Okay, guys, let’s see if we can subdivide this a bit.

(1) Flenser, I do indeed believe in an inalienable righ to free association to the extent that it doesn’t conflict with another’s rights. If you don’t want to marry another person of the same sex, that’s just fine with me. If you don’t want to go to a gay bar, that’s fine too.

If you so object to gay marriage that you want to beat up gay people who are trying to get married, I object to that.

If you don’t want to employ gay people in your private business, I think you’re a moron but I think you have that right. If you want to make it illegal for gay people to be employed, say as school teachers, I object.

To the extent possible, I’d prefer to see the government prevented from making any distinctions in what rights and benefits are granted to adults by keeping the government small and ineffectual enough that they don’t have the ability to have much effect.

To the extent that this is impossible, I think it’s wrong for the government to select one group over another to benefit. Thus, I dn’t beleive in affirmative action (but do believe that it might be useful to have remedial programs for people who want to better their positions.) I don’t believe in a “marraige penalty” in the tax system, but then I’m not a big fan of “progressive” taxation.

I believe that men and women are properly equal — which imples indistinhguishable — before the law. I therefore don’t think that it makes sense that we have certain contracts that can only contain one of each, as that imples a legal distinction. And, before you ask, yes that means I think women ought to be available for combat in the military.

I’m not a big fan of the whole notion of legal protections for “groups of people”. I do believe that the government has a proper role in preventing the rights of one person from being infringed by another. If you want to propose some particular interaction that you’re thinking about, I’ll try to answer.

To the extent that this answers your points about rights etc, I hope it satisfies you. A lot of the rest of that seems to be arguing with someone else, because I don’t remember saying anything about most of that argument. You might want to find whomever it is you’re addressing and take it up with them.

(2) You are, however, mistaken to assume that I am proposing that the government impose some solution on someone. If the government were to, for example, eliminate all vestiges of any trace of particular advantages to marriage — which is pretty much what John and I seemed to be converging on — I’d feel that appropriate.

It’s the privileging of certain two-party contracts over others — in fact, the impossibility of making such contracts — to which I object. I’ve laid out the reasoning, and the answer I keep getting is that it’s not traditional.

I don’t accept “it’s traditional” as a well-founded argument, because, in WB said, we have so many different traditions in this country, and in history, that it seems inevitably to reduce to a petitio principii — it “begs the question”. Have you got another one? that doesn’t turn out to be equally fallacious?

(3) For both of you, but especially John: some time ago I didn’t want to get into an abortion argument because, I said, it would inevitably lead to a conflict of axiomatic values. This one has done the same thing. You, flenser, and Knuck appear to me to be making the notion that there is something special about “marriage” (whatever it is) into an axiom. That axiom appears to me to depend on magical thinking: there is magic in the word “marriage”, so that if gay people had a legal agreement with the same extent, rights, and obligations as “marriage” that would be all right, but if it was also called “marriage” it would be a Danger To The Fabric Of Society.

Now axioms, logically, can be selected as desired. However, when applying logic to the perceptual “real world”, it’s generally good to confirm that those axioms model the real world.

I tried to point out the underlying issue here by proposing we come up with some other name, like “Aloysius”, for the state of “same privileges and obligations as marriage but it’s not marriage because same sex couples could enter into the state of Aloysius.”

I claim “marriage” and “Aloysius” are the “same thing” in the sense that they’re not distinguishable, except arbitrarily — “isomorphic up to renaming”. To demonstrate that claim, consider a pair of people who enter into aloysius, but who happen to be of opposite sexes. Can we distinguish this from “marriage”? It has the exact same rights and privileges as marriage, and it’s between people of the opposite sex.