Simply saying: “your starting assumption is trash, therefore your rationale is trash” is not doing anything other than playing the stick-your-finger-in-your-ears-and-talk-louder game. 
(I don’t like to use “gay” or “queer” to refer to homosexuals because those words have different meanings than homosexual. I’m gay and queer pretty much all of the time… but I’m not homosexual… I hope that doesn’t offend anyone. I’m taking them back for the sake of the English vocabulary!)
That’s a pretty piss-poor reason to deny tens of millions of Americans rights, don’t you think? Your gut intuition isn’t something I’m standing in awe of.
The only reason to deny a right to someone is if there is a compelling reason. You don’t have any idea what or why something would happen, so you can’t tell me if the reason is compelling enough.
If a hypothetical compelling reason came up, I’d certainly consider it.
You admit that you have no idea what the negative consequences would be in the immediate future. But you want us to imagine some negative consequences 40 years from now?
I mean, gimmie a clue, man! Do you mean that conservative old bigots will grumble more? Or that God will rain down fire and brimstone on America?
Will scientists discover that heterosexuals have taken to murdering their children because there is a killler gene in straight people that is activated 40 years after the first time they see two guys or two gals tieing the knot? If it were something that horrible, yes, I would support making ssm illegal again. I would be willing to make that sacrifice for my country.
But this sounds kind of like science fiction, does it not?
If you, an opponent of gay marriage, can’t imagine a single negative consequence for the forseeable future, does that maybe tell you something?
If my posting above lists seven countries outside the US that have ssm, some for almost a decade, without negative consequences, does THAT tell you something?
I’d want President Newt Gingrich to sign the ban into law personally, because your scenario is about as likely as mine.
Sure, and if it was proven that high-definition television caused Spontaneous Eyeball Explosion (SEE) I’d want that banned, too.
Flippancy aside, yes… if there was a dramatically negative consequences and if it was, without doubt, caused by gay marriage and if the harm was such that depriving some individuals of their rights was necessary to preserve society as a whole, then yes, I’d support a ban. Of course now I’m curious what hypothetical negative consequences you have in mind, assuming it was anything more than that vaguest of notions.
Except you want a special priviledge for people who are prejudiced because of their church. What about people who are prejudiced because of their dad? If your dad raised you and said that black people are worthless until you believed it, do you think you’d not be racist?
Your argument is stupid. It doesn’t matter why someone wants to oppress people. It’s the desire to commit the oppression that makes them prejudiced. Seriously, is this the best you people can do? :dubious:
‘Gay’ and ‘queer’ pretty much just mean ‘homosexual’ nowadays. Go ahead and use them to describe yourself, but expect people to take them to mean that you like men.
Depends on the consequences.
If the consequence is that on November 18th, 2061 all the remaining religious Christian conservatives left after the coming of Cthulhu feel a slight rumbling in their tumblies - heck no! It stays legal!
If 40 years down the road people’s heads start exploding left and right, and this can somehow be traced back to SSM - then heck yeah! Ban it!
So, these significant consequences you imagine might happen but which are so significant and world-changing that you can’t even articulate them…what do you suppose they might be? Hazard a guess.
What if instead of trash, we say “purely arbitrary”?
Of course it would be “ok.” That is, if by “OK” you mean, would it be rational, and would it be governmentally moral. Indeed, that sort of law would hardly be unconstitutional. Would I agree with it? Of course not, but then that’s because I start from different assumptions. But I’m not so intolerant of other assumptions as to assert that the laws of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or the Islamic Republic of Iran are somehow inherently wrong, a violation of basic principles of government that all people should be able to enjoy the merits of.
Your cherished notion has no place in anything relating to the Founding Fathers. They would be horrified at the notion that homosexuals were being allowed to marry. And they did NOT, contrary to popular opinion of the Constitution, “try and avoid one group’s views trumping everyone else’s.” The had very narrow concerns. The did not want a Federal State Religion, because they didn’t want those who were practitioners of other religions to suffer the agonies they had suffered in England/Great Britain under the events of the prior three hundred years. The were concerned with making sure that individual states were not subsumed in some gigantic federal monster, removing the ability of the individual states to order their societies accordingly (notice how that’s gone totally out the window; California isn’t allowed in your mind to disallow a type of marriage Iowa allows ). They most certainly didn’t believe in “freedom of choice” (whatever that means!); please note that many of the states of the original union practiced religious discrimination of one sort or another through almost modern times! And in the history of our country, we have routinely allowed one group to trample the rights of another group, often on the flimsiest of pretexts.
But you are right that as a society we should try to root out such behavior. That explains your vehemence, it certainly justifies your attempts to overturn such behavior, but it does not provide a good reason for pointing at those with alternate assumptions or viewpoints and dismissing their viewpoints out of hand, on the basis that they are somehow irrational and their proponents are just evil people.
Who said anything about “excellent.” Not all rational reasons are excellent, as I am often reminded of as I listen to my Geometry students justify their incorrect answers. 
Do you even have an idea or conjecture as to what they might be? If not, what you’re describing is fear of the unknown, not a concern with some legitimate basis.
It would depend largely, if not entirely, on who gets to decide that these things are negative and who gets to determine that the consequences are due solely to the legalization of SSM.
For instance, let’s say that 50 years from now, the state of North Somewhere sends Joe W. Smith, a politically and socially conservative politican who also happens to be a member of an extremely religiously conservative Christian denomination, to Congress. JWS personally believes that homosexuality is disgusting, and his church also teaches that homosexual people are abominable and sinful. He believes that any society that tolerates homosexual sex is degenerate, and legal same-sex marriage is a degenerate’s degeneracy. As far as JWS is concerned, America is in a sorry state, and it’s due precisely to legal same-sex marriage. He mounts a campaign to make SSM illegal, claiming that SSM has had negative consequences.
Would I support making SSM illegal again in this case? No, I would not, because I do not believe that Joe W. Smith is capable of making an objective decision on this subject. Argument from religion is not objective.
Explain to me how your starting point (there is nothing inherently amoral about homosexuality) is any less arbitrary?
ALL mores are arbitrary at some level. Even an otherwise common and excellent more such as “killing is wrong” is arbitrary, and that arbitrariness is why even such an excellent more ends up having exceptions.
No, the majority of Californians (or, a slim majority of those Californians who voted) thought it should not be legal for two people of the same sex or gender to marry. Prop 8 didn’t address morality. It addressed legality. Morality and legality aren’t the same. Don’t confuse them.
It doesn’t matter if I think they are bigoted or not (that’s a matter of definition more than anything) - what matters is if they are able to provide a compelling reason to do things their way. Personally I don’t care if somebody is bigoted against gays - if they can still provide a separate, rational, compelling reason to ban gay marriage, then I shall listen. To do otherwise is to fall into the Ad Hominem fallacy.
What you are conveniently mixing up is that these “mores”, as you call them, are a flimsy and worthless standard upon which to legislate unless they are also defensible by some objectively rational argument. Which is to say, we may have originally made laws against murder because we copied them from the ten commandments, but the reason we still have them is because there are compelling objective arguments for discouraging murder. Whereas we may have originally had blue laws about businesses being open on Sunday because they were pushed from a pulpit, but we’ve since torn them all up because there’s no objective, rational reason why people who want to shop on Sunday should be prevented from doing so.
Anti SSM laws are blue laws, I’m sure you will agree.
This distinction between random mores and rational mores is a very real thing, and glossing over it or pretending it doesn’t exist is tantamount to pretending that America is a theocracy. Sorry, no - that is not the reality of the situation - at least not at the moment.
No.
The will of the people does not prevail here.
Read up on the Tyranny of the Majority and our FF’s views on the subject.
Barring a compelling reason to trample on other’s rights in this country we do not do it (or try not to anyway).
We have been at this thread for several hundred postings, I think, and NOT ONE opponent of SSM has given us a credible example of objective harm that can be caused to society by same-sex marriage.
By “objective” I mean a harm that any citizen, no matter what his religious beliefs, would see as actually hurting society.
I do not mean that members of the religious right will be outraged that those queers are not being kept in their place.
By the way, I am thinking of deserting this thread, which seems to be played out, and starting another: Instead of asking people to say what the negative consequences of ssm might be, why not start discussing what the positive consequences might be?
Only because we’ve gone beyond it at this point. I think you will find that most of those who oppose same-gender marriage would prefer that the civil unions be struck from the law as well. And if they manage to get some traction going, they may try for that next, with another focused, targeted constitutional amendment.
Not all prejudice is bigotry, but certainly religion can be the font of bigotry. But the issue isn’t “Biblical support” or lack thereof. It’s an assumption about a certain type of activity. Which is why this isn’t the same as having a religious belief that “blacks” are inferior. As I said, simply asserting that homosexual acts are immoral does not mean that you view any given homosexual person as inferior.
Of course, some do, and those people are, indeed, potential bigots.
I consider not a moral issue at all, hence I feel no more need to discuss its morality than I’d discuss its effect on the orbit of Jupiter. My own syllogism is:
Citizens of Group A have a certain right. (demonstrably true)
Citizens of Group B also want this right. (demonstrably true)
No harm has been shown or plausibly argued as likely to occur if Group B gets the right. (demonstrably true, but subject to modification if the anti-SSM crowd ever present a well-constructed argument, such as has been requested repeatedly)
Therefore, extend the right to Group B.
My starting point is just fine, thank you.
They would almost certainly also be horrified at the notion of a black (mixed-race, whatever) President, women and Jews in high office all over the place, and mixed-race couples pretty much anywhere you care to go these days.
If I taught Geometry, I’d have to steal this for my sig.