I shall have to ask my parents how their son being able to marry has lowered the quality of their marriage. I´m sure it was devastating to their marriage, really.
Well, I posted a little rant upthread about what the "threat to marriage" really involves. Suffice it to say, nobody thinks your parents' marriage specifically will be damaged. They just think that they will be less able to convince future generations that they have no choice but to marry heterosexually and monogamously and bear children, and they really, desperately want people to have no choice in that matter. The threat to marriage is a threat to *compulsory* heterosexual marriage, and they're quite right about it -- we are trying to take away their power to compel that. They like having that power and the validation it brings, and they don't want to surrender it. Fair enough.
They're going to have to, however. Hell, if George Wallace learned to deal with modernity, so can Orson Scott Card.
I was going to say, you know, that presumably allowing gay marriage will make marriage more appealing to future generators of, you know, gay people, but then I remembered that Card's argument is that gays totally have equal rights already, given that they have the same right to marry someone of the opposite gender as a heterosexual has, much like everyone in a theocracy has the same right to practice the state religion (I'm sure he totally supports that in, like, Iran.)
Well, you can say that because you don't regard compulsory marriage as the only frail mechanism propping up civilization. Card does. When people like him say gay marriage is a "threat to marriage," they don't mean the specific marriage of OSC and Kristin, or Barak and Michelle, or Barb and Seth -- they mean that not continuing to compel all people to enter monogamous, heterosexual, child-bearing relationships is dangerous to society as a whole
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Yes, he's as much said that. Something about how since it's easier for men to understand men, and women to understand women, that if given the option to marry their own sex, people would not choose to marry the opposite one.
Which makes me raise my eyebrows and wonder "if you think socially approved gay relationships are so overwhelmingly attractive, are you sure *you* are straight?"
I really try not to assign motive to strangers, and also not to assume that all homophobes are themselves hiding teh gay -- but honestly, some people just seem to beg for it.
I see what you're saying, and to me, yeah, this is one of the fascinating things about Card's position. It's not so much homosexuality that bothers him, it's the entire modern (as in, within the last century or two) project of redefining marriage. The vast majority of us in the West now believe that it makes perfect sense and is only right and proper that people enter only into marriages that make them subjectively happy. That's a pretty new project, so his ultimate point is somewhat valid: Civilization was not built on companionate marriage. It's not a proven commodity yet, on the historical scale
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I do wish every random nutjob person, however strong his convictions, would stop refrain from setting himself up as the One True Declaimer of Rightness and just... see what happens. I mean even if pigs fly and Card is right about the OMGhorrors that would come from legalizing gay unions... what's it to him? Why not just wait and see, and let the (per him) immoral-or-gullible get their just deserts
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They're going to have to, however. Hell, if George Wallace learned to deal with modernity, so can Orson Scott Card.
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Which makes me raise my eyebrows and wonder "if you think socially approved gay relationships are so overwhelmingly attractive, are you sure *you* are straight?"
It's very wacky logic, to say the least.
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I mean even if pigs fly and Card is right about the OMGhorrors that would come from legalizing gay unions... what's it to him? Why not just wait and see, and let the (per him) immoral-or-gullible get their just deserts ( ... )
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