Gosh, when you say things like "we plan someday to reproduce together" it gets me all teary over our sacred institutions.
Dahlia Lithwick is pretty awesome, though.
Yeah, and since reproduction is where marriage's sacredness comes from (Darwin would be so proud!), we'll somehow be sacred without the ceremony. Innovators, we.
since reproduction is where marriage's sacredness comes from
Can't tell if you're serious about this.
I think the interesting 'marriage debate' emerges not from some unique dillema posed by gay marriage, but from the libertarian/traditionalist divide suggested by Bob's posting.
What's neat is that both sides see the point as a no brainer. Libertarians observe that marriage is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of a committed and loving relationship. Thus: marriage, shmarriage.
Traditionalists note that marriage has been a foundational institution of all functioning liberal societies, and that communities where marriage decays often find themselves afflicted by a series of social pathologies. They tend to regard the replacement of marriage by some less norm-fraught insitution as a obvious recipie for disaster.
This, I think, more than tolerance for gay marriage, is the real intellectual chasm (Hard not to see lots of basically unprincipled homophobia in that debate, charitable as one tries to be...) And I suspect it is one that marks a very different division in the American body politic.
Sorry, Ogged. I myself don't think that reproduction makes marriage sacred. (And I certainly don't think that sacredness should enter the debate over marriage's legal definition. Or it should enter as an example of how marriage definitions don't even belong on the books.) Dahlia Lithwick argues that hard-core marriage traditionalists usually pin their arguments on marriage's function in providing societal support for babymaking.