October 02, 2003
Golly, I never thought of that. I love the smell of obtuseness in the morning. (Or perhaps it's just the habit of throwing in links to posts that one hasn't actually read.)

But one more time, just for the merry hell of it:

There is a distinction between people's personal reasons for marrying and society's reasons for instituting and regulating marriage. This is not a subtle distinction.

It does not logically follow that a person capable of recognizing this distinction is necessarily anti-SSM.


Posted by Moira Breen at October 02, 2003 07:31 AM
Comments

Marriage is a legal and social institution that exists for the primary purpose of ensuring that children are created and raised properly. Personal happiness is a purely tertiary benefit and irrelevant to the question whether society ought to extend the institution of marriage to (i) gay couples, (ii) polygamous or polyandrous relationships or (iii) any other form of sexual relationship. The reason we don't inquire whether any particular couple intends to or is capable of having children is because that would be (a) intrusive and (b) difficult to determine with any degree of accuracy. So, we have a presumption, which happens to be true in the vast majority of cases, that people intend to have children when they get married. At any rate, I know of no other explanation for the perseverance of the institution of marriage over thousands of years of human history, across many widely different societies and cultures.

Posted by: douglevene on October 03, 2003

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