As was pointed out prior to your post, under no-fault divorce laws, one can be resolutely opposed to divorce, perfectly innocent of any marital wrongs, and STILL end up divorced, if you happened to marry somebody who didn’t share your views on the subject. This is rather like accusing a rape victim of being hypocritical on the subject of monogamy.

Yep, and that black people are genetically inferior and that the earth was created in seven 24-hour days and gosh-all what else. And yet the nation survived both Scopes and Loving v. Virginia…

I think that’s too simplistic. I am a supporter of gay marriage, but I would say that opponents believe that legal gay marriage would change the institution by changing the meaning of marriage, in ways that are difficult to anticipate completely. Furthermore, I think it’s reasonable to suspect that it would tend to change the meaning of marriage in ways that liberals would find congenial and religious conservatives would not. Heterosexual divorce, on the other hand, would have no such effect.

My own message to religious conservatives is, “Sorry, but the human rights of gay people outweigh your concerns about changes in the institution of marriage”. But to pretend that gay marriage and divorce are somehow comparable or that religious conservatives are delusional in believing gay marriage will change how society views marriage—that’s just not honest. Legalizing gay marriage will change the institution of marriage, but it should be done anyway.

Civil partnership rather than gay marriage in the UK but the first break up only took three months (and there is a one year waiting period to boot).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/05/19/ndivorce19.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/05/19/ixuknews.html

Divorce lawyers are quoted so I’d guess they’re already aware of the opportunity.

If it was true that women were inherently more vulnerable than men (I’m not sure), then there is nothing inherently illiberal with such a law. Recognizing a fact does not mean we are happy about it.
But you forget the children in your argument because children are less powerful than adults. There can be no doubt that children concerns the state – it may be the easiest way to become a citizen, after all, just be born. As such, I recognize that the state may need to concern itself with who has children or not. They may also want to know if people live in the same household, share ownership of property, etc. What the state should not do, IMO, is try to (re)shape the old social-religious institution that is called marriage. They should be completely separate, and everyone should be clear that the legal part, the one the state does, is NOT marriage. That is the detail that France and some other countries get wrong.

Your argument doesn’t seem very persuasive to me. It strikes me that the following set of attitudes toward a given institutionalized form of behavior are mutually consistent: (i) it is very important to preserve the institution, (ii) actions that harm the institution are therefore prima facie wrong, but (iii) bringing an end to certain deficient instances of the institutionalized behavior do not harm the institution, but actually help preserve it.

Suppose a village has a tradition of weekly square dances and vocal concerts. The people in the village think it is very important to preserve this tradition, and participation is more or less mandatory. Skipping is roundly and severely condemned, as are certain other acts that threaten the survival of the tradition – for example, organizing competing dissident events, or positively disrupting the dances and concerts.

Yet a relatively small minority of people are exempted or excused. Those who have proven themselves to be incorrigibly disruptive are banned. And those whose vocal abilities or physical coordination are so bad that they would seriously degrade the quality of the events, and damage the high esteem in which they are generally held, are excused. Some of these latter give it a try, but ask to be excused after failing repeatedly to improve and to contribute in a positive way through their singing and dancing. These people are usually asked to help support and preserve the tradition in other ways.

One of these excusees even runs for mayor, and makes it his chief aim in life to preserve the tradition of the weekly dance and vocal concert. While he allows for reasonable exceptions, he passes some laws to prevent widespread truancy or shirking, and passes other laws that prevent dissidents from holding alternative events, in which certain novel forms of singing and dancing are practiced.

Now the mayor may be wrong or misguided. Maybe his fears about the dissident forms of dancing and singing, and the threat they pose to the dominant tradition, are overblown; or maybe the tradition could get along perfectly well with larger numbers of shirkers; or maybe it isn’t so all-fired important to preserve the dominant tradition in the first place. But I wouldn’t say the mayor is a hypocrite because he, himself, asked to be excused from the events. Removing a few terrible singers and dancers may in fact help to preserve the institution, and not at all harm it.

So just as seeking to end one’s incorrigibly deficient participation in traditional weekly dances and concerts does not necessarily harm that tradition, and may even help preserve it; so seeking to end one’s own incorrigibly deficient marriage may not harm the institution of marriage, but help preserve it.

During the ‘50s which most Americans, particularly those who haven’t lived through the period, regard as a Golden Age, the Dick and Jane family was represented as the norm and indeed the epitome of the Good Life. Divorce doesn’t undermine that vision: people who get divorced have just failed to achieve the Good Life—and may still get it if they remarry. Single people will get it when they marry, have kids and set up house in the suburbs. Bachelors are fools and spinsters are to be pitied.

People who buy into the vision, live it, and like it are on the defensive. For the past 20 years or so, in popular culture or on TV at least, the Good Life has been represented as the comaraderie of the glitzy law firm, unwinding at the after work bar and home to the apartment in an urban high-rise—a world without children where there’s no marriage or giving in marriage. “Suburbs” is a funny word in the way that mother-in-law used to be and “housewife” is a dirty word.

The “gay lifestyle” as people perceive it is just a special case of that world. Gay marriage stamps it with respectability. This hypothesis has some explanatory power since it explains not only why people who oppose gay marriage as a threat to Family Values don’t oppose divorce but why a significant number of Americans who oppose gay marriage don’t oppose gay “civil unions” and why even more oppose anti-sodomy laws. These guys don’t want the state to intrude in people’s private lives—they just don’t want what they see as an official stamp of approval on alternative life styles that they see as more prestigeous than their own.

As an avid TV viewer and pop culture consumer I’ll be interested to see the response to Big Love: heterosexuality, piety, family values, sex roles, suburban life and housewives—just too many per male breadwinner.

That said, on the purely practical question, my mother, for one, held the position that a family was ideally composed of parents of both gender for fear that children would be ridiculed and singled-out until I pointed to her than then my (paternal) grand-parents should not have been allowed to divorce (as it obviously included a lot of ridicule and singling-out for my father when he was a child). I am not sure she was being an hypocrite, but certainly inconsistent, and pointing inconsistencies can work.

Maybe the most effective argument is simply to point that legalizing same-sex marriage has a miniscule effect on you if you are not interested in entering one (if not no effect at all), while not legalizing it has an enormous effect on other people so you should refrain from preventing its legalization. So one can disapprove, sure, but not vote against it. A position than could be sumed up as “strive to be rational when dealing with matters that influence other people”.

A good position to think about same-sex marriage and a not too bad one for any other question.

Stepping back, couldn’t one think that public recognition of marriage is simply a subsidy for the institution of marriage. In that regard, divorce and public recognition of gay marriage aren’t similarly situated, are they? Divorce cuts off the subsidy, while gay marriage begins it. So, in the present scheme of things, there are some benefits that flow to those in the institution of marriage, but no real bars to exit. There are no subsidies to divorce—to the contrary, even with liberalized divorce laws it is often expensive and there is no public support for those with limited resources. To treat divorce and gay marriage similarly would mean that gay marriage shouldn’t be subsidized through recognition by the state (though people should be able to commit themselves to the goods of gay marriage without the subsidy, just as they avail themselves of the goods of divorce, despite any damage done to the institution of marriage).

So if you support government sanctioned marriage on the bassis of stability and you have yourself been divorced then I see you as being considered a hypocrite. If, on the other hand, you believe it is to support the continuation of the civilization, and during you married time you did procreate, then being against gay marriage is not so hypicritical.

The point is, the scope of this topic is far broader than being discussed here. I don’t think that there would be a simple way to determine a person hypocricy based on such limited criteria.

Personally I think the government should get out of the marriage buisness and leave that up to the religious folk to make up what every rules they would like (no matter how contradictory). I mean after all isn’t this just like saying if you have only one spouse can you comment on polygamy.