Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
And now for more mainstream homophobia
Washington State ruled 5-4 that it was constitutional to ban gay marriage under state law. I haven't read the ruling, but the choice quotes from the above-linked New York Times article suggest that the reasoning was based on the same flawed logic as the New York state ruling, which I addressed three weeks ago.
The controlling opinion in yesterday’s decision, signed by three justices, reversed the lower court’s, holding that the 1998 law, the Washington Defense of Marriage Act, was supported by rational reasons.
“Limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples,” Justice Barbara A. Madsen wrote in that opinion, “furthers procreation, essential to the survival of the human race, and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by the children’s biological parents.”
It's of course legitimate, if mad, to pose procreation and biological parenthood as state interests. But no state in the US prohibits adoption, surrogacy, post-menopause marriage, or any similar arrangement that applies to straight couples. Madsen refuses to see the obvious discrimination involved, like a creationist screaming "Won't!" when faced with evidence for evolution.
Jane Schacter, a law professor at Stanford, said the reaction to the 2003 decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court legalizing same-sex marriage there might have left other courts gun-shy about making sweeping rulings.
“There is a real self-consciousness in this decision and the New York decision about the role of the courts,” Professor Schacter said. “We’ve traditionally looked to the courts to buck public opinion to defend liberty and equality, but we’re not seeing that here.”
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go write a retroactive judicial opinion postulating a rational basis for the Nuremberg Laws. I'm thinking mostly of posing racial purity as a legitimate state interest and of postulating that Jews are collectively treasonous, but I'm open to other ideas.
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The Christian right thought process
Having grown up in a conservative environment, perhaps I can offer a glimpse into their perspective.
Conservatives DO want to get rid of divorce, idealistically. They've been lamenting the ease of divorce laws for years. It's just not a hot-button issue. However, very few people would support going back to a stricter enforcement and the idea of "covenant" marriage either feels hypocritical or like it gives ground by redefining the "ideal marriage".
They really do want to preserve the myth of the ideal heterosexual marriage as a special social relationship that transends other relationships in commitment and social responsibility due to the spiritual connection of its participants. Getting a divorce, from this perspective, is evidence that your relationship had more to do with your carnal desires than your "spiritual connection" to the other person. So, divorce can be tolerated if it dissolves a relationship that was based on impure premises. Because of the biblical nature of their perspective, they can not view a homosexual relationship as anything other than carnally motivated. Hence, permitting it and supporting it as part of our society promotes the carnal to the level of the spiritual. Or, if you will, evil to be equal with good.
Before you can get them to accept other types of relationships as non-threatening, you have to clue them into the false dichotomy of body(evil) and spirit(good). Blame Plato's influence on the early church.
So apparently the idea is to
So apparently the idea is to have unstable marriages without any kind of romantic attraction; then what we want is to force gays into hetero relationships and straights into homosexual ones.
The point of the court seems to be that marriage is not primarily a romantic institution but a familial one. That may ring strange to the modern ear, but not to a traditional one. I think the notion of marriage as a means for an individual to pursue his or her romantic destiny is a fairly recent one.
I agree that it's mad to posit procreation and biological parenthood as state interests, but what rational state interests are served by civil marriage?
How traditional does one have to be?
I know that the medieval concept of marriage was completely unrelated to this of romantic love. At the same time, modern conservatives tend to have a very un-medieval conception of marriage. Curt Rozeboom's comment presents the conservative view as an idealization of romantic love, rather than the property-inheritance system that medieval marriage really was.
If marriage is for procreation
Then there should be a fertility test for each partner before marriage and those people failing to meet a minimum standard of fertility would be denied a marriage license.
No woman past menopause would be allowed to be married. Good news for men though since our fertility does not typically cease with age.
If the greatest good is for the biological parents to care for the children then divorce should be absolutely outlawed.
But this would be if the people supporting the gay marriage ban weren't titanic flaming hypocrites.
not only that
If as they say marrage's purpose is to care for one's genetic offspring than adoption of unrelated children should be illegal (which would make adopting geneticly unrelated embryos illegal too).
Also people should be able to declair that they were never legally married if after marrage they find that their partner is infertile.
In the case of procreation failure
The couple would be retested (I'd say after a childless three year period just as a ballpark) to see who is at fault and then the marriage would be dissolved so that if only one partner is at fault then they would be able to get re-married ASAP to someone able to provide them with children.
Naturally birth control for married couples would only be legal after producing a certain number of children (say four or so depending, of course, on the number of average children produced by the group that you want to outbreed).
Breed like there is tomorrow and you guarantee that there won't be, or if there is the chorus of misery will be purest agony to the ears. I can hear the hammers of the demon farriers pounding red hot iron on cold black anvils. I can hear them hammering shoes for the horsemen's steeds white, red, black and pale.
Four?
Encouraging white Christian women to have merely four children isn't enough. Eight's the minimum acceptable; if the Nazis preferred eight children per Aryan woman, then the Dominion surely shouldn't set its standards any lower.
Well
Four is just a number I picked out of thin air. Like I said, all you really need to do is outbreed "Them" (whoever "them" happen to be). Of course interbreeding with "Them" would be strickly forbidden. If maximum breeding (and the accompanying rush to die choked in your own filth) is the goal then of course any contraception would be illegal and women would be having their biological maximum of children (whatever number that might be).
Human race going extinct?
“Limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples,” Justice Barbara A. Madsen wrote in that opinion, “furthers procreation, essential to the survival of the human race..."
Do people really make this argument today? Isn't it pretty obvious that we are in no danger of going extinct from lack of procreation? There are many things that threaten the long term survival of the human race, but lack of procreation isn't one of them.
But the argument itself (even if it were valid) doesn't have anything to do with same-sex marriage in the first place. A percentage of the population is gay. They will remain gay whether they are allowed to legally marry or not. Hence, they will not (traditionally) procreate like heterosexuals regardless of whether they can marry. So same-sex marriage will have no affect on heterosexual procreation because homosexuals will remain homosexuals regardless of marital status.
If you are worried about heterosexual procreation, then you need to take away people's access to birth control and/or give them more incentives to have children (bigger tax incentives, universal health insurance, good economy with well-paying jobs, etc...). If you hate homosexuals and don't want them to have the same rights then just come out and say it. But trying to make the argument that allowing gay marriage will somehow lower procreation and threaten the survival of the human race just makes you look stupid.
Ban Divorcees As Well
Great points Alon.
snark mode on
By this court's arguments, divorced people have shown an inability to foster two-parent families and should be banned from entering into such contracts again.
Hell, why not go all the way and make divorcees get sterilized as well. They've already shown they can't be trusted with kids. Sterilzation will help ensure that our society won't ever be threatened by their ineptitude again.
Ok... snark mode off
Schacter's comments made good explanatory sense as well.
{shakin'head} And still I hope...
a personally evolving organism
No, no
The idea is to encourage childbirth, so sterilizing people is a bad idea. What you want is not for gays not to have children, but for them to enter heterosexual marriages and have biological children. So apparently the idea is to have unstable marriages without any kind of romantic attraction; then what we want is to force gays into hetero relationships and straights into homosexual ones.
Off Topic
I know this is off topic on your post, but can't take it anymore, Alon. What has happened to the feministing blog? Is *everything* about white privilege now, even eating disorders? Samhita was so incredibly, factually wrong that I had to post back. Even the article she linked to contradicted her. Sigh....
Maybe we should all get our own blogs.
btw I agree with your post about the recent court ruling. The courts are just a bit rattled right now from all the Bush bullying. But eventually, common sense and forward thinking must prevail. They just can't keep making excuses for excluding same-sex couples from the non-religious exercise of marriage.
I think it's a group blog thing
In a group blog, different people have different issue emphases, of course. For example, here everyone's an atheist, but for Darksyde there's an additional science angle, for me there's an additional general-liberal angle, and so on. When one person posts more than the usual amount, there's a shift in general blog emphasis.
On Feministing, Jessica, who posts from a mainstream feminist perspective, is away, and I think that so is Vanessa. So Samhita, who has a more international-feminist/woman-of-color angle, posts more, shifting the emphasis of the whole blog. I don't think there's anything inherently problematic with such shifts (mind you, UTI became a bit more clearly liberal after I became a frontpager, so I'm somewhat biased here).
Your commentary about the case is about right. Gay rights are one of the few issues on which the US is unambiguously progressing; as the NYTimes article notes, a similar lawsuit in Washington State was rejected unanimously in the 1970s. The Court overruled the lawsuit this time not necessarily because it really believes discriminatory marriage laws are constitutional, but possibly because it feared public attacks of the kind that plagued the Massachusetts Supreme Court.