No Same Sex Marriage In World of Warcraft?

Previously, we discussed a World of Warcraft guild representative getting reprimanded for mentioning same-sex relationships while advertising their organization. The subject hasn't been dropped in the intervening days, with GamePolitics providing an update to the community's reaction. Additionally, a Cathode Tan post links to a supposed discussion with a GM that kind of wrecks their whole equal treatment statement. From that post: "[GM] Anyone can report and we will take appropriate action. While it may seem ok because they are truly a heterosexual couple in real life, in game they are two females. Please keep in mind, you need to worry about the other players. While I do understand where you are coming from, there are those who do not have the maturity"

Seem kind of odd that they would do that...

...queer, even.

Re:Sorry Zonk

I say screw the middle man.

So... You're saying 3-way marriage should be okay too, then?

Re:Sorry Zonk

the church is probably a whole lot more qualified to interpret God's will, since two milleniums of millions of minds is probably better than a year or two of one mind.

Yeah, it's pretty sad that so much brainpower has been wasted through mankind's history on a meme which, almost by definition, can never be connected with any kind of objective reality..

About the only thing that such thought has been good for is occasionally coming up with some simple rules on how people should treat each other to try and improve the human condition, but those rules could have easily been arrived at without the need to invoke anything supernatural as motivation - just plain old common sense and an appreciation for history.

Blizzard's got some house-cleaning to do

Say what you want about it being Blizzard's game and they can set the rules blah blah, but they damn well better set the rules for everyone. This notion that some of their players aren't mature enough to be tolerant is bunk.

Obplug for my friend's blog, but I think she says it best: [ambernight.org]

"...having spent a little time in World of Warcraft myself, I would have to agree that a large number of WoW players really are poop-flingers who can't even spell tolerance, let alone practice it. But if I were one of the few non-gold-farming players left in WoW, I think I would be insulted by [Blizzards] response, no matter how I felt about GLBT guilds. And what about the Christian WoW guilds? Will Blizzard shut them down too?"

Mox

Re:Blizzard's got some house-cleaning to do

In other news, homosexual marriages in the United States are not legal, because "while you may be ok with it, some other people in the world, might not have your maturity level."

Re:Blizzard's got some house-cleaning to do

Actually, homosexual marriages in the US are not legal because it's a back-door way (pardon the pun) to get in on all that sweet graft of economic and legal incentives which were intended to keep the parents of children together.

The hypocracy here is that men and women who are incapable of producing their own biological offspring are still allowed to get married, even though they are no different (procreatively speaking) from gay couples.

Being a libertarian, of course, I'm all for dropping all those freebies (and slashing everybody's taxes to make up for it) and then letting anybody marry anybody or anything they choose... but alas, libertarian nut-jobs like me never get elected to anything.

Re:Blizzard's got some house-cleaning to do

So 'Snow Crash' [wikipedia.org] is the end result of libertarinism(sp?). Sign me up!

Re:Nominal libertarian

Yeah, it's off topic, but I agree with you about the civil liberties...

Ending the downward redistribution of wealth would certainly change how wealth was distributed. Without some sort of constant downward redistribution, those with wealth ought to be able to easily aquire ever more of it unless they are incompetent, which they aren't. I'll stipulate that that might be in some sense a more fair society, but I suggest it may not be a more healthy one. Historically, it appears to me that insufficient wealth redistribution mechanisms will screw up your society just as surely as excessive ones.

Re:Nominal libertarian

And, moreover, since rich people are taxed much more than poor

Sorry, but that's backwards. Rich people get most of their money from dividends and long-term investments, which are taxed at a lower rate.

Re:Blizzard's got some house-cleaning to do

On the other hand, if everybody has bread and circuses, it's a pretty good indicator that our system is mostly working. Even 90% of civil liberties issues come about as a result of people being denied equal opportunity to access one or the other.

Which begs the question of what our system is trying to do in the first place - is it intended to placate us enough that we don't notice the small number of people at the top (wherever they are) doing whatever the hell we want and running roughshod over is to get it?

Theyre not freebies

The laws around marrige and finances have nothing to do with what you're taking about. The reasoning behind it all is that if you are married to someeone, it is for all intents and purposes impossible for someone to accuratly track what is yours and what is your partners. Therefore there needs to be provisions for that, in the income tax act, in the housing act, etc etc.

The reason you can move your deductions onto your partners return and vice-versa, to get the tax breaks, is because even if there was no law allowing it **you could do it anyway**, because they would never be able to prove whose actual deduction it was in the first place, since you likely have joint accounts etc etc.

Re:Theyre not freebies

Please. You can create a contract spelling out who owns what (it would be equivalent to your argument). Indeed you could do this for a spouse, business partner, child etc.

The REAL reason for marriage licenses goes back to Miscegenation e.g. racial
mixing. [originalintent.org]

Frankly I have always found it offensive that the state thinks it can force you to get permission and pay them in order to marry someone.

Re:Blizzard's got some house-cleaning to do

So you're trying to say that a same-sex couple can not "raise children in a healthy environment"?

I am sorry, but that's just bigotry.

Re:Blizzard's got some house-cleaning to do

Those children do come from several sources: female couples can get artifically inseminated; male couples can get a surrogate; all same-sex couples can have children from previous heterosexual marriages; all same-sex couples can adopt.

In particular, same-sex couples who want children would seem the idea group of people to help take up the slack for all those unwanted children that heterosexuals seem to be constantly producing and putting up for adoption. It would seem the Religious Right, who wants to ban abortion and force all pregnancies to come to term and result in children should be pushing FOR gay marriage and gay adoption, to help take care of all those unwanted children that would result.

Re:Blizzard's got some house-cleaning to do

Well, duh! But why can't the stork bring babies to same sex couples?!

Re:Blizzard's got some house-cleaning to do

Only if you subscribe to the notion that a parent of one gender or the other is not particularily important.

This requires that you believe that abstract properties like the sexuality of the partners are more important than the concrete properties of the individuals involved.

This seems to me to be absurd. Two loving, caring parents of the same sex are surely better than two nasty, cruel parents of opposite sexes. I once naively assumed that everyone agrees on this, but I now know for a fact that many Bible-believing Christians do not. Instead, they believe that homosexuality is akin to drug abuse in terms of the harm it does to individuals and their children, although when pressed on the nature of the harm they retreat into abstract, unprovable, or provably false claims.

The very language of the GM reaks of homophobia: "Anyone can report and we will take appropriate action. While it may seem ok because they are truly a heterosexual couple in real life, in game they are two females. Please keep in mind, you need to worry about the other players. While I do understand where you are coming from, there are those who do not have the maturity"

What is "appropriate action"? Sending gifts and good wishes? Isn't that what you do when you hear people are happily married?

What is "ok" about being "a heterosexual couple in real life"? And what is wrong with being two females in-game? Sounds kinda hot to me.

Can someone explain to me in a way that someone who does not believe that the Bible is anything more than a collection of human literature why any of this is a problem? I'm looking for concrete terms that I can understand--if you were to explain why murder was bad it wouldn't be too hard to give concrete details that are true in the case of virtually all murders that I can easily understand are bad because they do concrete, obvious harm to a human being. I just can't see the harm in homosexuality, and despite years of asking no one has ever been able to demonstrate what is harmful without lapsing either into Bible-speak or into claims that are demonstrably false.

And why is it a matter of "maturity" to accept marriage between people who love each other? In my experience homophobia usually hits around adolesence. Small children, who are less mature, don't have anything like the problems with same-sex marriage that many adults do.

Re:Blizzard's got some house-cleaning to do

Absence is a particularly interesting one. That bastion of hard-core conservativism, The Atlantic, reported a while back that children raised without both a male and female role model in the home are at a significant disadvantage compared to those who do not (subscription required). Now that was comparing single-parent relationships to two-parent relationships, so it is extrapolation to suggest this applies to homosexual relationships.

I can't get to your linked article, but I'll comment anyway.

Implicit in your argument is the idea that the reason these children are disadvantaged is because they do not have a role model for one sex. That's a massive oversimplification of a complex problem. A parent in a single-parent household will probably be less able to spend as much time with their child, so he will get less parental attention. For that same reason, he might not be able to get as much help with schoolwork, and might not get as good an education. Or, because single parenthood tends to correlate with lower incomes and younger parents, one of these factors might be what's causing the poorer outcome.

Jumping to the conclusion that (e.g.) children in a lesbian household do poorly because they won't have a male role model is a major jump to a conclusion, not a simple extrapolation. All the studies I'm familiar with say that children raised in two-parent, same-sex households do just as well as their heterosexually, two-parented friends.

Re:Blizzard's got some house-cleaning to do

If everyone went to med school and became doctors, we'd have no one to build things. What if everyone did that? Becoming a doctor must not be a good thing.

Re:Blizzard's got some house-cleaning to do

That said, anybody marrying anything has a few problems

So it is a good thing that no one here or anywhere else is advocating "anybody marrying anything." [wikipedia.org]

Marriage as conceived in the modern world is fundamentally about mutual aid. This is a new, radical idea, at most a few hundred years old and probably a good deal less than that. There have been at various times and places in history a huge range of marriage arrangements, from arranged marriages to plural marriages to things that to a modern eye look far more like concubinage than marriage. Yet no where did this diversity wind up with "anybody marrying anything."

Homosexual marriage is based on an even more radical variant of the modern idea of marraige: that it is a relationship of mutual aid between equals. Once this definition of marriage is admited, and to many of us it seems like quite a healthy and positive thing, it is obvious that homosexual marriages ought to have the same status in law as heterosexual ones.

Re:Blizzard's got some house-cleaning to do

I'll just ignore the baiting in the "in a healthy environment" part, given that children raised by same sex couples grow up equally well socially adjusted [webmd.com] to the general population. Instead, I'm going to just focus on your comment about "violating its very purpose".

In 1995, 4.1 million women [findarticles.com] in America were "voluntarily childless". Double this to get the total number of people. The trend has been continually rising - almost three times the percentage as in 1982. 18.4% of married childbearing-age women have no children. Where's your self-righteous rage at them?

What percentage of Americans are gay? That number is highly contentuous (and partly depends on definitions), but usually ranges between 1% and 10%, usually around 2% of adults in a same sex relationship at a given point in time. Lets say that 1.5% of Americans are in a long-term (marriage-equivalent) same sex relationship. That's 4.2 million people. Hardly a staggering number compared to the 8.2 people in 1995 (probably near 10 million now) who are voluntarily childless, and the many millions more who are involuntarily childless.

At a more fundamental level, "violating its purpose". So, when your children are raised, is it time for a divorce? No? Then it's not solely about raising children. But even if it was, same sex couples who raise children have the exact same *purpose* as straight couples.

Re:Blizzard's got some house-cleaning to do

Freebies? More like higher taxes if you both earn decent livings, because more of your income is in the upper brackets. I would have saved a lot of money -- not to mention been eligible for IRAs*, more dependent care reimbursement, etc. -- if I wasn't married. Sure we get tax breaks for dependents, but they would have saved each of us individually exactly the same amount they save us as married's. The only married couples that get a break are ones where one spouse doesn't work outside the home. Look up "marriage penalty" sometime. If you earn about the same amount (like my wife and I do), it's especially heinous, because qualification for Roth IRAs, etc. is capped for married couples' combined income at substantially less than twice the limit for singles.

So sorry, but your claim is nonsense. Gays want to get married because they want to make the formal commitment that is recognized by society, and "freebies" like right of inheritance, next of kin status for medical issues, etc. that don't cost the rest of us a dime (save possibly in estate taxes.)

* In the mid-90's, I was working a job with no retirement benefits. I could not open a traditional IRA because my wife had retirement benefits from her job. Those benefits were in no way larger because she was married.

A real-world example:
"Roth IRA Income Limits
You can contribute to a Roth IRA if your adjusted gross income is below these limits:

Full $2,000 contribution
Single/Head of household Up to $95,000
Married filing jointly Up to $150,000" -- from quicken.com

Got a couple where one earns $90K, one $80K? Single, they could both do full Roth contributions. Married? $0.

Slippery Slope...

This is as I warned! First you allow interracial marriage- Humans and gnomes, dwarves and tauren. Disgusting! Now these same groups want to take a step further. Two troll males as fathers?!? This is unnatural! They cannot have children. This is not the way it is supposed to be. They should not be allowed to adopt either. Can you imagine the poor child with two Tauren daddies? Or two undead mommies? Inconceivable!

The next thing you know, these same groups will be preaching polygamy. Kalimdor cannot support this! It is a slippery slope!

**disclaimer** /please don't take these comments seriously ;p

Re:Slippery Slope...

Isn't it a non level section of ground that has a low coefficient of friction?

Re:Dude, they got a business to run

And I can just imagine, 45 years ago:

"And, like it or not, 60-70% of the South Carolina public is against negroes being in the same movie theaters as whites. If allowing negroes in the theaters pisses off more people than it pleases, it'd be a bad business decision. The "Why" of what their movie-watching population doesn't matter to them."

It would undoubtedly go on to argue that imposing restrictions that prevent the majority from being offended (separate theaters) is perfectly reasonable, and that the black patrons can still watch movies and have a good time.

Re:Blizzard's got some house-cleaning to do

And what about the Christian WoW guilds? Will Blizzard shut them down too?

Straw man. Blizzard has already said that gay-friendly guilds are fine - it's the advertisement in-game of guilds based around RL controversies like sexual orientation, religion, nationality, etc., that is not. They've also said that if guilds wish to recruit based specifically on these qualities (and can do it without disparaging those of differing qualities), they are welcome to use the official guild recruiting forum on their website (an out-of-game resource) to do so.