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  • This is not the reason why conservatives oppose gay marriage. Here are the reasons I can understand (though not necessarily agree with):

    • having 1x mom and 1x dad is important because men and women provide different functions when raising a child, and children deserve to get both of these things.
    • "marriage" is a religious thing, not a legal thing; maybe gay-"legally married" is fine, but religious congregations shouldn't be forced to perform gay marriages as they go against their religion.
    • the normalization of homosexuality will spread and convert more people to homosexuals/bisexuals and/or encourage people to come out of the closet. (I'm not exactly sure why this is a problem tbh.)

    Are there other reasons that they have?

    • First of all. Thank you so much for refusing to fight against strawman arguments and putting forward what people actually believe. It's much more productive, and interesting to talk about. I hate religion and I hate their stupid arguments, but I wish that criticisms would focus on the stupid arguments they actually make, instead of stupid arguments they don't make.

      On the marriage front, and I know it's not your beliefs I'm rebutting here, that argument has always especially bothered me. Because it's like. Yes, actually, I do think gay marriage is nonsensical. Marriage is indeed a religious concept, and all of the religions that promote it condemn homosexuality. I hate marriage in general and wish nobody would get married. Yet it still happens, why? Why do gay people even care about being married then?

      Primarily, it's because the Christians forced their religious construct to become so intertwined with legal and financial benefits that are otherwise unobtainable, that you put yourself at an objective disadvantage as a couple, economically, medically, legally, if you do not get married. The problem is that once marriage passed from the religious conceptual realm where it gestated, and into the political sphere, it should have become a separate, secular concept under the idea of separation of church and state. But of course the Christians can't accept that kind of compromise either. They want to have it all, all, all. So if Christians didn't want gay people to want to get married, then they shouldn't have enshrined their religious concept unfairly above others in the governmental system. Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, motherfuckers.

      • This presupposes that marriage is a strictly religious tradition - which is false. Marriage as a concept exists across many cultures sometimes as a religious tradition and sometimes as a civil one or as a swearing of personal oaths.

        It is also not strictly a thing that all religions abhor same sex unions or do not have traditional same sex marriage as a thing. There are a number of Indigenous religions across the world which have gay marriage as a feature, new religions can factor them in as valid or existing religious sects can change. Bans on gay marriage force the state to adopt the traditional Christian stance on marriage at the exclusion of other religions and cultural traditions... While also denying a number of functions at a civil level such as spousal benefits, rights regarding legal decisions, visitation rights in hospitals and so on.

      • I don't agree that marriage is strictly a religious thing. It's for the same reason I also don't think that Christmas is a strictly religious thing. I'm not religious, and even if I were, my parents' religion is not christianity. Despite this, I celebrate a secular Christmas. Gifts are given, mirth is enjoyed, and various other traditions observed. Perhaps some day I'll be secularly gay-married.

        Christians rarely complain about non-christians celebrating christmas but wrong, but some christians are quite vocal about gay marriage being an affront to god or whatever. I wonder if it's because Christians understand that there's "christmas" (the capitalist funtimes holiday) and then there's Christmas (the religious holy day). Maybe this understanding can be extended to marriage as well.

        Either way, as someone who doesn't really understand religion and is happy to let other people do their own thing, it doesn't bother me if there are churches that refuse to perform same-sex marriages. I can understand that perhaps a baker shouldn't be allowed to reject a making gay wedding cake on homophobic grounds, but I think it's a tougher sell for me that religious congregations should be forced to do same-sex marriages. But again, I don't care strongly either way.

        • Yeah, that's a good point about Christmas. I guess the reality of whether something is religious or not really just depends on the way that it's practiced culturally. I feel like the majority of marriages still involve altars and vows and all of the Christian trappings, so I think that they have a lot more of their original Christianity retained than Christmas does... Especially since the most iconic elements of Christmas were pilfered from earlier religions (which probably contributes to why Christians don't want to complain about it that much).

          It really is as simple as just having a clear distinction between secular and religious marriage like you said. I think that if someone is licensed to perform a legal marriage, they should not be able to turn down a customer on account of them being gay. But I do agree that a religious marriage should be able to turn down gay people. The problem of course, is that the boundaries between the two are so muddied - and it's only the Christians that are doing the muddying. I used to be more of the " let them do their own thing" type of atheist, but I think the real key thing to watch out for there is that a core tenet of most religions involves spreading itself to others whether they like it or not. They believe they have a moral imperative authority over your private behavior. It kind of reminds me of the bugs in Factorio if you've ever played that. Like, at first it seems fine for me to just let them chill and breed their little hive off in the corner of the map, since we both leave each other alone. But the problem is that the intrinsic nature of those bugs is that they'll eventually come and fuck up my factory - they can't and won't leave me alone. When it comes to Christianity at least, I've started to see it more like this:

          If they're leaving me alone right now, it's just because they're incubating power to force upon me later.

    • Yeah I honestly don't get this. It's like saying kids should be raised by one scientist and one artist because the kid deserves both influences. Even within the nature of "women" and "men" the diversity of experience and personality is so massive is seems to defy logic that this could possibly create some unified, prescriptive parenting framework, unless you are desperate to pigeonhole individuals into gender roles which simply don't exist in reality.

    • Ohhh I can feel downdoots incoming but hell.

      1. Yeah, parents being of both sexes is important. No, it doesn't have anything to do with marriage, it has to do with adoption/in-vitro or other means of reproduction.
      2. Marriage is both politcal and religious. You cannot force religion to recognize gay marriage, but you should force law to recognize gay marriage.
      3. Heard this, irrationally feared this, but truth be told fuck my discomfort and that of other people, nobody deserves to be denied who they are. -.-' But the reasoning is simply fear of unknown coupled with fear of change. I was raised in a straight society with straight values - it can be offputting, or even straight up disgusting to see them broken. To be able to come above this you need to be able to put your values above your ingrained feelings so a lot of people won't.

      And I think you aced it with the reasons, conservative people couple marriage, family and having kids together so gay marriage is turbo-evil for them cause it "hurts" all three. I myself am on the fence where it comes to children, but marriage and family? Fuck off, that's people private business, they have the same right to it that anyone else.

      • I appreciate risking downdoots. I have downdoots disabled in my user settings, so I only see updeets. The lack of downdoot etiquette on lemmy is aggravating sometimes. "Downvotes are not for disagreement" my ass :P

        it's important to understand viewpoints of conservative people, even if we don't agree with them. I think the community on lemmy really struggles with taking political opposition seriously.

        regarding (2) I don't know about "cannot force religion to recognize gay marriage," since Canada does indeed force religion to recognize gay marriage. So it's not a can/can't thing. Personally, I don't really have strong feelings one way or the other if religions don't want to recognize gay marriage; I don't really understand religion.

      • Something to consider on two fronts.

        1. Parents being of both sexes is not terribly important for long term child raising. Same sex couples sometimes choose to adopt but they often have the capacity to have children themselves without assistance of a medical body and often with the help of friends or compassionate donors. There are a lot of gay folks whose names are on the birth certificates of their kids because they did the deed the old fashioned way in the interest of having a kid. They maybe just didn't enjoy the process. This doesn't present a problem legally because mechanically speaking people have kids out of wedlock or split up amicably all the time and the mechanisms for transferring parental rights are pretty much the exact same.

        Also your concerns are not new. They are also not unstudied. It has been studied extensively. Science has found there is no meaningful difference between the outcomes of being raised by a same-sex couple as a mixed sex couple. They measured their rubric across a number of success variables across physical wellbeing, mental and emotional health, acedemic outcomes and so on. Basically if you are raised by adults who show affection, are responsible and committed to the wellbeing of the child it doesn't really matter what their sex is. At some point trusting a body of science is nessisary over one's gut feelings or supposition.

        Here's a study with an approachable abstract to get you started.

        https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4091994/

        1. Marriage exists in a number of cultures, its functions even in a traditional sense are not always religious in nature and not all cultures that have marriage have bans on same sex couples marrying. Religions can also be newly formed and are still valid. Banning same sex marriage is in effect favouring some religion over others. Christianity does not have a monopoly on the concept of marriage as a religious feature. When a religions (ie Christian) reason is given to enforce a marriage ban it stops other religions from being able to properly function. Gay marriage being federally allowed does not stop Christian denominations from being allowed to refuse to marry couples under the beliefs of their religious creed.
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