"Interracial" marriage vs "same sex" marriage

[Dark Jaguar]

Turns out it's kinda the opposite situation. In one the law predated public acceptance, and in the other public acceptance is quickly predating the law. Actually, this seems like another argument we can use. So many politicians opposed to equality treat legalizing same sex marriage as "forcing the gay agenda on all of us". Well, the law previously "forced" racial marriage equality on a far more unaccepting populace. Was it wrong then? Should we settle for just waiting for public opinion to support minority rights, or should things work a bit more like the "good ol' days" where laws could be passed recognizing the legal necessity of equality even when the majority was vastly opposed to the minority?

By the way, how the hell did it take until 1995 for "interracial" marriage approval to get above the halfway mark? That confuses my sheltered little mind and goes against how I was raised, but hell's bells, it seems that using "that's how I was raised" as any sort of metric of popular opinion doesn't work so well with me.

[A Black Falcon]

Wow, 1995... that is kind of amazing. I mean, I knew that acceptance of interracial marriage was slow, but it really says a lot about how hard the race issue is in America that it took that long -- and that despite acceptance now being at 85%, we still have major race-relations issues today as anyone watching the news at all knows.

As for that comparison there, it is also definitely interesting that gay marriage moved so quickly towards public acceptance. There's been a massive cultural shift in less than a decade! Very impressive progress. And that's why now so many states are getting gay marriage, and only the republican fringe is yelling about it, while just a decade ago they were driving lots of people to the polls with gay marriage bans. Just amazing pace of change.

[Weltall]

It took that long primarily because it took that long for most of the racists of the civil rights era to die off in sufficient numbers, to be replaced by people who lived their entire lives acclimated to the idea of interracial marriage. People who grew up in that more tolerant atmosphere were far more likely to end up tolerant of gay marriage. We're approaching the point, I think, where the idea of arbitrary restrictions, in general, will be disregarded.

The homophobes love to suggest that gay marriage will lead to a slippery slope that will also see polygamy, incest, pedophilia and bestiality legalized. I don't accept the latter two, because it's much harder to argue that beings incapable of informed consent can enter into a marriage. But, there really isn't any rational reason to disallow the former two. I think the major factor determining whether or not those two are legalized will primarily be, will there be a sufficient number of people who care enough about it to agitate for their legalization?

That, I don't know, but I don't personally have a problem with either of them being legalized, as long as the arrangements are inclusive and consensual.

[Dark Jaguar]

It's the consensual part that makes the former two so difficult. The biggest cases of polygamy, right now at least, occur in Mormon controlled cities, where female rights (and children's rights) are basically nonexistent. As for incest, well, the consent issue is a pretty obvious one there. Family members have a hierarchy, which sort of makes it impossible to really promise consent there, even as adults like Norman Bates (he wouldn't harm a fly).

It's the preexisting relationships that make those two such problems in practice that pretty much any real world case you can point to the result of some sort of lack of consent or abuse scenario (not to mention basic genetic issues with the incest, should children ever be attempted, which they shouldn't be).

That was my "sipping brandy while having a calm rational emotionless discussion" version, and in that mode, I can concede that if such issues are somehow resolved in some way or another, then there wouldn't be any other reason to ban them. That said, since gay couples meet in the same way and have the same basic levels of consent as straight, none of those issues apply there.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, those are not like homosexuality. Incest has the problem of power relationships that you mention (the issue of consent in the all-too-common abuse scenarios incest often centers around), first, and second, has a higher chance of genetic problems if there are any children -- there's a reason why incest is one of the oldest taboos, dating back to the earliest days of humanity. The Westermarck Effect, as it's called (that children who grow up together as siblings from a young age don't see eachother as sexual partners), exists to ward off those genetic problems as much as it does to improve human societies.

As for polygamy, I think a relationship with one person of one gender and several of the other is fairly obviously sexist. There's no way to have a relationship like that and have it be equal! You can very much see this by looking at polygamous Mormons in the US, yes.