That’s not working for Judge Sotomayor and it’s not working for you either! 
Oh, if you want empathetic, millions of Americans see the joys and security of marriage denied to them. Why would a just and merciful God torment them so, making them love others in a way others spit upon? Surely in America, land of the free, it need not be so. Why must their suffering go unremedied? To swear before all, in freedom and in love, to share one’s life with another 'til death do them part, how could this possibly offend God or a nation that holds liberty and individual freedom as ideals?
…
I could pile it on for five or six hundred more words, I guess; sappy emotional appeals about freedom and love and such. By the “empathetic form” you’re claiming, surely I could compose something just as heart-tugging and hopelessly vague and entirely unprovable as whatever it is that you’ve been trying to sell.
It’s not quantifiable at all, which is what “intangible” means. This is the contradiction in your argument - that something will be lost, but what that something is, is impossible to say, or describe, or even know for certain when the loss occurs. The “loss” you describe isn’t unique to conservatives or Christians, it’s felt by anyone over the age of 30 who sees the culture changing in a way that was, in one’s youth, somewhere between unlikely and inconceivable.
Heck, I remember when the Berlin Wall fall and feeling utter surprise and a bit of unsettlement. Since my childhood, that Wall had been a clear-cut symbol of international politics. Then it was gone and who knew what to think?
I survived, obviously, and adapted to the change. So will the people you’re defending.
Poor you. It’s rare for sarcasm actually to move me to tears, but you managed it here. You suffer under such cruelty and unfairness–no wonder you have to erect straw men in order to demonstrate why you believe your opponents are bigotbigots!
I weep for you; I deeply sympathize.
[/viewing the thread empathetically rather than rationally]
Wow surreal. hint: I am not the one viewing my opponents as bigots.
Ladies and gentlemen we have entered bizarro world.
Luckily for all of us, I’ll never be nominated for the supreme court and do not have to worry about such frivolous nonsense.
You heard it, I repeated it. They will lose aspects of the culture that were once mainstream but will now be marginalized. That is the argument. You just choose to diminish it. You don’t want to hear what I have to say, if you did, you would hear it, every time I repeat it. No, you want me to say what you want to hear. That’s an entirely different beast entirely.
The only one deflecting my dear, is you. I’ve been straight forward and consistent in my answering.
Yes, I have sympathy for them too, which is why I support SSM. I am not the bete noir you guys want to thrash, I am just proving a poor substitute.
Entirely unprovable. Ok, prove to me that homosexuals actually love each other. That’s it’s REALLY ACTUALLY love, you know, not some vague intangible. :rolleyes:
Quantify how much homosexuals are capable of loving each other and then prove it’s in the same quantity as heterosexuals. :rolleyes:
Who indeed?
On a long enough timeline you will not survive the fall of the Berlin wall and neither will they survive this, barring some kind of wonder drug of course. 
It’s kind of interesting to me that you choose only to respond to snarky posts from me, not from substantive ones :). At any rate, did you not suggest that people were bigots for using the term bigot so freely? Maybe I have you confused with someone else.
I actually responded to several posts in a row. I responded to you, Bryan Ekers, Whack-A-Mole and Lobohan.
Yes, I suggested that they were bigots, but only in an attempt to show how useless that term is in determining a person’s rationale. It begs the question, “Why are they bigots?”, which gets us right back to the question, “What is their rationale?”
Wait, I have to prove an intangible? Gosh, the rules are so confusing.
I’ll just say it is REAL, and note my mighty capital letters, and talk about how it isn’t the place of an SSM opponent to question the love of others and such. From my observations, this exactly meets the requirements of an empathetic argument.
Clearly the quantity of homosexual love is less than the quantity of heterosexual love because there are more heterosexuals than homosexuals.
See what I did? When faced with a question I couldn’t answer in any meaningful way, I latched onto some minor literal element and responded to that, to stall for time. That’s something else I learned from your empathetic approach.
Case in point.
The thing that I most notice is the one-sidedness of the empathy. One group hates and activiely tries to marginalize another group? Sympathize with the first group for the arduous trial of having things in thier general viscinity that don’t really affect them much, but which bother them anyway!
And never mention the problems of the other group. And especially don’t compare the two.
And who here has failed to acnowledge that some people will feel oppressed that other people are given the right to marry? Who here wants you to say otherwise?
No. What people want you to do is admit that the fact these people will be bothered pales in comparison to every other consideration. That, true it might be, it still is not an argument that SSM should be denied.
Thus, when pitying your poor noble put-upon self in keeping with the spirit of your post, I pointed out that all your opponents are bigotbigots. We’re not in bizarro world after all.
‘Don’t handwave it away, prove it!’ (imitation of Bryan Ekers)
I meant quantity per capita. Prove to me that their love is really real and of equal value to a heterosexuals?
Umm, no, that’s not what I ever did. I told you I couldn’t quantify something that was unquantifiable.
Yeah, you just don’t deal with me fairly. That’s the bottom line. For you debate is not about understanding a side it’s about winning the argument. For me it’s about understanding.
Not everything that has value is quantifiable. If that concept is too difficult for you to grasp that is not a failing on my part.
Well that settles it. Proof positive, you don’t even READ my posts.
Why should I argue the SSM marriage side when literally EVERYONE ELSE is arguing that one? If I didn’t have sympathy for it why would I say, over and over and over that I am pro-SSM? Oh yeah, because I want to fool everyone into thinking that I am not really a crypto-Evangelical. :rolleyes: I forgot. You nailed me Begbert2.
Left Hand of Dorkness So you really had nothing to add you just wanted to participate in the pile-on? Carry on then. Enjoy.
Again, I note that you didn’t respond to my substantive earlier post about the uselessness of decrying the death of culture. You love to rise to snark, but you glaze over substantive posts.
Again: there’s nothing significant about the death of culture (or whatever term you use for it), except that it makes a bunch of people sad. Culture doesn’t die, it changes. A culture that doesn’t change is in such a state because it’s dead already–see, for example, ancient Roman culture, which no longer changes.
People are sad about the legalization of gay marriage. We ask, “Why does it make you sad?” Your answer boils down to, “Because it makes them sad.” That’s not an answer, it’s a tautology.
It is, however, probably the real answer: it makes them sad because it makes them sad. It also makes them sad because they’re viscerally disgusted by homos, and although they can’t admit that in polite company, they can flutter their hands and gnash their teeth about the death of morality or other tommyrot.
The fact that you show empathy for them is barely admirable (the amount of self-backpatting you’ve done for your empathy means you’ve already received all the admiration you’re due for it). But it’s ridiculous to suggest that their tautological sadness and icky-poo revulsion has any relevance in the political arena.
I don’t need you or magellan to prove that evangelicals will be upset - this is fairly obvious, after all - I’ve always wanted you or megellan to prove that them being upset (or some other consequence of gay marriage) is a sufficient argument to reconsider supporting gay marriage. Magellan, for example, hinted at dire consequences 40 years from now, but was never able to describe what he thought they might be, or how they might come about.
It is REAL. Capital letters prove all.
Umm, yeah, it is. Sorry.
And for most people this would be a strong indicator that their position was, to be charitable, shaky. If this was a purely religious debate or we were analyzing free will or something equally purely philosophical, and there was never going to be a real-world application, fine; we could throw unquantifiables back and forth indefinitely.
Trouble is, there is a real-world application under discussion and millions of real people who see what millions of other real people have and ask, not unjustly, why they should be denied by the people on whose behalf you claim to be arguing.
Well, it’s mostly about entertainment for me. The battle’s already won in my country and will soon enough be won in yours as well. Frankly, I’m hoping this is indeed a sign of a continuing evaporation of the influence of evangelical Christianity in the United States, because a lot of damage has been done in its name.
It’s an easy concept to grasp. Perhaps I’m simply not stupid enough to find intangibles to be persuasive in this discussion, though.
You are REALLY STARTING TO PISS ME OFF with your “you don’t agree with me or praise my argumentive skill or whatever the hell I want so you must not be reading me or understanding me or in some other way you must be deficient 'cause I certainly can’t be” line of festering, pusillanimous bullshit.
Stop blaming the messenger when your posts convey things you don’t like. Especially when doing so requires you to retreat behind ad-hominem to protect your little illusions of self-perfection.
Let’s be QUITE clear here. Are you, or are you not, deliberately and persistently arguing positions that you not only don’t hold, but also know are complete bullshit in your zeal to accurately portray a member of the opposing position? Is your persistence in beating a dead horse, arguing that molehills are mountains and mountains are molehills, repeatedly bringing up blatantly fallacoius definitional argumements after they have already been defeated - is all this really nothing more than a deliberate act to pretend that we really do have an irrational, possibly bigoted religious zealot to argue against?
Because if you are trying to mimic such a person, well done - your act is perfect. Flawless in every way.
However allow me to submit that it is possible to bring up and discuss an argument without engaging in the fallacious argumentive tactics required to support it. The discussions will be short, true - but far more fulfilling on all sides.
TWEEEEEEEEEET!!!
Everyone back off.
These threads got boring a week or two ago with the repetitive name-calling and substanceless hostility. You are all beginning to look like you’re trying to see how far you have to go to get a Warning and I am about to close down the thread.
[ /Moderating ]
Prove to me that heterosexual love really real and of equal value to that of homosexuals.
Because that’s common practice for people holding that sort of position who want to avoid being condemned for it. I bet some of your best friends are homosexual too.
I can’t it’s intangible. That was kind of the point.
Some of my best friends are atheists. ;p