IIRC, some of the “marriage protection” amendments that have passed do include language forbidding marriage or “anything substantially like marriage” in an attempt to preempt civil unions.
“You people.” You make an assumption there, one that could well be unwarranted. I’ll let you figure it out. 
I don’t want a “special” privilege for anyone. Like it or not, the concept that two people of the same gender should be allowed to marry isn’t accepted without qualm by a majority of the people of the nation. So if a large part of society has a certain assumption about morality, it’s hardly a “special exception” to have a law based upon that morality.
And of course I’d be racist. But the morality I raised wasn’t “anti-gay,” it was “homosexual practices are immoral.” That’s different entirely. The fact that many people hold both opinions simultaneously doesn’t negate that fact.
You want to opress people who are murderers, I’m willing to bet. You probably also are quite happy to opress those who fail to pay their taxes, those who refuse to return library books, and those who can’t see well enough to pass the eye exam for a driving license. I don’t hear you fretting that you are “prejudiced” as a result.
But continue in your approach, if you prefer. If it seems easier to you to demonize the opposition, and thus refuse to engage them in actual dialogue, since all you’ll be saying is, “You fucking bigot! You’re WRONG!”, then go ahead. Of course, you aren’t doing anything positive to advance your agenda that way, but hey <shrug> whatever floats your boat…
That you’re in the set of people presenting arguments in opposition to legalizing SSM?
At last, I have done what none of the opponents of ssm have been able to do over almost 400 postings in this thread. I have finally been able to come up with an objectively harmful and negative effect that same-sex marriage could have on American and western society.
Fundamentalist Muslim fanatics who consider the US a corrupt great Satan (and its allies little Satans) would have one more accusation to throw at us. “By the Beard of the Prophet (Peace be unto Him) not only do they not lash and execute homosexuals, but they actually allow them to marry as if they were man and wife! Surely Allah will strike them down for their corruption.”
Of course, they could say the same about gender equality or freedom of religion, I suppose. But I have found a genuine negative effect of ssm, after two days of trying! Are you proud of me???
And I’m not arguing with your syllogism. But your syllogism depends upon this step:
No harm has been shown or playsibly argues as likely to occur
In your viewpoint. Why? Because you don’t accept the assumption of those who define certain behavior as immoral/amoral. As I indicated, that will lead you to a different conclusion from them.
Which is fine until you start pointing at their conclusion and asserting not that it’s badly reasoned, not that it’s likely to lead to a society with flaws they and you would prefer to avoid, but that it’s inherently wrong because they are “bigots.” Which, as you will recall, is my only dog in this fight.
Exactly. I have said nothing argumentative about legalizing same-gender marriages. You have no basis for concluding what my position on them is at all. And, if you have reached the conclusion your statement appears to imply, you might well be wrong as to my personal views on the subject.
I’d be prouder of you if you hadn’t described 364 as “almost 400”.
And I rebut your argument by claiming that they already hate us infinity-much, and thus will act precisely the same with or without this impetus. As I can successfully blow off an increase in irritation in local religious zealots, I can *certainly *blow off an increase in irritation in foreign religious zealots, unless you can convince me there will be an actual change in their behavior.
I still rate your argument a 3 out of 10, though - at least as good as anything else in this thread gets.
I must have completely misread your post 340, then, because it departs from just abstractly arguing that we shouldn’t be ad-homineming the bigots and by my read explicitly argues that the social more against SSM should be respected at a legal level.
And I don’t care what your personal views are; just your arguments (though I may be in the minority about that).
I know you’re of the group that thinks it can produce a non-prejudiced argument against SSM. Said group has thusfar produced drivel similar to what you’ve produced. So peel your wink back Lash LaRue, you aren’t as clever as you think.
First off most people thought slavery was moral at one point. Rights are given to everyone unless there is a compelling reason. Liberty can be suspended if you kill someone and so on. So forbidding marriage rights without a reason other than “Those people are gross” (which by the way is exactly what you’re arguing) is moronic.
Sorry chester, you think that gays don’t deserve marriage rights because the are immoral sinners. That makes you prejudiced.
There are obvious societal effects to letting killers and tax evaders run free. There has been no negative societal effect suggested by the anti-SSM crowd.
One more time, since you seem to have trouble keeping up: There has been no negative societal effect suggested by the anti-SSM crowd.
My boat floats because it pushes away a volume of water that weighs more than it does. Your boat seems to float because “gays are immoral”. :dubious:
Fact: You have yet to make an argument that doesn’t depend on prejudice.
Re-read the post, then. You have reached an incorrect conclusion as to what it says. :eek:
That’s a completely unfair summary of magellan01’s arument. His position is not “Separate but equal is TOO okay.” Instead, his position is “My proposal is true equality and the fact that everyone else thinks that it’s ‘separate but equal’ merely demonstrates that the rest of the world is just too obtuse and/or stubborn to grasp my brilliance.”
At long last, we’ve found the target audience for Mallard Fillmore.
You aren’t a person?
OMFG ROBOTS ARE POSTING IN FORUMS!!!
Well, it’s actually I don’t give a fuck about the morality arguments because they’re endlessly flexible and arbitrary. I’m only interested in the harm arguments, because this, at least, has some element of tangibility.
Anyway, bigot is as bigot does. While I don’t see the value of applying the label as anything other than an emotional appeal, I feel casually confident in pointing out that the arguments being used today are the same as were applied in the fifties and sixties to keep blacks in their place.
Who said anything about special exception? Lobohan didn’t. What he was saying is that the kind of privilege they want is special in that it is not based on anything objective and yet they would want universal application to the detriment of a portion of the population.
And why should that determine the law? Absent any objective rationale, why should your own view about homosexual practices determine the rights and the name applied to the action that secures those rights?
Because there is a rationale behind those restrictions - which is precisely what was asked by the OP. If you can’t see the difference…wow…just…wow!
But can you really blame people for conjecturing if it’s all bigotry if none of the opponents of gay marriage have been able to provide any objective and compelling rationale behind their opposition. I could use the same arguments some of the opponents of ssm right now and with a little tweaking apply it to blacks and inter-racial marriage and everyone who hears it will universally recognize it for what it is - bigoted.
I proposed a perfectly good negative societal effect. You just dismiss it as being not worthy of consideration. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a negative societal effect; it means you don’t agree that it is a negative societal effect.
Now, if you can’t be persuaded that there are negative social effects from allowing same-gender marriages, then one would presume that you would see no reason to block them. But that’s different than saying that someone who DOES see that as a negative societal effect has no rational basis for his/her desire to block them. As to the two of you, you are at impass, unless you can convince the other person that
a) their initial assumption is wrong (homosexual practices are not immoral),
b) society won’t suffer from negative social effects if the marriages are allowed (for example by noting that homosexual sexual practices haven’t appeared hampered in California by the lack of even civil unions until recently, so allowing marriage isn’t going to increase much of anything), or
c) the negative societal effects aren’t sufficient reason to allow the practice to be outlawed (same-gender marriages should be provided constitutional protection by application of accepted law on the subject, for example).
None of what you are doing here is designed, in my opinion, to accomplish any of these three.
You argue that there are more anti-SSMers than pro. You argue that IF we want to have SSM recognized, we should endeavor to change their morals. For this to make a lick of sense, you must be arguing that until popular opinion is in favor of SSM, the social more against SSM should be respected at a legal level.
Deal with it, dude.
You anti-robot bigot! :eek:
You had best be “casually” confident because to somehow equate the two is to do two things:
-
fail to understand the substantial difference between the two, and
-
IMHO really, really be insulting to the former slaves, who were treated in a way even in the 50s and 60s that bears very little relationship to how gays are treated in this country on the whole.
But I understand, I think, what you are really trying to say, which is that you think most anti-gay people are anti-gay out of knee-jerk prejudice, without much thought on the subject, and thus act out of spite, rather than true rationality.
But you are right that morality as an arguing point is flexible and arbitrary. That’s why arguing against someone who is holding a viewpoint based on their “morality” is hard to do. If your starting point on the abortion topic is that a fetus is a “human being” entitled to the same legal protections as you or I have (an assumption rooted in religious morality for many), your discussion of abortion will get almost no where with someone who doesn’t have that assumption, because no matter what they say, no matter how reasonable their arguments, your morality is going to trump their rationality. It’s like punching a big airbag; it always pops back into place. :mad:
It should be easy to quantify, if it exists, in lowered employment, GDP per capita, birth rates, literacy, life expectancy, or any number of measurable benchmarks.
How do you propose your “perfectly good negative societal effect” be measured and proven to exist? magellan has proposed that it’ll take 40 years or so for the effects to be felt. Assuming your proposed effect exists, how would we know? What signs should we look for?
If it boils down to something unprovable like “Americans will become less moral”, then I don’t see how it is worthy of consideration, since there’s nothing tangible to consider.