Wrong. You have offered only fear, not “rationality” of any kind.
All this time, all these posts, and only *now *are you going to get around to actually addressing the topic? Only now?
That has to be about the lamest thing ever said on this board, and that took some doing. Until the time you provide some reason for opposition other than irrational fear, you can certainly expect frequent reminders of that remarkable offer you just made.
I hope you’re aware of how often ignorance and hate are given the label of religious doctrine in order to make them appear respectable.
Nonsense. When you have ONE water system that’s accessed through TWO means (white-only and black-only fountains) that’s seperate-but-equal and clearly wrong.
But when you have ONE system of laws that’s accessed through TWO means (straight-only marriages and gay-only civil unions) that’s true equality for reasons that are clear to magellan01 if no-one else.
mswas is clearly going for the old “You can’t call it ignorance and hate if it’s religion !” dodge. Which isn’t any more valid for religious claims of the Evils of Gays than it was for religious claims that blacks should be slaves or that women should submit to men.
One more time:
I am not seeing how mswas gets to handwave away “bigotry” as used here. The word means something. To wit:
Seems to me the shoe fits perfectly for those opposed to SSM. It is not “vague” and there is no “false equivalence”. The word takes no note of why a person is a bigot.
In the opposition to the SSM debate I clearly see obstinance and intolerance from people devoted to their own prejudices and treat homosexuals with hatred and/or intolerance.
Pretty straightforward.
It could be fifty or a hundred more times, but it’ll never resolve the underlying problem - the lack of trust that for any and all purposes, present and future, the people in a civil union will have the exact same rights and privileges as those in a marriage. Looking at historical precedent, consider the difficulties faced by blacks in southern states when trying to register to vote. On paper, they had that inalienable right, but barriers can and were put in their way by local officials who would use flimsy letter-of-the-law justifications that made it harder for blacks but were shrugged off for whites. The Alabama Literacy Test of 1965 is a classic example.
Consider a local official who doesn’t like gay people for whatever reason and takes it upon himself to oppose gay civil unions. He can, in the name of doing the paperwork right, pile on any number of ridiculous requirements for said civil union and reject the application if the paperwork is not filled out perfectly. Existing marriage-license requirements are relatively straightforward, but who’s to say how comprehensive a civil-union application must be? Fifty questions? A hundred? Five hundred? And these can be changed quite freely because, after all, it won’t hurt any normal people, who can continue to get married - it’ll just inconvenience the fags.
But let’s assume the law tries to prevent this potential for abuse by including some bold language along the lines of “For any and all legal purposes, present and future, and under all circumstances real and imagined, a civil union created in this or any other legal jurisdiction shall be treated as equivalent to marriage.” Do you see such language being written in all fifty states? If it isn’t, I hope you can see the potential for “slippage” where civil unions are not the legal equivalent of marriage, and the potential for abuse where (for example) the surviving member of a CU must fight all the way to their state’s supreme court to resolve an inheritance issue that would be a mere rubber-stamp in a marriage.
Despite mswas’s claims, this is not an emotional issue. It’s a mere recognition of reality.
Well the question is why we should consider the cultural mores of the Nuer culture when determining our own? What relevance does it have to how we organize our culture? Have we in the past taken Nuer tribal custom as a guidepost to making law in this country?
Captain Carrot I’m sorry if I am making an argument step by step and you see that as, ‘shifting goalposts’. New information when presented is analyzed by its merit. Some African tribes cut off women’s clitorises, so we need to establish the authority African tribal cultural practice over the American legal system.
If you guys wanted to drop the asinine line of argument where you insist that marriage hasn’t been defined as between a man and a woman in the mainstream of our culture for centuries then of course we don’t need to go down this road.
Can we just operate on the assumption that it make no difference if the concept of gay marriage was invented last Tuesday or ten million years ago? I’ve never understood why the novelty of the issue was relevant.
I admit I was asking a leading question in order to construct the argument. When I said I hadn’t seen any examples, it’s true I hadn’t, but I already knew that if such examples were presented they’d be irrelevant as they wouldn’t fit within the cultural framework we are working with.
So I thank you for providing an example, now we can argue its relevance. It was much easier for people to evade and dodge before you provided the example because they were remaining in an abstract realm of cultural relativism. Now that we can deal with facts we can move forward and narrow the field.
As you have established that there is an example of an African tribe, we can now narrow our search to a ‘Western’ culture. And to show where this is going after we establish western cultural tradition we can get more granular to American cultural tradition if we need to. I doubt it will be necessary because I am fairly confident that there is not a single example of homosexual marriage being culturally normative in the West at any time in the past 1000 years.
Have we actually established that the cultural normativity of SSM is at all relevant to the OP?
Well because you want to redefine the definition of marriage of course. If you want to redefine it you have to give sufficient justification. If marriage means, between a man and a woman, then homosexuals are being denied nothing. If it doesn’t mean that then that’s different. But that is the core of the debate. My problem is that you guys keep asking these questions about the subject and then handwave the core of the argument away as if it’s irrelevant, it’s not irrelevant. I think a much stronger case can be made for the decision to broaden the definition of marriage rather than pretending like it’s always been this broad.
To come back to the OP though:
What, specifically, would be the negative consequences of allowing gays to marry?
Specifically it would create a problem for those who think that homosexuality is an immoral act. If this does not apply to you, of course you think there would be no harm, but if it does apply to you then there is actual harm being done, as has been pointed out by people time and again that state sponsored schools will be teaching acceptance of homosexuality(sin).
It touches on a deeper problem, that of separation of church and state. Really the problem with the notion of separation of church and state is that it is so narrowly defined that it is a convenient way to eliminate one philosophical approach i.e. that which has been codified into a religion in favor of other philosophical approaches, i.e. that which has not been codified into a religion. Really what a religion is, is a community of belief. So this interpretation of the separation of church and state favors informal communities of belief over formal communities of belief. I fully expect this line of reasoning to be lost on the vast majority of posters in this thread, as it almost universally is when I bring it up, but I find it very interesting myself.
Whack-a-mole It’s not descriptive. So they are bigots…yeah…and? Calling them bigots is a way to shout down discussion, it’s uncivil and unproductive. I don’t care if they are bigots 100% to the core. Repeating, “They are bigots”, over and over is a puerile tactic that tells us next to nothing about their mindset.
If you haven’t then you should have. Because if you don’t see it’s relevance then you aren’t capable of actually understanding any responses to the OP. The harm is relevant in its damage to the culture as it is exists. It is disruptive to traditional practices. That is where the harm lies. So you think that it’s an acceptable price to pay, mainly because it’s not your culture that would be harmed by it, that’s ok make your decision, but if you want an honest answer to the question then ignoring the cultural normativity will preclude you from ever being able to understand the answer to your own question.
Is the love that is shared between a man and a woman unique and special enough to deserve its own unique and special celebration?
If so, then I think that is the most convincing argument to protect marriage as a heterosexuals-only union.
So a negative consequence of allowing gay marriage is… heterosexual couples who wish to celebrate the love that exists between a man and a woman will be robbed of the traditionally unique and special way of doing it.
Someone posted a great article from The Weekly Standard or National Review upthread that talks about the differences between Romantic Marriage and Marriage as cultural/social bond cementing kinship. Very interesting read, though I am not sure many in the thread actually read it. Marriage as a romantic bond is a recent thing, and ever since it has been emphasized over the kinship bond divorce has become quite common.
I’m sorry, but the case you cited has no bearing on the Constitution of the United States. Or are you forgetting that? 
The Supreme Court of the United States has not established that gender or sexual preference discrimination is a violation of Equal Protection subject to strict scrutiny. Nor have they said that there is a right to marry someone of the same gender. So my point is that you have an argument that it violates the Equal Protection Clause, but you do not have legal authority for your bare assertion that it does. Yet.
Case filed in federal district court in California just the other day attempting to assert that it does. Stay tuned.
Substituting “same-race” where I used “heterosexual” has… failed:
Marriage is not, traditionally, a celebration of a same-race union.
Didn’t say it did, nor did you limit your question to that. But the principles on which Goodridge was decided are exactly the same as those in the US Constitution. As I said, you really ought to read it sometime.
Nor have they said otherwise. They haven’t addressed it at all. That fact is not supportive of your position. That shit doesn’t work when Bricker tries it, and it doesn’t work for you either.
Note, btw, that it isn’t necessary even to consider appropriate levels of scrutiny if the rational basis test is not passed first. And it isn’t, as you know.
While you’re at it, you really ought to read Brown too. Hint: It wasn’t about blacks having the right to go to school.
Is your point also that there is a presentable argument to the opposite? No? Then kindly dispense with the Socrates act, please. Even he eventually got killed for it, and you’re no Socrates.
Exactly.