Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Clio »

cntrational wrote:I feel most of the recent association between between reproduction and marriage is a reaction by conservative Christians to the rise of LGBT relationships and sex education, rather than a strongly held and talked about belief. It was probably just a "fact of life" before then.
That probably holds some water, but I figured I'd dig around in the New Testament to see what it says about reproduction and marriage. (Using the NIV because I don't have access to anything much better right now.)
1 Corinthians 7:4-7 wrote:4 The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. 5 Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. 6 I say this as a concession, not as a command. 7 I wish that all of you were as I am. But each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that.
So Paul seems to think that married couples should be having sexual intercourse regularly, but he doesn't particularly like it. In fact, allowing sex within the confines of marriage seems to be mostly a way of keeping people from having sex outside of marriage.
Matthew 19:3-9 wrote:3 Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” 4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” 7 “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?” 8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
And Jesus (well, the author of the Gospel According to Matthew) cares quite a bit about whether sex occurs in marriage (naming infidelity as the only legitimate grounds for divorce). As far as whether this passage demands that married couples reproduce, I'm not so sure.
Pretty much the same thing also happens in Mark 10, but there Jesus doesn't make any mention of acceptable reasons for divorce.
I didn't check the other canonical gospels.

Of course, none of this makes much of a difference as to whether marriage is about property or reproduction from a scientific/sociological viewpoint--just shows that people did in fact think about the role of sexual intercourse in marriage in the first century CE.
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by k1234567890y »

Ahzoh wrote:
Thrice Xandvii wrote:
Squall wrote:Same-sex marriage
Gays do not exist in the conworlds.
Gays!?

Really... That's the term you're going with?
And what about lesbians?
Speaking of the lesbian things, I frequently have a cute autistic human girl protagonist who is a lesbian into conworlds I take part in when it is a world of human beings...
Last edited by k1234567890y on 05 Sep 2015 08:31, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Khemehekis »

druneragarsh wrote:
Khemehekis wrote:...The parties who wish to marry are recorded on a maritogram, a two-dimensional graph that shows the name of each entrant to the marriage going down, and against going across. At the place where any two names intersect, there is either a dot to indicate that the two are married to each other, a Kankonian equals sign to indicate that the two are the same person, or a blank space to indicate that the two are not married to each other. Both the religious official and the newlyweds keep a copy of the maritogram to keep track of exactly who is married to whom. ...
I can't quite visualize it; would you have a picture example that you could show to us?
Like this:

http://khemehekis.angelfire.com/maritogram.gif

Note that I made the names using the Roman alphabet, so Terran readers can understand at a glance what's going on. A real Kankonian maritogram would use the Kankonian alphabet.

Incidentally, sasram, the Kankonian word for maritogram, was the 49,000th word to be added to my Kankonian dictionary!
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Thrice Xandvii
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

That's.... not ever been how you tag images on this forum.

(Putting it in a spoiler since I'm not sure how large of an image it is.)
Spoiler:
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Edit: Aaaaaand, your link is broken. Not too surprising, because Angelfire.
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

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If you go to http://khemehekis.angelfire.com/maritogram.gif you should be able to see it. Just reload if it doesn't show at first.
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by k1234567890y »

Khemehekis wrote:If you go to http://khemehekis.angelfire.com/maritogram.gif you should be able to see it. Just reload if it doesn't show at first.
I can't see it, do you consider to use other services like http://imgur.com ?
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by cntrational »

Angelfire doesn't let you link images directly. Copy the url and paste it into a new tab. You might need to cache-refresh (Ctrl F5) to make it work.
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Lao Kou »

Thrice Xandvii wrote:
Squall wrote:Same-sex marriage
Gays do not exist in the conworlds.
Gays!?

Really... That's the term you're going with?
In Squall's sig, there is mention of not being a native speaker along with pre-apologies. That might be what's happening here, so perhaps some slack is in order. One may recall a while back that even we native speakers were not of one mind about how or why we feel about usage like "the Japanese", "the French", etc.
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

That's a good point, 老彄, and one I didn't really think about before I posted. It completely slipped my mind that he (she?) isn't a native English speaker and so that could indeed explain the choice.
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Salmoneus »

Trailsend wrote:@elemtilas: Sal isn't arguing what you think he's arguing, hence the confusion. (Please correct me if I've misinterpreted you, Sal.)
elemtilas wrote:You made a claim: "Sex is only tangentially and circumstantially related to marriage, which is a way of regulating the transmission of property."

I countered: "Actually, sex is pretty central to the Christian concept of marriage."

You replied: "Not really, no."
What Sal replied with is that the Christian concept of marriage is not the same thing as Christians' marriages.

The pope and the Catechism are absolutely evidence for what (a particular) Christian concept of marriage is, but that's not what Sal is talking about.

(As a crude analogy, English speakers may have a conception that you shouldn't split infinitives, but the behavior of English infinitives is an entirely different thing. What people think or say about something and what they do with it are very different questions.)

Sal is arguing that what people actually do with marriage is very much about filial relationships and transmission of property. It certainly may be true that in Christian rhetoric/doctrine/teaching/whathaveyou, sex is central to the concept of marriage, but that fact alone says nothing about the concrete behavior of marriage relationships.
Yes, exactly. When the Pope says 'marriage is about X', he is, if taken as making an empirical claim, not certain to be correct. Alternatively, he can be read as saying 'I think that marriage SHOULD be about X' or 'God defines marriage as being about X', and in either case he can't be proven wrong... but then he's also stopped making a sociological claim about how marriage actually works. The Christian concept of marriage, what christianity believes about marriage, is not the same as what is actually true about marriage, even within christian cultures, let alone in a general, cross-cultural sense.


For instance, take that quote about sexual immorality and divorce. WHY can you divorce a woman for sexual immorality? Is it because marriage is about monogamous sex? No! Because if it were, the wife would be equally entitled to divorce the husband for his sexual immorality. To understand why that was not the case, you have to look at marriage as primarily about inheritance rights. If marriage gives the wife's children the right to be legally considered the husband's children, then suddenly it is not surprising that the man might have the right to consider the marriage invalid if he learned that there was a good chance that his wife's children were not actually his children. When your job is to validate that X is the case, naturally you might withhold validation if you learn that X has a sizeable probability of not being the case. So from the perspective of marriage-as-defining-legal-heirs, this asymmetrical pattern of divorce makes sense, whereas from the perspective of marriage-as-ensuring-monogamous-sex, it doesn't. Likewise, this perspective also explains why Jesus doesn't want men to divorce women for any other reason. Because if there is no sexual immorality, the children really are the children of the husband. And then divorcing the woman would be disowning his own children. If we assume that children have a right not to be disowned by their biological parents, which is a common belief, then naturally divorcing a woman for any reason other than adultery would be unjustified.

[it's a bit more complicated than this, of course, because spouses also have rights as heirs of each other, and of each other's parents, and so on, but you get the idea]
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by elemtilas »

Trailsend wrote:@elemtilas: Sal isn't arguing what you think he's arguing, hence the confusion. (Please correct me if I've misinterpreted you, Sal.)
elemtilas wrote:You made a claim: "Sex is only tangentially and circumstantially related to marriage, which is a way of regulating the transmission of property."

I countered: "Actually, sex is pretty central to the Christian concept of marriage."

You replied: "Not really, no."
What Sal replied with is that the Christian concept of marriage is not the same thing as Christians' marriages.

The pope and the Catechism are absolutely evidence for what (a particular) Christian concept of marriage is, but that's not what Sal is talking about.
Well, to be honest, Sal's original statement didn't specify either Christianity (in any flavour) or Christians within a Christian context or even Christians within a secular context. Sal simply made a blanket statement. However, I do agree with you: yes, this "Christian concept" of marriage is not necessarily the same thing as "Christians' actual practice of marriage"! Thank you for quoting back to me what I said originally in response to Sal's blanket statement: "Actually, sex is pretty central to the Christian concept of marriage." To be clear, I am not implying that particular Christians believe / agree with / go along with that concept. The concept speaks for itself.

I can only go on what Sal actually said in that particular statement. It seemed an overly broad and obviously non-water-tight statement. It was just asking for refutation.
(As a crude analogy, English speakers may have a conception that you shouldn't split infinitives, but the behavior of English infinitives is an entirely different thing. What people think or say about something and what they do with it are very different questions.)
Of course. I'm only continuing the reply to make clear the circumstances here: I am not arguing what Christians believe, how they as individuals behave or how they interpret official teaching; I am not arguing what secular society has to say on the matter; I am not arguing what current scientific thought on the matter is.

To continue the imperfect analogy: Sal has a conception about sex and marriage, that they are only tangentially connected; the reality is quite different in that there are indeed conceptions of sex and marriage in which they are integral.
Sal is arguing that what people actually do with marriage is very much about filial relationships and transmission of property.
And to be quite frank, I do nòt disagree! If he had said at the outset something like "For most people in modern (Western) society, sex is only tangentially and circumstantially related to marriage..." I would have let it pass without comment. Because that would be a true(r) statement than the one he actually made. My interest in this argument is, again, not what people actually do, not what this or that secular culture holds to be true at this time, not even what other religions have to say on the matter.
It certainly may be true that in Christian rhetoric/doctrine/teaching/whathaveyou, sex is central to the concept of marriage, but that fact alone says nothing about the concrete behavior of marriage relationships.
Again, behaviour was never at issue. Concept and ideology from the (Catholic) Christian perspective was my starting and shall be my ending point with refuting his statement.

If Sal wants to go down another road, that's fine. (If his original intention had been to go down another road, that's fine too, but that direction was nowhere close to clear.) I'm not interested in going there -- mostly because we're already in agreement on those points. If he wants to defend his position on topic within the context Christian teaching, that's fine. We can continue from there.
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Trailsend »

elemtilas wrote:Again, behaviour was never at issue. Concept and ideology from the (Catholic) Christian perspective was my starting and shall be my ending point with refuting his statement.
This is precisely the problem. Behavior was always the issue in Sal's statement. If you interpret it as something else and then endeavor to refute that interpretation, you're just going to keep talking past each other.
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Squall »

The conculture portraits marriage as a union of a couple that are compatible for reproductive purposes and they should continue together to raise and protect children. They must trust and help each other.
cntrational wrote:
Squall wrote:Polygamy
In most countries, it requires the permission of the other spouses. Consequently, the answer is 'no'.
This is how real life polyamory works, you know. The partners don't freely have sex with anybody, they get permission from the others.
Polyamory is a concept that I did not know.
Real cases of polygamy that I thought are slavery or submission of women.
Lao Kou wrote:
Thrice Xandvii wrote:
Squall wrote:Same-sex marriage
Gays do not exist in the conworlds.
Gays!?

Really... That's the term you're going with?
In Squall's sig, there is mention of not being a native speaker along with pre-apologies. That might be what's happening here, so perhaps some slack is in order. One may recall a while back that even we native speakers were not of one mind about how or why we feel about usage like "the Japanese", "the French", etc.
Sorry. I do not know what I have said.
The dictionary does not tell anything unexpected.
Could you fix my English?
I see nothing wrong with "the Japanese" as well. :roll:
English is not my native language. Sorry for any mistakes or lack of knowledge when I discuss this language.
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Khemehekis »

I'm bisexual myself and don't see anything wrong with the plural "gays".

Didn't we routinely hear about "gays in the military" awhile back?
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Dormouse559 »

At the very least, it's not the most elegant phrasing one could hope for. I think "gays in the military" is only somewhat acceptable because there isn't a way to avoid the noun that isn't also really unwieldy. But the way squall used the noun, just on its own, sounds very awkward. Generally speaking, I'd prefer "gay people" or in the context of our world "members of the gay community". Specifically, I would rewrite squall's sentence as "Homosexuality doesn't exist in the conworlds".
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by cntrational »

Occasionally, adjectives used as nouns to describe cultures or people sound rude in certain contexts. "He's a Japanese" sounds off, "He's a Japanese person" is okay. "That Jew took my drink!" sounds really bad, but "That Jewish guy took my drink!" is pretty acceptable in most contexts. But this isn't a hard and fast rule, "American" has no restrictions and is freely converted between an adjective and noun. Feels like it's applied to people and groups discriminated against in the past.
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by elemtilas »

Trailsend wrote:
elemtilas wrote:Again, behaviour was never at issue. Concept and ideology from the (Catholic) Christian perspective was my starting and shall be my ending point with refuting his statement.
This is precisely the problem. Behavior was always the issue in Sal's statement. If you interpret it as something else and then endeavor to refute that interpretation, you're just going to keep talking past each other.
Fair enough, however, that is entirely unclear in his original statement. Anyway, like I said before, as far as actual behavior is concerned, we are agreed. So I guess here we can leave it!
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

cntrational wrote:Occasionally, adjectives used as nouns to describe cultures or people sound rude in certain contexts. "He's a Japanese" sounds off, "He's a Japanese person" is okay. "That Jew took my drink!" sounds really bad, but "That Jewish guy took my drink!" is pretty acceptable in most contexts. But this isn't a hard and fast rule, "American" has no restrictions and is freely converted between an adjective and noun. Feels like it's applied to people and groups discriminated against in the past.
Precisely. Saying "gays don't exist" sounded to me to be rather strange and off-putting. Far more logical would have been that "homosexuality doesn't exist." Using a descriptor like that as a noun is generally seen as rude, though as cntrational points out, that isn't universal depending upon the term in question. For "gays" it's definitely not something I would use to describe myself "I'm a gay"!?! Yeah, no way.

However, I find the fact that homosexuality doesn't even exist to be really implausible unless your con-culture doesn't exist on Earth. There is a long history of homosexual behavior in human and non-human species alike on this planet, so to say it doesn't exist seems really weird, but that is completely aside the point of the phrasing.
Dormouse559 wrote:At the very least, it's not the most elegant phrasing one could hope for. I think "gays in the military" is only somewhat acceptable because there isn't a way to avoid the noun that isn't also really unwieldy. But the way squall used the noun, just on its own, sounds very awkward. Generally speaking, I'd prefer "gay people" or in the context of our world "members of the gay community". Specifically, I would rewrite squall's sentence as "Homosexuality doesn't exist in the conworlds".
Also of note, is the fact that "gays in the military" was coined by the news media as a headline or talking point, a scenario in which riling up viewers over a topic is more important than tactful handling of a topic. Further, it was used by and about an institution that isn't known for inclusive behavior, namely: the military.
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by druneragarsh »

Thrice Xandvii wrote:However, I find the fact that homosexuality doesn't even exist to be really implausible unless your con-culture doesn't exist on Earth. There is a long history of homosexual behavior in human and non-human species alike on this planet, so to say it doesn't exist seems really weird, but that is completely aside the point of the phrasing.
On this tangent, I'd like to point out that the concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality didn't exist until the 1800s IIRC. Sure, homosexual and heterosexual behaviors have happened since the dawn of time, but sexuality-as-something-one-is only took root in the Victorian era. The labels "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are a product of our culture, and I don't think that a conculture would have the same notions of sexuality that we do.

However, homosexual behavior has existed since the dawn of time, both in humans and in a variety of animal species, so it's unrealistic to say that a human conculture doesn't have such behavior.
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Re: Gay marriage, polygamy, etc.

Post by Salmoneus »

druneragarsh wrote:
Thrice Xandvii wrote:However, I find the fact that homosexuality doesn't even exist to be really implausible unless your con-culture doesn't exist on Earth. There is a long history of homosexual behavior in human and non-human species alike on this planet, so to say it doesn't exist seems really weird, but that is completely aside the point of the phrasing.
On this tangent, I'd like to point out that the concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality didn't exist until the 1800s IIRC. Sure, homosexual and heterosexual behaviors have happened since the dawn of time, but sexuality-as-something-one-is only took root in the Victorian era. The labels "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are a product of our culture, and I don't think that a conculture would have the same notions of sexuality that we do.
Depends what you mean, really. Homosexuality in the modern sense of a sexual orientation wasn't invented until some time in the late 19th or early 20th century, and didn't become mainstream until a few decades into the century.

However, the concept of a type of man who mostly had sex and romantic relationships with other men, and that this might be a social and cultural identity, apparently originated (in the anglophone world, at least) as far back as the 1690s.

[Before that, there was some sense of men-who-had-sex-with-men, but 'homosexuality' was not distinguished from 'bisexuality', which in turn was not distinguished from 'promiscuity' - the theory was that those who had sex with men simply had overactive libidos. Apparently as late as the Restoration (when that sort of thing was very fashionable), the caricature of the man who had sex with men was of the rake going through town with a boy on one arm and a girl on the other. It wasn't until the end of the century that a subculture began to arise of men who had sex only with men and not with women, and who began to adopt some feminine behaviours (originally limited to London, apparently). This in turn triggered the sudden societal turn toward homophobia (and misogyny) in the 18th century.]
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