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It's because you'll know that every time they're simulating the nasty on Dexter and doing the 'oh noes!' walk in as brother and sister, they're actually doing the nasty in real life. Yay! I'm happy for them, and yes, slightly odd about it too.
I assume this happened because there was a secret law passed 20 years ago that says that celebrities can only marry other celebrities, thus guaranteeing the next crop of celebrities.
I'm completely and utterly squicked out by television shows that feature serial killers and bigamists as their main characters.
Dude, one of these things is not like the other. If everybody's of age and consenting, they can bigamize away till the cows come home as far as I'm concerned.
Well, strictly speaking you shouldn't be as freaked out as you should be because, after all, they're not biological brother and sister in the show; but that's nerdish nitpicking. Congratulations to the both of them. It's been on the cards for a while, btw.
LT, I can see your point (interesting grouping of serial killer/bigamist there tho), but is it more that you're being asked to sympathise with the lead character as an anti-hero than actually having a serial killer as a lead character? Hannibal Lecter was a lead character in SotL but you were never meant to sympathise with him, for example.
I'm a big fan of Dexter. I spent the whole of yesterday curled up the sofa eating biscuits and watching the whole of series 3. After this announcement it'll be interesting to see if there are any subtle changes in their acting in series 4.
Greg and Marcia Brady used to make out with eachother back in the day, according to Barry Williams autobiography. There's an epidemic of TV incestizing going on out there.
I'm only freaked out because SHE'S THE WORST ACTRESS ON TV, and I expect Michael C. Hall, in his infinite awesomeness, to be justifiably seething with hatred at the total insanity of having to be on the same TV show with her.
I care about how people structure their family when we're talking about legal rights and obligations that apply to everyone. In a civil society it's okay to care about the establishment of legal institutions - that's actually what it means to be in support of gay marriage. At some point, people who it doesn't apply to have to care about other people's families if the law's expected to change. Being agnostic about it is what creates the status quo.
I suppose, but I don't really see how that applies here. If people want to have multiple wives or husbands and everybody involved is of age and consenting then I can't see any compelling reason for it to be illegal.
The reason I see for it is that marriage is a contract that confers specific rights on an individual. Those rights often pertain to legally significant decisions that allow the parties in the contract to alter the courses of one another's individual lives - such as the ability to make final medical decisions for the spouse if the spouse is incapacitated, or the right to make decisions about whether or not to put a child up for adoption or whether to contest that adoption or the right to sue for alimony or shared property. To create a legal contract of marriage with more than two parties to the contract would allow for a disagreement to arise between two parties who were, in theory, equally entitled to the contractual rights of marriage. Such disagreements could easily wind up in Terry Schiavo-like court tangles, financial struggles, and family-law messes.
I'm sure the theoretical structure could be put together to create an entirely new body of multiparty marriage contract law, IF people in the majority wanted it to happen, but it would require a lot more active work and support on the part of the society - not just 'meh' on the part of society. It would be an enormous change that would affect every institution from schools to hospitals to health insurance arrangements to housing law to privacy rights. It's been difficult enough to achieve equal rights for two parties within marriage - as far as women's rights within traditional marriage, we're not even quite there yet - I don't see a good prospect for arbitrating three- or more-party marriage contracts in a society whose entire legal heritage descends from common law specifying two parties in a marriage contract. The overhaul would be enormous and I'm skeptical that there'd ever be enough political will to make it happen.
Never mind the temporalizing! Bigamy = squick! Why is this? I don't want two wives! The scary Utahns in their hoop skirts and sullen expressions! The "whose kid is who" aspect! The sheer cultishness!
AIEEEEEEEEE!
This is not to equate serial killing with bigamy.
I'm also squicked by insects, dolls, and the music of the Residents.
And yet, if you want gay marriage to pass, one of the major arguments you get into is the 'slippery slope' argument that by opening up the genders allowed in marriage, there is no barrier to opening up marriage to other structures currently illegal for equally arbitrary reasons - marriage for people under 18 (or when one party is under 18), marriage between blood relations, and marriage between more than two people. There really is no rationally defensible reasons other than the protection of minors (ie, "squick") for saying that someone age 14 can't get married. There are a lot of heterosexual, adult marriages that make me go "squick," too. My thinking on this isn't about "squick" but about the rationale for law.
Since it damages prospects for gay marriage to talk about totally breaking down legal marriage structures, I'm not willing to go there, and I'm fully willing to insist on marriage as a two-party contract. At some point the institution has to mean something and grant privileges to specific people, or it's only an abstract decoration, not a meaningful contract. I think gay people want the meaningful contract, not a symbolic institution so empty of specifics as to be meaningless.
To extend the 'if-it-doesn't-harm-me-it's-okay' libertarian type of thinking to all possible relationships is, to me, a seriously slippery slope. I'm more of a pragmatist and, when confronted with questions about legal rights and responsibilities, I ask: what's best for the society? For the healthy development of children? For the efficient and humane management of institutions? Rather than: does it bother me? When we agree to live in a society we are working within a cultural and legal context. We're no longer a group of individuals who do whatever they want. We engage in a discussion about our governance.
People already can and do have the relationships they want. When they seek an institutional and legal recognition of the relationships, in a society governed by law it's totally fine to develop opinions about who's eligible for the rights. I'm kind of squicked by the idea of a fifty-year-old marrying an eleven-year-old. I'm not ashamed to feel that way. And I think that you're right, jonmc, that "squick" isn't enough of a reason for something to be illegal, but it's also not negligible. Sometimes "squick" exists because of irrational prejudice, but sometimes it exists because of a visceral reaction to potential social or individual harm, as with the fifty-year-old marrying the 12-year-old. It's quite legitimate for a populace to decide, 'in this culture at this time, this is not a legally supported form of institutionalized relationship.' That's what societies exist to do. Certainly they change, but it's not ridiculous that people have opinions about what changes are welcome or allowable. When you want to change the law, first you need to change the hearts and minds - or wait for time to change them. You'll find that until such time, 'squick' becomes shorthand for a societal shift in basic social schemas that people are not ready or willing to accept.
So in some cases, "squick" may have a lot of underlying potential difficulty and damage - or it may be a fairly superficial reaction. There's not enough to tell based on just "Squick."
Many people may continue to feel "squick" when gay marriage is legal, and that's basically their prerogative, but we won't strike down the 'traditional' definition of marriage just because it squicks people out any more than we keep it just because the alternative squicks people out - we strike it down because it's a violation of the right to equality to create a contract for two adults at the age of majority and then discriminate against individuals who want to enter into the contract based on gender. That's why there's a case for gay marriage.
The case for legal polygamous marriage, on the other hand, rests on no such case. It instead requires the development of an entirely new institution and form of contract and would demand the adaptation of all of our basic institutions related to the family to accommodate it. Currently three-or more-party marriage contracts are not available to anyone in the US, regardless of gender or any other identity component, and that's fair in that it violates no equal rights stipulations.
Miko, I don't think we disagree, I just think we took different mental paths to get there. And I'm not on a crusade here (although, if they made it legal, i would join the Anti-Bigamy League either), I was just kind of both amused and taken aback by LT's pairing it with serial killing, is all.
Sure, it's sorta funny. In real life he doesn't think they're equivalently bad, he just gets yicked by both. We talked about it at length when I rented the first season of Big Love and he really found it disturbing. I find religious polygamy creepy as hell, too, but I'm happy enough to gawk at it for shallow entertainment. To each their own squick and nonsquick, say I.
I just wanted to stand up for squick a little - most people have that feeling about something in society, and that isn't really the problem. People can be squicked but they can be persuaded to accept change anyway by reference to something they value even higher than their squick reaction, like the Constitution or human rights or whatever.
I just wanted to stand up for squick a little - most people have that feeling about something in society, and that isn't really the problem.
Absolutely, and some stuff deserves it's squickiness. (Of course, now you know TL's weak spot. If you want to send him screaming into the night, you can round up a half-dozen male friends and introduce them as your new husbands.)
(also, do polygamists have to wear a wedding ring for each spouse? that could run into money and make you look like Mr.T or Zsa Zsa Gabor.)
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