Ha! Told you!

[elfs]

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. David Gibbs, a prominent conservative lawyer most famous for interfering in the Terry Schaivo case, told people at a gathering in North Carolina that gay marriage will "open the door to unusual marriage." He told his audience, "Why not polygamy, or three or four spouses? Maybe people will want to marry their robots."

Maybe they will.

Someone should write a story about that.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

hee hee hee hee hee... or maybe make a movie?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I suspect Mr. Gibbs has watched a little too much Battlestar Galactica and would like his own Boomer.

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

... but then, don't we all...

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

Sounds like we're at the "laugh at you" stage. I think we'll need some smarter robots before we get to the "fight you" stage.

[(Anonymous)]

Or sexier robots. Make 'em sexy enough, and even Gibbs will want one, and then we can skip right to the "then we win" stage!

Anyway, the whole "slippery slope" argument is silly. The equal protection and due process arguments made about same-sex marriage just don't exist in the case of polygamy or incest or bestiality or whatever else they put forward. It's a sound bite that makes surface sense to people who have no understanding of U.S. law.

Anonymous Blog Reader #127

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that the equal protection arguments don't apply in the case of polygamy. Why wouldn't they? I suppose you can argue behavior vs. identity, but that's a tenuous thread.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, two reasons.

First and foremost, the reason gay marriage was legalized in California is that sexual preference is a "suspect classification," meaning they are afforded the highest level of anti-discrimination protection. That's not the case at the federal level yet, but, God willing, it's just a matter of time.

Polygamists have no such special status, and I don't see that changing in this country in the foreseeable future. As long as the government can give even a halfway reasonable-sounding reason for not wanting to recognize polygamy, they're in the clear.

Second, there are substantive differences between monogamous and polygamous marriages; enough to make a good case that they are qualitatively not even the same animal. Is polygamy just "monogamy scaled up," or is it a fundamentally different type of relationship? If the latter, equal protection wouldn't apply because the two are not equivalent.

Anonymous Blog Reader #127

[mundens.livejournal.com]

Gibbs is a bit behind the times, at least one man has already married a robot. :)

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Maybe he reads online comics... (http://www.askdreldritch.com/comic523.html)