ForumsWEPRWhat if straight marriage was illegal and gay marriage was legal?

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231terminator
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231terminator
87 posts
Nomad

my girlfriend actually asked this interesting question recently and I figured it would make for an interesting topic. How would things be different if straight marriage was illegal and gay marriage was legal?

to be honest i had no idea how to reply to this either

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fluffypancakes
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fluffypancakes
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Nomad

everyone would die due to lack of repopulation

Ishtaron
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Ishtaron
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Blacksmith

There is no answer to that question because it lacks context. Obviously not everyone will stick to homosexual relationships in this hypothetical, and people don't have to be married to have children. So this wouldn't necessarily end all human life. But why are the roles reversed? Are we in some dystopian Chinese future where population control is a necessity for life to go on? Did some ancient religion glorify homosexuality and alter how people perceive sex? Was Henry VIII cutting off the heads of ex-husbands instead of ex-wives? Each scenario is a very different situation with different impacts on how people would treat such a law. Tell your girlfriend that the pedantic nut on the internet demands specificity in hypotheticals.

HahiHa
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HahiHa
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Regent

Obviously not everyone will stick to homosexual relationships in this hypothetical, and people don't have to be married to have children. So this wouldn't necessarily end all human life.

î Obviously this.

Other than that, I guess the roles would simply be reversed. I wouldn't expect a big difference.

Freakenstein
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Freakenstein
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Jester

I imagine our flag in a Support Heterosexuality Movement would be a color-to-color gradient instead of a rainbow, but other than that, not too much difference. To keep our population relatively stable, in vitro fertilization would need to be an absolute must.

nichodemus
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nichodemus
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Grand Duke

The trend of the contemporary household is increasingly heading in the direction of unmarried couples and their children so I doubt that will do much other then create another political issue to quibble about.

Now if heterosexual intercourse is banned and homosexual intercourse is legalised; I imagine that will be a tad bit more provocative.

pangtongshu
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pangtongshu
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Jester

You answered your own question by asking it. If the question were to happen then hetero marriage would be illegal and homo marriage would be legal. Going further into the hypothetical begs far too many questions and requires so much context it really isn't worth getting into.

231terminator
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231terminator
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Nomad

yeah it was a rather odd question but i figured it would at least cause some form of new dscussion in the WEPR. anyways before i get off topic, kinda hard to say the context, actually some guy asked my girlfriend this question and she figured itd be funny to ask me, so i thought itd be interesting to ask it here. But like yall pointed out, there isn't much context to such a question. i guess that in such a world females could get eachother pregnant and uh guys are just sorta there as far as populating goes.

PS: ishtaron, Henry VIII would be an incredibly raging homo lol

Moegreche
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Moegreche
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Duke

Just a few things to consider when thinking about this sort of question - or marriage in general, for that matter.

1) Marriage is an ill-defined concept.
What this means is that marriage practices vary widely across cultures and throughout time. Providing a definition of marriage that adequately represents these different unions is both challenging and contentious.

We might be able to identify some key, necessary features of marriage. For example, it is a recognised agreement or contract between two or more people. The level of recognition, however, can vary widely - from the members of a small tribe or community to a state-level recognition that we typically think of. There also seems to be a sexual connotation that goes along with marriage. In other words, those who enter into a marital contract are assumed to be having sex. Of course, there are cultures in which marriage doesn't imply monogamy - or even that the sexual encounters must be limited to those parties engaged in the marital contract. These considerations lead to the second point.

2) Marriage is not a natural kind.
This is the standard line taken by philosophers when discussing gay marriage. The notion of natural kinds can get kind of technical, but here's a nice way of summing it up which I found on the SEP article:
"To say that a kind is natural is to say that it corresponds to a grouping that reflects the structure of the natural world rather than the interests and actions of human beings."

Another way of putting this is that marriage is a human practice, like paying money for goods and services, legal contracts, and the like. This also means that there is nothing contained in the notion of marriage that necessarily involves a contract between one man and one woman.

We can see this by looking at the very question in the OP. There's nothing incoherent about the question and, despite the fact that a lot of things would change in the world, we can imagine what some aspects of the world would be like. Compare this to something like a married bachelor, which would lead to a clear contradiction. In other words, if we were ask 'What if all bachelors were married?' - we wouldn't be able to imagine what this world would be like.

The long and short is that those who claim that marriage is, by definition, between a man and a woman are failing to recognise the above considerations. Marriage may have been something that was widely practiced between men and women. But like other human practices, there is nothing unnatural or incoherent about the practice changing. So the question your girlfriend asked highlights a crucial feature of marriage that sheds a lot of light on a hot-button topic.

Thrillology
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Thrillology
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I don't think this is an interesting topic. It's clear that we'd all die off except for the people who use logic over emotions, then only the logical ones would be repopulating but that wouldn't be enough since most people follow their heart and not their brain.

Moegreche
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Moegreche
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Duke

It's clear that we'd all die off

Take a look at my post. I know it's long, but there are (I think, at least) some important things to consider. As for this point, I note there that marriage does not imply sexual relations with only those involved in the marriage.

As for the interest of the topic - it is what you make of it. I think the question touches upon some important issues about our understanding of marriage, which I discuss at some length.

Kalaina
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Kalaina
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Nomad

There are some interesting points here. I think personally I've always considered marriage as a mostly social contract between two individuals, but thinking about it in detail it really is a very ill-defined concept. I think that's one source of the political issue, too - two sides are talking about marriage without having the same definition of what marriage is. Those who oppose gay marriage believe it's a reproductive contract bound in rigid gender roles, and also tend to have a very shallow understanding of gender.

Marriage being a product of human society is also an interesting observation, and perhaps a better question might be "What if humankind did not have the concept of marriage?" In all honesty, that might be a better society. On the other hand as a married person I have to admit the legal pooling of assets can be really helpful, but I can also conceptualize other ways of doing it.

In terms of the direction society is headed, one thing I do wonder is which will persist longer - marriage in the strict, binding sense, or the idea of "straight" and "gay" relationships. Certainly, the latter will eventually go away, primarily because it's an extremely inaccurate way to look at things. But committed, single-partner life relationships can be achieved without marriage, and I think we're moving in that direction as well.

Ishtaron
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Ishtaron
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Blacksmith

Those who oppose gay marriage believe it's a reproductive contract bound in rigid gender roles, and also tend to have a very shallow understanding of gender.

Okay, A) Those who tend to oppose gay marriage do so from a religious perspective believing it to be amoral, not because they demand all marriages be between an XX and XY gened pairing to mass produce babies. This is an important aspect of considering how to define marriage given how often marriage wasn't about forming a contract but about binding two souls together. Honestly, it's kind of racist to ignore the spiritual history of marriage to promote it as a purely contractual relationship. B) If we are going to discuss marriage as a purely legal matter here then yes, in the eyes of the law part of marriage is the ability to produce children. Finding out your partner can't help you produce children is a legally valid reason to nullify the contract by getting a divorce.

Marriage being a product of human society is also an interesting observation, and perhaps a better question might be "What if humankind did not have the concept of marriage?" In all honesty, that might be a better society.

Monogamy is hardly unheard of in the natural world. Penguins are famous for being strictly monogamous. There might be social issues tied in with marriage that are strictly the result of human culture, but I have to disagree with Moegreche on the concept that marriage itself is a solely human phenomena.

But committed, single-partner life relationships can be achieved without marriage, and I think we're moving in that direction as well.

This is something I've been saying for years. Many of the benefits of marriage are achievable without it, and those that aren't can be fairly easily made so with only minor adjustments. This is why I advocate returning marriage to the church as a spiritual matter and creating a separate, well defined, legal union for people of any and every gender to join into.

Kalaina
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Kalaina
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Nomad

Okay, A) Those who tend to oppose gay marriage do so from a religious perspective believing it to be amoral, not because they demand all marriages be between an XX and XY gened pairing to mass produce babies.

I'm not sure those are distinct concepts. Gay marriage is seen as immoral within a religious context for two reasons. One is that reproduction seems to imply a male should may a female. The other is that having the gender roles of masculinity and femininity within a union seems like a wholesome, spiritual thing.

Yes, in the Christianity that is our dominant religion in the US, we do have explicit condemnation of homosexuality in the Bible. But the Bible condemns a lot of things and we ignore quite a few of them. There are other reasons why this particular issue is salient.

Monogamy is hardly unheard of in the natural world.

I think you misinterpreted - marriage is human, monogamy isn't.

I'm entirely I'm agreement that our society would be better off if we removed all references to marriage from all our laws and left it to be a purely spiritual thing. However, to my knowledge no government is presently set up to allow comprehensive rewrites of thousands of different laws based on a cleanup initiative. Further, should we create a law saying that no lawmaker may reference marriage in future changes to our laws? Otherwise, what stops opponents of homosexuality from reinstating the problems we have now? Surely they won't be satisfied until homosexuality is criminalized as much as possible.

I used to think that removing the word "marriage" from law would be the best solution, but I have since reconsidered. The best solution is to stop allowing the religious context of marriage to influence our laws around it - it's the only solution we can ever practically achieve, and it's the best way to ensure equality in a world where not everyone is in agreement that our laws should be secular.

FishPreferred
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FishPreferred
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Duke

Certainly, the latter will eventually go away, primarily because it's an extremely inaccurate way to look at things.
I see no reason to assume this.

Honestly, it's kind of racist to ignore the spiritual history of marriage to promote it as a purely contractual relationship.
Religion and spiritualism aren't races, so no.

If we are going to discuss marriage as a purely legal matter here then yes, in the eyes of the law part of marriage is the ability to produce children.
No, it isn't. Legally, it really is just a trumped-up contract.

Finding out your partner can't help you produce children is a legally valid reason to nullify the contract by getting a divorce.
So is finding out they sold your house, drained all your financial assets, and ran off to some resort in southern Florida.
Kalaina
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Kalaina
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Nomad

My assumption that the rigid gay/straight dichotomy will eventually go away or at least be less extreme than they are now is more of an expectation based on an observed progression of social values over time than it is something I can logically be certain of. I don't typically conceptualize human interaction as a purely logical endeavor in search of truth, so I don't rigorously avoid making statements that can be interpreted as not logically sound.

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