Marriage isn't a right for anyone. Yes, not even for straight people.

I have a right to life.
You can't kill me.

I have a right to property.
You can't take my stuff.

I have a right to marriage.
You can't stop me getting married.

You changed the syntax of your last claim to fit your point. I get why, but it kinda destroys the logic of your claim. Really, following the logic of the first two points it should read:

I have a right to life.
You can't kill me.

I have a right to property.
You can't take my stuff.

I have a right to marriage.
You can't stop me getting married.

Anyway, the claim's flawed in the first place. A right to life doesn't mean you can't kill someone - it means that you shouldn't. A right to property (not sure that's a universal right but that's another debate) means you shouldn't steal, but people still do. And a right to marriage means you shouldn't stop people getting married, but you still can.

Rights exist even if they are not exercised.

OK, I think I may have phrased my description badly.

Here's the thing. The right to life and right to property, etc., are specifically negative rights. You can enjoy them as an individual, without action on anybody's part - the only action incumbent on other people is that they respect your rights as you respect theirs; i.e., not kill you or steal from you, in the example cases.

A right to marriage, on the other hand, can't be enjoyed by an individual. By definition, it requires two people to exercise, or to frame it another way, it requires action on the part of a second individual. (If a single individual wants to enjoy it without someone else cooperating, is society required to force someone to cooperate? If yes, that violates their natural rights. If no, then we have here a right that not only isn't exercised but can't be exercised.)

Further, natural rights exist independently of context. The rights to life, property, etc. are in theory natural rights; they exist independent of the need for a society and institutions to enforce them and grant them meaning. Obviously, marriage is not and cannot be such a natural right. It could be a civil right, perhaps, but civil rights are defined by the society that creates them, and so have no natural definitions.

I submit, therefore, that marriage is not and cannot be a right in the normal sense of the world.

I agree, but for a different reason. In order to get married (even to a woman), I have to ask the government for permission to do so. If the government grants me permission, it issues us a marriage license. Then, once we have a license, we can execute our "right" to marriage.

I have a right to life. You can't stop me from continuing to live

I have a right to property. You can't stop me from owning things

I have a right to marriage. You can't stop me from getting married.

This falls under the right to self-determination. The fact that another person is involved -- that a unit of two is self-determining -- is not relevant.

D'A

I think the closest right would be the right to contract or the freedom to contract.

David Watson: I'm with you there, and frankly I could see considerable benefits from rendering marriage, in many ways, a matter of private contract.

The problem, of course, is that as long as legal, tax, religious, etc. appurtenances are attached to marriage, then there are - effectively - other parties to the contract, and all parties have to agree, y'know?

(Also, there are some issues with using contract rules for marriage, like consideration and most ickily, remedy of specific performance, but metaphorically, at least...)

Are you saying I don't have a right to meet my friends and talk to them? That it would be fine for the government to take away the right to assemble? That also requires more than one person.

The point is not that anyone has to give me people to assemble with, but that if people choose to assemble together, then nobody has a right to stop them. And marriage is just the same.

And I would like it to move to contracts and get the government more out of the way.

Freedom of assembly is a "civil right", not a natural right - which is to say, essentially a privilege granted by the government in its role as a manager of the commons, hopefully in the country's constitution, but not a right. And usually, it's interpreted as only referring to the right to assemble for political purposes - if you check the books, you'll find all sorts of perfectly enforceable, Constitutional laws that limit the "right" to assemble for various other purposes.

It's "not infringed" largely because smart governments know that any such law would be entirely unenforceable, even if they could see any point to having one.

(And no, I'm not saying it would be fine for them to pass such a law - I'm just saying that under the current system, it violates no such right to do so.

I'd argue that it would violate the natural right to liberty, which I'd find a more compelling argument, but then, lots of things do...)

(Outside public spaces, it's protected by the property rights of the owner of the property on which you assemble, of course. If they agree.)

How is it not a natural right? It infringes on liberty and it would be wrong to prevent people from doing so. So, what is this distinction between natural rights and civil rights you are trying to draw? And how is one any less of a right than the other?

Ethically, I consider them equal.

This claim also says "marriage isn't a right" not that it falls only under a particular subcategory of rights.

R and AY: There are no natural rights. Contradiction in terms. Rights, as discussed here, are social constructs. I know you're smarter than this. You're both letting personal morality suggest that rights are somehow divinely laid out. Either make a compelling point that 'rights' are not human constructs, or get back on point, and stop with this 'my moral dickwaving is more "natural" than your moral dickwaving' bullshit.

Rachel: Right, um - I think I have material for what should have been a whole series of claims, here. (This was an early one, please forgive my bad phrasing.) More shall follow for the sake of clarity, once I chop the argument up into atomically claimable parts.

Ben Breedlove: While I shall make such a point in an upcoming claim, Kant, Hobbes, Locke, etc. constructed natural rights theories without benefit of divine intervention, basing them in universals of human, or rational being, nature.

While there are plenty of philosophers who'll disagree with that, the rights-as-entirely-human construct school is a long way from a philosophical monopoly, and there's a lot of people who'll call that one bullshit too.

Is arithmatic a human construct? Both yes and no. I view rights the same way. And most of ethics. You need sentience to understand ethics, but I think there are inherently better and worse ethical systems.

At least legal marriage isn't a right, in my opinion. Association is, though, and contract, provided no deception is involved, and I think there should be some things that you can't contract away.

Association's an interesting case, which I'm sure I'll probably claim something about later, if I can skip over that one for now.

Contract, I agree, but marriage as contract gets tricky, because there's all sorts of issues with which standard things in normal contracts you can't really apply to marriage (as gets icky pretty fast, as per my comment above), and arguably you might have parties to the contract who didn't exist at the time it was made, depending on how you want to handle children.

Not that I'm saying you can't construct marriage on top of contract, and I would say it's probably a good idea, even, but it gets really complicated very fast.

Crap! Damn you Hobbes. I love the taste of crow in the morning. Apparently some people do take the concept of 'natural rights' seriously. I'll get around to claiming my distaste for that train of thought later, I guess.