{"id":1468,"date":"2011-02-17T11:10:13","date_gmt":"2011-02-17T16:10:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/?p=1468"},"modified":"2020-04-04T13:15:49","modified_gmt":"2020-04-04T17:15:49","slug":"same-sex-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/2011\/02\/17\/same-sex-marriage\/","title":{"rendered":"Same sex marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I was on the radio show<\/a> again tonight, and we spent some time talking about same sex marriage. This is an issue on the legislative docket in Rhode Island right now, and it\u2019s been the topic of a few shows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First off, one might wonder why an atheist radio show<\/a> would care about same sex marriage. Couldn\u2019t we just, like, go off by ourselves and not believe in God? The answer is that, really, I would love to. I\u2019m not all that worried about other people\u2019s beliefs, per se. If we could get to the point where we had removed the majority of the institutionalized bigotry and intolerance that uses a thin veneer of religiosity to stay alive \u2013 I would love<\/strong> to hang up my combative hat and talk philosophy. However, what we\u2019re really talking about is whether it\u2019s okay to deny a fundamental civil liberty to a decent fraction of the population. Where the rubber meets the road, I\u2019m worried about civil liberties, rationality in public health decisions, and so on. I no longer believe that religion is the cause<\/strong> of most of this \u2026 but it is certainly the excuse<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question we asked callers was \u201chow does allowing same sex marriages affect your<\/strong> heterosexual marriage? For all the talk about same sex marriage \u201cdevaluing\u201d and ruining the institution of marriage \u2013 I expect some sort of detail to back it up. I\u2019ve been married for more than a decade. In my experience, the marriages of my neighbors have almost no effect on me. I live next door to a woman who is raising two kids, solo, after her husband left her. I live across the street from a couple in their 60\u2019s whose grandchildren come to visit from time to time. Neither of those relationships is like mine, but neither of them effects me all that much either. In Minnesota, I lived across the street from a couple of gay men in a long term relationship. They were fine neighbors. I also lived next door to a Yeshiva, a school for orthodox Jewish boys. They were fine too. In East Providence, I was frequently on the edge of calling the police over the sounds coming out of a perfectly heterosexual house. Even with that, there was no real effect on my<\/strong> marriage besides some good conversations about when to get involved in what was obviously some level of domestic abuse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the question was: \u201cWhy does it matter?\u201d Sadly, we had only one caller who tried to answer \u2013 and he went with a combination of the \u201cslippery slope\u201d and the \u201cword is and always has been defined this way\u201d arguments. The latter works out to \u201cnothing should ever change.\u201d To that I say \u201csociety changes, and we can do better this year than last year.\u201d When the US constitution was written, slavery was law and women didn\u2019t have the vote. We\u2019ve gotten past both of those mistakes. Let\u2019s get past this one too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cslippery slope,\u201d argument is ridiculous in a way that I failed to address on the air. I found myself yelling at the steering wheel on the way home over this one. The caller said, specifically, \u201cif we let men marry men, what\u2019s to stop someone from marrying their daughter, or their dog?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the thing: We are not anywhere near the slippery slope<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we talk about same sex marriage, we\u2019re talking about the very most rational and stable members of the gay community. These are the folks who want to settle down, publicly commit to a long term relationship, use words like \u201cfather in law\u201d or \u201cbrother in law\u201d to talk about their partner\u2019s family, and generally do all of the totally ordinary and boring stuff that heterosexuals take for granted in a lifetime-committed relationship. Nobody is talking about sexual promiscuity and serious deviancy here. If we were, then heterosexual marriage ought to be hauled on the carpet for some of the stuff I saw at college parties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t even get me started about Jersey Shore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was on the radio show again tonight, and we spent some time talking about same sex marriage. This is an issue on the legislative docket in Rhode Island right now, and it\u2019s been the topic of a few shows. First off, one might wonder…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1468"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1469,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468\/revisions\/1469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}