrock of society deeply reflects his implicit ties to marriage in the current fundamental Judeo-Catholic context.

Furthermore, the author is clearly cherry picking. He's claiming benefits to marriage though you have to be a man and a woman to derive those benefits. And should they be infertile, doesn't matter because the other benefits apply. Nice circular reasoning there. Plastering over the infertility question with negative counter-assertions of incest, polyamory, or beastiality doesn't help either because it's pandering to his side rather than persuading the other side by taking into account for their argument for legal marriages to apply to consensual and mature partners.

I don't really care about the current illegality of incest given that statutory rape or abuse isn't involved. If somehow a man married his long estranged mother and didn't know about it before, the letter of the law is breaking the spirit of it. And at a certain point in society when we can prove statutory coercion isn't involved, then maybe the spirit of the law can change. That's my 'revisionist' view...or is it 'pre-traditional' since incest marriages were practiced among royalty and isolated tribes?

For polyamory, the author is clearly off his rocker since open marriages are not illegal. Well why not have group marriages, implies the religious dingbat? They can create their own contracts and live in a commune like agreement. Some cults and churches practice workaround to get tax breaks.

That's the biggest smell to these weird long winded circumlocutious semantically technical arguments. If the language is complex, then it implies that the task or message is difficult to convince to others

Marriage, as popularly defined, is already evolving beyond what the good old days were. Marriage rates are declining, with the incentive to marry becoming less and less important. And for those who are married, the success rate is slightly better than flipping a coin. Some hallowed institution right there. Gay marriage won't accelerate or reverse that tide because the decline in straight marriage has nothing to do with gay marriage.

Seems it's better to preach than to practice.

 

You're showing some major bias with your response here. While it may be true that many major achievements and a lot of progress have come from proving conservatives of the period wrong, it's also true that every step in the wrong direction in human history has also been against the wishes of the conservatives who wished to leave things unchanged.

You're ignoring every single example of a time when those crying for "progress" have been wrong (e.g., the early 20th century eugenics movement).

 

"What is it with you people and animal f**king?"

-Jon Stewart

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Based on your argument, conservatives don't oppose something like eugenics because it's logically and morally wrong - they oppose it because they just don't want to see the status quo change. Assuming your straw man example (that eugenics was an example of progressive values rather than conservative - any evidence to support this assertion?) is correct, then conservatives don't have the capability of discerning between good tradition and bad tradition - they'll simply pick tradition every time, regardless of the moral and logical implications. That doesn't make them noble - that just makes them the proverbial broken clock that gives the correct time twice a day.

I'd hypothesize that it's more likely that the best arguments against eugenics were made not by conservatives, but by other progressives. But again, this is a strawman argument that makes the ridiculous assumption that "progressives" (or "conservatives") are uniform in their belief on any particular issues. I find that very dubious at best.

 

There really isn't one anymore. The question has been answered.

It's just a matter for some to let go of their fear.

 

I will admit that the eugenics example was imperfect, but it was the first example that came to mind of something really horrible and well known that was supported by progressives. See Margaret Sanger and Oliver Wendell Holmes (not really a progressive himself, but greatly admired by the progressive movement) as prominent proponents.

You're right that it's ridiculous to assume that either progressives or conservatives are uniform in their beliefs, but you have to look at the post I was responding to and take that into account. The post asked when have conservatives ever been right about anything.

 

"They" sound.....awfully like you. What with the vague threats of the rest of us all going to hell and all.