Posted by caraher on November 8, 2008, at 17:14:24
In reply to Marriage definition, posted by rayww on November 8, 2008, at 13:16:55
> Marriage to me means I (a woman) have chosen to be married to a man, and commit to only him in my sexual relationship. It also means I have chosen to have children, our own flesh and blood.
I don't think that your complaint truly is definitional fidelity, at least not as presented above. I sincerely doubt you would, for instance, deny the title "marriage" to a union between a man and a woman initiated when they are beyond reproductive age, and I would support you in that judgment. Yet your definition states that marriage means a choice to "have children, (the couple's) own flesh and blood."
For instance, when my (widowed) mother remarried in her mid-60s, it seems to me that this logic would demand that we call it not marriage but "E-arriage" or "O-arriage" (for "elder" or "old" or something like that. Or suppose a man and woman who are biologically infertile want to marriage - again, by this logic we should insist on some kind of other name.
And what about fertile couples who simply choose not to have children and use birth control? To be consistent we should make up a name for that too... (And do we have a different name for the ones who choose artificial means of birth control... and do they petition for a change should they either change their minds about children, or have an accidental pregnancy and choose to keep the baby?)
> They want to wear my label, but I'm not willing to give it up. I wear it with a capital "M". I have been true to my husband and my children, and it hasn't always been easy.I have been true to my wife and to my children, and it hasn't always been easy. And I can't think of a more succinct and suitable label for committed couples of other sexual orientations to wear than the one we both do. And nobody asks anyone to "give it up," as if we had a finite number of pieces of cloth to pass around.
What is so wrong about defining legal marriage in terms of a committed relationship with a sexual component? Nothing in doing so prevents you or me from imbuing our own marriages with more meaning than this merely legal one; in fact, everyone does that. You do that by saying bearing and raising children is an essential feature of what it means *to you*, and I admire and appreciate that. But we routinely share this "marriage" label with heterosexual couples for whom this is not essential, even impossible - and rightly so, I think. We legally acknowledge marriage even in cases where the couple does not share our sexual mores, for the excellent reason that we think the government lacks a compelling interest to justify their presence in our bedrooms.
Marriage is degraded far more by heterosexuals who enter into it insincerely, with absurd expectations or in undue haste, than by gay couples seeking the most basic legal recognition of their committed relationships.
poster:caraher
thread:861505
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20081002/msgs/861584.html