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Uh oh, they found out the real marriage plan…

Holly

From The News & Observer:

Two well-known conservative Christian commentators who spoke at the rally described a breakdown of society should gay couples be allowed to marry[…] David Gibbs III, a lawyer who in 2005 fought to keep brain-damaged Terri Schiavo on life support, told rally participants gay marriage would “open the door to unusual marriage in North Carolina.”

“Why not polygamy, or three or four spouses?” Gibbs asked. ”Maybe people will want to marry their pets or robots.”

They know! Our cover is blown! Abandon OPERATION GAYSPOUSEBOT 6000! Back to the Basestar!

(minor BSG Season 1 spoilers after the jump)


Awwwwwhhhhh. Doesn’t this love deserve marriage too? Cyborg children need society’s support as much as you pure-bloods do.

For the record, I support equal social recognition of any committed partnership between two self-aware beings that can understand and communicate meaningful consent. That does not include pets, who cannot give consent. It certainly would include self-aware, sentient robots with the capacity to make choices for themselves.

(Hat tip to Pam.)

54 thoughts on Uh oh, they found out the real marriage plan…

  2. You have officially won this entire conversation.

    I would think that people like this would LURVE the Cylons, though. I mean, they Need God’s Love! To Reproduce! CYLONS: Kind of Like Quiverfull, But In Space.

  3. It would be wrong to make the same joke I made over at Pandagon, so I’ll let someone else have a turn with that one.

  4. Ahh, well, they’re half right. From the way I understand it what gay people are really after is being able to make their pets of the same gender into intelligent cyborgs and then marry that. On the upside, everyone knows queers are distracted by thumping bass beats so as long as The Scissor Sisters continue to record albums society will be safe…

  5. I support marriage between any number of adults or any gender/sex/identity/race/orientation who can give meaningful consent. I’m completely fine with groups of 3-4 or 10 or 20 getting married. We’d have to come up with some rules regarding who can leave the partnership and what it does to everybody else’s union, but I see no problem with groups of consenting adults loving each other and sharing a home.

  6. oh man, what joss whedon could have done with this during the buffy season when the nerds invented the buffybot!

  7. Back down the rabbit hole, burrowing into the mind of a Christian conservative…man that’s a scary trip.

  8. I don’t see the issue with gay marriage or polygamy, if three people want to be married to each other then why not? If two men or two women want ot be married to each other then why not? I don’t get what the problem is or why any adult(s) marrying any other adult(s) is anybody’s issue. Seriously.

  11. Phenicks: I have the exact same position about the matter. If two guys and one girl or vice versa can make it work, why not let them get married! It’s just when it gets into young men being run out of polygamist communities and 13 year old girls getting married off to 60 year old men my skin starts to crawl. I also think it’s important to point out that polygamy and crazy religious types aren’t mutally exclusive, but they are both minorities so let’s all CRUSH THEIR RIGHTS, bwahahahaha!!! And thanks for the Helo eye candy! Mmmm… hot Canadian goodness.

  12. good luck, maniacs. the old north state has seen the error of your ways and you think regressing to helmsian tactics will save you?

  20. I knew it! The Daleks are the true force behind the gay agenda!

    ::pictures Davros with a rainbow sticker on his life-support chariot::

  21. Haydin, what about consanguinity?

    It’s a problem primarily because of potential children. It’s unfair to create a situation in which a child is very likely to be born with genetic problems. Additionally, it’s a problem because it makes the “free choice” difficult.

  23. All I’m saying is, the creepy straight guys are the ones who are going to want to marry robots that can’t think for themselves, deny them sex, walk away from the relationship, own themselves, or have any kind of real agency.

    Fixed that for ya!

    Not all robots in the future will be so unable to meaningfully consent! In the future. Which is where we all have jetpacks, and cats have laser eyes.

    As for the turing test, that’s just about fooling people into thinking that a robot or AI is real. It doesn’t involve real agency, self-awareness, or capacity to make decisions like consent, entering into contracts, etc.

  26. It’s a problem primarily because of potential children. It’s unfair to create a situation in which a child is very likely to be born with genetic problems. Additionally, it’s a problem because it makes the “free choice” difficult.

    It’s not as much of a problem if you completely separate the idea of marriage (or “committed partnership,” if we want to avoid endless attritive battles over the word) from the idea of child-rearing. Some partnerships are about having and raising kids; others are not. This is true of marriages too! Gasp some married couples don’t want to or can’t have children! When it comes to kids, some partnerships are about commingling genetic material to produce those kids, others involve raising kids together without that.

    This is brought to mind by the civil-union equivalent in France (I think it was France? I can’t find the blog post I saw about this recently) which is open to any two adults. You get benefits and certain kinds of legal rights, and it is used quite frequently by relatives like two siblings, or a daughter and a mother, etc. There’s no reason there couldn’t be variations on this that involved parental guardianship too — a daughter and a mother or two siblings both raising a child, for instance.

    Like many people, I’m a firm advocate of letting people get religiously or symbolically wed by whatever means they find meaningful and appropriate, in a church or in the midst of a community that recognizes their union, or whatever, but then having a totally separate legal status that’s open to everyone. As the French (?) example shows, there’s no reason that legal status and the benefits it confers can’t extend to other types of family relationships.

    I can certainly buy the argument that society has an interest in helping parents raise children, so sure, there can be benefits that accrue to people raising children as well, whether alone or in a partnership. There’s no reason to try and bundle all this up in an indivisible and culturally-fraught tangle called “marriage,” other than the almighty excuse of “tradition tradition tradition.”

    There is something a little tricky about polygamy, however, because it can lead into weird group situations where everyone is married to everyone else. If we have to have benefits that accrue to committed partnerships (and maybe we don’t) this starts to go to odd places fairly quickly. Everyone on this blog could all get married to each other! Actually come to think of it, great idea. Let’s all get married! I’ll be the bride in orange and black polka-dots.

  27. Didn’t Glenn Reynolds of Instaputz write wistfully about the possibility of fuckable robots? He may want to have a talk with this Gibbs.

  28. I was going to come up with an insightful, amusing comment… but I’d rather make out with my Monroe-bot.

  29. Can I just love on Helo for a moment? Cause, you know…

    Yeah, my skin-job partner consented to mate (marry) me. Frackin’ consent!

  31. I can’t help but think of the scene in Arrested Development where Buster hooks up with the Roomba…

  32. Holly — number 26, specifically:

    So incest is okay, but polyamory’s right out because things might get weird?

    Seriously, what?

  33. Can I just love on Helo for a moment? Cause, you know…

    Loving on Helo is ALWAYS allowed. Always.

    Tahmoh Penikett and Grace Park: two of Canada’s prettiest exports to the larger world. Don’t say we never never give you anything!

  34. I don’t see the issue with gay marriage or polygamy, if three people want to be married to each other then why not? If two men or two women want ot be married to each other then why not? I don’t get what the problem is or why any adult(s) marrying any other adult(s) is anybody’s issue. Seriously.

    Because we have constructed massive legal apparatus around the idea of a marriage consisting of only 2 people. Property rights, inheritance laws, family law, health law, and tax law (just to name a few) really only contemplate 2 people. Not saying that these institutions couldn’t either be adapted or overhauled, but it’s massively more complicated.

    Also, unless you separate out different kinds of relationships as Holly suggests, you’re then stuck with evaluating what the nature of the relationship between the parties is. What legal rights and obligations do (for instance) two wives have vis a vis their common husband? (If A is married to B and C, are C and B also considered to be married?) What about to any children born of that arrangement? Which adults make choices about medical care? Which adults have a right to put that child on their health insurance? What happens when one member of a foursome wants to separate from the other three? How do you conceptualize property division in a multi-split divorce?

    Like I said, how people structure their interpersonal relationships has vastly different legal implications when compared to how many people can enter a marriage.

    Oh, and Holly? I call dibs on something sleeveless.

  35. I think you mean MULTIGAYSPOUSEBOTS 6001? When you don’t keep up on your paperwork you endanger the entire gay-polygamous-robot-loving conspiracy!

  36. Best thing is, reverse the tone and i (almost) completely agree with him…

    “Why not polygamy, or three or four spouses? Maybe people will want to marry their pets or robots.”

    Absolutely, Gibbs. Why not? Let’s let people marry as many consenting beings as they want. I’m glad we’re all in agreement!

  37. of course, much like other officially unrecognized relationships, we already have polygamous groups (aka ‘couples’) creating their own unions and separating without any kind of legal whatsit.

    The problem with law is that it is relatively rigid. Then you judges to deal with individual situations. Of course, that’s then subjective, which some people would argue is unfair. or something.

    I wonder what the result of having one set of marriage law/divorce proceeding for 2 and 2+ marriages would be, given that they are so radically different and there is more potential for variation in the latter. (Coming from the woman who wants fully recognized same sex marriages not somehow separated from the hetero…)

  38. Yeah Dechant, what part of the explanation didn’t you get? It has nothing to do with who’s having sex, or incest; the government shouldn’t be legislating that anyway.

  39. The worrying thing is that we bought a Roomba last week, and I’m now getting the strong urge to tell it not to get any ideas…

  41. “I can’t help but think of the scene in Arrested Development where Buster hooks up with the Roomba…”

    What do you expect, mother? I’m half-machine!

  42. “Best thing is, reverse the tone and i (almost) completely agree with him…

    “Why not polygamy, or three or four spouses? Maybe people will want to marry their pets or robots.”

    Absolutely, Gibbs. Why not? Let’s let people marry as many consenting beings as they want. I’m glad we’re all in agreement!”

    Helen, correct me if I’m misunderstanding you, but are you saying that pets can consent?

  43. I’d marry my cat in a minute if I could; finally I cold tax deduct the little bugger, and since he’s been with me for 16 years, I think we should be at least common-law, since everything I own is his anyway.

    And love the Helo/Sharon example. If they had a Helo-model Cylon? Sign me up. In fact, I’ll take two!

  44. I love this thread, especially the title!

    Bitter Scribe, have you heard of the “Real Dolls”?
    I’ll see if I can locate a link to a very disturbing video.

  46. What? I don’t remember ROBOTS being mentioned before. If they had been talking about that for years, I would have noticed. Clearly they are stepping up their game, they’re willing to GO THERE. They’re going to robotville. Also crazyland.

  47. Question: If a virgin male had sex with a female robot, is he still a virgin? Because if so, I think the religious right would be all over this. But we all know anything going anywhere near a woman’s vagina makes her not a virgin. Fingers, tampons, particularly concentrated stares…

  48. Trixe23: I know about Real Dolls, and I think I’ve even seen the video you have in mind. In fact, wasn’t there a movie about this? IIRC, it was called “Lars and the Real Girl,” or something like that.

    At first, I just wrote it off as a very expensive form of masturbation. But then came the stuff about the guys dressing up the dolls, propping them up on the couch and watching TV or whatever with them. Now that’s creepy.

    But I guess it’s all good as long as nobody tries to marry them.

  49. I suppose that this was said in a humorous tone, but wouldn’t you think at least a few of the people at the rally would cringe at the stupidity and wonder if statements like that could, I don’t know, affect the credibility of their movement?

  50. Well if the two people involved in incestuous relationship are adults why can’t they marry and since when is marriage about makign things easier for the courts? As it stands right now there is a man married to a woman and HE just had a baby. He is the biological mother AND the legal father of that child, whats going to happen if they split? As it stands right now he’s literally BOTH mom and dad. As far as how multiple spouses would work well they’d have to pay more for insurance because its more people, that’s just simple math, everything for them would cost more because its more people to consider. Nothing unfair in that, its simple math. Marriage is a headache when divorce or death occurs for straight couples why should polygamists get the benefit of not having a legally recognized marriage to spare them the difficulties of the hypothetical divorce? They’re all adults. Simply put if three male cousins wanted to marry each other they should be able to, now whether or not anyone in the family besides them show up is not something for the court to enforce.

  51. I am suddenly feeling the urge to find a picture of wee Hera Agathon and Photoshop in a sign saying, “Please make my Mommy and Daddy’s marriage legal”. In crayon.

    However, given that they seem to change the little actress who plays her every second week, any photo I found would be almost immediately out of date. And the only people who’d get the joke are probably on the marriage equality side already anyway. At least, I would HOPE so.

    There are certain people who are replying to this thread in a woefully serious way. Either they don’t really know what this post is about, or they don’thave much sense of humour.

  52. Robots? Did he really say robots? (trying to keep straight face and failing) The stupid burns white hot…

    Would it have made any difference if the bible had had an additional commandment: “Thou shalt mind thine own damn business…” ?

    Naah. The fundamentalist busybodies of the world would make up other excuses for telling other people how to live and still manage to get idiotic laws passed.

    How about polygamous robot pets? Or is that in the comments somewhere and I just missed it? Sorry–the robots quote must have shorted out more of my neurons that I had originally thought (and I really need the few I have)…

  53. How about polygamous robot pets?

    Wouldn’t that be awesome? All the fun of having a pet, but none of the boring stuff like cleaning out the cat litter or vomit or trying to make them take their frakking medicine (usually far too expensive for them to turn up their nose at). And I bet you could program out the more annoying pet character traits, too.

    Would it have made any difference if the bible had had an additional commandment: “Thou shalt mind thine own damn business…” ?

    Naah. The fundamentalist busybodies of the world would make up other excuses for telling other people how to live and still manage to get idiotic laws passed.

    I was about to say no, but I see you worked it out for yourself already. It’s not like fundies have ever paid much attention to what the Bible actually SAYS. Why would they want to ruin a perfect record by starting now?

  54. there have been people who wanted to marry their pets, but who really cares? let ’em be crazy or whatever if they want. let gay people marry, i mean seriously, how is it going to affect anyone? or their marriage? people say that if gay people get married in the christian church legally that it will take the “specialness” or whatever, haha, out of their straight legal christian marriage. i don’t see why the government should know about who we’re married to ANYWAY… i mean seriously, it’s only so they can put it in records, right? it just makes it harder for people to get a divorce. they’re (meaning some evangical christians, can’t remember specific names) trying to make stricter divorce laws so people will start staying married. that’s just either going to make a lot more poor people and/or really, really depressed people… i think i’m getting off subject.

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