So, now, a rebuttal to an incorrect point must lead to a socially successful result?
Where, exactly, did this new rule come from?
Well played. 
40,000.
21,024,000,000 minutes, how do you measure. Measure those years.
You want an argument, Melchior? Sure, I’ll give you one, although I’ll be stunned if you reply to it with a post that’s longer than three sentences, two of which will (undoubtedly) be blank denials without any attempt at formulating a logical explanation for them.
“Marriage by definition is between opposite sexes. Same-sex marriage is, therefore, an oxymoron.”
Marriage does not refer to something that has an objective existence. A rock is a rock, regardless of what you call it. Marriage is purely conceptual, and therefore, as mutable as we want it to be. There is no objective object referred to by marriage whose characteristics remain the same regardless of what terminology is used to describe it.
So, if people want marriage to mean, “Any two people, including gays,” then that’s what marriage means. And that’s what the majority of people in this country want marriage to mean.
“Marriage is defined by tradition. If you ignore tradition, then it opens the door to changing the meaning of literally anything.”
Patently ridiculous. If you cannot defend the existence of a law other than by saying, “That’s how it’s always been,” then that law deserves to be repealed. The vast majority of laws (most particularly, the ones against murder, which you yourself bizarrely suggested would be repealed if we dispensed with tradition as the basis for our laws) have very good reasons for existing that have absolutely nothing to do with tradition.
“Gays can’t get married because they can’t have kids.”
So what? The number of couples in this country that include a post-menopausal woman alone vastly outnumber the number of potential same-sex marriages that would be contracted if SSM marriage became legal nationwide. To say nothing of all the other heterosexual marriages that are infertile for non-menopausal reasons, and the number of couples that are childless by choice, none of which have been presented by any side of this debate as “not real” marriages, or in any other way invalid.
“Yeah, but there’s other reasons, other than kids, for straight people to get married!”
So? Name one that doesn’t apply to same-sex couples.
“Well, marriage is an expression of a basic biological imperative, so it’s different, for some reason!”
Actually, the whole point of marriage, as originally conceived, was to put a muzzle on our biological imperative. The biological imperative in play here, for most human males, is to have as much sex as possible with the widest variety of partners as they can. Marriage, in theory, was meant to prevent people from following there base natural instincts, by forcing them to only have sex with one socially recognized partner.
“Okay, but Darwin…”
Darwinian evolution applies to population groups, not individuals. A non-fertile individual is not an “evolutionary dead-end” if having non-reproducing members in the group contributes to the group’s survival overall. This is particularly true among social predators (like humans) where the environment can only support a limited number before the ecosystem collapses.
In human terms, it’s an evolutionary advantage to have members of the group who can contribute to the group’s ability to gather resources, without the danger of increasing the group’s demand for resources. This is known as the “gay uncle” theory of human sexual evolution.
“But that’s a falla…”
I feel it’s important to re-iterate again that, in 8+ pages of this thread, as well as in every other thread in which you have participated on this subject, you have not only been consistently incapable of correctly identifying a logical fallacy, your own position exists *entirely *on two massive fallacies: The first is appeal to tradition (“This is the way it’s always been, and therefore, must always be”) and tautology (“Marriage is between a man and a woman because marriage is between a man and a woman”).
I would like to make it clear, however, that I’ve posted the above only in response to your repeated request for an argument. I do not, in anyway, want to dissuade you from continuing to vocally support marriage inequality in every venue available for you. I cannot think of a single thing you could do that would be more helpful to the eventual legalization of SSM, than to have you visibly oppose it. You are to the intellectual underpinnings of the anti-gay rights movement, what Fred Phelps was to it’s moral underpinnings. The more you talk about your position, the more it dissolves under your feet.
And just to borrow a page from Melchior’s playbook: if someone says custom is important for its own sake – not an anti-murder custom with an articulable justification behind it, but one backed only by the mere fact of custom itself – then I gotta ask: says who?
Miller, great post.
Jsgoddess, I applaud your prescience. Despite the massive derailment, the title of your OP actually still fits the thread perfectly.
Melchior: I’m going to respond just to a single part of your argument, the part concerning the meaning of the word “marriage” and how it can’t be changed. That doesn’t mean I don’t have responses to other claims you’ve made, just that I only have the energy to type up one argument at a time.
And this post will very clearly be a logical argument, not an insult, a drive-by, mockery, or anything else of the sort. If you respond to my claims politely and logically, I will extend the same courtesy to you.
So… it is clearly the case that there are gay and lesbian couples in the world today who wish to form lifelong romantic/familial with each other, and want societal and legal recognition of those relationships.
There are two questions this raises: (1) should the state provide recognition of those relationships? and if so, (2) what name should be used to describe them (with “marriages” and “civil unions” being the two main choices that people seem to discuss).
I’m not 100% sure whether your answer to (1) is yes or no, but it certainly seems to be the case that your answer to (2) is very much that the word “marriage” should not be used to describe these relationships.
(I assume, by the way, that you do acknowledge that there are in fact people who do in fact sincerely want these relationships… that is, it’s a real issue that affects real people.)
OK, so, what’s the right word to use? How do we decide what word to use when describing a new phenomenon?
Well, first of all, I claim that these relationships are VERY SIMILAR to traditional heterosexual marriages.
Heterosexual marriages (or at least version most commonly understood in the current culture of the USA) are:
-entered into by two consenting adults
-of opposite sexes
-who love each other
-and are committing to each other, usually exclusively
-intending it to be lifelong
-involving cohabitation
-and sex
-and often procreation
-and then child-raising
-possibly also raising children via adoption, or pre-existing stepchildren of either parent
-and a host of legal benefits are granted, including such things as power of attorney, various tax implications, etc.
The gay relationships under discussion are:
-entered into by two consenting adults
-of the same sex
-who love each other
-and are committing to each other, usually exclusively
-intending it to be lifelong
-involving cohabitation
-and sex
-possibly also raising children via adoption, or pre-existing stepchildren of either parent
-and a host of legal benefits are granted, including such things as power of attorney, various tax implications, etc.
So while I agree that the potential for biological procreation is a big and important feature of marriage, I think that if you look at the totality of the relationship, it’s very clear that these proposed gay relationships are clearly SIMILAR to traditional straight marriage.
So then the question becomes, there’s a new phenomenon, and it’s very similar to an existing phenomenon. What word should we use for it? The two obvious choices are to give it a brand new name, or to use the existing name, with an extra modifier sometimes needed.
As an example, currently we think of Strawberries as “red fruit with (some more precise details)”. If someone discovers a new type of fruit that is the shape of an strawberry, tastes and feels like an strawberry, has the same nutritional characteristics as a strawberry, can be cooked like a strawberry, but is purple, what should we call it? Should it be a “purple strawberry” or should it be a Voolberry?
To me, the answer is that we should do whatever makes language, going forward, the most clear and useful. And a lot of that depends on how interchangeable the two concepts are.
If you’re in the mood for a strawberry, are you also in the mood for a Voolberry? That is, if you say “hey, I’m hungry, can you bring me a strawberry”, would you be just as satisfied with a Voolberry? Presumably you would, because they taste exactly the same. So you’d say “hey, I’m hungry, please bring me a strawberry or a voolberry”. Language is more awkward, you had to use 3 extra words. If you want to ask someone if they like the taste of strawberries, you really kind of need to say “so, do you like the taste of strawberries and voolberries?”. If you want to ask the grocery store if they have any strawberries, you have to ask about strawberries and voolberries. Granted, there are some cases in which language gets simpler. If you are describing a shirt that was red with little brown spots in a diagonal pattern you can say “that shirt looked like a strawberry”, and that’s simpler than saying “that shirt looked like a red strawberry”. But overall, I think language is simpler with voolberries being a kind of strawberry, generally referred to as strawberries, with “purple strawberry” and “red strawberry” being used when necessary.
And in fact, you will notice that red apples and green apples are golden delicious apples are all apples, and blood oranges are oranges, and so forth.
So, how does that apply to marriage? Well, what are the contexts in which you actually talk about someone being married in every day life.
For instance, you might be chatting with a young person and you would say “so, do plan to get married if you meet the right person”? Or you could be a paramedic and someone is having a heart attack and you would be saying “uh oh, this is looking bad, anyone know if this guy is married?”. Or you could meet someone who you are flirting with and you want to know whether they’re available, so you ask if they’re married or not.
In all of those contexts, the language we’d have to use does not change at all if we allow gay marriage. The paramedic sees someone having a heart attack and says “does anyone know if this guy is married”, and that one question is equally valid if the guy is gay or straight. And clearly, language gets MORE complicated in many of these situations if we refer to committed gay relationships as civil unions, because you suddenly need to start sticking “and/or civil unioned” all over the place, much the way you have to start replacing “his” with “his or hers” when trying to use language in a gender-neutral fashion.
Granted, things get somewhat more confusing when there are children involved. A teacher might ask little bobby “so, little bobby, are your parents married?”. In a society in which the only possible relationships are straight marriages, that’s a nice simple question. But in our modern world, that question is ALREADY complicated, even without legal gay marriage. If Bobby is living with his father and his father’s very serious committed boyfriend, then “little Bobby, are your parents married” already has a very complicated answer, because maybe Bobby’s biological mom was a surrogate who Bobby’s dad hired, or maybe Bobby was adopted and never met his birth parents, and has grown up with two parental figures (two men) his whole life, etc. So yes, things get complicated there. But things are already complicated there. And at least part of the relevant information the teacher might want (whether Bobby is being raised by two people who are cohabiting and are committed to raising Bobby as part of a permanent family) can still be queried by asking about “marriage”, not “marriage and/or civil unioned”. Again, I think language is simpler with these gay relationships called “gay marriage”.
Finally, looking at all of this in a slightly different way, you have claimed repeatedly that the phrase “gay marriage” is meaningless, impossible, a contradiction, etc.
Well, clearly it’s a set of two words that can be typed and can be spoken. So think about it this way: Some guy comes up to you on the street and says “I’m an eccentric billionaire. I’m going to give you a reading comprehension and language quiz. If you pass it, I will give you a million dollars”. The first question is about a straight marriage… he say “Bob and Sue are married, which of the following statements are likely true”, followed by some yes/no questions about their marriage. The second question is about words that you just don’t understand… it’s something like “Dog fountain lisp upside ran comma?” followed by nonsensical questions. You fail these questions. But it’s best two out of three. The final question is “Mary and Elizabeth are married, which of the following statements are likely true” with some more questions about their (so-called) marriage. Would your response be “well, gee, that question just makes no sense, so I have idea what you mean, and I guess I’ll just flip a coin for each answer”? Or would you be able to actually gather and understand information from the sentence “Mary and Elizabeth are married”, enough to have a much-better-than-chance likelihood of answering the follow questions? Because if you could in fact answer those questions, then that implies that the concept of Mary and Elizabeth being married DOES mean something, that you DO understand the concept and the idea and the implication.
A few final thoughts:
-I suppose you could might agree with the arguments I’ve made here, and say that yes, purely in an efficiency-of-language standpoint it makes sense to call these relationships “marriages”, but then claim that there are some kind of weight-of-cultural-importance language arguments that override efficiency. That is, language would be possibly more efficient using “gay marriage” but it’s for some other set of reasons still BETTER overall to not use “gay marriage”. If so, can you explain to me what those other reasons are?
-I’m certainly not saying that the reason I support gay marriage is because it makes language more efficient. The reason I support gay marriage is because I think it’s wrong to deny rights to people because of who they love. I’m simply trying to address one facet of the argument that you have made.
Is Melchior actually a (very effective) false flag attack by gay marriage advocates?
Your post is filled with distortions and misunderstandings so vast that it defies belief, and I cannot imagine responding to this pile of excrement.
Nah. We’d have done it funnier.
ETA: Ninjaed…but it only proves my point.
Dang Miller, you were right.
So you were struck dumb.
As opposed to all the other posts you gave thoughtful replies to?
A man walks into an Italian restaurant and orders fettuccine Alfredo. In a few minutes the waiter brings a plate of fettuccine Alfredo (medium-sized noodles in a white cream sauce). He yells at the waiter and says “This is not what I want! I want that!” (and he points to another diner’s dish which contains pappardelle with marinara sauce). The waiter blushes and says perhaps the customer is mistaken about what that dish is called. The customer becomes enraged and insists that he is right and that he can call it what he wants.
Does this ring a bell? Does the customer have the right to call pappardelle with marinara sauce by the name fettuccine Alfredo? No, of course not. He is mistaken.
Miller wins.
You should probably reconsider the whole debating-on-the-Internet thing. You’re really bad at it.
Oh? Well if the use of argument matters I certainly have no competition here.
Yes, using an argument matters. Glad to hear you realize that know.
yes, I do use them here but nobody else does.
“If you oppose SSM then you are a homophome and a bigot who opposes equal rights”.
This is nothing less than intimidation and disingenuousness.
A man walks into an Italian restaurant and orders the pasta. The waiter replies that pasta comes in many forms and preparations.
The man insists there is ONLY spaghetti and meatballs because that’s all he has ever eaten and all he’s familiar with.
Does this ring a bell? Does the customer have the right to narrow the definition of pasta to meet his limited view? Of course not. He is mistaken