On why I imagine people who are against gay marriage are against it:

[xiphias]

Underneath the following cut tag are concepts which many people on my friends list may find offensive.

But who I'd REALLY like to hear from are people who ARE against gay marriage.

I'd like to put together an argument which, I suspect, may be a reason why people are against gay marriage. This is not an argument which I believe; rather, it is an argument which I can imagine which leads to the same conclusions that I perceive among people who are against gay marriage.

What I'd really love is if people who are against gay marriage would let me know if this argument is close to how you feel.

Anonymous commenting is on, and IP tracking is off. And I'm going to do something which I NEVER do on my LJ: if anyone gets nasty against people, I'm going to delete comments. I'm inviting people to say things which actually, in a real sense, are personal attacks against other people on my friends list.

In other words, if this works the way I hope it will, griffen, you, among other people, are not going to want to read it.

In Leviticus, gay sex is one of the ONLY forms of sex referred to as "an abomination". In Hebrew, it's a much stronger form of condemnation than any of the other things.

It is understood that people will, in their own private lives, make choices that you don't agree with. But to place legal government sanction on this act is to state that you agree with it.

Taking laws against sodomy off the books -- that's fine. By doing that, you are "agreeing to disagree". If it's an abomination, well, it's THEIR abomination, and you can live and let live. If they want to be public, and even have ceremonies -- that's, again, something where you can agree to disagree.

But by placing actual government sanction on such relationships -- that crosses the line between "not opposing" and "supporting". Allowing "abominations" to have the same status as REAL marriages, well, that gives marriages the same status as abominations. And THAT'S why it destroys marriage.

Even "civil unions" can be seen as a live-and-let-live compromise. But this -- putting a real marriage and an abomination in the same category? That calls into question the legitimacy of ALL marriages.

So -- people who are against gay marriage? Is this somewhat similar to how you think about it?

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I'm passing along something here, and it's not something I believe myself, but I think it provides a rational secular argument that at least has the benefit of stating a well thought position:

Redefining "marriage" is like redefining "freedom." Both words appear in laws without any explanation of what they mean, and that's because their meaning was considered self-evident when those laws were written. If a word like "marriage" can be redefined to mean something so completely different from what it meant two centuries ago, that opens the door to redefinition of any other legal term when it becomes convenient. Soon words like "liberty" and "justice" could mean something very different too.

[My disagreement with this argument is that the efforts to extend the definition of marriage to include same sex partners doesn't in any way restrict the marriages of opposite sex partners. So no restrictive redefinition is happening.]

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

"Freedom" and "justice" are constantly being redefined, in practice. I don't mean that cynically: sometimes they are redefined in ways of which I approve.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Sure, but that redefinition is exactly what our Founding Fathers *did* do (with some help from Locke and other political theorists of the day). Remember the movie Wallace, where at the end Mel Gibson as William Wallace screams out "FREEDOM!" as he's led to the gibbet? He didn't mean what we mean by it, as far as I can tell from reading about history. Burns nailed what "freedom" was to Wallace: "Wha, for Scotland's king and law / Freedom's sword will strongly draw". That is, the right for a people to have their own king and law and to live according to their own traditions rather than having them imposed from outside. That only works for a homogeneous group with a shared tradition, though (sort of like what some of the Fundamentalists keep insisting America has, despite the reality showing otherwise).

The revolutionary bit from the FFs is the idea of individual liberties, including feedom even from your own government. I think both sides on Prop 8 would say that's all they're asking for - my personal belief is that, given that no one's forcing any straight *or* gay people into same-sex marriages, one side is totally wrong about that, but that part is just opinion.

[brooksmoses]

See argument above: Governments are forcing people to recognize same-sex couples in important ways (e.g., renting apartments to them, photographing their wedding, letting them adopt children), through various anti-discrimination laws. Same-sex marriage, while not actually doing any of that directly, will be a clear and solid cornerstone in the foundation for it.

So, no, I don't believe either side is wrong at all about that. This is a case where one person's nose is another person's swinging fist, and anywhere one draws a line for where the right to swing a fist ends is going to bruise someone's nose.

[kinfae.livejournal.com]

Yet at the same time, certain states are denying those expansions. I can't remember which state it was, but one state also passed a proposal stopping same-sex couples from adopting.