I don’t understand this “distraction” argument.

One would think that the UK government has enough people to focus on the economy, the reform of the House of Lords and on gay marriage at the same time.

I am only one guy, and I can handle more than three things at once.

@ 1 Andreas

Agreed. Distraction politics is usually on the part of the government – trying to misdirect the media into talking about something interesting but undamaging, while burying bad news.

They managed to find the time to ‘reform’ the NHS. This was something that, before the election, Cameron specifically pledged himself not to do.

House of Lords reform, by contrast, appeared in the manifesto of each of the main political parties.

One of the weirder attitudes of the Tory Right is that the Government shouldn’t be “wasting time” on say same sex marriage or House of Lords reform (or say in the past fox-hunting) when the economy should be the main priority – as it always is

But SSM and HoL reform are legislative matters not economic ones. Are they saying that they have legal measures that will magically transform the economy for the better which are being held up instead?[1] Are they suggesting that all these freed-up MPs will instead be manning the borders or manufacturing widgets?

If your only objection to such changes is that they waste time, then all you need to do is keep quiet and let them go through Parliament as easily as possible. Otherwise objection on such grounds makes no sense.

[1] Privatise everything and give it to firms that employ them/their partners as consultants does not count.

@ 4 Roger Mexico

“If your only objection to such changes is that they waste time, then all you need to do is keep quiet and let them go through Parliament as easily as possible. Otherwise objection on such grounds makes no sense.”

Wasn’t one of the things with fox hunting that some MPs did exactly this – claim that the bill was an unimportant waste of time while doing everything they could to block it, actively causing it to take up even more parliamentary time?

Figures seem similar for both questions, I’d be interested to throw a few wildcards in there to see what the response would be.

@ 6 dave

“Figures seem similar for both questions”

Only on the positive side – there’s a lot more people against gay marriage than HoL reform, although both are in the minority.

“I’d be interested to throw a few wildcards in there to see what the response would be.”

Do you mean questions or responses? “Wildcard” tickbox options would probably break the survey. If you mean questions, there were a lot more asked than just those two: see the link behind “YouGuv” in the OP.

@7 – Yes I meant questions, didnt click the link ill get it out thanks

When your sole argument against something (in public at least) is that it’s not as high a priority as x then you have lost all other arguments or just wish to obscure your real reasons for objecting would do you no favours with the public, such as the potential loss of a £300 a day attendance allowance for the rest of your life whenever you retire or are defeated as an MP.

The truth is reform will never be a priority for those opposed to the elimination of entrenched privilege and the establishment of a truly independent Lords/Senate elected by the people rather than packed with former MPs and party doners.

There’s always something more important going on. Almost four years of economic crisis now, and before that there was a war on terror to be getting on with. I can’t imagine a time when they’ll say there’s no major issues, time to get all the irrelevant things like gay marriage out of the way.

51% means pretty evenly divided to me.

UK Muslims, Sikhs slam govt’s gay marriage plan as ‘unnecessary, assault on religion’

@ 11 damon

“51% means pretty evenly divided to me.”

Only because you’ve conveniently ignored the fact that it’s 51%:35%. You don’t get to count the “don’t knows” as on your side.

…In other words, if my vague memory from school of how to calculate percentages has not failed me, 69% of those who express an opinion are in favour of gay marriage. That’s a pretty solid margin.

This is not about gay marriage. It is whether the state should redefine the word “marriage” to include civil partnerships between single-sex couples. yougov got what appeared to be a very different answer when it phrased the question in terms of a civil partnership with an overwhelming majority in favour.
Forty-odd years ago I did a Statistics course and the first thing they tried to drum into our relatively thick (relative to the lecturers, paper thin compared to Sunny) heads on surveys was that we should avoid bias in the way we asked questions.

@ 14 John77

“This is not about gay marriage. It is whether the state should redefine the word “marriage” to include civil partnerships between single-sex couples.”

That’s a pretty huge false dichotomy, seeing as you’ve just described the same thing two different ways, then said “it’s not about description 1, it’s about description 2″

“Forty-odd years ago I did a Statistics course and the first thing they tried to drum into our relatively thick (relative to the lecturers, paper thin compared to Sunny) heads on surveys was that we should avoid bias in the way we asked questions.”

Agreed, but what’s the uncontroversial, unbiased way of phrasing this one? Your description 2 above won’t do, as it’s an obvious attempt to focus on linguistics instead of individuals.

John77

This is not about gay marriage. It is whether the state should redefine the word “marriage” to include civil partnerships between single-sex couples.

No it isn’t. Firstly “it is” about what was asked “Do you think the government should or should not go ahead with the following policies… [...] Allowing same-sex couples to get married”. Polling companies are usually very careful about wording. True, Sunny’s headline may be a little misleading but by now we’d feel slight uneasy if it wasn’t, such is the tradition.

Secondly this isn’t what the proposed Bill will do. Existing civil partnerships are to be unchanged (presumably with a quick and cheap conversion option). Civil marriage will be allowed to partners of the same sex – presumably with the same restrictions as for those with different sexes. Whether the latter can also have civil partnerships is not proposed but could be campaigned for. If you wish to have your say the consultation is open for another four weeks:

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/about-us/consultations/equal-civil-marriage/

As to what the word ‘marriage’ means will be dictated by usage in the end. A lot of people seem to use it to include civil partnerships already.

yougov got what appeared to be a very different answer when it phrased the question in terms of a civil partnership with an overwhelming majority in favour.

Any references to opinion polls should include a link if you want to be taken seriously.

@ Roger Mexico
The government allows same-sex couples to enter into a civil partnership. You admit this.
I suspect – and since I am using simple commonsense the burden of proof is on you to disprove it – that most people asked the question thought that this was the point of the question.
I take exception on the grounds that it is an abuse of the English language.
This is now being finessed into a basis for campaigners to sue churches if they refuse to conduct a “marriage” service in church.

“I take exception on the grounds that it is an abuse of the English language.”

Pretty much the funniest thing I’ve read all year. Words change. Normally it’s because the public gradually get into the habit of using them differently. Sometimes it’s because we make a change in law, so “murder” doesn’t mean quite the same thing once the concept of self-defense is brought in. And so on. This is language, and that’s how it works.

And then, when I need a comedy break, someone will come along and desperately try to justify their hatred and oppression of gay people by accusing them of changing our language. It would be sweet, if it wasn’t so fucking hateful.

Let’s produce a new dictionary called The Bigoted Cunt’s Guide To The ENGERLISH Language. It should explain that “marriage” means the union of a man and a woman, and “wife” means someone who has your meal on the table when you get home, and “proper” means someone who goes to bed by ten o’clock, and “thief” means that black guy who I saw hanging around before I was robbed. That way, we all know where we stand.

@ Chaise
I have accepted the case for civil partnerships. I do not accept that churches should be obliged (i) to ignore the Bible and conduct ceremonies that conflict with their doctrines (ii) to face lawsuits if they decline.
The government can pass a law that says the word”gold” now means brass.
There are ways to phrase an *honest* question (such as a 5-way query do you think marriage should be (a) banned, (b) have separate categories for heterosexual and same-sex couples (c) be for for life between one man and one woman (c) include same-sex couples for life (d) be until you get bored and change partners, and even if you query how ComRes phrased the question it is obvious that the discrepancy between the two polls (ComRes had 70% supporting the old-fashioned view of marriage) shows that the poll Sunny quotes is misleading

@ John77

“I have accepted the case for civil partnerships. I do not accept that churches should be obliged (i) to ignore the Bible and conduct ceremonies that conflict with their doctrines (ii) to face lawsuits if they decline.”

Agreed, strongly. If someone breaks the rules of a religion, to the point that they are obviously no part of that religion, what the hell are they doing demanding to be recogised by that religion’s church? There are people who think that every Christian minster should be legally forced to marry gay couples, and I really don’t like those people.

“The government can pass a law that says the word”gold” now means brass.”

Meh. You don’t actually care about the word itself, and on some level you know it. What are you actually arguing against?

“There are ways to phrase an *honest* question[...]”

Many ways, as you have shown. So how do we pick a neutral version?

“shows that the poll Sunny quotes is misleading”

Yeah, that’s because Sunny is the kind of pillock who lets reality die in the face of his beliefs. This isn’t news.

John77

The government allows same-sex couples to enter into a civil partnership. You admit this.
I suspect – and since I am using simple commonsense the burden of proof is on you to disprove it – that most people asked the question thought that this was the point of the question.

Your second sentence is so bizarre that it needs examining to see how very strange it is. You are saying that instead of words being read as they as written, they actually mean what you think they ought to mean, and your interpretation was shared by all 1,663 people who participated in the YouGov poll.

Furthermore this interpretation is, according to you, so obvious that it is up to me to disprove it. Though presumably, even if I somehow managed to contact all 1,663 of them to ask what they really meant, you could still argue that the replies they gave to that question “really” meant what you want it to mean.

I’m afraid ‘simple commonsense’ dictates that when people mean what they say not what a particular individual blog commenter would like them to say.

I notice by the way that the YouGov poll which you said justified your views has now changed into a ComRes one. Or were we all expected to ‘know’ by ‘commonsense’ that that was really what you meant?

Two footnotes to the above:

Firstly, despite the opponents of SSM waving the ComRes poll around to justify themselves, as I pointed out on another thread in actual fact it was the ComRes question that was badly worded so the result from that cannot be relied on.

Secondly (and I’m surprised more fuss hasn’t been made about this) the actual proposals currently up for consultation state:

civil partnership registrations on religious premises will continue as is currently possible i.e. on a voluntary basis for faith groups and with no religious content

but this means that Parliament can and will continue to be able to dictate what can and cannot be included in ceremonies conducted on religious premises. True for historical reasons it has nominal control over some activities of the Church of England, but no one has ever suggested that it should control what other religions should practice.

Once this principle has been accepted, there’s nothing to prevent it being extended. Laws could be passed that Catholic Masses only be conducted by naked women or that all Muslim ceremonies involve the worship of a giant butter model of George Osborne. Morally neither religion could complain because they did not do so when Parliament passed laws dictating the religious content of Civil Partnership ceremonies conducted in say Quaker Meeting Houses.

Now surely is the time for the religions to stand up and demand the abolition of this ban on “religious content” which strikes against the very idea of freedom of worship.

@ Chaise
“What are you actually arguing against?”
What I object to is firstly the dishonesty, the abuse of statistics to mislead instead of to inform which devalues them. Were you aware that it was by using statistics and drawing a time-series chart that Florence Nightingale persuaded the government to turn hospital hygiene from one woman’s experiment in one field hospital into recommended practice throughout the British Empire? They can still be used to show whether someone’s moan is a case of one-off bad luck or an example of a systematic problem that needs a cure, but public faith in official statistics is being eroded by such misuse to the point where any statistic published in the Daily Mail is automatically disbelieved the left and any published in The Guardian is disbelieved by the right and without trust in the data we won’t even have the rear-view mirror to help us steer the car.
Secondly, language does matter. Leaving MinTruth on one side for the moment, we get bigots arguing that “That shalt do no murder” means that you cannot kill a lamb to celebrate Passover or the fatted calf to celebrate the return of the Prodigal Son because the word “kill” was used in the King James translation. It is one the duties of the vicar/rector/curate of a CofE church to marry parishioners (subject to a handful of necessary conditions, such as eschewing/renouncing promiscuity). So if you pass a law to change the meaning of the word “marriage” without simultaneously going through the long process of changing Canon Law, you can, and I bet you *will* get “Gay Rights” activists demanding to be married in their local church. I used to have a couple of friends who belonged to the Gay Christian Movement (lost touch after I moved away): one of them, who was persecuted at work for his Christian beliefs but not for his homosexuality, said that it was similar to a marriage, not “the same as”.
Thirdly, I am allergic to bullies. And this smells like a build-up to bullying people who disagree with the lobbyists.
Lots of ways to phrase an honest question. Basically: don’t push people to give the answer I want. Example: have multiple choice for the five choices I listed plus the French version where marriage is a civil contract registered by the state and if you the Church’s blessing you go to church for that afterwards and Muslim/reactionary-Mormon polygamy and Himalayan polyandry (if that still exists?) with strongly approve/approve/disapprove/strongly disapprove/don’t know/don’t care.

@ John77

“What I object to is firstly the dishonesty, the abuse of statistics to mislead instead of to inform which devalues them.”

What abuse? All I see is you grasping at straws because the data is inconvenient to your politics.

“Secondly, language does matter [...] So if you pass a law to change the meaning of the word “marriage” without simultaneously going through the long process of changing Canon Law, you can, and I bet you *will* get “Gay Rights” activists demanding to be married in their local church.”

So we should confim in law that churchs have a right to decide who they do and don’t marry. Why is throwing the baby out with the bathwater your preferred solution?

“I used to have a couple of friends who belonged to the Gay Christian Movement (lost touch after I moved away): one of them, who was persecuted at work for his Christian beliefs but not for his homosexuality, said that it was similar to a marriage, not “the same as”.”

And your friend is the official spokesperson for all gay people, right?

“Thirdly, I am allergic to bullies. And this smells like a build-up to bullying people who disagree with the lobbyists.”

You are siding with bullies. Disagreeing with people is not bullying. Treating people like second-class citizens decidedly is.

“Lots of ways to phrase an honest question.”

For example? A multiple-choice option still needs a question.

“Basically: don’t push people to give the answer I want. Example: have multiple choice for the five choices I listed plus the French version where marriage is a civil contract registered by the state and if you the Church’s blessing you go to church for that afterwards and Muslim/reactionary-Mormon polygamy and Himalayan polyandry (if that still exists?) with strongly approve/approve/disapprove/strongly disapprove/don’t know/don’t care.”

Problem with this is that you don’t find out how many people are in favour of gay marriage. It’s still interesting data but on a different topic.

@ Roger Mexico
Smears don’t work
Nor do lies when transposing “most” into “all” is so transparent.
I made a mistake referring to a poll I had looked at several days ago, since when I had seen multiple references to yougov: when my wife heckled me I went back to the source material and corrected the reference in my next post. I am human, so i can err, but I try to correct my errors.
Sunny does at least allow people to link to the yougov poll that he is selectively quoting (carefully omitting the 82% in favour of a British Bill of Rights to replace the European Court, because he doesn’t like that one).
But *you* seem to be saying that 51% of all the people in this country think that “marriages” should take place on religious premises with no religious content, with no ability for the CofE to reject them unless they are divorcees with a partner living or under 16 (or unbaptised but since any nominal Christian can baptise any unbaptised person, that’s not much of a bar). So a divorced Christian cannot (re-)marry in a church building but Sunny’s poll would promote a new law that will require the vicar “marry” a promiscuous atheist to his/her temporary gay partner. Pardon me if I say that I don’t believe that the majority of British people have sunk that low. They answered the question put by yougov as*they* understood the question, not as YOU want to claim they did.

So a divorced Christian cannot (re-)marry in a church building

Hang on, wasn’t the whole point of the Church of England so that a divorced Christian could remarry in a church building?

@ Chaise:

“You are siding with bullies. Disagreeing with people is not bullying.”

Trying to stop people from disagreeing with you by calling them bigots, OTOH, is.

“Treating people like second-class citizens decidedly is.”

Good job we’ve got civil partnerships, then.

“For example? A multiple-choice option still needs a question.”

How’s about “Which of the following statements best matches your view of marriage…?”

@ Sunny:

“Public DOES want gay marriage, Lords reform”

The public also wants less immigration and a refendum on the EU, but you don’t keep running articles on why we ought to do these things…

@ 27 P Ve M

“Trying to stop people from disagreeing with you by calling them bigots, OTOH, is.”

Depends if it’s justified. I don’t think we should lie about people’s intentions whether that means whitewashing them or demonising them.

“Good job we’ve got civil partnerships, then.”

Indeed. We’re nearly there. If we legalise gay marriage it’ll pretty much be job done.

“How’s about “Which of the following statements best matches your view of marriage…?””

Yeah, that’s fine. Although as I said to John, that doesn’t tell you whether people support gay marriage. For that you want a question like “Should same-sex couples be allowed to marry under law [yes/no/don't know/no answer]“.

The phrasing of the YouGov question was: “Do you think the government should or should not go ahead with the following policies… [Allowing same-sex couples to get married].” This isn’t biased. Although it’s worth pointing out that it refers to the law as currently being discussed, not gay marriage as a general thing, and it’s possible that someone might answer “should” because they don’t want gay marriage but think the backlash to keeping it illegal isn’t worth the cost. But generally I’d expect this question to return accurate answers.

Chaise @ 28:

“Depends if it’s justified. I don’t think we should lie about people’s intentions whether that means whitewashing them or demonising them.”

Perhaps one day Lib Con might even see a thread where it’s not taken as given that everyone who expresses doubts about gay marriage is motivated by bigotry.

@ 29 P Ve M

It doesn’t help that the arguments against gay marriage seem to fall into three categories: personal homophobia; views based on a homohphobic religion; and incoherence and desperation. In other words: bigoted; bigoted; suspicious.

I am open, in theory, to people being opposed to gay marriage without being motivated by bigotry. However, I have yet to hear a sensible argument that doesn’t at some point rest on the idea that gayness is wrong/inferior. All the attempts to do so that have reached my ears thus far have fallen into the third category there. That doesn’t mean those arguments don’t or can’t exist, just that I’ve not heard them.

In fairness, I suspect some people using argument type three are genuinely not homophobic, but instead are motivated by the instinct to argue with anything the other side says.

John77 #25

I found your comment rather confused and confusing. Can I suggest that, presumably now you have calmed down, you actually (re)read what I wrote.

To be fair you may not be very familiar with how opinion pollsters ask their questions, but they usually take great care to be as unambiguous as possibly (their rivals will be quick to pick on any mistakes). Those answering will be members of regular on-line panels who are used to answering such questionnaires and so they know that they should respond to the question that is actually in front of them (often they are asked a number of questions about related topics). And remember that it is in before them in writing and they have as long as they want to answer. It’s not like just being asked “what you think of thingy” in passing. If they are uncertain about what it means, they can always answer “Don’t Know”.

Given all this, don’t you think that saying that you know what those polled really meant comes across as a bit arrogant and insulting to them? Logically it is ‘all’ by the way, as saying you ‘know’ that some meant something different means you also think you ‘know’ what the rest did as well. Either way – 1,663 or 833 plus – it’s an awful lot of mindreading.

Of course a badly worded question can cause confusion. A good example of that is the ComRes question you mentioned. Follow the link above to the comment I gave on another thread and read my explanation. In that case I think you can show statistically that the poor wording affected the result. (You’ll also see that we do all make mistakes because I copied one of the original figures wrong from YouGov). But even then you can’t say that the responses actually show anything – just that the ambiguous wording made the whole thing useless.

Can I also suggest you read what Sunny wrote. He said “Conservative MPs keep saying that the public is neither interested in legalising same sex marriage nor in House of Lords reform”. He then showed this was wrong. But the MPs aren’t complaining about the other things you talked about, so why should Sunny?

Finally and most importantly can I suggest you follow the link I gave to the consultation on same sex marriage and actually read what is there. What you seem to think it says bears no relation at all to what is proposed, and it does seem a waste to get worked up over something that doesn’t exist.

@ 26 cim
NO
It was to allow a king of dubious legitimacy to make sure that he had an heir recognised under English Law (which was amended to do so).

@ 30 Chaise
The definition of Christian Marriage implies (the likelihood of) children of a heterosexual union. Civil partnerships include all the appropriate legal benefits that I can think of – I stand open to correction because I am not a family law specialist, but …
I really cannot see why you should demand that Christians abandon their definition of marriage. If Gays want to abandon promiscuity and enter into a permanent one-to-one relationship we will do nothing to stand in their way, but that is not marriage any more than George Foreman cutting down Mohammed Ali with a longsword would have been boxing.
I am being smeared as homophobic when I object to Sunny’s abuse of statistics. And then smeared as bullying by someone trying to bully me.

I really cannot see why you should demand that Christians abandon their definition of marriage.

Given that the Quakers and the Metropolitan Community Church (among other Christian denominations) willingly perform religious marriage ceremonies for gay couples in those jurisdictions where they are legally allowed to do so, I can’t see how allowing them to do so in the UK would be requiring them to abandon their definition of marriage.

Or are they the wrong sort of Christian?

@ Chaise 24
LibCon’s software has clearly swallowed my reply because it’snot there I get round to answering #30.
i) Sunny is claiming a majority view based on a misleading question whose rersut would not be statistically significant even if it was the result of an honestly phrased question
ii) *I* am not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If, and that now seems an if whereas it didn’t earlier, you want to preserve the freedom of the CofE to celebrate marriage according the Bible’s definition, then you must wait for the slow process of change in Canon Law before you decide to change the English language. If you don’t like reality blame previous Parliaments, not me.
iii) No – are you? He was a gay Christian, so was better placed than I to express their views, and to pass them on to me (he alternated between my parish church and a “Gay” congregation). Until someone can quote better-sourced data, I’ll take take his word for it. Other Gay Christian friends have chosen life-long celibacy.
iv) I take exception. Whom have I ever treated as second-class citizens? No, seriously: searching my memory all I can find is a group of young thugs who attacked smaller boys from my school, when I was called upon to drive them off – several of the thugs were bigger than I was at the time, so assuming that they would back off when challenged was treating them as second-class citizens. Are you saying that I should have let them beat up the little kids instead of standing in the way?
v) “Problem with this is that you don’t find out how many people are in favour of gay marriage. It’s still interesting data but on a different topic.” Please READ what I said “b) have separate categories for heterosexual and same-sex couples (c) be for for life between one man and one woman (c) include same-sex couples for life (d) be until you get bored and change partners, ” before you condemn me
What form of gay civil partnership is excluded? There may be some but if so, my mind boggles.
I really cannot believe that you honestly think that my example of a multiple-choice format on seven different definitions of marriage fails because I didn’t include in my previous post “which box do you tick”? You are better than that.

Chaise @ 30:

“I am open, in theory, to people being opposed to gay marriage without being motivated by bigotry. However, I have yet to hear a sensible argument that doesn’t at some point rest on the idea that gayness is wrong/inferior. All the attempts to do so that have reached my ears thus far have fallen into the third category there. That doesn’t mean those arguments don’t or can’t exist, just that I’ve not heard them.”

Well, marriage, defined as the union of a man and a woman for the purposes of raising a family,* is one of the common features of all human societies; it is, as far as we can tell, a part of human nature, rather than a deliberate creation of the government or of human societies. It’s true that the government regulates marriages, but this is a response to a pre-existing fact of human nature, rather than a sign that marriage was created by the government, much as food production regulations are a response to the pre-existing fact that human beings need to eat. Gay marriages, on the other hand, have no such pedigree; they are something which some people in a few twenty-first societies want to create by the power of the State. Now, this doesn’t mean that official recognition of gay relationships is wrong, but it does mean that gay marriage is different to straight marriage, and trying to claim (as a lot of gay marriage proponents do, with varying degrees of explicitness and implicitness) that they are really the same thing, or that allowing gay people to get married is somehow the natural state of affairs and is only being stopped by a few religious bigots, is making a fairly serious category error. You might not agree with the above, of course, but I don’t think it rests on the idea that gayness is somehow wrong. Nor is it necessarily a religious argument; it would work just as well whether marriage were set up by God or the product of a long process of evolution (or, indeed, both).

* And this includes marriage in polygamous societies, where the main difference was generally that a man could get married to several women at the same time, rather than that the nature of marriage itself was different. A man might be married to several women, but his wives wouldn’t be considered married to each other.

John77

Liberal Conspiracy sometimes develops this irritating habit of looking like it has eaten a post when it hasn’t. If you look on the front page it shows your comment under Latest Comments and if you try to post exactly the same text (I compose in Notepad so if stuff gets lost I don’t have to start again) it will tell you it’s a duplicate. But you can’t see what you wrote and often other recent comments on the same thread are invisible too.

It usually seems to happen when they’re trying to get the site to run faster, so it’s a technical thing. There’s not much you can do except wait, though coming completely out of the site seems to help sometimes.

@ 35 John77

“Sunny is claiming a majority view based on a misleading question whose rersut would not be statistically significant even if it was the result of an honestly phrased question”

How is it misleading? It ask whether people are in favour of letting gay people get married. This tells us whether they think gay people should be allowed to get married. Believe me, I am not lax about bad data. I regularly criticise LC for using dodgy polls, or over-enthusiastically interpreting good data. Indeed, I sometimes get accused of right-wingery by lefties who don’t understand why a fellow lefty would question claims that support the left. But the poll question in this case seems clear and unambiguous.

“*I* am not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”

You are if you ban gay marriage because you don’t want churches forced to enact it.

“If, and that now seems an if whereas it didn’t earlier, you want to preserve the freedom of the CofE to celebrate marriage according the Bible’s definition, then you must wait for the slow process of change in Canon Law before you decide to change the English language. If you don’t like reality blame previous Parliaments, not me.”

I’ve been very clear about supporting the right of Churches to decide who they want to marry, so I don’t know what that first sentence is about. Perhaps you are unfamailiar with the idea of supporting people’s right to do something you personally disapprove of? Anyhoo: I’m not quite sure what you’re saying. Is there a CofE rule that “marriage” has to be defined based on the law rather than the Bible? If so, we can give them the right to change that. If they’re slow about changing it that’s their business. We give them the freedom, it’s up to them what they do with it. Cos it’s freedom, you see.

“No – are you?”

Nope. I don’t need to be because I’m simply saying they should have the freedom to choose. And if most gay people don’t want to be married but a few do, those few still deserve equal rights.

“He was a gay Christian, so was better placed than I to express their views, and to pass them on to me (he alternated between my parish church and a “Gay” congregation). Until someone can quote better-sourced data, I’ll take take his word for it. Other Gay Christian friends have chosen life-long celibacy.”

As is their right. Incidentally he expresses HIS views, not theirs. I can’t believe you’re arguing about bad data and now insinuating “I know a gay Christian that thinks X, therefore the gay Christian view is X”.

“I take exception. Whom have I ever treated as second-class citizens? No, seriously: searching my memory all I can find is a group of young thugs who attacked smaller boys from my school, when I was called upon to drive them off – several of the thugs were bigger than I was at the time, so assuming that they would back off when challenged was treating them as second-class citizens. Are you saying that I should have let them beat up the little kids instead of standing in the way?”

You’re getting weird. No, obviously I was not making reference to an incident in your life that I didn’t know about till now. I was talking about supporting a system where first-class citizens are allowed to marry, but second-class citizens are not.

“Please READ what I said “b) have separate categories for heterosexual and same-sex couples (c) be for for life between one man and one woman (c) include same-sex couples for life (d) be until you get bored and change partners, ” before you condemn me
What form of gay civil partnership is excluded? There may be some but if so, my mind boggles.”

The problem with multiple-choice polls is that you get people all trying to claim that people who checked a box that straddles the middle of the debate are on their side really. And the problem with loaded questions (“until you get bored”, indeed!) is that they skew the data.

“I really cannot believe that you honestly think that my example of a multiple-choice format on seven different definitions of marriage fails because I didn’t include in my previous post “which box do you tick”? You are better than that.”

I didn’t say it fails. I asked you to say how you would phrase a question, and you didn’t actually say how you would. That is all.

@ 33 John77

“The definition of Christian Marriage implies (the likelihood of) children of a heterosexual union. Civil partnerships include all the appropriate legal benefits that I can think of – I stand open to correction because I am not a family law specialist, but …
I really cannot see why you should demand that Christians abandon their definition of marriage.”

Where the FUCK have I demanded Christians abandon their definition of marriage? I specifically said churches should be allowed to decide who to marry. I’m leaving Christians alone, giving them the right to do as they wish. So grow up and stop arguing with a made-up version of me.

“If Gays want to abandon promiscuity and enter into a permanent one-to-one relationship we will do nothing to stand in their way, but that is not marriage any more than George Foreman cutting down Mohammed Ali with a longsword would have been boxing.”

Until we change the law, at which point it is marriage. Which is the whole point of this bloody debate.

“I am being smeared as homophobic when I object to Sunny’s abuse of statistics. And then smeared as bullying by someone trying to bully me.”

I’m gonna call you homophobic now because of that ignorant comment about promiscuity. Promiscuity may be more common among gays but many of them are already in permanant relationships. I am not attempting to bully you, just pointing out that you want a system that bullies gay people to continue. You are getting pathetic, this is the equivalent of people who say that objecting to prejudice is prejudice against prejudiced people. Some people disagree with you, learn to deal with it.

@ 36 P Ve M

That whole post is based on the incorrect assumption that I am basing my argument on the naturalistic fallacy. I am not. I’m not saying gays should be allowed to marry because it’s “natural”, I’m saying gay people should be allowed to marry because it’s their business, not ours. Oh, and you also seem to be implying that the prejudice of the past is a reason to be prejudiced today. “Casteless people have always been seen as inferior, due to society not law, changing it now would be unnatural.” And so on.

Chaise @ 40:

“That whole post is based on the incorrect assumption that I am basing my argument on the naturalistic fallacy. I am not.”

But a lot of gay marriage advocates are.

“I’m not saying gays should be allowed to marry because it’s “natural”, I’m saying gay people should be allowed to marry because it’s their business, not ours.”

Except that being married isn’t just a private state of affairs with no impact on anybody else, it also affects society as a whole. It is, for example, in society’s interests for as many children as possible to be raised in a stable two-parent environment, and this is more likely to happen if people view marriage and having children as being connected. Even if you reject this argument, married couples get various tax breaks and legal privileges which non-married couples don’t.

“Oh, and you also seem to be implying that the prejudice of the past is a reason to be prejudiced today.”

How is it prejudiced to say that two things with different origins are in fact different things? That seems like common sense to me.

Chaise @ 39:

“Where the FUCK have I demanded Christians abandon their definition of marriage? I specifically said churches should be allowed to decide who to marry.”

You seem to be getting confused between marriage as an institution and a marriage ceremony. You might not want to force Churches to perform marriage ceremonies for gay couples, but your reaction to John77′s idea that gay marriage is not in fact marriage (as an institution) suggests that you do in fact want Christians to abandon their definition of marriage as an institution.

It is, for example, in society’s interests for as many children as possible to be raised in a stable two-parent environment, and this is more likely to happen if people view marriage and having children as being connected.

The bit I’ve bolded is what is commonly referred to as ‘unmitigated bollocks’. Benefit system reforms, so that they stop penalising unemployed/low-income couples with children for living together, are a far better way to achieve your societal desire than your proposal of apparently doing and changing nothing. Hell, full unquestioned access to abortion manages to further increase the chances of “for as many children as possible to be raised in a stable two-parent environment”, because you ain’t gonna be forcing some girls against their will to become single parents, rather than trying to keep a clamp down on the ‘definition of marriage’.

The bit I’ve bolded is what is commonly referred to as ‘unmitigated bollocks’.

Why has the number of lone parent families risen so consistently over the last fifty years?

@ Vimothy
Well it’s not because of gay marriage is it? Unless you intend to claim gay marriage has been about for 50 years.

Your argument at was that children will not be more likely to be raised in a stable two-person family if people view marriage and having children as being connected. You described the idea as “unmitigated bollocks”.

Instead you recommend more benefits for unmarried couples and “full unquestioned access to abortion”. But as you go back in time, you see less of your recommendations and less single parent families. In other words, we already tried that, and it brought us here.

@46 You also see less rights and regard for women, how far toward the past you willing to delve?

46

Children may be better-off in a home with two parents working together harmoneously (could be same-sex parents) But the period which saw the highest number of children lliving in single parent homes was during the war years. Nobody ever thought that it was problematic.

Cylux @ 43:

Oh, so there are several things which can affect the likelihood of children being raised in a stable environment. That’s interesting. It’s also totally irrelevant, since none of what you’ve said means that seeing marriage and child-raising as linked doesn’t also change the likelihood of this happening.

Oh, so there are several things which can affect the likelihood of children being raised in a stable environment. That’s interesting. It’s also totally irrelevant, since none of what you’ve said means that seeing marriage and child-raising as linked doesn’t also change the likelihood of this happening.

Well, you need to prove that gay married couples won’t raise children together as a family unit, which Elton John and David Furness are the most public example of doing so.

The reason why marriage and child-raising were linked in the distant past, was because it helped define the differences between ‘legitimate heirs’ and ‘bastards’.

Cylux @ 50:

“Well, you need to prove that gay married couples won’t raise children together as a family unit,”

No, you’d have to prove that redefining marriage so that it’s about being in a loving, committed relationship, rather than about having children — which is what most gay marriage activists seem to be trying to do — will lessen the link in people’s minds between “being married” and “having children”. Which it pretty obviously will, since if you remove the “having children” part from the definition, of course people will be less likely to associate having children with being married.

“The reason why marriage and child-raising were linked in the distant past, was because it helped define the differences between ‘legitimate heirs’ and ‘bastards’.”

Surely the whole concept of legitimacy only makes sense if you already have a concept of marriage being linked to having children, for, if the two concepts weren’t related, who would care whether the mother were married to the father? Marriage and child-raising must have been linked before the concept of legitimacy arose, and thus can’t have been linked in order to define who was legitimate or otherwise.

@51 Having looked at the various definitions of marriage at wiki I don’t think you’re onto a winner with this “you are redefining marriage” argument. Given that the change you seem to dislike, the loving committed relationship, has been around since the 1930′s. (And the change was from same guy who defined marriage in the 1920′s as being a union between a couple for propagation purposes) You’re defending a meaning that had already fallen out of popular use for nearly 80 years as a justification for denying gay people the right to be wed. Social institutions change as society demands, or they die. Vimothy’s arguments above seem to indicate his belief that marriage was on its way out, (otherwise why would he use the last 50 years as evidence against today’s change?) and here we have a minority group wishing to breath new life into the institution, and you’re opposed!?!?

Furthermore – inheritance, lineage and dynasty – these were the concepts that birthed legitimacy, wars of succession could be bloody affairs, so the only kids that counted were those from the king’s wife (queens get around this rule by dint of being the one giving birth). It’s a very ruling class view of marriage, to be fair, so I’m not sure why you’d think it’d fly on a lefty website.

Cylux @ 52:

Just because an institution has changed in the past isn’t automatically an argument for continuing to change it. I don’t deny that people are now less likely to associate being married with having children than they were fifty or a hundred years ago, but given that this disassociation has been accompanied by (and probably caused) the rise of fairly major social problems, I don’t see why we should disassociate the two concepts even further.

As for “denying gay people the right to marry”, you seem to be making the mistake I referred to above, namely, that gay marriage is the natural state of society, and that anybody who opposes it is therefore trying to deny gay people their birthright due to some kind of bigotry. Looking around at various historical and modern societies, it’s by no means obvious that this is the case.

“Furthermore – inheritance, lineage and dynasty – these were the concepts that birthed legitimacy, wars of succession could be bloody affairs, so the only kids that counted were those from the king’s wife (queens get around this rule by dint of being the one giving birth). It’s a very ruling class view of marriage, to be fair, so I’m not sure why you’d think it’d fly on a lefty website.”

If that were the case, we’d expect to see that marriage and childbearing were linked only among upper-class dynasts. Do you have any evidence for this?

we’d expect to see that marriage and childbearing were linked only among upper-class dynasts. Do you have any evidence for this?

The number of children born outside of wedlock is my evidence. Because if the opinion that “marriage and childbearing were linked” were more mainstream, you’d see few children born outside of wedlock.

Just because an institution has changed in the past isn’t automatically an argument for continuing to change it.

You’re argument requires that we change it to your preferred meaning, so you yourself are arguing for further continuing change.

I don’t deny that people are now less likely to associate being married with having children than they were fifty or a hundred years ago, but given that this disassociation has been accompanied by (and probably caused) the rise of fairly major social problems, I don’t see why we should disassociate the two concepts even further.

Well what social problems would these be? Children not as often being raised in a stable two-parent unit? Well, aside from the fact that gay and unmarried couples can also provide a ‘stable two-parent unit’, I’m not sure how you can lay all the blame at changing perceptions of marriage as the root cause. Women’s emancipation and empowerment will play a role, being able to tell your perpetually drunken deadbeat partner that you and your children are better off single and without him developed in the same time period. Poverty is also a strong indicator and cause of single parents and broken families, which the Thatcherite reforms designed to make large swathes of the nation unemployed most assuredly didn’t help. Plus as I mentioned above there’s the whole ‘you can get more money/help if you live apart’ idiocy in the way benefits are awarded, which incentivizes living singly.

Cylux @ 54:

“The number of children born outside of wedlock is my evidence. Because if the opinion that “marriage and childbearing were linked” were more mainstream, you’d see few children born outside of wedlock.”

Got some figures for the number of children being born out of wedlock over the past few centuries, then? Preferably ones comparing illegitimate births among the upper class with ones among the lower classes.

“You’re argument requires that we change it to your preferred meaning, so you yourself are arguing for further continuing change.”

Change back, technically. But my argument was that we ought to do this because it would be good for society, not that people’s views of marriage have changed, so we might as well change it a bit more.

“Well what social problems would these be? Children not as often being raised in a stable two-parent unit? Well, aside from the fact that gay and unmarried couples can also provide a ‘stable two-parent unit’, I’m not sure how you can lay all the blame at changing perceptions of marriage as the root cause. Women’s emancipation and empowerment will play a role, being able to tell your perpetually drunken deadbeat partner that you and your children are better off single and without him developed in the same time period. Poverty is also a strong indicator and cause of single parents and broken families, which the Thatcherite reforms designed to make large swathes of the nation unemployed most assuredly didn’t help. Plus as I mentioned above there’s the whole ‘you can get more money/help if you live apart’ idiocy in the way benefits are awarded, which incentivizes living singly.”

I never said that changing perceptions of marriage were entirely to blame, just that they were a factor. The idea that somebody who thinks “I ought only to have children within wedlock” is less likely to have illegitimate children than one who doesn’t seems so blindingly obvious that I don’t see how anybody can reasonably deny it, unless they’re doing so in order to argue for a preconceived political position.

(As for poverty being a cause: Britain is richer today than at any time in previous history. If your argument were correct, we’d expect to have seen illegitimate birth figures plummet over the past hundred years or so. In reality, the opposite has happened.)

@ 41 P Ve M

“But a lot of gay marriage advocates are.”

Talk to them, then. If you’re talking to me it’s a straw man.

“”Except that being married isn’t just a private state of affairs with no impact on anybody else, it also affects society as a whole. It is, for example, in society’s interests for as many children as possible to be raised in a stable two-parent environment, and this is more likely to happen if people view marriage and having children as being connected. Even if you reject this argument, married couples get various tax breaks and legal privileges which non-married couples don’t.”

Hang on, are you arguing for keeping civil partnerships but not gay marriage, or ending civil partnerships? Because it’s in society’s interest to be raised in a stable two-parent family regardless of whether the parents are married, partered or just living together. And I believe civil partnerships get the same legal privileges.

So if you don’t seek to ban civil partnerships the above seems to come down to associating marriage with children. First, what has this got to do with it? Gay people often have children, and are we to force straight couples to divorce if they fail to have kids? Second, is slapping a minority group in the face really the most reasonable way to achieve this goal?

“How is it prejudiced to say that two things with different origins are in fact different things? That seems like common sense to me.”

The present-day prejudice is in our marriage laws. You seem to be excusing this on the basis that for much of history marriage was reserved for men and women. Because of prejudice.

So try “We shouldn’t free the slaves, as for most of American history ‘citizen’ has meant white people and ‘slave’ has meant black people. They are different categories and should not be mixed”. Like the sound of that?

@ 42 P Ve M

“You seem to be getting confused between marriage as an institution and a marriage ceremony. You might not want to force Churches to perform marriage ceremonies for gay couples, but your reaction to John77?s idea that gay marriage is not in fact marriage (as an institution) suggests that you do in fact want Christians to abandon their definition of marriage as an institution.”

This is ridiculous. It’s an argument for never changing anything because it’ll make the meaning of a word slightly different. So if we didn’t allow self-defence as an defence for murder, and you came along and said we should change it, I could say “But my definition of murder includes killing in self-defence! You are forcing me to change my definition! Look at me, I’m being repressed!”

You can still think that gay marriage isn’t proper marriage. You can refuse to describe married gay couples as “married”. Changing the law doesn’t reach into your brain’s language centre and edit your definitions of words.

It’s this kind of desperate, bizarre argument that makes me suspect many anti-gay-marriage people are hiding their true reasons for wanting it banned. I’ve not heard the argument used in any other context, why is it suddenly important now?

Chaise,

What is your revised definition of marriage?

@55

over the past few centuries, then?

Aside from the past century or so, marriage has been about a man establishing property rights over the woman and any attendant children. This can be seen somewhat in today’s modern arranged marriages. Plus, if we go back even further, even just looking at examples in the bible, we find marriage between 1 man and several women to be allowed. How far exactly do you want to take this reactionary logic?

Furthermore, upon looking into it, I discovered that being illegitimate was actually discriminated against by law as well as social mores as you go back into the past. With obvious consequences. Incidentally I did stumble upon a scholarly article about how legalised abortion in California had caused a reduction in illegitimate children being born. Funny that. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1965092?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=56188062143

@ Chaise
Civil partnerships have the same legal benefits as marriage
Marriage is defined as being between one man and one woman (that is not a specifically Christian definition since its older than 2,000 years).
The Christian definition adds love and cherish (inter alia).
I am not making anyone a second-class citizen or treating them as such by observing that the definition of marriage does not cover two men or two women or one human and one animal.
If the definition of marriage is changed in law to suit the “Gay lobby” then the CofE can be sued for discrimination by “gay rights activists” and there is *nothing* you can do to stop that. I had thought a change in Canon Law would do, but I have realised that that in itself would be the basis for a “discrimination” lawsuit. I suspect that the ECHR would probably strike down any clause in UK law that exempted the CofE from celebrating “gay marriages” while still requiring it to celebrate heterosexual non-bigamous marriage.
51% of a small poll is NOT statistically significant.
The USA does not have an established church so their abuse of the English language is not relevant.
The only people to benefit from this would be lawyers [for comparison, the cost to the NHS of treating "whiplash injuries" is £8m, the cost to UK insurers is £2 Billion, of which more than £1 Billion goes to lawyers and claims management companies].

@ 58 vimothy

“What is your revised definition of marriage?”

In this context, whatever the definition currently is, but with the words “no gays, though” crossed out…

Part of the problem with declaring that the law defines the meaning of the word is that this meaning becomes too long to write. It would have to cover every law that deals with marriage in some way, so it would include things like “Marriage means getting all of someone’s stuff by default when they die, if they don’t leave a will and you’re not found guilty of related funny business, possibly minus inheritance tax, because Chaise doesn’t know offhand if inheritance tax applies between couples who own seperate assets.” It would be pages and pages long.

So my point is that arguing that gay marriage is wrong because it involves slightly redefining the concept, based on legal precedent, is weird if you don’t act the same way every time they raise or decrease the tax benefits paid to married couples, and so on. It has a stalking-horse look about it, as do most of the arguments used against gay marriage.

Chaise:

“Talk to them, then. If you’re talking to me it’s a straw man.”

Well, to be fair, you hadn’t really laid out your reasons for supporting gay marriage. It seemed like a reasonable supposition that your reasons would be the same as those of most other supporters of gay marriage.

“Hang on, are you arguing for keeping civil partnerships but not gay marriage, or ending civil partnerships?”

The former.

“we to force straight couples to divorce if they fail to have kids?”

One might as well say that, since we don’t force couples to divorce if they don’t love each another enough, marriage can’t have anything to do with love.

As for the question of whether marriage related to having children, I’d advise you to have a look at this site, which puts it better than I could: http://curlewriver.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/marriage-and-procreation/

“The present-day prejudice is in our marriage laws. You seem to be excusing this on the basis that for much of history marriage was reserved for men and women. Because of prejudice.”

*sigh*

No, it was not “because of prejudice”, it was because marriage was seen as an institution for raising a family, and gay couples can’t have children. What, do you really think that every pre-21st-century country just happened to be full of raging homophobes who arbitrarily drew up the marriage rules to stop gay people getting hitched? Wow, what a coincidence! And I suppose societies like Ancient Greece, which most scholars think were fine with homosexuality, were actually seething hotbeds of anti-gay prejudice? Why have you not published a paper about this new discovery? The academic world is in desperate need of your wisdom!

“This is ridiculous. It’s an argument for never changing anything because it’ll make the meaning of a word slightly different.”

No, it’s an argument for not disingenuously pretending that you aren’t going to change something when in fact you are. Saying “My definition of marriage is better than yours, so we ought to adopt it” is fair enough. Saying “I’m not going to change your definition of marriage” and then doing so is just dishonest.

“You can still think that gay marriage isn’t proper marriage. You can refuse to describe married gay couples as “married”. Changing the law doesn’t reach into your brain’s language centre and edit your definitions of words.”

So if somebody runs a service available only to married couples, and refuses to serve a gay couple because they don’t believe that gay marriage is proper marriage, would you support their right to do so, or just “I’m not trying to change Christians’ definition of marriage” in this context mean “Christians say that marriage means X, but for all practical purposes they have to change their definition to Y”?

Cylux @ 59:

Erm, I don’t see how any of that answers my question, or offers any proof of your idea that only the upper classes saw marriage and childbearing as being linked.

@ 60 John77

“Civil partnerships have the same legal benefits as marriage”

Not quite – they almost do and are intended to do, but there are a few loopholes, which would be closed were it redefined as marriage. I’ll say they do for the sake of argument though, because the loopholes aren’t the main issue for me.

“Marriage is defined as being between one man and one woman (that is not a specifically Christian definition since its older than 2,000 years).”

No. You don’t get to impose your preferred definition on all of us. And if we changed the law tomorrow then it would NOT be legally defined in this way.

“I am not making anyone a second-class citizen or treating them as such by observing that the definition of marriage does not cover two men or two women or one human and one animal.”

You are, however, seeking to keep people second-class citizens by arguing that the legal prejudice should not be removed. Just like you wouldn’t be racist for describing a black 1800s American slave as a “slave”, but you would be racist for campaigning against emancipation. (And no, I’m not saying that you guys are the moral equivalent of slavers, before you say anything.)

Oh, and let’s leave the examples of potential “marriages” involving partners that can’t consent out of it, please. Unless you want a long, arsey and patronising explanation of why that’s a straw man argument.

“If the definition of marriage is changed in law to suit the “Gay lobby” then the CofE can be sued for discrimination by “gay rights activists” and there is *nothing* you can do to stop that.”

Nonsense, I just told you how you could. Or at least how you could prevent these suits for having merit.

“I had thought a change in Canon Law would do, but I have realised that that in itself would be the basis for a “discrimination” lawsuit. I suspect that the ECHR would probably strike down any clause in UK law that exempted the CofE from celebrating “gay marriages” while still requiring it to celebrate heterosexual non-bigamous marriage.”

I highly doubt it, seeing as it isn’t somehow forcing everyone to legalise gay marriage in the first place.

“51% of a small poll is NOT statistically significant.”

If you’re going to complain about statistical significance then you need to know how to do statistics properly. Rule one is that you don’t try to imply that the “don’t knows” are on your side. The ratio is 51:35, just shy of 70% in favour among people who express an opinion. That’s a very solid margin.

Now, I agree that a survey is only as good as its methodology, including its sample size. But 1,600 people is not particularly small if that group is carefully selected to demographically represent the UK, which I believe YouGov does. Certainly it could get swept away by a bigger poll, but that would have to actually happen first.

” The USA does not have an established church so their abuse of the English language is not relevant.”

I don’t understand this. You seem to be saying that you don’t care about non-CofE Christians, but maybe I’m missing something. Language changes, by the way, if that’s an “abuse” then you’re abusing the English language for not speaking like Chaucer.

“The only people to benefit from this would be lawyers.”

And with that statement and a wave of his magic wand, John77 magics all of the UK’s gays and lesbians into non-existence!

@ Chaise again:

“In this context, whatever the definition currently is, but with the words “no gays, though” crossed out…”

Well, according to English law, one of the purposes of marriage is “the procreation and nurture of children” (source: https://simple-note.appspot.com/publish/MWB38w), so you’d at least have to get rid of that bit as well, as you’d be marrying couples who cannot procreate.

Essentially, though, your main problem seems to be that you imagine everybody really agrees with you about the definition of marriage (and, indeed, has agreed with you throughout the whole of human history…), and that anything stopping gay people getting married must therefore be an afterthought, an ex post facto justification for being nasty to gay people. You have so far provided no reason to think this is the case, however.

@63 I said it was a very ruling class view, not that it wouldn’t be shared by the ruled. The fact that the ruling classes also had put in place laws to penalise illegitimate children for being illegitimate will also have been a strong motivator for everyone to embrace the same values. That was the ‘obvious consequences’ I was talking about. though apparently not that obvious to you.

Of course, you’re talking about protecting the concept of marriage from well over 100 years ago, if not longer. We’ve had nearly a full century where marriage has been about love and partnership, and that a human child born out of wedlock has the same equal worth and value as one born within, it’s because of that current social context which is why gay marriage is an inevitability.

Chaise,

In this context, whatever the definition currently is, but with the words “no gays, though” crossed out…

But that rather dodges my question!

I don’t understand how the idea of gay marriage makes sense. It seems like a “round square”–if you say, “whatever the current definition is, but with “no gays, though” crossed out”, then you haven’t done anything to resolve the contradiction.

Marriage has a natural function. Since the union of two men or two women is necessarily sterile, it cannot fulfill that function. Likewise, I could in principle marry an inanimate object, or an animal, or myself, but it wouldn’t be meaningful. It would also necessarily defeat or frustrate this natural function.

If you change the legal definition of marriage, then this is only part of the battle. It’s obvious that marriage not simply purely the product of positive law. Otherwise, the idea that gay men and women have the right to get married makes little sense. Marriage is more than just a word–it is an institution, one that precedes the law.

For gay marriage to be meaningful, the institution of marriage itself must change. That is what the argument is about.

I could get very annoyed with those who wave a magic wand to “disappear” anything that doesn’t suit their prejudices and follow that up by accusing *me* of prejudice.
Those who refuse to read a dictionary or a legal definition. (Although procreation is only one part of marriage, doesn’t impose a duty on 60-year-old widows and widowers although the “love and cherish” clause does).
Those who dismiss as anecdata the *only* evidence provided about the views of Gay Christians*.
Those who lecture me on statistical theory and, in so doing, demonstrate their ignorance thereof.
Putting on one side the arguments about yougov’s methodology that lead it to systematically overstate Labour’s support, the result of its poll would, if the poll had been validly constructed and used an unbiased question that the respondents fully understood, be viewed as demonstrating that only a minority opposed same-sex couples getting married: it does NOT demonstrate that a majority favour same-sex couples getting married. (Of course it fails to prove that they don’t but it does NOT show that they do).
Next someone will be telling me that Euclid thought the earth was flat because most of his theorems referred to the geometry of a plane – in fact the Greeks made attempts to measure the curvature of the Earth.
After I have stated that civil partnership provides all the legal benefits of marriage (if I am wrong, just *what* is missing). I am accused of magicking away all UK gays and lesbians (doesn’t that double-count lesbians?) into non-existence by saying that the beneficiaries of legislation whose only impact would be placing a legal obligation on the CofE to marry same-sex couples would be lawyers. NO.
* Not just one, although I prefer to report first-had evidence in preference to second-hand in preference to third-hand.

Cylux @ 66:

Again, I see no evidence that marriage and procreation were originally linked as part of some sort of upper-class plan to stop succession wars.

“We’ve had nearly a full century where marriage has been about love and partnership,”

Not *just* about love and partnership, otherwise we’d be allowing siblings to marry.

“and that a human child born out of wedlock has the same equal worth and value as one born within,”

A human child born out of wedlock does indeed have equal worth as one born withing. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t on average better to raise a child within wedlock than without, or that there’s no reason to encourage people to raise children within wedlock.

“it’s because of that current social context which is why gay marriage is an inevitability.”

“X is inevitable” =/= “X is right”.

@69 You’ve yet to prove why it is wrong.

@69 Furthermore why do you think that gay married couples won’t be raising children? You’ve constantly had to equate ‘child-rearing’ with ‘child-bearing’ in this thread for your argument to even hold water. Given that your argument is little more than quibbling over the definition of a word that means many different things to different people, and different things at different periods of history, I can’t see how you can build a solid case.

@ 65 P Ve M

“Well, according to English law, one of the purposes of marriage is “the procreation and nurture of children” (source: https://simple-note.appspot.com/publish/MWB38w), so you’d at least have to get rid of that bit as well, as you’d be marrying couples who cannot procreate.”

Maybe, but surely it’s fine as we don’t force barren women to divorce their husbands already?

“Essentially, though, your main problem seems to be that you imagine everybody really agrees with you about the definition of marriage (and, indeed, has agreed with you throughout the whole of human history…), and that anything stopping gay people getting married must therefore be an afterthought, an ex post facto justification for being nasty to gay people. You have so far provided no reason to think this is the case, however.”

No, I’m not the one pushing my definition down other people’s throats. I’ll leave that to you guys. I’m saying that gays should not be banned from marrying simply because they don’t fit YOUR preferred definition, much like the impotent men you would presumably force to remain single. If you want to prevent someone from choosing what to do with their life, the impetus is very much on you to justify the use of authoritarian policy – from a liberal perspective, at least. If two gay people of marrying age want to marry, and feel justified in doing so by their own view on what marriage means to them, I don’t see why they should be forced not to. That’s pretty much it.

@ 67 vimothy

“But that rather dodges my question! ”

Is this some colloquial meaning of “dodges” that mean “answers in detail”?

“I don’t understand how the idea of gay marriage makes sense. It seems like a “round square”–if you say, “whatever the current definition is, but with “no gays, though” crossed out”, then you haven’t done anything to resolve the contradiction. ”

I see no contradiction. Two people want to get married to confirm and reinforce the love they bear for each other. Good for them. It is only a contradiction to you because you’re worshipping the status quo. The above really boils down to “we should not change the status quo because then it would no longer be the status quo”.

“Marriage has a natural function [and all the rest down]”

This is not a particular function of marriage. Marriage is not needed for it. And marriage has other functions. And the word “natural” is meaningless in this context. And while you can whitter away to others, arrogantly telling them that their marriages are not “meaningful”, don’t expect them to care what you think. And don’t expect decent people to support your attempts to keep your small-minded prejudices enshrined in law, either.

@ John 77

I could get annoyed with people who make inaccurate attacks on me, but don’t mention me out of name out of passive-aggressiveness, friend. Let’s take a look.

“I could get very annoyed with those who wave a magic wand to “disappear” anything that doesn’t suit their prejudices and follow that up by accusing *me* of prejudice.”

I’m coming from an unprejudiced position where I do not impose my preferred idea of marriage on others. You, on the other hand, are not.

“Those who refuse to read a dictionary or a legal definition. (Although procreation is only one part of marriage, doesn’t impose a duty on 60-year-old widows and widowers although the “love and cherish” clause does).”

If you’re too stupid to understand that there’s no merit in appealing to the current legal definition as Word of God to reply to someone who wants to CHANGE the current legal definition, there’s not much I can do for you.

“Those who dismiss as anecdata the *only* evidence provided about the views of Gay Christians*.”

It’s not my fault you don’t know what an anecdote is.

“Those who lecture me on statistical theory and, in so doing, demonstrate their ignorance thereof.”

Ha ha ha ha ha! This isn’t going to work. You cheat at statistics and don’t know what anecdotes are. This is kind of like someone who thinks the sun goes round the Earth telling me I don’t understand astronomy. It’s too silly to even get annoyed with.

“Putting on one side the arguments about yougov’s methodology that lead it to systematically overstate Labour’s support, the result of its poll would, if the poll had been validly constructed and used an unbiased question that the respondents fully understood, be viewed as demonstrating that only a minority opposed same-sex couples getting married: it does NOT demonstrate that a majority favour same-sex couples getting married. (Of course it fails to prove that they don’t but it does NOT show that they do).”

Indeed. Get to the bit where you get to count the don’t knows on your side, would you? Look, dealing with statistics properly means maintaining an attitude of honestly. It doesn’t mean saying things that are technically true, but misleading due to omitted data, in an attempt to deceive.

“Next someone will be telling me that Euclid thought the earth was flat because most of his theorems referred to the geometry of a plane – in fact the Greeks made attempts to measure the curvature of the Earth.”

I assume this is supposed to be a beat poem or something.

“After I have stated that civil partnership provides all the legal benefits of marriage (if I am wrong, just *what* is missing). I am accused of magicking away all UK gays and lesbians (doesn’t that double-count lesbians?) into non-existence by saying that the beneficiaries of legislation whose only impact would be placing a legal obligation on the CofE to marry same-sex couples would be lawyers. NO.”

YES. Because you’ve discounted the people who would benefit from being allowed to get married, you stupid little man.

Done with this. As you can see, I just can’t keep my temper while arguing with unpleasent people who cling desperately to bizarre arguments to justify imposing their bigotry on other people who have done nothing to hurt them. I try not to say this sort of thing, as it’s not conducive to dialogue, but you and your authoritarian, bigoted brethren make me sick to my stomach. I can’t wait till you’re floundering in the dustbin of history along with the people who said blacks aren’t proper humans or that women can’t be trusted to vote.

So I’m out. Feel free to have the last word.

Chaise @ 72:

“Maybe, but surely it’s fine as we don’t force barren women to divorce their husbands already?”

Well, we don’t often know who’s barren or not, and can’t really find out without an unacceptable level of intrustion into their lives. And as I said above, we don’t force unloving wives to divorce their husbands, but that doesn’t mean that love and marriage aren’t associated.

“No, I’m not the one pushing my definition down other people’s throats. I’ll leave that to you guys.”

Except that anti-discrimination legislation means that anybody who doesn’t accept gay marriages will end up in court. Unless you want to abolish marriage entirely as a legal institution and just make it an informal agreement between two people — which you don’t seem to — you’re going to end up forcing a definition down *somebody’s* throat.

“If you want to prevent someone from choosing what to do with their life, the impetus is very much on you to justify the use of authoritarian policy”

Why? Why isn’t on those who want to change the status quo? That’s how it works in pretty much every other area of human life after all.

And you seem to be ignoring the fact that people don’t live their lives in hermeneutically-sealed bubbles with no effect on other people. If marriage were just a matter of wearing special rings, sleeping in the same bed and not having sex with anybody other than your partner, then it would indeed be nobody else’s business who got married. But marriage carries with it certain responsibilities towards and privileges from society as a whole, which means that society — and every member thereof — has a valid stake in how marriage is defined.

@John77 #68:

<blockquote.After I have stated that civil partnership provides all the legal benefits of marriage (if I am wrong, just *what* is missing). I am accused of magicking away all UK gays and lesbians (doesn’t that double-count lesbians?) into non-existence by saying that the beneficiaries of legislation whose only impact would be placing a legal obligation on the CofE to marry same-sex couples would be lawyers. NO.

Permitting gay marriage would not place any legal obligation on the CofE or any other religious institution to marry same-sex couples; in exactly the same way that legislating against discrimination on the ground of either sexual orientation or religion didn’t place a legal obligation on the CofE to marry gays or Hindus. I know it is an article of faith for you that everyone else is wrong and you are right on this issue, but you don’t get to define legal reality; you are wrong.

@P Ve M #75:

<blockquote.Except that anti-discrimination legislation means that anybody who doesn’t accept gay marriages will end up in court.

Like the Bulls? Why not.

There’s a difference between someone not liking the idea of gay marriage, and acting on that dislike to the detriment of married gays because they are gay.

The Bulls, by the way, are an example of civil partnerships not providing exactly the same legal rights as marraige – at least on their case as put to the Court. They claimed that their concern was extra-marital sex, and that they would treat unmarried heterosexual couples exactly the same as the gay couple whose room booking they failed to honour. They said it wasn’t because the couple were gay, but because they weren’t married; and that they applied exactly the same restriction – no double bed if you’re not married – to both homeosexual and heterosexual couples.

If, therefore, Preddy and Hall had been married, the Bulls would have honoured their room booking – wouldn’t they?

@ P Ve M #75:

…which means that society — and every member thereof — has a valid stake in how marriage is defined.

Well, I’ve been married for nearly 30 years now, and I vote for removing the discrimination against gays inherent in current marriage legislation. If that emans that “the definition” of marriage is changed – so what? It’s not the definition that matters, it’s the substance.

@ 75 P Ve M

“Well, we don’t often know who’s barren or not, and can’t really find out without an unacceptable level of intrustion into their lives. And as I said above, we don’t force unloving wives to divorce their husbands, but that doesn’t mean that love and marriage aren’t associated.”

But you’re not making it an association, you’re making it a necessary requirement. Of course marriage is associated with the male and female standard setup, just as it is associated with love and child-raising. But many marriages don’t contain all three. You could be advocating that a doctor who discovers his patient is barren reports her to the marriage police for a mandatory annulment. You’re not, and I doubt that’s solely to do with patient confidentiality.

“Except that anti-discrimination legislation means that anybody who doesn’t accept gay marriages will end up in court.”

No it won’t. We don’t have laws against thoughtcrime. If you’re referring to suing priests who won’t marry gay people and so on, I’ve already said (although perhaps not to you) that I favour protecting their right to discriminate by law.

“Unless you want to abolish marriage entirely as a legal institution and just make it an informal agreement between two people — which you don’t seem to — you’re going to end up forcing a definition down *somebody’s* throat.”

I’ve yet to see how. Even if so, I’d rather the couple in question were forcing their definition of their relationship down outsiders’ throats, than people had their relationships dictated to them from outside. But that’s if it turns out impossible not to force anything on anybody, an ideal solution wouldn’t do that.

“Why? Why isn’t on those who want to change the status quo? That’s how it works in pretty much every other area of human life after all.”

I did say from a liberal perspective. From my point of view, pointing out that the current system is authoritarian is a sufficient opening argument for changing the system. Authoritarianism is from my POV bad; if we’re going to keep it, there needs to be justification for doing so. If you think dictating people’s lives is morally neutral, or even worth doing for its own sake, then the perspective changes.

But in that case, I’m blacklisting all your favourite food for the sake of it, and you can only get those back that you can prove are a net benefit to society. And so on.

“And you seem to be ignoring the fact that people don’t live their lives in hermeneutically-sealed bubbles with no effect on other people. If marriage were just a matter of wearing special rings, sleeping in the same bed and not having sex with anybody other than your partner, then it would indeed be nobody else’s business who got married. But marriage carries with it certain responsibilities towards and privileges from society as a whole, which means that society — and every member thereof — has a valid stake in how marriage is defined.”

This is pretty much the mating cry of the fascist. Not saying you’re a fascist, but it is. “Obviously wearing skinny jeans in public is a personal choice, but if people do so then I have to look at them, and I don’t like skinny jeans, so I should be allowed to ban them.” What you’re doing is putting your offence at an equal or higher level than other people’s freedom. Logically this leads to everything being banned because it offends someone. Say goodbye to public worship, for a start.

As for responsibilities and privileges, these are almost totally available to gay people already via civil partnerships. Are you saying these privileges should be removed from gay people? If so, why?

Chaise,

Is this some colloquial meaning of “dodges” that mean “answers in detail”?

It means that you didn’t answer the question. Or that if you did so, it was in a way that was invisible to me.

What is the current definition, as you understand it (which implicitly includes the phrase, “no gays, though”)?

I see no contradiction.

I understand that you see no contradiction–that’s why I am asking you what marriage actually is that the idea of gay marriage does not contradict it.

@ 80 vimothy

“It means that you didn’t answer the question. Or that if you did so, it was in a way that was invisible to me.”

Then you should have read post 61. There’s not much point me copy-pasting it.

“What is the current definition, as you understand it (which implicitly includes the phrase, “no gays, though”)?”

See post 61. Oh, sod it, I’ll repeat: my whole point is that by defining a concept by “the totality of what can be said about that concept based on laws currently involving the concept”, which seems to be the logic behind claiming that marriage has to be between men and women “by definition”, you don’t get a useable definition of that concept. You get a several-page report, including many things that we would consider non-essential to the meaning of the concept, such as the tax breaks it entitles you to in the present moment in time.

It also means that, if you declare that changing the law is changing the definition and therefore Bad, you should feel the same everytime we change the details of those tax breaks.

It really does help if you don’t ask a question, ignore the answer, then ask the same question again.

“I understand that you see no contradiction–that’s why I am asking you what marriage actually is that the idea of gay marriage does not contradict it.”

I’d say: a way for two people to mutually confirm their feelings for each other, cement the idea of them as a family unit, and gain whatever legal rights and responsibilities are attached to the union. If this is leading up to “well you get all that from a civil partnership”, then that’s true, but a) I don’t like having a deliberate slap in the face of gay people built into our system, and b) ultimately if straight people can get married I don’t see why gays can’t. Vice versa with civil partnerships.

Chaise @ 79:

“Of course marriage is associated with the male and female standard setup, just as it is associated with love and child-raising.”

Yes, and it has been associated with the male and female setup in (as far as we know) every human society through history, whereas gay marriage (again, as far as we know) is something which is, historically speaking, found only in a certain specific kind of cultural milieu. Again (since you seem to have missed the point the first time I made it) this doesn’t make officially-recognised gay marriages wrong or inferior, it just means that they have different origins and therefore are different types of thing. One might say that heterosexual marriages are part of natural law, homosexual ones of positive law.

“No it won’t. We don’t have laws against thoughtcrime. If you’re referring to suing priests who won’t marry gay people and so on, I’ve already said (although perhaps not to you) that I favour protecting their right to discriminate by law.”

Actually I was thinking about hotel owners who only give rooms with double beds to married couples. Given that there have already been cases of such people being taken to court for denying such rooms to civil partners, I think it’s pretty certain that they’d also be taken to court for not giving them to gay couples.

As for the thought-crime point: nobody’s forcing you to think that only heterosexual couples can be married. If you want to think that gay marriage is OK, the government isn’t going to come and arrest you. So I suppose you think that the current system is fine then?

“current system is authoritarian”

I don’t think it’s authoritarian to point out that gay marriage is a creation of the State, not an inherent part of human nature.

Put it this way: the need to eat, although regulated by the government (with food hygiene regulations and so on), is nevertheless a part of human nature. If I decided that I wanted to try eating grass for a bit, obviously I should be allowed to, but the government shouldn’t be expected to pass a law saying that grass is now officially a foodstuff in order to make me feel better. Indeed, it could not: for, even if the law changed, it wouldn’t suddenly allow us to subsist off of grass, because what we can and cannot survive on isn’t determined by legislative fiat. Similarly, even if the government were to pass a law saying that homosexual unions counted as marriage, that wouldn’t actually make them marriage, because marriage is an institution older than and independent of the State, and the State has no competence to redefine it.

“This is pretty much the mating cry of the fascist.”

Ooh, is that a guilt by association fallacy I see?

““Obviously wearing skinny jeans in public is a personal choice, but if people do so then I have to look at them, and I don’t like skinny jeans, so I should be allowed to ban them.” What you’re doing is putting your offence at an equal or higher level than other people’s freedom. Logically this leads to everything being banned because it offends someone.”

Well, we already have public decency laws. Not quite as extreme as banning skinny jeans, but we still have them. Does that mean that we’re on a slippery slope to fascism then?

Also, my argument wasn’t “gay marriage offends me, therefore it’s wrong”, but “society gives married couples certain benefits, therefore it has a right to determine who it gives these benefits to”.

Perhaps I should also say something about “arrogance” and something about “nature”.

It is quite common to see proponents of gay marriage couch their arguments in terms of the bigotry, arrogance, fascism, etc, of their opponents. (Bigot, of course, being a synonym for someone who is not a liberal). I don’t take this sort of stuff personally, but it’s not an argument for gay marriage–or anything else, for that matter.

As for “nature”, in this context I’m using the word to refer to the essence of a thing, to its intrinsic purpose. For example, you can sleep in your car, but few people buy cars to sleep in, because they weren’t designed with that purpose in mind. When I say that marriage has a natural function, I mean that marriage has an intrinsic purpose, a “nature”.

One argument against this approach to marriage has been articulated by Robin Levett somewhere above (IIRC). If marriage has this particular function, then why should infertile couples be allowed to marry? Why shouldn’t OAPs be forced to divorce?

The answer is that marriage is not a piece of technology, a means to an end, and so a given marriage doesn’t stand or fall on whether the technical requirements for a particular end are met. Likewise, I don’t cease to be a father, a husband, or a son, if I can’t fulfill my duties as such because I am ill.

My place in the social order is determined by functional identities and not mere function, because society itself is not based on technical rationality. I am what I am–and wishing won’t make it otherwise. Marriage is something with deep roots in human kind, which reflects the functional identities of men and women and their place in the social order. You can change the legal meanings of words easily enough, but it will be less easy to change the nature of the institution of marriage without destroying it, which seems to me to be the logical endstate of the modern approach.

@ 82 P Ve M

“Again (since you seem to have missed the point the first time I made it) this doesn’t make officially-recognised gay marriages wrong or inferior, it just means that they have different origins and therefore are different types of thing.”

They’re a subgroup, if that counts as different. What bearing would this have on the issue?

“One might say that heterosexual marriages are part of natural law, homosexual ones of positive law.”

If one believed in natural law, one might indeed do so. This one does not.

“Actually I was thinking about hotel owners who only give rooms with double beds to married couples. Given that there have already been cases of such people being taken to court for denying such rooms to civil partners, I think it’s pretty certain that they’d also be taken to court for not giving them to gay couples.”

So it wouldn’t make any difference to them, because we’ve already seen that using the marriage/civil partnership distinction as a foil for banning gay partners is not actually accepted by the courts. Such discrimination is illegal, happily, whether gays can marry or not.

“As for the thought-crime point: nobody’s forcing you to think that only heterosexual couples can be married. If you want to think that gay marriage is OK, the government isn’t going to come and arrest you. So I suppose you think that the current system is fine then?”

Um, no. Because I’m not going around claiming that the current system means anyone who doesn’t accept that marriage is limited to straights is going to end up in court. I was debunking that specific false claim made by you. Don’t move the goalposts.

“I don’t think it’s authoritarian to point out that gay marriage is a creation of the State, not an inherent part of human nature.”

Nor is it authoritarian to paint the night sky, or to write a treatise on the behaviour of wasps. Done with the non-sequitur?

“Similarly, even if the government were to pass a law saying that homosexual unions counted as marriage, that wouldn’t actually make them marriage, because marriage is an institution older than and independent of the State, and the State has no competence to redefine it.”

Equivocation. We’re talking about state marriage here, which the state can and does define. You are currently arguing about how the state should define it, in fact, so you obviously don’t believe what you just said above. It’s state marriage I wish to change. I don’t give a damn whether you see the result as marriage or not, using religious, historical or personal definitions of the term. I want the state to recognise gay marriage. That is all.

“Ooh, is that a guilt by association fallacy I see?”

Fair enough. OK, you have a facist outlook on gay marriage.

“Well, we already have public decency laws. Not quite as extreme as banning skinny jeans, but we still have them.”

Indeed. Modern society is not in fact a bastion of perfect liberal tolerance.

“Does that mean that we’re on a slippery slope to fascism then?”

No, and nor does painting the night sky etc. Don’t complain about me using guilt by association if you’re going to straw man me thrice in the very same post.

“Also, my argument wasn’t “gay marriage offends me, therefore it’s wrong”, but “society gives married couples certain benefits, therefore it has a right to determine who it gives these benefits to”.”

A point which I responded to, which you in turn ignored. Apparently you’d rather restate the point than address the response to it. Why’s that?

Chaise,

Oh, sod it, I’ll repeat: my whole point is that by defining a concept by “the totality of what can be said about that concept based on laws currently involving the concept”, which seems to be the logic behind claiming that marriage has to be between men and women “by definition”, you don’t get a useable definition of that concept.

I wasn’t asking for a several page definition of the concept that covered everything that can be said about it, I was just asking what you meant by the word “marriage”. If marriage has no meaning, then what does it matter who can get married? If marriage has a meaning that is solely determined by the law, then this is incompatible with the idea of anyone having the “right” to get married, and indeed, of having any intrinsic meaning.

The fact that this debate exists at all is evidence that marriage is not meaningless, and that it is not simply a legal term.

And if we cannot describe simply what it is we mean by marriage, if we cannot pin down its essence, but are required to list its every facet and describe it totally whenever we want to talk about it, then it’s hard to see how it can be discussed in a profitable manner.

I’d say: a way for two people to mutually confirm their feelings for each other, cement the idea of them as a family unit, and gain whatever legal rights and responsibilities are attached to the union.

Thank you, that’s all I was asking for.

@ 85 vimothy

“I wasn’t asking for a several page definition of the concept that covered everything that can be said about it, I was just asking what you meant by the word “marriage”. If marriage has no meaning, then what does it matter who can get married?”

If it doesn’t matter who can get married, why on earth are we banning people from doing so? I’m not saying that the word has no meaning, anyway. Obviously you couldn’t sensibly use it to mean “hat” or “race car”. I’m saying that it has several meanings: that defined by law, and the multitude of meanings people give it based on religious/personal reasons. They’re all based around the same idea of a personal union, but what makes that *important* depends on the person.

If someone likes to think that a marriage isn’t a proper marriage if it isn’t between a man and a woman, or made before God, or includes the intention to procreate, that’s fine. They can apply that to their own marriage and say so when commenting on other people’s marriages (if they don’t mind being rude). The state should offer equal rights where possible, is what this comes down to. People are entitled to their opinion over whether these things the state holds to be equal really ARE equal.

[I think that addresses your next two paragraphs too]

“And if we cannot describe simply what it is we mean by marriage, if we cannot pin down its essence, but are required to list its every facet and describe it totally whenever we want to talk about it, then it’s hard to see how it can be discussed in a profitable manner.”

We can. I’m just not letting other commenters get away with special pleading by saying “marriage HAS to be between a man and a woman cos the law says so”, then not applying that logic (dodgy as it would be in any case: appeal to status quo) to every other thing that the law currently says about marriage.

“Thank you, that’s all I was asking for.”

No worries. Bear in mind that this is off the top of my head and could probably be refined.

Yes, and it has been associated with the male and female setup in (as far as we know) every human society through history, whereas gay marriage (again, as far as we know) is something which is, historically speaking, found only in a certain specific kind of cultural milieu.

Well, acceptance of gay people even being gay is a fairly recent, and not exactly widespread phenomenon, so I’m not sure why you think this makes for a compelling argument. It’s all very blaming the persecuted minority for not being less of a persecuted minority throughout history.

Chaise @ 84:

“They’re a subgroup, if that counts as different. What bearing would this have on the issue?”

It means that anybody treating them as the same thing is committing a category error.

“If one believed in natural law, one might indeed do so. This one does not.”

So, are you a moral relativist, then? If so, how can you reasonably criticise people for opposing gay marriage? Surely one position is just as valid as the other?

“Such discrimination is illegal, happily, whether gays can marry or not.”

“Happily” — so, you’re OK with forcing people to accept a certain definition of marriage, provided that it’s the definition you agree with.

“Um, no. Because I’m not going around claiming that the current system means anyone who doesn’t accept that marriage is limited to straights is going to end up in court. I was debunking that specific false claim made by you. Don’t move the goalposts.”

I was referring to people who didn’t accept it in practice. Sorry if that wasn’t clear enough.

“Equivocation. We’re talking about state marriage here, which the state can and does define. You are currently arguing about how the state should define it, in fact, so you obviously don’t believe what you just said above. It’s state marriage I wish to change. I don’t give a damn whether you see the result as marriage or not, using religious, historical or personal definitions of the term. I want the state to recognise gay marriage. That is all.”

“State marriage” doesn’t exist, because marriage is an institution prior to and independent of the State. The State can regulate marriage, but that’s not quite the same thing, just as State regulation of food production doesn’t mean that there’s something called “State food” separate from “normal food” which the government can define at well.

Also, the State can’t “recognise” gay marriage, as gay marriage is (as far as we can tell) neither prior to nor independent of the State. The State can *create* gay marriage if it chooses to, but again, that’s different to recognising a pre-existing institution, such as heterosexual marriage.

“Indeed. Modern society is not in fact a bastion of perfect liberal tolerance.”

And yet we’ve somehow managed to survive without become a fascist dictatorship. Just like we (and the vast majority of countries throughout history) have somehow managed to both not have gay marriage and not have a fascist dictator in charge. It’s almost as if there’s actually no connection between attitudes towards gay marriage and being a fascist.

“No, and nor does painting the night sky etc. Don’t complain about me using guilt by association if you’re going to straw man me thrice in the very same post.”

You said that my views were “the mating-cry of the fascist” and that “logically this leads to everything being banned”. Sorry if I misunderstood your point, but it looked very much like a slippery slope argument to me.

“A point which I responded to, which you in turn ignored.”

If you responded to it, I’m afraid I didn’t notice. Care to direct me to your response again?

(Unless of course your response was “As for responsibilities and privileges, these are almost totally available to gay people already via civil partnerships. Are you saying these privileges should be removed from gay people? If so, why?”, in which case I didn’t reply because (a) it seemed irrelevant, and (b) I’d already stated upthread that I didn’t want to get rid of civil partnerships.)

Cylux @ 87:

“Well, acceptance of gay people even being gay is a fairly recent, and not exactly widespread phenomenon, so I’m not sure why you think this makes for a compelling argument. It’s all very blaming the persecuted minority for not being less of a persecuted minority throughout history”

Firstly, I never “blamed” gay people for anything.

Secondly, saying “the only reason why gay marriage wasn’t allowed is that people were prejudiced” is clearly false, since cultures such as Ancient Greece or Rome, which were fine with gay sex and had no real concept of homosexuality vs. heterosexuality, and were therefore vanishingly unlikely to tack on a “no gays” clause to their marriage regulations in order to slap homosexuals in the face, also had no gay marriage. So there must be at least one other factor at work.

@89

So there must be at least one other factor at work.

That’d be the women as a tradeable commodity and/or second-class citizen thing. The modern equivalent would be majority-Islamic nations where vicious animus toward homosexuals exists, where the argument “persecuting gays means women end up suffering in marriages where their partner doesn’t actually love them and is hiding in the closet to prevent being murdered” doesn’t make much headway due to their whole ‘not giving much of a fuck whether or not women are happy in relationships or not, because they get little to no say in the matter anyway’. You can see what consequences this might have had in ancient Greece or Rome, getting married to a girl, and then spending yer nights with ‘the lads’. Which technically speaking gay men today can do, though it’s doubtful the women involved would be putting up with that bother.

Indeed all modern ‘problems’ and differences within marriage tend to derive from the fact it’s now more of an equal partnership than it ever used to be, which is why I keep banging on about women’s equality in this thread, in case you missed it.

Cylux @ 90:

“That’d be the women as a tradeable commodity and/or second-class citizen thing.”

Erm, evidence?

“The modern equivalent would be majority-Islamic nations where vicious animus toward homosexuals exists,”

Except that neither Greece nor Rome had “vicious animus towards homosexuals”, so the societies aren’t at all equivalent.

Erm, evidence?

http://rome.mrdonn.org/women.html It’s a resource for kids, but it’ll do. You’ll note the talk about ‘guardianship’ rather than ‘partnership’, ie not a relationship of equals. Plus for God’s sakes don’t read the bit about “a new form of marriage became popular”.

The point being made with the comparison with Modern fundamentalist Islamic states, is that because of the disparity between the status of men and women, the nature of marriage is fundamentally different to the nature of marriage where both parties are equal. In short, in a culture where women have less rights than men, and marriages are arranged mainly for familial gain*, same-sex marriage isn’t a pressing concern, because regardless of your sexual orientation and desires you’re gonna be ending up as husband and wife. Because love has nowt to do with it, the wedding is then more like taking out a mortgage or writing out a will, or any other perfunctionary task you ‘just do’ as you go through life, rather than a celebration of a loving union.
But when you and any prospective partner are equals and it’s up to YOU whom you marry, well, that’s when shit gets real, and same-sex marriage then becomes a pressing concern.

*Incidentally some Indian families have started coming to terms with their own gay children, and are actually negotiating arranged same-sex marriages for them!

@ 88 P Ve M

[This has dropped off the main page now so fair enough if you don't reply]

“It means that anybody treating them as the same thing is committing a category error.”

Putting things into distinct categories is generally a category error – normally it’s more of a sliding scale. But what has this got to do with the price of fish?

“So, are you a moral relativist, then?”

No. I just don’t try to claim things are “natural” and then say that makes them right. Because a) everything is ultimately natural and b) that includes murder and rape.

““Happily” — so, you’re OK with forcing people to accept a certain definition of marriage, provided that it’s the definition you agree with.”

I’m happy with forcing people not to discriminate based on sexuality when it comes to provision of services, just as I’m happy for people to get sued over a “no blacks, no Irish” policy. They don’t have to “accept” the definition, they just can’t discriminate. The issue with the homophobic hoteliers is that the married couple rule was clearly being used as a stalking horse.

“I was referring to people who didn’t accept it in practice. Sorry if that wasn’t clear enough.”

In that case, “accept this definition” means “obey the law”. Well, you are not above the law. Sorry. I disagree with some laws – drugs, for example. If I wanted to smoke cannabis, I would argue why it should be legal. I would not whine about being “forced to accept the definition of cannabis as an illegal narcotic”.

” “State marriage” doesn’t exist,”

Ha ha ha ha! Stop arguing about what form it should take then!

“because marriage is an institution prior to and independent of the State.”

The fact that marriage as a concept predates the state does not mean that the state cannot institute a form of marriage. Try: “Armies existed before Britain, therefore there is no British army”.

“The State can regulate marriage, but that’s not quite the same thing, just as State regulation of food production doesn’t mean that there’s something called “State food” separate from “normal food” which the government can define at well.”

That’s because food exists regardless of whether anyone believes in it. I can call a pie “state food” and it doesn’t change the pie. Whereas marriage is a concept, and means different things under different jurisdictions. A marriage in the UK is not the same as a marriage in Saudi, for example.

If you want to have your religious definition of marriage, fine. That doesn’t mean you own the word. Just as the fact that state marriage exists does not mean religious marriage is retconned into non-existence.

“Also, the State can’t “recognise” gay marriage, as gay marriage is (as far as we can tell) neither prior to nor independent of the State. The State can *create* gay marriage if it chooses to, but again, that’s different to recognising a pre-existing institution, such as heterosexual marriage.”

Fine, create. Makes no difference. Although heterosexual state marriage was created, or at least evolved, even if it took its cues from religious concepts.

“And yet we’ve somehow managed to survive without become a fascist dictatorship.
Just like we (and the vast majority of countries throughout history) have somehow managed to both not have gay marriage and not have a fascist dictator in charge.”

Did I already point out this was a straw man? I believe I did. If you can’t maintain a mental age of at least 12, kindly fuck off.

“It’s almost as if there’s actually no connection between attitudes towards gay marriage and being a fascist.”

I didn’t call you a fascist. It’s not an on-off category where people are either “fascist” or “non-fascist”. Instead people have fascist attitudes towards certain things. The anti-gay marriage guys, at least those arguing that they should be able to ban marriages that offend their sensibilities, take a fascist attitude towards gay marriage. Doesn’t make them fascistic in general.

“You said that my views were “the mating-cry of the fascist” and that “logically this leads to everything being banned”. Sorry if I misunderstood your point, but it looked very much like a slippery slope argument to me.”

Well, it’s not. See above for fascism, as for “logically leads to everything being banned”, see this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

They key word is “logically”, i.e. “if the principle you use to argue for X was applied consistently, this would logically lead to Y”. It’s a debatorial form used to show that your opponent is using special pleading. If I meant “this WILL lead to everything being banned” I would have said that.

“If you responded to it, I’m afraid I didn’t notice. Care to direct me to your response again?

(Unless of course your response was “As for responsibilities and privileges, these are almost totally available to gay people already via civil partnerships. Are you saying these privileges should be removed from gay people? If so, why?”, in which case I didn’t reply because (a) it seemed irrelevant, and (b) I’d already stated upthread that I didn’t want to get rid of civil partnerships.)”

Ah, so you did ignore it. And then repeated the question as if I hadn’t answered it. Very intellectually honest of you. Whatever you stated upthread, your previous statement (the one I responded to in the bit above) seemed to be arguing for an end to civil partnerships rather than gay marriage. If I’m wrong, perhaps you should grow up a bit and attempt to explain why, rather than ignoring the question and then, when pressed, trying to dismiss it as “irrelevant”.

Chaise,

Okay, so we agree that marriage must have some intrinsic meaning; otherwise the debate doesn’t make sense, because there’s nothing there to disagree about.

But that suggests that it’s not simply up to the individuals concerned to decide what marriage means, because if marriage can mean anything then it can’t be said to have an intrinsic meaning. It also means that the role of the government is important, because it formalises a collective judgement about the nature of marriage and its role in the community.

The idea of gay marriage can only make sense if it is in agreement with this intrinsic meaning. Otherwise, we’re in situation where gay people can call themselves married, but it’s no more real than me calling myself the King of the Gypsies.

It’s clear from the history of the institution itself that gay marriage is an idea radically at odds with what most people thought of as marriage. This implies that marriage has undergone a sea change–and indeed it has.

From a liberal, technocratic-rationalistic point of view, the only “end”, of which marriage is the “means”, is that two people formalise some sort of commitment to one another. That is, in the modern way of thinking, marriage is a private agreement entered into by two people for idiosyncratic purposes.

But here we go back to the start. If marriage can mean anything, then it has no meaning at all. The logical endstate of the liberal approach to marriage is that marriage disappears. It’s not that legalising gay marriage is going to do this, but that legalising gay marriage is symptomatic of the process by which marriage is transformed from an institution which has supported human society since time immemorial into something which is more or less meaningless and so disappears.

@P Ve M #88:

So, are you a moral relativist, then?

Who isn’t?

“State marriage” doesn’t exist, because marriage is an institution prior to and independent of the State.

Does that mean I’m not married? I thought when I went through a ceremony in Brixton Registry Office in 1982 that it was a wedding, and that in consequence I became married; was that not the case? Have I been fornicating all these years? How exciting.

Which is a long-winded way of saying – look who’s forcing definitions of marriage on others now. My marriage has no religious content; it is just as valid a marriage as any Christian’s marriage contracted in the local parish church and – here’s a point – more valid than a marriage contracted in a local parish church but not registered. If my marriage is anything, it is a State marriage.

#82:

Actually I was thinking about hotel owners who only give rooms with double beds to married couples. Given that there have already been cases of such people being taken to court for denying such rooms to civil partners, I think it’s pretty certain that they’d also be taken to court for not giving them to gay couples.

I notice that you didn’t respond to my reference to this case earlier in the thread.

The Bulls justified their claim not to have directly discriminated against Hall and Preddy by saying that what mattered was whether they (Hall/Preddy) were married or not. The Bulls expressly denied that their being gay was the problem; iot was their unmarried status (and, incidentally, they didn’ trecognise civil partnership as marriage…).. Are you saying that if, say, following state recognition of gay marriage a married gay Quaker couple rocked up to their hotel seeking a double room, they would deny them that room? That would suggest that you thought that the Bulls were not being sincere in their representations to the court, which would be a terrible thing to say about fellow Christians, given that they gave their evidence on oath.

@vimothy #49:

Marriage in the UK is a relationship defined and regulated by the Marriage Acts 1949-94. If it’s outside those Acts, it ain’t a marriage.

There are, separately, religious definitions of marriage; I say “definitions” because there are as many such definitions of marriage as there are religions, probably more; many of them inconsistent one with another. That is irrelevant to the issue raised here, though, because no-one in this discussion (with the possible exception of John 7:7) wants to change any religious practice in relation to marriage, or any religious definition of marriage.

Catholics will continue to be able to deny marriage to the divorced with living partners, and they can all continue to say that their definition of marriage excludes gays. What they cannot do is force their definition of marriage on others in the commercial sphere. To be fair, they don’t do so now; everybody recognises everyone else’s versions of marriage. Even the Bulls wouldn’t have enquired into the precise nature of a married couple’s marriage to ensure it matched their own religion’s definition before allowing them to have a double room. All of which points out the absurdity of you (and vimothy) arguing that your definition of marriage will be changed in a material way by state recognition of gay marriage.

Robin,

No one is arguing that “their” definition of marriage will be materially altered. (Indeed, gay people are even now free to call their civil unions marriages if they feel like it).

What we are arguing about is the proper meaning and function of an institution that is of great importance to society. If all men are islands, if there is no such thing as society, then the whole argument could easily be reduced to a set of mutually irrelevant opinions. And argument itself would become superfluous.

But since every man is a “piece of the Continent”, it is right to address the common good, and how best to order society towards it. You must agree with this on some level, because otherwise, why bother to comment?

@ 94 vimothy

“Okay, so we agree that marriage must have some intrinsic meaning; otherwise the debate doesn’t make sense, because there’s nothing there to disagree about.”

Sure. I’m not sure about “intrinsic” (see below) but we certainly can’t usefully discuss a word if it has no meaning.

“But that suggests that it’s not simply up to the individuals concerned to decide what marriage means, because if marriage can mean anything then it can’t be said to have an intrinsic meaning. It also means that the role of the government is important, because it formalises a collective judgement about the nature of marriage and its role in the community.”

Fine, but sorting this out means more than polling people on what they think that meaning is, and then telling the government to enforce it. It’s also to do with benefits and costs. Here, as far as I can tell, two men being allowed to marry does no harm to people other than those two men. Oh, they may be offended, but I personally don’t count “this offends me” as a cost, here or elsewhere, so I’m following the same logic I’d use to say that a book shouldn’t be banned simply because the majority of readers found it to be too explicit. And the benefits include the partners’ happiness in knowing they are officially married, and the fact that it removes a nugget of state-sanction homophobia from the books.

“The idea of gay marriage can only make sense if it is in agreement with this intrinsic meaning. Otherwise, we’re in situation where gay people can call themselves married, but it’s no more real than me calling myself the King of the Gypsies.”

Right, I’m dealing with “intrinsic” here. I don’t think meanings are intrinsic; they are applied by people to things. And when that thing is an abstract concept, it’s difficult to even get intrinsic properties, because these concepts are social constructs.

And that leads to problems. Here, as far as I can tell, you’re seeking an intrinsic meaning that applies to two seperate concepts: state marriage and religious marriage. This always happens when one word has two related meanings; people confuse them. More on this below.

“It’s clear from the history of the institution itself that gay marriage is an idea radically at odds with what most people thought of as marriage. This implies that marriage has undergone a sea change–and indeed it has. ”

I don’t agree with this. I don’t think that gay marriage is a radical depature from the concept of marriage any more than the idea of black freedom during slavery was a radical departure from the concept of freedom generally. It’s the same concept, only extended to a larger group of people.

“From a liberal, technocratic-rationalistic point of view, the only “end”, of which marriage is the “means”, is that two people formalise some sort of commitment to one another. That is, in the modern way of thinking, marriage is a private agreement entered into by two people for idiosyncratic purposes. ”

Now I need to talk about the difference between religious and state marriage. State marriage already is pretty much what you describe above, and it is state marriage I believe should be extended to gay people. State marriage is essentially a contract, albeit an unusual one with a special place in most of our hearts.

Religious marriage means a variety of things, because there are many religions. But none of them have a right to impose their form on state marriage.

“But here we go back to the start. If marriage can mean anything, then it has no meaning at all.”

But it doesn’t “mean anything”. State marriage is essentially codified; if you’re unsure of any aspect of it you can check the law or historical precedent. So all we’re talking about here is slightly adapting the nature of state marriage to include same-sex couples.

“The logical endstate of the liberal approach to marriage is that marriage disappears. It’s not that legalising gay marriage is going to do this, but that legalising gay marriage is symptomatic of the process by which marriage is transformed from an institution which has supported human society since time immemorial into something which is more or less meaningless and so disappears.”

I think you’ve reached this conclusion by conflating religious and state marriage. They are very different things, for all that they share a name and some common factors and are normally entered into on the same day. The fact that something’s meaning changes over time does not mean it is heading towards meaninglessness; there is a difference between CHANGE and LOSE. I don’t see any entropy here.

@vimothy #97:

What we are arguing about is the proper meaning and function of an institution that is of great importance to society. If all men are islands, if there is no such thing as society, then the whole argument could easily be reduced to a set of mutually irrelevant opinions. And argument itself would become superfluous.

Then stop arguiing definitions and start arguing substance.

But since every man is a “piece of the Continent”, it is right to address the common good, and how best to order society towards it. You must agree with this on some level, because otherwise, why bother to comment?

Yes and no. There is very often a tension between freedom, equality and the common good. The common good doesn’t get to trump other desirable outcomes.

Why do you say that extending marriage to loving and committed gays and lesbians, inter alia allowing their children to be brought up in a married household, is a net detriment to the common good? And why do you say that any such detriment should trump the benefits in terms of freedom and equality brought by such a reform?

Chaise,

It’s trivial to change the meaning of a word—at least, it’s relatively trivial, especially if you control the government. “Stalin is our father”. But underneath it all, the original signified remains, despite the equivocation. Stalin is not our father, even if we say that he is. What we’ve done amounts to sleight of hand. We could agree to say that people from Britain come from the Moon, and change the meaning of the words so that it is true by definition. But still we don’t actually come from the Moon.

The idea that things don’t have intrinsic meanings is a very modern one. It’s true, of course, that social institutions are socially constructed. But this does not imply that their meaning is arbitrary or can be easily changed. To take an example, “motherhood” is an institution that is a produced and maintained by society. It is hard to define precisely what is meant by motherhood or to place it exactly within some rational-technocratic scheme.

If we were to replace “motherhood” with a simpler means and ends institution, the result could be quite inhuman. Perhaps the state should raise children, in giant camps if that’s what’s most efficient. Perhaps the children of the poor should be given away to rich mothers who have greater financial and social capital. Neither idea is very appealing, and efforts to reorganise society along such lines would probably be destructive. It’s obvious that there is something more to motherhood than just a technical component, even if we find it hard to pin down what it is, and that treating it as a piece of technology could have unpleasant side-effects.

That said, the modern approach to life is technocratic, and so people do want to understand marriage as a means to an end. Since children are not a feature of all marriages, it must be the case that all that marriage is, is a means to formalise a commitment between two people—after all, that’s what all marriages bring about.

This sits nicely with the liberal principle of equal freedom. If no one is harmed, then the parties involved should be free to pursue whatever ends they please. Marriage, under this reading, is a private affair that is no business of the wider community. We can also see how we could end up in a situation where people can marry inanimate objects, or animals, or themselves.

That’s all fine from one perspective, but it rests on the premise that marriage should be a private agreement entered into for idiosyncratic purposes. We wouldn’t apply the same logic to motherhood. So why should it apply to marriage?

PS

I’m quite busy so I’m afraid I don’t have time to address everything else you’ve said in depth. A few things though:

I don’t think the issue revolves around what offends people, but what’s best for society.
It’s fine to distinguish between different types of marriage, but they are all ultimately types of marriage, and so society has a stake in what they are. (For example, the very concept of gay marriage reflects liberal values).

What marriage “means” is a formal commitment between two people. Everyone is free to find their own meaning in it. If I want marriage to be one thing and someone else wants it to be something else then we’re free to do that, as long as we don’t push it on others. That’s the basic approach. You can’t maintain that and say that marriage has a particular meaning, because the two are mutually exclusive. Marriage will have particular meanings for individuals, for instance if they are religious, but that just follows from the fact that marriage doesn’t have a given meaning for everyone, but rather is a private matter.

Just because something changes over time, doesn’t mean that it disappears—I agree. But if an institution becomes so open-ended that it is a private affair that can mean anything to anyone, then it might. If something can mean anything then it doesn’t have any particular meaning in and of itself, i.e., it is meaning-less. Something that is meaningless is unlikely to be of much interest to people for long, so it does’t seem unlikely that it will fall from use.

Chaise @ 93:

“No. I just don’t try to claim things are “natural” and then say that makes them right.”

My argument isn’t “marriage is natural, therefore it’s right”, or indeed “gay marriage is unnatural, therefore it’s wrong”; my argument is “heterosexual marriage is part of human nature; gay marriage is created by the State; therefore the two are different, and ought not to be conflated”. I’m not sure why this distinction seems to be causing so much difficulty with you.

“I’m happy with forcing people not to discriminate based on sexuality when it comes to provision of services”

But what if you (a) only provide a service to married couples, and (b) only accept heterosexual marriages as valid? Either you’re going to have to force people to accept your definition of marriage for practical purposes at least, or you’re going to have to say it’s fine to not count gay marriages as proper marriages. If the latter, then fair enough, although it would contradict pretty much everything you’ve said on the topic; if the former, then this position seems difficult to reconcile with your idea that it’s wrong to force your definition of marriage on people.

“In that case, “accept this definition” means “obey the law”. Well, you are not above the law. Sorry. I disagree with some laws – drugs, for example. If I wanted to smoke cannabis, I would argue why it should be legal. I would not whine about being “forced to accept the definition of cannabis as an illegal narcotic”.”

Erm, your whole rationale for supporting gay marriage was “it’s wrong to force your definiton of marriage on other people”. If you then force people to treat gay marriages as marriages, even when they do not accept them as such, then you are forcing your definiton of marriage on them. Do you not see the contradiction here?

“The fact that marriage as a concept predates the state does not mean that the state cannot institute a form of marriage. Try: “Armies existed before Britain, therefore there is no British army”.”

I meant “the State” in general, not “the British government”. Armies, as far as we know, are not part of human nature, whereas marriage is; so the analogy is a false one.

“A marriage in the UK is not the same as a marriage in Saudi, for example.”

I’d imagine that it’s legal to serve some things as food in Saudi but not in the UK, and vice versa, due to differing food production regulations. That still doesn’t mean that what counts as food is determined by legislative fiat, though.

“Fine, create. Makes no difference.”

I think it does, because an institution which is part of human nature is different to one which is the creation of a particular piece of law, and anybody claiming that they’re really the same is making a category error. (Sort of like “do not murder” is a different sort of rule to “always drive on the left side of the road”, since the former rule is part of human nature, whereas the latter was created by Parliament.)

“If you can’t maintain a mental age of at least 12, kindly fuck off.”

Ooh, very mature.

“The anti-gay marriage guys, at least those arguing that they should be able to ban marriages that offend their sensibilities,”

I didn’t argue that gay marriage should be banned because it offends my sensibilities, I argued that (a) gay marriage isn’t marriage in the same sense as heterosexual marriage, and (b) saying that gay marriage and heterosexual marriage are the same is likely to have negative social consequences. If you ever debate with somebody who makes the argument that marriages should be banned because they offend them, feel free to use your rebuttal.

“Ah, so you did ignore it. And then repeated the question as if I hadn’t answered it. Very intellectually honest of you. Whatever you stated upthread, your previous statement (the one I responded to in the bit above) seemed to be arguing for an end to civil partnerships rather than gay marriage. If I’m wrong, perhaps you should grow up a bit and attempt to explain why, rather than ignoring the question and then, when pressed, trying to dismiss it as “irrelevant”.”

“Whatever you said upthread” = “although you already gave an explicit answer to my question”.

Also, I’m afraid I have literally no idea why you think my statement argued for an end to civil partnerships, or why it’s relevant in the first place. Sorry if you think this is childish, but I can’t rebut your point, because I have absolutely no idea what it’s supposed to be.