Ok, here's a question for folks...

[gianni]

Before I get started, lemmie say I have no problem with same-sex marrage. So that said, my post is asking for comments on something I'd read earlier today in a blurb on the state supreme court's review of the state prohibition against it. The item that struck me, that I hadn't thought of before was the presidence of establishing arbitrary

Comments

[terpsichoros]

There are several things called marriage. What the law is dealing with is a legally-privileged contract. The legal argument for same sex marriage - the argument being made in the courts - is not that the government does not have the right to place restrictions on who may enter into the legally privileged contract called marriage, but that the particular restriction (that the two parties must be of opposite sex) is not a restriction the government is allowed to make, based on its laws regarding discrimination on the basis of sex.

Incidentally, the good reason for restricting cousin marriage isn't the possibility of birth defects, it's to restrict clan feuds. Many non-Christian societies (and some more isolated Christian societies) allow cousin marriage, and the result is that society organizes around family lineages which have very strong loyalties to each other and none whatsoever to the broader society. Requiring people to marry non-cousins means that they have relatives all over, that actions at the expense of the society at large may affect those relatives, and that their loyalty is diffused into a much wider community than happens where cousin marriage is the norm.

The restriction on polygamy is partially because it's not always clear that polygamous marriages involve consenting adults, and historically that is a much larger problem for polygamous marriages (in the U.S.) than for two-person marriages.