Is marriage a "right"?

[yyy]

@finley

yyy will be here in a minute to tell me I’m wrong,

Oh, Finsky. Again with the “in a minute” stuff? How did you get so spoiled?! Don’t you realize it takes me 10 minutes just to read this thread???

Anyway, here I am some 20 hours later, and others have said most of the things that needed to be said, so there isn’t much left for me to lecture you about. Still, I’ll try. Because I care.

@finley

Probably the Nazis came closest to telling the truth: a civic obligation, for the benefit of the State.

All kinds of things can be construed as beneficial to the state. Happy people tend to be more productive than unhappy people, for example, and despite the horror stories, plenty of people are made happier by marriage…

But when you describe marriage as being for the benefit of the state, are you really trying to say the state desperately needs more humans? (Can we pull @hsinhai78 out of whatever wormhole he got stuck in, so he can finish explaining that one to us?)

@finley

For example they denied the right to reproduce to “undesirables”.

…aaaand so did various other states, just for the record.

@finley

that will express itself naturally without intervention from the State or Society, and which you can be deprived of only by force.

I’m not well read on asexuality, but I’m willing to consider that it’s an actual thing.

@finley

I’m also suggesting the term “legal right” is a misnomer in this case, because the word “right” implies benefits.

Modern Britishism of the day.

@finley

Here’s the other side of the coin: in Vietnam (and no doubt other countries) you can be arrested for sharing a room with a person of the opposite sex if you don’t have a marriage certificate. It’s not implausible to imagine a future government making homosexual marriage compulsory on a similar basis, so they can keep a register of homosexuals. Wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened, would it?

Are you sure that’s still the case in Vietnam today? Either way, the same kind of law has been known to exist in common law jurisdictions, and the tendency has been for it to be repealed because it goes against the social consensus (more or less) of what it’s reasonable for the state to interfere or not to interfere with. You know, the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.

Any law could theoretically exist, just as any kind of human behavior that can be imagined could theoretically exist, but if you want to scare people with realistic legal oddities, you need to try a bit harder than telling people the state is going to force them to marry their roommates*. “Negotiable cow” is far more plausible than that.

(*I know, some Muslim countries – I won’t get started on that.)

@finley

Back there I suggested that reproduction might be considered a “right” if you are inherently capable of it. The problem is that people have now decided that this right should extended to them under all circumstances. If they are unable to reproduce, the gubmint still has to uphold their “right”, by means of technology or adoption.

Your concern would be legitimate if it weren’t fallacious. It’s “the slippery slope” all over again. In brief, removing a prohibition doesn’t impose a significant burden on the state, but giving people assistance to achieve something “at any cost”) would impose a significant burden on the state and therefore on society. You’re still thinking in terms of modern British “the peasants are coming for our tax dollars!” hysteria.

@finley

I’m saying that, if a large section of society is vociferously demanding something that has no demonstrable benefit to anybody (you don’t seem to dispute that this is illogical if not exactly immoral) then that society might have a deeper problem that needs examining.

Are we still talking about marriage? Ask a doctor, tax consultant, statistician etc. about the benefits.

@finley

I suspect this is going to have precisely the opposite of the intended effect: far from making the law more “inclusive”, more and more heterosexual couples are going to start opting out of the redefined version of marriage, on the basis that it no longer means what they believe it means.

A: Darling, will you marry me?
B: I used to want to marry you, but then our gay friends got married, so now it’s meaningless.
A: Okay whatever.

People have been cohabiting without marrying even though they could since before the modern trend of legalizing gay marriage was considered plausible. By what mechanism do you propose gay marriage would change this?

If more states follow the Austrian example of allowing civil partnerships for all (even though they were invented for gay couples as a compromise, before gay marriage was legalized), then yes, that’s plausible, because the concept of marriage as a one-size-fits-all convention is hard to justify, so there’s an argument to be made for allowing “marriage lite”. But in the absence of separate rules for civil partnerships, your argument doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.