Interesting. And I'd say accurate.

What's also interesting is what good things will eventually shake out of stupid things. For example, we have the Temperance movement to that for the prominence ice cream parlors, tea rooms and coffee shops.

With the gay marriage thing, I expect that eventually that will be accepted as well, but prim church ladies, lesbians included, will still reserve the right to look down their noses at sluts and hos, despite the fact that Britney's whirlwind Elvis-chapel marriage and divorce hurt no one, not even herself.

Then again, while we no longer give out scarlet letters, there are certain circumstances where you can still be facing jail time for being a ho: Consider Lindsay England's adultery charges.

Of course, there's also impeachment for a blowjob.

I'm sorry but I find some of Matthew's discussion a tad confusing. Maybe I'm slipping into one of those alternate time streams?

The "social justice" branch of the conservative movement lobbied for and got Mr. Bush to deny funds to the United Nations for the Women and Children Fund with the excuse that the fund supported forced abortions in China, which it clearly did not. They used it as an excuse because one of their games in the third world is to appear as champions of the poor in order to proselitize, and they didn't want the competition. They have played that game before. Their "social justice" carries a heavily weighted noose inside it.

And if you think I've decided never to cut any of them any slack, no matter how unreasonable that makes me sound, you are right.

I think he's saying what I've been trying to get across, namely that most people, even the ones who voted for Bush, think they ARE doing the right thing.

It's using the fancy word "social justice". I use a made up concept that most of us are "do good" machines and it's just a matter of getting us to run the program that we agree with.

If you said "social justice" to some religious person, they might think that means they should stop gay marriages, ban abortion, and arrest unwed mothers, in that order. Most people on this blog, I think, have a different set of items on their "social justice" list, but it still has the same heading.

As you say, interesting.

"prim church ladies, lesbians included, will still reserve the right to look down their noses at sluts and hos, despite the fact that Britney's whirlwind Elvis-chapel marriage and divorce hurt no one, not even herself."

Observe what is implied here, possibly inadvertently: that an act is morally permissable if it cannot be shown to have hurt anyone (or possibly, anyone *directly*).

Naturally, far closer definition of terms is required, and there are a number of caveats that must be taken into account. For example, what is to be done when any act or refusal to act will cause harm to someone?

Nevertheless, this is a statement of a belief. (I do not mean to imply that it is actually Mr Murphy's until I am far better acquainted with his views.) The point I make is that this idea leads to a moral position. For the record, I think it a perfectly defensible one.

But it is not mine, for I would go further. I would hold that the major institutions and practices of society are in themselves estimable to the extent that they meet human needs. I would hold on that basis that marriage and the family are estimable institutions, and that that which does reckless damage to them is, on a prima facie basis, morally wrong even if no-one can be shown to be hurt. The "marriage" of Britney Spears cheapened and degraded the institution of marriage by reason of patent insincerity and worthlessness. It was therefore morally wrong, and I am as one with the prim church ladies, whatever their sexual orientation.

Now, before I get accused of conservatism and other crimes, may I say that I gain the general impression that most here would actually agree with this idea in principle. (Of course, I speak under correction.) It appears to me that many here would hold that doing reckless damage to estimable social institutions (for instance, habeas corpus pending a speedy, fair trial with the presumption of innocence) is in and of itself immoral, without it being necessary to demonstrate that any person has been hurt by it. That is to say, by recklessly damaging those institutions, the Bush administration is acting immorally, and our government in Australia is also acting immorally by acquiescing in it.

Which, as it happens, is what I think, too. And I, mark you, am a conservative.

I'm with Emma. I don't think the Christian right has been engaged in social justice at all. They aren't adding new programs, they are just demanding that they can either evangelize while performing the old ones (in some cases programs that Catholic and mainstream Protestant communities were already performing without the evangelizing) or they derail existing programs and divert their money to commercial enterprises.

If you want to stop abortion, the first thing you do is find out why women want abortions. When you learn that there is a direct relationship between rates of abortion and economics, you try to improve the economics. Banning abortions, in that context, isn't social justice, it's inhumane.

It's like why I defend pornographers and pornography. I never cared about porn. I wanted to know why sex crime happens because I wanted to stop it. It doesn't take 25 years of study to learn that sexual repression has a direct connection to rape and other sex crime, including sexual abuse of children. That's one of the first things you learn once you start studying sex crime. And the next thing you learn is that an obsession with punishing people is entirely unhelpful. It protects no one and just creates more sex criminals. So if you care about preventing sex crime, you absolutely do not run around trying to make people feel sexually guilty and repressed. Only two kinds of people think shame and repression and punishment are the answer: people too lazy and ignorant to bother to find out where the problem actually arises, and people who are more interested in repression than in preventing sex crime.

The administration and its minions don't actually give 15 billion additional dollars to fighting AIDS, they just say they will do so and divert what resources they do contribute to far more expensive plans that - surprise, surprise - benefit the pharmaceutical industry while by-passing the experienced and dedicated communities that have already been addressing the problem. Given that these are the same people who loudly announced that AIDS was sent by God as a punishment, it is unlikely they have any intention to treat or cure it.

Evangelicals who think it's more important to evangelize than to ameliorate poverty and disease are not charitable or Christian, they're just self-righteous. Every school child learns the story of the Good Samaritan. How did these people fail to take it's message? The Samaritan did not first demand conversion before he would help someone in need. The whole point is that the name of one's god or faith or tribe is far less important than one's works. The faith-based initiatives of the White House are not about the works (which were already allowed in law), they are about the evangelizing. If we are not supposed to want government's help for simple, material things, why should we allow politicians to "help" us in evangelizing?

The so-called social justice of the Christian right is about forcing their views on others and punishing those who don't agree with them. It's about preventing abortion to "save" babies and then allowing them to die of starvation and disease. And then terrorizing the rest of us with the prospect of converting or being similarly cut off from the means of survival.

If that's what "social justice" has come to mean, it is less than worthless.

Schmitt was right; Matthew has just been conned.

I could pick a fight with Avedon's perfected certainty about the root causes of sex crime, since the rather massive body of research into it demonstrates no such perfected certainty, but...

Let's go to the end statement instead, because I think it perfectly captures the fundamental lack of curiosity and the resulting gap in knowledge that I'm hearing from a lot of people.

So, you say, the religious right doesn't think that it's involved in good works, in the creation of its own vision of social justice: it is just about forcing itself on others with no aim other than to force itself on others. It purposely wishes to save fetuses in order to have them die later. It is purposefully devoted to terrorizing everyone else.

First, if that was offered as an explanation of militant Islamism, a great many of the people who are satisfied with a representation of the American religious right in these terms would object that this was too simplistic and manichean a view, would insist that we have to think about root causes of Islamic militancy, that we have to understand social contexts, that we have to disaggregate the diverse reasons why people are drawn into movements that commit terrorism. Etc.

But suppose you're satisfied with this sort of rhetoric as an empirical description of the motives of both militant Islamicists and the American religious right. Can I ask you this? Why are they that way? Don't tell me what you think they're doing, or what their motivations are. I want to know the reason for your vision of their motivations.

It's one thing to view a particular individual as unusually motivated by what we might term "evil". Then I think you can just say, "It's a mystery", or "It's because he was locked in a closet for hours as a child" or "It's because he's a genetic sociopath". It's another thing to view a huge swath of people who are concentrated in particular communities or institutions that way.

Marxism or certain varieties of Enlightenment liberalism (think Hobbes) are about the only disciplined body of thought that have coherent answers for you about large-scale social motivations. But the Marxist answer in this case would have to be a complicated one, because on balance, the religious right is less wealthy than their cosmopolitan opponents. They're not a classic capitalist ruling class who dominate because it is in their own economic interests to do so. You'd have to do some pretty intricate thinking about the nature of social struggle in this case, and it is by no means certain that you'd be able to preserve your own claims to total virtue and a clear demonization of them in reverse in the process. (This is basically the Thomas Frank insight in What's the Matter With Kansas). If you took a more Hobbsean view that all social life is the struggle of all groups for social power, that society is just a constrained form of the struggle to domination, then that too is morally neutral. They're just doing what you do, what all social beings do. The only mystery there becomes why they're winning and you're losing: under such a heading, you can't make a moral distinction between you and them that doesn't amount to, "I like me, and I don't like not-me; I want me to win".

Suppose you say, "No, it's not domination as a Marxist or Hobbsean (or even Nietzschean) might have it, not a quasi-rational or 'natural' form of social struggle. It's that the religious right is composed of people who all share a social pathology that was maybe legitimate or non-evil once, but which has become corrupted over time. Now it reproduces itself--they train their kids who train their kids and so on. It's a *culture*". This also makes for problems. If it's a "culture", what makes it different from all the other "cultures" that we appreciate, respect, give autonomy to, even when those cultures contain practices and beliefs we ourselves don't like, or even when those cultures intersect our own unfavorably? Would you accept "cultural" explanations of African-American poverty? If not, why not, if your explanation of the religious right is "cultural" in this sense? More to the point, on what grounds do you depart from a kind of value-free neutrality in viewing other "cultures" than your own to deem one wrong or morally objectionable? When a culture tries illegitimately to change YOUR culture? But isn't that the origin of one of the major complaints of the religious right, that the secular left in the 1970s insisted, and still insists at times, in intervening into the practices and everyday social life of their culture? If what makes the culture of the religious right objectionable is its attempt to change the culture of others, we had better take a look at our own. Moreover, this still doesn't answer a lot of questions. Where do cultures come from? What are their boundaries? Is their culture really separable from our culture? Who are "we", anyway? How did our culture achieve moral neutrality while theirs fell from it? What makes us (you) special? etc. If this is your line of explanation, you have a great deal of historical labor to do, to find out what makes a culture, how it came to be. You cannot be incurious or simplistic about it; you can't just say, "They want to dominate us". It's not an option under this heading.

Or suppose you decline and say, "It's really very simple: they're just bad people with the bad aim to make the rest of us live the way they want. I don't have to explain myself: they're wrong, I am right". That ends up making the religious right out to be millions of Dr. Evils, fathomlessly malevolent social beings who just want to conquer the world and get...one...million...dollars. That might be an ok way to come at the problem if we were all living in a nursery rhyme or a fantasy novel, but we're not. As a pure practical matter of politics, this view gives you absolutely zero direction about what to do next, given that I don't think there's going to be a James Bond who comes and blows up the Secret Headquarters of the bad guys for us. As a philosophical understanding of why you're involved in political struggle, it amounts to not much more than a tantrum.

Understanding the sources of other people's social conviction in ways that grants the authenticity, the ways in which those convictions make sense to those who hold them, doesn't make your own opposition to those convictions less effective. In fact, I'd argue the reverse. It may give you a much more powerful way to answer back to your opponents, it may give you insight into why they do what they do and what they may do next. It may also lead, in various ways, to the construction of lines of compromise or truce, but that's kind of a necessity anyway in the context of political struggle within a nation. What's the alternative to working out a lasting settlement of disputes with the religious right? It's either coming up with a strategy that permanently locks them into an electoral minority and imposes our views on them--I hope everyone on the left NOW sees why this is not a morally sound approach, because we can see how it feels--or we exterminate our enemies quite literally. Otherwise, you're going to have to live with them--doesn't that obligate you to try and understand them in terms more complicated than "They just want to rule the world?"

The alternative is converting them, by reason and exhortation and the words of authorities that they respect, in judicious combination, to an understanding that the oversimplified narrative to which we subscribed - for I was, for most of my life, one of those single-issue prolife voters - is an incomplete, false, distructive myth.

That assumes that most of them, like me, are simply naive and ignorant (in specialized ways) and well-meaning, and just have trusted liars and deceivers.

It will not work for the unscrupulous ringleaders, who know that they are spreading falsehood as they take the paychecks of the Hegemony to promote the chemicals and bullets that Olin makes and the corporate power blocks of Scaife et al.

It will not work for those who are simply so self-identified with the group they happen to belong to that they dare not question it, because to do so is to question themselves.

Those people *must* be contained and neutralized, by being discredited, their true associations and policies and code words exposed and held to daylight, so that all decent folk recoil in horror from the mass of various sorts of oppressions that are the foundation of the Plutocracy, wrapped in piety and carefully promoting the worship of Tashlan these past five decades.

If they are not a minority, as opposed to class 1, like myself, then we're screwed.

Timothy Burke: yes, but. . . .

Hobbes also points out that it's not a symmetric relationship.

One side is reality-based, and thinks that opponents are misinformed, and are amenable to reason; the other side is full of religious conviction, and thinks that opponents are sinners.

Once religion enters politics, the reality-based faction is left at a distinct disadvantage. I don't think it's the reality-based community that's in danger of over-simplifying the motives of the opposition.

Dave Luckett: "Before I get accused of conservatism and other crimes"...

No accusation forthcoming. Yes, you're putting forth a conservative position, but it's real conservatism, rooted in a concern for the hard-won achievements of human society, not the radical narcisstic damn-the-consequences "conservatism" of the current regime.

Which isn't to say I agree with your every premise or conclusion, but you're on the reality-based map as far as I'm concerned.

I think Matt's right, but I don't think he goes far enough.

These people have talked to me many times. (I live in the Bible belt.) What I have learned is that they are genuinely and sincerely concerned for what they consider to be the Number One Priority. It's not my state of well being here. Because I'm just dust or will be. It doesn't matter if I have a good job, health care, or the right to vote. Those things are nice and all, but they pale in comparison to the possibility of me enduring an eternity in hell. 72 years versus Eternity.

If you truly believe that only those who accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior will be saved from eternal hell, then the moral thing to do is save as many people as you can. (Diversity is, then, literally damning.)

More moderate Christians of my acquaintance believe that God is smart enough to figure out who's good and who's bad across religious lines. He'll send the nice Hindus to heaven along with the do-good atheists. But the extremists don't believe that God is that smart, forgiving, whatever. So the big social injustice is (to them) being denied the right of heaven by being denied the word.

In that sense, I see these people (some of them anyway) as deeply moral, but wrong. The big change isn't social justice as part of religion, it's what God means and what God will or won't do in the afterlife and therefore what social justice means. I think of all the missionaries in history and they're mostly (as I remember it) truly believing also that God will damn any but the chosen. So, prayer in school is good. More money for missions connected to faithbased whatever is good. Secular missons are bad. Etc.

Bob Oldendorf:

"The other side is full of religious conviction, and thinks that opponents are sinners."

"I don't think it's the reality-based community that's in danger of over-simplifying the motives of the opposition."

Are you sure about that? I don't know about you, but I would think that the 51% of the country isn't some undifferentiated mass of people, all of whom are convinced that we are sinners, etc. That isn't to say that such people aren't out there. But if you want to tell me that the entire Republican electorate is adequately represented by Jim DeMint or Tom Coburn, then I think you're on pretty shaky ground.

This isn't about using "reason" to teach people the error of their ways and convincing them to vote Democratic because our facts are better. It's about convincing them that we respect their values and lifestyle and beliefs, even (especially) when we don't agree with them. There are a whole lot of people in purple states who could vote Democratic, who voted for Clinton and would vote for someone like Obama, if they felt they were being treated with respect. Maybe we should do that?

I agree that it's nuts to start out with the idea that 51% of the electorate is passionately committed to the worst impulses of, say, 29% of them.

What Patrick said.

Well, yeah. That's just not quite the vibe I was getting, somehow. A lot of Republicans scare the hell out of me. A lot of Republicans don't. It felt like Bob's comment didn't distinguish between Group A and Group B, is all.

Dave--

The "So long as it doesn't hurt anyone" position is one I hold part for morality, part for practicality, whereas the respect of social institutions is something that I feel should be done as a matter of politeness and practicality as well, but veneration of these institutions is simply going too far.

Consider Britney's Las Vegas wedding and divorce. First off, if she wasn't a pop queen, no one apart from her immediate family would have cared, and secondly, if it weren't for the gay marriage brouhaha, no one would have talked about it for more than two days. Third, as such things go, it wasn't that much of a big deal, because if we're going to venerate social institutions, we have to venerate all of them, and American society has set up a situation where the drive-in Elvis chapels of Vegas function as a safety valve for elopements the exact same way that the anvil at Gretna Green did for Regency English folk. Vegas also has the "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" slogan, along with gambling, prostitution and free-flowing liquor.

We tried Prohibition and it didn't work, so what we have now is a motley assortment of liquor laws that vary from state to state and county to county and generally serve their communities better via the old doctrine of community standards.

As for estimable social institutions, social institutions are continually invented and reinvented, and some aren't particularly estimable. Consider the anti-miscegenation laws we used to have, which basically stated that white folk couldn't marry folk of any other race, though folk of any other color could marry as they pleased. I know one author of mostly Asian ancestry whose grandparents had to search through three states for a minister to marry them, and after he did, his community revoked his status as justice of the peace.

Part of the trouble we have in this country is the separation between the civil and the sacred, in particular the folk who want the civil to be treated as sacred, despite the fact that by definition it is not. Gavin Newsom was not officiating as any variety of holy man, and the San Francisco City Hall, impressive as the architecture is, is not any variety of holy place.

Then there are the people who want laws against the desecration of the flag, despite the fact that by definition, before you desecrate something, it has to be consecrated first, unless somehow we canonized Betsy Ross while I wasn't looking and Old Glory has suddenly become a religious relic.

It's not, for the simple fact that the US has ensconced (as opposed to enshrined) in the Constitution the First Amendment, which not only makes church and state separate but has set that up as an acceptable social institution for over two hundred years. I realize it's different in other countries, but it's our social institution here.

Coupla items:

* Matt Yglasias is correct, given his viewpoint (I suspect he didn't grow up Baptist). "Good works" have always been a big item with the churches. Sometimes it's direct, but most often it's money to save the heathen children. Now, one Fundie cultural attitude is that one must never question the motives of another Fundie. How much of that money actually goes to starving children is simply not a question that can be legitimately asked.

Right now, we have an utterly poisionous combination of this don't- ask- questions religion and don't- ask- questions politics.

* Along with this, the Republican way of doing business has been bait- and- switch. In general, the actual results of Republican policies have been the exact opposite of what was advertised. This never gets reported; you have to dig to find out about the real results of, say, "No ChildLeft Behind".

* I see the coming divide (and the eventual downfall of either the Neocons or the Republican Party) as being between the reality- based folks and the faith- based folks. At some point, "reality" is going to get up and bite us in the arse. Reality is nasty that way.

* Never compromise with a fanatic. You can move your position all you want; the fanatic will never move his. This is what we've seen in politics since 1980 or so; the hard right hasn't moved an inch and the Left has turned into Goldwater conservatives from trying to "compromise".

Never heard Yglesias so right wing before. Maybe he's dreaming of a job in the new one party system.

That's nasty and uncalled for. If Matthew were really that much of a soulless careerist, there are hundreds of thousands of words he's written in the last year, including recently, that mark him as a remarkably imprudent one.

Reality always wins.

Sometimes it sucks to be standing nearby when that happens.

Niven's Laws, 1a and 1b.

Mark is spot on. There are certainly many among that 51% who possess "a certain modesty concerning their intellects and a certain prudence regarding their actions:" attitudes recently claimed as the essence of conservatism by Philip Gold, but in actuality defining at least a penumbra of the reality-based community, whether conservative or liberal or whatever. I know some of them.

Those people can be reached, but you can't start by invalidating their most deeply-held beliefs. A good starting point is today's Gospel reading (All Saint's Sunday): the Beatitudes.

Dave Luckett said:
Observe what is implied here, possibly inadvertently: that an act is morally permissable if it cannot be shown to have hurt anyone (or possibly, anyone *directly*).

Exactly who is hurt directly or indirectly if two people of the same sex can have a legally recognized agreement for passing on their inheritance to their loved ones, adoption rights, power of attorney statements, and health insurance for spouses???

Your sort of response is often used as a basis for a "slippery slope" argument: "if we legalize gay marriages because no one is hurt directly, then they'll want us to legalize prostitution because its a victimless crime, and then cocaine because no one is hurt, and then, and then..."

Anyway, the argument for gay marriage is not that it doesn't hurt anyone. The argument for gay marriage is based in the idea that justice is defined by what people DO, not who they ARE.

Gay people want to do the same thing that straight people do: inheritance, adoption, power of attorney, health insurance. They'd even like to be able to buy a house together and know that if they split up, they'd have to divide the property via a divorce instead of whoever's name is on the deed gets the house.

The argument against gay marriage is usually based on some religious belief, but fundamentally, it boils down to who they ARE, not what they DO.

"Everyone can DO this, except people who ARE gay."

And every time we've created a law based on the way people ARE rather than what they DO, justice loses.

Everyone can sit at the front of the bus except people who ARE black.

Everyone can vote in an election except for people who are women.

Well, following the slippery slope logically, the next items you get to after gay marriage are polygamy, polyandry and polyamory. Which would be a good and logical thing in my book, especially since there are many people already in such relationships with no legal safeguards aside from the ones they can cobble together from existing marriage laws, and when divorce and child custody arrangements enter into such an equation, it can get really ugly.

As for prostitution, it's already legal in Nevada. And parts of Europe. If you want to sleep with a prostitute, all you need currently is a plane ticket, unless you live in convenient driving distance.

Whereas cocaine is too potent of a drug to be used except under doctor supervision, aside from chewing raw coca leaves when backpacking in the Andes, which everybody there does.

Kevin:

"veneration of these institutions is simply going too far"

Quite so, and I did not advocate it. I wrote "esteem" and "estimable" and added the important qualifier "to the extent that they meet human needs". I should have written "society's needs", I find.

There are no institutions incapable of reform, and there are no institutions that are not to be critically examined with reform in mind; but we were not speaking of reform, but of reckless damage for selfish, insincere or partisan ends, or through sheer negligence.

Of course unjust and immoral laws must be reformed or repealed. I, too, would regard the 'anti-miscegenation' laws you mention as such. Further, I am of the conservative belief that the state has no right to interfere in a citizen's private life beyond a wholesome concern for the legitimate rights of other citizens, which rights specifically do not include any putative right to be offended.

I would, for example, hold that the domestic arrangements and privately expressed sexuality of the individual are no business of the state; that attempts by the state to meddle in those matters are indecent. There are caveats to that position, of course, but we no doubt know them so well that it is not necessary to repeat them. I would also hold that it is indecent to enquire after, or take public notice of any kind, of these matters. They are nobody's business but that of the persons concerned.

That said, consider my position on Clinton and the famous headjob. I am of the opinion that adultery is a Bad Thing, see above. I am not entitled to take offence or public notice of it unless it directly affects me, personally. If Mr Clinton had answered "This is no business of the media or of the state or of the United States Senate. The matter is private, it in no way affects the discharge of my duty, and it lies solely between myself, my wife, the lady concerned and God," he would have satisfied me. At the very least I would have required specific cause for thinking that he had been in some way derelict in his duty to the nation. (This, of course, lays aside the fact that as a foreign national I have no right whatsoever to an opinion on the conduct of the President of the United States except insofar as it directly affects my own country or me personally.)

The fact that Mr Clinton chose instead to lie about it is a difficulty for me. (Or would be, if it were not for the last parenthesis.) But I would still hold that his answer is not material.

As for gay marriage, (takes deep breath) I hold that marriage is and always was, in all human societies, a means of meeting a specific need: that of nurturing, raising and socialising the offspring of a sexual relationship. Homosexual relationships, ipso facto, can have no such offspring. Therefore marriage cannot apply to them.

Of course, like all human institutions, marriage gets fuzzy at the edges. So does human sexuality itself. But arguments from the extremes leave me unmoved. It might well be asked, why then would I accept as a marriage a heterosexual union that does not or could not produce offspring? My answer is the conservative one: because it has always been so and it harms no-one; and that social institutions are not perfect fits to every individual. They never were, and never could be. The question is whether they meet society's need, not that of every individual.

To that end, however, I would propose a compromise, one that might meet a need, without changing what I would regard as an essential feature of an essential institution of human society. Thus: I suggest a civil contract by which any two persons name each other as next-of-kin, and for this contract to be a matter of public record and taken notice of judicially. I think that this would meet the needs that have frequently, and reasonably, been expressed. And if the people concerned wish to celebrate the signing of such a contract, have friends around, cut a cake, dance, whatever, who am I to object? If a religious denomination, or a representative of one, is willing to ceremonially bless such an event, what's that to me?

The questions of estate, power of attorney, medical treatment, visitation rights and so on, are all, so far as I know, met by such a device; or if not, ought to be. There might still be questions as to the legal parentage of any children of either of the partners, but that would also be so for a marriage.

Perhaps, given time, society would come to regard such a contract as the same as marriage, or equivalent to it, or a social institution in itself of estimable value. Perhaps not. I don't know.

But I do know this: there is no possible way in which society can be brought here and now to an acceptance of gay marriage as such. To say that is being part of the reality-based community, too. It will do those who think it should be so accepted no good to be indignant, or to plead the callousness of the situation, or to feel fearful. Social institutions are the artefacts of a society, not the products of theory. Politics is about what is possible. And tell me, what's in a name?

All right, that last was disingenuous. What's in a name is perceived respectability and social acceptance, a public statement of status. But those things are not legislatable, anyway.

I'm a conservative. What Patrick said. I value the hard-won gains of a civilised society, while accepting that they must be examined, and where necessary, reformed. That's exactly what I'm doing, here. But I hold that reform, especially basic reform, can only take place with the consensus of the society itself, and I accept that consensus may be long in coming. That may be deplorable, but I hold that the alternatives are all far worse. That's what makes me a conservative.

"Thus: I suggest a civil contract by which any two persons name each other as next-of-kin, and for this contract to be a matter of public record and taken notice of judicially. I think that this would meet the needs that have frequently, and reasonably, been expressed."

David, that's exactly what a civil marriage is. Gays just want the right to make such contracts extended to them. Some churches don't recognize some civil marriages as it stands; the Catholic Church doesn't officially allow communicants to divorce and remarry.

I'm confused.

Randolph,

How do you do? A pleasure to meet you. Please call me Dave. Nobody but my late mother ever called me David, and that form has certain resonances for me.

I regret that I must insist that marriage is not merely a civil contract (whatever the law might say), but a social institution. I am sorry if I was confused on this point. As a social institution it has a certain meaning defined by its very name; a civil contract is defined by its specific clauses.

For the point is this: a change to the law of contract by adding or changing a class of contract is one thing. A redefinition of a basic social institution so that it has a meaning different from that applying in all other human societies, is quite another thing.

I recognise that many here seek social change, not merely legal reform. Quite so. But if you cannot have the one now, will the other suffice for the nonce?

Dave--

The trouble is that, with the law, separate does not mean equal, even if it is equal at the moment the law is passed. The very fact of using separate terms makes for two classes of things which perks and privileges may be added or deleted from, because the law, in its practicality, declares that if two states are meant to be exactly the same, then you use a single term for them.

With marriage, as a legal term, you get a whole laundry list of perks and privileges, including but not limited to: name changes, joint property, inheritance, child custody, and not having to testify against your spouse in court.

From a social end, gay marriage, and polyamorous marriage, and yes, gay polyamorous marriage, are already a done deal, because social depends on society which depends on community standards. Three friends of mine--two men and a woman--invited me as a witness to their commitment ceremony, the same as I'd been a guest at the wedding of two of them years before. I know two different gay couples who specifically refer to each other as husbands, and have been together long enough to qualify for common law marriage, which is what all of their friends view their's as. What it's viewed as by those outside their social circle is immaterial, because they're not on the guest list. Moreover my cousin and her partner (female) have been coming openly as a couple to family gatherings for the past three years, most recently my grandfather's funeral, with full acceptance of the family, and last year when my aunt died, though her partner of twenty odd years didn't have any legal rights, especially as my aunt had forgotten to leave a will, my mother and her remaining sister made certain that my aunt's widow received most of her personal effects and property, including several valuable collections, excepting certain family heirlooms from my grandmother. And while my mother had been rather twitchy for years about admitting her sister was a lesbian, the end result was going with what she thought her sister's wishes would be, and if that isn't societal acceptance, I don't know what is.

That leaves holy matrimony for last. My three friends are Wiccan, and had a Wiccan priest preside over their polyamorous triad commitment ceremony. That's holy by the tenets of their faith, and matrimony as well.

The social and the holy are already covered. It's simply the legal that folk need right now.

That was well put, Kevin.

Dave, I just got legally married, last month. It's all working out very nicely, for us as well as for lots of other gay people across the country, and the straights who are part of their extended social circles. Most sensible people do generally find it a relief to be allowed to give up treating minorities prejudicially, after all.

I mean, really, did you notice how many words you had to use to justify treating some people badly? Going the other route doesn't take nearly so many, since you no longer have to drown out your conscience.

Hi Dave, this is Jax. I don't comment much, but in reading this, I got a bit confused. When you say this:

...why then would I accept as a marriage a heterosexual union that does not or could not produce offspring? My answer is the conservative one: because it has always been so and it harms no-one...

I'm not sure what you're implying, so I'm guessing you mean a heterosexual marriage (not resulting in offspring) is okay because it's the custom and it doesn't hurt anyone. I get that. But you also seem to be implying the counter theory that homosexual marriage is not okay because it is not the custom and it hurts someone, but in an earlier post you stated the Britney marriage did not harm her (i.e., someONE) but rather the moral sanctity of marriage (an institution).

Then you said:

...social institutions are not perfect fits to every individual. They never were, and never could be. The question is whether they meet society's need, not that of every individual.

So, first you said homosexual marriage is wrong because it hurts someone (read: individual), then you said particular institutions are okay in spite of certain individuals getting hurt? Am I completely misunderstanding you here? If so, please correct me.

Though, when you say the question is whether society's need is met over that of the individual, I'd have to say my understanding of the Constitution is the exact opposite of that. First and foremost this country is about protecting individual rights. This was the country men founded to get away from social institutions that only seemed fair for a certain group of people. If we still held the right of a social institution as supreme over the right of the individual, we'd still have slavery, and women wouldn't be able to vote or participate in the Olympics, to name a few.

In my opinion I don't think the question should be so much what institution will get hurt if we allow gay-marriage as much as what individuals will be harmed by denying them a right others have. And those individuals, in this case, are homosexuals.

Again, if I've misunderstood your position, please correct me.

Dave wrote this and I fail to understand it viz reality:
"As for gay marriage, (takes deep breath) I hold that marriage is and always was, in all human societies, a means of meeting a specific need: that of nurturing, raising and socialising the offspring of a sexual relationship. Homosexual relationships, ipso facto, can have no such offspring. Therefore marriage cannot apply to them."

Since I live in an area (Northampton, MA) where many gay folk have chldren together (science has fixed this) and nurture, raise, and socialise them just fine, thank you, why should marriage not apply to them?

Or should those folk who cannot have children the old-fashion way--or who choose to adopt--be denied marriage whether hetro or homo?

If we allow adoption, or allow scientific testube babies tobe born, and THEY have all the rights of (gosh) real people, why not their parents? Or have we just entered Velveteen Rabbit Town here?

Jane

Jax, not only that, but marriages not at all intended for children, but to seal legal distribution of property, between older people, have always been made - particularly back in those "goode olde dayes" when landed aristocracy was more open about what it was. (The houses of Buckley and Bush and Scaife don't have titles, and thus people think that they are not as much barons and earls as such folks ever were.)

But you're asking for logical consistency, from an intellectual conservative, and you're never going to get it. You're only going to get its erzatz replica, passed off as the real thing, which is Casuistry.

Trust me, I was raised one. I grew up in a house with subscriptions to The Wanderer and the National Catholic Register and National Review and many other more obscure conservative intellectual journals, all devoted to fanatically hunting motes and ignoring beams, like Crisis, which I know now is also a mouthpiece of Scaife and arms manufacturers as much as NRO and Town Hall - which is where I first encountered and absorbed the memes that the death penalty is the best prevention, being the best cure for crime, and that liberal-atheist-feminist-pagans hate and despise and persecute us, and venerate crime as much as they hate Western Civilization™ and that homosexuality is a dread agenda out to poison and destroy all civilization...

...it was the cognitive dissonance between all these things, and working in a city where I actually *met* gays and feminists and pagans and even some criminals, too, and realizing that the Stories didn't match up to what I was seeing with my own eyes, and questioning after nearly two decades the Narratives I had been given, such as that women didn't deserve to get payed as much because they weren't as valuable because they left to go have babies and squandered their training investment, or that people who didn't own houses shouldn't vote because we had no vested interest in managing the country responsibly--

--and here I am today, like a political asylum-seeker from Umbar enlisting in the defense of Gondor, tearing down everything I believed and carried signs for and voted for up until 1996--

But until a conservative of the Buckley-votary stripe confronts the contradictions and refuses to take refuge in enthymeme and casuistry, you will only be frustrated trying to argue logically. Alan Keyes is simply the extreme example of this, if you have seen the video of his "debates" - he is not an anomaly. I know. I was there - once.

Jax:

No, no, no. I do not imply that homosexual marriage is not OK because it hurts someone. It doesn't hurt anyone. If it did, there'd be no argument, surely. I don't think that it damages marriage as an institution, either. Again, if I thought that, I'd say so. I was arguing that acts that cause reckless damage to estimable institutions are wrong, but I argue against homosexual marriage on a quite different ground.

I hold that marriage is a social institution the primary purpose of which is to provide the means to bring up the offspring of the sexual relationship which it includes. If that is true, then homosexual relationships cannot be marriages.

pericat, you can, if you like, call this idea prejudice. You can, if you like, inform me that I am seeking for reasons to treat some people badly, and I accept the criticism, though I must admit that I can discern no such motive in myself. I have difficulty, as do many people, in that area. I apologise for my prolixity, and I'm saddened to hear that you think it was to drown out my conscience. I take it as a compliment that you think I have one.

If I might venture a suggestion, however, it would be that you might have more success in convincing me if you argued against the idea.

My critique of the religiously conservative's idea of social justice has always been that it's self serving and, while outwardly looks like something good is being done, while in actuality it amounts to a big fat turd sandwich. Sure, it's a sandwich and sure, those poor people are starving but is it really all that nutritious? Might there be a better way to help these people? Well, never mind that, here, eat this sandwich.

This allows the pasty, bloated do gooders to sit back and say, "Look! my two cents fed children in Africa and I didn't have to soil my Morals by handing out condoms! Go, me!"

Meanwhile, the kid that ate that awful sandwich now has dysentery and his sister just got AIDS because their wasn't a condom within a hundred miles of their village. But at least they have plenty of Bibles.

Dave:

I hold that marriage is a social institution the primary purpose of which is to provide the means to bring up the offspring of the sexual relationship which it includes. If that is true, then homosexual relationships cannot be marriages.

If that is your belief, then you would have to classify a large number of unions between one man and one woman as "not-marriages" because the couple either cannot or chooses not to bear children. Is that indeed what you believe?

Jane,

No, that is not my belief, and I do not believe that it follows from that definition of marriage. I answered that specific question:

"My answer is the conservative one: because it has always been so and it harms no-one; and that social institutions are not perfect fits to every individual. They never were, and never could be. The question is whether they meet society's need, not that of every individual."

Might I remark that one reason why that post was so lengthy was that I had to anticipate sensible, logical and reasonable questions like yours?

Beth,
I apologise. I was thinking "Beth", but for reasons beyond my understanding my fingers typed "Jane". I beg your pardon.

Regarding Dave's notion of the purpose of marriage:
"Legal" or civil marriage has more to do with property rights than anything else, and has been a tool of the ruling class in Western society for centuries.

To assert that having children is the purpose of marriage is naive. Yes, it makes things simpler administratively, in terms of children vis a vis public records, schools, etc., but for at least twenty years in the U.S. has not been a heavy issue with public authorities.

To me, the common element in the Bush-fostered agenda on gay marriage and other so-called moral issues is simply to demonize the Democratic Party so that those voters who are confused or confounded by the currents of social change, and particularly the specter of a woman's right to choose whether to have a child or not, will vote for what they perceive to be the safe, _traditional_ candidate. As Emma and others have said, what Bush and his ilk advocate is not moral at all, and their attempt to co-opt that lovely phrase, "moral values" echoes hollowly with the first president in my lifetime to espouse the term or something like it: Nixon--family values was his litany, and the "Moral Majority" followed shortly thereafter. Like Bush, it's such a mockery coming from the lips of such a deceiver.

Dave--

I noted you didn't respond to my last post. Did you agree and not want to comment, or were your comments for pericat meant for me, or....

Regardless, it seems that you're going with the proposition that marriage is not meant for joint management of property and legal matters for long term relationship, but only for those relationships where a man bangs a woman and, whether by purpose or accident, human biology makes a child.

One of my friends, recently married, also recently had a vasectomy, because neither he nor his wife want children, and more than that, she has a chronic liver condition and she doesn't need any more stresses on her health. I'm guessing that you feel they are not truly married.

Luckily for them, most of society as well as the law feels that they are.

I agree that Dave's argument, that the Purpose of Marriage is to have and raise babies, is strange. It is a religion-neutral answer to a religious question.

I am a Christian, but I would rather have a religion-neutral answer to the political question of gay marriage; I think civil unions fit the bill.

My religious idea of the purpose of marriage doesn't make sense for long outside of the Christian context where it applies. The meanings of sex, male, female, homosexual, and so on, all similarly don't carry. So what common discourse can we assume on these religious issues? How deep does the disagreement cut?

"I regret that I must insist that marriage is not merely a civil contract (whatever the law might say), but a social institution. I am sorry if I was confused on this point. As a social institution it has a certain meaning defined by its very name; a civil contract is defined by its specific clauses."

I have a lot of sympathy with this; for me, "homosexual civil union" means something like "take the rights, just leave us the name. We need it." But that is a whimper out of me, and I'm reminded of Homer's whine about "queer": "That's our word for making fun of you! We need it!"

Even if gay unions are eventually called marriages (I'm not being derogatory), people can always have their precious opinions on their status. We are always free to judge. After all, everything is permissible. But then again, not everything is beneficial.

Meanwhile, more meaty questions of life, death, and religion continue. The Christian's attention is best spent elsewhere.

Dave:

Granting, for the sake of argument, that "marriage" is solely "for the children" (I don't agree): gay couples have children. The fact that, generally, those children are not genetically related to both parents is not relevant, unless you're also arguing that adoptive parents, blended families, and remarried widows or widowers are not actually marriages.

Dan:

I welcome your good-faith effort to address this issue. However, during the debate here in Massachusetts, many religious organizations fulminated against both same-sex marriage and civil unions; preprinted signs specifically said "NO TO GAY MARRIAGE - YES TO JESUS - NO TO GAY CIVIL UNION". It's difficult to compromise with that viewpoint, for obvious reasons....

Dave wrote:
I hold that marriage is a social institution the primary purpose of which is to provide the means to bring up the offspring of the sexual relationship which it includes. If that is true, then homosexual relationships cannot be marriages.

Ah, the "it isn't natural" argument.

First of all, the legal ramifications of marriage happen the moment two people sign the marriage license and say "I do". You don't accumulate the benefits after the first-born arrives. You get it immediately. Any argument that attempts to somehow tie marriage explicitely to having children are completely ignoring the application of law.

The effects of marriage happen at "I do"

Second of all, given that the effects of marriage are immediate, it is purely on basis of prejudice that a gay couple cannot have these same effects immediately upon saying "I do" themselves. Since marriage is not legally defined on the basis of children, the lack of children is irrelevant.

Thirdly, if two gay women get married, they might decide to use the same fertilization techniques used by husband and wife couples to get pregnant and have a baby together. THey might also come to the relationship with a child from a previous marriage to a man or other relationship. And if they do this, and one of them works while the other one stays at home to take care of the child, then the legal protection that comes from divorce keeps the relationship fair if the two end up splitting up. Visitation rights, child support, etc.

Dan--

I was fond of the whole "civil union" idea until I realized that the two boxes didn't have the same toy prizes inside, and those who took "marriage" were still getting the better deal.

Separate is unfortunately not equal, and those freaking out about a name need to suck it up, the same as folk did when they realized that black people were now using the same drinking fountain as they were! The horror!

I completely agree; I'm not saying that I have the power to change the agenda of the religious right, or the one-party government (when those new Justices start swooping into office, anyway).

In the long run, I hope there is a Judgment at Nuremberg moment, when the voters of the right come around to my point of view. Then, maybe it will be worth talking about my compromise.

In the short run, it's true that the right militated against civil unions as well as marriages in this election, and the politics of civil unions are fragile at best. In a post at TAPPED ((NO, NO, NO, NO, NO.), Garance Franke-Ruta discussed it last weekend. I think it's a little hysterical, but basically on point.

It's Utopian of me to hope that religion may remove itself from politics here. Still, that is my hope.

And Kevin: yes, I'm sure my right sense of linguistic descriptivism will catch up to my burning ears eventually.

Dave, thanks for clearing up your point on homosexual marriage *not* hurting the institution.

I'll go back to the most important point of my earlier post: to hold as superior the rights of an institution (marriage) over the rights of an individual (homosexuals) is going against everything this country, this constitution stands for (equal rights for *all* people, not just some of them, or those of them who don't offend others). Regardless of the countless and well-reasoned logical arguments you have in favor of keeping legal gay marriage banned (and any other compromise maintains the banned stated), gay people are still denied the right to form a legal union called marriage. This is a breach of the two consenting adult's rights who happen to be homosexual.

In regards to this:

I hold that marriage is a social institution the primary purpose of which is to provide the means to bring up the offspring of the sexual relationship which it includes. If that is true, then homosexual relationships cannot be marriages.

It doesn't matter what the *purpose* of a thing is. Let's say that, indeed, this was the reason marriage was invented (which, I don't agree with, but for the sake of argument, will concede it). If this is being used as the reason for why an institution should not be ammended to include a certain type of person from its benefits, then you must logically enforce its purpose. Meaning, you must force all married people to attempt to conceive a child or adopt one.

It helps to know why an institution was created for general knowledge but the only thing that this government should protect (instead of the institutions) is the individual whose rights are being subjugated for the sake of the sanctity of an institution, which, in this case, again, is the homosexual.

The idea that Christianity without an element of social justice activism (other than charity, and legislating morality) is unusual and in need of special explanation strikes me as exactly the wrong way round. I think it's pretty much the default condition, and not just for Evangelical Protestants. It certainly describes the conservative presbyterian denominations in Scotland over the past century or more.

With all due respect to Dave Luckett, what I don't understand is why, as a conservative presumably concerned with the ongoing survival of hard-won civil society, he isn't vigorously in favor of gay people getting married.

I mean, good grief. Here we have a big, high-profile, creative, economically productive and largely urban sector of American society which, unlike almost any other group meeting that description, apparently wants to join churches, serve in the military, get married, and raise families. And somehow, according to people who call themselves conservatives, this is a bad thing?

It's stuff like this that leaves me thinking that, as Gandhi said about Western civilization, actual conservatism would be a good idea. Too bad there don't appear to be any actual conservatives.

I mean, I can understand why a conservative Catholic might look askance at "gay marriage." Marriage is a sacrament in Catholicism, and Catholicism is all about sacraments. But conservative Catholics don't run around trying to keep the state from marrying non-Catholics in non-sacramental ceremonies, nor do they make a big deal about whether those ceremonies should be called "marriage."

Which leaves everyone else with even less excuse.

Ken, the question didn't concern Christianity but rather periods of Christian revival in American history.

Whatever one's opinion of the efficacy or good judgement of the "social justice" movements spawned by previous periods of American religious revival (great awakening ahoy!), the fact remains that there were such movements; there was a sense of outward-directed action. What's notable and extra-creepy about the current period is that it's a circle looking inward. And that is in fact new.

"I hold that marriage is a social institution the primary purpose of which is to provide the means to bring up the offspring of the sexual relationship which it includes. If that is true, then homosexual relationships cannot be marriages."

I'm wondering where, exactly, that primary purpose was explicitly stated. I thought I'd try Genesis 2, which seemed like a likely source, but all it says is

It is not good that the man should be alone

Well, yeah. I don't really want to be alone. Nothing about children there.

I will make a helper fit for him.

Yeah, I could use some help.

So what culture is it, exactly, that says that THE purpose of marriage is making children? How about a few centuries of the European ruling class? Oops, nope, that's an instrument of foreign policy. How about all those cultures where it's a means of securing peace with neighboring tribes, or forging clan alliances, or ...

Dave, where exactly does it say that again? And why should my culture take that culture's word for it?

I'm not certain. What about the Temperance movement? Was that a matter of social justice, or just being a busybody in the way other people ran their lives?

Dave, I'm spotting a bit of a logical fallacy in your argument. You say that child-rearing is the "primary" purpose of marriage, but then argue as if it's the only purpose of marriage. Which, of course, it is not. If it were, sterile couples whould never marry, and gay couples with children (there are several million of these in the US, by the way) would be considered perfectly marriagable by everyone.

If gay marriage really hurt hetero marriage, then Massachusetts would have the highest divorce rate in the US, rather than the lowest. What I suspect is actually happening is that homosexuals are being made scapegoats for the high divorce rates in the Bible Belt.

Kevin, The Temperance Movement in its beginning and heyday was connected with a keen sense of social justice. I know we always see parodies of Carrie Nation and her axe (so much so that I had to pause and make sure I wasn't saying Lizie Borden instead), but the reality was much more complicated than that. There were just-plain-prudes who supported Temperance, but there were also people who saw it as a class war issue -- that the owning class was warring against the working class by marketing alcohol to them, keeping them unable to seize justice for themselves. They were like Black Muslims saying that to become free, one must be "clean."

It's always more complicated.

Equal rights to be married do cause harm. The religious and political authorities who used to be able to control all aspects of people's lives would have one less aspect they can meddle with. The more the authorities are expected and required to be reasonable, the less power they have to be arbitrary and capricious, to pick on whatever people they want to solely because it is expedient. Not that I care about the hurt feelings of tyrants, but they care, and they are letting us know about it as best they can.

Jim--

I think the trouble is that Dave was just stating his personal belief of what marriage is, and so, ipso facto, what doesn't fit that definition isn't marriage in his book, which isn't necessarily the King James Bible.

Thankfully, society is composed of a whole lot of individuals with a whole lot of other books, and I could mention what's in mine, except for the fact that the books that matter most in this case are those of the individuals to be married, the ones who say "I do" and ideally live out the rest of their lives together until death do them part.

Compared to that, the opinions of some person on the other side of the planet who they are unlikely to ever meet are pretty inconseqential. Friends, neighbors and relatives--those opinions are a little more consequential, but that's why you send out invitations to your wedding or reception so you can have folk to stand by you, bear witness, and ritually bless you with gifts that will be with you for the rest of your married life.

I have a friend whose own parents didn't come to her own wedding because her father didn't approve of her marrying a chubby blond guy, as opposed to some guy of pure Korean stock. Lucky for her, the opinions that count are those of her and her husband, and they have a legal contract from the State of California to back them up and help them live their lives, no matter how much her father still disapproves of her lifestyle and his biracial grandchildren.

Rather sucks that my gay friends don't have the same legal opportunities and protections.

The Temperance movement was a huge mistake, but it was definitely driven by more than mere busybodyism.

The rate of alcohol consumption among 19th-century working-class Americans was absolutely staggering by modern standards, and you can imagine the side effects.

I'm going to split hairs and say that the Temperance movement was an excellent idea, and that its later stage/successor movement of Prohibition was an awful one. The idea of working-class people banding together to reinforce each other in self-discipline and self-betterment - Temperance groups were big on adult education - is one well worth backing. And the question of just how and why reform movements go bad is one worth study just right now, since it's going to be a big risk for embittered folx I like and respect during these next few years.

Lucy--

True enough. And the autobiography of Carrie Nation is an interesting read.

Been a while since I read it, but it has an interesting note about Grant's lips rotting off from cancer caused by sucking on cigars--a good reference for when smoking apologists try to play the "We had no idea it could kill you till the 60s" card.

Kevin --

Sure, I agree with all of that, that was sort of my point: what book is Dave reading from? When terms like "is and always was" start flying around, "personal opinion" is a small thing, unless the person himself "is and always was" (someone else this morning on another thread used the line "6000 years of recorded history") -- it leaves the realm of "what it is for me" and becomes something that requires some sort of backup. Was it really? Show me.

Patrick, point taken. But it looks like a revival of the kind of Christianity with which I'm most familiar. Mind you, the revivalism-activism pattern exists in British history too, in Methodism for instance, and the Free Church.

About objections to gay marriage - I can see why some non-Catholic Christians might object to putting what looks to them like a big seal of civic approval on sin. From the background I referred to earlier, homosexuality is the real non-negotiable among the private sins. Fornication and adultery don't even come close, perhaps because there are no destroyed cities called Fornica and Adulter on a plain somewhere.

I think everybody ought to have civil unions and if people want to additionally have a religious ritual, that's okay for them. The government should get out of the business of marriage.

Marilee--

Mostly in agreement with that statement, excepting that I don't think the government should have been in the marriage business in the first place, but since it is, it's kind of commited to folk who were already married under its laws.

Besides which, what in essence would be the difference between a civil union and a civil marriage anyway, if conferred as part of a civil ceremony by a justice of the peace? It seems kind of pointless to declare that all marriage certificates are now civil union certificates, and henceforth will be known as as such, when it would be simpler and affect less people to instead declare that all civil union certificates are now marriage certificates, rather like the situation where California years back declared that DOs were now MDs, because Doctors of Osteopathy and Medical Doctors both were licensed to practice the same things, had the same training, and the old philosophical split in the medical colleges was starting to get sewn up.

Holy Matrimony can still be the province of religion, and if your church doesn't want to marry gay couples, interracial couples, couples of different faiths and so forth, they don't have to. In fact, your church can keep crossing off lists of undesirables from those it will allow within its doors until inside, you can have your One True Faith, while outside, everyone dismisses you as a weird squirrelly cult.

Jax's answer to Dave reflects my own view. I don't think the legal system ought to be dealing with questions of "immorality". It ought only to deal with questions of actual harm done to actual people ... in which case the obvious harm done to gays who can't get into hospitals to visit their partners, who can't get health benefits for their children, etc., far outweighs any "harm" done to people who take the Bible literally.

I hope this isn't spamming, as I posted the same comment to Making Light, but I thought both of you might like Digby's post on the red-state/blue-state division as seen through American history? [I blogged it here]

Bruce, thank you. That's exactly what I was talking about. And I don't think it's hair splitting: I think different social forces were at play by the time of Prohibition, though I'm sure I would have to spend some time rereading things before I could elaborate.

"It helps to know why an institution was created for general knowledge but the only thing that this government should protect (instead of the institutions) is the individual whose rights are being subjugated for the sake of the sanctity of an institution, which, in this case, again, is the homosexual."

Good point, Jax. If I were to concede that homosexual marriage is a right of the individual, it would be crushing. As it is, it gives me considerable pause. Does "the pursuit of happiness" necessarily imply such a right? Let me think about this...

"When terms like "is and always was" start flying around, "personal opinion" is a small thing, unless the person himself "is and always was" (someone else this morning on another thread used the line "6000 years of recorded history") -- it leaves the realm of "what it is for me" and becomes something that requires some sort of backup. Was it really? Show me."

Jim, to show you that marriage - or any institution - always had such and such a property - whatever property we choose - I would have to demonstrate that the property was present in each and every moment of human history. I can't do that, and if that is to be the test, then I can't pass it.

Perhaps if I climb down a bit. I believe that marriage is the institution by which society secures the upbringing of its children, and that this is one of the very few constant properties of marriage throughout human history. I think, in fact, that it is the only such constant property. I can't prove that without exhaustive analysis of each and every human society - an impossibility - but is it so unbelievable as all that?

If that is granted, and I confess that it need not be, then it must follow that providing the means for the upbringing of children is a vital property of marriage. But homosexuality has been present in each and every human society also, and homosexual couples have always raised children. (Curiously, I have the feeling that you will not require me to show you that that is the case.) Why, then, are the societies that accord to any homosexual relationship the same status as marriage so very rare? (I might have written "unheard-of", for I have never heard of one, but that is unnecessary.) My answer is that the property of providing upbringing to the offspring of a sexual relationship must be an essential property of marriage, overall.

Of course this argument works only on the level of a whole society, and does not cover all individuals within it; but anyone who expects that a social institution will fit all persons in the society and function strictly according to logic is asking for a very great deal.

Perhaps they ask it rightly, see above. All the same, attempts to change a fundamental social institution without consensus always founder, and usually have catastrophic consequences in proportion to their support. Some here apparently believe that consensus already exists. If that is so, then tell me, why are numerous US states (and, alas, my own jurisdiction) rushing to legislate to define marriage as valid only between one man and one woman?

*delurking*

Dave:

I could respond to a few statements in your last post, but I'm really most curious about this one:

"All the same, attempts to change a fundamental social institution without consensus always founder, and usually have catastrophic consequences in proportion to their support."

I believe you've made that claim during this thread on more than one occasion (checking...yes, found similar language in your second post), and I wonder how well you think it applies to the issue of interracial marriage. At the time of the court cases that finally overturned bans on interracial marriage (the most famous being Loving v. Virginia), it is widely reported that the US population opposed interracial marriage in enormously greater proportion than they currently oppose gay marriage (the figure most often cited is 92%, as compared to 65% currently opposed to gay marriage and 35% opposed to civil unions - based on stats from the last election in those states where gay marriage bans were on the ballot).

Do you think interracial marriage was a special case, where the consensus of society was not necessary?

Or do you think that legalizing interracial marriage has had catastrophic consequences?

Or do you think the reported opposition to interracial marriage is exaggerated (I don't have a source at my fingertips, and my memory may be incomplete or completely incoherent, but the 9 of 10 stat is referenced again here), or that opposition to gay marriage is underestimated?

Or perhaps that the comparison between the two marriage disputes is not relevant for some reason? I'm aware that your justification for restricting marriage to heterosexual couples, child-bearing, would remain valid (I don't agree that such a definition is valid, but I'll stipulate it here for the sake of this particular point) in the case of interracial marriages. Would you contend that, since interracial marriage doesn't violate your definition of marriage, the fact that society had not reached consensus on this (to them) drastic change was not important?

I should really stop trying to guess your answer and just let you respond, shouldn't I? Heh...

Dave, you wrote:

Perhaps if I climb down a bit. I believe that marriage is the institution by which society secures the upbringing of its children, and that this is one of the very few constant properties of marriage throughout human history. I think, in fact, that it is the only such constant property. I can't prove that without exhaustive analysis of each and every human society - an impossibility - but is it so unbelievable as all that?

It's only unbelievable if you haven't made a study of other cultures, both current and historical. But the analysis doesn't have to be exhaustive. Throwing my diploma on the table, I've got a BA in Anthropology, and I'll quote a catch phrase from my African Studies class: "Mother's Brother."

This is well known enough that the joke in anthropology circles is to call Malinowski the "Mother's Brother of Anthropology." But I digress.

The point is is that the standard West African kinship pattern is the Mother's Brother pattern. That is to say, a woman stays with her family, while the father of her children does not, being from another, and possibly even rival tribe. Discipline for the children is provided by the mother's eldest brother, and, in the absence of any brothers, by the eldest aunt. The biological father, when he visits, takes a role similar to that of a favorite uncle or a godfather in European society, that of an occasional good-time Charlie who takes the kids out for fun outings and brings them presents, but isn't responsible for any discipline.

Simplifying terribly here, but most African Americans are descended from West Africans, yet when the old kinship patterns are echoed here, you get folk screaming about absent fathers and children being raised by their uncles and a whole lot of foofarah about people not understanding any kinship structure different from that depicted in "I Love Lucy."

Having a child raised by the mother and the mother's brother or the mother's eldest sister is a perfectly workable kinship pattern, and not even a rare one, so screaming about the naturalness of the Lucy + Ricky + Little Ricky nuclear family is to ignore the entire body of work of anthropologists throughout the ages, not to mention the bible itself, which if you note has more than a few instances of multiple wives, folks knocking up the handmaid as a surrogate mother, Onan having sex with his sterile brother's wife until he decided not to and....

Hell, if you go with the Immaculate Conception thing, Jesus himself was raised by a man who was not his biological father. If raising a child who is not biologically your own is good enough for Joseph, why not for someone else? And if sperm donation is okay (Onan) and immaculate conception is okay (Mary), then a lesbian with a turkey baster seems on pretty firm theological ground. Likewise, since Rachel couldn't conceive and had her husband sleep with her maid Bilhah (Genesis 30), it seems surrogate mothers are just fine.

Not to put to fine a point on it, but I think the thing that freaks the Christian Right out is not people raising kids which are not biologically their own but people in same sex relationships raising kids and teaching them that it's not a sin.

Homosexual sex is about as much of a sin as lobster and porkchops, which is to say, forbidden as an abomination by Leviticus and various other religious texts, considered a tasty treat by millions of others.

No one is going to die because the people next door can legally eat lobster and porkchops. Likewise with having their marriage legally recognized.

You may still be grossed out if you wish, however.

A couple of nitpicks:

Onan's brother was dead, not sterile. (Well, okay, being dead does normally make one also sterile, but...)

Mary's conception of Jesus was the Virgin Birth, not the Immaculate Conception. The IC applies to Mary herself: she was born free from Original Sin (in a sort of retroactive grace from her son's future sacrifice) so as to be a fit vessel for the Son.

I'm actually an atheist, I just love to nitpick. (grin)

I hold that marriage is a social institution the primary purpose of which is to provide the means to bring up the offspring of the sexual relationship which it includes. If that is true, then homosexual relationships cannot be marriages.

pericat, you can, if you like, call this idea prejudice.

I could, I suppose, instead I'll just note that it's false to observable fact. Neither the law nor 'society' make any provision for automatically dissolving any marriage which is not consummated, nor any which is not blessed with children genetically related to both partners. Having once taken oath to be married to each other, both partners are considered, legally and socially, to be married as long as they assert that they are, and in most cases, beyond.

You might have better luck maintaining that marriage is one of the institutions by which families extend their reach, and that children are among the usual products of this. Not the sole purpose, but certainly part of the whole picture.

Of course, if your purpose in all these flights of reason is to justify, by hook or by crook, excluding same-sex marriages, that definition won't help.

If I might venture a suggestion, however, it would be that you might have more success in convincing me if you argued against the idea.

I did, though. You may not have noticed, since you seem to think this is a hypothetical discussion not subject to proof. I presented you with an empirical argument: the fact of my legally binding marriage to another woman last month. In the society and country in which I live, this sort of thing has been going on for a bit over a year now. The social fabric remains unrent (I check every day, when I have my morning coffee, for blood in the gutters). The government has not fallen, drat it all. In short, it's been a complete non-starter when it comes to loosing mere anarchy upon the world.

Actually, it rather seems to have had the opposite effect.

Jim, to show you that marriage - or any institution - always had such and such a property - whatever property we choose - I would have to demonstrate that the property was present in each and every moment of human history. I can't do that, and if that is to be the test, then I can't pass it.

Of course I don't expect you to prove such a thing. I'm glad you recognize that you can't. My complaint was that you were, and are, asserting it as if it had already been proven.

Fortunately, it's much simpler to dispose of the question from the other direction (hint: finding one is a much shorter search than finding none), and Kevin already addressed this a little while ago. Marriage is in many cultures not the most important thing in childrearing, nor childrearing the most important thing in marriage (google "alliance theory").

You might be on somewhat firmer ground to suggest that family exists to support the rearing of children, which would cover those cultures where, say, the "family" is a multi-generational group of women raising their children, and the "husband" lives with the other men aside from the odd "midnight hour". But, y'know, families serve a lot of other functions too, and there's a lot of families with homosexuals out there already.

An Irish couple who were married in Canada are currently trying to force the Government here to recognize their gay marriage in the courts.

I don't think they'll win, but perhaps they are already thinking of an appeal to Europe. Even if they lose, there are moves towards recognition of gay marriage afoot in the legislature, although that will take some years at best.

pericat -

Of course, if your purpose in all these flights of reason is to justify, by hook or by crook, excluding same-sex marriages, that definition won't help.

See my post above on arguing with conservative intellectuals. -Yes.

If I was still on the Dark Side, I could twist history and "nature" into pretzels for hours, carefully ignoring the fact that adoption of kids for inheritance purposes by childless couples, either because their children had died, and they were too old, or biological infertility at childbearing years, was standard operating procedure in Roman times, and that various forms of fostering as well as recognized polygyny have been in operation in Western Europe, and in European immigrant communities here, back in those "goode olde dayes" when everyone was straight and square. The census records, as well as family lore, tell different stories.

--I have, btw, come around myself on the issue of gay marriage and civil unions, in the past year, because of it being explained to me as matter of guaranteed legal rights - I think that heterosexuals just don't ever think about those embedded rights that come with the amalgam of church/state weddings, because we take them for granted (like whites not seeing discrimination happening.)

Since I *tend* on an emotional level to the "marriage is just legalized prostitution, even if there are exceptions" view, my thought was in part, "Why would you guys *want* to get involved in our control-freakiness in regard to relationships?" After all, marriage is expensive, and a lot of het couples don't get married, either. But when I realized it came down to matters of financial rights and other legal issues, emotional aspects of it went right out the window.

And I *think* they would do so, if the justice element was recognized, for more "nice" conservatives (I do not speak of the Hannity/Limbutt/Coulter brigade) because appeals to justice are the core of conservative Catholic intellectual argument - but then, I'm not one any more, because they really *mattered* to me, and the cognitive dissonance between our ideals and reality was insupportable.

Speaking of nitpicking. I thought that the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah had to do with (among other things) men offerring their own daughters (of proper marriages) to whore for other men.

Maybe I am misremembering and the Bible is in another room.

Jane

Kevin:

Mother's brother: come to think of it, in traditional Australian Aboriginal society, a similar pattern holds for some aspects child-rearing. That is, brothers of the mother are responsible for teaching specific skillsets to boys, and I *think* sisters of the father for girls. But parents remain cohabitors and primarily responsible for the basic support of their children, and in any case an Australian Aboriginal kinship group in the same moiety shares all resources. The West African pattern you cite is unknown to me, and it certainly gives me severe difficulties.

I might, I suppose, point out that in citing the pattern you used the term "father of (the mother's) children" rather than "husband", and I suppose I could ask to what extent this can be called a marriage. The man concerned would appear to be no more than a regular visitor with sexual privileges. Nevertheless, this does put a considerable hole in my idea.

(One question: how do they ever get men who have sisters to agree to this pattern? By threatening to turn them over to the men who have none? The latter would appear to be very much the winners in this arrangement.)(Make that two questions: are either of the partners responsible for material support of each other? This has nothing to do with the argument. I'm just curious.)

Thinking in print: Is it a marriage if the partners do not ever live together? I'd recognise it as one, wouldn't I, if the forms were gone through? Well, yes, I would, holding that people's domicilary arrangements are their own business.

If they neither live together nor take joint responsibility for raising their children, is it a marriage? Hmm. That might be more acceptable. I feel in my bones that marriage is more than visitation rights with sex, and that the acceptance of raising the children resulting from the sex is an essential part of it, but it's still a nasty one. I can't now plead that it's the universal pattern.

Can I plead that the West African pattern is irrelevant to Western society? Well, I could, but it's not what I was arguing, and that would be shifting ground.

Nope. I'm stuffed. If it isn't the universal pattern, then it isn't. It's a local and cultural artefact subject to change like all such artefacts. Well, then, I guess I have to accept that it will change. Or has changed.

Anyone for a hand of gin?

pericat: does one offer congratulations or felicitations? Whichever, for what it's worth, you have mine.

This is a great thread. I love to see convincing arguments actually convince.

(Thought I posted this last night. must have been too tired and clicked the wrong button. Or maybe I put it on the wrong thread or the wrong blog. Anyway, here it is in short.)

OK, what is really scaring me is how little people are arguing for/against gay marriage based on the rule of law.

The declaration of independence and the constitution together promise life, liberty, freedom to pursue happiness, and equality.

There are ammendments that have been added to guarantee that the promise of equality is extended to certain groups that had otherwise been disenfranchised based on their race or gender.

When the promise of equality is applied to teh legal concept of marriage the law must follow the constitution. That's what happened in massachusetts: The court said the promise of equality in the state constitution must be applied to any couple who wants to get married, straight or gay.

The Religious Rights solution is to modify the US constitution. However, any specific ammendment cannot simply override the more basic promises of equality. You cannot promise "we are all equal", and then say "except for gays". That is the difference between rule of law and rule of the mob.

Arguments about nature and history and childbirth and other cultures are distractions from the real argument of the rule of law.

Do we honor the promise of equality for all, or do we ignore it and succumb to mob rule.

Dave. you have an interesting point about the definition of marriage in matrilineal (notice the precise word: not matriarchal)societies . (my BA is in Anthropology too: also, I spent part of my adolescence sitting in on my father's grad school classes in the subject, and hours in the Anthropology Library) But what you're offering as the definition of marriage is this: "Real marriage is what I, and only I, say it is."

Which may be a linguistic problem, but I don't think so. Cross-culturally, we have in different times and places a lot of lovely examples which include some of the characteristics you'd like to see gathered into a definition of marriage, and not others: and which contain some other characteristics you might not think is important.

We have the example of the Nayar. A young woman marries a man who is reckoned to be her husband and the father of her children. She is a virgin before this: it's important, because her first sex, with him, legitimizes the children who follow. After that, though, they may or may not continue a sexual relationship: she may or may not, and usually does, have serial relationships with other men: and while her husband has rights and obligations toward "his" children, so do her brothers and cousins.

So we have elements which can be viewed as similar to elements in your idea of marriage, and people who are (or were: I have no idea whether this group of people have changed their institutions or not) quite certain that this is the moral, decent way to behave. But it's different from your idea of marriage in crucial ways.

My kinship and social organization text is about seven feet directly above my head. It's a matter of climbing on to the desk to pull it down. If you want more different ways of defining marriage, I can look it up.

I do have a universal definition of marriage, but it's useless: "the system of defining rights and obligations between people or among lineages."

There you have it. I tried to put in more stuff, but it ended up looking like one of those every-contingency boilerplate contracts with "including but not limited to" and "except where noted" all over it.

Jane, the Jewish tradition holds that the sin of Sodom and Gemorrah was being inhospitable to visitors.

"Real marriage is what I, and only I, say it is."

Well, not exactly. I offered a definition of marriage and had it shot down. Fair enough. So it should have been, by all accounts.

But since we have an embarrassment of riches in the field of Anthropology, would anyone care to give an opinion as to whether homosexual marriage has been recognised as equivalent to heterosexual marriage by any society, except here-and-now?

Please accept my assurances that I do not mean to use such data to construct some argument along the lines of "if it's never happened before, it shouldn't happen now". That would indeed be self-evidently idiotic. I think, however, that if such recognition were very rare or unheard-of, it would be arguable that it represents at least a major, wrenching and disorienting change, and I could plead for patience on that account.

Equality under the law: Hmm. An interesting approach. Question: may the law ever exclude a given class of persons from a given institution (or allow such exclusion to occur) and not be held to trespass upon the guarantee of equality?

Dave: after reading this thread I have great respect for you. Backing down in the face of convincing arguments is rare enough that I've found I sometimes have had to explain that that was what I was doing!

I didn't enter the thread early enough to join the argument on gay marriage, so I'll just point out that The Economist, which is not known for its liberality, has gone on record as supporting same-sex marriage as an economic good: it promotes social stability.

Also, that even if something has always been a certain way, if extending it does no harm, why not? And no one has ever been able to tell me what possible harm (to individuals, society, or even "the institution of marriage") same-sex marriage would do.

But I guess that's part of being liberal: a proposed change tends to be met with "Any downside? Then why not?" Not a universal viewpoint, to be sure.

Avram, that's right, I'd forgotten that. I'm going to start calling those anti-immigrationists 'Sodomites' right away!

Dave,

Glad to take part in convincing you, and also glad that my anthro studies are coming in handy.

To stick another spoke in the wheels, from an anthropological standpoint, the terms heterosexual, homosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual and so forth are all cultural constructs, since the definitions of these change from culture to culture.

For example, and here I'll even give a citation with the anthropologist and his email, as I was told by Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, in Argentinian society, gays are very much looked down on by macho heterosexual men. However, the Argentinian definition of gay is not the North American "man who has sex with other men" or "man who desires to have sex with other men," but "man who is on the bottom when having sex with other men." Yes, so long as you're always an NA BDSM-style Top, regardless of who you're having sex with, in Argentina you're viewed and view yourself as a heterosexual male.

Going further, one of the tribal patterns in New Zealand is for girls to have sex with other girls, including having girlfriends, until a suitable match is found by their families, and then once married, they engage in what's defined in the West as straight heterosexual sex with their husbands. Lesbian anthropologists have had fun interviewing them, since the worldview of these women doesn't make them conceive of themselves as either straight or gay (they think it's a bizarre foreign concept), and have found that the general answer is either "I liked my girlfriend much better, she treated me nicer than my husband" or "I like my husband much better, he treats me better than my girlfriend ever did."

In fact, reexamining this sexual pattern, it looks as if we have a viable alternative to the Right-Wing "Abstinence Only" education. If high school kids were only having girl on girl and boy on boy sex until their parents arranged a suitable girl-boy marriage, unwanted pregnancies would be nil and abortion would be a non-issue. (Though we'd still need to give out condoms and dental dams to prevent the spread of STDs.)

Do you think we could get the same funding as the Silver Ring Thing?

Dave -- the Constitution of the United States guarantees (or should I say "guarantees"?) equal treatment under the law. Therefore any LEGAL institution that excludes one group or another is unConstitutional.

I'd oppose (of course!) any church or religious organization being FORCED to perform same-sex marriages. I want the legal institution, by name and with no distinction made, and will settle for nothing less. But Freedom of Religion (also guaranteed by our Constitution) is a critical quality of life issue for me, and I won't give it up either.

Interestingly, that estimable social institution (it's WAY beyond the status of a mere document) also forbids Congress from passing any law "respecting an establishment of religion." IANAL, but I think they're doing that when they impose restrictions based on any (or all!) form(s) of Christianity on any social institution, especially a legal one such as marriage: my religion does not share those ideas.

Gods, Kevin, I hope your program is instituted by the time I'm a teenager again...I figure that will be sometime around 2062, if all goes well and my turnaround time in the Summerland is as short as I currently plan.

The boys who have sex with other boys are the GOOD boys...wow. The contrast to my (this life) highschool years is sharp, to say the least.

Equality under the law: Hmm. An interesting approach. Question: may the law ever exclude a given class of persons from a given institution (or allow such exclusion to occur) and not be held to trespass upon the guarantee of equality?

In many states in the US, felons, or certain classes of felons, are deprived of the right to vote, and are therefore excluded from the class of enfranchised residents of this country [that is to say, citizens 18 years of age and older]. Typically, there is a mechanism provided for petitioning to have the right to vote returned.
However, those felons who lose the right to vote did originally have it, or were too young to have belonged to the enfranchised group, from which they would not have been excluded when they became 18, if not for the felony.
Poll taxes, literacy requirements and such were all exclusionary mechanisms designed to disenfranchise otherwise acceptable voters--typically, these were racist maneuvers, as were the laws preventing naturalization of Asian immigrants. I beleive the exclusion of felons survives because it is supposed to be a punishment for a certain degree of criminality, and because an appeal process exists. A lawyer would know more about this, know it more completely, and explain it better. However, because the exclusion is provoked by a criminal act on the part of the excludee, and is not necessarily a permanent one, I think the guarantee of equality doesn't apply to these cases. Of course, this is my half-informed interpretation of these things, and I'm prepared to be called on it, and to see a full explanation appear from any more knowledgable person.

I'm going to start calling those anti-immigrationists 'Sodomites' right away!

Dude, you just rocked my world.

Not just anti-immigrationists, but those bastards who shipped a pasing-through Canadian citizen off to Syria to be tortured. Sodomites, all.

Avram, it's a movement. Anybody else wanna join?

There are several societies in which, uncommonly but routinely, same-sex marriages traditionally take place. I'm blanking on names, but I'm thinking especially of a cattle-raising people in East Africa, where at times a woman will simply be accorded a male role, and she will marry in the usual way of a man, and the children of her wife are socially her children.

Having said that, and having cited other cross-cultural precedents, I want to say that all those cross-cultural precedents do is show that, in various times and various places, human beings have made themselves a variety of patterns to live by. We do get to have opinions on what other people do -- that's the heart of gossip, which has to be one of the most basic human entrprises -- no, drives -- but it is our responsibility to forge a society that sedrves our purposes.

I mean, how many people here would want to go to the trouble of arranging a suitable marriage for their son or daughter? I wouldn't. And yet that would be my responsibility in many societies.

And in a highly mobile society, how would you, for example, find a person of the proper clan, lineage, class or moiety to marry? How many people would want to negotiate the shoals of dowry and bride price?

We define social institutions to meet the needs of our own people. And in these days the needs of our own people include a broader definition of who can marry.

I could plead for patience on that account.

Equality under the law: Hmm. An interesting approach. Question: may the law ever exclude a given class of persons from a given institution (or allow such exclusion to occur) and not be held to trespass upon the guarantee of equality?

Consider patience granted to anyone who is actively contemplating gay marriages for or against.

Consider it revoked to those who have essentially said "damn the torpedoes! full ammendment ahead!"

As for the law excluding a given class, it only satisfies the guarantee of equality if the class is defined by a person's actions.

The class of convicted murderers may be thrown in jail for their crimes. But their crimes, their class, is defined by their actions. If you murder someone, you go to jail.

interracial marriage was illegal in 17 states until 1967 when then Supreme Court said the promise of equality must be applied to allow people to marry regardless of race. The class of "race" failed the constitutional requiremnt of equality.

Which all comes back to the difference between defining people for who they are (Black, White) versus what they do (Murder/Marry).

Excluding people from the benefits of marriage because they are gay is the same sort of approach. It defines the class excluded from equality based on who they are rather than any actions/crimes they have committed.

Dave,

Cross-posted.

But since we have an embarrassment of riches in the field of Anthropology, would anyone care to give an opinion as to whether homosexual marriage has been recognised as equivalent to heterosexual marriage by any society, except here-and-now?

Well, my Native American studies have been pretty scant, but there is a scene in "Little Big Man" with the always swishy indian boy growing up to be a male-wife, hitting on Dustin Hoffmann who said something like "There's no proper English word for what he was." But this is ethnography as viewed through the filter of Hollywood, so take some very large grains of salt with your popcorn and just use that as a starting point for the actual histories on which it's based.

However, my Southeast Asian studies are bit better, and I can report that among some Philipine tribes, the definition of man and woman is defined by role, not biology, so if a biological male decides he's a woman, he simply puts on women's clothes, lives as a woman, and is treated as a woman, even to the point of marrying.

Of the gay couples I know in this country, in one of them, one of the men calls himself the wife, stays at home, and dresses in a somewhat more effeminate style, so I'd say it's analogous. And my cousin's partner both dresses and acts butch while she acts femme, so "wearing the pants" in the relationship is a statement of fact as well as metaphor.

The trouble is, the current style of Western heterosexual marriage, with partnerships made for love as opposed to family alliance, women having voting as well as property rights, divorces only seen as remarkable after the third or fourth, is a modern cultural artifact as it is. You're pretty hard pressed to find historic examples which precisely mirror it, let along historic gay marriage examples which mirror the current day gay marriages which are templated off the current day heterosexual marriages.

There's also the old Spartans, where a man had a wife at home and a boy out in the field, and I know some examples of that kinship pattern in the current day Bay Area, though of course the current laws only provide for one spouse of the opposite sex to be recognized, regardless of the actual sexual practices, property and living arrangements.

Lucy,

Excellent points.

However, it's worth mentioning that dowry hasn't gone completely by the wayside. I, for example, have mine, since after my lesbian aunt died, my mother and her sister in Germany realized that while all the girls of the family had been given silver for their weddings (my sister, in fact, had been given the set that had been made up for my aunt when she'd been planning to get a heterosexual marriage in the 1950s until she'd called it off), there was a lot of family silver from my grandparents and great grandparents, so it was only fair that the boys get some as as well, especially since my cousin Ludger's wife was from Guatemala (and hadn't brought any proper German silver to the marriage), and if I get married, the chances of my wife having a bridal trouseau are similarly slim.

Actually, when my sister got married, there was a culture clash, since my mother had to get my sister to cancel her chosen silver pattern at the bridal registry because the silver had already been taken care of by the family.

But in any case, the fact that I have a dowry of German silver is a modern adaptation of the old cultural patterns, because while it's improper for the groom to be bringing the silver to the marriage, it's even more improper that the couple shouldn't have any.

I suppose I should be looking for a woman with a trousseau of china and linen.

Well, my Native American studies have been pretty scant, but there is a scene in "Little Big Man" with the always swishy indian boy growing up to be a male-wife, hitting on Dustin Hoffmann who said something like "There's no proper English word for what he was." But this is ethnography as viewed through the filter of Hollywood, so take some very large grains of salt with your popcorn and just use that as a starting point for the actual histories on which it's based.

The word you're looking for is berdache.

I'm pretty sure that the emotional and legal content of a modern trousseau is different from that of a traditional dowry. Well, I guess it depends, doesn't it? There are those who give their girls gold (or other valuables) that is never community property -- she's supposed to tend it and accumulate more of it and give it to her daughters. It's her very own.

But then there are the folks who "settle" on the bride -- or on the husband -- or on both of them -- land or property, and it does become part of the community property of the marriage, or even become the husband's, at least to use, tend, and dispose of.

Berdache isn't quite analogous to same-sex marriage, because a berdache was respected as a person who had significant spiritual power, and the current mess in the Anglican church shows that doesn't necessarily pertain in the here-and-now.

But berdaches could marry someone of their own (biological) sex. That was my point.

Mind you, that isn't what I want. I don't want to live as a woman or pretend to be one or anything, nor do I desire a husband who will or wants to. (No disrespect at all to those who do, or transexuals or any other differently-gendered people; I'm speaking only about myself, my wishes and desires.)

Well, the question of "living as a woman" becomes even odder in a culture where women are culturally allowed to wear the same clothes as men with no attached social stigma.

With according spiritual power, it's really hard to find anyone in western society who's accorded any spiritual power by general society, no matter how well they're costumed. But with the berdaches, I don't think it's a stretch to say that the rarity is what accords the special status, the same as the superstitions about redheads, or blue-eyed folk being thought to have the evil eye by a largely brown-eyed middle eastern population.

Just to correct what seems to be a common misconception: Marriage grants many, many more rights than simple kinship (even next-of-kinship/lowest consaguinity number), and where a right exists in both relationships, it is often substantially stronger in the marriage.

From what I've seen, Civil Union Statutes tend to be written to simply incorporate all benefits of marriage by reference (though of course, mileage varies by jurisdiction), and though common law marriage is mostly dead in most places, some courts will preserve marriage-like rights for same-sex couples without the benefit of union or marriage (see: Levin v. Yeshiva University 96 N.Y.2d 484 . Most notably, see the dissent on what constitutes immediate family. Have I mentioned lately how much I love NY?).

But, generally, I have two points here:
1: Non-union, non-marriage declarations such as suggested by Dave above, are, without such statutory language as I suggest, essentially meaningless.
2: Unions, where the statutory language says so, are simply marriages-that-are-called something different. Of course, depriving a certain class of a certain name simply to be spiteful (as far as I can tell) serves little policy purpose.

Oh, and my third point? As a hypothetical, I support the civil recogntion of non-binary unions. However, there is a reason besides walk-before-you-run to table that issue for later: Many of the benefits of marriage, as currently conceived, either only make sense when considered in the binary mode (off the top of my head, election rights in estates), or are extremely vulnerable to misuse if serial marriage is permitted (off the top again, inter-marital transfers). While I'd like to see a future where whatever sort of family you choose to build for yourself is recognized by the civil authorities and receives the rights of any other family, there are a number of questions that have to be settled before we can step into that future (again, off the top of my head: time/space unity of commencement and cessation? Serial, Plural, Parallel, Cyclic (flashback to graph theory when I try and think about poly-marriage cladistics)? Is there a primary spouse who gets the benefits only available in a binary mode or are all the spouses (insert spice joke here) considered, as a group, to be the recipient of those rights?).

Also, not having the name means an uphill battle against discrimination. Even if the law says a Union is the same as a marriage, if the hospital's rules say "spouse" or "married partner" the nurse might just say "Sorry, you're not really married, so you can't come in."

You don't have time to sue when your beloved is badly hurt; you need to be there right away.

This is an admirable discussion.

Xopher, you are completely correct, and that is a very good reason for a unitary name for legally recognized relationships with the same benefits and implications.

Further, one of the reasons to use the old term, as opposed to some new or recently excavated term, is that private institutions will also have their lists of rules and regulations, and if you use the old term that's already included in them, the gatekeeper doesn't have to make a judgement call as to whether something counts.

For example, while the Catholic faith may not recognize marriages conducted outside of the Church, I think you'd be pretty hard pressed to find a Catholic hospital that excluded spouses of patients married in civil ceremonies or other ceremonies of other faiths.

Thanks, BSD. That point is, in fact, what convinced me that Civil Unions were not good enough. I'd been in the "who cares what they call it as long as it gives us the legal rights" camp prior to that. The key is, nothing but the actual name will give us the PRACTICAL rights.

And Teresa, I think so too. I'm very proud to be a part of it, and Dave Luckett is on my list of People I Must Meet Some Day.

This discussion will teach me the worth of attempting to convince the opposition through honest, fallacy-free dialogue. Very important, if you're a jaded twenty-something.

Mr. Murphy: See the case I referenced for a NY court's view on that topic. (Well, not exactly, but if I had to argue the case you bring up, I'd certainly cite it.)

(To summarize: Yeshiva U (full disclosure, I go to their law school, case was at their med school) maintains married and non-married housing. You need to prove marriage to live in married student housing and have a non-student live with you (children of an unmarried student, though not directly referenced, are presumed to be permissible in a footnote). A pair of lesbians (not a couple) bring suit because they wanted to live with their partners in subsidized housing and couldn't. Their suit is initially dismissed, but the NYCA (highest court in NYS) eventually finds that if the policy discriminates against gay students in housing matters, it's impermissible under NYC law.) NOTE: I AM NOT A LAWYER. THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE.

BSD,

Interesting case, and while I agree with the ruling, in practical terms we're talking very different things with a visitation of a few hours in a hospital versus long term housing at a university.

With the hospital, for example, there's a difference between what the rules say and what the rules are intended for, which with a hospital is keeping the number of visitors passing through down to a reasonable number while at the same time bringing in loved ones for moral support during the illness. Limiting certain wards to immediate family only is part of this, but doctors nod, wink, and relax restrictions all the time.

As for college housing, I remember one housing administrator who lied to a student assembly for her convenience, rigged the housing lottery, and generally displayed many of the less savory traits of an administrator in service of her goal of keeping the bitching to a minimum and thus keeping her job. At least with the ruling for the lesbian couple, that sort of administrator can just say "Sorry, rules are rules" and get people who complain about their new neighbors out of her office.

Greg London: What is your opinion of legal tolerance of excluding a given racial group, or of all racial groups but one, from various forms of public assistance? For example, grants for education and training, access to legal aid and so on, which are here available only to Australian Aboriginals.

These programs (which, incidentally, I support and willingly pay to fund) clearly discriminate in favour of a class of persons on the basis of what they are - in fact, on the basis of their ethnicity - and not on the basis of what they do.

Would that offend the law in the USA, do you think? Would they offend you? Courts here have held that Parliament may approve such programs, but then again we have no provision in our Constitution requiring "equality". "Equality before the law", as I understand the matter, is for us a common-law provision that can be, and sometimes is, varied by statute law for specific cases.

pericat: does one offer congratulations or felicitations?

No earthly. Me, I offered cream-filled pastries.

Whichever, for what it's worth, you have mine.

Thank you, sir! That's very kind of you.

These programs (which, incidentally, I support and willingly pay to fund) clearly discriminate in favour of a class of persons on the basis of what they are - in fact, on the basis of their ethnicity - and not on the basis of what they do.

Yes, but what they are is a class that was discriminated against for generations. It isn't about what they do, it is about what was done to them. We need to get better at fighting the argument that undoing discrimination is discrimination. Maybe we could try to connect affirmative action with victim's rights, since many of the people who are against the first seem to be for the second.

I just have to say, I love this thread, and I appreciate everyone's effort in being calm, rational, thinking people over an issue that like so many can lead to very strong emotional reactions.

As for The Economist, they do have a strong libertarian streak; they first supported same-sex marriage some time ago, and Jonathan Rauch (author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America) was writing for them at the time.

Xopher's point is well-taken; I often make it in a different way, asking if politicians supporting only "civil unions" would be satisfied if their existing "marriage" were converted to a "civil union"--hey, it's equal, you're not losing anything, right?

Yes, but what they are is a class that was discriminated against for generations. It isn't about what they do, it is about what was done to them. We need to get better at fighting the argument that undoing discrimination is discrimination. Maybe we could try to connect affirmative action with victim's rights, since many of the people who are against the first seem to be for the second.

It's not so much about discrimination as it is about class, inheritance and history.

Let's say you've got some people: the first has money for college because his great-grandparents worked hard, invested wisely, and the intervening generations didn't piss the money away; the second guy's great-grandparents had all of their property taken by corrupt government officials and the family's been suing to get it back ever since; the third guys great-grandparents were the corrupt government officials and the intervening generations were insane drunkards and spendthrifts who spent all the ill gotten gains so there's no college fund for him either.

I haven't assigned any race to the hypothetical college students because I don't think it particularly matters. Everyone deserves an education, and the descendents of victims or criminals and spendthrifts are still of the same economic class, poor, and should get financial assistance however the government can wangle it.

Discrimination and race also aren't a cut and dried thing anyway. Speaking here as the descendant of Cherokees, Abolitionists, Nazis and a Prussian Countess, what am I supposed to bitch about? That one of my ancestors, when faced with the Trail of Tears, cleverly married a Dutch alcoholic instead? That another of my ancestors died of tuberculosis in Andersonville Prison for fighting to free the slaves? That my great-grandparent's lakefront property in Berlin was taken by the Communists after the war, never to be seen again (until German reunification, at which point my mother got a share as part of the settlement)? That the noble title which I may have claim to belongs to a country which no longer exists?

At some point, you have to stop bitching. I think living memory is a good earmark. I have a Palestinian friend whose family still has the deed and keys to a house in what is now Israel, and that, the same as the lakefront property in Berlin, is in living memory of folk in both our families, but I really can't get too concerned about the Civil War, the Trail of Tears, or the Fall of Prussia. I particularly can't get upset about the Potato Famine because the Irish part of my family, while they did come over during the 19th century, came over because of a job transfer.

Indiscriminate reparations for things before the start of the 20th century are a bit whacked as I see it, but any excuse you can find to give a poor kid money for college or find an excuse to lift a community out of poverty is a good thing.

California has been doing some entertaining things with licensing all of the indian reservations to have gambling, even to the point of finding lands for tribes who don't have any and letting them build casinos there.

There aren't perfect solutions, but some are better than others.

Lovely discussion going on here.

My main concern about the state of the country's "debate" on gay marriage is how seldom the concept of equal under the law is brought to bear on the argument. It does remind me somewhat of the debate over why women should or shouldn't have the right to vote, in that arguments were thrown around about how it would have a civilizing effect on politics, as women were more nuturing than men, or conversely, that it would contribute to irrational government, as women were overly emotional and not particularly rational creatures.
Forgive me for not being able to cite the source, but someone eventually asked, Isn't it enough that they are people? Exactly.

I am also dismayed at how often the (modern) christian idea of marriage serves as its purpose. Before there was a church, marriage was means of aligning families and transferring property. It was a power of the State in ancient Greece, not of the temple. And while in all cases (I believe), the care and provision of children were covered in any society's definition, that would be because children *did* often result from people marrying and would therefore be a responsibility of the marriage, although I don't recall it being cited as the defining 'reason' for its existence.

There is even scholarship supporting the existence of same-sex marriages within the early christian church, where there clearly wouldn't be the providing of children motivating the union.

Churches would retain the right to determine who they'll recognize as married 'in the eyes of God', much as they do now, with the Catholic church not recognizing people re-married after divorces for example. Because the church co-opted marriage as a sacrament doesn't mean that a government based on the separation of church and state should use the same definitions. Indeed, marriage has as long a secular-only pedigree as a religious one, so why are we being locked into discussing the issue of civil same-sex marriage within religious concerns at all?

I worry that a significant percentage of the population thinks of marriage as the property of the church, and therefore opposes same-sex marriage as an encroachment of the state onto church property. Perhaps the religious opposition is as worried about the erosion of the separation of church and state as I am, but from the other end of the telescope? The majority people have proved to be supportive of civil unions and the idea of equal respect under the law accorded to gay couples as to married heterosexual couples, but the support breaks down as soon as you switch the word 'union' to 'marriage'. I fear it may not be possible to separate the term 'marriage' back out from the church's ownership grab. We may need to retreat from that battleground word in order to win the war of equality under the law for same-sex unions. I'd rather concentrate on securing equality under the law than trying to win back the rights to a co-opted word. For now.

I fear it may not be possible to separate the term 'marriage' back out from the church's ownership grab. We may need to retreat from that battleground word in order to win the war of equality under the law for same-sex unions. I'd rather concentrate on securing equality under the law than trying to win back the rights to a co-opted word. For now.

I agree with the latter part of this (concentrating on securing equality under the law...). But I think in order to do that, the fight is ultimately rooted in the word, because if it weren't for the word, there wouldn't be the fight.

The church can claim whatever 'ownership' they want to whatever words, but if we let them win the battle on the word, it's only a matter of time that they win the war on the meaning, and then the law. These things happen in small steps and often it's the concession of a seemingly inconsequential dispute on semantics that loses it all.

Consider the word "citizen" as applies to whites and blacks. What if, instead of declaring blacks born in the U.S free citizens, we declared them free citizen-like people (like a civil union is like a marriage): they have all the benefits of citizenship, they just don't have the name. Or, we call women who can vote women with voting-like rights? It's ANIMAL FARM all over: they're all equal, some are just more equal than others, because the more equal ones, in this case, get the use of a special name.

If you compromise on the word, I think you've started out losing the battle, because by backing down you've already admitted to your opponent you don't need the name, you just want the privilege and that's an inequality in itself. This is an all or nothing deal. Any compromise merely makes the opposition stronger for future morality based legislation.

Personally, I'm very picky about the words I have the right to own, 'moral' being one of them. I grew up Christian (Lutheran, Baptist, Pentacostal, Episcopalian, I did it all). Later in life, I had a reverse Paul the Apostle experience. I shed my Christian faith and replaced it with agnosticism because I was too afraid of proclaiming myself an atheist (that, and philosophically atheism is quite different from agnostocism). Why? Because popular culture held that atheists weren't moral people. It took me years to really understand what was going on: that religious organizations had cornered the market on morality and they'd be damned if they were going to give it up...and I bought into it, hook, line and sinker. Admitting you're an atheist is still a stigma...like you're expected to sacrifice goats and rob banks at any moment...but at least now I fight for the right to my word: moral. [I feel like the Jan Brady of atheism to the Marsha Brady of religion: "Marsha, Marsha, Marsha! It's always about Marsha. What about MY needs!"]

Gay people have the right to these words, too. They have the right to say, "we're married," NOT "we're civil-unioned." There IS a difference, and while the government shouldn't be in the business of attributing religious meanings to the word 'marriage,' by allowing another phrase (civil-union) to stand alongside it as though there were no difference, those who concede to it have just introduced religion into the law.

Well, since the rituals and pictures and assorted whatnot tend to center around a church service, it's not unreasonable for people to think of marriage in a religious context, even if they realize on an intellectual level that the thing that lets them file a joint tax return is the marriage license signed at the courthouse, not the cake and bridesmaids and ridiculously expensive dresses and so forth.

I personally think that terms like "domestic partnership" should be kept separate for other situations, such as two sisters cohabiting and sharing property but not sex. That would also free up the word "partner" again so you could use it in conversation to mean business or legal partner without everyone seeing it as yet another coy euphemism for something sexual.

If you're living together until death do you part, and having sex while you're doing it, you're a husband, wife or spouse. No need to make up new words to fandance around the fact that you're having sex.

Kevin, it's easy to say that other people should stop bitching about past wrongs, when you're not personally still suffering under the direct consequences of them. It was realizing how deeply and ongoing the costs of the genocide are in the Reservations today, and the *present* effects of American slavery, that made me break with the "justice" meme of the conservative movement in re affirmative action and tribal rights, and also how much the reparations - trifling in $ - for those who were slaves of the Nazi's corporate enablers, has meant to them in terms of the admission of responsiblity by the heirs of those who stubbornly persisted in denial of guilt until this year.

For those few escapees (by marrying out or otherwise being able to "pass" in their respective mainstream societies) to tell the rest of their fellow helots (eg Thomas Sowell, Kenneth Blackwell) to just suck it up and deal seems ...patronizing, to say the last.

It also smacks of wretched denial, to refuse to engage in Truth and Reconciliation - but that is typical of almost all Americans I have met in my lifetime. We don't need no reconciliation, we're the Possessors of Truth, Justice, and Mom's homemade Apple Pie...How *dare* you suggest that we have anything we need to feel sorry for?

And to conflate the value of reconciliation with an abandoning of justice - smacks of the urgent bleating in sermons of the need to "forgive seventy times seven" that the prelates of my Church have used to escape their just punishments for having enabled child abuse by lies and fraud all these generations. (It also reminds me of all the young "post feminists" I see on the net, who argue that women who complain about sexual opression are overreacting, because we've moved beyond all that today and they're just bitter about the past.)

On positive discrimination:

"Yes, but what they (Australian Aboriginals) are is a class that was discriminated against for generations."

Oh, agreed. Quite so. And that is still the case, I am ashamed to say. But the point I was making is that a guarantee of equality enshrined in a Constitution might have the effect of preventing "positive" discrimination like that. If a law, or its administration, discriminates in favour of a given ethnic group, then ipso facto that law must discriminate against other ethnic groups. I don't know whether the Constitution of the United States might be invoked to prevent this.

See, my basic problem with binary absolutes like Greg's "Do we honor the promise of equality for all, or do we ignore it and succumb to mob rule" is that I prefer the common law idea that circumstances alter cases. Now, that's an ancient idea, and so conservatives like me tend to treat it with (perhaps exaggerated) respect.

Is it succumbing to mob rule to practice discrimination in favour of Aboriginals, even if it breaches the guarantee of equality? Not in this case. Would it be succumbing to mob rule to require that, say, Muslims be required to reside in special "estates" so that they could be protected around the clock, and locked down after dark so that they'd have alibis if the need arose? Certainly, and that would be so even if it were presented as an example of "positive" discrimination. But isn't that an example of deciding matters on a case by case basis, applying, not a shining principle of equality, but a humane standard of trying to do justice? And isn't that justice a process, a series of tentative try-outs, a line in the sand? A line in water, sometimes? But not a ringing statement, an absolute, a clear choice. Usually, I find, it's an anguished compromise.

Which is not to say that one should not stand on principle. It's just that, as a conservative, I'd want the chance closely to examine the exact ground I'd lay the principle on before standing on it. I wouldn't want either the principle or me to sink and be lost forever.

One of the things that clouds this issue is that the state already places direct restrictions on the ability of churches to marry people in the form of a marriage license. It's not too far a step for the paranoid to assume that the state could try to force clergy to sanctify marriages that don't fit within the definitions of a particular church.

Maybe we need to completely separate the institutions of civil marriage and holy marriage. Let's take away the power of clergy to officiate over civil marriage, and grant all of the property and family rights only to civil marriages on a go-forward basis. The churches, synagoges, mosques and temples could do whatever they want, but the folks they marry (perhaps even in various n-person forms with n >2) would not enjoy any additional rights unless they had a civil marriage as well.

As to whether or not we used the words "civil marriage" or instead chose something like "civil union" or "domestic union" is something I'd leave to the lawyers, but I'd hire a few marketers to test the terms before moving forward.

In short, I'd rather have an equality of rights across all marriages (or unions or partnerships or whatever) than a fight over the ownership of the word and the rights of the state vs the rights of churches.

"Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but he should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think the motivation for the anti-affirmative action movement is simple denial. Since race and class boundaries are never exact, and our identities are complex, it is easy to deny personal responsibility for systematic discrimination. And there are many who would dearly like to rewrite history to put their ancestors in a better light. They would like to imagine that the advantages they enjoy over others in this country was due to their family's merit, rather than a tainted legacy of oppression.

If an employer cheated you, taking your work and withholding your wages, you would sue for back pay. There should also be economic damages because the employer enjoyed the use of the monies that should have been yours, and you had to get by without them. There should be punitive damages so they won't try to do it again.

In the matter of American slavery, the Civil War can be considered punishment enough. However, there is still the matter of Jim Crow, which happened after the Civil War when they should have known better.

We're lucky that gays are willing to settle merely for equal treatment under the law.

We're lucky that gays are willing to settle merely for equal treatment under the law.

An interesting point. At first I thought, "No, it's not luck. It's a principled stand: have you seen the "=" buttons? With 'No more, no less' around the edge?"

Then I thought, since gayness is individual, we also can't claim any rights based on the centuries-old oppression of gays. Almost all of us have straight parents (I know a few gay people with children old enough to know for sure, and those kids are all straight...this is on the order of 3 or 4 kids, though, so not really significant).

BUT consider the case of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, who've been together for 50 years. Should they get to refile their taxes jointly for the time they were denied that legal right? If they do, do they get to cherry-pick the years when they benefit from such a refiling, ignoring the ones when they would have paid a marriage penalty? Or should they have to make an all-or-nothing decision?

No, that can may be labeled "Retroactive Compensation," but it actually contains worms. Let's go forward from where we are. RIGHT NOW, dammit!

It's not too far a step for the paranoid to assume that the state could try to force clergy to sanctify marriages that don't fit within the definitions of a particular church.

The religious right wants to use the power of the state, to force churches to not sanctify marriages involving gays.

I think the religious right doesn't distinguish between religious and civic morality. They believe in their faith absolutely, leaving no room for other faiths or other moral standards. The separation of church and state makes no sense to them. They have no compunction against using state power to enforce their religion, rather they feel compelled to do so.

They think they are being oppressed by a godless state. They have no idea how much worse it will be for them under a theocracy.

As to whether or not we used the words "civil marriage" or instead chose something like "civil union" or "domestic union" is something I'd leave to the lawyers, but I'd hire a few marketers to test the terms before moving forward.

The state issues a marriage license. Whether the happy persons choose to declare their wedding in a civil ceremony or a religious one is up to them, and whatever priest or judge they can talk into officiating. They could have no ceremony at all, or a private one by themselves. I don't care. Legally, they got married when they signed on the dotted line down at City Hall. Socially, they got married when their families and friends saw them go through the wedding ceremony. The two different acts fulfill different needs so I think we will always have them.

If the state refuses grant marriage licenses to some people, I think churches are entirely justified in holding wedding ceremonies anyway. It is valid as an act of protest, and the social good of a wedding is independent of the state's approval.

Sorry about the grammos. At least they made it through the spill checker.

They think they are being oppressed

If the state refuses to grant

Must get ... coffee ...

It also smacks of wretched denial, to refuse to engage in Truth and Reconciliation - but that is typical of almost all Americans I have met in my lifetime.

Bellatrys,

Interesting how you capitalize Truth, as if you have a corner on it.

But the trouble with Reconciliation is that the people who want it run around with a one-size-fits-all guilt trip, oblivious to the fact that most Americans of European ancestry had those ancestors come here after the Civil War, and in many cases, after the Civil Rights movement. My mom moved here in the 60s. Is she supposed to apologize to people like Barrack Obama, the first-generation son of a Kenyan diplomat, when the only possible blood tie either of them have to the Civil War is maybe on Obama's mother's side?

What about the recent Russian and Ethiopian immigrants in my city? Reconciliation, and for what? Or do we wait a generation for when their kids are respectively European Americans and African Americans (and that generation is actually now, since they started moving here in the 80s) and what exactly are they supposed to say to each other? (Note: I'm in California, where few people give a damn about the Civil War.)

And bi-racial people? Is Halle Berry supposed to apologize to herself?

And what are poor white folk, who already have such lovely names applied to them as "white trash" and "trailer trash," supposed to say to someone like Oprah Winfrey, who grew up in poverty, but is now considerably richer than the Widow of Croesus, and she earned it herself too?

As I see it, address the poverty and you've addressed most of the problem. Once you've got a swimming pool, and a mai tai in your hand, the horrible injustices done to your ancestors are about as relevant as the Peloponesian War.

None of my ancestors ever owned African slaves. They might have owned Saxon or Slavic slaves, since a lot of them were in Ireland. They might have been owned AS slaves.

I say, France out of Brittany! Saxons out of Britain! Celts out of Spain (oops, they already (mostly) left)! Indo-Europeans out of India and Western Europe! Humans out of everywhere except equatorial Africa!

Oh, here we go: Mammals out of Gondwanaland!

Kevin - I've never seen Truth and Reconciliation commisions anything but capitalized, when reading about them. Is your rhetorical snideness due to the same insecurity that makes you set up straw men, or is this simply the only way you know how to debate? (If so, I will cut you some slack, because I realize some people don't honestly know how to argue, and aren't doing it on purpose.)

This is a false dichotomy: to insist on creating some vast paradigm as if all cases must be treated identically on a Platonic plane of abstractions, and then, because that is clearly absurd, to say that there are therefore *no* just grounds for any reparations, is folly - as if to say that because some crimes clearly have mitigating circumstances, therefore *no* crimes should ever be prosecuted.

(It's the kind of pseudo-argument I'm more used to seeing on Town Hall or in the pages of First Things, than here, I admit, though I used to run into it teaching jr high CCD a lot.)

Bellatrys,

You never mentioned any commissions, just Truth and Reconciliation, capitalized in the same paragraph as Mom's homemade Apple Pie. Is there a commission for that too that I'm not aware of?

As for things like:

Is your rhetorical snideness due to the same insecurity that makes you set up straw men, or is this simply the only way you know how to debate? (If so, I will cut you some slack,

I do know enough about formal debating terms to know that that's an ad hominem attack. But I suppose if you can pardon my rhetorical snideness, I can pardon your incredible condescension, including incessant use of pejoratives, such as "smacks of the urgent bleating" which, to my mind at least, also should qualify as rhetorical snideness, not to mention hypocrisy. But I suppose in the same spirit as you pardoning me in my poor beknighted ignorance (suitable for a junior high school), I can pardon your rhetorical snideness as well.

However, to make this discussion a bit more useful, it seems from your mention of First Things--a magazine which I'm only familiar with because I know the poetry editor, not that I've ever even seen a copy--that you guessed I'm Irish Catholic, which I'm not, and also wasn't raised with it so hardly know the first thing about current conservative religious dialogue, and certainly not all the buzzwords. This debate is the first time I've seen Truth and Reconcilliation capitalized outside of 19th century poetry, but I'll be happy to do a websearch for it....

Alright, just did. Important thing for South Africa, but the only government website is one for Zaire, and it evidently wasn't important enough for them to maintain, since I can't pull the page up. Though there is the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission for Stonehenge. As neither of these is my neck of the woods, I'm not too alarmed about having been ignorant of them, and anyway, now I do know about them, so it's covered. On with the debate.

As for the false dichotomy business, I agree with your statement about what one is, but that wasn't my argument. My argument, which I suppose I didn't make succinctly enough, is that monetary reparations are irrelevant if an individual's personal wealth is enough that they are not suffering from any of the crimes inflicted on their ancestors. And if they are suffering, their suffering is not inherently more worthy than that of a person whose ancestors did not suffer crimes against humanity, but has nevertheless been born into an equally awful situation. What needs to be addressed is the poverty, not the cause.

Aside from that, yes, we should put up monuments that say "This was an awful thing that never should have happened, and we're sorry" but at a certain point, history has to become history as well.

Kevin,

I think you may be pointing at a red herring, a bit. If the issue is governmental reparations, then your mother's personal culpability is not at issue. The government is hers as much as it is any other citizen's, and its responsibilities are incumbent upon its citizens, just as its benefits are conferred: your mother did not personally fight in the Civil War or demonstrate to get suffrage for women, either, but she is equally benefited by the results of those actions.

Even in the realm of personal culpability, though, I think there is some argument to be made that your mother, though she did not personally come here during the time of slavery, did, upon her arrival, begin participating in and benefiting from a system that derived from the days of slavery. And certainly, if she came over in the 60s, she participated in the cafeteria of racial discrimination that was Jim Crow laws and FHA restrictions and redlining and discriminatory lending practices, etc etc.

I am not in any way saying that she was an *active* participant in perpetuating that system, but it was the system in place when she arrived and she could not help but be part of it. How that relates to any compensation is a much more difficult question, absolutely.

I have thought about this a lot, since my maternal grandparents came here after WWII. I suppose I could say that they had no responsibility for anything that happened before they got here...but then why did they come, if not to become part of the country, part of the process, and as such part of the continuum?

Note that this argument does not work well with my grandmother when I debate with her about Native American sovereignty, though. :)

Stefanie,

Fair points, but I thought I made it fairly clear that I was all for government reparations, scholarships, assistance and whatnot, at least in the case of economic hardship.

As for Jim Crow in the 60s, it certainly had an effect, but that effect wasn't homogenous throughout the 50 states. If we're talking about reparations, does the money come from the federal government or from the states? I think it's fair to say that Alabama had a lot more Jim Crow going than Hawaii.

I suppose, following the "were all in this together" argument, we could take federal disaster relief as a model and use funds to clean up urban blights.

Kevin, you jumped on bellatrys for capitalizing the words truth and reconciliation, though Truth and Reconciliation Commissions often come up in discussions about how to deal with great historic crimes. I get snide in arguments myself, and there's no good reason for it, but I know that when caught making a snide comment out of ignorance the proper thing to do is admit that you were wrong.

Yes. I got a couple of days behind around here, and I'm still a bit hazy about why Kevin and Bellatrys are on one another's case, but that detail really jumped out at me. There was nothing untoward, arch, or tendentious about Bellatrys upcasing "Truth and Reconciliation", and as a reader I understood immediately what was being referred to.

In for a penny...

Here's the letter I just finished writing to my local MP.

The Hon. Robert Kucera, MLA
10th Floor, Dumas House
2 Havelock Street
WEST PERTH WA 6005

Dear Mr Kucera,

I understand that it is the intention of the State Government to bring down legislation that will define marriage as being only possible between one man and one woman. This will have the effect of outlawing same-sex marriage, and hence bar a class of persons from the various legal rights accorded married people. This is despite the fact that there is no definable difference between their actual situations at law. Homosexual couples raise children, contract financial responsibilities and amass property jointly in exactly the same way that heterosexuals do. They act in all respects as married people to exactly the same extent that heterosexual couples do. There is no use blinking at this; the fact must be recognised.

It is no business of the State to intervene in the private lives of its citizens, so long as they remain within the law, as these unions do. It is emphatically the business of the State to grant equal rights to all its citizens. Further, the State has no role in enforcing religious law, no matter what the private religious beliefs of legislators.

Like most people in my situation, I came late and reluctantly to these conclusions. I married once, am still married to the same woman, and I am generally proud to call myself a conservative. I must admit to a mild distaste for public sexual exhibitionism, on the grounds of good taste, and I don’t care for the Gay Pride and Mardi Gras marches for that reason. But there is no good reason for this legislation, and every good reason to allow same-sex couples to marry on the very same basis as different-sex couples. Nobody is demanding that any given celebrant solemnise such an occasion. The various Churches are of course entitled to perform, or to not perform, ceremonies as they like.

But the State’s duty is to treat similar situations similarly, without applying any law other than its own. If homosexual acts and unions are lawful – and they are – and discrimination on grounds of gender or sexual preference is unlawful – and it is – then the rest must follow.

I urge you to consider these points, and I urge you to speak against the legislation. Further, I urge you to advocate legislation that would specifically permit same-sex couples to marry under exactly the same conditions, with the same documentation and legal rights, as different-sex couples.

Yours faithfully,

D. E. Luckett

Dave Luckett now goes on my list of People I Only Know Online But Really, Really Like. This should not be construed as in any way compromising his position in the People I Really Must Meet In Person Some Day list.

In fact, Dave, you're now on the The First Time We're In The Same Bar, He Doesn't Pay For His Own Drinks At All list. Well, unless I get laid off. I work for Marsh.

Is it OK if I share your letter, giving due credit, with a group of my friends? There's a listserve I belong to, and some of them are quite conservative, but I think they would find your letter not only persuasive but expressive of many of their own feelings. If you'd prefer not, I'll link to it here, but I think they'll be more likely to read it if I actually paste it into the list.

Bless you, Dave.

What a wonderful letter! Good job, Dave.

Dave,

Excellent. I'm really glad to read this letter, and am proud to have had some part in the thought process leading up to it.

Donald, Bellatrys,

Agreed. I hadn't heard of the Truth and Reconcilliation Commissions until they were mentioned, so apologies for the remark on that.

Kevin's idea of using federal disaster relief as a model for delivering educational and vocational opportunities to the places where past and present policies have created inequities is brilliant (at least I think so). Even as a metaphor in discussion, it works for me.

Dave Luckett wrote:
Greg London: What is your opinion of legal tolerance of excluding a given racial group, or of all racial groups but one, from various forms of public assistance? For example, grants for education and training, access to legal aid and so on, which are here available only to Australian Aboriginals.

Over here, we call reverse discrimination "Affirmative Action".

I favor a minimal level of affirmative action to correct a previously held monopoly that whatever the majority in power may have had.

The question is where does the program go from fixing a great injustice to replacing it with a smaller injustice. That doesn't have any easy answer.

Gay marriage isn't reverse discrimination though. It isn't favoring gays over heterosexual marriages. It's saying it should be teh same for both.

Greg, I'm pretty sure Dave's convinced on the topic of Gay Marriage!

See, my basic problem with binary absolutes like Greg's "Do we honor the promise of equality for all, or do we ignore it and succumb to mob rule" is that I prefer the common law idea that circumstances alter cases.

Yeah, it's an absolute, even binary, attitude. And, yeah, I think affirmative action fits in with it, at least in concept. (implementation has been a lot trickier.)

The basic premise is that if you have a minority group that has been held at a huge disadvantage by the majority (for example, whites holding blacks as slaves and later segregating them to black-only facilities) then the court can say "blacks and whites must be treated equally" and segregation laws can be struck down, but the actual implementation may retain segregation and racism.

If whites and blacks are supposed to be equal, but no blacks are getting admitted into a college, do you fix it on a case by case basis with individual lawsuits, or do you fix it with affirmative action requiring all schools to admit a certain percentage of minorities? At the point when no blacks are getting admitted at all, I'd support affirmative action because "equal" is a hollow word if the facts on the ground say otherwise.

equality doesn't just refer to what we ARE, it also refers to what we can DO. And if we ARE equal but somehow minorities cannot DO the same things that the majority can do (sit at the front of a bus, go to the same school, get the same job), then equality is not honored and laws may be needed to correct it.

Which isn't to say affirmative action has never turned into bald-faced discrimination favoring the minority.

The question is whether or not there are major inequities in the opportunities that a group has simply because of who they are (black or aboriginal or whatever group). Affirmative action can be applied in broad strokes to fix large problems like that.

Once the two groups are treated nearly equal (not perfectly equal, but nearly equal), affirmative action should be dropped before it starts generating new resentments. It also allows the minority group to start functioning without a government crutch.

Both groups in the end should be able to stand on their own as equals.

The tricky part is figuring out when you've hit that point.

Xopher wrote:
Greg, I'm pretty sure Dave's convinced on the topic of Gay Marriage!

Yeah, I figured that out later. I was offline all day yesterday and I was reading through and replying to posts as I read them. At the time, I wasn't sure if the question was in reference to gay marriage or not. When I read the later post, I saw that it was actually in reference to an absolute/binary demand for equality and replied to that.

No malice was meant on my part, though, so I didn't think an apology was needed. But since you flagged it, I'll clarify:

Dave, no malice was intended in my post. If I came across like a jerk, I apologize.

The trouble is, the United States is not homogenous. The inequities that exist in one corner are not in the same proportion in another corner, and certainly have varied over the course of generations.

There was a time when signs said "Irish Need Not Apply." My grandfather told me about being called "a dirty Mick." My only possible complaint is that people who see my name sometimes assume I'm Catholic, or at least was raised as such. And while there are likely places where I'd suffer some form of discrimination because of my name, they're probably balanced out by the ones where I'd get some unwarranted advantage.

I'll admit I'm not fond of affirmative action, but compared to several other inequities, it's relatively slight, and serves to balance the scales, even if they swing wildly at times.

Xopher, Michael,

Talk about there being more joy in Heaven...

Look, guys, I'm still an old straight bloke with the unshakeable idea that change will almost always produce losers as well as winners, and that the more fundamental the change is, the more this is likely to be true. I want to examine change critically, and I'm afraid I generally want to do it with cautious and skeptical empiricism rather than through idealism and appeal to theory; this often means tentative experiment, not bold leaps. I think that's how things actually get better. That's conservatism.

As to buying drinks, my wife and I plan to be at Worldcon in Glasgow next year; but if we meet, I must insist that I'm an Australian, and I stand my round. Call it a cultural value.

I am told that there's a pub in that city that stocks over a hundred different single-malt whiskeys, and I sorely wish to find it. On the other hand, (and I hope I will not offend anyone with a statement of personal taste) places where one must stand up in a crowd while bright lights flash and music plays at a visceral volume are a close approximation to my conception of hell. Purgatory is where the music merely interferes with the conversation. Unless, of course, the music is worth listening to for its own sake.

Greg, no apology is needed.

How do you react to this?:

I used to work with a woman - same level, same organisation. We used to car-pool. It took me quite some time to realise that she was Aboriginal. (There is no such thing, in Australian practice, as part-Aboriginal. One either is or isn't, depending on declaration, membership of Aboriginal organisations and acceptance by other Aboriginal people.) She had dark hair, dark eyes and olive skin, but nothing out of the ordinary. She lived in the same sort of house in the same sort of suburb that we did, drove a rather better car than ours, and had three children at private schools. I remarked that that must be fairly expensive. She replied that it wasn't really, because the Abstudy grants and assistance paid for nearly all of it. Their house was on an Aboriginal housing assistance loan, the effect of which was to peg interest at zero plus inflation. As a result the family was able to take an interstate holiday most years and an overseas trip one year in three.

I can't think of anything I knew about her that was outside of the usual Australian middle-class demographic for life-style. She was, of course, strongly attached to the idea that affirmative action was completely justified, in her case.

I must confess that I'm not so sure - in her case. And I wonder...how many other cases are like that, how much is it costing, and who loses by it?

Dave -
Xopher, Michael,
Talk about there being more joy in Heaven...
Look, guys, I'm still an old straight bloke ...

Well, I can't speak for Xopher, but all I said was "Bless you", not "Give us a kiss, then".

I must confess that I'm not so sure - in her case.

Why? Because her family is no longer poor? Sounds to me like a case of AA working as it should, and people making sensible use of the benefits they've been alloted. With a start like that, I'd be very surprised if her children did not go on to make positive contributions in their turn to society's good, as their parents (apparently) are now doing.

Dave: Let me join in the group thanking you for participating in this discussion with an open mind; not so open as to accept everything uncritically, but open enough to listen to and seriously consider others' arguments, and to allow yourself to be convinced if you find them convincing.

Thank you also for your letter, and for sharing it with us.

Let me also say that I (sadly) won't be at Glasgow, but should you make it to a Boston-area con at some future time, I would join the "want to buy you a drink" list--and I don't even drink!

pericat: "Why? Because her family is no longer poor?"

No, because other Aboriginal families are still poor. (In fact because they live under conditions that are a disgrace to the nation.) But with all the goodwill in the world, the resources available to alleviate that poverty are not limitless. Using them to increase the affluence of those who are not poor, and would still not be poor if the benefits were denied them, is to my mind a misuse of them.

pericat: "Why? Because her family is no longer poor?"

No, because other Aboriginal families are still poor.

Anyone you know? (I ask because you appear to know that lady well enough to discuss her financial situation, so I'm assuming, perhaps erroneously, that you are that well acquainted with other Aboriginal families.)

pericat: ummm, no. I have read the National Report on the Causes of Aboriginal Poverty, which documents some appalling statistics, and that's enough evidence for me that Aboriginal poverty is a national disgrace. Whatever the solution might be, providing the benefits I mentioned to people who aren't by any reasonable description poor can't be part of it.

But I shouldn't have discussed the lady's financial situation here. I apologise.

Things like this happen fairly commonly.

I remember at my high school, which was hardly all white, but you could count the black students if you sat down and throught hard about it. (Not the case with the Asian and Indian students, who were about a third of the class, and there were a fair number of hispanics as well.) Anyway, our fairly elected student body president was black, and on graduation, I heard he'd won the "Young Black Leader" scholarship, despite the fact that his parents were fairly well to do and would have been able to send him to college regardless.

My general thought at the time, and still, is that there were definitely some poorer students who could have used the scholarship more, but I couldn't blame him for reaching out for free money, and in his place, I would have done the same thing.

I must confess that I'm not so sure - in her case. And I wonder...how many other cases are like that, how much is it costing, and who loses by it?

It depends on how one sets up the dichotomy. If her rising out of poverty was necessarily at the expense of others like her, that would be bad. If, on the other hand, it were mostly at the expense of those who immigrated to the land her ancestors used to own, it seems like a fair trade. Also, one has to question whether the situation is a zero-sum game. My feeling is that affirmative action is a positive-sum game, and that we all benefit from helping others achieve a modicum of success. There would be limits, of course. Not everyone can be a millionaire. But you described someone who was living a middle-class lifestyle, comfortable, not wildly extravagant.

This reminds me of the fact that African-Americans in the middle class on average work more and have less savings than middle-class European-Americans. They are getting by, but just barely, and at a higher price. So don't assume that because you see someone living in the middle class that they have the level of economic resources and security that they should. I don't know your former co-worker, and if she really is doing well, so much the better for her.

It may be possible that she does not need assistance, but that doesn't mean she doesn't deserve some sort of benefits. Imagine if the Aboriginals had lawyers when the English landed (or if the English had respected the Aboriginal laws), and if the very best lands around downtown Perth had been leased to the colonists instead of taken by them. You're really getting off very cheaply.

That's my reaction. Thank you for your thoughtful comments.

pericat: ummm, no. I have read the National Report on the Causes of Aboriginal Poverty, which documents some appalling statistics, and that's enough evidence for me that Aboriginal poverty is a national disgrace. Whatever the solution might be, providing the benefits I mentioned to people who aren't by any reasonable description poor can't be part of it.

I think maybe it's a case of apples and oranges, then. I know some people who have done exceptionally well with the opportunities they've been given and the resources they've been able to muster, but setting them up as examples of their 'class' would, to my mind, be unfair to both them and to the faceless ones to whom you compared your friend.

In discussing AA as a whole with my partner over supper, she pointed out that AA programs are meant to rectify the grosser effects of power imbalances between classes, and that regardless of how well some members of the disadvantaged class did, or how poorly some members of the advantaged class did, the basic power imbalance remains: poor people, as a class, have not the power to affect (for good or ill) not-poor people.

You must correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that Australian Aboriginals do not have co-equal power and influence in either finance or government, with non-Aboriginals. I'm basing this notion not just on what I've heard here and there, but on your citing of the existence of a National Council that studies Aboriginal poverty as separate from general poverty.

As I understand the purpose of AA programs, within a few generations there may be still the poor and the not-poor, but there would not be whole swaths of people born to poverty, whose parents and grandparents were likewise situated, and who have no hope of bettering themselves, solely because of their class or heritage. IOW, as someone smarter than I said once, we may always have the poor with us, but there's no reason they need to be the same people.

When Australia's social makeup is such that a National Council to study Aboriginal poverty would not be convened, since the reasons for Aboriginals being poor are indistinguishable from the reasons non-Aboriginals are likewise poor, then Australia would no longer need AA programs geared to bettering the lot of Aboriginals in particular.

But I shouldn't have discussed the lady's financial situation here. I apologise.

As you did not identify her, I don't think an apology necessary.

Dave,

Being that you're Australian, I'm certain you know far more about the Aboriginal plight than I, so I'll defer to your historical knowledge if I get something wrong.

First, I'm not sure where I stand on AA. As a principle I'd have to say I'm against discrimination of any kind, including some forms of reverse discrimination that have resulted from AA practices (I keep wanting to spell out Alcoholics Anonymous ;-). Anyhow, I'm inclined to believe that as a race which suffered grievous wrongs for hundreds of years there is a time period in which it's appropriate to compensate that race and that time period should have something to do with how long it takes a new generation of that race to come out from under the cloud of its enslaved past (education-wise, health-wise, opportunity-wise).

As an example, slavery in America officially ended in 1865 with the ratification of the 13th ammendment, but Reconstruction lasted much longer, and the actual acceptance of the end of slavery, well, there's some folk who *still* do't accept it... Now that black people were freed, they were left with little or no education, no money, little or no skills (except those they learned while being forced to work on plantations), and a hell of a lot of justified hatred. Slaves were never given the opportunity to pursue their own happiness and create any kind of wealth to pass along to their generations, so it seems only fair to institute reparations for the whole race until such time as that race is on equal footing with the race that enslaved it. Just *what* is that time frame? Well, you got me there. I'm not so sure, but I'm inclined to think, some 150 years later, maybe it's not so much of a financial or educational issue as it was a hundred years ago. African-Americans still suffer tremendous prejudice in this country, but I don't know how many of them still suffer from the injustices of slavery, between which I think it's important to note, there is a difference.

But I think it's too soon to be comparing this with the Stolen Generations (I checked, I can capitalize it!) of the Aboriginal people. From 1910 all the way up to 1970 Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their homes, separated, and sent to rehabilitation schools where they had their cultures scrubbed from their lives. They were taught to integrate with white Australians as, basically, slaves: mistreated, malnourished, raped, even killed. There are displaced children living today still searching for their families.

The example you gave of your friend who drives a nice car, has a nice house, takes nice vacations, I wonder what the whole context is. Does she have missing family members, an aunt, or uncle, or grandmother who endured the terrible tragedy of being ripped from their homes? And I guess even if she doesn't know someone personally, less than 35 years ago her government wanted to eradicate her race. What do you think she thinks of that?

Like I said when I started this note, I'm deferring to you if I've gotten my facts wrong on this. A couple years ago I saw the movie "Rabbit-Proof Fence" and was motivated to do more research on the subject. Perhaps in 150 years when reparations are still being made to the Aboriginal people we can compare it to American slavery.

And, after all, *you* personally didn't take part in displacing these children (as far as I know), so you might be wondering why you should pay for it (as I wonder why I should pay for slave reparations or my father, who is German and was 10 years old when WWII ended should pay for the holocaust). That's where things get fuzzy for me. I'm in favor of finding all the people (including corporations who ever supported such crimes) actually responsible and taking *their* money.

Anyhow, those are my convoluted thoughts. It's a difficult topic for me so I'm glad we're threading it.

How do you react to this?:

Anectodal evidence in confoundingly tricky. I also must confess that my knowledge of the Aboriginal issues are likely less than zero (I probably know more false information and myths than I know facts adn truths).

The first question is whether or not the budget for this program is the limiting factor or whether the population of beneficiaries is the limiting factor. Put another way, does the program have enough money that this woman can have her house, private schools, and vacations, and still have plenty left over for the less fortunate Aboriginies? That means the population is what is limiting the payouts. The other scenario is that there is enough money for the program to only help some of the Aboriginies, not all of them, and this woman may be getting assistance at the expense of some Aboriginie who is less fortunate.

If the money is the limiting factor, and this woman may be taking benefits from someone less fortunate, then it really comes down to what the Aboriginies think of the situation. If they think its perfectly fine, then who am I to disagree. If they think the program should prioritize its benefits to the least fortunate of the Aboriginies, then further analysis of the situation is in order.

If the population is the limiting factor, and there is enough money that everyone can get benefits, then the question is more a matter of does the government want to support people like this woman. I would not be surprised if over time you find people who used to call themselves white suddenly declare themselves Aboriginie simply to get benefits. Then the question is how do you define who gets the benefits.

So, two possibilities:

either (1) a limited amount of money and this woman may be taking benefits from others less fortunate. In this case, ask the beneficiaries how they want to divy up the money.

or (2) enough money for all who qualify. In this case it is up to the benefactors to decide how to fairly define who qualifies for benefits.

I tried to write a coherent response to Jax's post, but when I hit 2000 words I realised I had failed. I'm afraid that the subject is too large for me, the problems too stupendous, the scope too great.

May I make one comment? Insofar as the neglect and absence of mind of earlier Australian governments can be characterised as policy at all, it was not actually to "eradicate" Aboriginal people, certainly not as late as 1970. If they thought about it at all - and there's little evidence that anyone ever did - they thought that Aboriginal traditional culture and what they then called "full-blood" people themselves would die out naturally, with their descendants becoming more and more mixed in race and western in culture. By 1930 this was slowly being replaced with "assimilation", which was the same without the distasteful references to people dying out.

The only minor comfort to be drawn from this is that at least intermarriage was generally expected - and in fact, it did often take place. In the USA miscegenation was often barred. In Australia, it was a public policy. Please don't think I call this an improvement.

Greg, estimates of Aboriginal population depend on what criteria are accepted for Aboriginality. Some time ago we gave up the idea that we should make some sort of count of what proportion of a person's ancestors were Aboriginal.

About 380 000 people check the box on the census form, a five-fold increase over 1974. About 150, 000 appear to access the programs, and maintain an affiliation with an Aboriginal organisation. About 40 000 seem to lead a traditional or mostly traditional lifestyle. According to the last census, about 48% of adults who claim Aboriginality are married to people who don't.

The budget for special Aboriginal programs, State and Federal, is about $A1.5 billion per annum.

Dave, I accept your cultural value of standing a round, of course. The problem is that I don't actually drink myself, and even when I did never wanted to have as many drinks as there were people in the group, which is what the "everyone stands a round" thing results in.

So I'll buy you a single-malt whiskey, and you'll buy me a seltzer with a wedge of lime (pretty much all I drink these days - it's a med thing), and we'll call that a round each. Deal? I'll buy your wife one, too.

And while I agree that there's a "more joy in heaven" effect operating here, it's also true that a letter favoring same-sex marriage from a self-declared conservative is likely to have more impact on a legislator, especially but not only if the legislator is hirself conservative.

Jax wrote:

And, after all, *you* personally didn't take part in displacing these children (as far as I know), so you might be wondering why you should pay for it (as I wonder why I should pay for slave reparations or my father, who is German and was 10 years old when WWII ended should pay for the holocaust). That's where things get fuzzy for me. I'm in favor of finding all the people (including corporations who ever supported such crimes) actually responsible and taking *their* money.

The trouble with corporations is a bit more complex, especially in that corporations are held by stockholders, and stockholders change.

For example, my grandfather invested heavily in German railway stock, being an economist and knowing this would likely survive the war. It didn't save his life, but it did end up providing for a lot, including college funds for myself and all my cousins.

Everyone knows the part trains played in the holocaust, but I think there's a difference between "supported" and "pressed into service." Yet even if you find direct culpability, at this date do you fine current stockholders for the involvement of past war profiteers whose heirs have long since cashed out and spent the money?

I think the only clear case is the one with the banks. If you die, your heirs are supposed to get the money. If heirs can't be found, the bank doesn't just get to pocket it.

About 380 000 people check the box on the census form, a five-fold increase over 1974.

Well, with intermarriage, I think the population of people with some fraction of Aboriginie heritage can only increase.

I do not support Affirmative Action to the point that it compensates people for the sins committed against their ancestors. I support it to the point that it corrects inequities in the opportunities that people have NOW.

My gut feeling is that that woman you spoke of has the same opportunities as you and your average white person in Australia, and that her house, private schooling, and vacations should not be subsidized.

As the definition of "Aboriginie" becomes more diffused, it might be that the idea of Affirmative Action is impossible based on race (your country simply will not be able to support it when EVERYONE has a great-great-grandfather who was aboriginie) and should instead be defined based on need. It would be called Welfare instead of Affirmative Action at that point.

And if it happens that a lot of Aboriginie people meet the definition of need, then so be it. My guess is that this woman you mentioned would not. This isn't to say that people don't use Welfare to get benefits that they don't really need, but no bureaucratic institution is ever know for its efficiency.

For example, my grandfather invested heavily in German railway stock, being an economist and knowing this would likely survive the war. It didn't save his life, but it did end up providing for a lot, including college funds for myself and all my cousins.

Kevin, your points are well taken and as I said earlier, this is not such an easy question for me. I do think, though, that stockholders are responsible for discovering as much about a company as is publicly available before investing, and if they don't do the research and the company's poor performance or illegal ties comes back to bite them, well, it's on the investor *if the information was knowable.*

This is not to speak at all to your grandfather's investment. I have no idea of his context, whether or not he knew or had the ability to know the railroads were transporting Jews to their eventual deaths. But, if he did know, and invested anyway, I would say *his* return would be subject to fines. It's like investing in real estate when one *knows* that property was bought with drug money. It's the risk of being part of something illegal.

Now, should *you* have to pay any fines with the money you received as part of your grandfather's investment. Of course, that doesn't seem fair and you made excellent points about the initial investors who might have known about the nature of their investments have already made and spent their money. Does the torch pass to you? I'd have to say no on that. I'm not a fan of the current Holocaust tax which Germans still have to pay today (I think...maybe they stopped it a couple years ago?), because what the hell did any of them have to do with the holocaust? It is a classic case of the son paying for the sins of the father.

But, you know, what if you've amassed a huge amount of wealth based on the specific investments into Nazi-supported companies at the time they were supporting them (Ford Motor being a huge one), I would say, should those companies be forced into a settlement and if you still have stock in the company, you would be responsible for either selling your stock or you'd have to the take lumps of a depleted stock. After all, if you invested in Ford during the war and your stock quadrupled due to the German based Ford factories supplying military vehicles to the Nazi's...because you personally profited from that and because your money supported it, I'd say it's subject to fine.

There's an interesting thing with Cisco stock. I don't own any, but my husband does, and I'm sure I'll be all too happy to take part in any profit we make from selling the stock. But, an interesting tidbit on Cisco: they've been accused of supplying highly customized firewalls and software designed *spefically* for China in order to spy on their citizens and prevent them from reaching certain websites. This has allegedly resulted in numerous arrests of Chinese citizens who simply searched for "Chinese Independence." Whether or not or to what extent this is true, it's still information I need to be aware of as an investor and if ever some financial restitution were to result, either in depleted stock or actual fines, I think I'd be responsible if I invested in the company.

Just how, to what extent, after what date, and what kind of money we're talking about, I'm just not sure about. Alas, I'm at the same place I started.

Jax wrote:

I'm in favor of finding all the people (including corporations who ever supported such crimes) actually responsible and taking *their* money.

That would be nice, but I support the idea of Affirmative Action, Welfare, Public Schools, and other such programs on the idea that everyone benefits when everyone is given equal opportunities. And so, I don't mind some of my tax dollars going to them.

This points to the difference between my attitude towards helping giving people equal oppportunity NOW and the idea of compensating people for sins committed against them or their ancestors.

I'm for programs that help people have equal opportunity now.

Punitive damages can be paid by the perpetrators. I would not favor the idea of the government paying blacks reparations for the slavery that their ancestors endured.

Amid all the depressing stuff going on, there is one ray of sunshine I just discovered:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movies/feature/thehitchhikersguidetothegalaxy.html

Jax,

There's a discrepancy in your arguments with the stock investments between *if it was knowable* and *if it was known.*

From practical purposes, it's impossible for an investor to look into every possible aspect of a company they're thinking to buy stock in, especially in the case of an investment tip which needs to be acted on immediately. Whereas if a crime is known, the company is generally being prosecuted in court for it.

With Ford Motors and Cisco, both of those things were happening legally with the US government's blessing, so I'd park the blame there instead if I have to park it anywhere, since it's not likely either the Nazis or the Chinese government said to the respective companies "Thank you, these should work splendidly to help us hunt and kill our own citizens!"

It's best as I see it to let the war crimes trials start and end with the war criminals and go no further. If you don't, you start looking like the French revolutionaries going after Marie Antoinette's hairdresser.

With Ford Motors and Cisco, both of those things were happening legally with the US government's blessing, so I'd park the blame there instead if I have to park it anywhere, since it's not likely either the Nazis or the Chinese government said to the respective companies "Thank you, these should work splendidly to help us hunt and kill our own citizens!"

Kevin,

I understand the point you're making here and there's sense to it, but using the same logic...the German government sanctioned the extermination of Jews. That doesn't excuse the individuals and corporations who willingly jumped on the kill-all-the-Jews bandwagon. I'll grant the choices were limited in Germany (either you complied or you fled or you died), but the U.S. is different in that the U.S. government may have permitted it, but they certainly didn't encourage it or make it a law.

I don't know whether or not the Chinese government thanked Cisco for their contribution toward oppressing their people, but there's a lot of evidence suggesting this was exactly the case with Hitler and Ford. A few references:

Holocaust Studies
Ford Lawsuit

Just because a government legalizes thud behavior shouldn't excuse the thud. Sure, the government's responsible for sanctioning the crime. But so is the person or institution that perpetrated it.

In regards to investing, one certainly can't know everything but there is a reasonable amount of knowledge that can be gained about any company. Acting off of a hot stock tip without doing the research yourself might get you rich, but it might bankrupt you if you didn't spend the time getting publicly available facts about the company.

I don't mean to say that if you unwittingly invested in some company who was later proven to have ties to terrorism that you should be brought up on charges.

Anyhow, your points are well taken. We may see things a bit differently on this subject, but as I said before, it's not something I'm completely sure about, so there's much to still consider.

Kevin,
This is actually a more in-depth, less biased reference to the Ford lawsuit article I linked to in my previous note:

Ford Lawsuit

Sally Beasley here. (Dave Luckett's wife, incidentally). I find myself wanting to chime in on the issue of Australian Aborigines, particularly in relation to Jax's post:

"But I think it's too soon to be comparing this with the Stolen Generations (I checked, I can capitalize it!) of the Aboriginal people. From 1910 all the way up to 1970 Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their homes, separated, and sent to rehabilitation schools where they had their cultures scrubbed from their lives. They were taught to integrate with white Australians as, basically, slaves: mistreated, malnourished, raped, even killed. There are displaced children living today still searching for their families."

I came to Australia in 1977, an immigrant from Britain, and immediately became involved in child welfare work. I can say from personal experience that there were Aboriginal children removed from their families and placed with white families as late as the mid-1970s. I can also say that Australian Aborigines didn't get universal suffrage until as recently as 1962 (although some Aborigines acquired citizenship and the vote earlier).

Currently, child abuse and violence are endemic problems among Aborigines, both those who live in cities and those who don't. Aboriginal people have a much shorter life expectancy than non-Aborigines. Aboriginal organisations put family problems and life expectancy alike down to the Stolen Generation and the lack of ownership of traditional lands. I'm not sure whether that's the case, either way. What I can say is: here is a group that is substantially disadvantaged. It is also a group that has demonstrably been treated in non-equal ways in the (relatively recent) past. I therefore believe that AA programs for Aborigines are a good idea, and that it doesn't matter if some benefits of the programs get to people who don't objectively need them as long as they do get to people who do.

OTOH, the argument that some of the benefits of affirmative action programs go to people who don't need them is usually made by people who are using it as ammunition to suggest that therefore the programs aren't needed. On that basis there may be an argument for being more selective about benefits. AA is a vexed question, anyway - if administered by non-Aborigines, it often doesn't actually help the people it is meant to help, or not in a way that is acceptable to the people it is meant to help. If administered by Aborigines or Aboriginal organisations, it still often doesn't help the people it's meant to help, and there have been several cases of embezzlement and large-scale misuse. Possibly there needs to be a situation in which Aborigines/Aboriginal organisations have a choice of programs and have the ability to develop programs, but where Aboriginality is not a prerequisite qualification for administering the AA programs. And where the administration of the programs is regularly audited.

Jax,

Read the third, relatively neutral reference link. The parallels between Ford in Nazi Germany, and Haliburton in Iraq, are, well, similar.

The trouble with corporations, governments and wars is that when there's a war, the governments are going to strong-arm every corporation into making things for that war, and the fact that Germany did this before the US isn't that remarkable since Germany started the war and was involved in it before the US. And to read the article, it shows that Ford plants in Germany built the trucks used to invade Poland while Ford plants in the US built, under licence with Roll-Royce, the engines for the planes which were likely the ones used to firebomb Dresden.

No one's talking about Dresden asking for reparations from Ford and Rolls-Royce, mostly because atrocities from the Allied side don't count, not even Hiroshima, but the plain fact is that if Henry Ford had told both Hitler and FDR to go take a flying leap, none of his assembly lines were going to be used to produce widgets for any war, ha ha, the company would have swiftly gone bankrupt, due to the wartime propaganda machine of both countries, not to mention the governments simply seizing whatever they damn pleased in the interest of national security and the war effort.

Besides which, after a while you're just going after Marie Antoinette's hairdresser. Yes, if she'd had bad hair maybe she wouldn't have oppressed the peasants as well or as effectively, but the fact is, Marie would have found another hairdresser, the same as Hitler would have found another automotive plant, and when the all powerful leader of a country comes to you and tells you to give them a hairdo or build them a car, you generally do.

Saying that Nazis wouldn't have been able to invade Poland without Ford trucks rather avoids the option of getting some other sort of truck, or just simply invading with wagons and horsedrawn carts, as people did in previous centures, assuming we're postulating a 20th century where there aren't any automobiles, which is still more plausible than a world where the Polish flee in trucks while the Nazis invade on bicycles.

My other thought is that war reparations with companies should have a date closer to the war, since a lot of this lawsuit smells of extortion with moldy old skeletons from the closet and threats to scream "Holocaust!" and thereby depress sales and stock prices unless someone gives them fat sacks of cash to shut up, go away, and try the same trick with someone else, despite the fact that Henry Ford's writings on why anti-Semitism was cool really have little bearing on the current board of the Ford motor company.

When I was driving down to World Fantasy a couple weeks ago, I drove by the cotton fields on I-5 and saw huge freight car-sized bales of cotton covered with tarps stamped with M.H. WHITNEY, obviously the corporate heir of old Eli Whitney, who invented the cotton gin and thereby caused the huge boom in slavery (despite thinking it might do the opposite).

There's a corporation which profited massively from slavery, and is still in business today. How much should they pay?

We could also go back to carding cotton and removing the seeds by hand, not to mention assembling each car individually, but that really isn't practical.

Besides which, you have to look at all the economic twists. Do you fine the Whitney company for making the cotton gins and selling them to the slave owners, thereby increasing their productivity and allowing them to buy more slaves to pick more cotton? Do you fine the northern mills which buy the cheap slave-picked cotton and turn it into cloth? Do you fine Levi Strauss for buying the cheap cotton cloth and turning it into jeans, the sales of which are causing the demand?

Or do you just say, "Eh, screw it" and put on your blue jeans, and only worry about Third World sweat shop workers being exploited today rather than reparations for people exploited in previous centuries.

...the same as Hitler would have found another automotive plant, and when the all powerful leader of a country comes to you and tells you to give them a hairdo or build them a car, you generally do.

First, in the eyes of America, Hitler was most certainly not an all powerful leader yet in 1939 when Americans were still calling it the European war. And, who knows the direction the war would have taken had the American automobile industry refused to provide product. Maybe they'd all be Russian cars, but when one strategic mistake can have dire consequences in a war, who's to say this wouldn't have had a tremendous and potentially defeating blow to the German army. As I'm sure you read in the article, Henry Ford personally vetoed a plan to produce the Rolls-Royce engines for the British planes. Now, if he was concerned about making as much money as he could off the war, why did he do this?

The example of Ford is a very specific one: not only did they aid in the mass production of automobiles for the German army, they turned a blind eye to enlsaved workers, and they *allegedly* continued to do business with Germany *after* the U.S made it illegal in 1941.

I haven't been advocating the kill-Marie-Antoinette's-hairdresser theory (though, I never liked her hair), I'm saying this is a very specific example within a certain context in which the principle of war crimes and restitution can be applied. And, you know, Adolf's style consultant didn't do near the kind of damage as Ford's German automobiles did. Sure, Adolf would have killed his hairdresser if she didn't oblige, but what was he going to do to Henry Ford, in America, under the government's protection? Threaten to take Ford's picture down from his wall? Ask for the German medal back that he personally gave to Ford. [I'm sorry, but when the Fuhrer gives me a medal and brags about my picture hanging on his wall, I'd have to be some fool to be flattered by it.]

One of the reasons the lawsuits were going on long after the war is the information wasn't available until recently and Ford motor company wasn't complying to any request to see such documentation. I mean, *how* long ago was it that the Catholic church finally said "sorry" for supporting Hitler?

Still, I'm in agreement with you on not taking this to an extreme and suing Levi's for the cotton in their jeans, but neither do I think it appropriate when new information is found to simply say, "oh well, it's all in the past now. Buck up Mr. Victim and give us money to save sweat shops." And here I find myself, yet again, quoting the timeless words of Jan Brady, "...But what about [their] needs!"

Okay, well, now I need a beer. Until tomorrow! And, just so you know, all your points are really well taken.

the argument that some of the benefits of affirmative action programs go to people who don't need them is usually made by people who are using it as ammunition to suggest that therefore the programs aren't needed

It seems to me that if we don't have affirmative action, most of the benefits will go to people who don't need them.

Jax,

Well, Adolph's personal stylist and image consultant was Leni Reifenstahl. She did a lot to make him look good.

And while she wasn't killed, it's fairly accurate to say that she was blacklisted for the rest of her life, which was fairly considerable, since she lived to a hundred and one.

But, until tomorrow.

Kevin

Tom B:
"It seems to me that if we don't have affirmative action, most of the benefits will go to people who don't need them."

Yup, much like the people who are horrified by the prospect of having a Quota. Hey, there's always been a quota; I just don't want to see it go back to zero.

It is wrong to associate religious feeling or belief or whatever it is that we see in our coutnry with worldwide Christian charity. Much of the socially conservative Chrsitians are simply not involoved in the already well established bodies that do charity and social developmet work, who rely just as strongly as their secular counterparts on a robust international law which the administration has always tried to undermine. It is a typical solpisism in American political thought that seeks to analyze all of these efforts in light of an American cultural shift. Surely there are points to be made about religious and secular cocneption of justice and work to end injusitce, but the international efforts as a whole carried out by religious organizations cannot in good faith be folded into the discussion of American religiousness. So, there are at least, I would say, two ways of thinkign about religious justice and charity: one where it is on behalf of a chruch or a worldwide community of believers, and on where it is directly associated ith the ideals and self-conception of a state. The problem we care about is the implications for the state (our state) of these two cocneptions. It contributes niothing to this disucsiioon to start making claims about religious work for justice in general simply becasue the admin seeks to make all moral action part of its grand gesturing simply by claiming to have similar ideals. Its claims do not make all religious ieals AMERICAN ideals. And there is nothing hypocritical about religious justice and religious work for justice PER SE.