Something like the Iraq War is a much more complicated and nuanced issue in which people can reasonably disagree. Many people aren't going to be willing to debate or compromise on issues like civil rights. You are either on their side or not.
Gay marriage is a question of, among other things, mundane issues like taxation, upon which people can very reasonably disagree. Should Alan Turing have been able to put himself in a lower tax bracket by filing jointly with his 19-year-old roommate? It is a nuanced question; your answer might depend on what regime of divorce laws you're operating under (e.g. are you in a community property state or not).
>Should Alan Turing have been able to put himself in a lower tax bracket by filing jointly with his 19-year-old roommate?
If he could do that with a female roommate why shouldn't he be allowed do that with his male roommate? It isn't reasonable to object to gay marriage on a technicality like that while also being fine with the laws regarding straight marriage.
> If he could do that with a female roommate why shouldn't he be allowed do that with his male roommate?
Didn't I already give the reason? Because it could be used as a loophole in the tax law, that men and women in temporary relationships didn't exploit, even if divorce is instant and the high earner can keep all the wealth that had been taxed at a lower rate. (Because women generally don't let themselves get used like that.) On the other hand, in a community property state, with no pre-nup, that loophole is closed.
It's also generally reasonable, as a structural concept, to object to the idea that laws should treat men and women equally, or men/women and men/men pairings, as some kind of universal principle. California's legislature adopts this stance: it outlaws same-sex boards (at least all-male ones) in publicly traded companies.
Similarly, it's reasonable to examine the question of same-sex relationship laws with more nuance than saying everything should be the same as marriage because equality. Maybe the divorce and taxation laws should be different, because the straight ones ought to be written with children and rapidly declining female fertility in mind. Maybe the "next of kin" definition or inheritance laws should be adjusted, when it comes to extended family. Maybe gay marriage should have a fine-grained series of check boxes to opt in to each of the privileges and duties and consequences, because that's just good customer service for gay citizens, but straight marriage should be all or nothing, for good reasons.
An argument that is cogent, but that I disagree with, is that those fiscal elements are intended to incentivize childbirth and raising a child under wedlock.
I personally think that this is outdated, and that we should incentivize such things in more direct ways if we should at all, but this is a reasonable point of disagreement prima facie.
Heterosexual couples can indeed get married without any plans to have a child, I agree.
And at the same time, it is true that a gay couple can have children through adoption, or biologically.
It is for both of these reasons that I disagree with the argument.
That being said, at the time when the argument was relevant, the overwhelming majority of married heterosexual couples did have children, and gay adoption as well as IVF were not really a thing.
But nowadays, of course, anyone making this argument would be making it from bias. In the framing of the thread, which was the 1940s, it is more reasonable.
IVF wasn’t invented until the 1970s, and even in 1976, 2/3 of middle aged women had given birth to 3+ children.
There is also the scientific question of whether sexual orientation is innate or a preference. For a long time, the science was wrong. Key research was done on that in the 1990s and early 2000s, and that filtered into the public conscience over time. Even as late as 2013, only 40% of Americans recognized that sexual orientation was innate. But once that premise became accepted, support for legalizing same-sex marriage quickly followed.
In societies that still don’t recognize same-sex marriage, there is a universal assumption, and intense social pressure, for heterosexual couples to have children. That is seen as the purpose of marriage, and life more broadly. And while the conceptualization of marriage has shifted away from that in the developed world, that is itself a contentious trend.
In the context of the US, your arguments are compelling, but they show exactly why the issue isn’t “morally indisputable.” It’s worth reading carefully through Obergefell. It spends a great deal of time establishing several things. First, that sexual orientation is innate and immutable: “Only in more recent years have psychiatrists and others recognized that sexual orientation is both a normal expression of human sexuality and immutable. See Brief for American Psychological Association et al. as Amici Curiae 7–17.” Second, that the understand of marriage had in fact changed to deemphasize children. Third, that new studies had shown that large numbers of same-sex couples were in fact raising children together. All of these established why same-sex unions should be protected as part of the fundamental constitutional right to marriage. Other approaches were possible and had been advanced. Some on the left wanted a broader rethinking of traditional marriage as a social institution. Obergefell could have treated marriage as just some government tax benefit, which was the libertarian view. Instead, it doubled down on the fundamental importance of traditional marriage, and the government’s legitimate interest in recognizing and promoting that institution, while expanding it to same-sex couples. It was very much the product of political debate and compromise amongst a variety of positions.
And in the end, this debate was ultimately a good thing because the political process fostered understanding and consensus. Same-sex marriage has become accepted quite rapidly. (Abortion rights, by contrast, remain highly contentious and no consensus has ever developed.)
Okay, but before you talked about the “severity” of the issue. Now it seems like something more along the lines of issues that have some sort of “moral clarity.” Apart from moving the goalposts, politics is a process for getting different stakeholders to agree through debate and compromise. If there is no room for debate and compromise, you’re not talking about a political issue, but a moral crusade. And moral crusades are great, but they’re different from “politics.”
Also, what is the scope of what people can “reasonably disagree” about? You mention same-sex marriage, but that’s illegal in most countries, including Switzerland. Are people in Switzerland, and India, and every single Muslim country in the world, for the most part not “reasonable?” And even in countries where it is legal, laws on related issues like surrogacy or religious exemptions vary. I’m talking about very socially liberal countries like France and Germany, where surrogacy is banned.
(1) Yes, bigotry against LGBT people makes Switzerland, India, and Indonesia less reasonable.
(2) The United States is generally underrated when it comes to moral clarity. We get a lot of stuff distinctively right and should pat ourselves on the back more often than we do.
(3) There clearly is a threshold past which we can refer directly to moral clarity, and can't hide behind the ambiguity of politics. It's been 73 years, and a lot of people on this thread don't have to Google "IG Farben", or, for that matter, to consult Wikipedia to know what I mean when I allude to IBM's complicity in the early 20th century. Some issues just are clear.
I think the US is better because we have legalized same-sex marriage, and I’ve always supported it. But it’s hard for me to say that an issue is such that “reasonable people can’t disagree” with policies that differ between the US and Switzerland.
I agree there are some issues that are beyond politics. But there is an impulse to expand that category beyond what fairly fits in it. The debate and compromise attendant in politics is how societies achieve consensus, and prematurely stifling it creates problems.
So: I agree with you that there's a slippery slope here and it's worth being aware of.
But I disagree with you that reasonable countries can debate discriminating against gay people. The countries that do that are, in that way, lesser than the countries that don't. Seems pretty simple to me.
It isn't directly an issue of morals. I was speaking to the severity to the individual employee. Opposition to gay marriage is obviously a hugely important issue for a gay person. There is no way to really compromise on a civil rights issue like that. Either people have equal rights or they don't. Someone being excluding from those rights can't accept neutrality as an answer.
Also I want to point out that I specifically called the argument unreasonable and not the people. I meant "unreasonable" as a synonym to illogical. There is no real logical consistency to any arguments that there should be added legal benefits for straight couples that don't apply for gay couples. All the arguments fundamentally come down to some sort of bias against gay people which can be ideological or spiritual but are never based on reason or logic.
I think you've just never been exposed to any counter-arguments, frankly. The media won't do it so you're left to believe anything you disagree with is completely irrational.
The rational/logical argument for opposing gay marriage has two strands:
1. Marriage != civil unions. You can have equal legal rights without the religious concept of marriage being involved, and many countries already had that, so the effort to go further in many places didn't involve doing anything beyond upsetting religious people. It didn't make the lives of gay people better in any specific legal ways. You seem to be conflating the two.
2. The historical taboo against homosexuality is because such couples don't produce children, and thus must be supported in old age or times of famine etc by the wider community who may not feel any particular loyalty to them. In a world where the family is the primary unit of support, such couples can end up with nobody to support them, and moreover, don't contribute to creating the next generation.
The concerns in (2) may seem parochial given the existence of the welfare state and contemporary concerns about over-population. But although it's a sad and scary prospect, it won't be a huge surprise if homophobia comes back in future generations because the demographic deficit is enormous and nobody's talking about it. The welfare state and pension schemes depends critically on a growing and strong economy to support it, which boils down at some level to having enough people. Yet birth rates are far too low to sustain those systems over the long run. If pension funds start drying up because there aren't enough workers, then gay couples might end up being hit by a doubly whammy of (a) not having children who can support them if the state fails to do so and (b) popular resentment against them for contributing to the problem of a declining population.
Of course, neither problem would be their fault. They didn't choose their orientation. However, people certainly knew that centuries ago and the taboo existed and was propagated because society needed families and a growing population to be stable. If pension funds are in as much trouble as demographers claim, we may see a return to that world, and it won't be entirely irrational.
