{"id":715,"date":"2004-03-23T02:33:30","date_gmt":"2004-03-23T10:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/03\/23\/same-sex-marriage-thats-what-its-all-about\/"},"modified":"2004-03-23T02:33:30","modified_gmt":"2004-03-23T10:33:30","slug":"same-sex-marriage-thats-what-its-all-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=715","title":{"rendered":"Same-sex marriage: that's what it's all about"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Jonathan Rauch article in The Atlantic <\/i><\/a>seems, to me, to put its finger on what’s wrong with the non-religious objections to same-sex marriage.<\/p>\n

Another objection cites not certain catastrophe but insidious decay. A conservative once said to me, “Changes in complicated institutions like marriage take years to work their way through society. They are often subtle. Social scientists will argue until the cows come home about the positive and negative effects of gay marriage. So states might adopt it before they fully understood the harm it did.”<\/p>\n

…Notice how the terms of the discussion have shifted. Now the anticipated problem is not sudden, catastrophic social harm but subtle, slow damage. Well, there might be subtle and slow social benefits, too. But more important, there would be one large and immediate benefit: the benefit for gay people of being able to get married<\/i>. If we are going to exclude a segment of the population from arguably the most important of all civic institutions, we need to be certain that the group’s participation would cause severe disruptions. If we are going to put the burden on gay people to prove that same-sex marriage would never cause even any minor difficulty, then we are assuming that any cost to heterosexuals, however small, outweighs every benefit to homosexuals, however large. That gay people’s welfare counts should, of course, be obvious and inarguable; but to some it is not<\/b>.<\/div>\n

That is the central immorality of the anti-same-sex-marriage position: they’d rather smash gay families with a log than risk straight families getting a splinter. I’m not sure if it’s homophobia or just incredible selfishness, but in either case it’s pretty distasteful..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This Jonathan Rauch article in The Atlantic seems, to me, to put its finger on what’s wrong with the non-religious objections to same-sex marriage. Another objection cites not certain catastrophe but insidious decay. A conservative once said to me, “Changes … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-same-sex-marriage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}