RE: Marriage

Wow! A four-page post to respond to! I hope I can be a little bit more concise, but I probably won’t be able to fit as much good analysis in even if I write eight pages. We’ll see what happens.

The first serious thing I want to say is that I thought I had established that Jones wasn’t really my friend, but it’s not really a big deal.

About Jones
1) You are correct that incest is bad for all involved. As a devils advocate, I would say that Jones was specifically talking about relationships that don’t produce children hence that business about the presumption of reproduction, but incestuous relationships that don’t produce children are still bad, so I’ll join you in calling it a mistake by Jones.
2) I want to play devil’s advocate again. I once read an article by a major feminist who was also a wife of a prominent Mormon, one of tens, at the least. She said that polygamous relationships were wonderful. She got to have children, but share the work of caring for them. This allowed her to become a concert violinist and a prominent Feminist writer. Of course, I read this was a long time ago, but you can probably still find it on the web. And, I don’t really agree with her about the majority of circumstances.
3) Am I allowed to have nothing to say? I guess…since I don’t. But it would look like I was ignoring the point if I skipped it.

Concerning my being factually misguided - Guilty as charged. Actually, I am guilty of a larger sin. I was aware of the evidence that went against my point, but I withheld it. I also did say that I was being idealistic, and I felt that instances of arranged marriages didn’t entirely apply to the argument, since I was discussing the idea of allowing individuals to choose their own terms with which to get married. I didn’t note this, but I thought I might be able to get away with not mentioning it…mea culpa! I won’t make the intentional mistake again.


Now to your response…
“But I don't agree with you about making marriage just up to the people. I think that though Love is always first, Responsibility is always second.”
Bravo for mentioning Responsibility.

“If you just have marriage completely voluntary, people will get lazy about it. They'll go in, the first time, thinking, "Ok, this is marriage, this is the most super important thing," but when they realize how easy it is (under Ben's idea) to break it off, they'll be strongly tempted to do so.”
I’d like to see some evidence that people are taking marriage seriously under the current system, before I concede that mine would be any different. I think that people already view divorce as “no big deal” – even those couples with young kids.

“And if making marriage easy and stripping it of all obligations and responsibilities is what you're talking about, Ben, then I won't support it.”
I’m not, and I wouldn’t support it either. In my mind my idea would allow people to take marriage more seriously, but this would only apply to the people who are interested in it. I guess some people might get married and have no intentions of up-holding the bargain since they would no longer have to jump through what little hoops currently exist…but the marriages they would get would not be valued by society. If the system were de-legalized, then I think most Priests/Pastors/Religious leaders would set higher standards for marriage than currently exist, and these would be the marriages that would have a good track record that would then gain the respect of society.


Quick note about point C. Did you know that Clinton used his religion as a reason for his positions far more than Bush 43 has? Clinton also referred to God/Jesus more often than Bush has (there was an article about this in the WaPo or some other major newspaper a few days ago. It might have also been on CNN. I'll try to find it, but you're welcome to look as well.) …It’s hard to compare the two, since not many people doubt Bush’s sincerity when he refers to God, but lots of people did when Clinton did the same thing. I also haven’t seen Bush promoting official theology or anything…nor has he made any serious attempts at converting any Muslims. He did make it easier for religious based charities to do their work…but tell me why, actually, is this a bad thing? He didn’t stop secular organizations from doing charity, and he effectively increased the amount of charity work that is done. As a conservative, I’m against government programs that hand out cash and benefits to citizens, on ideological grounds, and I would even if those programs worked perfectly. But that doesn’t mean I want people to starve. I just want charities to do the work…not the government. I can give reasoning for this later. My post is already too long.