For the moment I want to put my comment on the record at Opine just in case Ampersand deletes it at Amptoons (or attempts to obstruct my further commenting as he has endeavored to do at FSB).
I'll add an introduction to this bogpost and some aditional thoughts later.
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The exchange was about Ampersand's reaction to the following from Robert P. George's article, "What Is Mariage?":
"Marriage's independent reality is only confirmed by the fact that the known cultures of every time and place have seen fit to regulate the relationships of actual or would-be parents to each other and to any children they might have."
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See my comment at
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/2011/02/23/will-legal-same-sex-marriage-lead-to-legal-incestuous-marriage-no-it-wont/#comment-224520
You have used the count of cultures to argue against the man-woman criterion of marriage. Readers who have agreed with you might fairly expect that if this backfires on you, Ampersand, you will not flip-flop to abandon such a count as insignificant.
Your assertion is quantified: "huge numbers", "probably the majority", "many or most" human cultures.
You would be hard-pressed to come up with a count that justified such descriptors for polyandry.
Likewise for the SSM idea. You necessarily seperated SSM from the expanse of human cultures across the historical and anthropological records and necessarily used a different quantifying descriptor,"increasingly", which effectively conceded that the SSM idea does not provide a result that justified the other quantifying descriptors.
Polygny does have a much higher count. It, like polyandry and unlike SSM, is two-sexed. Multiple marriage is a series of husband-wife unions.
For instance, the second wife does not marry the first wife; they have a husband in common. A third wife does not marry the other wives. In each marriage the spouses become kin (if not already kin) and the prioritization of kinship is bound by cultural protocols; the sexual basis for consummation, adultery, and paternity is two-sexed and not sex-neutral nor one-sexed. The limits on multiple marriage in such cultures derives from the core meaning of marriage. Multiple marriage is a response, albeit a flawed response, to the core meaning of marriage.
The SSM idea is a response, too, and that takes the form of outright rejection of the marriage idea i.e. the core meaning of marriage which is deemed bigoted and hateful and harmful. Thus SSM cannot be counted with polyandry and polygny as counter examples of marriage as the union of husband and wife.
If you would rather point at exceptions, rather than many if not most human cultures (or even present day human cultures), fair enough. But best not to mischaracterize that as something else. You may have mischaracterized inadvertently or out of a hurried flub you had not comprehended. But you can correct yourself anytime.
While your count of polyandry is in error, your count of polygny is more plausible even as that count contradicts your remarks against George et al.
Confusion of categories is a profound weakness of SSM argumentation.
If you meant to count (or to include a count of) two-sexed groups rather than series of twosomes, then, the count still does not favor your opening remarks about marriage in human cultures.
But your conflating the twosome limit with the limit on number of concurrent twosomes, if indeed that was your intended meaning (please clarify), would be instructive both in terms of your argument aganst the man-woman criterion (an argument that has been made with the rhetorical emphasis on homosexuality) and in terms of drawing lines of eligibility based on kinship or relatedness and based on the twosome.
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Please confirm, clarify, or correct:
1) You think that it is extremely counter-intuitive to say that there is a core definition of marriage, an objectively true definition, which many or most human cultures have gotten wrong.
2) You feel it seems dubious to claim such a definition while at the same time defining marriage in a way that contradicts how marriage has been defined in many or most of these known cultures.
I'll add more later.
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