According to Fox News, that respected source, marriage died in 2013.
Marriage is over.
It was always at least a little funny that a huge percentage of people swore to stay together until death, then divorced and remarried.
But, now, it is, officially, judicially, a joke.
If two men can marry, and three men can marry, and five women and a man can marry, and three men and two women can marry, then marriage has no meaning.
It’s over. Go get rings, go get lawyers, go rent a nice hall, but City Hall should bow out.
I really wasn’t looking for a divorce, but I guess Mary and I will just have to live in sin from now on. Hmm. Maybe it will add a little thrill of the forbidden.
I fail to understand how more people being able to get married the way they want to gives other people’s marriages less meaning. I mean, I have had it explained to me repeatedly and often at top volume, but I still don’t get it. Something to do with losing a sense of superiority over people you don’t like, I imagine, but that seems a crappy thing on which to base a life long relationship to me.
You know what? Sure. If “City Hall” wanted to bow out of marriage, if conservatives would rather take their cultural practices and go home rather than let the gay kids play, fine. We can invent our own culture – people always do. I don’t think it’s actually legally practical (let alone politically possible) to write marriage out of the laws and the rules of other major organizations (such as hospitals) but if it somehow happened I wouldn’t object.
Biscuits are over.
It was always at least a little funny that a huge percentage of people swore to eat biscuits.
But, now, it is, officially, judicially, a joke.
If two men can eat biscuits, and three men can eat biscuits, and five women and a man can eat biscuits, and three men and two women can eat biscuits, then the eating of biscuits has no meaning.
It’s over. Go get biscuits, but City Hall should bow out.
Makes about as much sense.
Louis
Last time I checked “three men can marry, and five women and a man can marry, and three men and two women can marry” didn’t happen. Even if it did, how does that make marriage meaningless?
This. The only issues with polyamorous marriage are practical matters – inheritance, divorce, and such. There really aren’t any moral hangups I can think of. Now, there are the issues of polygyny in the classically awful Fundamentalist Mormon or Islamic sense, but that’s not a reason to screw over all polyamorous people.
Oh yeah, and in a way, Fox News got one-third of that statement correct. Five women and a man can marry (in some jurisdictions). Two pairs of women, and one man and one woman. Ta-da! Five women and a man can marry.
If the “little bit forbidden” adds a bit of zing to things, and it’s because of a dictum from Faux Nooz, you’ll probably not notice the heightened effect.
Something about divorce, something, something about polygamy, and a small something over some lawyers and some something of a city hall.
I’m beginning to think that Fox is not a very good news source. :-(
Well, see, it’s like this: ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!
Did you understand it this time?
The inclusion of this is very telling.
So, that means 35 years down the drain for us. Tsk. Living in sin? Not a problem, we did that prior to marrying.
Onamission5:
But, but, don’t you see? They won’t be able to feel all spayshul if just anyone can marry! And What About The Children™!? They might grow up to be thinking, tolerant people! And one of those gods didn’t mention ssm in the bible.
Actually, in isolation, this line isn’t that bad. Government can get out of marriage. Wouldn’t bother me, I don’t think. Change marriage from a formal decision to an informal agreement.
That said, it is useful to have government involved in marriage simply because of the practical issues I mentioned above regarding polyamorous marriage.
It says a lot to me that their ability to enjoy their marriages entirely depends on me not being able to marry who I want.
It’s as though there’s nothing in it for them other than the privilege of denying it to others. What they already have and get from it doesn’t count for anything at all.
Gays like me didn’t destroy their marriages. They don’t appear to actually have marriages to destroy.
Onamission5@1,
I like to ask those top volume explainers, “what level of confidence do you have in that opinion”? Sometimes they will sputter nicely. I don’t stand too close. Sometimes you just get the blank look and have to repeat the question for them.
How remarkably consistent. These are the people who favour private enterprise and wants government to stay out of their lives after all, aren’t they?
Well, it’s about time.
Quoth Rip Steakface:
I think I have figured out why Spouse and I aren’t married yet. It’s because we haven’t yet decided what group to lord our marriage over in order to get that warm, fuzzy feeling. /conservative logic
In happy news – I cheered when I watched the two men getting married on the Rose Parade float. When I told the hubby about it, he said “Cool, and the bonus is that conservative heads exploded all over the country”.
RFW:
I keep waiting for the day you’ll write something which isn’t assholish and stupid. This isn’t the day.
Of course those are practical matters. Making a will, practical matter. Also a legal matter. There are easy ways to deal with the practical, legal matters in polyamory. Many in poly relationships incorporate, as it’s one of the more streamlined ways to go when dealing with practical matters, and they are just as straightforward as the issues in any other relationship.
Rip Steakface:
I’m sure you realize that “wouldn’t bother me” has zero bearing on the matter. Changing marriage from formal to informal is rather silly, as in order to do so, you’d have to strip all the legal rights one acquires from marriage. It’s quite convenient to have those legal rights, and it’s simpler to allow others the same right when it comes to marrying.
Marriage is about creating legal kinship between adults, and the next-of-kin rights and responsibilities would become very problematic in cases where there are multiple spouses. But theoretically, I really don’t have a problem with poly-marriage, so long as all the people in the marriage are equally married to each other and enjoy the same rights. But that isn’t ever the case, is it? Poly-marriage always ends up being about one man with multiple wives.
And please, enough with this nonsense of ‘getting government out of marriage’. ALL legal marriages are civil contracts that grant special legal rights and privileges to spouses regardless of their religious, political, or ideological beliefs. Conferring the legal rights of marriage should never become the purview of religious institutions.
Rip Steakface, I have different issues with polyamorous marriage. The biggest is that it tends to lead to a surplus of one gender who can be driven away because they’re competition for more spouses. We’ve seen this in rural Utah where polygamy is practiced. Men who are little more than boys are forced out and have little if any of the skills necessary to make it in the real world. There’s also the “three’s a crowd/third wheel” situation where the odd-person-out is neglected emotionally or physically. I’m not saying that always happens, but I would like to know more about how it would be handled before I can support it. In other words, I’m willing to change my opinion given new data. Because I have met a polyamourous group and I did get the impression the third person was taken in out of pity. Of course that’s just my impression, reality can be very different.
quoted (as they say) for fucking truth
I support polygamous marriage. Although I like to see it restricted to the people who marry in the first place without further additions. If one of the participants wants to marry again it should count as a separate marriage.
loopyj @ 19
I’m not a man. I’ve had two woman partners at the same time and they were also partners with one another. Had things been different, perhaps our partnership could have become serious enough that we would want to exchange certain legal rights and responsibilities amongst ourselves, the same as I would like to do with my current partner.
People in group relationships that want legal recognition and protection are not all patriarchal polygynists. You probably shouldn’t talk about what poly marriage means if you aren’t familiar with the great diversity of poly relationships out there. The abuses and problems within the FLDS church and others are about patriarchy and controling women. They aren’t about being polyamorous.
@1 Onamission5:
For the sake of understanding the mindset, let’s use a metaphor. Imagine you work toward a PhD at an elite university, and eventually earn it after years of work. You’d be pretty proud of it, right? Then, imagine a few years later, that university decides to accept less-qualified students to its PhD program and lower the standards to make it easier for these students to graduate. In this case, wouldn’t it feel like the value of your degree has decreased, since it’s the same thing being gotten by a lot of less-qualified people after less work?
And here’s the implicit assumption behind anyone saying same-sex marriage being legalized devalues marriage as a whole. They consider same-sex marriage to be less than opposite-sex marriage, and so including it under the umbrella of “marriage” dilutes the meaning of the term to them.
Obviously marriages lose value because of marriage inflation.
Divorce is perfectly okay because it reduces the numbers of marriages, meaning that everyone’s marriage is worth more. But gay marriage? Interracial marriage? Interfaith marriage? These cause more people to get married, debasing the currency of marriage. It’s basically Zimbabwe but with marriages.
Because the state obviously cannot be trusted without debasing marriage, I’ve developed something called “Bitmarriage.” I haven’t worked out all the technical details, but suffice to say that it will allow people to get married without the need for a centralized authority. I still need to come up with a way to stop “double-proposing” where one person proposes to two people at the same time, but these are technical problems I hope to fix in the coming months.
A fine point. I was merely spitballing.
That said, I don’t like that marriage has more than just simple legal rights (like the ones involving inheritance and such), but also additional straight up benefits that have nothing to do with being in a committed relationship. Basically, I just don’t like that people have decided to incentivize marriage. People will marry regardless of tax incentives and the like, so why incentivize it?
There’s probably a good reason and I’m being a total ass by not bothering to look it up, but I’m feeling selfish (oh dear, maybe those liberturds are worming their way into me – that would be bad).
@25
By the Emperor, it’s like monetarism, except even more scummy.
Marriage was cool until all the posers started doing it.
hmmm, I do see that Ablow was raised a Jew thanks to wiki. Now what is he? Do the Faux Noisers know that they are listening to a filthy heretic?
I do love watching such people intentionally lie about their nonsense. I also feel sorry for Ablow’s wife.
I know you’ve walked this back, but I wanted to add that one reason my wife and I got married is that it makes it a hell of a lot easier to live in the same country together; it also made it easier for her to add a US passport to her collection, and our kids get the benefit of both nationalities (I’m the only one in our family with one passport, but if we live long enough in her country that could change).
Now as it happens we can do this without any difficulty because our genitalia are shaped differently and so governments all over the world recognize our marriage. If we happened to have the same sort of genitalia, though, we would have had a much harder time of it.
So yeah, I suppose in some utopian world marriage wouldn’t matter, but in the world we live in it does, and so marriage equality is a basic human right.
Totally. I thought the first album* was pretty good.
*(wedding album**)
**(these are the jokes)
Somehow, a medical degree didn’t make this rehash of tired right-wing cliches sound any more rational.
Another fine example of how some people just want to take their balls home. Because they’re special balls, and if anyone has any opportunity to even touch the balls then that would diminish their ball’s value.
How can some of those on the Right be so transparent yet so utterly oblivious? It’s a mystery.
Ugh, isn’t that the one where John and Yoko shriek at each other for 60 minutes?
Good! It’s about fucking time. Next step, destroy that wellspring of nereuoses, abuse, and oppression, the so-called “family”, then we’re one step closer to a better world.
wait I thought the “state” got into the marriage business for the express purpose of clarifying rights and privileges and inheritance. Did that need go away because the wrong people got married?
When I went to school it seemed that they taught that it was that the church was blessing the marriage implying that the marriage already existed.
I’m so confused now someone is saying because some people got married that they did not want to get married all marriage are of lesser value. Dose that mean that the church wont be blessing any more marriages?
uncle frogy
Well, my reasoning always goes like this: Since no goddamn priest never gave no blessing to us, in the eyes of any church we should still count as unmarried. So we never ended the stadium of having premarital sex, our children are born out of wedlock and we’re generally horrible people.
But funny enough, most religious people still think we’re totally married, yet they can’t explain why without getting their version of magical sky-fairy totally out of the picture.
Only the first of those has happened, and no, marriage has not lost all meaning. If we were to allow polyamorous marriages too, then I suspect a similar lack of fire, brimstone, and general catastrophe would follow.
Isn’t that better than casting them out for lack of pity?
You could always start bragging that you got your title in [year], before it was “easy”.
Or perhaps you feel the PhD program was unnecessarily hard when you went through it.
…except they didn’t do anything to get it. They just jumped through bureaucratic hoops. That’s not how you become a doctor!
Epic fail of metaphor.
:-D
Conflation of “marriage” with “family” and “family” with “new little taxpayers who’ll pay our pensions someday”.
Many of the “incentives” aren’t meant as incentives but as subsidies: if you’re marrying, the assumption goes, you’ll want to found a household and have children, two rather expensive activities.
Wait, I thought people and animals were supposed to start marrying now? Man and goat, woman and ferret, man and hagfish, woman and gryphon, and so on. At least that was some nutter’s prediction here in France… (As I now recall, said nutter is an MP.)
@25 DoubleReed:
I think I’m in love with you XD
So is Girlfriend.
Seriously, folks talking about how poly relationships can’t possibly work, and how you just know it’s always going to end up being about the patriarch and his harem, or how you totally knew this one triad once and they had a minigolf course in their backyard, so obviously poly people are just nuts…just shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about, and you don’t know how stupid you’re sounding.
To me, you sound very much – in fact, since I’m also queer and a longtime activist therefor, I can say pretty much exactly – like those people who say, “Well, same-sex marriage can’t work, I mean, how can they make sex if they can’t put their genitals together the way my partner and I can? Plus which of them will be the woman?” You sound like Ken Ham talking about evolution in that small, sad, lonely, and confused way of his, where he just really doesn’t get it, and just ends up sounding a complete fool.
Please do your own image, and our brains and blood pressure, a favour: stop. Just stop.
Signed, a very happily poly person, for more than twenty years now
Also, I hereby award doublereed my entire 2014 supply of awardable Internets for 25 and “Bitmarriage”. The problem, obviously, will arise when someone finds a way to implement Bitmarriage-mining in Minecraft. Then the marriage market will be like Greece, I tell you, GREECE!
Or maybe it was Grease they meant. In which case I am truly, properly scared.
I assume the family you were raised in was like that, but it’s unwise to generalise from your own case; just as silly, if less harmful, as saying “Well I don’t see how anyone could want to marry someone of the same sex, because I don’t”.
:-D
Infophile @25. I think I know what you’re trying to say about the conservative attitude to getting your marriage PhD. But the problem is (and I think it its the conservatives problem too) that they think they’ve got the PhD. They don’t seem to realise that they’re still working towards it. And there are a very large number of dropouts when you consider the divorce rate.
The fundies opposing plural marriage is kind of odd. After all the Old Testament seems supportive of the practice, and I don’t remember Jesus saying “Blessed is he who does not marry lotsa chicks.”(Because of course Jesus didn’t seem too big on preaching the whole gender equality thing.) Passages in the New Testament seem lukewarm about marriage period, but don’t go out of their way to single out polygamy.
Giliell #37, yes it’s … inconsistent, to say the least, that the religious don’t wail and gnash their teeth over all the billions of married people living in sin because they didn’t get married under the auspices of the right flavour of religion. If their dog must be involved, how can they possibly regard married couples from other religions or none as married? And yet, they do. Has there ever been a case of, say, xtians insisting that married hindu/buddhist/muslim/etc. couples aren’t really married? Goodness, could they possibly be using their religion as an excuse to justify their prejudices???
And that never happens in a dual marriage? Why do you seem to think that it’s a requirement that marriages should be perfect for them to come into effect?
Does this mean we have to return the gifts? We really like the Dutch oven.
CaitieCat @ 42
♥ After the first bunch of anti-poly comments, I was a little worried about even coming back to this thread. Glad to see it didn’t continue in the direction it looked like it was heading.
The abuses of patriarchal polygnists are abuses. Coercion and religious pressure is involved. Opposing situations in which boys and young men are forced out of the home, underage girls are forced into marriage and wives are subjugated is a reasonable, empathetic response. Using that as justification to oppose the legal recognition of multiple consenting adults entering a group partnership is absurd.
You might as well ban “traditional” marriage because men are such a danger to women.
I want to know how poly-marriage ALWAYS ends up being one man and multiple wives when lesbians actually exist.
One point my dad would often bring up when we talked about the issue: Is marriage a legal institution or a religious institution? If it’s a legal institution, it has to be a universal right so everyone has the opportunity to enjoy the legal benefits. If it’s a religious institution, there should be no legal benefits since the government isn’t supposed to respect a religious establishment. Additionally, homophobic churches have no legal basis to complain about other churches or non-religious groups recognizing same sex marriages, since the government isn’t allowed to play favorites among churches.
That’s pretty much the choice homophobes have to make. In order to be fair, the government must recognize everyone’s right to marry or it must recognize no one’s marriage rights. It all boils down to fundies wanting special privileges for their particular religion. Of course, if they were forced to choose, I’d worry that some might actually favor the abolition of marriage as a legal institution.
—
On the issue of polyamory and polygamy, I wish those people luck in sorting out the legal issues for everyone involved and getting recognized. I’m sure the complexity adds up quickly. I do worry about the abusive polygyny that exists, but I recognize that abuse as a product of patriarchal culture and religious privilege, not an inherent feature of poly relationships. Just like the all-too-common wife-beating male (and the less common husband-beating woman) isn’t an inherent part of hetero relationships or monogamy. Any kind of relationship can become abusive, and we need to find ways to prevent that, rather than make scapegoats.
If you feel that “inferior” marriages threaten yours, you need to stop marrying awful people you hate.
Seriously. This rhetoric makes sense if you imagine it coming from people who believe that marriage is a societal obligation. Imagine how you would feel if you got married because you had to, to please your family or your church or because you wanted to get laid but couldn’t kill the guilt of extramarital sex, and then you see people courageously deciding to get married on their own terms? It would seem that your own marriage was cheapened, only because it was cheap and dishonest in the first place and now you can’t pretend it was inevitable or necessary.
Oh, and a word about poly relationships which seem unstable: it’s not easy maintaining romantic relationships even in the context of a supportive society. Imagine trying to do it when your family and friends and coworkers would call you a pervert if they knew. Fuel for self-doubt.
@Jackie #52:
Because no woman — even a lesbian — can be truly happy and complete unless there’s a man around to tell her what to do.
Do I need to add the /snark? I suppose I’d better, just to be on the safe side ;-)
/snark
@#42, CaitieCat
What? How could anyone object to that? A minigolf course in the backyard is one of only four acceptable uses for the main space of a backyard, the others being vegetable gardens, flower gardens, and big grassy open spaces for kids to play in.
Darn, I wish I had some nutty poly people in my neighborhood.
The last time I played minigolf was in 2002.
I was 17. It was July.
I was in Regensburg, Germany.
I was falling-down drunk.
They tell me I punched the windmill hazard.
This is from the same guy, some time earlier:
Can you say hypocritical partisan hack?
@ #55, Loreo
I’m in a relationship with a married couple right now, and even with everyone’s parents, siblings, and friends being pretty okay and accepting of it, the people who aren’t are a pain in the ass. The current rule is that nobody’s grandparents are to be told, and one set in particular has a hate on for me. They only know that I’m a female roommate who recently left an abusive home situation(all true) and their reaction was to tell lady love that I was a dirty homewrecker who should just go to a battered women’s shelter before I stole her husband because so and so thirty years ago ran away with the baby sitter and “IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!!!”. Sometimes I suspect I respect their marriage more than some of their family does.
*lightbulb moment*
Now it finally makes sense!!! Thank you so much!!! :-)
That’s the kind of person who probably wants that to happen just so they can say “told you so”.
One of the mantras I think I’ve successfully passed onto my children has been, “This too shall pass”. Most marriages have, I believe, points of wonder and points of “wonder why did we do this?”. Starting out taking the long view has worked for my wife and I. Our kids are grown up, and often have pointed to the fact that so many of the friends they grew up with lived in broken or dysfunctional homes.
The institution of marriage is or should be about instilling that long view. It is a commitment to someone else, with all the complications, emotional sturm and drang, and joy that can come with that. It is, given human nature, perhaps a valuable bit of inertia in the domain of relationships. Once you are in one, you may (or should) pause before abandoning it when things go wrong. In sickness and in health, and all that. It can add a bit of stability to the two (or more) body problem we must solve if we are lucky. It is a useful, but not essential tool for long term relationships.
But man is a tool user, and will use available tools (hammer, atomic bomb, religious concepts) to achieve desired goals. Some will use the tool of marriage to consolidate property (a traditional use), and some will use it to control others (religious based polygamy). That doesn’t mean the tool is bad, but that people will misuse it to their own ends.
Marriage should simply be abolished, but there is a legal problem. There are many laws that inhibit that: family benefits, inheritance, and so on. All these things are in the domain of the states, so only state or local government officials should be allowed to perform marriages or their equivalent. Marriage is not mentioned in the U.S Constitution. State civil unions should replace marriage and have the protections and restraints of current laws on marriage.
For example, France has both civil unions and marriage(including same-sex), and both must be performed by the local mayor or his delegate. For civil unions, even members of the same family can engage in them for legal reasons such as preserving common property or a business if one of the partners die.
How does adding “or one man and one woman can marry” change the meaning of this sentence? It doesn’t.
You can tell a slippery slope is a fallacy when replacing “gay marriage” by “straight marriage” doesn’t really change the semantics.