One’s opinion of the moral value of sex between adults in a committed life partnership has no bearing upon the legal status of said relationship, nor should it.

I was asserting my belief that this is a normative statement. What I cut from my comment but should’ve left in was to ask you why you think this should be the case as opposed to leaving it as self-evidently good.

My second comment was meant to address the potential counter-argument that you weren’t making a normative claim. However, looking back on it – my first interpretation was that you were saying more than you were. I read it as saying there was no relationship between legally defined relationships and external opinions of the moral value of sex between adults (even in committed relationships), which is broader than your assertion. So apologies there.

I’m going to split the difference with you on the slippery slope predictions, depending upon how SSM becomes legalized it actually can seriously weaken the grounds upon which we continue to criminalize polygamy and bigamy. Which isn’t a reason by itself to oppose gay marriage, but it’s certainly a reason not to write off the concern as crazy talk.

To go a little bit OT and explore this amoral business some more. I don’t think liberals in general but SSM advocates in particular should be so quick to cede the language of morality in today’s Schwulekulturkampf (should I trademark this?).

In politics, it’s rare to win subjective battles with objective arguments. In a battle between “make gays equal” and “deus velt…for the children,” there’s a very clear winner. So is there a place for it? Probably. To me though, I think it’s a line of argument that only looks appealing if you already agree with the message. However, if there’s a lesson from the civil rights movements of the 50’s and 60’s it’s that equality was a moral argument, not a way around it.

One’s opinion of the moral value of sex between adults in a committed life partnership has no bearing upon the legal status of said relationship, nor should it.

First, that’s normative.

Second, as a positive claim, it’s not that accurate.

I don’t quite follow. Are you saying my statement is normative or positive? In my (admittedly limited) understanding of rhetoric/argumentation “normative” essentially means subjective, and “positive,” objective; if this is the case, then surely my statement can’t be both. So which is it, and how does this diminish my point?

I think it’s a lot simpler to say get your morals out of my laws than to actually do that.

True, very true.

In general, I’m a bit bothered by the ahistoricism of the approach. More specific to gay marriage, I think amoral arguments (as opposed to moral/immoral) just aren’t terribly effective.

I don’t mean to suggest that the amoral argument by itself is sufficient for the purpose of effecting social change. I do think that there is a place for it, though. Out in the morass of our national miscourse™ it’s common to hear indignant declarations that SSM is homosexuals demanding “special treatment” (usually followed by fallacious slippery-slope predictions that the next group to demand legal recognition for their marriages will be polygamists or bestiality practitioners, etc). What we’re generally calling the “amoral” approach is thereby useful to point out that, in fact, SSM advocates are striving only for equal treatment for same-sex couples.

In other words, the State can’t justify telling private actors that sexual orientation is, in effect, a suspect classification, and then turn around and say that its own use of that same classification is somehow not suspect.

That’s why equal protection analysis applies – once it has been determined that a particular trait is an improper basis for discrimination, ie, that the trait tells us nothing relevant about a person’s character, then the State cannot go ahead and treat that trait as if it were somehow relevant for purposes of the law.