For many men and women, getting married is the biggest thing that will ever happen in their lives. Certainly it has been in mine. I spent a lot of time trying to get into bed with women, and when I finally achieved it, it was a huge deal.
In a crude way, mating means you can go to the people in high school and say “see, I’m not gay”. Look at all those pictures on facebook of people advertising to their past their marriages and families. Making a kid is a sign that you may not be achieving much at work, but you can at least make decent offspring.
Gay marriage takes away that special state for many people who don’t anything else that compares in importance. I don’t believe I’m better than a gay man, but I think I understand that people are threatened in this way by gay marriage. Gay marriage takes away a distinction that makes them feel good.
I can’t tell if you’re sympathetic with, or critical of, the people you describe. Or both. Can you clarify? Are the reactions you postulate sufficient justification to refuse to legalize same-sex marriage?
I think it’s one reason to be careful of messing with this part of our social order.
If “messing with marriage” caused some problem with the social order, it would have appeared a decade ago in Europe.
While I appreciate the sincerity of your post, I think it illustrates the risks of assuming that everyone else is like you.
I don’t see how a choice that Fred or Wilma makes for their lover or life partner has any bearing on anyone except Fred and Wilma. None.
not so much about anyone else.
Gay marriage is no-ones business except the people who are gay and getting married. This is what I can’t stand about politics and policy in America. It’s like living in a nosy neighborhood. A group of people decide that the way they live their lives is the appropriate way and that all others should do the same. Rrrrrgggghhhhhh. If everyone would just mind their own business we would have a much happier country.
So seascraper, you are very right that getting married is a very important part of ones life. However, when you get married, you should be happy in your beliefs and not feel that the only way to validate your marriage is to make everyone else marry like you do.
Sadly, all too many people make such “commitments” based on what they hope those around them will do and say. I say that because a great many of those marriages end in divorce. Somebody marries a “trophy spouse” seeking the perceived admiration of their peers — and then discovers that their trophy farts, pisses, vomits, and snores just like everybody else. The trophy gets old, loses a job, loses their looks, loses their waistline — and then the “commitment” is done, because the “trophy” no longer turns heads at parties. Not to mention the marriages that fail because the trophy not only does turn heads and then doesn’t say “NO” quickly enough (or at all) — jealousy and extreme possessiveness often accompanies such fiascos.
This excessive focus on the approval of others is a prescription for failure. It is among the worst possible reasons to get married, and is among the weakest of arguments against gay marriage.
I know how people should feel, how do they actually feel?
Allowing, and accepting, gay marriage will make he act of entering into a straight marriage far stronger proof of ones heterosexuality than it has been- not that facilitating the ability of people to prove to their former high school classmates that they’re not gay should be a basis for public policy.
After all, due to social & economic pressure, or whatever reasons, it hasn’t been an unusual occurrence for people who are gay to have gotten married to people of the opposite gender and even had children. Having been married (or being married), is not necessarily proof that an individual is not gay. But, if gay marriage & the ensuing families are allowed and accepted (removing those social, economic and other pressures to appear straight), the gender of the person you marry will constitute much stronger proof of the nature of one’s sexuality than it has been in decades past (assuming anyone is actually looking for proof).
Haven’t we often heard from opponents of marriage equity that gay people already do have the right to get married (to someone of opposite gender), just like everyone else?
There is a danger in saying that gay people do not have a right to marry someone of the opposite sex, that people will think they do not have a right to be straight, they’ll be bullied into accepting that they are gay. Everyone has a right to marry someone of the other sex, though of course no one has to.
Can’t say that I’m at all surprised that a statement advocating the acceptance of gay marriage would draw you out of the woodwork.
Also not surprisingly, you seem to be making a bizarre argument against an assertion no one actually made. But, as for your concern about people being bullied into accepting that they are gay (?), I guess it’s a good thing our society is now recognizing the seriousness of bullying and putting in place increasingly robust programs to fight it. This would cover a case such as you describe, as well as many other circumstance that actually do exist.
It’s rare and valued when conservative thinking is stripped of rhetoric and dog-whistle language. This is such an example.
Thank you, seascraper, for laying bare so much of the conservative objection to marriage equality. I wish all conservatives were so honest.
candor, but the distinction he notes one matters only because others are kept separate and unequal. Didn’t poor Southern whites support Jim Crow for the same reasons?
And if Seascraper is right, Obama was right when he described such people as clinging to guns and religion.
I like seascraper’s candor, but it mainly served to reduce opposition to gay marriage as preserving a dilute rationale for self-satisfaction, rather than a stance of significant moral or political grounding.
He is raising a real moral and political point, that equating everyone’s marriage to a same-sex couple, and saying they have the same civil rights and social value, and denying that they have any societal and legal approval to have sex and make babies, really denigrates the most important significant achievement in people’s lives. It’s like, imagine if we said everyone should be able to get a college degree just by asking for one to be sent in the mail, and telling graduates that they don’t have anything they didn’t have before they graduated…that denigrates the value of the degree, and people would be right to be upset about that.
Marriage is not a college degree. Your comment is insulting to EVERY married person, and insulting to every gay and lesbian person. Your attempted analogy makes no sense whatsoever.
The traditional religious viewpoint is that, as a sacrament, marriage is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace”. The marriage ceremony is a public statement to the community about a private commitment that has already happened. The “value”, if any, from being married comes from within and that value is then supported by the community.
Traditional religious belief is that the private love between a man and woman that results in marriage is a gift from God. What somebody else does has NO BEARING. That’s the argument that ended religious bans on interracial marriages, and will (sooner or later) end the the religious bans on same-sex marriages. What God has joined, let no person put asunder.
Nothing — absolutely nothing — about that very classical “traditional” model is in any way harmed, diluted, or denigrated by marriages among other people, whatever the race, religion, or gender.
You just can’t help yourself, can you? Who in the world is denying anything like this? Certainly, no one here has.
You make a deep, serious, life-long commitment to someone else just to prove you’re not gay? Seriously?
What, pray tell, are the other things you have to prove?
The purpose of having kids is to show you aren’t a total loser???
I’d hate to be either the spouse or offspring of someone who felt like this.
What does this really mean? Something like, I’m in a room with 60 other married people and the only thing important in my life is my marriage. So I’ll feel worse if there were 62 married people in the room — because I’ll be like 1.5% less special.
Happily married people find each other special, and they don’t find that specialness diluted by the happiness, marriages, or achievements of other people.
Well, unless they are really pathetic happily married people.
See how they have substituted a surrogate activity for the human need for fulfillment through becoming part of the chain of life, by portraying getting a degree and working for some job as necessary to have dignity?
…though it is definitely helpful on the job front. However, last I checked nobody was being denied the opportunity to earn a degree on the basis of sexual orientation (and if that IS happening somewhere that is of course unacceptable).
I’m not sure that’s what dont-get-cute meant. Maybe it’s about surrogate parents getting degrees to make up for their surrogacy.