I think hijacking the word to mean other things muddies and confuses things for society, when there's actually an opportunity to use a new word to mean marriage between a same sex couple.

The fact that roughly 50% of marriages end in divorce (at least in the U.S.) makes whether or not marriages create said optimum situation the decision of a rounding error, more or less.

To be fair, I guess I can't say for sure what I think about whether marriage is important to kids until I have some of my own.

Perhaps messing with tradition is risky, as was trying to fly. But I'm ok with that.

PS: A lot of people stay married to the end because one spouse kills the other is that a benefit?

Yes this means I consider same sex families and single parent families "sub optimal". No, I would not suggest for a second that having a child requires "optimal" conditions.

I grew up in basically a single parent family. There are a lot of things I know I would have been able to benefit from (that I've learned and am learning along the way) had this not been the case.

We need to stop pretending that every different way of raising a child somehow produces the same results. At the same time we need to realize nobody is able to provide the optimal conditions all of the time.

Note that seventeen comments after you make this case, when I concede some obscure point about the value of men or women in parenting, I'm just going to come back at you and say that this is really just evidence that we should ban divorce, like Ireland once did. What it has to do with gay marriage, I don't know.

However much we lack strong heterosexual families, we're more awash in mediocre heterosexual families, and far more disturbed by unplanned single-parent families. You will have a hard time saying that a child will do better in a loving two-parent gay family than in the median family in the US.

Is it possible that children will, for a variety of reasons, some of then intrinsic and some of them extrinsic (such as societal pressure against homosexual parents --- the same arguments that might be marshalled against racially diverse couples), do marginally better in the Ozzie and Harriet family of the '50s than in the Ozzie and Ozzie family of the '020s. I concede the last point you just made, up front. But that argument doesn't preclude my argument, which is that availability of loving gay couples to raise wanted children will be a net benefit for society and for children.

http://www.civitas.org.uk/hwu/fathers.php

You will have a hard time saying that a child will do better in a loving two-parent gay family than in the median family in the US.

Which is why I'm specifically not saying that. In fact, this is what I said: No, I would not suggest for a second that having a child requires "optimal" conditions.

* single parent homes

* poor single parent homes

* poor and middle-class single parent homes where the single parent works full-time and has less influence over their children

* poor single parents homes in cultures that overtly disrespect fatherhood and implicitly promote weak family structures

I grant you immediately that it's not optimal to be raised in single-parent households --- with the obvious caveat that you have to control for income, culture, setting, and atypically excellent parents that pull it off anyways.

It looks like you & I agree more than we disagree.

And he kicks ass: he's smart (probably smarter than me), well-liked, well-adjusted, confident and happy.

Seriously, at six he already rocks. I honestly think he's doing better than if me and his mom were together.

Seriously? You don't see any value in having both a male parent and a female parent?

Is there some huge man-woman socio-cultural hoo-hah I'm missing about what our relationship imparts on our children that would be dramatically different if I was replaced with an equally loving woman? Perhaps the pancakes would become crepes (though I'm good at that too). The whole of western civilization shudders.

There might be a real argument you have to make, axod, but you have to actually make it. Innuendo doesn't cut it.

Look into how badly boys do at school when there teachers are female - or how badly girls do when their teachers are men. The evidence is that neither do well in those circumstances.

Women and men are very very very different thank goodness. If you're missing out on either of them, you're missing out on a complete other world.

Just from my own anecdotal evidence, my ability to learn from a teacher was based far more on their knowledge and passion than their genitalia.

I'm sorry but if you believe that you're blind, or really haven't lived.

Your statement sums up what is wrong with the political correctness/equality mob. Men and women are not equal. They will never be. Thank goodness. Celebrate the differences. Embrace them. Don't just blindly pretend they don't exist.

http://www.menteach.org/news/its_not_who_but_how_boys_are_ta...

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/boys-taught-men-do-better-stu...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/sep/30/primaryschoo...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/5294854.stm

"A study of 25,000 pupils by Stanford University economist Thomas Dee found children did 4% better in tests when their teachers were of the same sex"

"In general, girls learned more with female teachers and boys with male teachers"

"A large fraction of boys' dramatic underperformance in reading is linked to the fact that their reading teachers are overwhelmingly female," Dee concludes.

There are a large number of similar studies with similar results.

My experience, including my kids experience of various teachers, is that they are not.

Of course it's a "controversial" study - it highlights differences between the sexes. Which isn't "cool" in this politically correct age.

The claim you're citing is surprising not only because it defies conventional wisdom (which it does), but also implies that whole of the American educational system is built on an easily-corrected inefficiency. Why can't you marshall better evidence for your extraordinary claim? Why don't you have a better source than an untenured Swarthmore professor writing in a journal with dubious peer review?

one needs a legal binding contract for these things? i mean seriously. this is adult stuff, if "the law" is the only thing preventing you from sleeping around, then you aren't mature enough to be in the kind of relationship that requires it.

and as far as kids are concerned. i highly doubt a legally binding marriage of two people who don't want to be together being forced into raising a kid would create an optimum situation. if they want to be together, they will be. and if they don't, moving on is far healthier.

Right. And the majority of grown adults are not.

Also I think it's a good idea to make breaking up a family hard.

Are you blind? You haven't noticed that it's ghetto shit-hole everywhere in modern world that stable two parent families aren't the norm? Marriage in its traditional form is an institution arrived at through a Darwinian process of cultural selection. It has been proven by time to be the best way to further a society. Messing with it is extremely dangerous.

Cultural conservatism is much like environmentalism. You just don't want to go blindly messing around with complex natural systems. The consequences are usually bad.

For starters, monogamy in highly socially stratified societies is a very rare social phenomenon. You might want to check out "The Moral Animal" for some discussion of this. The line I remember: "socially stratified monogamous cultures are the true freaks of nature" (paraphrasing here, but I'm close).

However, they do tend to be the norm among highly prosperous and free societies, which takes us to your second point...

Haven't you noticed the strong correlation between wealth and freedom and gay rights? Look who is for gay marriage and who is against it. Genentech, Google, and Apple were were very high profile donors against Prop 8. This isn't just a San Francisco leftist coalition - we're talking the biggest, heaviest hitters in the most innovative fields in America.

I agree with you that Scandanavian countries are lauded a bit too much by the left... but let's compare these economies (where gay rights are supported strongly) with the cultural and economic environment in regions where they are not... oh, say, Afghanistan?

Even in the US, the regions that support gay marriage tend to be attracting the best companies with their top notch workforce. They companies come to them, not the other way around. The regions that don't are still wondering what low skilled factory they're going to be able to attract to replace the textile mill that closed in the seventies.

Seems to me like this one is pretty obvious.

The point is, being wealthy and free does not give one a more "correct" opinion than one who is not.

And I don't see a strong correlation between "wealth and freedom and gay rights". I see a strong correlation between gay rights and political image.

The upper classes carry themselves on with bourgeois family traditions whatever the legal environment. They don't personally see the disastrous consequences of family breakdown because their families remain whole, so they don't give a second thought to liberalizing laws. In poorer areas, the breakdown of family values is a real pressing issue. People see the social catastrophe around them and recognize the further threats.

Wealthier areas are more socially liberal because it's personally irrelevant to them. The areas are wealthy usually because of strongly bourgeois family traditions. Poorer areas are usually more socially fragile.

Now, that doesn't mean you're wrong about the social catastrophe that the failure of marriage brings in poor areas - just because wealthy episcopalians get divorced all the time doesn't mean they experience financial disaster when they do. They're well off enough that they can just split into two (or three or four) different households and still have enough to pay the mortgage, fix the car, buy clothes, and take nice vacations.

But I will definitely disagree that they are wealthy because of strongly bourgeois family traditions. Man, that's the last phrase I would use to describe these people.

For the record, I was in the 10% of the class that lived across town, and didn't come from a family with that kind of money - though I would certainly not describe myself as deprived or from a social class that feared financial catastrophe.

By the way - I'm genuinely interested in hearing why you think that gay marriage would be a threat to marriage in poorer areas. I do agree with you that families are important and should be protected - but why from gays? That one doesn't really make sense to me. It seems like poverty, layoffs, long shifts, poor schools, and so forth threaten families. Adultery and constant conflict (I'm not talking about the truly criminal violence, just the way people can be constantly fighting) can also obviously wreck a marriage - though I think that's often a symptom of the things I listed above.

Gays getting married? Seems like the last thing I'd worry about. This is why the anti prop-8 crowd is so frustrated to see the Catholic, Mormon, and Evangelical churches so actively working to ban gay marriage. It's like: people are hurting, and this is where you put your resources?

1. You seem to have settled on a root cause ghetto shit-holes being the lack of social and cultural bonding rituals between one member of each gender. Generally, I look at cultures like that and see things like oppressive governments, lack of stable, productive economies, and the absence of anything resembling education causing strife? I haven't seen anything to suggest that oppression comes from the lack of observing ritualistic pair-bonds. Perhaps you have data to prove me wrong?

2. Marriage is not a natural system. Nor is culture, except for the tendency for humans to form them. That they manifest at all seems to be a product of human nature; how they manifest seems much more based on environment and random variation. Otherwise, our culture would be indistinguishable from that of everyone elses. Or are you suggesting that we are still in the process of cultural selection, and ours will inevitably prevail?

Looking back it's hard to extrapolate the value of "traditional family values" because we have a lower crime rate, better educated population, and a better economy now than we did back with they where more common.

No, it's been changing fairly rapidly for less than 100 years, and usually with serious unforeseen consequences.

> Look at marriage in nortic countries

I'm tired of hearing about nordic countries. First, they aren't nearly as great as the pom-pom crowd thinks. If you do an apples to apples comparison of middle class whites in northern US states to nordic countries, they're really not so fantastic. And there is plenty of hand-wringing about social degradation in Sweden. They're, what, one generation in to their shift away from more conservative arrangements? Give it time and you'll see problems.

Woman's rights have been on the rise for much longer than 100 years. (I hear they can vote, own property, and even work in the theater.)

I used to be a crime to have sex outside of marriage but that's been on the decline for a long time.

There used to be limits on who could marrie based on class and or race lines. (Duke's don't get hitched with just anyone you know.)

Dowery's used to be common but now it's mostly just the wives family paying for more of the wedding. (This trend has been going on for a while.)

Divorce was introduced by one of the Henry's (he killed most of his other wives but their was one he liked.)

I could go on but most of these trends are a lot older than 100 years. One of the few things that does not really seem to change is infidelity. Genetic tests have shown that married women tend to have about ~20% of their kids from someone other than their husband. This does not seem to have changed much over time.

PS: Nordic marriage traditions go all the way back to the vikings, but they don't look much like "Christian" family values.

the law should simply allow simplification of contract terms should they be required (custody, assets, etc).

the idea that "marriage" is a set legal method that is rigid and unyielding to change is retarded. the concept is so ridiculously outmoded. society and culture have moved on, it's time for "marriage" to get with the program