An atheist view on gay marriage

[BurtWorm]

I find KoKo01's thread on her misgivings about gay marriage very interesting, and I commend her for her honesty. I fundamentally disagree with her on both points she raised, that marriage is essentially heterosexual and that the sexual orientation of a bishop is relevant to his or her ability to perform his or her spiritual duties. My own feelings on these subjects are undoubtedly influenced by my atheism. That could account for the seemingly cold-blooded tack I take.

It seems clear to me that no matter what one's spiritual orientation is, marriage boils down to license to have sex. Of course people get married for different, sometimes more noble reasons, and many married people have sex with partners other than their spouses, or have no sex at all, even with their spouses. But the only reason for marriage in and of itself is to have an essentially sexual relationship legitimized by the state or the community. The idea of having a marriage "blessed in the eyes of God" is alien to me, but I take this phrase to essentially mean "legitimized in the eyes of a spiritual community or tradition." In any case, what is being legitimized, especially in religious terms, is sex.

When you get right down to it, the state has no clear interest in monogamous sexuality of any kind, except insofar as it has an interest in population control. That is, the state has no interest in copulation, though a case can be made for the state's interest in reproduction. It is never clear whether the state has an interest in encouraging the fruitfulness of its citizens, but it is clear that, especially in times of scarcity, it frequently does have an interest in keeping the population growth rate near zero. (Think of China, for instance.) It's also not clear that legitimizing heterosexual monogamy is sufficient to maintain near-zero population growth, especially considering that the average US family has slightly more than two children. Thus, from my cold-blooded perspective, the state's need to legitimize heterosexual marriage is dubious. It seems to have borrowed the institution of marriage from the religious domain as a form of social control, but I'm not sure if marriage's usefulness as an institution for social control has healthily survived secularization, and I'm not at all sure if it should survive.

So what is the religious domain's need for heterosexual marriage about, really, besides, as I've pointed out above, a need to set limits on the sexual freedom of its community members? What is that need to delimit sexual freedom about? This is a question an atheist would ask, this question about what a religious person would take to be unanswerable for being a matter of faith. I have evolutionary suspicions about the reasons, but a religious person would most likely say the ultimate reason is that God so wills it. That is not a very satisfactory answer to me, but I'm not a person of faith, and ultimately, that's what a religious person's objections to gay marriage must be based on. There is no rational reason to object. But religious faith is persistently, even proudly, irrational.

[Maple]

1. Marriage is

a property contract.

Very important in a society of home-owners, businesses, wills and divorces.

However, who is IN the marriage, what sex they are, or however many there are, is irrelevant.

[Paschall]

3. Yes

The historical studies I've read all agree that when modern marriage came into being, it was designed to resolve property relations between the spouses. The female often being "part of the property" under consideration, as contracts were drawn up between the families rather than the future spouses. Nothing to do, I think, with controlling people's sexual lives. In those "bed 'em and wed 'em" days, priests could marry and have extra-marital relations without stigma. Remember, a few of the early popes were also husbands.

[Specterx]

2. Cattle follow the herd

Religious people object to gay marriage because the Christian Coalition and their local priest/minister says it's wrong, because their religious/social leaders say it's wrong, and so on. When you've been told something all your life, you tend to believe it. It is only the fortunate few who were not indoctrinated from birth, or those with exceptionally independent and analytical minds, who can avoid falling into the trap. Throw in an unhealthy dose of right-wing mass-media, and there you have it.

Marriage as a secular institution is IMHO fundamentally a good thing, and we're very lucky as a society to have evolved to accept it (especially before such things as birth control). If nothing else, marriage obligates the parents of any children that result to support them, financially and socially, until they can fend for themselves, and children who are raised in a stable family environment simply do better than those coming from single-parent homes. It's definitely more than just a "license to have sex", since (at least in the more urbanized and sophisticated areas of the United States) extramarital sex is both accepted and indeed expected (imagine telling your GF that you wanted to wait till you were married... lol).

[RIindependent]

4. I am also an atheist

BurtWorm, I understand where you are coming from. And I am assuming you know that marriage is a legal contract, with all of its legal ramifications, that the other replies are stating. Very well by the way Specterx.

[BurtWorm]

14. Of course marriage is a legal contract concerning property rights.

But it is, I think, even more fundamentally about the legtimacy of sexual relations, or the issue of gay marriage would not fundamentally be an issue.

[JanMichael]

5. An answer from another Atheist.

*keep this to yourself because it's really personal....

I'll be getting %&^$&*&%$ in the very near future to a liberal believer (she has her beliefs and quite frankly they don't prevent a real love).

Why? I don't really know other than the fact that it really does mean something to make that commitment. There are only so many tools available.

Could our ^&*^%% really last without that governmental sanction? YES!

But the act, the simple signature and proclamation, means something.

No, I haven't figured out exactly why, but dammit it I want to do it!

I can accept some structure/legitimization of a relationship.

Rationally? It shouldn't matter but frankly I could care less.

[Hamlette]

6. what bugs me...

is that prohibiting same sex marriage hurts some people and allowing it harms no one. If you object, you don't have to do it.

[Mal]

7. I am a hetero atheist

and to be honest, the thought of male homosexual sex is reasonably repulsive to me. So I don't think about it. What other people do in private is their own business, and I expect the same courtesy. I may be a little uncomfortable around gay males, but that's my flaw, not theirs.
That establishes my own prejudices.
Marriage is a legal property agreement. As pointed out, the wife used to become the property of the husband, now its more akin to a company partnership.
One argument I've heard against gays raising children (and marriage is, in my opinion, an excellent vehicle for raising children) is that the children will be more likely to be gay. This suffers two problems.
1) It is unproven (although does seem likely)
2) AND THAT WOULD BE A BAD THING?! The very raising of this argument (which we have surely all heard) exposes the secret homophobic agenda of the speaker. "We have to put up with those already here, but avoid if possible creating any more of them"

[GiovanniC]

20. While I recognize the anecdotal nature

of this observation, I've known two couples (both lesbian) who have raised daughters and the daughter has been heterosexual in both cases.

[Phatfish]

8. what these religious zealots fail to comprehend

in all its glory and simplicity is that how will the joining of two consentual adults, whether they are strait or gay, affect their own lives and their own marriage? It does not hurt anyone for two people of the same sex to be married. To me, we should outlaw things such as drive-thru weddings and sham marriages only for money before we even think of intruding on the freedoms of two loving adults. For now, call it civil unions if it will make you feel confortable, but give everyone the same rights no matter how they differ from you.

Homosexuals are said to be sinners, yet their is no law against a murderer being able to be wed in prison, or a habitual liar to be wed to someone else, or someone who has been adulterous to a previous wife. The inconsistencies are glaring and we need to fix them. Jebus! If only Canada weren't so gosh darn COLD!

[MrPrax]

9. one's spiritual orientation??? not a real atheist

Marriage has been secular from day one...its a contract and luckily in this country a contract that people NOW can agree to...
The I do, I do part is Roman jurisprudence and religion could even get a toehold until the 14th century...
Unless the Left learns a bit of history, then the People are doomed...
I tend to speak for the People of the Reeds

[BurtWorm]

15. Not a real atheist?

That's funny. I didn't realize there was a doctrine for atheism. So you're an Orthodox?

[WindRavenX]

10. This atheist's answer:

Love is love. Doesn't matter if it's between a man and a man, a man and a woman, or a woman and a woman. It's still love and that in itself is sacred and should not be looked at with fear or loathing. God would have no objection to such love, IMHO, if there was a god.

[tedoll78]

11. I have a trivia question for conservatives.

Where in the Constitution does it say that tradition can be used to trump the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection?

The answer, of course, is nowhere. They're realizing that it would take an amendment, and that the amendment would be basically an anti-equality amendment.

Legally, I'm a stranger to my partner of seven years, but I can go to Vegas, pick-up a whore off of the streets, and get all of those rights and protections bestowed-upon us immediately. All because she's got a vagina. That's what it breaks-down to: body parts.
Sure, that's a crude way to put it, but it's the truth.

[alaine]

12. In many periods of human history, the chuch=state.

There was no separation.

The origins of marriage as our society knows it come out of it's endorsing a system of property inheritance known as patrilineal.

"Marriage" meant that the woman was a virgin beforehand and would only copulate with the man she was wedded to, therefore guaranteeing that all heirs would be legitimately his and could legitimately inherit his property. Although it has evolved into a system (in the some Western countries, but not in all) where the husband is expected to be faithful as well, that was not the concern initially. The whole reason this society is so uptight and repressed about sexuality is because patrilineality DEMANDS it, it is an unnatural state, and requires complete control over the sexual expression of women to maintain it. All the shame and judgement and moralizing are politically and economically, not spiritually, motivated.

It also enforces the separation of women into two classes, whores and marriage material, because powers that be never seriously meant the whole virgin/monogamy thing to really apply as absolutely to men, so there has to be a class of women that can be used for sexual release, and a class that one can count on to be faithful and not birth bastards. Along came DNA testing, which in my view renders the whole sytem obsolete.

Now it does give legal guidelines about dividing property equally between spouses, but these issues have only been relevant since divorce became socially acceptable.

Matrilineal inheritance has been practiced by probably as many cultures in the last 100,000 years as patrilineal has. There's no proof that women dominated these cultures, but there is proof that the society is more egaltarian for both genders. These are both unilineal methods of tracing ancestry. There are bilineal methods, too. One, where the females trace their lines (and property inheritance) through the mother, and males through the father. (The females inherit the home, the men the cattle). Then there are some cultures that trace through both and that is too confusing to even describe. Anthropologists have even found some that trace the line of descent through which ever set of in-laws is the most well-off, it can vary from generation to generation.

My personal theory about how homophobia came into it (because no one really knows) is that when the indo-europeans came down into the middle east (in their three separate invasions) and started spreading a more patriarchal state, they, being more controlling, demanded that the women give up their female (and male) partners, and the women responded that the men would have to give up their male partners to make it fair. Any one who traces the history of things like marriage and property inheritance through the years can see there has been a whole lot of back and forth and deal-making between women and men over the years, instead of just one rule from the beginning of time like many want to believe. The reason I have this theoy (which may be complete bunk) is because in almost every single animal species that lives in groups, there is a dominant male, and as the adolescent males come of age they either have to leave the group or challenge the head male. Most leave, and they hang around in groups, and in the animal kingdom these groups of young males are highly homosexual.

Anyway, that's more than enough from me. : )

[BurtWorm]

17. Excellent points.

Very well-put synthesis.

[Trajan]

13. Its all about ONE thing ....

and ONE thing alone: ..... Liberty ........

WITH Liberty: ..... A man decides FOR HIMSELF whether he loves another man ...... He decides FOR HIMSELF whether he wishes to join in union with that other man, who also FREELY chooses his mate .....

Its all about Freedom .....

Its all about Liberty .......

You know ? .. they HATE US for our freedom ......

[jonnyblitz]

16. good post....so true about religion being irrational.

If you look at the threads on here the past few days that are the most heated, they involve some archiac religious doctrine causing "struggle" in the mind of the believer. It would usually be a "no-brainer" otherwise without the religious baggage.

[Karenina]

18. It goes deeper, I think

I, too, was very impressed by Koko1‘s openness and honesty in publicly airing such an intense personal struggle. I was doubly impressed at the sensitivity of most DUer‘s responses and queries to her.

I feel this is a more appropriate thread in which to comment, as I should like to completely separate my remarks from any reference to our dear fellow DUer personally. I was fascinated at what I watched being articulated.

The issues of „civil unions,“ „affirmative action,“ „welfare state“ et al become vitriolic and divisive due to the underlying emotion I gleaned in the very first sentence of the thread in question. It jumped off the monitor and screamed into both my ears...

ASSUMPTIONS OF SUPERIORITY

It is perhaps something we are all born with. Anyone who has spent time with an infant knows they are ALL notorious meglomaniacs. (How about the fun and games that ensue when a second child arrives on the heels of the first)? During the process of socialization and integration into family, community, society, we are each programmed to accept what those various outside influences have collectively determined is our „place“ in the hierarchy. It‘s classic „I & Other,“ „Us & Them“ stuff. When we feel our positions threatened, we fight with all the ego we can muster to preserve them. (I personally see the human ego as the sickest manifestation on the planet. It is impervious to logic or reason, is destructive in it‘s self-centeredness and will fight to the death to preserve itself.)

„All men (sic) are created equal,“ is a VERY ENLIGHTENED concept. It implies at the very least RESPECT for each living, breathing human life. And there lies the rub. WE DON‘T BELIEVE IT. The struggle begins when one realizes the depth of his own disbelief in that concept. It is emotion in a head-on collision with the intellectual perception of self. It creates a complete disconnect and a violent attempt to defend that self-perception.

The projection of the „ASSUMPTION OF SUPERIORITY“ can be extremely subtle. It is also very much tied, IMHO, to the view of the world as a zero-sum game. Anything YOU „get“ takes something from ME and YOU AREN‘T AS DESERVING, YOU ARE BENEATH ME (because your eyes are blue, your mother wears combat boots, you need Certs, whatever).

The original post is rife with in-your-face „stealth bigotry.“ Why should „they“ be accorded the same recognition and participation as I??? This fundamental emotion is then dressed up with all kinds of socially programmed misinterpretations, and misconceptions of what „marriage“ or „Christian values“ actually ARE or who the „other“ in this case, IS!!! I wondered what would change if a celibate priest who has a same sex living partner is ordained a bishop. :shrug: But I‘ve been wondering about a LOT of things for MANY DECADES.

„It's asking others or besieging others to change to what Gays believe which has some folks upset.“

I was reminded of a birthday party I attended as a 9 year-old in a gated, restricted community just a tad south of the Mason-Dixon line. Mrs. W. (who believed NO ONE had the right to tell her who her daughter could invite) made me get on the floor of the backseat and threw a blanket over me as we whizzed by the guard. Later we gaggle of girls went down to the pier to swim and were there for an hour before I was noticed by little Ellen who quickly headed for shore and screamed back, „I‘M NOT SWIMMING WITH A NIGGER IN THE WATER!!! It must be that my presence somehow CHANGED the composition of the Chesapeake Bay! :-)

„Why go at the established churches and make them change, when gays/lesbians could start their own church movement and create something maybe better and more inclusive that exists and be a beacon to the whole Christian world?“

Hmmm... separate but equal? Anyone heard that before?

„But........I cannot condone a Gary Episcopal Priest's Ordination or Celebrate a Gay Marriage in the Episcopal church with the same vows and ceremony I took with my husband.“

So.......Gays must found their own church and find scriptures in the Bible (if they want to be Christians or whatever religious group) to support their beliefs.. Then they can marry in their own faith.......but not to change my whole reilgious foundations because they want to for their own beliefs.

„I really thought given our political nature on this board and that this issue is stirring up a hornet's nest out there that I could find some help with my dilemna. And, I've kind of walked myself through explanations and thought as I've replied trying to figure out what it is I really believe at my core about this.“


I‘ll stop here with the snippets as this is IN NOW WAY to be construed as an attack on the poster and I VERY MUCH ADMIRE her courage. Rather it is to examine, in what was expressed, the underlying emotion of FEAR OF CHANGE and that the ASSUMPTION OF SUPERIORITY is being threatened. (It‘s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve! :-) This is a difficult issue and is the CORE of „white privilege.“ It also is at the core of just about EVERY „hot button issue“ in the U.S. today. I just wish more people were as introspective as Koko1.

[waggawagga]

19. Why I Think Many Straights Dislike Gay Marriage

Let me start off that I'm 100% in favor of legalizing gay marriage. I'm also straight and bring this issue up with straight friends who are on the fence all the time.

I don't think the discomfort of many straights about this is based mostly on religion. That's an obvious target but there just aren't that many deeply religious people around, even in the US.

Second, all arguments which reduce the origins of marriage to one thing (eg. sex, religion, property, patriarchy, children, etc.) are wrong, imo, and what you're getting, usually, is the bugbear of whomever is proposing it.

Marriage, let's face it, has always been around. The problem with theories which suggest that this was "invented" sometime in prehistory is that literally every society has some form of this (eg. you can't go to Australia and find aborigenes who form families in some radically different way).

Here's my gut feeling about where public discomfort comes from. Marriage is (and in some sense has always been) the means by which society makes the joining of male and female sacred.

Men and women aren't alike. Every boy and girl grows up with some sense of the opposite sex as "the other" (much more so in the past when men and women just had totally different roles, again, this was universal, but this isn't something which has gone away or is even likely to).

Marriage makes a promise. If you grow up and become an adult, commit your life to someone of the opposite sex, someone who is "mysterious", you'll be happier for doing this and society will be better off.

I think this is the litmus test of for what marriage means to most straight people. If you're young it's basically this promise. If you're older and married the story of your marriage is how you and the person you're committed to made this work (or didn't, there are failed marriages).

I don't care what society you're talking about or what form the ceremony or resulting family takes. Marriage, intuitively, is this promise of a better life and process of adjustment to achieve it (which essentially means conforming to someone whom you didn't understand at first and might have thought was "icky" when you were young).

Now for the problem. To many straight people marriage is so closely associated with this experience of adjusting to someone of the opposite sex, ie. marriage is the making of this process sacred, that they conclude, perhaps without ever being fully aware that they're doing this, that gay marriage "lacks something".

It can't be a marriage. This process of adjustment is missing.

My suggestion: they're right. It's not exactly the same. Mars and Mars or Venus and Venus lacks this element which, I think, most straight people perceive intuitively.

What such people miss is that it has its own "story". Eg., part of being gay is realizing that you're not like people who are straight and that your romantic life is oriented towards people whose gender you share.

It's a different "mystery". I'm trying hard not to offend anyone.

It's absolutely true that just committing to any person who is not yourself is: mysterious, requires adjustment, presents the challenge of cultivating adult intimacy, creating a family, etc. This is universal and yet is as distinct as each couple.

But if your sense of the word "marriage" is associated with this process of emotional maturation which almost all straight people go through, ie. committing adjusting to someone of the opposite sex is part of what it means to be an adult, marriage is this process made sacred, if you do this it will work...

...then it makes sense, to me, anyway, that many straight people, intuitively, would have this sense that the relatioships which gay people enter into, even those which create families, are not strictly marriages.

This whole other componant, which is very personal, just seems absent.

My point in offering this argument, lastly, isn't to suggest that gay marriages aren't legitimate and shouldn't be legalized.

It's more like this. If you can address people at precisely the point where they have concern, especially if they're not entirely clear in their own minds about why they have it, it becomes possible to change their minds.

I've converted a few friends by saying, "Hey, you had this experience, someone else has a different experience, intuitively your sense of what a marriage is might not change, but it's a big world, why not people make sacred the biggest commitment of their lives using the terms they want in a manner which is natural to them?"

Another advantage of this argument is that it brings home just how little the "institution of marriage" (how society perceives and presents this) would be affected by legalizing gay marriage.

Because the sense that straight people have that marriage is this process of sanctifying Mars + Venus almost certainly won't change. This isn't founded in law. Or even a specific religion. The roots of this are much deeper (and are perpetuated by the experience which virtually all straight men and women have while growing up).

Gay marriage would be the exception which proves this rule (it wouldn't change things much, that's the irony, this wouldn't make straight people gay and visa versa, it wouldn't even change most people's sense of what marriage is about because that is so personal and based on experience).

[Nikia]

21. It is different for different people

I have never found men anymore mysterious than other women. I have always felt like an outsider and treat people as individuals. On self tests that determine gender inclanations based on talents, preferences, and attitudes I tend to score towards the center on the femine side (52-60 on a 100 point scale if 100 is completely feminine). I have always had friends of both genders. I tend to like androgynous minded people more than stereotypically gendered individuals though I have had strong feminine oriented female friends as well. I tend to dislike strongly masculine oriented men. For this reason, my husband is not a typical man, but neither is my father. I think that society in general is still very sexist and that is possibly why many straight people are uncomfortable with homosexuality. I think that there may be some general inclinations driven by biology but that society drives these to extremes and that any given individual of either gender may have different talents, preferences and attitudes.

[BurtWorm]

22. I'm very grateful to the people who responded to this post

So many clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the issues and took a lot of care expressing their thoughts on them. Thank you, everybody!