[Much more after the jump.]
Widespread public (in the media and online) reaction to the announcement of the consensual incest between two adults has largely been "eeeew" "yuck", "gross", "disgusting", "I can't imagine doing that", and so forth – so some variation of the "ick" response, along with "since it is icky to me, it is wrong."
Many of these same people feel that same way about homosexual behavior between consenting adults. They may admit this privately, if not to their "LGBT" friends/family members/coworkers. Yet they do not express it in the same public forums. (Standard disclaimer: I’m not saying homosexual behavior is the same as incestuous behavior.)
Why is that?
I suspect it is a matter of pressure from activists, not about right or wrong. Someone who honestly, openly expresses that the idea of homosexual behavior grosses them out is tarred and feathered by homosexuality advocates and other "tolerance" experts, even accused of wanting to kill LGBT people.
As the younger Phillips has said, there are, no doubt, other adults engaging in consensual incest. I'd bet those people have negative feelings when they see how people have reacted to Phillips' claim. There are children whose parents are siblings or parent-child. How can we be so insensitive to their feelings and their desires to be consider a normal family that is just as good as any other family? Yet here we are as a society, screaming out that the behavior is sickening.
Once we abandon the standard that sex is for marriage, or merely deny that sexual relationships between adults are about children (even if not all of them produce children) as a corollary to the insistences that sex is not for marriage and that marriage is not about children, then how can we claim that incest is wrong because of the possibilities of what (heterosexual, adult) incest can do to resulting children? We can't use the "ick" factor as an indication it is wrong, because that has supposedly failed us before, leading us astray. That reaction of disgust or merely that the feeling that the behavior is wrong could be nothing more than evidence that we need diversity training and perhaps books for children with a title like Johnny's Mom and Dad Are Also His Aunt and Uncle, or Jane's Family Tree Looks Like a Wreath.
I can rattle off many reasons why incest is wrong, aside from my belief that all sex with someone other than your spouse is wrong. But can the people who insist that "consenting adults" is the standard that makes sexual activity okay, even that we have an obligation to promote it with a state-issued marriage licesnse as acceptable and a viable marriage model? If they can't tell us why incest is wrong without invoking the same arguments they dismiss when it comes to marrige licensing or the morality of homosexual behavior, but still publicly say "eeeww!" to Phillips' claims, can we rightly call them bigots?
One of the main problems with incest is how it affects the fabric of our culture in how families function eternally and with other families, how families are perpetuated, and how men and women relate within their own sex and between the sexes. This, by the way, is also one of the problems I have with homosexual behavior, and one reason why it is a mistake for the state to license same-sex pairings as "marriage". There is hardly anything else as important as the conditions in which we create and raise the next generation, and as part of that, how males and females relate to each other in their different roles that should be distinct. Your parents/children, siblings, and spouses should all be distinct categories and not act like they are in one of the other categories, let alone actually be in one of the other categories.
The Phillips' kind of relationship is like the kind you like. It is very anti-neuter, because the two are opposite sex and can make children.
ReplyDeleteI never pretended that having one female and one male were the only criteria, so no, this isn't the kind I like. However, incestuous marriages have been recognized in the past and have produced relatively healthy offspring. Indeed, they were marriages. I don't think states should license incestuous marriages, for a number of reasons.
ReplyDeleteAnd I bet you that it was not gay marriage that has led to them. It never has, and it never will, so it's completely off the subject in a discussion of gay marriage.
ReplyDeletePlayful made an astute link above...
ReplyDelete'Widespread public (in the media and online) reaction to the announcement of the consensual incest between two adults has largely been "eeeew" "yuck", "gross", "disgusting", "I can't imagine doing that", and so forth – so some variation of the "ick" response, along with "since it is icky to me, it is wrong."'
To justify one action lends to the establishment of precedent that justifies the next. So lets say you are right, and incest is what plows the say for same-sex marriage. Does that make it any better? Either one will do the same erosion and lead to the other.
Playful says that men and women's role in raising children and in marriage "should be distinct". That's the kind of thinking that made it ok in the past for fathers to withhold any kind of affection toward their children, with neglect and abuse being quite common. Today, some of the things men do in marriage was considered women's role in the past, and vice versa. Marriage was neutered way before any gays got married. What did it was giving women the right to vote. Gay marriage came from this way of thinking, and reinforces it, and that's why it's a good thing.
ReplyDeleteThere's no reason why a more enlightened understanding of gender roles should confuse anyone into wanting to marry their to marry their mother or their sister.
Arturo, it took 50 years from the time women got the vote until the time the gay movement gained any traction, and at least another 20 years before any push for gay marriage started. It just doesn't logically follow. And I may add that contrary to your assertion there are many routes by which the idea for gay marriage might have developed traction other than through women's equality. And in fact, it came close to doing this in some primitive societies. Indeed, if the belief (commonly held by progressivist utopians such as yourself) that marriage in the past was just an "anti-cuckoldry" device, it needs some explaining as to why it never took hold, since it could then have been seen as a good way to minimize cuckoldry.
ReplyDeleteR.K. it's you who keeps saying that it takes time, generations, to start seeing the consequences of changes in society. and that's why we're not seeing yet the real effects of same-sex marriage where it's now permitted. so you're being dishonest.
ReplyDeleteThe Phillips' kind of relationship is like the kind you like. It is very anti-neuter, because the two are opposite sex and can make children.
ReplyDeleteRight, Arturo, this is why Playful et al need to start making sense, and start saying that marriage is not just for couples that can, or desire, or might have children, but only for couples that could ethically have children together. I've been saying this for years. Playful, don't you agree? You must've seen my comments many times. It is so simple. Marriage conveys society's and the state's approval and establishes the couple's consent and commitment to each other, for a couple to have children together. It IS the right to have children together (unmarried procreation might be allowed and may even also be a right, but not by couples who are not eligible to immediately marry).
Same-sex couples should be treated like siblings and NOT ALLOWED to have children together. And, all marriages should be allowed to have children together (this needs to be codified into federal law, it is so under attack right now). No couples that are prohibited from having children should be allowed to be married, or it will strip procreation rights from all marraiges.
Oh, re-reading my comment, I want to make something clear: marriage is only for relationships that can ethically have children together. By "relationships", I mean all the stuff that's in the general laws now about "no man may marry his sister, daughter, mother, aunt, wife's mother, etc." The supportable basis for prohibiting certain kinds of relationships include risk to the potential child, but are not limited to that, they can include family cohesion, social order, environmental cost, etc. The huge infrastructure and loss of reproductive rights that would come from allowing modified gamete reproduction is a supportable basis to prohibit non male-female marriage.
ReplyDeleteI doubt very much that arturo has objective criteria by which to assert that marriage would account for more child abuse (if in fact that can be established anyway) within married homes in the past than today. Indeed the nonmarital trends are closely associated with greater risks to children.
ReplyDeleteFurther, sex integration is not about playing roles. Husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, are not costumes that actors adorn themselves with.
Fatherhood and motherhood are united within the social institution. That is the default position and marriage makes this normative. There is an overflow effect outside of marriage but the source of that overflow is the core meaning of marriage -- and you won't have that positive influence on society if responsible procreation is abolished from the regard of the law and the marriage culture.
On the other hand, SSM argumentation insists that marriage means less and less and less. It is from THAT thinking that "gay marriage" came. That is not about an overflow effect of marriage on the type of relationship that arturuo has in mind. The effect runs in the other direction, to his approval apparently. In other words, SSM argumentation is about queering society -- and marriage has become a target for because of its pervasive influence.
Even prominent SSMers acknoweldge that. As is strongly implied by arturo's own remarks here.
Also, while RK talks of the universal features of marriage in the context of milennia, arturo and SSMers in general talk in terms of a few years. And while RK talks of the core meaning of marriage across the historical and anthropological records, SSMers emphasize the anomolous examples where identity politics has been pressed into a few rare examples where jurisdictions have merged SSM with marriage.
John Howard does point to the core of marriage with his last two comments. That core entails sex integration and responsible procreation. It does not entail human manufacture nor sex segregation. The core is what the eligility lines are drawn around. But SSM argumentation attacks the core and so renders the line drawing a matter of arbitrary use of governmental power. Or rather the abuse of governmental power to assert gay identity politics as a trump card -- and to replace marriage recognition with recognition of a specious substitute for marriage (i.e. SSM).
R.K. it's you who keeps saying that it takes time, generations, to start seeing the consequences of changes in society. and that's why we're not seeing yet the real effects of same-sex marriage where it's now permitted. so you're being dishonest.
ReplyDeleteAh, good retort, Arturo, but we're talking nine years vs. fifty, plus there is a much more straighforward explanation for why the idea for gay marriage took root at this point in Western societies, and it's not women's equality, or even equality per se. However, I disagree that that reason, which I will spell out in a bit, is the only possible avenue for the idea to develop. Also, it does not adequately explain its absense from earlier cultures, let alone guarantee that it is a good idea. I'll get back to you in a few hours. Have to run out now.
Arturo, what really has triggered the idea of neutered marriage in recent Western society has not been giving women the right to vote, or even more broadly women's equality.
ReplyDeleteYes, cultural effects can take generations. Cultural corollary ideas probably are seen more quickly. Your argument is that same-sex marriage is a cultural corollary idea to giving women the right to vote.
It would be no less logical to argue that women in combat (or the draft) is a corollary to giving women the right to vote. Or that mandating the end of separate restrooms is a corollary to giving women the right to vote. Or that ordering the end of separate sections for men and women's fashions in clothing stores is a corollary to giving women the right to vote.
And even if these could be seen as corollaries to giving women the right to vote, that would not prove that they were good ideas. Corollary ideas to good changes in a culture, life women's suffrage, are not necessarily good in themselves. Culture is not like mathematics or abstract logic. One could argue that Communism was a corollary to the idea of equality, in the cultural sense. But it was not a good one. (And I am not accusing anyone here on either side of the neutered marriage question of being a Communist; there is no reason for me to believe that any of you are). Cultural corollary ideas can be severely flawed.
The more direct trigger of the idea of neutered marriage in recent Western society is the idea, not that the genders are equal, but that all sexual acts are qualitatively equal.
And the trigger of this idea is the idea that sex is first and foremost for pleasure and not for procreation.
And what gave this idea a huge shot in the arm was the "liberation" of sex from procreation provided by the Pill. You can credit Gregory Pincus.
And the effects of this have not all been good.
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/07/002-the-vindication-of-ihumanae-vitaei-28
The "Sexual Revolution", not women's suffrage, was the trigger of the idea of neutered marriage in recent Western society. But this does not mean it is the only route by which the idea could have developed, as you imply.
One thing I've learned from both biological and cultural studies is that different steps can lead to similar ends. You can't assume that there is only one possible route which may have led to the idea of neutered marriage in the past.
Let's for argument's sake, assume that the following contentions of progressivist utopians and SSM advocates were true: 1) that marriage's main purpose through history was as an "anti-cuckoldry" device; 2) that marriages between homosexuals and heterosexuals are "living a lie", and 3) that men and women in such relationships can not be "sexually satisfied" and thus will seek outlets for satisfaction elsewhere.
If this is all true, would not it have been observed in at least some cultures, that women married to homosexual men were more likely to make cuckolds out of their husbands? And that this in turn may have made women married to heterosexual men more likely to cheat on their husbands also?
And, thus, would not at least some cultures, to prevent the encouragement of cuckoldry, have decided that it was better thus for homosexual men to be married instead to other men, so that they would not be cheated on by unsatisfied wives who thus encouraged such behavior onto the broader culture?
It's a wonder why not....unless there turned out to be something else very wrong with the idea.
Chairm, when is a man more likely to get away with beating his wife and kids? Today, or 50 years ago? 100 years ago? The problem you have is not that marriage means less and less and less (it doesn't). It's that more is expected of men, like being an actual husband to their wives and a father to their kids. Out of this new idea that both persons in a marriage are equal partners, gay marriage came from. Your opposition to gay marriage is at it's core anti-women.
ReplyDeleteR.K., I'll read your reply later.
Arturo, you tried to make a point about child abuse and now switched to something else. You did not provide objective criteria for the first attempt nor for the switched attempt.
ReplyDeleteA batterer is less likely to get away with it. On the other hand ...
A man is more likely to batter a woman he lives with if they are in unwed cohabitation or in a sexualized relationship outside of marriage and noncohabitating.
That woman's children are more likely to be abused than children at home with their married father.
If you would emphasize the odds of a woman being vicitmized, arturo, look to the significantl higher rates of domestic violence that reported in same-sex sexualized households.
The idea that you say emerged is that the wife and the husband unite in an increasingly egalitarian relationship.
So-called "gay marriage" came from nothing more than the assertion of supremacy via gay identity politics.
There is nothing "gay" about "gay marriage" that is not also sex-segregative. It is also anti-responsible-procreaton and thus anti-woman and anti-child.
Your comments upped the "anti" in a direction from which you attempted to misdirect the discussion.
It should be enough that you are pro-"gay marriage" (GM) but since you have failed to state the essentials of GM, it is understandable that you haven't the basis for being pro this or that. Your support of GM is anti-social, arturo, in the sense that you would impose upon all of society the supremacy of identity politics over marriage, the rule of law, and common sense.