The argument is that marriage is "ordained of God" and since homosexuality and other sexual "deviations" are "perversions" and "sins", then gay marriage makes a mockery of marriage and insults them to the point they think it infringes on their freedom of religion. Mind, I'm not saying I agree (you know I don't). The idea that it infringes on their freedom of religion is bullshit. It only infringes on their ability to force their religious views down others throats. It's the "moral majority" trying to impose their will on an unwilling group.

Notice I didn't say "evangelical" in there. That's because there are plenty of evangelical churches and Christians who don't hold that view. The E in ELCA standards for Evangelical, but the ELCA (the largest Lutheran denomination in the US) doesn't believe that way. Being evangelical means you believe in sharing Christ's message of Love (the ELCA believes in doing it through works, not by brow beating and shoving a Bible in your hands and down your throat), but it doesn't mean you are a Bible thumping, bigoted, misogynistic literal Creationist.

Gay marriage is criminal, i.e. not legal.

Um, "not legal" does not equal criminal. Please. Something is criminal if it's a violation of the criminal code, puts a misdemeanor or felony on your criminal record, and carries jailtime or fines.

By way of example -- I might decide to call myself The Grand Poobah of Nectarine City. Now, there is no recognition in Texas law for such a title. In that sense, it is not a legal title, so calling myself that is not legal (in the sense of being legally recognized). But it would be completely absurd to suggest that it would be CRIMINAL for me to call myself that.

Here's the thing though - the marriages the state performs and recognizes are not associated with any one religion, by law. So attempting to apply the religious beliefs of any one group or groups to marriage policy is crazy.

A lot of laws that legislate our culture have fallen, but many remain and are mostly unchallenged - for instance, what about incest if the participants agree to be sterilized? What about polygamy if some hoops of consent are jumped through? You could specify during the first marriage if the marriage is polygamous or not; if it is, one of the spouses can take another spouse with the consent of the original spouse. There is also nothing technically wrong with this.

The reason these things aren't going to happen any time soon is that the cultural and moral zeitgeist isn't there yet, but on a few of those kinds of issues it may yet get there, if you begin to notice certain things that are illegal/considered "wrong" that actually have no business being illegal.

What would be criminal is if you insisted that your title WAS a legal title. Just as if I married a man and insisted my marriage was legal, that would be criminal. I may not necessarily be arrested, charged, or sentenced with anything but I would be punished in that the state would refuse to recognize my marriage/title/etc.

And depending on what lengths I went to to "legalize" my marriage I could potentially be charged with some variation on forgery.

Let's put it perhaps another way.

Marriage law in Texas says that a marriage can only be opposite sex, certain age, etc.

Now suppose a bunch of government officials conspired to notarize and issue some marriage certificates, all done in the totally legit way (therefore not forgeries) but just with same sex spouses. What they did would be criminal and illegal, because they broke the law that basically says the marriage has to have one member of each sex.

"A lot of laws that legislate our culture have fallen, but many remain and are mostly unchallenged - for instance, what about incest if the participants agree to be sterilized? What about polygamy if some hoops of consent are jumped through?"

Actually, these examples are exactly what _opponents_ to gay marriage continually bring up, and I doubt your fellow supporters would appreciate your being so candid.

The point is precisely that what's at issue is NOT a criminilization or proscription, but an absence of a positive endorsement. So your banning of lies is a little off-point. Any gay couple can live together and call themselves married. The concern of opponents is that they don't want the state actively certifying and promoting something they feel is immoral.

And yes, that's why you'll have a huge problem getting anybody interested in your polygamy or incest situations too. You're perfectly right -- those are only banned based on moral judgments. But they're moral judgments that -- in these cases -- almost everybody wants to keep making.

And you're right. It's a little weird. Anybody can go live in a house with a bunch of women, already. He just can't call it marriage.

Unless the court forces it on people, gay marriage will happen once it is a moral judgment that people no longer wish to keep making. But I do think that precisely the examples you cite cause trouble for anybody who wants to make a LEGAL argument that it must be allowed (but wants to keep disallowing those behaviors).

"What would be criminal is if you insisted that your title WAS a legal title."

No, it wouldn't. Unless I did it as part of another crime, such as fraud, where I was defrauding somebody's money.

"Just as if I married a man and insisted my marriage was legal, that would be criminal. I may not necessarily be arrested, charged, or sentenced with anything but I would be punished in that the state would refuse to recognize my marriage/title/etc. "

Yeah... it wouldn't be criminal, in other words. Just like my example above wouldn't be. Gosh, Thucy, this is an important distinction to understand.

"What they did would be criminal and illegal, because they broke the law that basically says the marriage has to have one member of each sex. "

Well, it would be invalid. I have my doubts whether there's actually a law making it criminal, though, though I can't say for sure. Criminal for a government official to fill out an invalid license? Hmm. Could see it going either way. But to be clear, it's a simple empirical question that one would solve by looking up the criminal code for that specific issue.

Now, for YOU to forge the document would, yes, be forgery. But it's forgery that's criminal. Not gay marriage.

"The concern of opponents is that they don't want the state actively certifying and promoting something they feel is immoral."

What I'm saying is that these days you can't argue that something should not be legal just because you feel that is immoral, you have to provide evidence that it would bring harm to society if it were legalized. Most young people today think no harm would be done if gay marriage was legalized. So that's why young people are usually against gay marriage.

The reason I brought up incest and polygamy is because these also would not harm society, so we really have, under the "laws should prevent harm" doctrine, no reason for these things to be illegal, which is why I predict that one day, if enough people agitate to be allowed to have those kinds of marriages, they will be allowed to.

Ultimately the "definition of marriage" is something that has changed drastically over time and changes hugely from culture to culture. Nations tend to have laws that reflect their culture, so as long as the culture of the United States is evolving into in which gay couples are accepted as normal, which it is, gay marriage will become legal.

The bottom line is that you have a lot of gay couples who, thanks to decades of work by the gay community, now feel confident enough to demand that the state recognize their marriages, and a lot of people, because of the changed culture, see no good reason to prevent them. If you're not a religious fundamentalist of one stripe or another, or just a random non-religious homophobe, you really don't have any reason to argue gay marriage should not be legalized, especially if you know gay people who are perfectly stable and normal.

I know what distinction you're making between criminal and illegal, but I'm saying that ultimately, the distinction is merely a practical one. In theory, anything status that is not recognized as legal is outside the law, just as are criminal acts. It's a moot point though, so whatever.

Put another way: there is a finite list of things that the state will allow you to do. For my purposes, I call all these things "legal." Everything else is "illegal" and outside the law.

"What I'm saying is that these days you can't argue that something should not be legal just because you feel that is immoral, you have to provide evidence that it would bring harm to society if it were legalized."

Well, you can argue anything you want. It may or may not be successful.

In the case of polygamy, there is extremely broad support for continuing to keep it illegal on moral grounds. Nobody is interested in changing that. (Well, you may be, and some fringe religious groups).

"The bottom line is that you have a lot of gay couples who, thanks to decades of work by the gay community, now feel confident enough to demand that the state recognize their marriages, and a lot of people, because of the changed culture, see no good reason to prevent them."

I agree, and for this kind of reason, it likely will be legalized at some point.

Incidentally, I looked it up -- it is indeed a crime (misdemeanor) in Texas to knowingly make false government records. It's section 37.10 in the Penal code.

That, of course, does not mean gay marriage is criminal.

"It's a moot point though, so whatever.

Put another way: there is a finite list of things that the state will allow you to do. For my purposes, I call all these things "legal." Everything else is "illegal" and outside the law. "

That's fine. Just don't call it criminal. That has a specific meaning, and not just to lawyers.

Personally, I don't see it as moot at all. By your argument, your earlier claim that lying is not illegal is false -- because I can't go to the courthouse and get a document telling me that what I said was true, or that my lie was legitimate. There's every difference in the world between criminalizing something and failing to officially recognize it. If you fail to understand that difference, you will indeed be mystified by the anti-gay marriage movement.

(Well, those of them that are making moral arguments, anyway).

I will agree that legally speaking gay marriage is not a normal rights issue in that the right of gay people to marry is not very easily covered by other broader rights because of the unique status of marriage as a state-recognized contract.

However I think the huge weakness in opponents' argument is why gay people shouldn't be getting married anyway. To be convincing, they have to demonstrate that it would bring society harm, but they fall totally flat on this point. I think most people who go from opposing gay marriage to supporting it do so on the grounds that it eventually just dawned on them that there's nothing wrong with it, it's actually quite wholesome. So far a large number of people it's your classic "I'm not familiar with it so I don't like it" position mixed with a large number of religious leaders who see it as their duty to draw the line in the sand at gay marriage.

If you ask me I'd say that any Christian social-issues conservative who put his money where his mouth is would work tirelessly and single-mindedly on abortion - something as petty as gay marriage is a waste of resources if what you give up for that is possibly saving millions of fetuses from what they consider murder.

When I was an evangelical, I remember being slightly disturbed when I thought about this issue - if abortion was the murder of babies, why did we treat it more like some kind of mid-level human rights abuse like torture? (that is to say, relatively tame activism)? Shouldn't we be protesting every fucking day and donating everything we have to a campaign to amend the constitution?

What really began to creep me out is when I realized that there are indeed Christians who reach this conclusion. Some of the more bold ends-means types among them end up becoming domestic terrorists. It's scary to think about how closely associated with all that I was at one time.

Okay, then if in your book it's not a moot point, I concede to you this point that I think is moot and you do not.

Actually, out of curiosity, on what basis were laws that did not recognize interracial marriage struck down? If it was on discrimination based on race, gender, age, sexual orientation, etc., then I think that's cause to assume that laws against gay marriage can be struck down on the same basis, no?

Look up Loving vs. Virginia, Thucy. The citation is 388 US 1. But basically, no, the reasoning does not generalize easily at all, for the reasons I pointed to earlier. Race has been held to be a suspect classification in this country -- the most suspect, really -- so any law that distinguishes anything based on race has a very hard time surviving. (It's called strict scrutiny -- any law that invokes a suspect classification must pass strict scrutiny not to be overturned). On the other hand, plenty of laws distinguish based on sex are allowed, and those laws do not have to pass strict scrutiny. Similarly, the Court has twice silently passed by opportunities to call sexual orientation a suspect classification -- Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas.

So it doesn't generalize very easily.

Here's a link.

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=388&invol=1

But the basis of discrimination here isn't *really* just sex, the discrimination is actually against homosexual people. And that's a suspect classification just as much as being black is.

"And that's a suspect classification just as much as being black is."

No it's not. There are only four suspect classifications -- race, religion, nation of origin, and legal alienage.

A classification isn't suspect just because you or somebody doesn't like it. The Supreme Court occasionally (so far just four times) extends the definition to another situation and then it's considered suspect. They're in general extremely reluctant to do this. As I mentioned, they have passed up two very good opportunities to do it for homosexuality -- one of which was Lawrence vs. Texas, where they overturned the Texas anti-sodomy law without declaring homosexuality a suspect classification.

Also, incidentally,...

"the discrimination is actually against homosexual people."

That's also not as clear here as it was in the Loving case. There, the statute made explicit reference to race, so there wasn't any ambiguity. Here, the statute defines something in a way that fails to extend to another case. It's substantially less clear-cut.

Just saying. To be clear, this point is not as important as the other. The people arguing this at the Supreme Court will want to argue hard that this is a suspect classification.

Ultimately, as I mentioned earlier, gay marriage bans will survive for a few more decades mostly on the backs of loopholes and technicalities that allow it to escape being legally considered discrimination, but in the future at the very the least the Court will end up ruling that discriminating against LGBTQ people in such a way is illegal.

"but in the future at the very the least the Court will end up ruling that discriminating against LGBTQ people in such a way is illegal. "

I'm not too sure I follow this sentence, but anyway -- I imagine it will end up legal eventually, yes. Democratically if not otherwise. I personally think that would be FAR preferable to legally for a great many reasons, most of which Invictus ably stated earlier. But I do think there's a 50% chance the court will decide it next year in favor of gay marriage.

No way. This court is really conservative. The makeup will have to change before it changes its stance.

I think Republicans who favor it (like Dick Cheney) will increase in number as the guard changes in politics to today's 30 somethings, and impetus will rise yet more, and then a test case will come to the court.. the rest will be history, and LBGTQ status will be a protected one just as race is.

At least that's my theory.

"No way. This court is really conservative. The makeup will have to change before it changes its stance."

You have to look at the individual justices though. Four are VERY conservative -- Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Scalia. Four are liberal to very liberal -- Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer, Ginsburg. The 9th -- and in this case, the likely deciding vote -- is Anthony Kennedy. He's conservative, certainly, but he's not SO conservative, and he's already personally written the two most important gay rights opinions: Romer v. Evans (overturning Colorado's constitutional amendment denying special privileges to gays) and Lawrence v. Texas (overturning Texas's anti-sodomy laws).

I see it being a close call.

Semck has no argument, so he hides behind legal arguments and what the Supreme Court says. It's a convenient cover for bigotry.

"Semck has no argument, so he hides behind legal arguments and what the Supreme Court says. It's a convenient cover for bigotry. "

Um, no argument for WHAT, putin? I never even took a position in this thread (except, briefly, to support Invictus) except on legal points. So what was I supposed to have a non-legal argument FOR?

I do see what Thucy is getting at though, and you are tying everything up in legalese, and not really looking at Thucy's larger point. Leaving the finer points of constitutional jurisprudence aside for one moment, the point is that anti-gay groups are fighting an entirely defensive fight at this point. All their arguments boil down to "Well technically this law doesn't SPECIFICALLY target gays, so you can't really say they're being discriminated against, so there's no reason to overturn it." There are no arguments left with which to say "Gay Marriage is a bad thing that will harm society, and must be stopped." People keep making those arguments, but everyone knows they aren't true. It's like a game of chess between a very aggressive and very skilled player with the white pieces, and a mediocre and very defensive player black. There's only so long this can go on before the side actually doing the attacking will win. (Unless somehow the issue ultimately goes up for a popular vote, which would be stupid.)