The One is not yet in the White House, but already, one of his most enthusiastic cheerleaders in the blogsphere, Andrew “Excitable Andy” Sullivan, has discovered that Mr Obama might not be totally signed up to the notion that consenting adults should be left alone to make arrangements to their liking, such as gay marriage.
Well done, Andrew. It took Mr Sullivan just two years to swing from rather gushing praise for George W. Bush to treating him as as worse than Attila the Hun. Will Obama’s fall from Sullivan’s pantheon of political heroes be even quicker?
Just to be serious – and lest folk think I am just engaging in a spot of mud-throwing at Sullivan – it is truly sad to see how this influential commentator has made a prize ass of himself over his assumption that voting for Obama was something that anyone who favoured small, limited government could be comfortable with. Oh for sure, Mr Obama may remove some of the bad things that the Bush White House encouraged, but I would not bet on it. Come to that, I am not at all sure that civil libertarians, be they concerned about issues like gay marriage, drugs, free speech, abuse of police powers, etc, can be at all confident that Mr Obama, a scion of the Chicago political machine, is good news. That’s not to say that the GOP will be any better, of course.
What Sullivan, and indeed all of us, need to remember is that Bush, Obama, or for that matter Brown, Sarkozy and Merkel, are politicians.
More important than what those personages are is WHY they are what they are – and beyond that WHY have the electorates placed them in their positions.
There is nothing wrong with politicians, per se.
Some of their ideas may be great, some shite.
And the electorate decides.
ADE
http://jammiewearingfool.blogspot.com/2008/12/bad-news-for-trig-troofers.html
Another instance of deranged Mr.Sullivan…
Poor old Sully.
Ah well. Still grateful to him for his clear-sightedness in the “people of America, let’s roll” years, when it really mattered. He eventually found his excuses to distance himself from it all, but then so did almost everyone else.
Why do people get crushes on politicians? Sullivan is a bit extreme in that he starts with big crushes and proceeeds all the way to hysterical spurned lover mode, but politics is not an honourable profession, the nature of politics means that it is going to be populated by (at best) cynical people who make compromises and (at worst) by outright criminals. There is a tribal aspect of it sometimes (people on our side are good and we cannot see anything bad about them and people on the other side are bad and we cannot see anything good about them) but on the whole I just don’t understand it.
Which is a bit like saying “there is nothing wrong with gangsters. Some of their ideas may be great, some shite. And the electorate decides who gets to rob/rape them.”
Politics is only necessary to the extent the state is necessary, and as I think we would do rather better with 1/10th as much state, we would do rather better with 1/10th the politics.
Politics is a bit like shitting, an unpleasant thing we need to do from time to time. Sadly a great many people spend a great deal of their lives in the public toilets demanding (at gun point) that we regard shitting is in fact a noble endeavour that must be placed at the centre of our lives.
Now that I have burned that analogy into your minds…
I am deeply suspicious of anyone who becomes a professional politician and operate on the assumption such a person is a thug with a personality disorder until proven otherwise, regardless of their ideology.
Mr. Sullivan needs to get with the program, not “waste [his] question,” and start worshipping the Great and Powerful Obama and his “new” ideas, emulating every good (i.e. leftist) reactionary, before GPO finds a way to silence him. We are one people, one country, and we can’t go around having our One Leader sullied.
BTW, there was a WSJ report that the neo-Soviet Putinistas might be trying to get any Kremlin critic labeled a traitor. Surprise, surprise, if true.
Why do you all persist on reacting as though Andrew Sullivan is a rational being? The fellow in order to survive has to imbibe a cocktail of powerful drugs which in itself is enough to make ons pause before taking anything he says or writes seriously. Then on top of all that his hysteria meter seems seriously out of whack. Poor Andrew.
Obama is the president elect because so many people poured their hopes and dreams into their own personal idea of Obama. When he said something that conflicted with their vision (which he tried to avoid, to be sure), they simply ignored him. The same sex marriage issue is a case in point. Obama said, as clearly as he says anything, he is against it. So why the heartache?
Sullivan writes well, but that’s all there is.
I would imagine that the coming months and years will be much the same for the Obama cultists as we experienced here after Tony claimed the purple. They’ve all pinned various hopes and dreams on the guy; they’ll got through various stages of confusion, upset and denial as he doesn’t do as they expected- because of course, just like Tony, he’s not been put in power to serve the people who voted for him. He’s there as the frontman for the systemic change which will complete the transformation of the USA into a social state, just as we’ve undergone for the past decade.
That’s why I like you, Ian B: you’re always so upbeat!
Ol’ Pollyanna, that’s me!
I suggest that America’s Bush Derangement Syndrome wil rapidly be replaced by Obama Dissapointment Syndrome.
I think gays should marry. Why should I have had to suffer and they didn’t? It’s not FAIRRRRRR!!!!!! (And now that I said that, will Andrew Sullivan write fawning bullshit about me?)
So, Ian, I guess what you’re trying to tell us is, “We haz a doomed!”? Dude, go on a three-day bender with one of your models. You’ll feel better. (Yeah, and I should be smart enough to take my own advice when in real life I make you and Paul M. look perky!)
How is governmental approval of same-sex “marriage” equivalent to “allowing people to make arrangements for themselves.”?? It’s just another government handout to be added to all the handouts that go along with real marriage, without the debatable rationale that it is essential to the survival of the human race.
Mr Speirs,
I’m married (to a woman) and I am no more in receipt of governmental cash than I was before (i.e. zilch). So I’ll be buggered (so to speak) if I see what your point is. In the vein of Sunfish why shouldn’t friends of Dorothy contribute to the income of florists, hair-dressers and cake decorators like the rest of us? The fundamental point is that in a truly free individualistic society a fundamental right is to choose your own next of kin.
Nick:
They have been doing this for years, this is not what this is about.
I don’t know what the situation is in the UK, but in the US married couples are entitled to some benefits that singles are not (in taxes, for example). So Robert Speirs is spot on on this.
It all falls into place once you start seeing the entirety of human existence through the prism of contract law.
Actually, I have no particular quarrel with the Libertarian argument for Gay Marriage, or a least no quarrel which can be constructively argued over. It’s based, soundly I think, on a view of society that I have come over the past few years to view as incompatible with civilized existence, but that’s by the by. (And those debates invariably descend into screaming matches in which the words “atomistic” and “strawman” predominate).
However, a self-styled Oakeshottian conservatism structuring all his political opinions around gay marriage is simply contemtible. Either it makes sense to tamper with the basic building blocks of society when it seems fair or it doesn’t. No amount of blither about homophobia is going to change that.
It’s also worth noting that Sullivan’s intense interest in affairs of the penis extends to one of JP’s pet concerns, namely the “Genital Integrity Movement”.This obviously leaves him open to all sorts of crude homophobic jokes that I will leave mercifully unsaid.
To put it another way, when Libertarians say they want gay marriage what they really mean is that they want to abolish marriage as traditionally conceived because it is incompatible with a consistently individualistic political ethics. They are, in the limited sense, correct and Godwin established this pretty well 2 centuries ago. I disagree with the premise rather than the conclusion and because I belong to a exclusivist religious minority I actually don’t care a whole bunch if you lot abolish marriage. I think it’s unwise to tamper with the spiritual basis of your civilization in the manner of a 4 year old with a power drill, but in the end it’s really your business. There’s a lot of other things you lot might do once in power that might cause me serious problems.
However, when a conservative starts to argue for gay marriage I really have to take issue, because he is talking drivel and thus adding to the already intolerable level of incompetent thought on this planet.
Well, it’s a matter of language, it’s a matter of what the word “marriage” means. It’s what happens when a word is wrested from the people and redefined by a particular vested group.
Take “art”. The word “art” was coined to described something which was understood by people in general. The word had a meaning which was consensual- to be basic, pretty pictures, sculptures and so on, which were aesthetically pleasing, made with skill and, normally, representational. It doesn’t mean that any more. In fact, most of what ordinary people consider “art” isn’t considered officially “art”, it’s just illustration. Why? Because the word was wrested from the people and redefined to mean “things that promote lefty modernist views”. Art was no longer about art, it was about “meanings” and propaganda. If I paint a lovely picture of a landscape, that’s not art. But if I shit in a wastebin and call it “Israel’s Rape Of Palestine”, and I’m part of the Fine Arts Guild, then now it’s art. The word has been stolen from the people and given to a clique to define.
And thus, with “marriage”. People in general have a perfectly clear idea of what marriage is, and have had for at least two millennia, and that definition has never included two blokes. But gradually, the word has been redefined, to mean something like “an exclusive contract enforced by the state which provides certain state entitlements”, whereas the general consensus was, and indeed still is, “a man, a woman, and some religious officer, white dress, bride’s father drinks too much and causes an embarrassment”.
By the old definition, you intrinsically couldn’t have a “gay marriage”. Two blokes just isn’t part of the word. Or wasn’t. But once you’ve taken the word away from what the population think it means, and handed it to various intellectual interests to ponder what it means, then as with “art”, it can mean anything, except what it originally meant.
If gays, or any other people, want to contract with one another, that’s up to them. Perhaps a couple of spinsters who share their lives, but not a bed, might like some form of contract too. But you can’t have a gay marriage. It’s oxmoronic. It’s like talking about single seater tandem or saying a cow is a type of fish. It’s not part of the meaning of the word.
But then, a wastebin full of shit wasn’t by definition “art” either, until the Enemy got hold of the word.
It’s also worth noting that this is the kind of area where conservatism as a philosophy breaks down. It means you have to keep sawing bits off your childrens’ genitalia, or forcing them to marry elderly relatives from the Old Country, or whatnot, just because that’s what your ancestors did, regardless of actual merit. Then using bizarre arguments such as “the people who disapprove of my creepy fascination with infant genitalia are the ones who are unhealthily obsessed with genitalia”.
Nope, it’s precisely here where conservatism becomes invaluable and where the superficial differences between Libertarianism and progressivism* melt away.
*and all the other political movements based on the politics of the felt need.
Between Perry and Ian B this threaqd has taken on a distinctly shitty tone. I do take Ian’s point though I think he’s misusing it. For a very simple reason. In the UK we have civil partnerships for ginger beers *but* quite naturally everyone thinks of them as “marriage”. I seriously don’t see this as some top-down imposition so that Mandelsnake could Roger the cabin-boy. Even heterosexually marriage means a lot of different things. A religious or civil ceremony is different. Different religions differ. Some are polygamous for example though frankly that’s depraved if it doesn’t (and Islam doesn’t) allow threesomes and moresomes.
He is bang on about art mind and I look forward to seeing his “Rape of Palestine” in Tate Modern sometime soon. Might I just make a suggestion Ian? Get a celeb to do it. Get Jordan to shit in a wheelie bin and you’ll win the fucking Turner Prize.
Alisa,
I think you mistake tax breaks and benefits. A tax break is not a benefit it’s just them stealing less. If Adam and Steve or Adam and Eve construe their affairs in such a way as to give less money to our insane masters (and e.g. Gordon Brown is clearly rug-munchingly demented) then fine by me.
Gabriel,
Jeebus Chris-Cringle. You just won’t leave foreskins alone will you? Moreover gay marriage has bugger-all to do with the foundation of civilization. It’s allowing a minority to do what they want. I am deeply amused by the wailing and gnashing of teeth it provokes amongst some. You are just blowing stuff out of all proportion. Just like calling “genital integrity” a “pet concern” of J-P. One post on the subject. If that’s a “pet concern” of J-P’s then God knows what you’d make of his many, many posts on financial regulation – a monomania perhaps? One of the primary reasons I’m not a conservative is conservatives’ unbelievable capacity to make mountains out of molehills. Gay marriage matters feck all unless you’re gay and want to get married and to go on about “tampering with the basis of society” or whatever is bloody ridiculous. A couple of fellas walking down the aisle does not the End of Days make.
Just one final thought. Not that long ago a practising Jew couldn’t stand for parliament or attend a university (grave consequences for civilization would have been quoted) . The “conservative” approach would have left that as the status-quo. Would you agree that that would have been the appropriate “conservative” position to take? And if not how is this different? It is, afterall, merely extending a common right to a minority isn’t it?
Oh, and I didn’t mention a single atom or a strawman.
Nick: fine, call it “entitlements”, or any other name. The point is that it is not about the government meddling in our bedrooms or our churches (at least not in this case), it’s about them meddling in our checkbooks.
Mr. Speirs:
If I understand you correctly, your objection is that allowing Adam and Steve to gather all of their 6’4″ bridesmaids with hairy legs and Adam’s apples in order to bore their relatives with a ceremony followed by overcooked Chicken Kiev is that it would decrease tax revenues?
At least in the US, marriage carries legal consequences apart from economics (although I don’t understand the objection to two guys having the same tax benefits). Joint adoption of children. Adoption of each other’s children. Medical decision authority[1]. Hell, even being first in line to be notified in the event of the death of a spouse is something.
Gabriel: I’m still not understanding your foreskin fixation, but there we are. I’m also not following how extending legal recognition of marriage to gays would destroy society, anymore than the laws ending polygamy in most of the west, or the repeal of laws against mixed-race marriage, etc. You keep asserting this, but when asked for details all you do is call other people “progressive.”
[1] While technically, an unmarried couple can prepare mutual medical powers-of-attorney naming each other, those can be challenged with distressing ease. The legal barriers to challenging the medical decision made by one spouse on behalf of another are significantly higher. My parents could try to challenge a medical decision made on my behalf by an unmarried designee pursuant to a properly-written PoA, if they wished, but it would be virtually impossible for them to challenge such a decision made by my wife.
In a total state, that depends where you draw your datum. If the default state is to pay 25% of your earnings as tax, and some special interest group get theirs cut to 20%, it’s a benefit from the relative position of those outside their group. Any such differential is effectively a tranfer of rent.
There has never been any such thing as a polygamous marriage per se. Marriage has always and everywhere been between one man and one woman, it just hasn’t always and everywhere been considered to be mututally exclusive with another marriage.
Maybe, maybe not. I’ve said about as explicitly as I can that I think that a consistent Libertarian can have no problem with gay marriage, though a more honest approach would be to admit that what you are actually doing is abolishing marriage. I have also made it pretty clear that I think that by abolishing marriage you are damaging yourself and not me.
Regarding parliament I would be very happy to see membership of the House of Commons restricted to Anglicans. I’d think it a bit rum if recusants, fanatics and atheists were allowed in while Jews were excluded, but I wouldn’t be that bothered. If Jews want to run for political office they should move to Israel (actually they should just get a proper job.)
Universities would be a bit tougher, though I hasten to note that Jews were never disbarred from universities, only Oxbridge. I suppose that should be left as a decision for the institutions themselves. My guess is that if they wanted to remain top class institutions they’d have to take in Jews.
The comparison with gay marriage, in any case, is utterly facile. There is nothing in the definition of going to university that excludes Jews, there is something in the definition of marriage that precludes two blokes having one. What you want to do is not extend marriage, but abolish it and replace it with a formalised sytem of contracts in which any two people become mutually dependent.
It’s as if I adopted a 90 year old and then demanded the right to be considered a “mother”. I guess that’s my right, but what I’m really advocating is not the right to become a mother, but the abolition of motherhood as a category recognised by law. (Which by the way is also the logical conclusion of Libertarian individualism and no doubt we’ll be having that debate, with he same amount of obfuscatory language, in a few decades).
*Note, I would certainly not think it a good idea for Jews to be given legal right of entry to those universities which have the purpose of training priests. In that case the definition of the university education in question simply excludes Jews. Likewise I don’t think Catholics should got to Yeshivot.
It’s simple when you think.
Not necessarily: in a libertarian society the two systems should have no problem existing side by side. But I do agree that calling the other system “marriage” would be a misnomer.
Regarding parliament, Nulab are moving towards disestablishing the Church of England, in the name of modernity and fairness, of course. Now I’m an atheist, so I ought to be pleased about this, right? No more bishops in the House Of Lords, right? Great!
No.
Seeing as we’re governed by proggies smitten by the desire to impose “diversity” we can see where this one will go. Let’s look at marriage again. The point about “gay marriage” is it is a typical proggie “extension of privelege” to favoured groups (in this case, gays) which is misrepresented as being more fair by, well, sharing the privelege around rather than addressing the presence of privelege itself (if you take the view that marrieds get priveleges that other groups, e.g. gays, don’t). So, rather than say for instance “marrieds shouldn’t get tax breaks” the proggie says “other groups who don’t get these tax breaks are being discriminated against. They must get them too!”
So, back to the bishops. Currently, anglican bishops get to sit in the Lords, which is seen as a privelege to their group (anglicans). So, we can be sure as anything that what the proggies will see as a “solution” will be to extend that “privelege” to other arbitrarily comparable “victim groups”. And indeed, if we look at the article-
and
In other words, the privelege of sitting in the Lords and having political power over the proles must reflect this “multi-faith community”. Expect to see Imams and Rabbis and whatever Hindus have warming the red benches. And the really frightening thing? This is what the proggie quislings heading the C of E want to happen!
1. Until 1830 or so there only was Oxbridge in England. So barring Jews from Oxbridge was a de-facto bar on Jews going to university.
2. I don’t get your “abolish marriage” schtick. “What you want to do is not extend marriage, but abolish it and replace it with a formalised sytem of contracts in which any two people become mutually dependent.” seems a pretty fair description of a UK Civil Marriage which I hope you would accept is a marriage.
3. I don’t think it’s a misnomer – it’s maybe a shift in language but that’s not the same thing.
4. Rent seeking for groups. Well actually I think something like civil partnerships for anyone who wants them – think two elderly spinsters sharing a house and one dies and the inheritance tax. Of course abolishing that iniquitous tax is the proper solution.
5. Which is one of the reasons why I’m OK with the term “gay marriage”. Leave the civil partnership schtick for those who want it but the formalisation of a romantic/sexual relationship is marriage as far as I’m concerned regardless of who does it especially because that’s exactly what everyone thinks of gay civil partnerships as. Sorry but that’s what language does. Winess the changing in meaning of “gay”. If I were to say “I am gay” you wouldn’t assume I meant I’m feeling lightheartedly cheerful would you?
6. Ian B is bang-on about the the CofE disestablishment.
Well Nick, you have a point too. And when I find myself in a situation where I basically can agree with both sides, I tend to look for the problem elsewhere. Can you guess?
No.
Unless it’s just the state meddling in any of this.
Of course it is. If it were not, we would not be having this discussion, at least not as a “big issue”. Worst case I can imagine is Gabriel’s gay son inviting him to his wedding, and Gabriel merely disputing his choice of words.
This is indeed the weak point in the argument, namely that Britain has already gone pretty far in the direction of abolishing marriage, both as a legal category and a social construct. No-one much nowadays even bothers to pretend that the white dress has anything more that aesthetic significance, if you catch my drift; divorce is considered a fairly normal outcome; being born out of wedlock carries no stigma etc. I’d go as far as to say that had this process not already proceeded pretty far already no-one would even be bringing up the Gay Marriage issue.
Again, it’s not really my business and if you want to continue your long march into a post civilized society where all modes of association are reduced to contract law, then I guess that’s your prerogative. How is post-modern Britain working out for you by the way?
I’d say “why don’t you just run a country hotel together like all the other woofters?” He’d call me hopelessly anachronistic, I’d say, “you bet sonny”.
What larks.
**
P.S.
Oh Noes!!1! Seriously, who gives? Happy Chanukah.
What larks indeed. Happy Hanuka:-)
Gabriel.
But when I got married that’s what I wanted. My bride was not in white – that would have been a farce.
That was in Manchester and if you have any fear of a Messiah being born here… then relax. There’s no fucking way you’d ever find three wise men and a virgin round here 😉
Why should be being born “out of wedlock” carry a stigma? Why punish children for their parent’s transgeression of medieval morality? The utterly feckless have kids but the utterly feckless are somet5imes married as well. The first wedding I went to the bride was in white and six months up the duff. It lasted less than a year. How is that any better than a committed unmarried couple having kids?
And it isn’t just a contract in the same senese that my clients sign one with me. I got married because I loved the girl and I wanted our relationship legally recognised. You know so she’d be the one to yank the plug and all. What’s wrong with that?
Gabriel. You’re just an oldie. Get with the program!
There is a lot wrong with contemporary Britain but sexual morality (and we still have it, it’s just not Victorian and as hypocritical anymore) is not one of the things wrong.
Anyhoo… Gabriel… Happy Hannukah!
Marriage, as a concept, is rooted not in civil law or religious spiritualism, but in biology. Families form, ties of heredity bind, mutually supporting roles are formed for members of family, tribe, etc. Family formation goes back to the beginning of human life – and beyond, as observation of wildlife will attest.
Gabriel makes a valid point. To substantively re-define a concept into something entirely different is, effectively, to define the original concept out of existence.
Civil equality has been granted piecemeal to Gays, via the “domestic partnership” and contract law routes for several years. Some tweaking with statutes remains to be done, but for all practical applications – inheritance, hospital visitations, community property and such, society has been moving in that direction for some time.
What the current crop of “Activists” want is the word “Marriage”, with the goal of de-legitimizing marriage as a social norm. They want to tell the rest of us what to think. Only secondarily are they interested in acquiring equal “civil” rights. If that were not so, they would be pushing for the statutory tweaking noted above, rather than feteing Mormons to pogroms.
With all their aggressive behavior and blather about “homophobes”, bigots, oppression, ad nauseum, these people expose what they really are. Neo-Fascists, demanding obedience.
They can piss off.
While my previous comment languishes in Smite Limbo, I’d just like to point out that the comment before that (to which Robert Speirs replied) was more about Andrew Sullivan than about who is or is not marrying whom.
I was going to take issue with this statement, but then I caught myself noticing that you spelt programme the foreigner way, so I’ll just leave it.
My point is that I don’t expect you to agree with any of my above arguments because you are a Libertarian not a conservative. However, Sullivan claims to be a conservative (indeed an Oakeshottian) and so I must conclude he is not only a wrong, but a colossal dumbass.
That said.
I don’t think it will “destroy society”, I think it is part of a process of a very grave change tending towards the abolition of one of the building blocks of society and this will have ramifications we cannot predict,. (In fact it will have ramifications that our equivalents 100 years from now will not even be able to work out). You understand this point when it comes to economics, why not elsewhere?
(i)As far as I know polygamy has never been the norm in the west.
(ii) The prohibition of polygamy is not a change in the definition of marriage, but a restriction. In all times and in all places marriage has been between one man and one woman; in some countries a man is allowed to have more than one marriage, in others not. A closer parallel would be changes in the age of consent. Neither of these are remotely comparable to changing the gender composition of a marriage.
or the repeal of laws against mixed-race marriage, etc.
Are mixed-race marriage laws the universal custom of humankind? No. How can you possibly compare the abolition of laws made in the 1870s in some American states, with a change of the magnitude of gay marriage? (If you don’t mind me saying, this seems an example of Americocentrism. Mixed-race marriage laws are actually a historically peculiarity of the 19th and 20th centuries, not a normal feature of human societies.).
That’s how I roll, snark.
Moses (Jew) married a Midianite and an Ethiopian, didn’t he? 🙂
I don’t, as a heterosexual married man, feel remotely threatened, or feel that my marriage is in any way devalued if say, Andrew Sullivan and his chap want to make binding commitments to one another.
For what it is worth, I think the state should keep well out of marriage, as with so much else. The only rule worth observing is that any such agreements are genuinely conensual, between those of an age reckoned able to consent (which is why I have a problem with sharia law, BTW).
I also do not see why Sullivan is being inconsistent with his brand of Oakeshottian conservatism by arguing for the right of gays to get married and to form such unions. He would argue – and has – that if people make such binding agreements, which make possible the transfer of property and so on, this reinforces, rather than weakens, civil society.
Those who want to ban adults from making binding, contractual agreements with one another and where there is no obvious harm thereby are under the burden of proof to demonstrate why such things should be banned. I do not see heteros becoming any less willing to get married or to value it because gay men and women can do the same. As usual, I suspect that a lot of those who fear gay marriage are insecure.
Gabriel claims that libertarians see all agreements between adults as a form of contract. Well, in a way he is right. The core concept is consent. That is why, by the way, I argued several months back against the circumscision of male and female babies precisely because such babies are not in a position to consent.
That is the basic principle: respect for the consensual arrangements of adults, and protection of those who cannot – yet – make such consents (children).
Jonathan:
I know there are people out there who want to do this, but there are also still people out there who want to ban interracial marriages as well. They are (thankfully) on the fringes of society these days, and they are not the ones we (or, I presume, Sullivan) are discussing here. Nor are we discussing the actual legitimacy of any such agreements. See CFM’s comment above. Of course, he in turn probably makes a rather sweeping generalization of the prevailing attitude among gays re marriage, but he nails it as to what the actual issue seems to be. That, and money (benefits/entitlements/whatever).
Well Johnathan, I think you’re overlooking the language issue, which is important here; central in fact.
Word and their definitions are implicitly bound. Words are invented to describe particular categories of things which are useful to distinguish. Such definitions are inherently restrictive and some may say arbitrary, and sometimes there are grey areas, and all sorts of things, but that’s the way language works. For instance we have words like car, bicycle, omnibus, motorbike and so on.
We might say “a bicycle is a two wheeled vehicle which is powered by the rider” and “a motorbike is a two wheeled vehicle powered by an engine”. And then somebody might say “why can’t you have a motorbike with pedals and no engine?” and the only answer is “because that isn’t what the word “motorbike” means”. If you don’t maintain those restrictive definitions, then motorbike can come to mean any vehicle at all, or indeed anything. “Why should motorbike only describe vehicles?” we are asked, “what about a motorbike that is a type of mammal with long ears?” and so on.
“Marriage”, even from a narrow contractual perspective, describes a narrowly defined subclass of contracts. It can’t be used for other types of contract, e.g. between an employer and employee, because that is not what the word is for. There are other words for these things.
I can’t think of any other way to put this; gays by definition can’t get married, because that isn’t what the word means.
I know that M.J. Oakeshott was at Cambridge during the 1920’s and 1930’s – but I doubt he would have been very happy with redefining “marriage” to include homosexual relationships. Actually the homosexuals at Cambridge would not have been happy with the idea either – and for the same reason they would have hated illiterate me.
They had too much respect for language.
Still “gay marriage” may be a wonderful idea. If so convince the people to vote for it (in California they have voted against it – TWICE). Do not get a corrupt court to twist a Constitution to say what it does not say.
It is legal issue – if courts can AMEND a Constitution (and the Californian Supreme Court did amend the Constitution under the cover of “interpreting” it), then what can the court NOT do?
Why can the Supreme Court not declare “the Constitution of California demands that all homosexals be put to death”?
If neither the words of the Constitution or the intentions of those who wrote them matter – then the above is fine.
Jews at university in England – U.C.L. in the 1820’s.
However, it could be argued that England was better off when hardly anyone went to university, and (therefore) going to university was not considered a qualification for various jobs.
“Gay Marriage”.
Actually my own position is to ignore the idea – as I do not even believe in the Births, Marriages and Deaths (Registration) Act of 1836.
In short I do not believe government should be involved in marriage.
However, everyone (bar me) seems to agree there should be such a thing as “civil marriage”, and the demands for “gay marriage” lead directly to more work for the “anti discrimination” administrators.
Small guest houses in Vermont have already been hit for “discriminating against Gay couples”.
Private property is always trumped by “anti discrimination” – this is why everything becomes political.
How did Barack Obama get elected to the office of President of the United States?
Three reasons (in reverse order of importance).
The bias of the main stream media and “education system” – which has been getting more extreme for decades.
His own good campaign organization (huge amounts of money – a lot of it from untraceable places on the internet, no I do not believe that most of the money was from ordinary leftists although it was mostly in small sums to avoid election law demands of traceablity) and good delivery of lies – “tax cuts”, “getting rid of wasteful spending” and so on.
But lastly, and most importanty:
John McCain supported the bailout – at that point he cut his own throat.
Hardly original (Dick Morris pointed it out at the time) – but true.
“But Obama supported the bailout also”.
But the one good thing about McCain was supposed to be his resistance to wild spending for special interests – then he turned into a Bush clone.
So we get Comrade Barack.
I wonder if he will follow Joe Stalin’s approach to people like Mr Andrew Sullivan.
The whole campaign was finished by that.
Admittedly oversimplifying and over generalizing, but here goes. Divine right kings ruled in a quid pro quo with religious powers in a mutual reinforcing system that left moral code essentially under a theocracy.
Through English history, religion was slowly in many increments prised free from the government. Matters of religion entered the realm of personal choice. With religion, moral (consent based as opposed to forcible) right and wrong became personal along with religion. Births, deaths and marriages were under the purview of one’s church. In the case of the Catholic Church, in 1563 the church declared that marriages had to be witnessed by a priest and two witness.
In the US, Roman style cohabitation marriage was recognized as common law marriage. Individual states began using state powers to regulate who could call themselves ‘married’ and of course, popular religious moralities were written into the laws. Governments continue to use the powers best suited for deterring crime to enforce various religiously based moral codes. In the US this reached its most extreme (and often violent) convolutions in the campaign to prevent Mormons from entering into polygamous marriages.
Across our nation countless numbers of people are having and raising children with multiple partners, sometimes simultaneously and yet, who got raided in Texas? An offshoot of the Mormons. It appears that the charges used to justify the raid and incarceration of those children (some of whom were adults) were fabricated. (Caveat, I haven’t been following the case and don’t know its present status.) Their real crime was calling multiple parenting partners ‘marriage’. With the secularization of society, we have now turned into a very strange chimera, a secular theocracy. Moral supremacists of all stripes are fighting over the controls that used to be wielded exclusively by Protestant Christians.
The term ‘marriage’ should be returned to the religious or social institution granting it. Government’s needs (taxing, etc) can be handled entirely under the category ‘civil union’.
Orwell presented the destruction of institutions through the destruction of the names and words describing them. By first commandeering the power to recognize marriage the government now has the power to destroy the institution. The only way to save the word, and thus the institution, is to remove it once again from the control of the state. The word ‘marriage’ and the title ‘married’ need serve no legal purpose, only a moral/religious and therefore personal one. By doing this, nobody can be compelled to acknowledge somebody else’s claim to being ‘married’ any more than they can be compelled to acknowledge somebody else’s claim to being ‘talented’ or ‘good looking’.
When the power of the state to define and therefore regulate and mandate the acknowledgment of a personal relationship is removed, the reward for mandating recognition of things like gay ‘marriage’ is removed. These silly campaigns will lose their point and almost certainly go away. The vast majority of people will understand and generally agree on the meaning of the term and sub-groups who use the word in unpopular ways will find them selves to be hyphenated. IE gay-marriage, polygamous-marriage open-marriage, etc.
Well, I am certainly insecure and also insecure in a a political sense, i.e. I think civilized life is something fragile.
You don’t accept that abolishing something hitherto universal among civilized peoples will have un-predictable ramifications. Fine, that’s your business if you want to be block-headed. However, for someone who claims to be a disciple of Burke it’s not just blockheaded, it’s downright mad.
In ideological systems derived from 1789, if something in society seems like it is unfair, you change it without taking into account custom. That’s Rationalism in Politics and seeing as Oakeshott devoted his political writings to attacking this conception of political activity, I think the idea that he would support gay marriage on the grounds that it made certain property transactions easier, or any other, is implausible. Scratch that, I think it’s an absolute f**king joke and, further, that Sullivan himself is an absolute f**king joke and that anyone who can’t see this is, quite literally, stupid.
His attempted reconciliation of gay marriage with Oakeshottian conservatism is, however, still not as laughably bad as his assay at doing so with Roman Catholicism. It really beggars belief that anyone takes seriously this raving hysteric of a commentator who quite patently thinks with his penis.
**
More or less. In the first case, it might be more accurate to say she married a Kenite, as this is subsequently how the desendents of Jethro, who spilt off from the Midianites, came to be known. In the second, there is some dispute over whether the word Cushite means, as it usually does, Ethiopian in that context. There’s no mention of Moses actually marrying anyone other than Tzippora, so when it says he a Cushite wife, it is often interpreted to refer to her and hence Cushite in this context refers to Arabian (i.e. Midianite), beautiful or ugly, depending on who you ask.
But I digress. Gay marriage is dumb idea and Andrew Sullivan is both a maniac and one of the most obvious examples of the cheapening and dumbing-down of public discourse in the modern west. (I actually just looked at his blog and he uses the term “we are the ones we have been waiting for”. I mean, come on!).
The proponents of gay marriage, or civil unions (or whatever term folk happen to want to use) are not, as far as I know, arguing that they are “abolishing” anything, rather, they are extending the right of adults to make consensual arrangements.
What you have not shown, by reference to any coherent sort of cause-and-effect line of reasoning, is how civil unions for gays somehow will deter heterosexuals from getting or staying married, or otherwise damage, undermine or indeed destroy this institution. If I were persuaded that gay unions did cause such damage, I would not support it, given that I share your and others’ general view that marriage is a fine institution that has stood the test of time.
But merely going on about how proponents of civil unions between adults might threaten things you hold valuable without providing much evidence really won’t do, Gabriel. I suspect that you probably would prefer it if homosexual adults were banned from entering any kind of relations at all, lest they pollute what you regard as the healthy normal state of affairs.
I have no idea of the truth of that or not. In any event, let’s be glad that that particular outrageous infringement of individual liberty has, at least in the West, been removed.
Of course they aren’t arguing that they’re abolishing marriage; this is the argument of opponents. You may as well say that anti-smoking campaigners say they aren’t victimising smokers, so therefore they aren’t.
On the second point you make; so far as I’m aware there are no barriers to gays making “consensual arrangements” currently. But arguing for gay marriage isn’t arguing for a consensual arrangement, because “marriage” as it practically is at the moment is a state supported arrangement which requires the entire population to agree with it, by coercion. It is an arrangement between two people and the state, not an arrangement just between two people. So that is the non-consensual part of it; if Alice and Bob get married, I as a citizen am now required to recognise their marriage as official, and to, for instance, fund tax breaks which Alice and Bob receive. Gay campaigners want that extended to Bob and Charlie.
So, they aren’t arguing for a “right” to be extended, they’re arguing for a coercive benefit to be extended. Different thing.
Anyway, it’s naive to argue this on the surface issues. That’s the same as arguing about the smoking ban on “workers rights” grounds the anti-smokers used. In both cases, these are political campaigns designed to fundamentally alter society in the manner desired by the campaigners, and each particular issue is just a step on the road to further demands, as with all progressivism. Whatever they get, they’ll be back for more.
Rubbish. Throughout most of the world, including some Western nations, such relationships are banned, often by severe punishments for transgressors.
Let’s be clear, Ian. What I want to see is the ending of State involvement in deciding what is and what is not the “right” sort of marital arrangement and I merely want private legal agreements to be formalised so that, for instance, if A and B want to set up a joint bank account, or transfer/inherit property from the other, etc, that there is no legal impediment. I do not want to see any “coercion” of anybody. Quite how anyone is being “coerced” by gay marriage or any other form of marriage is a mystery.
It may be true that for some of the progressives, gay marriage, like other things, is part of their demonic attempt to destroy bourgeois society. I happen to doubt it and I have not seen any evidence for such an agenda.
I should add, of course, that my arguments apply to adults only and that is one reason for my reservations – to put it mildly – about allowing sharia into the UK legal code.