There's the reason they give and then there's the real reason. Guys see polygamy leading to a few rich powerful men monopolyzing all the women, leaving none left for average men.

Marriage is often driven more by economic necessity than romance although this is somewhat less true now than in the past. But it still apllies and guys fear gay marriage becoming commonplace may place them in the position of needing to accept gay advances with promises of marriage for reasons of economic security.


PairTheBoard

Oh ok, so if a guy and a dog just lived together, and the guy treated the dog like his wife, and had sex with it, etc, that would be ok with most people, its just that "marriage is a contract between parties who can consent" so thats why people are against people marrying animals?

LOL

You need to be able to consent to have sex, so no. People have no problem with living with a dog, treating it well, and taking it places. It's sex and marriage with the animal that we care about.

I don't really know why people care about bestiality. I know at least 2 people who've gotten oral from a dog. I know a bunch of old guys who ****ed goats growing up on the farm.. it was evidently just a thing back then. There've been cases in the news of people ****ing horses. Any of these animals, if it really upset them, could do a number on a person.

The concept of animal marriage makes no sense though. I could **** a blow-up doll too, but what does marrying it even mean?

I was getting excited when you posted a link, since I thought it was going to be an argument which showed why changing the rules of marriage for homosexuals makes more logical sense than for polygamists. But it was just a wiki link to the association fallacy, which I'm familiar with already.

I still really believe you are off base here, Gonso. Not because I want you to be - I have gay friends and no polygamist friends, so I'd like there to be a sound logical argument which favors them, but I've just never heard one. The fact is, marriage is an exclusive club. It is reserved for two adults of the opposite sex. Forget how it's always been, that's the way it is right now. Changing that would be fine with me, but I see no reason why changing one aspect (opposite sex) makes any more sense than changing another (two adults). There is no need for an appeal to tradition or slippery slope. If this is a rights issue, I still cannot see why it wouldn't be hypocritical to change the rules for one group and not the other (much like changing voting rules for blacks and not women).

There's no sound logical argument for any law.

So what's wrong with evaluating each change on a case-by-case basis?

The strongest argument for gay marriage is that gay people are overwhelmingly for it, and all they want is that existing rules, benefits and obligations defined for straight marriage applied to them. This doesn't affect non-gay people. They can still call what they have marriage and they don't even have to personally acknowledge gay marriage. The only real difference is that gay people who already live in a marriage-like relationship are able to apply those rules to their relationship.

On the other hand, no group, including polygamists, wants existing rules, benefits and obligations defined for straight marriage applied to polygamists in a way that allows unrestricted polygamy. Existing rules don't even make any sense for polygamists in a coherent way. What happens in a divorce between A and B when B and C are also married, and there are assets of C that may be considered to be jointly owned between B & C? If you're a naturalized US citizen, can you marry (directly or indirectly) your entire extended family in a foreign country to get them green cards? Does filing taxes jointly even make sense when B is married to A and C, but A isn't married to C?

You need a lot of rules and clarifications for polygamy to function within the current legal system. If A and B are married and B and C are married, what's the relationship between A and C? If B is unable to make critical health decisions and A and C disagree, what happens? Child custody when you have a complex set of relationships? Gay people wanted marriage to apply to their relationships because it's much easier than creating a new institution called "civil union" and rewriting every law at every level of government (or in some cases, private contracts) to treat "civil union" essentially the same as marriage. And the rules are applicable. The structure of unrestricted polygamy is such that laws governing straight marriage aren't directly applicable without additional rules and clarifications.


It's not a rights issue - it's just framed that way for convenience.

I'd have to disagree with you on that one, though I agree it is the case for some of them.


This is good. I had not thought that deeply about the differences in execution of the marriage contract of polygamists vs. gays. I think you bring up strong practical reasons against allowing multiple people to be married. I'm not sure if the complexity of changing the rules should qualify as a good reason for denying adults who are in love from marrying one another (and another), but perhaps so.

For convenience? It's anything but convenient though. It causes all kinds of problems for the gay position since entering into legally binding contracts with one another requires governmental regulation which inherently tends to restrict rights. And of course, it brings up the annoying fact that other groups are also denied these rights as well.

You mentioned gay people (in the US, I assume) want marriage because it is much easier than making new laws to create a civil union... let's get real. It would not be that difficult, and many countries have done it already. The gay community in the US won't "settle" for it because they are too stubborn, imo. They want their relationships to be accepted by the rest of the nation, which I think is pretty noble. But since there is a large sector of the country who will never accept homosexual relationships as long as they live, e.g., most religious groups and ironically many blacks (just to name a few groups), insisting on marriage over civil unions will probably be at the expense of actually getting the rights they seek for at least a couple more generations.

But no one is being denied anything concrete here, unlike in the gay case. What's being denied is undefined - there's no set of rules, benefits and obligations being demanded by polygamist marriage rights advocates. Furthermore, allowing polygamist marrage fundamentally changes the nature of all other marriages. This is again, different, from gay marriage rights advocates who are united in exactly what they want, which does not at all affect existing marriages.


Rhetorical convenience.

This is much more difficult in the US due to multiple levels of governance. Other countries have a much more centralized system of governance, especially when it comes to marriage. The US has a much more complex system.

The marriage route requires state recognition and getting the Supreme Court to throw out the probably unconstitutional DoMA. The civil union route requires creation of a new institution called civil union, rewriting every state law that referenes marriage, rewriting every local law that references marriage, and rewriting every federal law that references marriage. This is politically very difficult in the US. Even then, courts may get in the way, especially when it comes to how private institutions attempt to differentiate between marriage and civil unions.

And state recognition for marriage is potentially easier than civil union, because of the possibility of court decisions. They were, for instance, able to argue that the status quo already allows for gay marriage in California and any law that bans it is unconstitutional.


Marriage is also easier to mobilize the gay community around. You need passionate, motivated volunteers to get anything done and it's hard to get anyone excited about civil union. There's no single mastermind behind this, but gay marriage won over civil union because it's more rhetorically sensible and civil union didn't get anywhere during the time that they tried to advance that.


I don't know about this, because they seem to be winning the marriage battle. I myself went from being largely indifferent to being supportive over the past few years, because spitefulness on the part of many opponents became obvious. Marriage being a religious institution is a bad-faith argument because the government recognizes non-religious marriages among non-religious people and no one is asking that gay marriage be recognized by a private religious institution. The anti gay-marriage people have a lot of otherwise indifferent people fooled and confused over this type of arguments, by framing this as though their right to practice religion is affected. That some religions don't acknowledge divorces doesn't mean government shouldn't allow a way to dissolve non-working marriage.

The closest, related analogy I can think of is this - a large group of people who believe that children are best raised by their biological parents and adoptive parents aren't real parents, demanding that the government not allow adoption. Then a sideshow about whether adoptive parents are real parents and adopted children are real children and how it would taint the true, real, biological, natural relationship between parent and child to allow adoptive parents and children to use those same terms, or to confer the same rights and responsibilities.

You need to be able to consent to be put in a cage, or walked around on a leash, or we'd call it kidnapping or wrongful confinement. And yet you seem to have no problem with that. Or killing them. Or eating them.

So it clearly is not about consent. You can violate animals freedoms at will, in ways large (slaughter) and small (dressing dogs up in costumes), and no one cares, even though these are done without consent. You just cant do ICKY things to them.

You've come to a conclusion (sex with animals is wrong) and are now grasping at straws trying to come up with arguments to justify your conclusion (but they cant consent!). This leads to inevitable results, i.e. you make bad, inconsistent arguments.

We leash and cage animals for safety (we lock people up in cages for safety too, without their consent). We kill them to eat because we need to eat meat (I'm pretty sure the whole world can't turn vegetarian and survive) and we are clearly developed to be omnivores.

And to contrast, marrying or having sex with an animal has nothing to do with safety and nothing to do with necessity. So we're back to the rules about sex and marriage are build around consent. You can't get the other party to consent (either because of age, drugs, or species of your brain), you can't marry or sex them.

I would have no problem with humans having sex with and marrying members of another species if it were intelligent enough to understand those 2 things. So while you claim to know the reason I'm against humans marrying animals, I think I've pretty clearly shown that you are wrong and my reason really is what I say it is.

Interesting. How do you propose that we address the billions of instances of animal rape (aka "mating") that are viciously perpetrated each year by other animals?

We don't consider it rape when younger humans have sex with younger humans, so why would we consider it rape when animals have sex with animals?

You've given me a lot to think about in the rest of your responses, but I'm not sure about this. Please explain what you mean when you claim no one (in reference to polygamists) is being denied anything concrete. Aren't polygamist marriage rights advocates demanding similar rights as gay marriage advocates?

But they're not. It's horribly defined with a ton of potential problems that don't exist in two-party marriages.

For example, if a husband should die leaving multiple wives (all heterosexual), do the surviving sister-wives remain married to each other, or can man be a "hub" that has multiple independent/disconnected wives? If not, does the loss of any one party dissolve the union? Can a party have another marriage outside of the household and not part of the main group. Are there limits to the number of people that can enter into these marriages? What (if any) are the restrictions placed upon who can enter into the marriage - for example, can two women who are blood relatives marry the same man? Then there are all kind of issues about biological parents vs. non-biological parents that could take place - if a kid's biological Mom should die, would another wife have equal legal standing to the biological father?

Some of those problems would be unique to that type of union. Whether you support polygamy or not these are things that would require careful thought, which you're not going to get when the issue is tied to some other issue without those factors. And lets face it, the people who are looking to group these issues are either for the legalization of polygamy or they're pulling a Rick Santorum and trying to paint gay people in an unpopular light since people aren't as receptive to polygamy.

In contrast to the fairly murky topic of polygamy there just isn't much ambiguity in what gays are asking for, or how a same-sex marriage would actually function in practice.

Besides all of that, considering how hotly the Mormons backed Prop 8, I doubt polygamists and gays see their plights as that similar at all. I wouldn't be surprised to find that each opposed the other if you count up a majority. [EDIT: And yes, I know that the mainstream Mormons no longer do the polygamy thing, at least publicly.]

No harm at all in evaluating each topic one at a time.

Yes, and yet they can't consent! I hope my point is obvious.