Guns don't kill people; I like mayonnaise
Most mornings at work are slow because we need clients or guests to come in and foul up stuff or make demands. Last week one of my coworkers - another Nicholas - offered a distraction by asking us about his thought experiment. He had spoken with another coworker who is gay, about same-sex marriage. My namesake called his audience (we five walked as a group in the twilight gloom) to consider a future where human cloning is feasible and performed.
He suggested that someone who desires gender blind marriage ought to accept the union of a person and his\er clone. I made the distinction between movie cloning that makes adults in minutes with the target's entire life experience and real clones. Obviously, if a clone were grown of me, he would only be a legal adult when I turn forty-one. That is a strong hurdle no matter the gender. But, in pointing out that decanting a clone at the birth of the naturally fertilized zygote would eliminate the age difference, I realized this query doesn't need to wait for successful cloning techniques. Substitute twins for clone in the question above. He and I wonder whether a person who supports same-sex marriage is comfortable with allowing twins to marry.
If I stipulate (agree) that same-sex marriage is desired, then I have no problem allowing twins to marry. Hypothetically, I have no problem if brothers and sisters want to marry. The watchword of the gender blind supporters is that only love matters; only mutually desired relations are valid concerns. Obviously, that decouples the normal reason for stigmatizing intra-family romance. The twins are not focused on having (genetically viable) children; they are focused on pleasing one another.
Oho, got you there mr\s namby-pamby free love monger. My laughably unlikely outlier case mocks your justification with a forbidden union that I despise more than the one you suggest. Thou art disrobed as crypto-orgiast and thus laid low.
Poison pen aside, the situation considered does resemble emergency ethics more than anything I desire. Emergency ethics are those questions where you are captain of a full lifeboat charged with ignoring the screaming, frostbitten swimmers or tossing out the sick infants for lack of food. Obviously, no one reading this is that captain or a twin finally relieved at finding a stepping stone to explaining his\er incest. Despite how I voted and would again for the foreseeable future, my views tend toward the pragmatic.
Specifically, the argument I heard on Michael Medved (oh dear, so many confessions) resonated strongest in me. He pointed out that government recognition of marriages comes with monetary benefits, ostensibly to subsidize couples into having children and keeping America's middle class from shrinking. (Paraphrased) “We have no business paying for Steve and David to fondle one another.” Pay, you say? Yes, recall the marriage credit on our federal and state income taxes. If more people qualify to marry, we get to pay for the same socialism with less money. I would never imagine that the courts would drag their feet on a retrial of that proposition during this difficult budgetary season, but the incentive exists. Mind, incentive isn't the whole story or even evidence, and the whole could be moot if statewide gays are minority enough that the tax credit is trivial. (If every Californian sent a dollar to just one poor person, sh\he would have thirty-six million dollars. Let's send three.)
However, the neo-Malthusians do tickle that vestigial eugenic Aspect I hold. If we embody the scenario Joe Haaldeman depicted in Forever War, (the UN encourages same-sex pairings to control worldwide populations), a gender ‘irrelevant' attitude would solve lots of problems. It wouldn't stop anyone carping about undesirable climate change, deforestation for meat, or peak oil; but, that formerly poor person doesn't care whether we send one or three dollars so long as everyone adds some to the heap. The Utilitarian Directory that I can't find very probably lists not having kids at the top of its list for redistributing utiles for the least advantaged.
There is no conclusion because I have no interest in rigorously defining marriage and its significance for contemporary American or abstract society. I feel neither horror nor peace knowing that a bunch of homosexuals married last year or so. Until I am stricken with male desire, it is just another excuse for navel gazing.
If you like the title, know it isn't mine and I hate mayonnaise.