This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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".
Why would the State care if Bob got his balls cut off years ago? Why would they make some special process to 'allow' this? It's extra work; it seems to serve little purpose on your account. They have a perfectly good default to revert to - you're cousins, so you don't get married. Why would they do this other mess?
Because all else being equal they want to maximize the number of requested marriages implemented (both because that's what the citizens want, and because it will make administration easier later down the line). Therefore any one couple failing to get legal recognition of their union is lost value, even if it is sometimes an acceptable loss in the interest of preventing inbreeding.
I don't know that I agree. This is sort of a weird and arbitrary thing to try to maximize. I think plenty of effort has gone into messaging that marriage is a big, serious thing, shouldn't be entered into lightly, and really annoying for the State to unwind if it goes poorly. Plenty of States have processes that take some time and effort, in part so that they're not just maximally implementing all marriage requests, when they could be really rash and hastily/carelessly requested.
I don't buy this one, because I don't think many citizens want to care about some cousins getting married. It's a tiny portion of the population. I think plenty of citizens are perfectly fine just not letting them get married. That's a perfectly fine default. Most citizens think they probably shouldn't even be having sex in the first place! There's basically no point in even thinking about them getting married. There's almost certainly not a ton of folks clamoring to create some special process for this for apparently no reason other than some vague quantity maximization. In fact, I think most citizens don't even know that this sort of case exists! On first impression, I imagine plenty would be perfectly happy with just reverting to the default of 'you're cousins, so you don't get married'.
I don't see how that's the case, either. It doesn't make administration much easier to have such a tiny percentage of people having sex marginally getting married, especially not for some weird special case that most people disapprove of anyway. This would be a tiny tiny change in the numbers and almost certainly not worth the effort.
Yeah, I just don't see how there's "value" in them just getting married. Even if there was, then there seems to be little reason for the rigmarole of proving infertility. The biggest issue with your account is that there's just no reason for the rigmarole if they're just maximizing requested marriages implemented.
Instead, what I think is far more parsimonious is that the State is using marriage as an incentive. They know that there will be some cousins out there who want to be having sex and such. They can't just ban this. But they certainly don't want irresponsible, inbred procreation. So hey, Bob and Alice; you'd like to get married, right? Ya know what, Bob, if you just cut off your balls (or take some less drastic measure to ensure infertility), we'll let you get married. I think this is much more parsimonious than some vague quantity maximization, especially if they're going to go to the trouble to set up a whole process for this, with what are likely to be some necessarily complex rules (how exactly do you verify infertility, what is sufficient verification, etc.).
Would you disagree?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link