some people seem almost too eager to make it about something other than homosexuality.

Actually, I was complaining that the conservatives were doing that. They're saying "It's about babies" or "It's about promiscuity", when in fact it's about homosexuality.

It's about considering the concept of marriage to be tied up in an essential manner with having and raising children.

But we already don't consider this essential. We aren't horrified when a 65-year-old woman marries. We ARE horrified when a 65-year-old married woman has in-vitro fertilization. If you're going to claim something is essential to our concept of marriage, you have to explain why we tolerate (and indeed applaud) marriages that cannot or will not produce children.

In 1600, English marriage was about property rights and children, no question. In 2003? Not so much.

This actually raises a question for me: Are Australia and Canada still mostly bound by English common law, or did you sit down and do a rewrite when you gained independence?

But we already don't consider this essential.

Pretty much the point of my last paragraph. The horse has long bolted; for all the lip service that may be paid to marriage as a sacred institution, it's ultimately treated as subordinate to societal norms (and for that matter, I think most people who deem it sacred also make such allowances).

If you're going to claim something is essential to our concept of marriage, you have to explain why we tolerate (and indeed applaud) marriages that cannot or will not produce children.

No, you don't, unless it actually attacks the link at a definitional level.The simple existence of instances of marriages that don't lead to kids doesn't do that. Person X being infertile is a contingent happenstance, it doesn't define their marital role. Basically, one may say 'they could have kids if X weren't infertile', and as that happenstance isn't constitutive of the concept of marriage, it doesn't erode said concept. Person X being male is another matter. Saying 'they could have kids if they were different sexes' is a different kind of statement.

There's a certain arbitrariness here, of course, as to what elements are deemed essential to the definition of marriage. But then definitions generally have a certain arbitrariness to them anyway. Which is why I think it doesn't work outside a religious framework, because then you have an ultimate arbiter to say "this is constitutive of the def'n of marriage, but this is not".

I'm not accusing anyone here of this, just trying to explain why I may come across as a bit tetchy on this issue.

Angus, I've revised and deleted too many messages on this subject to criticize you on this point.

Couple other logical fallacies in the "procreation" argument:

Adultery doesn't automatically nullify heterosexual marriages.

Heterosexual couples engage in certain sexual practices that are no more likely to result in pregnancy than anything same-sex couples do.

Plus, see the arguments I mentioned yesterday (heterosexual couples allowed to marry before having children, allowed to remain married after the children are grown).

Are Australia and Canada still mostly bound by English common law, or did you sit down and do a rewrite when you gained independence?

Canada has its own Criminal Code, and Quebec follows the Civil Law tradition of France (though uses the Canadian Criminal Code). Canada has its own written constitution, while the British constitution is unwritten.

while the British constitution is unwritten

This has me thinking it's a part of the oral tradition, that there are bards who travel all over the nation, and are always present for meetings in the parliament to recite the constitution, using all those ancient memory keys like interior rhymes and refrains and couplets. It'd be like Homer performing the Illiad and the Odyssey, but with less plot, and extremely repetitous.

That would be fun. Sort of like singing the Preamble to the Constitution.

Sort of like singing the Preamble to the Constitution.

And Betsy earworms me with Schoolhouse rock. Not that that's the worst earworm in the world.

I may still know all the words from that song.