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February 06, 2007

Start with building a Straw-Conservative

...then make a mockery of your own argument by attempting stunts like this

OLYMPIA, Wash. - An initiative filed by proponents of same-sex marriage would require heterosexual couples to have kids within three years or else have their marriage annulled.

Initiative 957 was filed by the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance. That group was formed last summer after the state Supreme Court upheld Washington's ban on same-sex marriage.

Under the initiative, marriage would be limited to men and women who are able to have children. Couples would be required to prove they can have children in order to get a marriage license, and if they did not have children within three years, their marriage would be subject to annulment.

All other marriages would be defined as "unrecognized" and people in those marriages would be ineligible to receive any marriage benefits.

“For many years, social conservatives have claimed that marriage exists solely for the purpose of procreation ... The time has come for these conservatives to be dosed with their own medicine," said WA-DOMA organizer Gregory Gadow in a printed statement. “If same-sex couples should be barred from marriage because they can not have children together, it follows that all couples who cannot or will not have children together should equally be barred from marriage."

Where have mainstream social conservatives said that marriage exists solely for procreation?

Certainly, children are the focus of much of the debate. But that's children and their rights, not fertility. Social conservatives don't argue from the individual point-of-view of whether or not same-sex couples affect opposite-sex couples, their arguments generally fall into institutional ones, on how a radical redefining of an institution will affect society at large.

Please revisit Megan McArdle's (libertarian, not social conservative) analysis of some of the arguments.

Social conservatives of a more moderate stripe are essentially saying that marriage is an ancient institution, which has been carefully selected for throughout human history. It is a bedrock of our society; if it is destroyed, we will all be much worse off. (See what happened to the inner cities between 1960 and 1990 if you do not believe this.) For some reason, marriage always and everywhere, in every culture we know about, is between a man and a woman; this seems to be an important feature of the institution. We should not go mucking around and changing this extremely important institution, because if we make a bad change, the institution will fall apart.

A very common response to this is essentially to mock this as ridiculous. "Why on earth would it make any difference to me whether gay people are getting married? Why would that change my behavior as a heterosexual"

To which social conservatives reply that institutions have a number of complex ways in which they fulfill their roles, and one of the very important ways in which the institution of marriage perpetuates itself is by creating a romantic vision of oneself in marriage that is intrinsically tied into expressing one's masculinity or femininity in relation to a person of the opposite sex; stepping into an explicitly gendered role. This may not be true of every single marriage, and indeed undoubtedly it is untrue in some cases. But it is true of the culture-wide institution. By changing the explicitly gendered nature of marriage we might be accidentally cutting away something that turns out to be a crucial underpinning.

Political stunts, especially cynical, insulting stunts served up merely to "dose" one's opponents with "their own medicine" rather than attempting actual persuasive arguments have a tendency to backfire.

As sympathetic as I am to having same-sex couples be afforded some legal institution to afford them contractual rights, I'm hoping this puerile initiative born of street theatre gets the derision deserves.

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Posted by Darleen at February 6, 2007 06:05 AM

Comments

Good grief. If SSM advocates ever want to be taken SERIOUSLY, this sure as hell isn't helping!

Apparently it's all just a game. Apparently marriage is, too. Morons.

Posted by: Beth at February 6, 2007 07:25 AM

So infertiles can't get married at all? What about couples who BECOME infertile between marriage and the 3 year limit?

Sheesh. Yeah, like that's ever gonna go anywhere except to make these people look like the jackasses they are.

Posted by: caltechgirl at February 6, 2007 11:01 AM

It's kinda funny - in a warped way. My husband and I waited five years after we were married before we had kids. Would that make them illegitimate in this scenario?

Posted by: Carol at February 6, 2007 06:24 PM

Actually, some conservatives in opposing gay marriage like to say that marriage is for procreation.

Which means that people who choose not to have children are somehow not engaging in a proper marriage.

It's nonsense of course, but you still hear it occasionally.

But I wouldn't pay too much attention to the sort of stuff far-out advocacy groups try to put on the ballot. Most ballot measures fail anyway.

Posted by: Carl W. Goss at February 7, 2007 11:16 AM

( rolling eyes )

( / rolling eyes )

Posted by: Stacy at February 7, 2007 03:24 PM

I don't know. I think this is calling the political right on their nonsense, and showing how constricting their notion of what families 'should be' really is.

Posted by: Monika at February 10, 2007 07:17 PM

That may be so, Monika, but this sort of stunt really isn't to win them any friends or influence people.

More likely, it's just going to make them more enemies.

Posted by: TalkinKamel at February 13, 2007 08:23 AM