Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2012 May 11

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May 11

Are there any rational arguments against gay marriage at all?

I don't believe so, but I have heard a few people make the argument that while they're all for civil unions and so on they don't like the idea of gay marriage because marriage means "between a man and a woman" (and variations on that theme) - or because they don't want to change forms so that husband and wife fields need removing... or that they want a Mr and a Mrs. I just about get the form argument, but it's fairly clear that the solution to that is just to get married gay people to designate one as a husband and one as a wife until forms/computer software/whatever are updated. But does the first argument actually make any sense from any respected philisophical viewpoint other than paleoconservatism? Is there any other argument I've left out that makes sense under any scrutiny? Egg Centric 01:05, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Well, there is the argument that the state has no business regulating private relationships, and enforcing a particular contractual form on them is a violation of civil liberties. Of course, this applies to 'straight' marriages as well... AndyTheGrump (talk) 01:11, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

There's nothing now, in any state in the USA, that stops same-sex couples from having a preacher-led wedding. That's not the issue. The issue is whether the state is to recognize such marriages for various practical purposes, such as tax breaks, inheritance rules, and other stuff that the law provides for those who are legally married. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:16, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Short answer: No. In my opinion. But then I would say that, being one half a gay marriage and all. -- role^player 01:14, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

One school of thought is that the purpose of marriage is to provide a stable framework in which to produce children. Barring some sort of miracle, with a same-sex marriage that is not going to happen. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:16, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Though the flaws in that reasoning are obvious: 1. The number of heterosexual marriages is in no way correlated with homosexual marriages (there is no reduction in frameworks for heterosexual reproduction and raising just because gays can marry); 2. there is ample evidence that homosexual marriages can be just as stable a framework as heterosexual marriages for raising children (and let's face it, the bar ain't that high), and there are plenty of possibilities for homosexual marriages to have children (adoption, surrogates, etc.). --Mr.98 (talk) 01:58, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Or to put it another way, are all these supposed benefits for married couples, that gays supposedly want in on, fair to us singles, if we have to pay for them? And if not, then does extending them to even more people, make it even more unfair?

I'm just playing devil's advocate here — I don't really expect gay marriage to cost me money personally, or at least not enough to worry about. But it's the kind of thing that could be a rational argument, depending on the details. --Trovatore (talk) 01:26, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Another oddity is that it's not just "true" singles who are disadvantaged by these marriage laws, nor same-sex couples, but also opposite-sex but unmarried couples. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:44, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Married filing jointly tends to result in lower taxes than filing as a single. That does seem discriminatory or unfair. But the federal government has broad latitude on what it can do. The income tax is the glaring constitutional exception to the constitution's rule that federal taxes must be equally apportioned, or whatever the term is. That is, if there were a federal sales tax, it would be at the same rate for anyone in a situation where they have to pay it. Not so with income tax, which is why a constitutional amendment was needed. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:35, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

That goes to whether the federal government has the constitutional authority, not to whether it's fair, nor to whether it would be more unfair (to singles) to expand the privilege. --Trovatore (talk) 01:46, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm not arguing that it's "fair". It is what it is. But the federal tax code is always subject to indirect pressure from the public via their congressmen. Even if every state in the union recognized gay marriage, or various kinds of civil unions, the fed would be under no compulsion to recognize it for tax purposes - unless Congress, feeling public pressure, changed the rules. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:50, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

I guess my point is that, if it seemed likely that gay marriage would cost me money, that would be, perhaps not an admirable argument against it, but at least a rational one. --Trovatore (talk) 07:30, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Marriage is a social construct, a group which believes itself to be socially dominant wishes to impose its construction of marriage on the rest of society. That group's construction of marriage appears to be internally consistent in the sense that they have a reason to believe that poorly retransmitted Latin, Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew texts ought to order material reality when interpreted in a specific framework. Fifelfoo (talk) 01:45, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Marriage wasn't invented by the Jews, Christians and Muslims. Every society has marriage, and it typically centers on the production of children, though that's not all of it, or they wouldn't allow marriage of women past child-bearing age. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:56, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Or of women under child-bearing age. OP requested a "rational" argument against gay marriage. I provided the rationale of one of the most stridently put arguments against gay marriage present in the United States: social construction of ritual combined with a particular (self-assumed) dominant culture that demands that society be constructed according to their reading of magic books. If you want a patriarchy or class theory of marriage, then yes, there's no rational argument in favour of marriage gay or straight; but OP didn't ask for that. Fifelfoo (talk) 02:04, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

The institution of "traditional" marriage is way much older than the Bible. Ironically, and not mentioned much, the requirement of marriage being one man + one woman also renders so-called polygamous "marriages" illegal. Of course, they already were illegal. And as with same-sex couples, polygamists probably couldn't care less what the government thinks about their lifestyle. But they likewise lose out on various legal benefits of marriage. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:48, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

If you want to assert an ahistorical category of marriage by constructing a continuous category out of historical discontinuities, feel fine to do so. It doesn't grok with changes in the structure of marriage within Europe 800 to 1600, for example. Most "traditions" in industrial society are recent inventions or radical reinterpretations. Fifelfoo (talk) 02:53, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Intriguing argument. Can you be more specific? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:05, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Is marriage about property, or procreation. When it is about property, is it about retaining property within a class (urban artisinal marriage structures of youth marrying widow[er]s), or is it about ensuring male land distribution, or stability of extended family network political hegemony. Does the church have any role in marriage, if so, what. Are women dehumanised by marriage, or merely stripped of all or some of their property. Is marriage a method and technique to subjugate women directly, or not. How many wives should you have? Is marriage a prevention of sin (and how many wives will you have in heaven?), or a sin in itself, or a sin in itself but it doesn't matter because of the fundamental impurity of the world. Anderson and Zinsser A history of their own, note the classed and periodic meanings of marriage. When you have artisinal communities transmitting "trade rights" via widower-maid, and widow-youth cyclical marriage in order to maintain the bourgeois community and apprenticeship, this varies a hell of a lot from unchurched peasant marriages as a way to force property demands for rights in land onto a community of older males who lock up the reapportionment. And this varies again, wildly, from marriage on allody in clans. In a hundred years, or a hundred miles, the status of women could vary from full participants in a community of property, through to basically chattel. Fifelfoo (talk) 04:37, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

You lost me at the bakery. However, I think I see what you're getting at, in that women having property rights is a relatively recent phenomenon. Marriage itself is a lot older. But keep in mind that people in those days were not in denial about their mortality like our generation seems to be. Anything could happen to anyone at any time. So a lot of these traditions stemmed from survival. So it may indeed be a carryover from seemingly old-fashioned traditions. But you do raise a key question: What is the purpose of marriage? The answer seems to be partly spiritual and partly material. The spiritual side is no problem. Anyone can marry anyone if they have the right preacher. The material side is what's at issue with all these "marriage amendments". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:29, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

My point was that women, single and married, had a variety of relationships to property, including holding property directly; and, that marriage included a wide variety of ways of dealing with female and male property--and so that marriages represented a wide variety of material, reproductive, and spiritual attitudes. Some of these were mutually irreconcileable. Fifelfoo (talk) 05:47, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

I can provided a historically rational argument, albeit one that no longer applies. That is, if your goal is to increase population as rapidly as possible, then having everybody in straight marriages is the best way to do that. Trying to rapidly increase the population seems like an idiotic goal today, but for most of human history, this was a serious goal of each group, so as to increase the power and wealth of the group, by pillaging their neighbors. It's even in the Bible: "Go forth and multiply". StuRat (talk) 02:17, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

It was also initially about survival. It's thought that humankind was pretty close to extinction at one point. Rapidly expanding our numbers was seen as a necessity. (Probably helped in defeating the Neanderthals, for one.) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:52, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

I don't know if it's even true that that's the fastest way to increase the population. I seem to recall the Nazis used a different expedient — they distributed deliberately defective contraceptives to the racially favored among their young unmarrieds. (Whether that worked or not I have no clue.) --Trovatore (talk) 02:23, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Contraceptives weren't an option in the time frame I'm talking about. StuRat (talk) 02:48, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

(EC) Agree with Trovatore there are too many unknowns here. E.g. if we assume that people who are gay or lesbian are less likely to to have kids yet these is no reason why they're more likely to want to marry each other or stay single and instead are likely to marry straight people then you can likely come up with a scenario where it's a net negative. Like if the average number of children for any coupling with a gay or lesbian is 1, but the average for any coupling without is 4, you'll likely find (I haven't actually done the maths to prove this) that effectively you've made things worse by increasing the number of couplings with a gay or lesbian person married to a straight person and a reducing the number of couplings with straight people married to each other. In any case, it seems clear the for humans, raising the young is an important part of ensuring a successful population, and this often involved more then the biological parents. It may be the same sex couples, while usually not raising their own children, do things which reduce mortality or otherwise improve success of the group sufficiently to reduce any loss of population due to them not having children. Edit: BTW, some of the assumptions may be unrealistic, but the point is to keep it simple for analysis. Nil Einne (talk) 02:49, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

The financial argument has the potential to be sensible in short-term evaluations of specific legislation. If it is going to cost the government money it doesn't have, what do you do? But that's the kind of problem that illustrates the need for a larger solution. You shouldn't have to sleep with somebody, of either sex, to get proper Social Security benefits. And when these sorts of unfairnesses exist in comparison to singles; also sometimes in comparison to couples in which both are of the same income, etc., then it is time to make some reforms. The push to gay marriage is part of a broader recognition that government has been regulating marriage far too much - it is a religious sacrament, and a private sexual affair; it is not something that should be a line item on the budget as you give or deny juicy plums to those who register their affections. Wnt (talk) 12:47, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Some religious people view "marriage" in purely religious terms. If their version of religion proscribes homosexuality, it makes a "rational" reason for opposing it, in their eyes, although not in others'. --Dweller (talk) 14:18, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

As others have said, there are two dimensions to marriage in the modern Western world. One dimension is symbolic: a couple's affirmation of their bond in front of their community. The only rational argument for denying this symbolic status to people of the same sex is that it is at odds with one's (irrational) religious beliefs or prejudices. The second dimension of modern marriage is material: the many benefits granted by the state and by private employers to married people. Here again, there is a rational argument that granting those benefits to same-sex couples is at odds with one's religious beliefs or prejudices, but it rests on the irrational premises of one's beliefs and prejudices. There are really only two kinds of completely rational arguments against awarding these material benefits to same-sex couples: 1) Awarding those benefits to same-sex couples imposes undesirable costs on others, or 2) Awarding those benefits will erode my position of privilege relative to same-sex couples. Of these last two arguments, a rational response to 1) is that awarding marriage benefits to heterosexual couples costs far more than awarding them to same-sex couples, since there are far more heterosexual couples. So, for position 1) to be fully rational, the position must call for eliminating all marriage benefits for both opposite-sex and same-sex couples. So, fully rational opposition to same-sex marriage boils down to two possible positions: 1) Opposition to material benefits for all married couples, and 2) Opposition to material benefits for same-sex couples to maintain one's own position of privilege. Marco polo (talk) 15:00, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm saying that for some people there are three dimensions. You omit the religious, which is quite different from the symbolic. --Dweller (talk) 15:05, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

From a logical/rational point of view, I don't see the difference. Neither is per se rational in its basis or material in its ramifications. Marco polo (talk) 15:53, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Only because you begin from different precepts or axioms. All people have axioms which for the basis for their worldview. That is, there are some set of principles that a person will accept as true without the need for proof, and then they will build their worldview and their conclusions by a series of (self-seemingly) rational extensions from those precepts. Understand that this is not an escapable situation; you as a non-religious person have a certain set of axioms which you hold to be true, and someone with a religious paradigm will have a different set of axioms. That you will each, independently, arrive at different conclusions, and both do so rationally, is unsurprising, because you both start from different places. So, someone may arrive at the conclusion that same-sex marriage is wrong because their worldview starts with a particular set of axioms, and a different person may arrive at the conclusion that same-sex marriage is fine, because they begin from a different set of axioms. The source of conflict is in refusing to acknowledge one's supposed opponent as a person who is just as rational as you are. If you begin from the notion that you have a monopoly on rationality, and that people can be determined to be irrational solely on the basis that they did not arrive at the same conclusions you have, then it becomes easy to consider such people as less-than-fully-human, and it becomes likewise easy to dismiss them. Once you dismiss them, there is no means by which to have a meaningful dialogue of equals with them, and then there is conflict. If we want to arrive at a peaceful conclusion to these problems, it starts not with accusing people who think differently than we do of being irrational, but of recognizing them as equally rational as we are. We don't have to accept their beliefs as right, or good, or beneficial, far from it. It is quite proper to find some beliefs as harmful. But what isn't proper is to assume that a harmful belief is necessarily the product of an irrational mind. --Jayron32 17:15, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

The original question was whether there are any rational arguments against same-sex marriage, not whether opponents of same-sex marriage are rational or whether they have rational minds. We are all irrational at times, and many of our beliefs, whether or not we are religious, are irrational. That is human nature. I did not argue that people who oppose same sex marriage for religious reasons are any less rational than I am. What I argued is that their arguments against same-sex marriage, resting on religious premises, lack a rational basis. Their arguments may be rational if you exempt their religious premises from rational scrutiny, but those premises are really the basis of the argument, so the rationality of those premises is at issue. Marco polo (talk) 19:26, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

But you have premises which you protect from all rational scrutiny too, what makes their premises less valid than yours, other than the fact that they are not your premises? --Jayron32 19:29, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Extending that logic further, what if my premise is that all Jews must die? Is that perfectly valid? How about the premise that Earth is flat? Or the premise that black people should be excluded from the vote? --140.180.5.49 (talk) 19:32, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

There are three problems here. First, not all axioms are equally rational. A schizophrenic's axiom could be "the CIA is after me" and all of his reasoning afterwards could be perfectly rational, but that doesn't make his beliefs rational. Second, a good axiom is intuitively obvious to almost everyone and cannot be contradicted by evidence. "If A is true, then A is not false" is a good axiom, but if your axiom is that Earth is flat, that isn't even a good axiom a-priori because there are experimental means to verify Earth's shape, and it becomes even worse when I bring you into orbit. Similarly, if your axiom is that the Bible is true, the validity of the Bible can be challenged on numerous grounds: internal inconsistency, geology, biology, linguistics, the shape of the Earth (which the Bible claims is flat), etc, which makes it an even worse axiom.

Third, the set of axioms that one believes in can and should change with shifting evidence. Three hundred years ago, it would have been perfectly axiomatic that if one second passes for me, one second also passes for you. We now know that's incorrect, due to Einstein's special relativity. It might have been axiomatic to some people to believe in the parallel postulate, but not only is the postulate false, we live in a universe that doesn't obey the postulate when close to large masses. --140.180.5.49 (talk) 19:30, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

The issue is not in the notion that everyone is right. The are obviously not. The issue is in how do we treat people when they are wrong. What you've done here (and especially further above) is extended the meaning of my comments further than what is written on the page, that is you have drawn erronoeous and incorrect conclusions which have zero connection to what I actually said. I have never, not once, as in zero times, as in i never did it, argued for the sort of moral relativisim you are mocking here. There is an absolute truth, and there is an absolute right and wrong way to look at the world, and there is a proper way to understand how the world works. My statement was not an indication that such facts do not exist. It is merely that there is a way to work with other people who view the world differently than I do, and they way to work with them is not to treat them as broken humans, who are less worthy of respect and dignity than I am. In order to work with someone else, you need to understand them, and if your only understanding of them is "they are irrational" then you cannot work with them, and conflict is inevitable. It doesn't matter at which point you treat them as irrational, if at any level, and on any grounds you treat someone as less than you, then there is no practical way to work with them in bringing them out of an improper conclusion. You can't change someone's heart or mind by convincing them they are broken people. That has never worked. You convince people they are wrong by letting them know you understand them, even if you disagree with them. You start from that premise, and build a bridge to the truth from there. To put this in terms related to the main discussion: People who oppose gay marriage are wrong, but it isn't possible to convince them of that if you start with the premise that they are substandard and not worthy of dignity and respect for believing that. Any action or expression you make which gives an indication that you think they have a fault, in either their reasoning or in their worldview, causes them to throw up walls and become defensive and refuse to change. If we have any hope at all of convincing people of the error of their ways, we first need to value them as people who are equal to us. In simplest terms: if there is any point in expressing my opinion to a person who as a conflicting opinion is to convince them that my opinion is right. And never, in the history of humanity, has anyone ever been convinced of that by someone who simultaneously belittles them and treats them as inferior. If our goal is to change people's minds, we need to first consider tactics and perspectives which are likely to do so. --Jayron32 19:50, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification; I misunderstood your post. You're saying that treating others as irrational or inferior is not a good way to convince them, and I agree. I would say, however, that there's no problem in treating another person's argument as irrational; if it weren't, why are you arguing against it in the first place?

I actually believe that rationality depends very heavily on the common knowledge that all of us takes for granted. There are tribes that can't count to 3, and can't even tell you whether the number of apples in pile X is greater than in pile Y, yet they're fully modern humans. A modern 7th grader can solve all of Zeno's paradoxes (which used to puzzle the greatest minds) in a few seconds, and would laugh at the fact that Plato actually believed his Theory of Forms, yet the ancient Greeks were far from stupid. Rather, in the 2000 years since Plato, the progress of the human mind has introduced wonderful inventions like number theory, Arabic numerals, calculus, astronomy, physics, and geology that have revolutionized our understanding of the universe and our place within it. Even a 5 year old, without ever realizing it, views the world with tools and ideas developed over thousands of years by the greatest minds.

This is precisely why it is so harmful to believe in the sacredness of an ancient holy book. Doing so throws away every accomplishment and all progress the human mind has made in the intervening 3000 years--all new insights in morality, politics, and sexuality, all discoveries in science, mathematics, and basic logic, all transformative realizations of our proper place in the cosmos--in favor of an ancient and static worldview. --140.180.5.49 (talk) 21:46, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

One perspective I heard recently is that for homosexual people to be seeking the right to marry is an expression of a desire by them to be more part of the establishment, mainstream society, and should therefore be warmly welcomed by conservatives. HiLo48 (talk) 22:31, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Your average conservative considers homosexuality to be a sickness, so the only warm welcome they're willing to give is to someone who wants to be "cured". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:56, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Oh, I was talking about people thinking rationally ;-) (That IS the point of this topic after all.)HiLo48 (talk) 23:30, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

(EC) Bugs... Please don't tar all conservatives with a single brush. What you are describing is an extreme fringe viewpoint within the conservative movement. There is a much larger segment of the the conservative movement who are more libertarian in their views towards homosexuality... believing that who someone has sex with (or who one chooses to marry) is no one else's business. And there is an even larger wing of the conservative movement that doesn't really care about gay marriage one way or the other... who think the entire issue is a distraction from what is really important... fixing the economic problems that face the US and Europe.

You should also consider that the African-american community (traditionally seen as being in the liberal camp) is strongly anti gay marriage. So, please, drop the simplistic stereotypes. Blueboar (talk) 23:42, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

I think this is a distraction from what is really important... forming a gender queer working class alliance to smash heteronormativity and capitalism.—which is to say Baseball Bugs' analysis may be conditioned by a radically different political framework to your own, where what is rational to you is irrational. Fifelfoo (talk) 00:18, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Of course one could argue that forcing the "rationality impaired" to be confronted by things that would upset them (like gay marriage) would raise their blood pressure significantly which in turn could cause heart attacks and strokes... in which case legalizing gay marriage is probably a violation of the American's with Disabilities Act.  :>) Blueboar (talk) 01:30, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

I think you could regularly extend arguments against homosexual activity to make arguments against homosexual marriage. Discount any right of freedom of association and include premises that marriage between two people promotes sexual activity between those two people, and that promoting something which is wrong is itself wrong. So you could have:

A1) If something is not right, it is wrong. A2) Seeking pleasure (or love, or companionship, et cetera) is not right. A3) Homosexual activity is done only for pleasure (or love, or companionship, et cetera). Therefore: A4) Homosexual activity is wrong. A5) It is wrong to promote something which is wrong. A6) Establishing marriage between two people promotes sexual activity between those two people. Therefore: A7) Establishing marriage between two people of the same sex promotes homosexual activity. Therefore: A8) Establishing homosexual marriage is wrong. Premise A2 could be established in a number of ways: Revelatory, i.e., God commands it; Formalist, i.e., it is a contradiction in the deontic modality to make pleasure-seeking (or love-seeking, or companionship-seeking, et cetera) your maxim; Consequentialist, e.g., seeking pleasure results in less utility overall; Intuitionist, i.e., e.g., seeking pleasure does not have the basic, intuitable "good" quality; etc. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 06:05, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Sorry to interrupt right in the middle of your post, but I don't get A2. While seeking pleasure might not be right, seeking love or companionship is not forbidden in any religion by my knowledge, and I can't see how it would result in less utility either. Joepnl (talk) 11:59, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

B1) What's good is what is natural, and what is bad is what is unnatural. B2) Homosexual activity is unnatural. Therefore: B3) Homosexual activity is bad. B4) Promoting something which is wrong is itself wrong. B5) Establishing marriage between two people promotes sexual activity between those two people. Therefore: B6) Establishing homosexual marriage is wrong. Premise B1 could be established in a number of different ways. For example (something like this is given by Aristotle): C1) The good of a thing is not instrumental for some other aspect of that same thing, but rather the good is for what everything is done. Therefore, in other words, C2) The good of a thing is the final end of a thing that performs its natural function. Therefore: C3) The good is natural, and, conversely, the unnatural is bad. Premise B2 could also be established in a number of different ways. The following has been given ad nauseam: D1) The physical structure or evolutionary history of things can demonstrate what is and what is not their natural function. D2) The physical structure and evolutionary history of the penis and vagina are such that it is clear their natural functions are (in part) the conjoining in sexual intercourse. D3) The physical structure and evolutionary history of the penis and vagina are such that is is clear that neither's natural function is to be conjoined with or masturbated by other body parts or things. Therefore: D3) The natural function of these organs is (partly) heterosexual intercourse, and, conversely, their natural function is not homosexual activity.

You could make straight-out Revelatory or Consequentialist arguments as well: E1) Not maximising total utility is wrong. E2) For utility-relevant effects, establishing homosexual marriage only causes consternation in some set of people W and jubilation in some set of people X. E3) For utility-relevant effects, not establishing homosexual marriage only causes jubilation in some set of people Y and consternation in some set of people Z. E3) The sum of utility wrought by the consternation of W and jubilation of X is less than the sum of utility wrought by the jubilation of Y and the consternation of Z. Therefore: E4) Establishing homosexual marriage does not maximise utility. Therefore: E5) Establishing homosexual marriage is wrong.

F1) All immediate revelations that something is or is not the case are true. F2) There is an immediate revelation that establishing homosexual marriage is wrong. F3) Establishing homosexual marriage is wrong.

A note on revelation: I think your back and forth with StuRat above was pretty good. I would add that I think the key premises in Revelatory arguments (as F2 above) are tough to deal with. You seem tempted to say that F2 would not be rational. I'm not so sure about that. First, I would make a distinction. I wouldn't say you can call a simple fact rational or irrational. It might be improbable or impossible, but not irrational. Rather, believing the utterance of the statement is what can be rational or irrational. If someone believes and just simply claims that he received an immediate revelation from the divine saying that homosexual marriage is wrong, there would be very little reason to believe him, and it would seem that to do so would be irrational. But is that person irrational? Well, that depends if it happened or not! If he had a clear and distinct perception of the divine communicating to him that homosexual marriage is wrong, then that would seem to be pretty strong evidence that it is wrong. None of that would be apparent to you or anyone else who didn't share in this moment he had with the divine, so would be useless as evidence for your part, but I don't think there is a contradiction in one person having evidence and another not having it. These are just my thoughts anyway.

Finally -- and I don't think anyone regularly here would be so mean to assume otherwise, but I say this only because I think there may be a few, more inexperienced people who come by this post -- just because I state some arguments does not mean I accept them. Obviously, since I repeat them, I think they might at least approximate valid arguments, but I know that validity is different from soundness. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 06:05, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

• [1] is about as rational as any other argument I've heard--Jac16888 ^Talk 22:38, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

There's a pretty strong consensus here that there is no rational argument against gay marriage. I was just reading of one of our politicians who, like many others much of the time, said "his electorate has made it clear it thinks marriage is between a man and a woman, and therefore he would vote against reforms in favour of gay marriage".From here. (And this guy is not naturally a real conservative.) Does that mean that the editors here are not representative? Does it mean that we think the masses are irrational? HiLo48 (talk) 03:23, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

I think that, pretty much irrespective of the subject, "the masses are irrational" is a pretty safe bet. This is somewhat independent of what I might think of them as individuals. I tend to believe in the idiocy of crowds.

Or, as a Very Demotivational poster put it: "Meetings. Because none of us is as stupid as all of us." --Trovatore (talk) 03:28, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Rob Oakeshott may be an independent these days, but he started out as a National, and the seat he represents, the Division of Lyne, has been solid Country/National Party territory forever, and will be again when he leaves the scene. The electorate may be happy to have an independent representing them if they've come to know and respect and trust him personally, but they are still fundamentally conservative in their outlook, particularly on issues that their grandfathers would never have even talked about, let alone supported. That's what it often comes down to in deeply conservative areas like Lyne, and Gippsland, where I live - "It was good enough for my father and his father before him to vote conservative, so it's good enough for me". Hence, the views of Oakeshott's electorate were as predictable as the sun rising in the morning. Gay people in these places may not be personally harrassed on a daily basis because of their sexuality, if they learn to mask it very early under a veneer of super-machoness or whatever the female version is. Those who can't deal with the struggle often kill themselves; the rural youth suicide rate is out of control and has been for a long time. There are reasons for this. Hence, Oakeshott was always going to receive far more anti-gay marriage views than pro-gay marriage views in a place like that, and he surely knew that. -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 04:22, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

So are you saying that conservatives are irrational? HiLo48 (talk) 04:59, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

No more so than any other comparable group of people, but no less so either. All humans are irrational about some things; some more than others. It's just a question of what they're irrational about. I'm just saying that for him to fall back on what his constituents say they want is a bit of a cop-out when he knows the views voluntarily tendered to him (which is the only means he has to gauge their views) will necessarily represent a disproportionately status-quo approach in what is already a deeply change-resistant electorate. The 18-year-old farm boys will not have been sending him any emails, but the retirees certainly would have. -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 05:47, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

I don't think "thinking marriage is between a man and a woman" is completely without merits. Saying "I'm married" simply does imply "I'm married to someone of the opposite sex" because that's what the word means. For example, laws constructed around marriage were made with a working male and a caring female in mind. Not for double income male couples. If gays or lesbians want to have their relationship "official", marriage would be a perfect way to establish that, but the English word would have different meaning. Dutch society hasn't come down after more than ten years of gay marriage btw. My personal view is that the word "marriage" should not be in federal nor state law at all. Similar to the law not treating baptized and not-baptized people differently. Joepnl (talk) 12:25, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Saying "I'm married" simply does imply "I'm married to someone of the opposite sex" because that's what the word means. - Not in Canada, Spain, the Netherlands and other places. They've managed to include same-sex unions in their concepts and definitions of "marriage", without doing any harm to the fragile fabric of society. "Doctor" used to imply a strictly male medical practitioner, but no longer. "Minister" used to imply a strictly male religious person, but no longer. "Jockey" used to imply a strictly male horse rider, but no longer. In those and other cases, the world adjusted and got on with more important things. Well, now it's mind-widening time when it comes to same-sex marriages. -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 12:41, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Well, now, let's be a little careful here. The debate as I understand it is about legal marriage. No one is being required to say that two men are "really" married, if they don't believe that. You can't legislate beliefs, at least not in our tradition.

There's plenty of precedent for legal marriage to mean something different from what people think is "real" marriage — for example, the Catholic Church holds that lots of couples are not married even though the law says they are, and that lots of others are married even though the law says they are not. --Trovatore (talk) 20:43, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

This isn't about the Catholic Church's definition of marriage, or any individual's definition of marriage, but the law's definition of marriage. There's no problem with two people of the same sex living together, owning property together, raising children together, and generally conducting their lives in exactly the same way as the straight couple next door. Except, the law does not permit them to be actually legally married, while the straight couple may marry if they wish. The law makes certain concessions, and in some circumstances there is no longer any distinction between a gay couple and a straight couple (e.g. when it comes to claiming unemployment benefits; the partner's circumstances are taken into account, and their sex is irrelevant). That's a good move. Anything that removes discrimination based solely on sexual preference, even if it works to the financial disadvantage of individuals in certain cases, is a good move. All gay people want is to be treated with equality under the law in all respects, not just some respects. Currently, my partner and I can split up and we would just decide who owns what and go our separate ways. As inconvenient as it would be, I would prefer us to have the capacity to divorce, in exactly the same way as straight married couples have to go through a divorce if they want to marry someone else. Divorce presupposes we were legally married in the first place. I personally would not marry again, but I want the option; not all straight couples marry either, but they all could if they wanted to (as long as they weren't married to anyone else). It's as simple as that: we want what they're having, and why shouldn't we have it? -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 21:27, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

That's exactly my point; the debate is about legal marriage. But "what the word means" is not necessarily about legal marriage; might be, might not be. Positive law can change, but if you think there's a "natural" notion of marriage, then that one presumably will not (which does not necessarily mean it will not include same-sex couples, just that if it does, then it presumably always has, even if we were slow to notice that). --Trovatore (talk) 01:40, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Personally I don't care much about marriage. If grandma wants offical approval to get married to a tree, let's change the law. But there should not be such an offical approval, and there should not be any extra rights for married people that others don't have. As long as there are such special rights, it's up to the majority to decide who gets them. The majority might have very valid reasons to exclude gay couples, and maybe the majority has it all wrong. Maybe that's another proof that democracy is an awful way to decide on what's wrong and what isn't. Joepnl (talk) 22:25, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

For the Netherlands: I do think we need to rethink things like laws about custody, inheritance, etc. For example, if I inherit a large sum from my (married) parents, I pay very little tax. If I would inherit a large sum from their neighbours, I'd pay halve. For some reason, politicians decided that there is a major difference between married couples and bystanders, and by allowing gay marriage these laws need rethinking too. A Dutch gay couple could already adopt children before they could marry, but if that wasn't the case they would automatically after being allowed to marry. There are many more implications to the legal word marriage than there are to a doctor being male or not. There are no different laws for male or female doctors. Maybe a large part of the "ignorant masses" don't care if 2 men want to be able to say that they are married (or the "offical stamp of approval" that they can have sex, or whatever "ignorant" point of view they could have), but do care about a range of other implications. "Widening of the mind" is not confined to just "the law discrimates agains gays, let's fix that and we'll have a better society". Btw, in Dutch "being married" still has its old meaning. A sentence like "mr Doe's husband" does need re-reading, similar to "spokesperson" which always signifies a spokeswoman. Joepnl (talk) 13:27, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

The words "Husband" and "Wife" still have gender specific connotations in the English language... but "Spouse" is more gender neutral. So, while saying "He is John's husband" or "She is Jane's wife" can cause (momentary) confusion... saying "He is John's spouse" or "She is Jane's spouse" will cause much less. (Saying "He is John's partner in marriage" is very clear... but also rather clunky). Blueboar (talk) 13:45, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Thank you (sincerely). Less sincerely: Listen to Jack, as soon as the law is passed people will automatically change their connotation of the word "husband" and turn into less-ignorant and better people. Joepnl (talk) 13:57, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Up yours, sincerely. :) -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 18:01, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

forgive english, i am Russia. i come to study Mechanical Engineering at American university. i am here little time and i am very hard stress. i am gay also and this very difficult for me, i am very religion person. i never act to be gay with other men before. but after i am in america 6 weeks i am my friend together he is gay also. He was show me American video game and then we are kiss. We sex together. I never before now am tell my mother about gay because i am very shame. I feel so guilty that I pick up my telephone and call Mother in Russia. I awaken her. She say you boy, do not marry American girl, and I say "NO I AM SEX WITH MAN" and my mother very angry me. She not get scared though.

Pierre De Fermat

"Although Fermat claimed to have proved all his arithmetic theorems, few records of his proofs have survived." <---- I got this from the article of him. What happened to all his records? According to what I understood is that something has happened that destroyed many of his proofs. What has happened? There is no mention of it at all in the article! I'm curious about this, thanks!174.20.9.68 (talk) 03:28, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Regarding Fermat's Last Theorem, he said that he had found a remarkable proof of the theorem, but there was not enough space in the margin of the book to write it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by OsmanRF34 (talk • contribs) 16:37, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

It's not all that surprising that records would be lost. After he died, whoever looked through his stuff to decide what to keep probably just saw a bunch of mumble-jumble and decided those papers would be most useful in providing kindling for the fireplace. And somebody who did this wouldn't be likely to leave any records of having done so. So, if his proof never made it into a library, it was unlikely to survive. StuRat (talk) 16:40, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Nice explanation. Where did you read it, StuRat? Usually they tell that Fermat's son published his father's papers instead of burning them..--91.50.25.228 (talk) 21:45, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

If he devised a mathematical proof, why wouldn't he have mailed a copy of it to a peer? If he did not publish a proof or send a copy to contemporaries, why would anyone believe he had actually proved anything, or that his proof did not contain an error? Was the world of mathematics really so much more trusting than the world of science in that era? Edison (talk) 18:24, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Why wouldn't he publish it ? He probably intended to, but the old grim reaper beat him to it. As for whether people believed him or not, I imagine that, lacking proof, they only had his reputation to go on, and I trust that his rep was a good one. StuRat (talk) 02:07, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

I've read that while he thought he had a proof, it's unlikely that he did, because the techniques used to actually solve it were not discovered at the time. Shadowjams (talk) 22:53, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

But it's always possible that there is another way to prove it, using the methods of his time. For an example in another area on mathematics, maximization/minimization problems can be solved with calculus, but there are also much simpler methods, like graphing. StuRat (talk) 02:07, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

It is possible, but hardly anyone who is intimately familiar with the case thinks that it is even remotely plausible. Too many good people have worked too hard on the problem. It seems much more likely that he had a convincing proof attempt with a small hole in it that invalidated it; this happens to good mathematicians all the time (for that matter, it happened to Wiles on his first announced proof, though it turned out to be possible to patch the hole).

As I understand it, there is a very plausible candidate for such a trap. I don't know the exact details, but if a certain class of ring were always a unique factorization domain (hope I'm getting this right), FLT would follow, and this could have been his "marvelous proof". The problem is, these rings are not always UFDs, but the early examples could easily lead you to conjecture otherwise and plan to prove it later.

Another suggestion I've heard is that Fermat's brief note in Latin may have been misunderstood, and maybe he only claimed to have proved the result for cubes and fourth powers. --Trovatore (talk) 07:35, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

In any case, the "last theorem" is an unusual case; the OP is asking about all of his other alleged proofs. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:43, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

You have to remember that the only reason this theorem is so famous is because its statement is so simple, yet evaded proof for so long. Would Fermat have considered it to be particularly important? Something else that might be relevant is that mathematicians in this period often challenged each other to devise proofs (indeed Fermat's Last Theorem notes that he challenged some of his peers to recreate his proofs of the n=3 and n=4 cases). Perhaps a lot of his correspondence was of this form? 81.98.43.107 (talk) 20:14, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

My understanding — which isn't that deep — is that in Fermat's time, the vast majority of the scientific work in mathematics took place in correspondence between scholars, not in publications. (The "scientific journal" was not firmly the site of scientific work and priority until the 19th century.) The consequence of this is that it spreads the historical record a lot thinner than in later eras. The early 17th century is not the easiest thing to document in any case — there's a lot of stuff on the aggregate but often huge gaps regarding specific people. (I've always been amazed that we really have no clue what Robert Hooke looked like, despite him being part of one of the few learned societies that actually did take time to preserve documentation, publish widely, and have journals.) --Mr.98 (talk) 17:48, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Countries whose civilian salute is placing the right hand on the heart?

According to an article I read, there are a number of countries aside from the US and the Philippines where the civilian salute is placing the right hand over the heart, apparently including Italy and Nigeria. I'm not sure about Nigeria, but the last time I checked, at Italian sporting matches, neither the audience nor the players actually do it. For some reason it seems to be common among football players, but not with the actual audience. In which countries is that form of salute widespread? Not just among football players, but among the general public? Not as in like the Mexican-style salute, but as in the one used in America. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 07:19, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

See Zogist salute. Joefromrandb (talk) 08:24, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

I already said. Not that one. I meant the American civilian salute. As in the one described at salute. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 09:12, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

See a previous question on the same subject. You sometimes see Brits doing it these days - quelle horreur! Alansplodge (talk) 09:35, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Here in the UK, civilians do not routinely salute anyone or anything, and there is no gesture which would be widely understood to be a 'civilian salute'. AlexTiefling (talk) 10:38, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Popular UK civilian salute: the two-finger salute --Dweller (talk) 17:48, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Netherlands single party majority

When was the last time that Netherlands had a single party majority? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.31.23.159 (talk) 14:52, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

The last time the Netherlands had a single-party majority was in the first months of 1897, before the 1897 election. Marco polo (talk) 16:02, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

And that was before there was universal suffrage, so only some men (and no women) were allowed to vote. - Lindert (talk) 20:53, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

ISA

What is ISA?Curb Chain (talk) 19:27, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

From context it sounds like Islamic State of Afghanistan, the nominal government of that country in 1993. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 19:44, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

"Purpose" of marriage

In the above discussion about homosexuality, one example of an anti-same-sex-marriage argument was that the purpose of marriage is to provide a stable platform for child-rearing. Is that even true? Specifically, is there any evidence that marriage in Western societies was invented to provide a good environment for child rearing? I can imagine other origins, like chieftains marrying off their daughters to solidify an alliance, or to serve as a hostage to an enemy tribe. --140.180.5.49 (talk) 20:11, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Marriage in Western society was never 'invented', it was inherited from civilizations before them, such as the Romans and the Jews. In fact, marriage is so universal I cannot recall any culture, past or present, without any form of marriage. The only thing that is a (recent) invention is homosexual marriage. I do think most people have historically viewed marriage as the proper way to procreate and rear children, as children born outside of a marriage have been considered 'bastards' etc. Furthermore, in ancient Greek society, homosexual relationships, especially involving pederastry were quite common, but as far as we know, nobody ever thought of calling that 'marriage'. - Lindert (talk) 20:31, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

As Fifelfoo more or less explained, anthropologists tend to see marriage as mainly about inheritance rules and the transfer of property among families and individuals and after the owner's death. By stating who may marry whom, society's rules for marriage also regulate exogamy and the incest prohibition. Marriage is also a cultural tool for organizing the gender division of labor. Note that this need not mean that marriage can only occur between males and females. In fact, in many traditional societies there was also a provision for same-sex unions, in some cases seen as equivalent to opposite-sex marriage, though in traditional society usually one member of a same-sex union would take on the role of the opposite sex. So same-sex marriage is not exactly a modern invention. Obviously, child rearing can be and has been organized in all kinds of ways other than a nuclear family, including extended families, community child care, and so on. Aside from the "origins" question, the argument about child rearing makes little sense when there is not a one-to-one correlation between opposite-sex couples and children being raised. There are obviously opposite-sex couples who choose never to have children (or who marry too late in life to do so), and there are same-sex couples who choose to raise children (either the biological child of one member of the couple or an adopted child). Marco polo (talk) 20:37, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Can you give an example of same-sex unions that were seen as equivalent of opposite-sex marriage before the 20th century? (just curious) - Lindert (talk) 20:44, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Have a look into the Fa'afafine's role in Samoan family reproduction. Fifelfoo (talk) 00:06, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

From what I gather, Fa'afafine are effeminate men who are considered neither male nor female. Although they do engage in sex with men, I could not find anywhere that they ever marry a man, but on the contrary, that until recently, most married a woman later in life ([2]). Furthermore, it seems that no reports before the 20th century of Fa'afafine are known, let alone same-sex marriage. - Lindert (talk) 10:33, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer! I know that having children outside of marriage was frowned upon, but was it true that married couples were expected to have children? If the purpose of marriage were procreative, there should have been social pressure on couples who chose not to procreate. --140.180.5.49 (talk) 21:01, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Well, the traditional Christian viewpoint (in this case Anglican but representative of the mainstream):

"Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this Congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man's innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church...

First, It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name.

Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body.

Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity. Into which holy estate these two persons present come now to be joined."

The Book of Common Prayer: The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony. Alansplodge (talk) 21:27, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

I don't want to offend anyone here. But — they really say the second point in the marriage ceremony? I want to paraphrase it as "well, of course if you two had enough self-control to keep from jumping each other's bones, of course it would be better for you to stay single, but since we kinda doubt you do, I guess we'll go ahead and let you get married". I know that pretty much is what Paul thought, but to say it out loud during the happy occasion seems — odd. --Trovatore (talk) 21:32, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes, they really say that, or did until the 1970s. I was a choirboy and sat through dozens of 'em. The modern version is here Alansplodge (talk) 23:14, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Oh, I like that version much better. Even the "honourable estate" bit from the old version sounded kind of like an apology: "You know, you might think these two are just slaves to their fleshly desires, and we're not exactly saying you're wrong, but we've decided it's honorable, so if you think different, keep it to yourselves". --Trovatore (talk) 03:07, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

For reasons of space and pertinence, no doubt, Alansplodge left out some of the more colourful language (which was theatrically useful at renaissance faires when I, who have no religious beliefs, played the village priest):

DEARLY beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man's innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church; which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee; and is commended of Saint Paul to be honourable among all men: and therefore is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men's carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God; duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained....

So, yes "men's carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding" (i.e. know no better) was very much on everyone's mind. Here are the services from the Elizabethan prayer book of 1559 and the Restoration prayer book of 1662. —— Shakescene (talk) 08:43, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Pauline, and early recorded Christian attitudes towards the body are quite unusual in terms of the variety of human experience. The Cathars took this weirdness to one of its natural conclusions. Anglicans are still Christian enough to maintain the Pauline revulsion towards the body, though, also Christian enough to recognise the procreation of children as a higher ordination than a remedy against sin for the incontinent. Fifelfoo (talk) 00:06, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Well, the Cathars took it to its logical conclusion for the perfecti, but that's not so different from what the Catholics do for priests. For the credentes, I gather that they were in some ways more sexually permissive than their contemporaries in the Catholic church (though they did discourage procreation). --Trovatore (talk) 10:44, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

It's not a revulsion against the body, but against sexual immorality/promiscuity. Otherwise Paul would not advise married couples against abstaining from sex, and telling men to love their wives 'as their own bodies' and quoting Genesis that a man and his wife 'shall become one flesh'. - Lindert (talk) 08:36, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

This doesn't really reflect the Anglican position accurately. The BCP words are based on the Pauline text (1 Cor 7:1-9), but without the critical line "It is good for a man not to touch a woman". The traditional Anglican position is that fornication (sex between people who are not married) is sinful; to avoid this, a few people have the gift (see Spiritual gifts) of continency (asexuality in modern terms), as stated in the marriage service, derived from 1 Cor 7:7, but most people don't, and therefore should either get married or abstain from sex. But Anglicanism doesn't regard abstention from sex as an ideal, as St Paul did. Tevildo (talk) 09:02, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't equate continency with asexuality, Tevildo. Asexuality is "... the lack of sexual attraction to others or the lack of interest in sex". Continency is where you have sexual feelings but choose not to act on them. It's a form of self-denial. It has long been the churches' advice for homosexuals as a life-long practice, which is double-speak. On the one hand, they acknowledge that few have the gift of continency, yet that is exactly what they prescribe for a significant chunk of their congregation. And not just for a short period like the 40 days of Lent, but for their entire life. Sheesh. -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 09:49, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

The distinction I would make is between "the gift of continency" (for which "gift" might not seem an appropriate term today), and "sexual abstinence", where I would agree with your views on traditional church practice. Tevildo (talk) 11:00, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't take "gift of continency" as meaning asexuality. I hear it more as "sufficient self-control to be able to live without sex". That's why the passage from the Book of Common Prayer would strike me as jarring at a wedding. It sounds like "what's happening today is good and honorable but not quite as good as if you could control yourselves, but that's OK, not really your fault, you weren't given that gift". --Trovatore (talk) 21:31, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

It was every Irish Catholic mother's fondest desire that all her sons would enter the priesthood, and maybe end up as bishops. They also wanted lots of grandchildren, preferably all bearing the family surname. Mother Nature and the Will of God sorted this all out. Now say 5 Hail Marys and be off with you. -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 21:55, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Every church and society I know of is perfectly happy to allow the marriage of a heterosexual couple incapable of having children, either through age or some other physical barrier such as illness. The argument from many unthinking (or politically manipulative) commentators that it's ONLY about having children has never been true. HiLo48 (talk) 22:06, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

For the Catholic Church, sterility per se is not a bar to marriage, but inability to consummate is. See canonical impediment#List of diriment impediments to marriage. I am not sure whether or not this is a proxy for sterility; the article says something about "paying the marital debt", whatever exactly that debt may be. --Trovatore (talk) 07:00, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Back in the day when that sort of thing was important, there wasn't any way of finding out if you were sterile, except by trial and error (unless there was an obvious physical deformity). Similarly, the OP's suggestion that couples could "choose not to procreate" wasn't really an option before reliable contraception was invented (late 19th century?), unless you also chose not to consumate the marriage. Alansplodge (talk) 08:33, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Which type of marriage? Spiritual? Or material? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:54, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

All types of marriage that I can think of. Are there any exceptions? HiLo48 (talk) 23:25, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

In Fordist society marriage was reinvented as an economic institution for White (or Japanese) workers to systematically exploit female household labour in certain ways, as part of the Western (and Japanese) capitalist classes' need to access material for primary accumulation (other techniques included imperialism, commodification of for example prepared reheatable household meals or the process of washing, war waste, etc.). As a result of this a significant portion of social expenditure (ie: "welfare" in its broadest sense of state mediated wage payments), goes to heterosexual couples with children. Part of the politicisation of non-heterosexual marriage involves fear regarding the reapportionment of this wage away from existing beneficiaries and towards new beneficiaries. Fifelfoo (talk) 00:14, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Well, that's certainly an alternative understanding. It's not an understanding that matches any of the discussions and arguments going on over gay marriage in England and Wales, so perhaps you don't consider us to have joined Fordist society? 86.140.54.3 (talk) 15:28, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Current analysts claim that the UK is a "Post-Fordist" society; they'd be wrong, but this isn't the place to debunk "post-fordism." You wouldn't expect the ideological phenomena I've indicated above to reside in the level of political ideology (the superstructure) because it is a material foundation for the very argument of straight privilege in family formation. Look at the standard "equal access to legal rights" argument in the gay marriage debate—the rights being sought are the ones that uphold the Fordist (ie: nuclear) family structure as a method of reproducing labour power. You should be able to get this argument from any post-"Wages for housework" workerist marxist. Fifelfoo (talk) 02:09, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

My point is that all the "equal access to legal rights" have already been granted to civil unions in England and Wales, and yet the argument still rages that gay marriage is required, suggesting that it is about something very different from practical family structures. I do not think this fits anywhere into your marxist structure. 86.140.54.3 (talk) 15:07, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Not when enacted, and not currently according to the Government Equalities Office. (Catherine Fairbairn (Home Affairs Section), Same-sex marriage and civil partnerships, House of Commons Library SN/HA/5882 15 March 2012, p3–5; Government Equalities Office, Equal civil marriage: a consultation, 15 March 2012, p5). YMMV, but when House of Commons in a standard briefing note, notes the difference in life outcome (ie: material difference) between declaring to an employer that you're civil unioned and declaring to an employer that you're married—there's a substantive material difference in terms of the construction of the family. Let me show you the gender disparity in income for the UK? (10.1111/1467-985X.00089) "In 1990 nearly a quarter of the income of families with children came from women's earnings. … Adult women were somewhat more likely to be poor than adult men were, but female-headed families were very much more likely to be in poverty, and much more dependent on state benefits, than male-headed families were." (Davis & Joshi, "Gender and income inequality in the UK 1968–90: the feminization of earnings or of poverty?" Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) 161:1, 1998: Abstract). Whether or not the government produces "formal" equality at law or not is not the measure. As Davis & Joshi show for gender, equal pay continues to be elusive; and as Fairbairn for the House of Commons notes the material construction of the family in the UK continues to exclude homosexual couples from the material construction of the UK family. Fifelfoo (talk) 22:19, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

To me, this seems to be a bit of a chicken and egg type of question: Which came first? Marriage or the justification for marriage? My guess would be that the earliest types of marriage happened so long ago that people weren't really able to write down that they happened, or why they happened. As humans, we seem to be very intent on codifying behaviour, very often with basis in norms that we inately hold. E.g. Dawkins frequently points out that even without religion or concepts such as 'sin', few people would kill each other, because we inherently know that it is 'wrong'. I.e. making murder illegal isn't due to the fact that humans naturally have an urge to kill each other, but because we all know, in our 'heart of hearts' that killing others is wrong.

Why then codify heterosexal marriage and not gay marriage? To me, that seems to be simply a result of how nature works. Naturally, humans, and animals, seem, on the lowest levetl, to live together in groups that are defined by sexual relationships. In human society that is one man, and one (or a small number of) women. From the animal kingdom, we hear of various types of animals that are 'similar' to humans, in that they also choose to live together in lifelong monogamy. In other cases, there are packs of animals that live together in groups consisting of one male and several females (e.g. the lion) or in groups consisting of both males and females, but where there is a dominant male (the alpha male) who has access to all the females, while the other males' access to the females is restricted. The reason for such organisation is undoubtedly due to the fact that multi-cellular organisms procreate sexually, requiring the presence of both males and females, thereby drawing together individuals of either sex to form social units. And, since most individuals, in the end, are heterosexual. (Also

The question that we are now pondering, of homosexual marriage, then leads to the question: Why have we for so long chosen to wed only heterosexual couples and not homosexual couples? One argument is that scripture doesn't allow it. (In my view, that is a legitimate argument within religious communities: just as a Christian church can refuse to wed two individuals who do not subscribe to that church's faith, it could also refuse to marry individuals who do not meet other criteria.) This argument, at least in liberal and secular societies such as in the West, do not weigh very heavily, since secular law should be based on the values of the society rather than on those stemming from a specific religion.

My guess would be that this has to do with how marriage is defined. Today, the ideal marriage in Western society is lifelong and monogamous (no cheating!), but that has not always and everywhere been the case. The Romans probably saw marriage differently, frequently divorvcing and remarrying, and I am sure that there are other societies which chose (and choose) to see marriage in a similar way, i.e. as a temporary social bond between two individuals. Coming from a tradition that sees marriage as lifelong and monogamous, it is difficult to see or understand how a society could accept such a temporary view of marriage, as it seems to go against the very foundation of what a marriage is meant to be. Seeing marriage as a temporary bond between a man and a woman would not fit very well with the idea of marriage creating a stable relationship for child rearing.

Another issue is how homosexuality was viewed or defined in various societies. A criticism of the Christian ban on homoxeuality, specifically the verses in the Bible condemning homosexuality, is that these come out of a specific historical context, not where there were many homosexuals living together in households, but where older men slept with young boys (sexual exploitation) in the time preceding their marriage to women. This was also in a time where the concept of 'sexuality' was seen as more fluid than it is today: Today we think people have one sexual orientation that is unchangeable, while that necessarily wasn't the case when the Bible was written. The ban on homosexuality, therefore, is not so much a ban on homosexuality as a ban of certain sexual acts. In this view, homosexual sex isn't a sin because it's homosexual sex, but because it is exploitation and sex outside of marriage (marriage being defined as the union of a man and wife), i.e. it would be infidelity to have sex with a person of the same sex as oneself.

I think that marriage is the end result of human behaviour, i.e. humans tend to live in couples consisting of two people, a man and a woman. (Even people who aren't married, might still choose to cohabit in this type of relationship.) As a result, the institution of 'marriage' has arisen as a way of codifying this behaviour. The rationale that is given as to why this 'marriage' is better than 'all others', I assume, would depend on how marriage is viewed in various societies. As humans procreate sexually, and since most humans are heterosexual (including 'bisexuals' who in addition to same-sex attraction also have opposite-sex attraction), and given that not all societies might choose to see sexuality in the rigid way we do in Western society today, it makes sense, in my eyes, that the type of marriage that historically was codified was heterosexual rather than homosexual. 21:20, 12 May 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by V85 (talk • contribs)

I'm a bit surprised that in the discussion of the history of same-sex marriage above, nobody linked to History of same-sex unions, which mentions that in ancient times, same-sex marriages were recognised at times in the Roman Empire, and parts of China, Africa, and North America, among other places (the Roman emperors Nero and Elagabalus both married men - though apparently it has been suggested that Elagabalus was transgender, and he also married several women). I think you also have to bear in mind that - due to the extreme social unacceptability of homosexuality in many societies - a lot of information about historical same-sex relationships has probably been lost or destroyed. 81.98.43.107 (talk) 21:09, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

I think that the purpose of marriage is primarily restrictive. I think it was more or less a matter of common law and prohibition of adultery, and often homosexuality, in the U.S. originally (e.g. The Scarlet Letter). But the introduction of the Mormon church got a whole lot of people riled up about the notion of polygamy, and so it became more formally regulated specifically to oppose that phenomenon. Wnt (talk) 20:25, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Can we clearly distinguish between the social and religious aspects of marriage or is this a hopeless case and any regulation that touches on the subject is simply government persecution of religious liberty? Hcobb (talk) 09:04, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Catherine, daughter of Joan I of Naples

Can anyone give me or link me to information about Catherine, daughter of Queen Joan I of Naples and Louis, Prince of Taranto. This page says she was born in June 1347 in Avignon and that she was last mentioned in 1362. This would mean that she was at least 15 years old when she died. She was heir presumptive to her parents all her life, first as the elder daughter and then as the ony child. Having died older than 15, she must have been a very attractive bride and there must be more information about her; I just do not seem to be able to find anything. Surtsicna (talk) 23:21, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

This page (in French) shows that she died in 1364, therefore aged 17. This page on French Wikipedia agrees with the death date, as do one or two other French sources I came across from searching on Catherine d'Anjou. There's little more coming forward than that, however. -- role^player 09:08, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

This page on Catalan Wikipedia also gives a death date of 1364. I have searched in Italian too, with nothing else substantial coming forward. -- role^player 09:18, 12 May 2012 (UTC)