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I think that the division might be better described, not as 'religious' vs. 'secular' so much as 'metaphysical' vs. 'material'. Material assertions can be settled empirically¹, whereas metaphysical debates are often predicated on diverging axioms, and thus, if placed as support for state policy, tend to lead to bloodshed; the most salient example to the authors of the Bill of Rights being the European Wars of Religion in the XVII Century. The disputants in that example being competing religious institutions led to the principle being phrased in terms of 'separation of church and state'.
To take a different example, imagine two opponents of a nuclear power plant. Alice claims that it will release a metric arse-load of radiation every hour it operates, exposure to the tiniest bit of which will cause eleventy-hundred million cancer deaths; Bob asserts that splitting atoms is a contravention of the natural order, and making human existence easier and less precarious by the provision of abundant energy is an impermissible defiance of the Will of Gaia. Alice's claims can be refuted by measuring the radiation levels outside and inside existing reactor sites with a Geiger Counter, and referring to the health statistics of the inhabitants of Ramsar and Karunagappalli². Bob's argument, however, rests on assumptions (the existence of a natural order which does not include human-built technology; the notion of a personified environment rightfully possessed of an authority outweighing human well-being) which are not amenable to testing by experiment or observation¹, and therefore can only either
(a.) be set aside as not legitimate groundings for state policy (hence 'separation of church and state'), or
(b.) be decided on the battlefield.
The Protestant and Catholic churches in early-modern Europe chose the latter, and caused such devastation, for so little gain, that even fourteen decades later, people knew that allowing the sword of the state to be wielded on behalf of metaphysical assumptions is playing with fire.
¹cf. Newton's Flaming Laser Sword: "What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating."
²Locations in Iran and India with high levels of background radiation and no obvious increase in cancer rates.
The 'secular' arguments I have seen for state non-recognition of same-gender marriage while recognising opposite-gender marriage³ include arguments based on 'complementarity of male and female' (not religious in the narrow sense of "God/the Church/Scripture says so"; nevertheless metaphysical in nature), and arguments relating to parenthood, (entirely material, but do not support discrimination between same-gender couples and opposite-gender couples one or both members of which is entirely infertile.)
If you know of any other secular arguments for the proposition that the state ought to distinguish between 'two men' and 'one man whose testicles have been disconnected and one woman who ran out of eggs ten years ago', I am willing to consider them.
³As opposed to the arguments that the state shouldn't involve itself in marriage at all.
I'd phrase it more as "Do not impose your religious beliefs on people who do not share them."; or as it was put in the 2000s, "Don't tell me I can't have cake because you happen to be on a diet."
Except that pretty much all of our "culture war" issues are more "metaphysical" than they are "material" — and are equally so on both sides.
The existence of "inalienable human rights" is not a material question. Unlike your radioactivity example, there's no Geiger counter for detecting the presence or absence of, say "the universal right to free speech."
While they may not be as explicit as in the case of the anti-gay-marriage side, the pro-gay-marriage side is just as grounded in metaphysical commitments. On the question of "is there a universal human right to free speech?" both the answers, "yes" and "no", are metaphysical commitments. And if no positions based on metaphysical commitment cannot be "placed as support for state policy," then the state must reject both answers — and what does that even look like?
It's impossible for any state to be truly neutral on metaphysical commitments; the attempt appears to mean that victory goes to whoever can keep there metaphysics as implicit and hidden as possible. And again, that means those whose metaphysics aren't explicitly grounded in theological beliefs (often, it seems to me, because they aren't grounded in anything) get to win over those who are. Which, again, equates to religious versus "secular."
The state is still picking sides on metaphysics, it's just picking the side that pretends not to have any.
I posted an argument, by toy analogy, a year ago here. The tl;dr is that "hat teleology can constitute a valid "joint" upon which reality may be "cleaved," particularly when it comes to law" even in an imperfect, entropic universe.
The parallel in that case is the observation that:
In the Sequences, this is referred to as an Ethical Injunction.
...but some states are closer to it than others.
As metaphysical beliefs are not falsifiable, disagreements about them, if derived from diverging axioms, can only end in one of two ways: either the sides agree to disagree, and mutually refrain from attempting to forcibly impose their beliefs on others, or they wage war against each other until one or both is dead.
Liberalism is the 'agree to disagree' option; for the other, see 17th-century Europe.
More the side that is willing to agree to stop the bloodshed even if those people keep thinking and living in a way which, even if it 'neither picks anyone's pocket nor breaks anyone's leg' (as Jefferson put it), is nonetheless heretical/problematic/unnatural/[insert snarl word here].
....which rests on the metaphysical assumption that 'same-gender couple' and 'infertile opposite-gender couple' have little XML tags saying that the latter is supposed to be able to bear children while the former isn't.
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To what extent?
The whole of philosophy of science and epistemology grapples with exactly this. Karl Popper's problem of induction, Bayesian inference, and the entire rationality sphere online (as insufferable as it may often be) are all oriented towards trying to determine the limits of empiricism.
This line of thinking, taken too far, gets towards scientism and "trusting The Science (TM)." It wraps back around the horseshoe and becomes a faith all it's own. "The men in the long white robes (scientists) said it must be so!" Even though the entire idea of the scientific method is that everything is held as, at best, the current state of research and theory and, almost never, and iron law of the universe.
In terms of policy and legislation (to speak to your Bob and Alice example. Thank you for using the canonical names, BTW) policy is even more fraught because of capital-C Complexity and second, third, fourth, nth order effects. Our ability to predict these things is approximately zero. The Yellowstone Wolves example is legendary in this regard.
I am hyper suspicious of anyone who makes some version of the statement "this legislation is good because X will happen after it passes." Perhaps X will absolutely happen, but the entire system of laws will necessarily adapt because of it as well.
To a greater extent than metaphysical propositions.
They are, at least in principle, amenable to some form of test to determine which side is correct, even if we do not yet know what form that test might take.
Yes, sometimes people use science as attire, using appeals to authority rather than facts. "We gave $PILL1 to 250 people with $DISEASE2 and a placebo to another 250; 237 of the first group got better while 71 of the second group did; therefore $PILL1 treats $DISEASE2." is science; "Dr Weißmantel has umpteen Oxbridge/Ivory League degrees; he says $PILL1 treats $DISEASE2; therefore $PILL1 treats $DISEASE2." is not the Scientific Method being tried and found wanting; it is the Scientific Method being found difficult and left untried.
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Interestingly, many states had laws on the books that some people couldn't marry unless they showed that they were infertile. Namely, close relatives.
This has been trod over time and time again, but people still draw on this silly argument.
Do not impose your atheistic beliefs on people who do not share them.
For the purposes of civil liberties/avoiding sectarian conflict/&c., atheism is a religion.
Thus, if Alice believes in a deity or deities, and Bob does not, they are equally obligated to refrain from imposing their beliefs on each other.
This is why many New Atheists drew such ire; they promoted their Views in a manner that would have been seen as inappropriate in the other direction. However, the symmetry breaks down in that atheism per se does not impose demands founded on metaphysical assumptions, although some atheistic ideologies do, e. g. Gaianism ("Thou shalt not eat of produce that groweth not where thou livest, even if it be transported in a minimally-damaging way, for it is an Abomination Unto Gaia for people in northern climates to make it through the winter without developing early-stage scurvy.") or
WokismThe Ideology Which Refuses To Be Named Because It Considers Itself Entitled To Have Its Precepts Be Unmarked ("Thou shalt not eat of ice cream from an ice-cream truck, for the song they use has the same tune as a racist song used by ice-cream places during the Wilson Administration"; "Thou shalt not avail thyself of the easing of thy toil by human-shaped machines, because pre-civil-rights-era attempts were designed to resemble caricatures of black people and called Mechanical Negroes-with-two-Gs.)The same principle applies to those demands as to "Thou shalt not engage in coitus with a consenting adult of thy own gender because the Bible says something that, if you squint at it, looks like it says not to; never mind that the relationships to which Paul was referring to were probably the older man/young boy type often seen in ante-Christian Greece."
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I don't follow how the first sentence leads to the second.
No one's asking religious people who are against gay marriage to get gay-married against their will.
Yeah, I remember that line. And the companion line about how gay marriage was not going to affect your (straight person's) life at all. Funny how soon it morphed into "bake the cake, bigot!"
Just try the line "hey, if you don't want to own slaves, nobody is forcing you to do so" and see how far it gets with regards to "this law will not impinge on you" and "you can't legislate morality". Owning slaves is bad on the face of it, and we cannot permit people to have their own opinions on whether it's a sin or not, or if they are good, kindly slave owners or not. This is the law and you cannot be an exception to it.
The baker was trying, in a small way, to impose his beliefs on the couple. A hypothetical symmetrical case could be imagined in which 'people being allowed to believe in God and attend religious services' does not affect atheists' lives, even if Mr Euphoric-Fedora, who owns a hotel and sees no difference between religion and psychosis, is expected to provide rooms to religious people on the same terms as he provides to non-believers.
But it impinges on the enslaved persons. There is a difference between 'I am imposing my views on you' and 'I am not allowing you to impose your views on someone else'.
From what I recall of reading the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, the proprietor was willing to sell them one of the generic cakes. The issue came up when he was asked to provide one with personalized, theme-appropriate decoration.
Which is to say, to produce an expression of the beliefs the couple had regarding their wedding. And so in that way the couple, too, was attempting to impose their beliefs on him.
Now, it's a very mild sort of imposition I am talking about, of course. That kind of economic incentive to get someone else's expressive faculties dedicated to your cause for a moment is quite common, and in fact it is a good thing that the modern world lets those of us with less training or talent harness the voices of others that way. But it is nonetheless their voice, and many people are leery of forcing someone to say something they disagree with.
For comparison's sake: imagine Mr. Euphoric-Fedora advertises a service where he will leave one of a selection of texts in the hotel drawer if the person renting the room requests it. The local newspaper, or a copy of Godel Escher Bach, or one of several others from his collection. At his discretion he may even purchase a new one if you contact him ahead of time. But he won't put a Bible in it. Is that a failure to "provide rooms to religious people on the same terms as he provides to non-believers"?
A reasonable point, and one which was unfortunately lost in the noise as the pro-equality side either naively pattern-matched¹ the case to one of a business posting a '
WHITESSTRAIGHTS ONLY' sign (or worse, all the businesses in a less tolerant area doing so), or possibly sought to avoid creating a precedent which would allow such an outcome.¹cf. the Rightful Caliph's Meditation on Bingo Cards.
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This is not in fact a cosmically-preordained consequence of legalizing gay marriage.
And yet somehow it fell out of the air that a man was found guilty of not recognising a ceremony that was, at the time, illegal in his state and punished for the same. Schrodinger's gay wedding: it both exists and does not exist? Fail to recognise that you should celebrate what is technically non-existent and feel the consequences?
Some lawyers help me out here: if something is not permitted by the state constitution, does that make it illegal/a crime, or just "no don't do it but we won't stop you"?
What does "prohibited" mean here? And if you don't agree to be complicit in a prohibited act, how come you are the bad guy?
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That might be the case in a world where modern liberalism doesn’t exist, but in this world, it’s at least the next closest thing to cosmically-preordained.
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What do you think the purpose of such laws is?
I think this debate would go rather better if you told me.
Possibly. Possibly not. I'm not really viewing it as a "debate". I'm just encouraging you to think about things. It would be nice to get your perspective on how you think about it. Perhaps it's something you've never thought about before; it would then be useful to get your fresh perspective on the matter rather than simply treating it as a "debate" to be "won", because that often leads to people simply trying to shove things into a pre-canned bin where they think they can just draw from their pre-canned set of talking points. So far, I think it's apparent that you don't have a simple pre-canned talking point for this, specifically, so it's useful to get your first impressions concerning the brute fact of such laws.
I'll note that I'm not treating it as a debate to be won but as a debate whose shared purpose is to arrive at the truth.
But alright - humoring you: I don't, in fact, believe that marriage laws historically existed as social-engineering policies intended to encourage the creation of heterosexual families. As a broad simplification, I think that a critical mass of a given human population will be inclined to pair up into heterosexual households anyway, and the law eventually started keeping track of who's shacked up with who for a variety of administrative purposes (like settling inheritance disputes between a bereaved partner and the blood family of the deceased).
Only at a secondary stage did social engineers and moralizing busybodies realize that, once legal marriage became the norm, they could gatekeep it as a way to police who fucked whom and on what terms, whether based on their subjective ick-factors, or on their clever notions about the greater good of the nation. "By default any man/woman pair who ask for it can be legally married, but we will deny it to couples that could produce inbred children with defects in the hope that that'll make them give up on fucking one another at all" is a policy you get if you start from "everyone who's liable to shack up together in practice should get a rubber-stamped piece of paper regularizing that status", and only secondarily try to prevent unions that will be actively deleterious to society. I don't think it's a policy you get if you start from "we need to encourage fertile heterosexuals to shack up and make babies and raise them to adulthood" and come up with marriage licenses as an incentive, because if "number of fertile families" is your success metric rather than "number of people who'd have fucked anyway whose status is now regularized", it would be much cleaner to simply ban all potentially-inbreeding cousins from marrying than to carve out exceptions for infertile cousins.
(To be clear, I am making a kind of Rousseau or Thomas Hobbes "deriving the current state of affairs from a frictionless spherical state of nature" argument, not historical claims about a real sequence of events. This is only a model. But I think it's a model with greater explanatory power than "marriage was invented to boost demographics".)
What about the bit about letting them marry if they show that they're infertile?
I think this comes naturally out of the very sentence you quoted. Say Alice and Bob ask to get married: the legal clerk will look into their application and say "but hang on, it says here you're cousins. if you fuck each other, it could create inbred babies, which is bad. you're more likely to fuck if I accept your request than if I reject it. therefore, I should refuse", and then Bob will say "hold your horses, Padre, my balls got cut off years ago in a tragic fencing accident", and this eliminates the problem, causing the clerk to revert to the default policy of "they asked for a marriage therefore they should get one".
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