I used to waffle on the issue of gay marriage. But then I stopped caring because I realized it’s a marginal and trivial issue. Only two or three percent of the population are gay, and only some of those people will actually want to get married. Gays can’t have kids anyway, and gays also tend to be fairly wealthy, so they don’t need the financial benefits of marriage that much, and we have no reason to offer them those benefits. By contrast, the breakdown of traditional marriage among heterosexuals actually matters to huge numbers of people.
Lots of ‘moral’ issues are quite trivial. Indeed, some causes would be downright harmful if they weren’t so unserious. Fair-trade coffee, for example, probably does more harm than good to target countries because of the market-distorting effects. The daftest moral fad I can think of at present is the locally-grown food movement. The inefficiencies that would be involved in realizing such an ideal on a large scale would be staggering.
A somewhat positive thing that can be said about the last two fads in particular is that people are more isolated from one another than they used to be, and certainly our relationships with the various far-flung people we’re economically bound up with are far more tenuous. Our moral sensibilities are formed (and were formed, evolutionarily speaking) on much smaller scales. Few of us really know how to react to our change in circumstances. People understandably try to make things more personal even when it doesn’t really help anyone.
On the other hand, all of these are popular moral topics precisely because they preserve our isolation. Few people are directed in any very direct or obvious way by a decision to buy fair-trade or locally-grown food. Neither will many people affected by the legalization of gay marriage, but we’d rather let them have their way than coming into conflict with them, few as they are. Taking a supportive stance on these issues is a lot easier than, say, policing your children’s behaviour or criticizing your neighbours. So trivial moral issues also play a useful role in allowing us to feel like we’re doing important things without having to actually step on anyone’s toes.
A supportive stance on any of these topics is also a status marker: it sets you apart from the traditionalists, or the suburbanites, or Wal-Mart shoppers, or whatever. This is a positively bad thing — and not only because it’s needlessly divisive. The reason is that we give ourselves a sort of moral quota for good behaviour. Accordingly, studies have shown that when people buy fair-trade goods, they allow themselves to get away with worse behaviour in other areas, because they feel they’ve satisfied their quotas for the day.
Avoiding morally trivial issues is thus important to our moral health. When people get self-righteous about these or similar matters, you should scold them for their frivolity.
Cross-posted at Johann Happolati.
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The local food movement is trivial? It’s the only way to get healthy, nutritious food in the US (other than growing and raising your own).
I guess you prefer to eat the pink sludge that industrial food gives you. The amount of damage done by eating industrial food is not trivial. It is literally making millions of Americans lazy, fat, and sick.
GMO corn is causing high spontaneous abortion rates (I’ve seen 45-75% vs baseline of 2-5%) in livestock herds. You can keep eating the poison pushed by the industrial agricultural system. Local farms are already having trouble meeting demands in my area due to the massive shift in eating habits.
The one thing the EU has done right is ban and put restriction on GMO use in Europe. Of course agrogiants (Monsanto, Aventis) are using the WTO to sue for allowing GMO into Europe.
Yeah, the percentage of gays who want to get married probably accounts for 1% of the population, tops. The problem is that the percentage of people who would have to live in a society vulgarized not only by the toleration but the positive endorsement and subsidization of sodomy is 100%.
Laws are, in a very real sense, an expression of the moral consensus of society. And a society which confesses belief in gay “marriage,” an ontological oxymoron if ever there was one, is deranged to an extent which is utterly without historical parallel. Even legendary degenerates like Nero and Elegabalus did not presume to elevate their flings to the status of a legal institution.
Otherwise, though, you won’t get any argument from me about the totally meritless pseudo-sacraments the left insists we all receive like good little anti-Christians.
“Sodomy has been decriminalized in the United States, and America lagged behind most of Europe in this significant achievement. It seems that if gay advocates today were truly concerned about real oppression, they’d be concentrating their efforts on political asylum programs for homos in Muslim countries, where accused homosexuals are still routinely executed or forced, foolishly, to submit to testosterone injections.” – Jack Donovan, Androphilia
“Even legendary degenerates like Nero and Elegabalus did not presume to elevate their flings to the status of a legal institution.”
They do say, however, that Caligula married his horse. (He actually didn’t, but the truth is almost as humorous: He appointed his horse to the Roman Senate.)
I’m curious as to what sort of information you have on Fair Trade coffee.
It irritates me for the simple fact that the name is a Tautology – by definition, any trade that doesn’t involve guns is fair, according to both parties.
Yes the gays that do marry can still adopt and artificially inseminate themselves to have children. And there are gays raising children.
@ Nullpointer:
It’s true that healthy food can sometimes be hard to find, especially in the US. Obviously if the only way to buy healthy food is to buy locally-grown food, then it makes sense to do that. But this is certainly not always the case, and certainly not the only ‘reason’ offered by locally-grown advocates.
On the whole industrial agriculture is one the bases of modern life and wealth. Problems are best handled by the market, or, failing that, by regulation.
@ Proph:
In Canada, where gay marriage has existed for almost ten years (with some regional variation), there are about 8,000 gay marriages (= 16,000 gay spouses) and 26,000,000 adults. That works out to one in 1625 adults, or .06%.
And yes, one can only go so far with the distinction between legality and morality.
@ Aurini:
A paper by Mathias Risse and Malgorzata Kurjanska (“Fairness in trade II: export subsidies and the Fair Trade movement”) discusses fair trade and market distortion from a moral perspective (and I’m sure there’s lot’s more on the topic). PDF here: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/mrisse/Papers/Papers%20-%20Philosophy/FairnessInTrade%20II-SubsidiesFairTradeMovement.pdf
if you care about two guys poking one another in the butt, you have too much free time on your hand.
if we want to protect marriage, we’d outlaw divorce. if we wanted to protect the children, we’d outlaw abortion.
if we cared about drugs and protecting people alcohol and cigarettes wouldn’t be legal. hell, neither would f’ing fast food.
the sanctity of marriage line is every bit as false as the other utterly false and hypocritical reasons put forth as justification for discrimination.
Of course there are Roman emperors who claimed to have “married” men. But they never formally legalized gay “marriage.” Their arrangements were exceptions to the rule — and they were *kept* exceptions.
Which means our society is now officially more deranged than the Roman Empire at its worst!
What’s wrong with discriminating against that which deserves inferior treatment?
*Of course* we ought to outlaw divorce and abortion. Even from a consequentialist standpoint, they’ve been utter disasters for society. Our inability to move in the right direction is not reason to continue moving in the wrong one.
What if we, one day, find out out that homosexuality is a disease, and we found the cure? Would it be moral to treat the gays, even if they don’t want to be cured, in order to prevent any person from future generations from getting infected with a parasite inducing homosexual attraction?
This is a moral dilemma we may soon have to face; leading researchers (the politically-incorrect kind – you know, the ones that are also into race and IQ and stuff, like Greg Cochran & Henry Harpending) think that there is a high probability of homosexuality being a disease. In any case, the case for it being genetic in nature is flimsy at best, as it is a maladaptive trait and hence would have been wiped out of the gene pool a long time ago by natural selection.
http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/depths-of-madness/
I have no problems with gay men, there is less competition this way. Lesbians that are not bisexual, those I have issues with. Still, normally I would agree with gay marriage, but… I just can’t. Why? Because they will end up just like Blacks: a sainted minority that we from the normal majority have to “respect” and accommodate.
Gay marriage cannot be accepted in any way, marriage is based on heterosexuality. However homosexuality is not a simple problem. It is so dangerous. Homosexuals are abusing under age children and deform their sexuality, they deform their future sex life as well. Both gays and lesbians are doing this.
http://spiritofnature99.blogspot.com/
The practical impact is higher than the 2-3% due to lesbians-by-choice (like Cynthia Nixon admitted before the LGBT mafia made her shut up). Lesbian marriage will be more than 2-3% of the population as it becomes more legitimized, because women have greater sexual/relational flexibility than men do.
The post started off great and could have gone the distance with more thought and research. Most of the media has been writing along these lines today in reference to the Santorum voters making a big mistake in thinking that we want politicians to agonize about regulating such issues or not.
Bad example in mentioning locally grown food, which is simply an idea that counteracts the lie that preservatives are not unhealthy. No, the economies of scale (including advertising power) from national food production do not make it worthwhile for anyone to feed themselves preservatives or hydrogenated oils.
Back to Santorum: I predict a brokered convention where he will have about 900 delegates, Romney will have 800, Paul will have 500 and Gingrich will have 300.
Romney will then put Rand Paul (Ron’s son) on his ticket and take the nomination and the election in November. Their platform will be one where social trivialities will not be the focus and they will, therefore, win independents, etc.
@ Eugenick:
Thanks for the interesting link. If homosexuality is a disease, then it’s a bit like deafness. Obviously we should try to cure it in children etc if possible, but people who actually struggle with it tend to form an identity around it. I don’t think we treat people against their will, though.
@ Brendan:
I agree about women’s sexual flexibility. Fortunately that also means any growth in lesbianism could be rolled back relatively easily.
@ Anonymous:
Thanks for the feedback, and it’s a good point about what politicians should be worrying about. (I’m not an American, so I tend to abstract away from politics a bit.)
Trivial issues like gay “marriage” and media coverage of murders and disapearences and such is simply a msm attempt to distract the public from serious issues and hide the fact that the public in the West is increasingly powerless in the face of hostle elites. Increasingly the West consists of Plutocratic and Cleptocractic Oligarchies disguised for propaganda and legitimacy reasons as “democracies”.
Homosexuality is a disease in the sense that the homosexual nature is self-annihilating. Homosexuality also suggest that the evolutionary process includes a self-destruct mechanism that is rooted in the addiction to self-sexualizing, a self-evidently self-annihilating addiction.
Exalting self-annihilation is no trivial matter. Exalting self-sexualization via the homosexual proxy is no trivial matter. Attempting to attach a self-annihilating “union” with a spiritually life-affirming institution is no trivial matter. It’s a deadly matter.
@ thoraddy: As you can see from my last paragraph, I agree that indulging triviality is not itself a triviality.
Chris Hedges, a man slightly to the left of Che Guevara, has written about Mainline Protestantism’s “boutique causes”.
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