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Post by millring on Jul 22, 2014 3:48:26 GMT -5
Maybe she took too big a swing. But, I still don't know what argument she thinks she is settling. Arguments made on Twitter. In other words, straw man arguments by virtue of the medium in which they were presented.
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Post by aquaduct on Jul 22, 2014 8:23:11 GMT -5
Nowhere do I see a denigration of heterosexual marriage or a reduction of marriage to a merely-utilitarian or bureaucratic arrangement. When she writes "I want a spouse," I hear something more than the desire for a tidy legal status. But she clearly does not see herself as being treated as a full citizen if her domestic relationship is denied that status. To me I see exactly the opposite. True, she wants a spouse. But she doesn't want the state or anyone else passing judgment on what that requires or means. She wants the benefit part of the equation without the responsibility part of the equation. Which is where I see the major flaw in these types of defenses. By focusing on the mechanistic legal historical definitions and dismissing the core relationship (for lack of a better term) basis for marriage out of hand, she effectively does reduce marriage to a simple, merely utilitarian and bureaucratic arrangement. The crucial example for me is her use of Joseph and Mary to dismiss the notion that marriage is about kids. That is the most brazen and overly simplistic reading of the story I've ever heard. Any kid who ever attended Sunday School in 3rd grade is familiar with the true story. When Joseph discovered Mary was pregnant with a child other than his own he was furious. Being a decent guy he looked into trying to get rid of her legally without actually stoning her to death. He wanted to make the whole nasty situation go away quietly. Which he was entirely within his rights legally and every other which way to do. The state marriage mechanism said it's perfectly legal. In fact he could have outted the whore and had her executed. That's the historical, utilitarian, bureaucratic mechanism in all its property administration grandeur. But one night he got some other counsel. Not some brilliant lawyer or politician with an eye toward keeping the masses down. No, he got the angel Gabriel who communicated exactly what God thought in no uncertain terms. You get your head out of your own selfish ass, marry her and raise the kid. No, there's nothing in it for you. You're going to be hunted. Life won't be easy. No, it's not your fault. No, you don't even get to experience the joy of coitus. It doesn't matter. Man up and get on with it. And he did. Went to his grave as the father of an obscure Jewish preacher from a Roman backwater that met a horrible end. No fame, no glory, no tax breaks, no inheritance, no statues. No reward in his lifetime at all. The writer here dismisses Christianity as not having much interest in marriage because (in typical Catholic tradition) nobody got around to writing it down until centuries later, but the view of marriage as strictly sacrificial is right there in the preface of the faith. And as we discussed before, I'm perfectly comfortable with gay marriage as a function of the state (Russell has helped me a lot with that). But that's due in large part to the fact that my marriage is sanctioned under another body that doesn't recognize a lot of things that state marriages do- abortion, birth control, divorce, etc. In the version of marriage that I signed up for there are no perks. You don't even get to cut to the front of the communion line. It is strictly sacrificial. You commit to it and you are expected to die for it. No excuses. And at the core it really is about the kids. Having kids is the single event in life that where you get to experience God-like creative power. Where there was nothing life now exists. And that life needs to be protected. Complete innocence. If it's too much of an inconvenience, just leave it in a dumpster. Inconvenience solved. I also believe that selflessness and sacrifice has broader social benefits. I think a little more concern for taking responsibility for where you put your privates would probably do much more for the south side of Chicago than the fool's errand of trying to reduce murderous thug's access to weapons. So I think she's got a point and I can't particularly argue with it. As one wag put it, let gays marry, they should suffer like all the rest of us. We have focused for quite a long time on eliminating the responsibility side of marriage. Sure, shack up and have a party. The state has a perfectly adequate no fault system for divvying up your property when some tighter ass with bigger boobs comes along. It's all well and good. Everybody and everything should get a chance to play. But I also believe that it's not really marriage.
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Post by patrick on Jul 22, 2014 8:39:51 GMT -5
Um, am I the only one who reads the piece as addressing a group of arguments against gay marriage that she sees as historically uninformed? I could have sworn that I understood the burden of her essay by the end of paragraph four. Pretty much how I read it too. The arguments against same sex marriage tend to be all over the place, necessarily a reply to them is going to be also. I didn't read anything new in the piece, I was already aware of most of it. Marriage has traditionally been mostly about men's property, and women AS property. We can make marriage about anything we want, and we always have. Marriage has traditionally been about one man/one woman only in one religious tradition, prior to that or outside of that tradition it was one man/as many women as you can support or tolerate. She points out that marriage traditionally has been used not only to preserve wealth, but to deny access to it by others. So non-whites couldn't legally marry in the US for a long time, and it was only in 1967 that the US struck down anti-miscegenation laws. In Israel today, marriage is totally controlled by the religious authorities, so that no one who is non-Jewish, or who is not Jewish enough, can legally marry. Yet life goes on, which undermines the entire argument that traditional marriage is the foundation of society.
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Post by patrick on Jul 22, 2014 8:52:04 GMT -5
Incidentally, while reading her footnotes she references Reynolds v. U.S. in which the Supreme Court ruled, in 1878, that the state had the right to outlaw polygamy. The reasoning: Which is pretty much what Justice Scalia wrote in Oregon v. Smith in about 2005. Which was overturned by the Hobby Lobby case. So, does the Hobby Lobby ruling now legalize polygamy?
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Post by Russell Letson on Jul 22, 2014 10:20:09 GMT -5
Arguments made on Twitter. In other words, straw man arguments by virtue of the medium in which they were presented. No--shorthand arguments, often of the bumper-sticker variety and thus generally with a deficiency of nuance and an oversupply of emotion. Straw-man status is an independent variable, as are a number of other infelicities (bigotry, sentimentality, pig-ignorance, arrogance . . .). I think of Twitter as the untethered dwarf cousin of the blog comment thread.
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Post by Russell Letson on Jul 22, 2014 11:22:51 GMT -5
Peter, it's a challenge to respond to your long post without seeming to reject your particular vision of marriage, so take the following as a reading of its theoretical or systematic implications rather than as a dismissal of your choice or the vision of life it is part of.
First, a specific disagreement with your characterization of what the writer wants from the state's treatment of marriage in general and of hers specifically: I think you misread what she wants as well as the sentiment behind the words. She does not see having (and by implication being) a spouse as simply participation in a set of legal or bureaucratic rule-sets: "For my part, I don't think any church or state can authenticate or create a marriage for any couple; the couple do that themselves in the ways they care for each other and build their lives." [Emphasis added.]
Second, the notion that marriage "really is about the kids" (let alone that it is "strictly sacrificial") is not a majority position even inside Catholicism. (Canon law tries to deal with all the possibilities, but canon law is not the Body of Christ, no matter what the Curia would have us believe.) You know that we have no children, and I have a number of friends in the same situation. We are all just as married as can be. And (this should probably be "third" or at least "second-and a-half") while any long-term relationship is going to require some reining-in of one's ego and selfishness, I don't think I've spent the last 44 years sacrificing anything. (I don't call her my better half for nothing.) And I certainly didn't need children to valorize our marriage. I only needed one person.
In the Odyssey, Odysseus' and Penelope's bedroom is built around an olive tree that he made the main post of their bed. It's literally rooted in the middle of his home. It--and Penelope--is what draws him back to Ithaca, though it takes him ten years of wandering (during which he walks away from a goddess and a princess). Now, that's what I call a marriage.
A theological sidenote: Most of the material about the role of Joseph is not part of the canonical Gospels but a later construction back-fitted onto the Gospels' meta-account and clearly designed to reconcile conflicting, theologically troublesome inconsistencies (e.g., Mary's virginity/Jesus' siblings) and to fill out the human side of the story. (The "Cherry Tree Carol" comes out of these apocryphal accounts--"and Joseph flew in anger, in anger flew he.") Protestants don't make as much of Joseph as do Catholics, mainly, I suspect, because they don't need to wrangle the problem of Mary's perpetual virginity.
And just to nail this down: the misspelling of "marriage" in the URL is a reference to this:
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Post by epaul on Jul 22, 2014 11:28:31 GMT -5
... And Paul, to your final sentence, I offer Brother Dave's answer: "I believe in love and charity and goodness and kindness, and I believe that when a man's down, kick him! That way, if he survives, he'll have a chance to rise above it." I like Brother Dave.
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Post by millring on Jul 22, 2014 12:05:57 GMT -5
Arguments made on Twitter. In other words, straw man arguments by virtue of the medium in which they were presented. No--shorthand arguments, often of the bumper-sticker variety and thus generally with a deficiency of nuance and an oversupply of emotion. Straw-man status is an independent variable, as are a number of other infelicities (bigotry, sentimentality, pig-ignorance, arrogance . . .). I think of Twitter as the untethered dwarf cousin of the blog comment thread. What I meant is that the author has taken the occasion of poorly framed twitter arguments to create straw men, rather that assuming, as one might when being honest, that a twitter post is probably not a good representation of a point of view. Certainly not a complete representation.
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Post by aquaduct on Jul 22, 2014 12:39:22 GMT -5
Russell, I understand all of that. I'm not implying that one needs children to valorize a marriage. Real marriage in my view consists of the commitment one has made when they've gotten married. Nobody knows what life will bring in the next 44 years, but I assume that at the moment you committed to taking on anything that comes your way. Even if you weren't planning children, I'd guess that you would have dealt with and stayed committed if life had deemed to screw up that plan. Even though life has not required sacrifice of you, you were up for it if asked.
And I realize that it's impossible to really base something like marriage law on the sincerity of one's intentions. However, avoiding any expectation of aspiration doesn't really accomplish much. It's the same kind of argument you get over the idea of chastity as birth control. Obviously the kids are merely animals that can't be counted on to keep their urges in check. So we won't bother to ask them to. And we will mock any gap toothed bumpkin who suggests otherwise.
And in any relationship children are the biggest game changer going. There is nothing that screws with a vision of idyllic economic security like having mouths to feed. And unemployment with mouths to feed is a whole other ballgame from just garden variety being between positions. Signing up for marriage without the risk of children is a significantly less risky commitment.
I agree with the writer's assessment that the core of a marriage is private and not determined or validated by any outside entity. But that also means that there really doesn't need to be any real purpose. It can be anything you want. A frat house that wants to share medical benefits can simply revolve members in and out of the marriage. There's no downside and no responsibility necessary for anything.
And that does effectively gut the meaning of the institution and turn it into a merely-utilitarian bureaucratic arrangement.
Which is where the disconnect comes in for me. If you ask whether we should just lift the whole idea of state marriage people have a fit since it's apparently vital and a fundamental right. Except nobody can tell me why.
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Post by dickt on Jul 22, 2014 12:45:19 GMT -5
... And Paul, to your final sentence, I offer Brother Dave's answer: "I believe in love and charity and goodness and kindness, and I believe that when a man's down, kick him! That way, if he survives, he'll have a chance to rise above it." I like Brother Dave. And apropos of Russell's first post I like Peter Cook.
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Post by epaul on Jul 22, 2014 13:19:01 GMT -5
And apropos of Russell's first post I like Peter Cook.
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Post by Rob Hanesworth on Jul 22, 2014 13:42:06 GMT -5
When my first wife died after we had been married 26-1/2 years, I could look back on the marriage as, overall, a pretty darn pleasant experience. I had no qualms about doing it again and have now enjoyed another 13-1/2 years of (overall) happiness. That's my rational account of marriage.
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Post by Russell Letson on Jul 22, 2014 14:11:33 GMT -5
What I meant is that the author has taken the occasion of poorly framed twitter arguments to create straw men, rather that assuming, as one might when being honest, that a twitter post is probably not a good representation of a point of view. Certainly not a complete representation. At the risk of seeming to fuss and wrangle over a minor point: The Twitter (or blog-comment-thread) "arguments" (I'd call them sentiments) may not be "good representations of a point of view," but they are certainly statistically-significantly representative of what some segments of the public believe. I've seen every one of the positions she replies to expressed repeatedly over the last few years (and for some of them, the last few decades), at various lengths and with varying degrees of sophistication. Every last one of them. (Some of them I have been questioning since my high-school catechism classes, which got me the stink-eye from our pastor.)
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Post by millring on Jul 22, 2014 14:15:11 GMT -5
What I meant is that the author has taken the occasion of poorly framed twitter arguments to create straw men, rather that assuming, as one might when being honest, that a twitter post is probably not a good representation of a point of view. Certainly not a complete representation. At the risk of seeming to fuss and wrangle over a minor point: The Twitter (or blog-comment-thread) "arguments" (I'd call them sentiments) may not be "good representations of a point of view," but they are certainly statistically-significantly representative of what some segments of the public believe. I've seen every one of the positions she replies to expressed repeatedly over the last few years (and for some of them, the last few decades), at various lengths and with varying degrees of sophistication. Every last one of them. (Some of them I have been questioning since my high-school catechism classes, which got me the stink-eye from our pastor.) For one who doesn't like an argument to be "flattened" or oversimplified, you seem quite insistent upon allowing it in this case.
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Post by Russell Letson on Jul 22, 2014 14:16:45 GMT -5
Huh?
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Post by drlj on Jul 22, 2014 17:02:25 GMT -5
You guys break me up.
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Post by millring on Jul 22, 2014 17:22:53 GMT -5
And all this time I thought I was just observing mitosis.
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