Why Kerry Thinks He Lost

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
81

ZEB: Thanks for posting this. Maggie makes some very good points about the importance of marriage and children.

I’d like to start out by saying that most of the article tries to define marriage as an institution. Here’s where she tries to come up with some argument against gay marriage:

And this is how she reasons this:

But she is wrong. Gay marriage doesn’t do this. What she is talking about: “It would mean the law was neutral as to whether children had mothers AND fathers. (emphasis mine) Motherless and Fatherless families would be deemed just fine.” This is not gay marriage law, this is DIVORCE law. What gay marriage means is that marriage doesn’t have to always mean children. That’s it. Do you see this? When she reasons backwards and upside-down like that, it’s like she’s dividing by zero or something. This is NOT a convoluted and complex issue. You can either say that marriage is between parents and children, or you can say that marriage is between two adults.

So this is what I’ve been getting at with the “open your brains guys” shtick I’ve been promoting lately. Y’all and your wives wear the wedding rings – not your kids. Gay marriage isn’t about the degredation of the family unit. It’s about enhancing it. Read this link, and see what I’m talking about:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aaS9ln8F0P5w&refer=us

In short, here’s some evidence that gay families raise kids just as well as heteros. Is the idea of a married family important? Sure, in a traditional way it is. But when non-traditional people enter into the equation, you can either open your mind to different ideas or resist. I would like to point out that Maggie’s article does a fine job of supporting gay marriage (in the places where it’s talking about marriage and children) in that a married gay couple raising kids would be more apt to stay together through the bumps and wrinkles of this life, and would stand more firm in every way than an unmarried gay couple. Make sense?

82

[quote]rainjack wrote:
lothario1132 wrote:
…For lack of a better word, I “accused” some of the cons on this board of close-mindedness because that’s what they are on this issue. I don’t know what y’all consider close-minded, there’s definitely different degrees of it, but I consider close-minded to be “not open to new ideas”. Is there any doubt about the guys not being open to the idea of gay marriage?

Yet another shining example of those on the left side of an issue ordaining themselves as the arbitors of open-mindedness.

You keep equating being against gay marraige as being anti-gay, and that’s not the case. 68% of the U.S. oppose gay marraige. Does that mean that 2/3 of this country are close-minded homo-phobes?

Have you no other argument in this debate other than, ‘Those guys are close-minded’? If that and emotinal appeals are all you have left in your bag-o-tricks, you might want to pick a different fight.
[/quote]

The correct way to show something as not being the antithesis is appeal to authority - where has any significant GOP leader ever said that they fully support and endorse the rights of Homosexuals under the law?
Quite simply, Conservative opposition to gay marriage has as much to do with values as it does with tax burden. If Homosexuals are allowed to legally marry, that creates substantial increase in the amount of benefits that must be doled out under the GOP backed marriage incentive, originally designed to sway unwed couples into the institution of marriage.
Finally, just because something is popular, doesn’t mean its right. It isn’t about being open minded (Nothing in politics is!). How are you going to say that homosexuals don’t deserve the same civil rights and civil liberties as everyone else?

83

[/quote]briangoldstein wrote:
The correct way to show something as not being the antithesis is appeal to authority - where has any significant GOP leader ever said that they fully support and endorse the rights of Homosexuals under the law? [/quote]

If I remember correctly, Dick Cheney said as much during the campaign just a few weeks ago.

[/quote]Quite simply, Conservative opposition to gay marriage has as much to do with values as it does with tax burden. If Homosexuals are allowed to legally marry, that creates substantial increase in the amount of benefits that must be doled out under the GOP backed marriage incentive, originally designed to sway unwed couples into the institution of marriage. [/quote]

So we’d increase the number of tax returns filed as Married Filing Jointly by 1%? That’s hardly a substantial increase.

84

[quote]lothario1132 wrote:

Oh really? How? How can you know this? BB posted a link to a rather comprehensive conservative weblog which addressed the issue. In a small county called Nordland in Norway, there are two statistics which coincide. The high “acceptance of gay marriage” and the high “out of wedlock parenting”. Stanley Kurtz (the weblog author) uses this to show a causality between gay marriage and the decline of traditional marriage. I would beg to differ.

Talk about apples and oranges! Comparing a small county in Norway with the US is a great leap of faith, in my book. Maybe it’s not in yours. That’s cool. What other factors could be contributing to the rather high out-of-wedlock births? Could it be that gay couples who get married are raiding sperm banks and impregnating women in their sleep? Perhaps the gay married couples beat up couples who are heterosexual, preventing them from being married? (Hehehe, sorry, I couldn’t help myself) The causality link is ridiculous. Being a bit more open-minded than Kurtz, I came up with a much better explanation. Ready?

A high acceptance of gay marriage = a high amount of ultra-liberals

a high amount of ultra-liberals = a lot of pot-smoking hippies

a lot of pot-smoking hippies = why get married, we’ll just have children anyway

Now THAT’S a logically ordered reason. You will, of course, note that the gays being married didn’t actually CAUSE the decline of marriage rates as measured by out-of-wedlock childbirths. It was being a stinking damn hippie that did it.[/quote]

lothario:

I think the point is actually sliding under your radar. It’s not a causal relationship the way you set it up because there are some unstated assumptions that are missing from the equation.

The real cultural fight here [this is separate from my main fear, which is judicially enforced “right to marriage”], if you get down to brass tacks, is against the re-conceptualization of marriage that you are arguing has already happened in the minds of people – basically, it’s a fight against taking the legal focus off of encouraging marriage in order to provide stable homes for kids, and turning the raison d’etre for marriage into adult “rights” (and don’t forget, by “rights” we are basically talking about access to benefits when one doesn’t want to engage in the precise behavior that the legislature has required to obtain those benefits).

That worry is two-fold. On the one-hand, they want the cultural understanding to be that marriage is about families and bringing up kids. However, that’s not really the focus of the fight. The focus of the fight is that the legal concept of marriage be set up in order to encourage heterosexuals to form two-parent units, which will become the bases for nuclear family units. Basically, they want to encourage those people who can create kids to form units to best take care of those kids (“best” here meaning better than single-parent homes).

Now, the world is changing. Kids can be produced scientifically for same-sex couples, or those couples can adopt – but there are not kids in danger of being accidentally created by same-sex couples. Homosexuals fulfilling their urges – irrespective of whether one views them as natural, unnatural, or doesn’t care – won’t accidentally conceive.

So, society – by way of the government – has created preferences for heterosexual couples to enter unions to take care of the product of them satisfying their sexual desires. They crafted this set of contractual rights adn responsibilities, and put them all together in an easy package, and then bestowed people who entered into those contracts with certain tax benefits. In other words, this particular contracting is favored as policy. It’s a one-size-fits best for society, so older couples and infertile couples and whatever don’t affect the overall policy decision, because those are exceptions to a general rule, and they don’t take away from the policy justification by weakening the purpose.

That’s why the most dangerous thing isn’t gay marriage, but rather civil unions available to any two adults. And reconceptualizing marriage into something that is only concerned about what the two adults involved want, and their “rights” threatens to turn traditional marriage into just some glorified form of civil union.

The “cause” here, and in the cases to which Kurtz pointed in the Scandanavian countries and in Holland, is that re-conceptualization of marriage. This re-conceptualized view fits easily with easy-divorce laws, and with handing all the previously reserved benefits out to all adults who can share them with their partners of the moment (easy-access civil unions).

Marriage is hard – you are committing to stay with one person for life, through thick and thin. As a guy, you’re taking responsibility to be there and take care of your kids (and guys are generally the ones who need more incentivizing in this regard). The fear is that without incentives, people wouldn’t necessarily choose it. So there are incentives for people to form couples, and incentives for them to stay together.

Easy-in, easy out marriages are a problem. Easy divorce laws are a huge problem, but re-conceptualizing marriage as being by and for adult wishes would take away some of the incentives to stay together, and thus further weaken the institution.

Of course, this particular aspect isn’t just a legal thing – any time someone indicates that “we just fell out of love” or some other such reason is an acceptable reason for breaking up a marriage in his social judgment, he adds to the problem. Especially if there are kids involved – it’s not about the adult being a latent adolescent and going off to seek some mythical self-fulfillment. It’s about responsibilities, sacrificing for your kids, and, for lack of a better description, being an adult.

Those are the most dangerous aspects, and they should be fought against as hard or harder than gay marriage – the problem is that easy divorce laws are already on the books, whereas gay marriage isn’t. And the cultural battles generally aren’t contested in the courts. That’s why the fight is taking place on the gay-marriage battlefield at the moment.

Now, circling back to what I said above in a previous post, this is why I could conceive of a solution that involved creating a separate contractual bond for same-sex couples. Perhaps society could decide there is very good reason to encourage long-term monogomous relationships among same-sex couples (AIDS comes to mind), and thus create a different class of union for them, with targeted benefits, survivorship rights mimicing marriage (although I still favor abolition of the death tax as a preferred solution), and make it as difficult or more difficult to get out of than marriage. Such an institution would not harm marriage by re-conceptualizing it or diluting its meaning.

That’s how I see it anyway. My 2 1/2 cents (too long-winded to be just $0.02).

On a completely separate note, what are you and rainjack doing up at the god-awful hours that your posts are time-stamped? =-)

85

lothario:

Yes, I’m sure that a gay couple could raise a child every bit as good as a heterosexual couple. After all, it’s perfectly natural. :slight_smile:

A young boy watching two men kiss and hug each other daily would have no effect on him at all. I’m sure there would be no confusion, resentment, hostility or any sort of anxiety over the situation. In fact he would probably be more apt to invite his friends over to the house for a game of hoop. Yep…

I don’t know what the heck I was thinking. Must be I’m not PC enough. I can only apologize and attempt to drop the subject. :slight_smile:

86

Not to beat a dead horse, but I did find this little newsbyte interesting:

Bush staff gloats OBL tape is a “gift”

NY DAILY NEWS

“We want people to think ‘terrorism’ for the last four days,” said a Bush-Cheney campaign official. “And anything that raises the issue in people’s minds is good for us.”

A senior GOP strategist added, “anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush.”

He called it “a little gift,” saying it helps the President but doesn’t guarantee his reelection.

The link is:

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/247753p-212149c.html

Incidentally, the day that senior Bush strategist was crowing about what a gift that tape was, 8 Marines DIED in action. These guys have a funny way of looking at things.

87

I wonder who the “campaign strategist” or the “official” is?

How much power they had/have?

Bottom line: Had Kerry had anything consistent to say about combating terrorism, the tape would have helped him. Had he had a consistent record of supporting military systems, we might have been more reassured by him.

It helped Bush because no one doubts his committment to fight terrorism.

Four more years!!!

JeffR

88

Roy:

Two things:

  1. You cannot associate the staff liking the idea of Osma being shown in a video tape with those same people liking the fact that American troops are being killed.

  2. You might also point out that the Kerry people would gloat everytime something went wrong in Iraq. Did that mean that they wanted American troops to be killed? No. They also enjoyed bad economic news…

The entire thing is politics as usual. Whatever harms the country and thus the administration is viewed as positive political news to the challenger, democrat or republican. Whatever good news is broadcast about the country helps the current administration, matters not what party.

Basically, if you have not yet noticed, politics stinks!

89

[quote]ZEB wrote:

Basically, if you have not yet noticed, politics stinks!
[/quote]

Yet Bush’s administration smells like roses to you?

90

[quote]Professor X wrote:
ZEB wrote:

Basically, if you have not yet noticed, politics stinks!

Yet Bush’s administration smells like roses to you?[/quote]

I don’t think his administration is any better or worse than any other previous Presidents for the most part.

However, that is not what I stated. It’s the political end that stinks. You have to say and do things that are at times questionable. Both parties do it, those who deny it are really living in la la land.

91

This seemed the best place to post this very interesting post from a new left-wing-academic group weblog, http://www.left2right.typepad.com on the politics of homosexuality:

http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/the_politics_of.html#more

the politics of homosexuality

I have now seen enough analyses to be persuaded that Bush did not benefit from the presence of gay marriage on the ballot. Especially impressive is an analysis (not itself online, but cited above by Josh Cohen) showing that, in states where gay marriage was an issue, Bush did better than expected in counties where he had won 60% or more of the vote in 2000 but worse than expected in counties where he had previously won less than 60%. So gay-marriage initiatives seem to have both helped and hurt Bush – maybe even to have hurt more than they helped.

All the same, I think that the politics of homosexuality is an interesting case-study for some of the issues under discussion here. Specifically, I think that social divisions over homosexuality challenge us to re-examine our conceptions of mutual toleration in a pluralistic society.

The problem is that toleration is owed not only to homosexuals but also to those whose religious convictions commit them to disapproving of homosexuality. People have the right to believe – and, if they like, to teach their children – that homosexuality is wrong and that homosexual relationships are not as healthy or fulfilling as heterosexual. Not only, then, can religious condemnations of homosexuality threaten gay rights; assertions of gay rights can at least seem to threaten religious freedom.

The appearance of a conflict here is due, I suspect, to a conflation of civic respect and personal esteem. (Here I am tempted to cite Steve Darwall’s paper on “Two Kinds of Respect” [subscription required]. But that would be pedantic.) In both the civil rights movement and the women’s movement, demands by oppressed groups to have their equal status respected have been combined with efforts to repair their self-esteem and its sources in the esteem of others. As a result, disapproval has come to be conflated with discrimination.

This equation becomes problematic in the case of gay rights, because there are people whose religious freedom entitles them to condemn a way of life for which others have suffered grievous discrimination. We therefore need to distinguish what we have elsewhere conflated. We have to distinguish condemning homosexuality from stigmatizing homosexuals, which must in turn be distinguished from infringing on homosexuals’ rights. Law and public policy must protect homosexuals from discrimination, and social mores should protect them from being stimatized; but it should not be part of public policy, for example, that homosexual relationships are just as healthy and fulfilling as heterosexual, since that is matter on which people are entitled to disagree without themselves being accused of harassment or stigmatized as rednecks and homopobes.

(Of course, everything I have said thus far will sound off-key to those who believe that homosexuality is just a biologically determined trait. On this question, I believe, the liberal community has been anything but “reality based”. But it’s a question that I’ll have to postpone for another occasion. Note, in any case, that I have not called homosexuality a lifestyle; I’ve called it a way of life; I would also call it an identity. As I understand it, an identity or a way of life cannot be adopted or shed at will, but it is indeed constructed, albeit from elements that include biological givens. As I’ve said, this topic can’t be done justice here.)

The specter of a “gay agenda” is a paranoid fantasy, but as they say, even paranoids have enemies. Judging from the way in which public institutions, such as the public schools, have combined the restoration of minority rights with the celebration of minority pride, conservatives are not entirely unreasonable in fearing that writing gay rights into public policy will entail inscribing gay pride there as well. And making gay pride an article of public policy would at least potentially infringe on the rights of religious minorities. I believe that we must never give an inch on gay rights, but we must explicitly acknowledge that value judgments about sexual mores do not belong on the state side of the wall between church and state. If the difference between marriage and civil unions is that the former honors what the latter merely recognizes, then Kerry’s position on gay marriage was sensible. (Sensible but not quite right, since on this interpretation, the right position would be that the state should grant only civil unions, leaving marriage to the church.)

This post has become too long at this point, but I don’t pretend that it has done more than scratch the surface of one facet of a very complicated issue. I hope that people will argue with me about it rather than shake their heads in embarrased silence: it’s an issue on which I’d like to work out a defensible position.

92

A left-wing blogger (Daily Kos) venting against the ineptitude of the Kerry campaign – pretty amusing stuff:

EXCERPT:

But what makes me angry was Kerry and his gang’s inability to take advantage of the situation. I may regret saying this later, but fuck it – they should be lined up and shot. There’s no reason they should’ve lost to this joker. “I voted for the $87 billion, then I voted against it.” That wasn’t nuance. That was idiocy. And with a primary campaign that consisted entirely of “I’m the most electable”, Kerry entered the general without a core philosophy or articulated vision for the job.

Obviously, there’s a lot of invective against Bush in the post as a whole, but I can’t help but think I’ve heard the criticisms against Kerry somewhere before…