Happy Marriage Equality Day!

@ freemage

Thanks, that makes me feel better. Guess I should’ve seen right away Tom was trolling, but I’m new-ish here, didn’t know if maybe he was a regular and I committed a no-no out of ignorance.

Josh: Once you’ve been here awhile, you start to recognize the patterns. They only have a few–if they were imaginative, they’d probably not be MRAs.

Somebody posted a comment by Judge Richard Posner on another blog, and I think it’s worth posting here.

“John Stuart Mill drew an important distinction between what he called “self-regarding acts” and “other-regarding acts.” The former involves doing things to yourself that don’t harm other people, though they may be self-destructive. The latter involves doing things that do harm other people. He thought that government had no business with the former (and hence—his example—the English had no business concerning themselves with polygamy in Utah, though they hated it). Unless it can be shown that same-sex marriage harms people who are not gay (or who are gay but don’t want to marry), there is no compelling reason for state intervention, and specifically for banning same-sex marriage. The dissenters in Obergefell missed this rather obvious point.

I go further than Mill. I say that gratuitous interference in other people’s lives is bigotry. The fact that it is often religiously motivated does not make it less so. The United States is not a theocracy, and religious disapproval of harmless practices is not a proper basis for prohibiting such practices, especially if the practices are highly valued by their practitioners. Gay couples and the children (mostly straight) that they adopt (or that one of them may have given birth to and the other adopts) derive substantial benefits, both economic and psychological, from marriage. Efforts to deny them those benefits by forbidding same-sex marriage confer no offsetting social benefits—in fact no offsetting benefits at all beyond gratifying feelings of hostility toward gays and lesbians, feelings that feed such assertions as that heterosexual marriage is “degraded” by allowing same-sex couples to “annex” the word marriage to their cohabitation.”

In other news, Mozambique just decriminalized homosexuality and abortion.