Why has the Gay community tried to convince the religious right that their definition of marriage is wrong/should not be the legal definition?

Most of the folks I’ve encountered in the gay community (*) aren’t interested in convincing the religious right of much of anything. Even if that were desirable, it doesn’t seem especially likely. What they are interested in is convincing some other groups of people that the religious right’s specific religious beliefs about marriage shouldn’t be given privileged legal standing.

(*) At least, the activist end of it, which is the main region of the gay community I’ve spent time in.

Why haven’t supporters of gay marriage …

Well, you ask “Why haven’t…?” but the strategy and tactics that you’re suggesting here have already been suggested over the past several years by a lot of different people who support gay marriage, as well as by people who oppose gay marriage from a gay liberationist standpoint. (See for example Alisa Solomon, Terry J. Allen, Steve Swayne, Marcus Line, Alexander Cockburn, Betsy Brown, etc.) There are liberal versions of this (e.g., Solomon’s article) which turn on separation of church and state and call for a lot of existing legal privileges to be transferred from religious to civil institutions; and there are radical versions of it (e.g., Brown’s article) that cal for a lot of existing legal privileges to be abolished, by devolving the rights from couples to individuals, or to private associations that might or might not have anything to do with sexual coupling (e.g., might apply to “Boston marriages” or to best friends or any number of other relationships).

I happen to agree with these authors, and I think that this approach, especially in its radical version, is a good idea. But you should also be aware that what you’re proposing is not a simple one-off reform, but a radical and fundamental rewriting of nearly all existing American law. That’s why I like the idea; but it shouldn’t be surprising that many people who have pressing immediate concerns (like being able to be with the love of your life in her dying moments, or not constantly living in fear of deportation) might end up looking for quick fixes that can piggyback on existing social norms and legal protections for married couples. I think that’s regrettable in some ways — I think the search for political quick fixes actually often retards progress, because of the way it bogs us down in interminable political fights. But I’m not puzzled as to why people do it, or particularly sympathetic to the claim that it’s motivated by a desire to control others. It’s generally motivated by people having very serious real-world problems and wanting not to be treated like shit by local or national authorities.

Anon73:

From a left-libertarian perspective wouldn’t this be a good law since it is protecting bakers from tyrannical bosses?

That sounds more like a left-paternalist perspective than a left-libertarian one. Left-libertarians generally believe that workers ought to defend ourselves from tyrannical bosses, through the economic means, rather than depending on legislatures or courts to protect us through the political means.

... I'm against circumcising infants or anyone else who hasn't consented to it. But one could only argue that it's "just as bad" as clitoridectomy from a

MBH:

I read it like this: if an author’s notion of the analytic entails a dichotomy between the synthetic and the analytic, then that author’s endorsement of analytic a priori judgments implies impositionism.

O.K., but why do you read it like that? What’s the argument for holding that, under an analytic-synthetic dichotomy, analytic apriori judgments are imposed?

Your reading doesn’t seem to help you out much with Frege: Frege definitely endorses a version of the synthetic-analytic dichotomy (he thinks that Kant was wrong in characterizing arithmetical judgments as synthetic, but he explicitly agrees with Kant that geometrical judgments are synthetic apriori). Maybe I missed it somewhere, but I also know of nowhere that Frege suggests that the division between the two is anything like a “continuum.” Wittgenstein certainly gets many things from Frege, but I don’t know of any sign of Frege specifically suggesting much of anything like the later Wittgenstein’s concerns about projectibility or enabling conditions for the application of concepts. If he does, could you show me where he does?

Unless I’m missing something, it seems like Frege meets your conditions for impositionism about analytic apriori judgments. But it seems to me that that’s would be a very peculiar assessment of Frege’s views, and you’d need to offer some very strong reasons to support it. If Frege is a party to the impositionist-reflectionist debate, then it seems to me that his notions of logic and its relationship to an eternal, non-material, non-psychological, objectively graspable Third Realm place him obviously and completely in the reflectionist camp, not the impositionist camp — at least, about the judgments of arithmetic.

Or, to go to the daddy of this whole analytic-synthetic business, Kant, when read as an impositionist, is, again, plenty big on a rigid dichotomy, but he’s not an impositionist about analytic apriori judgments. The whole point of the exercise, on impositionist readings of the critique, is that synthetic apriori judgments are imposed. Analytic apriori judgments don’t need to be; Kant never suggests that there is any particularly fancy story that has to be told about them.

Wait, what? What makes you think that believing:

(PAA) Praxeological judgments are analytic and apriori judgments

implies impositionism about praxeology? That would only follow if analytical apriori judgments are all imposed; but non-impositionists don’t believe that they are.

Frege believes that:

(AAA) Arithmetical judgments are analytic and apriori.

But if that’s supposed to imply that Frege is an impositionist about arithmetic, you must have a different understanding of Frege than I do.

The impositionist reading of Kant (which I think is the wrong reading, but it is a reading) doesn’t generally hold that analytic apriori judgments are the things that are imposed on the thing-in-itself, either. What Kantian impositionists are interested in are synthetic apriori judgments.

I think the conflation problem also shows up even in putting the words into use in categoricals. E.g., the double use of “animals” doesn’t cause much trouble in being able to understand that “No animal can speak for itself” has a (true) exclusive interpretation and a (false) inclusive interpretation, or in accepting statements like “Some animals can fly aeroplanes” or “Some animals are human.” Supposedly “All men are created equal” should be just as flexible in interpretation, but the same people who would accept “Some animals (viz., us) can fly aeroplanes” are far less likely to be willing to accept “Some men can give birth” or “Some men are women,” unless they are defending a thesis.

But I suspect the interpretive stickiness in the “Some” categoricals has something to do with cognitive stickiness that probably also shows up in the “All” categoricals — that there’s some reason to think that the meaning is not really reliably being switched over to the inclusive meaning in the universal claims, either. If they are being understood to include women, it’s generally only going to be done by some considerable act of will, against the cognitive grain (the same act of will it takes to read “Some men are women” as a true existential claim), or else is being done only as an afterthought, which is easily forgotten when you start reasoning from the statements that you’ve accepted as true.

... Sure; neither can I, but I think that we're not the sort of prospective customers Steve Jobs intends to sell iPads to. (Speaking for myself, if I had the

... All contracts foreclose on other options, by definition. If they didn't, they wouldn't be binding contracts. But I think Kevin's point is that that, just

Anon73: My understanding is the term ‘man’ originally meant humans …

Around the time of Beowulf, sure. (*) But by 1952 the primary use of “man” was “an adult human male,” and any educated writer who decided to use it in the allegedly gender-neutral sense would be aware of the distinct possibility of conflation between the exclusive and inclusive meanings. (It’s just that, in 1952, cultural politics were such that most male writers didn’t particularly care about that possibility.) The gender-exclusive primary use of “man” had been well established since “wer” disappeared in Middle English, and in fact the 19th century had seen a series of public controversies in English-speaking countries as to whether or not the use of “man,” “he,” etc. in traditional laws, charters, by-laws, etc. should be construed to include women, or to include men only — with a number of schools, courts, professional associations, etc. specifically deciding that it should be read to exclude women from admission. (**)

Of course, if the title is read as “Males Against the State,” that’s mostly an accurate description of the contents of the book. Angela Heywood, Voltairine de Cleyre, Gertrude Kelly and Emma Goldman are all mentioned in passing only; the folks whose expositions of individualist Anarchism get significant discussion in the book are one and all dudes. Which is a problem in itself, aside from any problems with word choice.

Anon73: If you’re absolutely opposed to it then what do you propose to replace with ‘man’ for a gender-neutral term? “Humans against the State”?

Enemies of the State would have made a good, equally-provocative title. Individuals Against the State would be clunky but prefigure the individualist content of their opposition to the state. There are of course lots of other titles you could choose that couldn’t be carried out by a simple search-and-replace operation on the title. The fact that anti-sexist language sometimes makes one particular phrase awkward or unwieldy doesn’t mean that a talented writer can’t come up with some other arresting phrase to put in its place, if she simply goes back to the blackboard and thinks it through a bit.

(*) “Man” in Old English was inclusive, like “homo” in Latin or “anthropos” in Greek. If you needed to specify gender, you said “wer” or “werman” for an adult male and “wifman” for an adult woman.

(**) In the U.K., the Interpretation Act of 1850 was passed to require gender-neutral constructions of “he,” “man,” etc. in acts of Parliament, apparently mainly to allow more succinct writing; but that bill was also a response to existing legal controversies, and meanwhile in the U.S. a number of schools, courts, and professional associations were insisting on males-only readings in order to exclude women from admission to a number of institutions and professions.

“Man” in Old English generally functioned like “homo” in Latin or “anthropos” in Greek. Of course, people talking about homo in Latin often implicitly had a male in mind, but
If you needed to specify gender, you said “werman” for a male adult and “wifman” for a female adult.)

... Well, so is a paperback book, but I buy a fair number of those anyway. A tablet makes a poor option for your only computer, if any substantial amount of