Soooo I heard some interesting banter yesterday on talk radio. The slightly right-wing host (‘slightly’ as in Shag is slightly tall) was discussing the topic of Maryland’s courts hearing testimony on the constitutionality of restricting marriage to a man and a woman. He had a guest come on who has written a book about marriage and the new American caste system (http://www.city-journal.org/printable.php?id=1921). The synopsis is that in the past three decades, women who go to college have followed the traditional “woman meets man, women marries man, they have baby” scenario in life, while women who don’t go to college more often have babies out of wedlock. As you can probably predict, the college-educated women who marry are better off than their single-mother counterparts.
The host kept trying to turn this into an argument against same-sex marriage, but the guest kept resisting it. And I agreed. Same sex unions who raised kids would presumably be better off and give their children better iving conditions just like their traditional counterparts. It’s not the fact that they’re man and woman, it’s the fact of having two adults pooling their resources to raise a child.
Then I wondered: Why do married couples get a tax break anyway? Perhaps in the past once marriage came, there would be a purchase of a house, and therein a need for a tax break. But we get tax breaks on mortgage interest anyway. So…why not do away with the tax break for marriages, create a civil union status for non-standard couples, and then give more tax breaks for those raising children. Because face it: the drain on your pocket when you get married in negligible compared to the drain on your pocket once you reproduce.
So allow same-sex unions, but don’t get any tax benefits to them (or married couples either). Just give the benefits to those raising children (married and civil parents alike). Because in the end, the purpose of life is to propagate the species. Otherwise, why do I have all those nerve endings in the reproduction areas?
My $.02 Weed
Strong opinions…
I have some strong opinions on this topic:
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Matthew P. Barnson
Sharing Matt’s strong opinions
Ditto.
Interesting idea to restructure marriage. The problem I’ve always had with today’s marriage is its existence as equal parts legal entity and romantic entity.
A possible solution to cure the high divorce rate is education. The pre-wedding counseling session is nice, but it isn’t enough. Marriage should be part of a mandatory Home Administration class at the high school level.
Also, the discrimination isn’t “going to be seen” as the same type of discrimination against ethnic groups. It is seen. Check out my Marriage Discrimination Amendment comment at http://barnson.org/node/258 from six months ago.
You mean like a flat tax?
Weed, you mean like eliminating the absolutely asinine U.S. Tax code and replacing it with a flat tax system in which the only tax credit is for child deductions?
I’m on board for that cause.
On board, with caveat…
I’m on board, but with a caveat: limit the tax deduction to one child per parent. This might make for some interesting situations in the case of divorce, but I don’t think we should incentive-ize growing our population to third-world proportions. This would also handle (rather neatly) polygamous/polyamorous relationships. I’m not a fan of polygamy (note my slight change in position from early 2004, where I said I had zero objection to polygamy [see footnote]). However, if it were legal, I’d mainly be interested in limiting the secondary problems of hierarchical polygamy, such as abandoned or abused children, limited education, teen marriage and pregnancy, etc.
As far as gay marriage being recognized as a human rights issue, well, about 60-70% of the nation disagrees with you, Sam. That’s the average margin with which anti-gay-marriage amendments have passed in the US, as far as my back-of-the-envelope WAG suggests. This is why I don’t think that it’s widely viewed in the US in the same light as equal rights for blacks yet. If most people, in fact, do view it as an equal-rights thing, why didn’t they vote that way and prevent anti-gay-marriage amendments from passing in 43 states?
Regardless, the debate sure seems hackneyed to me. Western-style “marriage” in the “have a public ceremony, involve the church” fashion, has only been formalized for about 500 years. Prior to the 1500s, you were considered married if you shacked up together. For commoners, particularly, this was the normal course of things until it was outlawed by the Catholic church in 1563.
As an interesting aside, civil marriage is not recognized in Israel. There are approximately 300,000 Israeli couples residing in the state proper (not its controlled territories) who cannot get married in their home country. The solution to this problem, currently, is that couples who cannot be married under halakha must travel abroad to be married, and then once married, Israel will recognize the legal status of their marriage and all the privileges which attend it.
Very weird, but a useful case of how the religious/civil interdependence has been “resolved” in another country. I wonder if marriage were ceded to be a purely religious ceremony if we could come to any interesting accommodations regarding alternative marriage in the US?
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Matthew P. Barnson
Footnote: I’ve changed my opinion on polygamy during the intervening 3 years. I have met quite a few former polygamists now, enough to believe that hierarchical religious polygamy is, on the whole, evil. Not an absolute evil in the “murdering people” sense, but an insidious evil in the “father who gets drunk and beats his children and wife” sense. It’s messy, and it’s not something most people want to know about, much less be involved in. I think the trading of women like chattel, and the limitation of their education in order to increase the chances that they will agree to be polygamists, should be strongly discouraged by legislation.
First and Second
First, I didn’t know the US was facing a population problem? Not to harp on subjects we’ve explored and carried out to great extents on other nodes, but I’ve never been fully convinced the population growth is a problem. I’ve actually argued both ways on this blog and nobody’s called me on my mercurial flaw. Regardless, one minor benefit of eliminating the tax code would be to get out of legislating social mores. Polygamy may be a big problem in your state, and you want the federal government to solve it using the one and only deduction line in a federal flat tax system?
Second, I understand your point about the general populace failing to see gay-marriage as an equal rights issue. I disagree with you. Referencing Sen. Allard’s example of using language to mask the issue, most people are smart enough to remain closet bigots. They hold hands over their ears and shut their eyes tight so they don’t have to come out and outwardly acknowledge. Unless you’re Mitt Romney.
Recognize that you and I share the same strong opinions and we’re arguing over minor points.
Population is not a problem
I don’t think population (or over-population) is a problem at all. There are pockets where it may be problematic, but as a nation (and as a planet), I don’t think it’s a problem at all.
We pay farmers not to grow corn. So the food supply thing doesn’t hold water. And speaking of water, there’s much more becoming available thanks to the rising of the average temperatures in the world.
It’s not that the world can’t sustain the population, it’s that the population all wants to live in certain areas. The ideas of familiarity and home are strong motivators in where to live.
I agree with Sam about the tax code. Simplify it. If you want polygamists to pay a tax penalty, have Utah do it as a state tax. But I don’t think a extremely small subset of the populace (polygamists) should prevent me from receiving tax help for my three (okay, 2.93, and speaking of tax breaks will he hurry up and get here before the new year!) or your four children. The IRS should not be involved in social change.
My $.02 Weed
Tax penalties, etc.
My point was actually not directed at polygamists, though I pointed them out as my stream-of-consciousness became aware of that potential effect. I was more thinking about welfare queens.
But then again, a welfare queen usually doesn’t pay any tax anyway, so my point is moot and I retract the suggestion.
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Matthew P. Barnson
Want.. to.. respond..
But too busy.. So I’ll ask this.. If you focus the concept of overpopulation as not being a real-estate issue, but rather a resource issue (energy, food, waste, war, sickness) and then factor in that it took the span of human history to get us to 3 billion, and only 60 years to get us 3 billion more (total 6 billion) – with projected numbers in excess of 20 billion in our lifetime – does this affect your argument that the population explosion will not be a big problem before we all reach 70?
Just a thought.
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Incentivizing births, etc…
We’re not, but I’m concerned about it. I think I’ve covered this ground before about the secondary effects of a rising population, chiefly in disasters but also as a management problem. And I’m convinced that a human population which doubles every thirty years is not sustainable, though we obviously haven’t hit the limits yet.
Of course, limiting the population in first-world countries — which tends to happen on its own — will have little to no effect on the third world. Second-world countries (India and China, for example) already have strong incentives in place to prevent a dramatic rise in population (the famous “one child per couple” law for Mandarin in China, and taxation of more than 2 children per couple in India). So I’m ambiguous 🙂
So if I understand you correctly, you’re saying that it isn’t that people see it as an equal-rights issue, but that they do see it that way but don’t want gays to have equal rights? If you are correct, then what I think is ignorance is actually maliciousness.
At the moment, I choose to believe it’s unintentional evil. “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity” (Robert J. Hanlon, though attributed to many other people, too).
Yeah, the other night at a flying club dinner, I found myself in a spirited argument with another club member. Then after a few minutes of arguing over language choice and definitions, this old guy just looked me in the eye and said, “So do you think such-and-so?” and I replied “Yes”. He said, “So do I,” and we went on to a very cordial argument over the Bernoulli principle and the relative utility of flat-bottom vs. semi-symmetrical airfoils 🙂
Flat-bottoms airfoils only provide ease of building. Semi-symmetrical can often provide even more lift more efficiently than a flat-bottom airfoil. But some Luddites just fail to see the obvious!
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Matthew P. Barnson
Thoughts
You think giving a tax break for children is an incentive to have them? Last time I checked the cost of raising a kid was greater than the tax savings you received, so you’re better off financially to not have the child at all. So I don’t see why limiting the tax break to one per parent is necessary.
As for polygamous/polyamorous relationships, aren’t they illegal in 99% of the country? Can you claim to be one when you file your tax returns? The closest I get to that issue is “Big Love” on HBO, so I don’t have any real opinion. I agree with Matt that if the majority of such cases are drunken men beating and abusing women into the lifestyle, then its bad. But I really don’t have any experience, so I defer.
As for homosexual discrimination versus ethnic discrimination, the problem is that most religious groups’ thology didn’t have issues with being ethnic. There’s nothing in the Bible/Koran/etc (that I’ve seen) that says being black is a sin. There IS such a statement about homosexuality, though.
Biologically speaking, homosexuality is a deviancy, because the purpose of the species is to propagate the species, and homosexuals cannot do that. But the same could be said for handicapped people and people with big heads. Meaning my blockhead children, which could not have been born 100 years ago, because their noggins forced a Cesarean section. They’re 100% normal kids (or as normal as they can be sharing my gene pool), but probably would not have survived 100 years ago.
So if we can work around that with technology, we can work around homosexuality’s inherent lack of child production with technology as well. Now that we’ve done that, the question is how long until the social mores follow suit? Homosexuality is becoming quite okay in the media (Brokeback, Queer Eye, etc), and children get a lot of their sense of society from the media. So I think Matt’s generational statement that homosexuality will become more tolerated in a generation or two is relatively true.
The biggest thing I dislike about many conservative arguments is that we need to get back to the way things used to be. The idea that things were better in the past is a strong, romantic, and absolutely false idea. Marriage was a necessity because the world was a wild place, and surviving it took a lot of hard, hard work. If you lived to be 50 or 60, that was great, so you started courting in the early to mid teens, married soon after. It took two adults working non-stop to get a family through (plus the village, of course).
Now, we go down to the store and buy everything we need in one place, for nothing. There’s a single mom who works with me, always complaining she has no money. Today, she came in happy because she know some friends who are selling a used Miata to her. Mind you, she owns a townhouse and a Dodge Durango, and is now buy a Miata for a few thousand dollars. The silliness of buying such a car when you’re a single mom complaining about cash flow aside, the ability of a single mom to being to do that these days is amazing.
We are amass in wealth and long lives. The traditions brought over from hundreds of years ago need scrutiny to see if they’re still necessary and relevant.
However, there’s a difference between survival and becoming a productive member of society. The problem with society, in my humble opinion, is that parents don’t take responsibility for raising their kids. The let the TV do it, or the computer do it, or the school system do it, or the neighborhood do it, but they don’t do it. Where traditional marriage has an edge is in the raising of children, provided the parents work at the task. You have a male role model and a female role model. This isn’t to say that same-sex couples can’t do it, and do it well, but they’re disadvantaged in the fact they don’t have role models of both sexes. They have to bring a third person into the mix to provide that. Traditional marriage just has that slight advantage to it, not that it can’t be overcome by a little hard work. And hard work is what a lot of parents today don’t put forth for their children. Laziness of the parents cause kids to have problems, not the sexual orientation of the parents.
Wow, can I ever ramble from here to there and back again 🙂
My $.02 Weed
Disadvantage of one sex
Weed,
Excellent post. Really enjoying your thoughts.
I’m not sure kids growing up in gay-marriage households have a disadvantage from having a role member of only one sex? When your kids get to elem. school they will start having that “third party” role model.
Probably
Probably not, but I do think traditional marriage parents have an advantage. Maybe it’s from the biological perspective then. And I don’t think it’s a major advantage either, because with the wealth we enjoy now, it’s easily overcome. It might actually be a disadvantage because I think a lot of successful people are forged in a household where they have to work to overcome a disadvantage, be it economic or abusive or what-have-ye.
It’s like saying that height is an advantage in basketball, but then seeing 6’6″ Michael Jordan dominate the game. Not that 6’6″ is short, but it IS short in the NBA.
Or saying left-handers are at a disadvantage playing bass 😉
My $.02 Weed
The way things used to be…
I heard a great statement from a black comic some time ago regarding this topic. It went something like,
“People keep talking about the good old days. Do you mean the good old days of the 1950s? The 1850s? For the black man, there was no ‘good old days’. These ARE the good old days!”
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Matthew P. Barnson
funny you should mention it
Interesting discussion, and all the more so because I’m currently procrastinating from studying for my Tax Law final exam. Here are a few nuggets I learned that should be interesting:
The tax law is as complicated as it is because: a) The people who wrote/amended it were politicians, not accountants, b) lobbying groups (the AARP, for example) are tremendously powerful in getting amendments to the tax code that help them.
Here’s what you must realize: Tax reform will never happen. If the bloated tax code is scrapped and replaced with something simpler, it will be a short-term disaster — people at the IRS will lose their jobs, some taxpayers will be disenfranchised, people will be unhappy with the transition, etc. If there’s one thing politicians avoid, it’s changes that will go poorly in the short term. Unless you have a president like an FDR who is willing to make unpopular decisions that will pay off over decades, tax reform just isn’t going to happen. It’s not politically advantageous.
Nor, do I think, is it feasible. Another reason why the tax code is complicated is because a simple tax code couldn’t achieve all of the different and disparate goals we want it to. I don’t want to lose my deduction for paying interest on my mortgage, for example. Well, for that to be in there, there’s a lot of other stuff in the code that evens it out (more or less). And, any kind of simpler tax solution (like consumption tax or a flat tax) are fundamentally discriminatory to the lower economic classes, UNLESS precautions are put in, which would defeat the purpose of simplifying the tax code in the first place.
I favor, instead, localized improvements to the tax code – close loopholes on corporations that make all their money in the US despite being “based” in Bermuda or wherever, for example. Repeal the alternative minimum tax. Fix the marriage penalty. That sort of thing.
Now, gay people. It IS an equal rights issue, whether 60-70% of the country agrees or not. If I’m allowed to get married and be recognized under the law as such, and the two guys down the street are not, they’re being denied a fundamental right. Plain and simple. Just because 60-70% of the country are morons doesn’t change the truth.
And this has nothing to do with religion. If your religion tells you homosexuality is a sin, fine. Don’t be gay. But gay marriage is a state issue, not a church issue. Churches already have the right to refuse to marry whomever they choose (for instance, you can’t get married in a Catholic Church if you’re divorced, or in an orthodox synagogue if you’re marrying a shiksa, etc.), so if churches don’t want to marry gay couples, that’s entirely within their rights. The gay couple can go elsewhere – there are plenty of churches that do gay marriage now, even without the recognition of the state.
Um, what was the question again?
— Ben