Who Do You Love?
Somewhat surprisingly, Vice President Biden seems to have gotten to the essence of the issue in his recent statement about same-sex marriage. He says it all comes down to a question of who you love, and who you're willing to be loyal to.
That's what it's all about, isn't it? Marriage today may stand for a lot of things, but at its heart it's not about who will control property, it's not about who owns the female, it's not about following religious rules, it's not even about how should we raise kids (plenty of kids are born out of wedlock, and barren people have a right to marry); it's about two people willing to make a state-sanctioned public commitment to each other, to say to the world they love each other and plan to stay together for the rest of their lives, and if the state is going to say no to this, then it better have a good reason.
Conservatives attacked Biden, claiming he got it wrong. They brought up the usual arguments--if it's just about who you love, then you could marry your dog, your sister, etc. I've discussed these arguments before. I find them wanting, but they're lacking in another way. It seems rather than discuss same-sex marriage, opponents keep bringing up other things it might lead to. Is this because they can't find anything wrong with gay marriage itself, or fear they'd look cruel if they argued two gay people deeply in love should be denied a basic right that heterosexuals enjoy? It does seem to come down to what Biden claimed, after all.
Whether or not Biden's right, he created a firestorm. The President's official position is still against SSM. Was Biden's statement a trial balloon? An assurance to supporters that the President is secretly on their side? My guess is Biden, as he often does, simply shot his mouth off.
I'd guess most people believe the President secretly supports gay marriage but doesn't think the time is right yet (though it might be right the second after he gets reelected). Right now America seems to be split down the middle on the issue, though I'd guess likely voters oppose it (partly because it's a generational thing, and older people vote in large numbers). Still, it's quite possible within a decade a solid majority will support it. In fact, let me make a prediction--Obama will be the last Democratic candidate for President to oppose SSM. (For all I know, Romney will be the last Republican to oppose it.)
But Obama isn't worried about how future generations will feel, he's trying to get reelected now. And with the swing state of North Carolina strongly supporting an amendment preventing the state from recognizing SSM, the last thing he needs is for the Veep to stir up a hornet's nest.
PS A day after posting this, it now seems that Obama has come out and supported same-sex marriage. Personally, anyway. We don't know if he'll politically back any change. Fascinating. Did Biden force his hand, or was he always planning this?
While writing this piece, I checked out how independents split, and thought maybe it's already time for Obama to change his stance. Despite the North Carolina vote, it still may work. According to Gallup, independents, which is where the action is, support same sex marriage 57 to 40. I'd also guess though there's a fair amount of support for traditional marriage among African-Americans and Latinos that the President isn't too worried about losing their backing.
What really counts is how much the issue matters to people--to most it's nowhere near the importance of the economy--and how this plays in the swing states. I'm not saying Obama isn't taking his stance based on principle, but it's hard to believe there was no political calculation involved.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:02 AM
16 Comments:
You're leaving out the best part. Biden referred to Romney as President Romney and his boss as President Clinton. This is why I don't believe he plans anything he says.
Yeah, that's what interests me, the lying mechanism and how important it is. Do we all want them to lie? It seems so.
But on your topic, I thought you were libertarian, and this seems decidedly statist.
Of course you are dead wrong on "what it's all about."
It has never been about love, and it has always been about children. To say that someone barren might marry is bizarre. All the rule has to do is be efficacious, not perfect, and it is uncharacteristic of you to miss that. I don't know what the low end would be, but I do know that it could be quite low, even below 50 percent I would say. Here I'd say it's probably well into the 80's and probably the 90's.
Your comment about children born out of wedlock seems to establish the point you're arguing against, not the one you're arguing for. (Unless you think it's costless for society. Tom Sowell would disagree with you, along with a few others, but you could believe it.)
So, love sounds nice, and one hopes it's a big deal, but marriage is all about children, with property coming in a close second. There might be an argument for getting the state out of marriage (I hesitate, since as far as I know every legal code we've ever known deals with children), but there is no good argument for gay marriage--except state imprimatur for every form of individual conduct. Of course that's not an argument I'm hot for.
Perhaps there was a time it was about kids, or other factors, but people today get married because they fall in love and want to commit. If they want to have kids, that's fine--many do--but I don't know of too many marriages that are based on having kids without the love coming first.
I'd just as soon the state have nothing to say about it, but as long as they provide a special service, they should not prevent gay people from marrying their mate of choice.
Regarding the cost to society, how does letting gay people marry make things worse? Even if you believe people marrying who'd otherwise have kids out of wedlock makes things better, I don't see how also having same sex marriage makes things worse. And even if you think a man/women couple is the best set-up to raise kids, we don't prevent people from having kids without the benefit of marriage, and we don't force single moms or dads to marry or remarry, so it sure seems that it's not all about kids.
My problem is I don't think anyone in gov't today has any idea "'what it's all about." Why in fact do we have state marriage licensing? 150 years ago, when the practice took off, it was to prevent those pesky mormons from claiming they had a right to multiple wives against society's monogamous conventions.
To be fair, well before that, governments latched onto religious certifications of marriage as a convenience for dealing with common issues arising with disposition of property and children. Marriage was a handy indicator of couples' state of mind with respect to such things when nothing else was written down in a will or contract. But the gov't marriage license has never been a a requirement to "get married."
So today, apparently Biden thinks people can't properly or fully love each other and commit to each other unless they have a gov't license to do so? I think this is ridiculous.
The fact is, marriage licenses have become in the last 30 years or so the method of choice for people who want government to make a statement about the value and respectability of gay marriages. Which is fine, if (when) it represents the opinion of a majority of the population. That's what it's all about.
It's not that "people can't properly or fully love each other and commit to each other unless they have a gov't license to do so." It's that marriage is a bsic right which people who fully love and commit to each other should not be denied simply because they love another of the same sex.
Here's a question. If the country is allegedly split 50/50 over gay marriage, then why does it lose big every time they vote?
The same way segregation would have won in referendums in the past (or maybe today). The very committed on this issue has a larger majority among the antis- there are a lot more evangelicals than there are gays and civil rights activists
Obama is still waffling a bit. He says the states can do what they want. I doubt he'd say the same thing about abortion.
Anon # 2 asked:
If the country is allegedly split 50/50 over gay marriage, then why does it lose big every time they vote?
As mentioned here, opinion surveys and actual voting differ by 7% on the average. In other words, around 7% of the electorate will vote against gay marriage in a secret ballot but won't tell a pollster this on the phone.
The speed of the change is amazing. Americans' change on civil rights took many decades; there were people advocating total integration as early as the 1860s, but it wasn't until the late 1970s that saying you supported segregation became seen as a hateful and unacceptable thing to say in public.
By comparison, the change on gay marriage took barely more than one decade. Today, a sizeable portion of the country (and apparently a solid majority of Democratic politicians) regard as "bigotry" a position that was not merely the majority position a couple years ago but was actually the unanimous position twenty years ago. In fact, if you go back to 1988, you will find that gay civil unions were just becoming legal in Scandinavia, and nobody in the gay rights movement anywhere was asserting that civil unions were bigoted because they were not called marriage.
I think the reason it was able to happen so fast is that it piggybacked on the race-based civil rights movement. The most common pro gay marriage argument I have heard for the last decade has nothing to do with the merits (which we have discussed here before), but is simply an argument by analogy to the racial civil rights movement.
I'd say it's a good example of how there's nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. For years something seems unimaginable and then, almost overnight, it seems obvious.
As for how long these movements take, it depends on how you pick the starting point and the end point. There was agitation for race-based civil rights for a long time, but I'd say it's not until after WWII, when the concept of racism (as we understand it today) being unacceptable becomes widespread do we really get the start of the modern civil rights movement. And within twenty years the movement was able to get the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed.
Views on homosexuality have had a similar arc. For decades there was discussion and research into homosexuality, with many leading thinkers saying there shouldn't be a stigma attached. But even with all this, we should remember that 40 years ago homosexuality was still considered a mental illness and much more recently was still illegal in many states. So it is true that the concept of same-sex marriage seemed out of the question no so long ago. Soon, support for SSM may be the solid majority stance, but there's still a significant number of people who believe homosexuality is wrong (forget about marriage) and it's hard to say how long will it take for them to change their minds. ("Change their minds" may be the wrong way of putting it--sometimes that's a euphemism for them dying off.)
LAGuy#1--in a sense you are correct, kids is the last thing it is about. Again, though, my point is that an institution built around kids is about the only thing that makes sense.
Of course you understood that what I was saying was that the cost comes from the institution decaying, so it makes little sense to make silly observations such as we do not force single parents to wed. No, we don't, but the institution still decayed and that had a cost. I think it likely we would have been better off had the institution not decayed, even if that meant there would never be gay marriage.
The way gay marriage "makes things worse" is in continuing to undermine the institution.
Of course it's politically incorrect to observe that the rationale for gay marriage--the circular "basic right" and the love argument--applies just as well to any deviancy, or "deviancy" if you prefer. I personally see very little objection to polygamy (and heck, between Romney and the growth of Islam in western cultures, maybe it's incipient) or other forms of corporate marriage, but you sure won't see supporters of gay marriage arguing for it, or, say, (adult) incest. Why not? Is the love less powerful? It's simple hypocrisy, or cowardice, or the same sort of bigotry to which they object when it is aimed at them.
I don't deny that the norm is where you say it is, or approaching that. Is the purpose of the law merely to reflect that sort of norm? I would hope not, generally, but I admit that in many cases it is. Once marriage is shorn of the child connection, it has relatively little import. All the present debate is about is changing norms, and in that kind of a thing there is very little to argue against if the norms should run the other way (the image of gay protests of supposed Islamaophobia comes to mind, when those gays would be stoned to death in the cultures they were using to club Republicans with).
So, gay marriage? It certainly is not a passion of mine, and I don't see any value to it apart from validating gay preferences, which I do not see the state having a role in, but I can't say it has any meaning apart from marriage having no state interest. (I did enjoy Dennis Miller's joke--Obama took in $2.5 million in donations after his public pronouncement, all in $3 bills.)
The so-called institution of marriage has changed regularly through time, and many generations have bemoaned how civilization is falling apart because of what those crazy kids want to do. But marriage in a free society (and I think getting rid of a free society has a greater cost than almost anything else) is up to the people involved.
Right now, individuals are free to go for a traditional marriage or not, and if same-sex marriage were legalized, they'd still be just as free. I don't think you've made your most basic point--that if we have an ideal of marriage we'll hurt it if the comfort, happiness and support of that institution isn't denied to people who probably wouldn't want traditional marriage anyway.
To Anon, I would note that the purpose of civil law in a democratic nation must and is to reflect and enforce the "norm." What else can it do? Our Constitutional democracy even allows for amendment of any provision the majority eventually comes to consider out of the norm.
But LA Guy, don't you see the gay marriage debate as an argument over distribution of entitlements, rather than civil rights? How is any freedom curtailed for gays living in a state that distributes benefits only to traditional married couples? How is this different from the sick low income person getting Medicaid, while the sick high income person must pay for medical treatment (or go without)?
The Supreme Court (not to mentioned everyone else) has recognized marriage as a basic human right. If you get something less, you are being denied this right.
As I've suggested before, here's a thought experiment. Go argue that everyone except Jews, blacks and Irish can enjoy state-sanctioned marriage, and then when they complain tell them it's no big deal, since they can do whatever they want personally, and it's not about their rights--anyway, we'll allow ciivil unions, which are just as good.
Or to put it another way, either it's a big deal to allow homosexuals to marry their partner of choice or it isn't. If it's a big deal, then you agree with me--this issue matters quite a bit, and goes to a person's humanity, not just about distributing entitlements. If it's not a big deal, then do it my way, since it doesn't matter much to you.
The S.Ct. would certainly find denying benefits to Jewish married couples an unconstitutional discrimination by governments because there is no substantial state interest in treating these citizens differently than other citizens. This would be the reasoning doubly so because any gov't discrimination on the basis of religion faces strict scrutiny.
Discrimination on the basis of sexual preference to date does not face strict scrutiny, but I have always agreed that the S.Ct. might find that such discrimination on which domestic partnerships will be designated as marriages (and thus receive benefits) may be deemed too arbitrary. The key to that question is why are any domestic partnerships being recognized as benefits-worthy marriages. That will be a very complicated analysis, because I believe hardly any legislators anywhere have a justifiable explanation of why the state licenses any marriages, let alone gay marriages.
If the justification is found to be to promote people joining up in committed, loving unions of two people (but not apparently more than two people), then the S.Ct will require all governments to recognize and give equal benefits to gay marriages, because any distinction would be arbitrary. If the reason is to promote procreation, then the discrimination is not arbitrary. But the answer won't be that clear cut, because if the reason is to promote two parent households, regardless of the origin of the children, then again the distinction seems arbitrary. If the purpose is simply to honor religious tradition (though possibly an unconstitutional reason in and of itself), then the discrimination might be constitutional.
Your last point is the strongest. If it doesn't matter to anybody but the gay couples that their unions be recognized as marriages, then why not have governments do that and be nice and make things easier for gay couples. I agree, but it isn't a constitutional argument. The only issue for me then is does it cost a lot to do this nice thing. And the decision whether or not to do a nice thing is a political one, driven by popular sentiment at the State level.
If I were a legislator, I would vote first to do away with all meddling by Gov't in private unions - end all marriage licensing. My second choice would be to eliminate all marriage licensing, and institute Civil Unions at the gov't level for any two people who want to publicly commit to love and care for each other and be legally obligated to do so until the Civil Union is legally undone. In return for this commitment, the gov't would give you some benefits.
Jewish, black and Irish gays can't marry, either.
It's a matter of definitions.
Which side will end up yelling the loudest that they have the right one?
Post a Comment
<< Home