Under United States federal laws, according to a 2003 GAO report, there are 1,138 laws relating to the rights, privileges, and obligations of marriage. Google “gao gay marriage report” to find it.

A marriage license costs, what, 40 bucks? My same-sex partner and I spent $2500 for wills, powers of attorney, medical powers of attorney, and living together agreements. Let’s see, 1,138 minus 4 = 1,134. At $625/document (actually 2, one for each of us per line item) times 1,134 . . . that’s $708,750 we would have to shell out! Wow! What a bargin! Thanks for opening our eyes to the beauty of contracts!

But wait, reading through the GAO’s report, I see a few interesting items which have nothing to do with couples who have children: the right not to be compelled to testify against one another in a court of law, the right to claim a deceased spouse’s body (as well as to determine burial), the ability to sue on a spouse’s behalf were the spouse gravely injured at work, etc., etc., etc.

Unmarried same-sex partners CANNOT contract for these and “anything else” as you so blithely phrase it. Get real.

This really isn’t a startling or counter-intuitive thought. If women and men are supposed to behave in different and complementary ways, then you can’t possibly have two women or two men in a marriage. How will you know which one of them has to earn a living while the other stays at home? Who’s the “man of the house”? Who initiates sex?

You can also add the sterotype that a woman who takes on a “man’s role” must act, feel and behave according to a stereotypical, traditional male role (and the reverse for men), which is anathema to those who admire rigid gender roles. This is where you get ignorant comments like “But which one of you is the man?”

chris s, I don’t know where you get the idea that children born out of wedlock are ‘legally invisible’.

Or putting it another way, I don’t so much mind marriages without children as I mind children without marriages. Allowing one seems to allow the other. See 70, 74 for why I consider it a bad idea.

I don’t. Of course you’re better off today than yesterday, but society can’t protect your civil rights if it doesn’t know you exist. Children born out of wedlock, sometimes without the knowledge of the father, sometimes without the knowledge of the mother’s own family, are legally invisible, and legally invisible people have no rights.

Are you certain this is a good thing? It seems to me that when you disconnect marriage from childrearing two things happen. 1) childless couples can legally marry (no problem, I guess), and 2) children can be legally born out of wedlock. This concerns me greatly.

I’m sure you’re aware that children can be put to all kinds of evil uses: unpaid labor, sex trade, organ harvesting. Children born in anonymity have no protection against abuse or exploitation, and creating a culture of anonymous children attracts human predators like crows to roadkill.

First, apologies for missing ghr’s point the first time around. The question is whether attitudes toward gay marriage is a cause or consequence of feelings about gays in general. My off-the-cuff answer is that, for most people alive today, their feelings about gays were “formed” before their feeling about gay marriage, given how recently gay marriage has become a salient issue. So my intuition is that the causality is generally running from feelings toward gays to attitudes about gay marriage.

However, it is possible that the salience of a relatively unpopular issue, gay marriage, made some people feel more negatively toward gays in general. GHR asks whether the feeling thermometer score dropped after the Goodridge decision in Massachussetts. That decision was announced on November 18, 2003. So, one might ask whether the feeling thermometer score dropped between the 2002 National Election Study and the 2004 NES (which I used to produce the analysis in the original post). (To be sure, comparing 2002 and 2004 is pretty rough, since the surveys don’t precisely bracket the Goodridge decision.) Below is the mean on the 0-100 thermometer for every year the question was asked. As you can see, there has been a substantial increase since 1984, which parallels numerous other trends in public opinion towards gays and lesbians. Between 2002 and 2004, the evidence suggest a small increase rather than a decrease in the feeling thermometer:

1984-29.9
1988-28.5
1992-37.7
1994-35.5
1996-39.8
1998-45.4
2000-47.3
2002-46.4
2004- 48.5

So there is no evidence here that feelings towards gays in general grew less favorable as a result of the debate.

I did a little searching in some polling databases to see if I could find questions that (1) measured general feelings towards gays and lesbians and (2) were asked relatively close to the Goodridge decision (both before and after). I didn’t see anything that fit the bill, though my search probably wasn’t exhaustive.

Hope that is helpful.

Maybe they should try a correlation between those who oppose gay marriage and those who prefer shorter haircuts.

Marriage is already defined in this way, chriss. Childless married couples, whether childless by choice or by circumstances beyond their control, are completely equal to married couples with children under the law.

It’s clear that you find this objectionable, but the fact is that it has virtually nothing to do with same-sex marriage.

When I heard this story, I wondered, confused by what? Now I think he didn’t want his son confused about “proper” masculine behavior.

I heard that one from some of the teacher-training students when I was at university and the right-wing lunatics in the government were banning the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools. I think it wasn’t so much about behaviour as the idea of ‘normality’. The idea is that you teach young children a simplified version of the way things are and don’t “confuse” them with all the exceptions: which includes being gay, if you’re the kind of person who thinks being gay is “abnormal”.

Yes, this is indeed what I intended. Mere correlation does not tell us which way the causation goes.

I agree. Family is more than direct bloodline. I’m all for people being directly involved with the raising of their sibling’s nephews and nieces. Partly why I support marriage as an unbreakable institution between mother and father is that it promotes access to the protection of their relations on both sides of the family.

Good for you :) See? If everyone did that our population would plummet.

Every culture I have ever looked into has been anchored by strong customs of pairing men with women for the purpose of procreation. The particulars of the union vary from culture to culture, but as you travel away from the basic mom, pop and baby format it becomes increasingly infrequent. No culture that I know of has ever considered the act of cohabitation to require binding vows like marriage, and I happen to agree that they are separate categories of relationship, not to be confused with one another.

By ‘binding vows’ I mean that when you make them, society will enforce them as law. Parents with children need this kind of societal oversight to help them stay together in hard times, but two adults? There is no reason why society needs to enforce interdependent relationships between consenting adults.