Redefining Marriage

Conservatives like to complain that allowing same-sex couples to get married is redefining marriage. The most common response to this is to argue that redefining marriage isn't necessarily bad, and to point out the many times marriage has been redefined in the past. However, I think the argument can be refuted on another level: Gay marriage is not a redefinition of marriage.

Or rather, the redefinition of marriage which logically leads to gay marriage already happened, and it happened a while ago. The change happened gradually, over a long time. There wasn't a single landmark court case I can point to like Loving v. Virginia.

A long time ago, a woman was considered to be basically the property of her husband. Even after that was the case, a woman was still supposed to be subservient to her husband. He had authority over her.

But over time that changed. Eventually, a marriage was no longer a relationship between owner and property, or between superior and inferior. It became a relationship between equal and equal. And once that happened, there was no longer a masculine role and a feminine role, and thus no need for a man and a woman. Just two people.

Religious Exemptions

Today, the Supreme Court ruled that Hobby Lobby doesn't have to provide its employees with insurance that covers contraception, because that would violate Hobby Lobby's religious freedom. Legally speaking, the Supreme Court probably made the right decision. The Affordable Care Act has a religious exemption written into it.

That's the problem. Laws shouldn't have religious exemptions. I'm not just talking about this law, I'm talking about any law. Or rather, no law should have a specifically religious exemption. Laws can have exemptions that include religious reasons, but they shouldn't be exclusive to religious reasons.

There are two reasons for this. One is that religious belief shouldn't be treated any differently than any other belief. If a religious conviction is enough to exempt you from a law, then a secular conviction should be as well. Otherwise you would be elevating religious beliefs above secular beliefs.

The second reason is that it violates the separation of church and state. You might not think so, since usually religious exemptions are intended to prevent laws from hindering the free exercise of religion. But that's the problem. It forces the government to decide what is or is not a valid religious belief to qualify for an exemption.

Not only does that violate separation of church and state, it does so in a way that is biased against minority religions. Members of major religions generally won't have any problems convincing a judge that their belief is sincere. Only members of small religions will have to worry about not being allowed to practice their religion freely, which seems like exactly the kind of thing that freedom of religion is supposed to prevent.

But what about free exercise of religion then? Well, generally laws are passed for reasons. If those reasons are good, they probably apply to everyone, religious and non. You can't murder people, even if you really truly believe that the god Huitzilopochtli needs them to make the sun rise.

If a religious exemption is really necessary, it can probably be rephrased to be secular, and still apply to the religious. For example, non-profit organizations are tax-exempt, whether they're churches or not. (Though current law more or less automatically gives religious organizations non-profit status, which is the kind of thing I'm arguing against here.)

And if that's not possible, maybe the law shouldn't be a law in the first place. If "I really truly believe in " is a good enough reason to be exempt from a law, then "I really truly believe in " should be as well, based on religious beliefs not being treated differently than secular beliefs. And if that's good enough, then pretty much anyone who doesn't want to follow the law doesn't have to, which completely defeats the purpose of it being a law in the first place.

An Abortion Hypothetical

People opposed to the right to get an abortion like to make the argument that a fetus is alive, has a heartbeat, can feel pain, etc. It's obvious that these features are not sufficient to make the case. After all, cows have all those things, but the same people who complain about abortions don't usually have problems with eating meat.

But there's a related feature (well, more of a complex conglomeration of features) that isn't so obviously irrelevant. Is a fetus a person? That's a more reasonable question. But I still don't think it's relevant. Even if a fetus were undeniably a person, I'd still be in favor of the right to get an abortion. I'll illustrate with a hypothetical.

Suppose one winter's day, you accidentally leave your door unlocked. When you get home, you find that a homeless man has taken up residence. He doesn't pose any direct threat to you. He just takes up space, eats your food, and is generally inconvenient.

So, you decide to kick him out. "But", the homeless man protests, "It's freezing out there, and I have nowhere else to go! If you kick me out, I'll surely die!"

Is it morally prohibited to kick him out? Should you be required to provide him with food and shelter?

Now obviously, this hypothetical has a lot of differences from abortion. Here are the two I find most important.

One, homeless man is most definitely a person. A fetus may have a heartbeat, but this guy can talk. In the case of abortion, the status of the fetus is, at best, ambiguous.

Two, the homeless man is only taking shelter in your house, not your body. If you're allowed to decide who may or may not be in your property, surely you should be allowed to decide who may or may not be in your body.

And that's the important point of the abortion debate. It's not whether or not the fetus is a person. It's about whether women have the right to control their own bodies.

Would Gay Marriage Lead to Polygamy?

An argument that opponents of gay marriage make is that legalizing gay marriage will inevitably lead to legalizing polygamy, which would be a bad thing, therefore gay marriage shouldn't be legalized.

As a syllogism, it's not invalid. If the premises are true, the conclusion is too. If gay marriage actually did lead inevitably to polygamy and polygamy actually were a bad thing then gay marriage is a bad thing. But neither premise is true, so the conclusion doesn't follow.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with polygamy. Past implementations of it have been sexist and bad, but then again, past implementations of regular marriage have also been sexist and bad.

And gay marriage won't lead inevitably to polygamy because they're two separate issues - and polygamy is significantly more complicated. To change straight-only marriage to include gay marriage, all you have to do is replace every instance of the word "man" and "woman" with "person" and replace every instance "husband" and "wife" with "spouse". It's not like the husband gets certain privileges the wife doesn't, at least, not anymore.

But to generalize marriage to more than two people takes more work then simply replacing "two" with "two or more", because a lot of the ways marriage currently works assumes that there are only two people involved. For example, when one spouse has a medical problem and is incapable of making a decision about what to do, the other gets to decide. How would that work if there's more than one other? What if they disagree? Also, is marriage a transitive property? That is, if A is married to B and B is married to C, does that mean that A is married to C? These are questions that never arise when marriage is restricted to pairs.

I don't have any answers to those questions, but they'll need to be answered to legalize polygamy. And legalizing gay marriage doesn't get us any closer to answering them, which is why it won't inevitably lead to polygamy.

Reclaim Socialism

I know someone who, despite having socialist tendencies, refuses to be called a socialist because, she says, it would mark her as being on the fringe. I suspect this is a rather common sentiment.

But I say it is for exactly that reason that we should embrace rather than avoid the term.

Universal health care is attacked as being a socialist idea. You know what? Universal health care is a socialist idea. And that's a good thing. You know what else are socialist ideas? Public education, police departments, fire departments, roads...

We need to reclaim the word socialism so it isn't perceived as being on the fringe, because it's not and shouldn't be considered to be. We need to reclaim the word socialism so it can't be used as a thoughtless insult. We need to reclaim the word socialism because we live in a society, and that's a good thing.