A stupid argument
Bookworm on May 16 2009 at 11:52 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
I don’t like Michael Steele’s effort to position gay marriage as an economic concern. I’m feeling mentally muddy right now, and can’t put my finger on it, but I know that’s something wrong with his argument. My first feeling is that, if these same gay people suddenly turned straight and married someone of the opposite sex, they’d also put insurance demands on business. Either way, straight or gay, it’s the same people getting insurance. I’m not sure, though, if that’s the fatal flaw in Steele’s argument.
What I do know is that, with polygamy, there is a huge problem, which is already showing up in England, which recognizes wives from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. There, for every worker, you have to provide insurance or care for 2 or 3 or 5 other non-workers.
The deal with family health care is that we contemplate a societal benefit: he works, she raises children. He contributes economically, she contributes demographically and societally. That’s less true with gay marriage, but not in significant numbers, and one partner in that marriage could still be a stay at home spouse raising children. With polygamy, while it’s true in a private insurance system that one partner is working, the home balance is wrong. Instead of one working and one raising children, you have one working and way too many staying at home. As a society, we have a vested interested in producing happy, healthy children, but this works only if people don’t over-burden the system. There’s got to be proportion between financial producers and wives and progeny. With polygamy, that proportionality vanishes.
Ah! Must run. Meanwhile, will one of you dear people please clarify for me what I’m struggling with here?
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I’ll give it a shot, Book.
Mr. Steele’s argument is a politician’s attempt to give you a baloney sandwich and tell you it’s filet mignon.
The economic argument doesn’t work because it’s purely a secondary argument, and in fact, it’s an unfair one.
“We choose not to support this program for our Italian-Americans, because quite honestly, we can’t afford it,” a politician might say. “It’s difficult enough providing the program for our German- and British-Americans. We’re just not going to add those Italians to the mix.”
And I think on the face of that you should agree with me.
But… “Woah!” you might say, having read that. “How dare you compare being gay with having ancestors from various countries? That’s a specious comparison!”
And that’s exactly my point. Marriage is a *different* issue; and there are values involved. For Michael Steele to try to turn this into an “economic program difficulty issue” actually cheapens marriage and cheapens the marriage argument. Which is why I think my example above makes the point.
And the economic is an unfair argument, if you try to make it purely on the basis of economics. We don’t do things that way in this country. “Sorry, you’re too late to the party, we just don’t have room for you!” is not the way we make decisions here; it’s not the reason we make decisions here. There are far more important and valid reasons why gay marriage is not a supportable idea, than trying to rely solely on an economic argument. You lose this argument if you try that.
For me, this is another blow against Michael Steele, for whom in the beginning I had such high hopes.
Assistant Village Idiot had 2 posts this week (Wed and Thurs) on the topic of gay marriage. One links to an older article by Jane Galt (Megan McCarthy) that is worth a read. They are definitely a few classes aove Steele’s position.
http://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/
Mike, I’m with you on Steele. I wish he had spent some time in the Senate instead of hitting the national scene as a purely political player. Whatever weight his opinions as a conservative black might have had is being lost, and he is coming across as pure opportunist.
Sorry. That Jane Galt ID should have been Megan McCardle.
Bookworm:
Yes, you are on the right track. A big part of the problem has to do with the fact that the gender of the spouse does not affect the cost of the insurance policy.
Plus (as you also began to formulate) the idea of extending employee benefits to family members is based on a model in which the employee’s wife stays home to raise children, and therefore can’t earn her own insurance. This scenario may not apply to same-sex couples as frequently as it does for different-sex couples. Because the children of gay couples are often adopted or from previous relationships, I’d imagine that gay couples are, in general, less likely to have small children who require a stay-at-home parent. I imagine that, in same-sex marriages, both spouses are likely to have jobs and to be able to insure themselves. In alternative parenting situations, there is even the possibility that a third or fourth parental figure is insuring the children, and thus the cost of child-raising is not necessarily absorbed by the gay individuals’ employers.
Mike is correct that it is patently unfair to refuse to provide benefits to a group of people if that group is arbitrarily selected for discrimination. This is, I think, a violation of the right to equal protection, if I correctly read the recent Iowa Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage. And, by the way, if marriage is such a burden to the economy, then why did President Bush request to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to promote (heterosexual) marriage through the Healthy Marriage Initiative, partly on the grounds that more marriages would be good for the economy?
There are a couple more points I’d like to make, though.
1. Even if one employer insures both spouses, that’s one employer who pays for two policies, while the other employer pays for none, so there’s no net increase in burden on the economy if you take a birds’-eye view. it seems that Michael Steele presumes a situation in which a married gay couple shuffles around their insurance policies. He focuses only on the employer who has to pay more, and ignores the employer who has to pay less. One of these employers saves money when the employee gets married. Also, it isn’t clear that the burden would always fall on a small business. I’ve worked for a small non-profit and a large company; the small non-profit directly communicated to me that it didn’t have the money to insure me (let alone a spouse!) whereas, when I wanted to insure myself and my spouse at the large company, all I did was check a box on a form. When one individual works for a large company and their spouse works for a small business, they will probably choose to insure themselves through the large company. That’s how the economics work out best for everyone. So it would probably turn out to be less of a burden for small businesses, and more of a burden for large businesses (but statistically miniscule).
2. If it is bad for people to earn their own healthcare, childcare, and retirement benefits, then does Michael Steele, speaking for the Republican Party, believe that government should pay for these services? Gosh, I thought Republicans were stridently opposed to welfare and have always wanted to push people into the workforce so that the private sector could absorb the cost of their living expenses. (Maybe I missed something.) If large businesses are currently hemorrhaging jobs, and the Republican Party Chairman is trying to come up with gay-panic excuses for small businesses to avoid paying their employees, and the state oughtn’t provide benefits on the principle of limited government, then what’s the next option? Charity? This is what people mean when they say that the Republican Party is out of ideas. That, Bookworm, may be what you were trying to put your finger on
All,
I’ve been out a while (related to personal issues) but what BW is pushing at is less about the gay marriage aspect than the impact of polygamous marriage on the system. The current issue involving gay marriage is actually quite similar to a phenomenon we see in the military – the TDY marriage. This is when two people decide that they’d rather be getting the basic housing allowance and sharing an apartment off post rather than live in the barracks. They get married, not for love (and often not even including sex), but rather for the extra money and freedom. Gay marriage suddenly opens a large number of cans, including one that was the subject of a comedy recently (Chuck and Larry, anyone?). There are reasons for someone to marry their friend – regardless of sex – that can be an incentive.
Take your average college-age male – he can benefit from lowered insurance rates, share a lower (total) insurance bill, apply for (and get!) food stamps and public assistance, and get more/better grants and aid for school if he is married. Say he and a buddy are smart enough to figure this out; they “get hitched” on paper and file for all the benefits. Same for two girls, though their insurance savings would be lower, their public assistance would be higher.
The incrementalization that moves towards polygamy is a greater threat. Not only do you have more people on a “family” insurance program, but you also have a larger number of dependents for tax purposes and other assistance programs scaled by number. Polygamists are already using the gay marriage acts as levers to try and legalize multiple partner marriages. The problem is not that a homosexual union is “worse” than a heterosexual one, but rather that there is a societal/historic line there that becomes much harder to establish once the initial barrier is broken. Where does one stop? What about adult children living with their parents – can they then state they are still a solid “family unit” living together and thus qualify (no matter the ages) for insurance and benefits? Is it discrimination if a mother and daughter (both single) are not allowed to file for a civil union to benefit from insurance and tax benefits while their lesbian neighbors (of similar ages) are able to do so? People game the system – for every honest protester and true believer there are a half-dozen scam artists looking for the next free lunch.
I’m not against civil unions, but I feel (as I do about marriage) that there should be a penalty for severance of the union/marriage. I know that it isn’t fair to those in bad relationships, but I’ve seen too many rush into a bad committment to have much sympathy for them.
Anyhow, I hope that I illustrated what BW was trying to move towards, and I hope all is well.
SSG Dave
“It isn’t about right and wrong; it’s about dominance and submission.”
SSG Dave:
(a) I agree.
(b) It’s so nice to hear from you again. Welcome back.
The problem is not that a homosexual union is “worse” than a heterosexual one, but rather that there is a societal/historic line there that becomes much harder to establish once the initial barrier is broken. Where does one stop?
I think the train robbers don’t care where the train stops, so long as the robbers get their loot and are long gone by the time the train has to go off a cliff or not because they shot the conductor.
Studying mass group psychology, delusion, and hypnosis provides readily available and common sense explanations for why the current activist lobbying for gay marriage is a bad idea for a strong and just America.
Of course, people can’t argue the merits or demerits because this is propaganda we are talking. The side with the greatest propaganda need not worry about how good their arguments are. When you have control of other people’s behaviors and emotions, logic becomes far less important. Why? Because logic requires self-awareness on the part of the person using it or the person having it used on.
No self-awareness, no usability to logic. No logic, no reason. No reason, you get a mob stampede that goes where they are told to go, and inevitably ends up lynching whomever they feel like lynching. Often times this is as dangerous to the rabblerouser as to those he targets. But in the glorified age of the internet, people can rabblerouse and burn churches and create libel/slander, and they have the protection of anonymity.
Anonymity on the internet is not just a case of not having a traceable real life address. Anonymity on the internet means being unable to track one person’s record and history in one spot of the internet, to another spot on the internet. This is classically referred to as a get out of jail free card to criminals back in the day when the Wild West was still Wild and fair from legal jurisdictions that could enforce their laws. Wanted posters and the telegraph beat crime, if only because people in a new town could realize what the criminals looked like that were being chased out of the old town. But on the internet, we don’t have such things, such recognition. We have anonymity, and that is great for terrorists and trolls. They, like the criminals of yester century, rely upon the cluelessness of their victims for their profits.
For example, the offensive profit in attacking Prejean would go way off if those making the comments were required to carry the reputation of such comments with them. This would not deter columnists or editorial writers or bloggers, for they have a recognizable brand usually, but it would mitigate the vast “anonymous herd” of which propaganda can be most extensively exploited with.
Y,
Exactly my point; those seeking to rob the train do not care. Those of us looking to continue and care for the train and the service it provides need to figure out where to put the “do not cross” lines to keep the train running. And where the guards go to stop people from robbing the train (or if the losses are negligible and acceptable as shrinkage). The problem with moving lines is one of tradition. It is easier to keep a certain standard even long after it is less useful if the loss of the standard would create confusion and damage over the short- and mid- term while providing unknown or marginal improvements over the long run.
In my line of work, we still use the 5.56x39mm round for standard shoulder weapons. The 7.62x51mm has better stopping capacity, better range, and the new weapons capable of using this round are only marginally heavier than the current 5.56x39mm versions. Yet we stay with the 5.56 – because the changes would be expensive, require massive retraining, render stockpiles outdated, and – ultimately – provide only a very small return in real effectiveness for these short- and mid- term difficulties.
We’re supposed to be responsible adults; the proponents of many of these measures are acting like 3-year olds. As I have said in the past, the only people to benefit over the long run from this are the divorce lawyers. Note that marriage rates are falling among heterosexual couples because of smaller benefits, tax advantages, and the dangers to credit and income derived from divorce. As a couple I know (now in their sixth year of cohabitation) stated, “If we get in that bad of a fight, there is no reason to give a third of our stuff to someone else. Heck, we’d rather take the disputed stuff out back and burn it first.”
Anyhow, I’m off and running again; more work to do.
SSG Dave
“If you can’t joke about it, it is no longer a movement against the MAN – it has become the MAN’s movement.”
SGT Dave:
(1) The incentives to marriage, as you pointed out, are regardless of sex–and regardless of sexual orientation, I would add.
– I met a man and woman who were romantically involved and married earlier than they otherwise would have because they were going into public service and wanted to be placed together.
– I also met a man and woman who are “just friends” (he’s gay) and they married because her visa was expiring and she wanted to stay in the country.
Opposite-sex marriage has historically been used in this emotionally cavalier but rationally calculated fashion, and yet we don’t deny people the right to enter an opposite-sex marriage. I don’t see how same-sex marriage would exacerbate the problem. Are freshman roommates “Chuck and Larry” really more likely than “Chuck and Mary”? If a straight guy is willing to marry another guy just to get a better dorm room or student loan, wouldn’t he be all the more willing to marry a girl? Why would it occur to him to marry a guy, if it hasn’t already occurred to him to marry a girl?
(2) I don’t agree that every broken barrier is automatically a slippery slope. The slipperiness of the slope depends on how much thought is being channeled into it. If a law is changed arbitrarily, then, yes, it’s a slippery slope, because tomorrow it could arbitrarily be changed to something else. But if there’s a real reason why the law was established precisely as it was, there’s less chance that it’s going to slide anywhere.
Perhaps the most effective way to avoid a slippery slope is to avoid raising the question altogether, since, if we don’t question, we won’t have to do any thinking to prevent ourselves from slipping and sliding. But I hardly think that’s the most intellectually honest way. Marriage has always been under perpetual re-definition, for thousands of years; pretending that questions about marriage don’t exist is not the ideal way to keep the institution stable, in my opinion.
(3) Let me tell you a true story. I dated someone for two years and my thrilled parents threw us a big wedding and put a house into the bargain. Three days later, my spouse confessed that he’d been lying to me for months, and then he told me something, the details of which would make your hair stand on end. The first six months of the marriage were excruciatingly difficult. My life felt like a never-ending episode of Law and Order SVU. I fought tooth and nail to save the marriage–indeed, to save our very lives, while maintaining our privacy and dignity–but salvaging it was not within my control. My husband has been institutionalized for the last year and a half.
(a) This marriage cost me, and my family, tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars. I didn’t “rush into a bad commitment”. We were taken for a ride and cleaned out by a calculating criminal.
(b) While married, I suffered constant fear and anxiety, compounded by the shame of having entered a bad marriage.
(c) I continue to help support my husband out of my own paycheck, now that he is no longer in the workforce, because I don’t wish to rely on the state to clean up his mess.
(d) I am paying the entire cost of the divorce, which will be between five and ten thousand dollars, which isn’t exactly “extra money” for me these days.
(e) I suffer the daily shame of being someone who is going through a divorce.
(f) IF YOU STILL THINK I NEED TO BE PENALIZED, why don’t you come over here and hit me with your shoulder weapon, because that’s about the only penalty left that hasn’t yet been thrust upon me.
In case you missed the point: Some people divorce because they are abuse victims and they need to be encouraged to divorce. I had to enter therapy to be fully persuaded that ending the marriage was the right thing.
You’re damn right that penalizing divorce “isn’t fair to those in bad relationships.” I am done with this discussion. Nothing personal against you, just protecting what little well-being and inner peace I have remaining.
Before “irreconciliable differences” replaced actual and spelled-out reasons for ending a marriage, one side was held to be the responsible party for the divorce and there was an explicit list of conditions that would allow a spouse to petition for dissolution: adultery, cruelty, refusal to engage in marital intercourse, etc.
Perhaps by doing away with no-fault marriage and restoring some sense of import to the decision to divorce, we could serve both the needs of people like TBL who have every good reason to leave a marriage, and those of people like the Bickersons, who don’t need to be tempted during a rough patch to abandon their union and could use a strong incentive to work together to save their marriage.
TBL,
Sorry I hit a nerve; I have had friends in similar situations. The continuing refrain from many of them was “I didn’t think ahead” or “I should have slowed down” regarding the choice to marry. I agree that the “Chuck and Mary” is just as damaging as the “Chuck and Larry” situation in terms of marriage. My preference to put penalties is against these types of relationships – those that are purely for cynical reasons instead of even pretending to be a joining of two lives. When a marriage fails despite honest effort it is a tragedy – mine was on the rocks for the past three and a half years – and it is a good thing when it survives. I’m not advocating whistling and plugging ears. I’m advocating active participation of concerned people in the preservation of marriage as a contract and a spiritual bond.
As to details that would curl my hair; I appreciate that they would be quite horrific. I’ve been through a bit, though, between Iraq, the Balkans, and Central America in my military career. I am truly saddened to hear that your marriage was destroyed by deception and the hostile acts of others.
Strangely enough, your troubles and your actions (noble, honorable, and committted) are the reason why I get angry about the marriages of convenience – Chuck and Larry/Mary, your gay friend, or the green-card seekers.
As to why Chuck wouldn’t search for a Mary, here’s the easy part. If there is no oversight (i.e. Chuck and Larry are both hetero), then both are free to pick up girls, throw parties, and generally act like college-age boys. Same goes for two girls; it is easier to live with someone like you, especially for convenience. A girl in the house puts a crimp on the beer bashes, pizza boxes, and the rent-a-stripper service for halftime of the big game.
I do disagree with the statement that eliminating a line causes a slippery slope; I work as an analyst and diagonse systems in dynamic situations (yep, that’s really obtuse of me, but pretty much nails it). Any time you change a limit or variable, the situation will flex until it hits a reasonably stable dynamic – and it is hard to predict where that dynamic will be. If a marriage is an agreement between two parties (regardless of sex) is it discriminatory to state that a party (consisting of a married couple) cannot join with another party (a single person or another couple)? Sex doesn’t count; cohabitation may or may not count; joint property is divided by pre-nup; etc. You hit the nail on the head when you stated “If a law is changed arbitrarily, then, yes, it’s a slippery slope, because tomorrow it could arbitrarily be changed to something else. ” The law is currently being interpreted arbitrarily – and that is not likely to change with the current administration and activist judges. I’m worried about where the arbitrary changes are going.
I’m not one to avoid hard questions – it is part and parcel of my job and my basic mental process. I’ve looked, pondered, and weighed the options in consult with my friends, my best friend (my wife), and with collegues of all stripes. I’m on board with civil unions based on long-term cohabitation, religious marriages recognized as civil unions by the state, and limitations of civil union partnership rights to an exclusive single pair of persons and their legal dependents. I just don’t think that is where the activists will stop – and I fear what it will do to my children and their children if the next stability point of this dynamic is damaging to society in general.
I hope this wasn’t as rambling as I fear it is.
Be well, and good luck with the resolution of your situation – you have my prayers and my admiration for your adult behavior in the worst of circumstance.
SSG Dave
“It isn’t that it is complex; it is that “simple” doesn’t mean EASY.”
(2) I don’t agree that every broken barrier is automatically a slippery slope.
There are fundamental fail safes built in to allow robust and dynamic systems certain interplays and fluctuations. Every once in awhile, however, the system breaks down, i.e. the Civil War, because of either too much change or too much fear of change. And it does not matter if the change is better or worse, for when the system breaks down, the trust in the Constitution breaks down as well. And change thus, begets more change, far beyond the original intentions of the reformers, the radical Republicans, or those that believed a war would be good for the South and crippling to the North.
These barriers are being broken to destroy the fail safes and make them fail. These barriers are being mitigated and undermined to make the system fail.
There is no doubt on this score. There is no solid argument otherwise. The proof is insurmountable.
and yet we don’t deny people the right to enter an opposite-sex marriage.
There are no “rights” here. There is no right to same sex or opposite sex marriage. What the law provides and what the government allows, it can also deny. What the Constitution allows and what the Constitution demands as due for human dignity and human rights, however, are an entirely different thing.
This Orwellian skewing of the definitions of rights, duties, and good government will inevitably destroy the very system that secures any rights or privileges in America. The all cannot stand with this kind of acidic corrosiveness of the foundation. No foundation, no building. No building, the ones at the top stories fall and crater.
You’re damn right that penalizing divorce “isn’t fair to those in bad relationships.”
While I don’t have the service record of our dear Staff Sergeant here, Dave, I do believe I have quite a bit of experience and exposure to the darker sides of human nature. In fact, I seek it out for study and contemplation. As such, I feel reliably comfortable in saying that it wasn’t the presence or absence of a penalty for divorce that caused the most harm. It was the fact that people have problems voluntarily taking advantages of the resources available to them to get out of abusive relationships or situations, the fact that they are not trained nor do they train themselves or their children or their friends to inflict fatal harm upon those who are inflicting harm upon them.
These, none of these, are affected in the least by “penalties”. For example, it does not truly matter in self-defense if the penalty for killing is to be prosecuted for murder. All that matters, all that should matter, is whether your life is in danger. You can worry about the legalities later. And if that is true for the basic fabric of society, which is protected by laws against murder and which might and probably has in the past, impinged and penalized true self-defense, who are the wannabe dirvorcees going to claim that their right to a trouble free divorce should be guaranteed by law? My right to life and the pursuit of happiness isn’t guaranteed by law, if I run afoul of the Democrat party or fall into a legal crack or the desk of an ambitious prosecutor. The penalties always exist because they should exist. Should I exercise lethal force without legal justification, it does not matter if I ‘thought’ my life was in danger, if I could have substantial evidence to back it up, I will pay the legal price. Of course because this issue is so important and contentious, the laws have been created in mind to oversee the “relative threat” estimation concerning self-defense, defense of loved ones/family, and defense of property vs murder, manslaughter, passion crimes, etc.
The US military has been harassed and set up with fake charges of atrocities for simply utilizing lethal force as they have been trained to do, and as they should do against the foreign enemies of the United States. They do not have this “immunity” to penalties concerning their actions. But divorces should? Marriages are not less important than the common defense of the realm, if only because the children are the future and it doesn’t really matter if that future is secured by stable and healthy families or secure and strong military might.
People are blinded by their personal prejudices not because the human state of civilization currently has not yet acquired a method of inculcating a proper cosmopolitan education and perspective on the members of civilization. Certainly that plays a part, but people are blind because they choose to be blind, because their natures demand that they be blind, and humans are often as helpless against our nature as animals are.
1. Even if one employer insures both spouses, that’s one employer who pays for two policies, while the other employer pays for none, so there’s no net increase in burden on the economy if you take a birds’-eye view.
This is like saying there is no net burden on the economy by putting everybody’s money into social security, since it is one policy that pays for all instead of numerous companies paying for the same number of beneficiaries.
There’s a certain lack of expertise and knowledge concerning brownian motion and group psychology lacking in our public and mass media education system when people are unable to comprehend or even recognize these basic, basic points of departures.
Some people divorce because they are abuse victims and they need to be encouraged to divorce.
Society does not care about individual preferences. That is not what it is for. That it is not what it does. You can’t change it. No government, no individual, can change the basic human need for hierarchy and all the authority and compromises that entails. Individual responsibility is for individual preferences. Government is for individual preferences. Society and civilization? Nope. Those are the ultimate examples of “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one”. It is not justice, because the human condition is not just.
I don’t care whether people need to be encouraged to divorce or not. Their lives are their responsibilities, society and government are only required to provide an adequate environment for individuals to exercise their will and to pursue their goals in life free of undue influence. However, human nature is such that people require punishments and rewards to behave appropriately. This is the part where society gets to sacrifice scapegoats for a greater good. This isn’t because I say so, and it isn’t because I like the way it works, it Just Is. This is how we are, irrespective of religion, skin color, or national ethnicity.
Btw, just because there is no legal penalty for divorce does not mean there are no penalties. And the vice a versa is also true. Just because society engenders a punishment for certain behaviors relating to divorce, it does not mean it will punish everyone equally or even certainly. This is why society is not just, why it cannot be a tool of justice. Cause it is not certain, it wholly depends on how the mass mobs move and think, and it is not restricted to any fundamental set of principles except the principle of self-survival.
People will be hurt regardless of what laws there are concerning divorce. This is unavoidable. You can only debate which set of laws causes less harm to the individual and the innocent, the most overall good to society, and with the most sustainable lifespan. The absolute demand that society must cater to individual preferences 100%, 365 days a year? That’s a product of recent innovations in mass delusion and Leftst psychological manipulation. It’s not designed to work. It’s designed to use individual fears, insecurities, and desires as a method to controlling them as puppets. That is also irrefutable, especially in this day and age.
Marriage has always been under perpetual re-definition, for thousands of years; pretending that questions about marriage don’t exist is not the ideal way to keep the institution stable, in my opinion.
There’s a lot of pretense going on, yes, but none of it concerns pretending that questions about marriage do not exist. Except in so far as people use marriage to mean “my own individual preferences and prejudices”.
As you have already seen here, if you are giving notice, people like Charles do not favor keeping marriage in a state of stasis. Changes to marriage laws are considered and some are even considered progressively positive in terms of its impact on society or individuals.
If you think a primary or important problem that exists in America is that people want to keep marriage in a bubble, you are ignoring key aspects of metaphysical reality.