(no subject)

Wow. I hadn't realized this, but to some extent, my LJ reading and writing are antithetical to each other. When I'm reading a lot it kills my desire to post. And to some extent, vice-versa.

(no subject)

Y'know, I realized something. The argument against gay marriage that goes "if we let gays marry, soon we'll have to let houseplants, dogs, hubcaps, poor people and other undesirables marry" is a little weird, and not just for the obvious reasons.

Because nobody seems to extend that to, say, murder, assault, burglary and so on. There's too obvious a reason that it doesn't work, and it's the same answer people give to the pedophilia thing -- there are other perfectly good reasons that that's already a crime, so you don't have to worry about them marrying.

So the argument actually runs, "if we can no longer arbitrarily forbid you to marry someone of your own gender, then soon we'll have to stop arbitrarily forbidding you to marry *anybody*, and before long we'll have to have reasons for all *sorts* of laws, and society as we know it will collapse."

In other words, "we can't require laws to have *reasons*, because that way lies anarchy!"