The state has a vested interest in procreation (i.e.: creation of new citizens & taxpayers as others die off), so takes an interest in "marriage" as a means for facilitating the most efficient & effective means of promoting procreation, doing so by giving special benefits in return for parents taking on special obligations. Expanding the beneficiaries of those benefits to those to whom there is absolutely no chance (to the point of the notion being preposterous based on just 2 literal bits of information) of procreation is giving benefits to those whom will give nothing back in return.
The problem, as you sort of touch on, is that between evolution, religion & politics we've added abstractions & tangents to the issue, making most people think it's really about feelings etc instead of the base issue of procreation.
> The state has a vested interest in procreation (i.e.: creation of new citizens & taxpayers as others die off), so takes an interest in "marriage" as a means for facilitating the most efficient & effective means of promoting procreation, doing so by giving special benefits in return for parents taking on special obligations. Expanding the beneficiaries of those benefits to those to whom there is absolutely no chance (to the point of the notion being preposterous based on just 2 literal bits of information) of procreation is giving benefits to those whom will give nothing back in return.
So, you think marriage shouldn't be available for straight people who are both infertile?
You ignore the important role that marriage plays in mutual care. Marriage gives legal backing and support (in the form of certain tax and other financial and non-financial benefits) to a reasonably large set of people in long-term care relationships. Those people who care for each other aren't going to be needing as much support from the public purse to care for them when they get older, because they care for each other.
My dear old grandparents cared for each other when they were old - when my grandma died, my grandfather had to go into a residential care home. But because they were together, they provided care for each other that prevented both from needing that social care for a long time. Long term gay couples will give something back in return: caring for each other, providing health and wellness benefits that would otherwise be something that the welfare state may need to provide.
The state has a strong vested interest in people caring for each other. Here in Britain, the support given to parenting are done for parenting regardless of marital status in the form of child benefit payments.
> So, you think marriage shouldn't be available for straight people who are both infertile?
The rest of your argument around mutual care is reasonable. There are more nuanced views than a blunt "if state support for marriage depends on procreation, let's ban marriage for infertile people as well.", which sounds like spite: if I can't get it, then those guys over there should not get it either because they are similar to me on dimension X.
From the perspective of the state, there is a man, there is a woman, statistically they have a high probability of having and rearing children. Splitting hairs whether they are fertile / infertile is something the state shouldn't get into, partly because it's administrative hell and partly because it's an invasion of privacy.
With gay marriage, there is a man, there is a man, statistically they have close to zero probability of having children, so from the perspective of perpetuating the state, there is no statistically significant benefit in offering them special treatment.
We can now argue whether the state has the right to determine the gender of an individual, or whether that's an invasion of privacy as well. It's pretty easy to tell a man from a woman at birth. Biology and cultural norms make this distinction pretty obvious to anyone who's paying attention. It's both cheap and reasonable to tell apart men from women.
> It's pretty easy to tell a man from a woman at birth. Biology and cultural norms make this distinction pretty obvious to anyone who's paying attention. It's both cheap and reasonable to tell apart men from women.
The decades and decades of non-consensual infant "corrective" surgery of people with intersex conditions, leading to physical and mental damage (and in some cases involuntary sterilisation), suggests otherwise...
As any parent will tell you, pregnancy and childbirth are only the beginning of all that is involved in raising a child. And those can be contracted out: adoption has always been possible, and modern technology gives us the option of surrogacy. Plenty of gay couples are raising kids, and have been doing so for years.
You're just trying to rationalize your prejudice by pretending it's about fertility.
You're overreacting. "> So, you think marriage shouldn't be available for straight people who are both infertile?" is, sadly, quite close to spite. Pointing out that gay couples raise children in significant numbers is a constructive argument, though this implicitly recognizes that marriage benefits are, at least partly, about procreation and child rearing.
My cousin and the two kids that he and his husband adopted beg to differ. As do many, many other kids who might otherwise be in the foster care system consuming the resources of the state. The state has an interest in stable household formation, full stop.
Right, so we should add fertility tests to remove other people that have no chance of procreating from the marriage pool. We should also eliminate many of the benefits if couples don't produce children after a certain age and maybe even eliminate tax benefits after a certain number of years since a married couple's last child. Thanks for bringing this discussion back to the true soul of marriage: procreation incentives.
The government doesn't care if you plan to have kids when you get married, there's no tick box saying "You agree that this marriage license is only valid if you have kids.".
For most of human history, and without having to get into more specific details, a man and woman living together for more than a short time usually resulted in children. The institution was enacted to encourage such couples to avoid getting into such a situation unless they agreed to stay together, ensuring the likely offspring would be raised by their own parents (generally the best possible conditions).
There's no point in formal social recognition of a union if there's no chance of reproductive consequences thereof. And by "no chance" I mean "the notion is utterly preposterous", not "they may choose not to" or "parts don't work"; if literally two bits of information (one quarter of a byte) is enough to make the decision, that's enough.
>>> For most of human history, and without having to get into more specific details, a man and woman living together for more than a short time usually resulted in children. The institution was enacted to encourage such couples to avoid getting into such a situation unless they agreed to stay together, ensuring the likely offspring would be raised by their own parents (generally the best possible conditions).
Ridiculous concept. Most of human history was based on a gift economy, in small groups not couples, partly because it was unlikely to know for certain that one specific kid was yours. It's only later on that humans lived in smaller and smaller groups. The concept of a nuclear family is relatively new, in fact many societies still have the entire first degree family living together (India).
And besides, we're all tired of the argument, marriage today has little resemblance to its old form.
You know why you ask the girl's father's permission when asking her hand in marriage? Because traditionally, girls were the property of their fathers and it was literally a transfer of goods. So I don't really care what happened for "millions of years".
>>> There's no point in formal social recognition of a union if there's no chance of reproductive consequences thereof.
I beg to differ. There are many many many legal reasons one would want to get married to your loved one, I won't bother explaining them to you, as I'm sure you know them.
You can redefine the purpose of marriage however you want, but at the end of the day, legally there is no mention of procreation when you sign a marriage certificate. Unless you are seriously suggesting we should verify the fertility of couples before they get married?
The real reason for official recognition of unions is that, as a married man/woman, you are less likely to create damage to society, you are seen more stable, it has nothing to do with your ability to procreate.
The state has a vested interest in the prevalence of emotionally and financially stable, productive citizens. Anything more than that is emotionally charged fluff.
"Spouse" and "parent" are not synonyms. Fertility was never a requirement of civil marriage. Post-menopausal women were always allowed to marry, just one example.
So you're saying the government's "vested interest" should let it prohibit/nullify the marriages of heterosexual couples don't (or can't) pop out a child?
What about couples whose prospective offspring would be... undesirable to the state? Eugenics?
No, it's not about procreation, it's about social structures. Adoption is always a possibility.
The problem, as you sort of touch on, is that between evolution, religion & politics we've added abstractions & tangents to the issue, making most people think it's really about feelings etc instead of the base issue of procreation.