The Rants of Issachar

Well one way to escape from the total chaos of my house is to come down to the Mayan and see if anyone's posted anything on my rants. I suppose I could do prep work for the next week, but what fun would it be if I wasn't panicking the night before trying to get ready for class?

But it's a beautiful west coast day. Cloudy with sun and I've got the day off. No this does not make up for Saturday. Yesterday was nice though.


So how's this for news. Jason Kenney, the Conservative MP from Calgary SouthEast, speaking at a meeting of the Punjabi Press Club in Brampton, Ontario has said that gays already have the right to marry. Just not to someone of the same sex. NDP MP Libby Davies (Vancouver East), says this is "absolutely absurd" and "If there was an award for making an idiotic statement, this guy would get it". (Source: Province Newspaper Feb. 14 pp. A12)

Well Kenney wasn't the first to say it. My good friend Alistair said it before he did. But is it really an idiotic statement? "Gays the right to marry + qualifier" doesn't necessarily make it idiotic. It depends what that qualifier is. So is the qualifier idiotic? (Yes I really want feedback on this).

Basically the statement rests on the assumption that heterosexuals and homosexuals are fundamentally the same. This is different from having equal rights. Men & Women have equal rights, but they are not the same and so those rights are expressed differently. I have the right to use a public restroom, but not the ones that are for women. A woman has the right to enter a room which I do not. But it would be silly to call that a restriction on my rights. Leaving aside the gay issue for the moment, I have right to marry a single woman, while she has the right to marry a single man. Our rights are equal although differently expressed. I can't "enter the room" of marrying a man.

So let's address the gay issue now. Are homosexuals fundamentally the same as heterosexuals or not? The idea that gays do not have equal rights unless they can marry people of the same gender assumes that they are fundamentally different. If they were the same, then a gay man's rights would be expressed the same way as mine: as the right to marry someone of the opposite gender if he chose to do so. That's the way our right to enter public restrooms are expressed. A gay man goes in the same restroom as me. We don't say he needs to go in another room. If they are fundamentally different then there a lot of consequences to that we should consider.

How does this relate to inter-racial marriages? I'm not sure about anyone else, but I think that restricting inter-racial marriage is wrong because a black man is not fundamentally different from me. Since he is fundamentally the same he should have his rights expressed in the same way mine are expressed. The right to marry a single woman. If a black man was fundamentally different, one could legitimately argue that our marriage rights should be expressed within our own fundamentally distinct groups. (Races)

So is Kenney's statement idiotic? I don't think so. I think he's working on a different set of assumptions that Davies. Davies assumes that gays are fundamentally different from straight people. I wonder if she knows that?

Responses?

Posted by:  Sarah

After careful deliberation, I think that Kenney's statement is in fact absurd. How would Kenney's statement "gays already have the right to marry. Just not to someone of the same sex", be any different from a statement such as 'Black people have the same rights to be educated as white people, just not at the same school' (I just made that up in the spirit of something that might have been said in the southern USA ~50 years ago (and not reflecting my personal opinion in any way!).

I don't think homosexuals are different from heterosexuals, in the sense that you were talking about (ie physiologically, anatomically, visually etc...), they just have sex with a different subset of people. Some people argue that homosexuality or heterosexuality is genetically determined (as would be the colour of skin or hair), but research on that is incomplete. If homosexuality IS genetically determined (and as a biologist, I tend towards that opinion myself), then I think to dictate rights on that basis would be discriminatory, in the same way that preventing a white person from marrying a black person, (or any coloured person) would be discriminatory.

My thoughts on this issue are a little fuzzy, but at the end of the day I think that it hurts nobody to allow men to marry other men, or women to marry other women, so why not give them the right to do so legally. Common-law same sex couples have the same legal rights (and taxation benefits?) as a married couple, except for the right to hold a marriage certificate. What is the difference, except for the sensibilities of conservative people?

Posted by:  issachar

Sarah,

I think there are two issues here: The first is whether or not people should have the right to marry people of the same sex. The second issue is whether or not the "equal rights" argument in favour of gay marriage has any validity. I'm beginning to suspect that the "equal rights" argument is based on a false premise. That doesn't mean that marriage laws shouldn't be changed, as false argument doesn't prove that the opposite is true, it just fails to prove the point.

If gay men are fundamentally the same as straight men then why should their rights be expressed any differently? I don't think there's any reason to say that they should be. Am I missing something here? If someone wants to change marriage laws that's one thing, but I don't like fuzzy logic arguments and I think that the "equal rights" argument is fuzzy at best.

But as for the question of "whether or not people should have the right to marry people of the same sex"...

I actually don't think that the genetic argument has any real validity. Laws preventing inter-racial marriage or inter-national marriages between people of the same race would both be considered wrong even though the second has nothing to do with genetics.

To address your last paragraph it's not true that common law same sex couples have the same legal rights as a married couple. As far as I know that's the issue before parliament right now.

As for the comment about "it hurts nobody"... I don't really like the slippery slope argument but you've reminded me of MP Pierre Pettigrew's recent Op-Ed column in the Globe or the Post. (Sorry no link) He dismissed the "polygamy is next" claim as ridiculous, but at the time I had to wonder why. Why is it a silly argument? Who exactly does polygamy hurt? Why shouldn't they have the right to marry? Why should two brothers not have the right to marry? Why not two sterile opposite sex siblings? I can't come up with a single reason that isn't being dismissed as "sensibilities" by the current gay marriage proponents. Can you?

In a way I regret bringing that last half my comment up as it really has very little to do with the first half. But this is my rant blog I guess...

Posted by:  Sarah

I forgot about this thread...
I wasn't really putting forward any arguments to be debated. It was more of a ramble. And when I said my thoughts were fuzzy, I didn't mean I was using fuzzy logic (which is a mathematical algorithm, no?).

However I don't think arguing about whether people are the same or different has any bearing on what their rights should or shouldn't be. I think that what you are actually saying is not 'if two people are not fundamentally different, then why should they have different rights' so much as 'if two people are not fundamentally different, then why should we change their rights as they are currently defined?'.

From a legal standpoint, is a man allowed to marry someone who was born a man, but undergone sex change operations to become a woman? I have no idea what the answer to that question is. But I am interested in how male and female is defined in the law, and what bearing that has on marriage rights. Is it a matter of X and Y chromosomes? Or is it a matter of genitalia and breasts? In which case what are the marriage rights of people who are intersexual or born with sex chromosome disorders - these are people born with no clear genetically defined gender and/or no physically defined gender. Who are these people allowed to marry?

Polygamy is not an issue I want to get into, except that I regard it as immoral in the fact that there is a very high incidence of underage sex, rape and consanguinous breeding associated with it (at least in the polygamous communities I have read about in the USA and BC). It has nothing to do with my view of the marriage rights of heterosexuals and homosexuals, and is a total confusion of issues.

Lastly...as far as I understand, as one half of a legally common-law couple in Canada, we have the same rights as married couples. We are exercising those rights currently in my application for permanent residence in Canada.

Posted by:  Sarah

One more thing...
As I understand it, the marriage laws as they stand at this time, do not define marriage specifically as a union between a male and a female. Am I wrong?
So to change the law at this point to define marriage as the union of a male and a female would be to take away the existing rights of any person to marry any other unmarried person, regardless of gender.

Posted by:  Marco

Oh Sarah, how could you speak this way?

"Polygamy ... I regard it as immoral in the fact that there is a very high incidence of underage sex, rape and consanguinous breeding associated with it"

And you end your comment with the words "confusion of issues". Aren't you doing the same? You're denouncing polygamy as immoral because of other (unrelated) sexual deviances associated with it? Aren't we told not to associate homosexuality with increased promiscuity, STDs, paraphelia, etc.?

I believe that gay rights are a moral issue, and not necessarily a political one. I think homosexuality used to be considered a psychological ailment and was stripped of that designation for political rather than medical reasons, but I'm not sure of that, and I'm definitely not qualified to judge such things. If it turns out to be a social issue as well (like, say, if many children raised by gays end up being suicidal and a causal link is established) then it should probably be made into a political issue. I actually think it IS a social issue, only one that we don't really know enough about to consider its ramifications.

But Issachar is actually right. Whom does polygamy hurt? (And I'm not talking about rape or consanguinous breeding because the question is POLYGAMY, not other practices you happen to associate with it.) Whom does incest hurt (unless you have offspring)? Whom does -- heck, even bestiality and necrophilia don't necessarily "hurt" anyone. Are there arguments against making all these practices legal and socially acceptable?

Posted by:  issachar

Sarah,

I'm not really trying to address "should gays be allowed to marry" as much as I'm trying to say that the "Gays should be allowed to marry because they need equal rights" argument is... well I think it's fundamentally flawed.

Sort of like if I said the fact that dragons fly in straight lines proves the world is spherical. The world may be spherical, but my argument is still rubbish.

I'll get into the "chromosomes or breasts" topic another time... But I'd be interested in hearing your response to Marco. The moral arguments against gay marriage are exactly the ones I'm told we're not allowed to use because they're "personal morality". So what do you think about Marco's question?

Posted by:  issachar

oh, and I think fuzzy logic is a math thing. a math thing that I don't understand.

:)

Posted by:  Sarah

This post has been removed by a blog administrator.

Posted by:  Sarah

Okaaaayyyyy....
You guys should know I really only get involved in these debates to be the devil's advocate. It has no bearing on me personally whether homosexuals are allowed to marry their soulmates or not. But why shouldn't they? I really don't see why this should be a problem. I realise its a shift from the status quo, but that doesn't qualify it as wrong or immoral.

Marco, you are absolutely right, I should have just said 'I don't want to get into polygamy' and left it at that. I see absolutely no relationship between gay marriage and polygamy. One is a question of gender, the other of numbers.

I know of no medical/ psychological 'conditions' that cause somebody to be homosexual. I also know of no studies detailing children raised by homosexuals who have turned out to be homosexual themselves, or suicidal, or murderers, or any other kind of societal misfit. Current scientific thinking is that homosexuality is genetically determined - but forget about high school Mendelian genetics when you rebutt me on this. I can hear you asking already, 'but how can homosexuality be inherited if homosexuals don't pass on their genes?'. I am friends with a guy who is gay, and has known so since his first memories. He has an identical twin brother who is not gay. They were brought up in exactly the same environment. What does that mean? I don't know. It flies in the face of a genetic basis for homosexuality. But if we think we have even scratched the surface of all there is to understand about genetics we are totally misguided.
So even if I don't understand the basis for homosexuality, I choose to accept it (because I have no choice but to accept it), and accept their rights to live with all the rights that I have as a heterosexual. And that means the right to marry anyone that they want.

No doubt there will be a barrage of responses.... ;)

Marco, just to a pest, I'm going to answer your question with a question. What is a sexual deviant, if you please? Other than somebody who 'does it' in a manner that wouldn't suit the majority. That doesn't make everyone else right and the so-called deviants wrong.

To ask my own question again, am I correct that in Canada, men can already legally marry other men, and women marry other women? Does the law specify gender? I know that in the USA, gender was not specified in marriage laws, and now they are doing all they can to change the law (or did they do it already?)

Posted by:  Sarah

For some reason my "thinking" link is not working.
try this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=14964212.

Although the publication isn't available online anyway, so its not much use..

Posted by:  Marco

Sarah, your question is the same one I'm asking:

"What is a sexual deviant, if you please?"

I'm still trying to get YOUR view on this. You say that homosexual marriage and polygamy don't compare because one is a question of gender and one of number -- does that make one "deviant" and the other not? Perhaps, but there would need to be some explaining and defining. What I'm asking you is:

"Are there arguments against making all these practices [mentioned in my previous post] legal and socially acceptable?"

So you say you're answering my question with a question, but really you're just rewording my question and firing it back at me. I asked it first. I will give you my views on this if you give me yours (as you see, it's a sensitive issue).

Oh, and I didn't mean to say that there WAS a causal link -- or even a statistical one -- between suicidal tendency and gay parents. It was a hypothetical scenario to ask whether we would reconsider allowing gay marriages if it was found that gay marriages damage people. (Your stand against legalizing polygamy seems to rest on that basis.)

(as to your last question: I have no idea what the current state of legislation is regarding gay marriages in Canada)