How is this equality? It seems like the opposite of equality to me.
Sure, but unless laws superceed biology, she’s still a woman.
Sure. Here in Peru mternity leave is up to 90 days. Paternity leave is 4 days.
That’s why I said “in the same way”.
Good for you that you weren’t affected.
Of course, the effects of a societal change like SSM are rarely felt immediately.
It’s good that you agree that the actions of others can affect you.
SSM will not affect your marriage in the two aspects you mentioned.
No. It’s as clear as it gets.
Exactly. In a society that live around equality, there are unequeal parts that don’t render it unequal as a whole.
There are, and will be, aspects of the law that will never be accessed by all in the same way.
First; you have absolutely NOTHING, to base that on.
2nd; Marriage as a societal legal institution was NEVER the ideal you and others think needs protection.
You’re talking about financial value which is not relevant. Nothing your neighbors do can change the quality of your love and comitment to your marriage. Nothing they do can change what you teach your children by lesson and example.
Using this analogy, what you’re doing is judgeing people as guilty before they enter your special club even though they’ve done nothing. You just don’t want thier kind associated with your club. That kind of judgement has happened before but we don’t call it “defending” or “protecting”
What we have is a disingenuous imagined ideal of marriage that is not reflected in actual history. What we also have is a real history of the struggle for equality for various groups and mankind in general. What we have is the existence of cultural and religious indoctrination paintiing some group as less than or worse, that we have slowly worked to overcome.
In specifics it is, but in general it’s about the bigger picture of equality and human rights, which is far more than a blip in history. We have a history of one group or another claiming that another group is not worthy of equality, and that they will sully the imagined purity of , a tribe, a nation, religious group etc etc all the way back to the story of the good, but hated Sammaritan. You’re familiar with that story right?
Really? Maybe when women got the right to vote they should have just called it something else. They could cast their preference rather than a vote. Then the people who oppposed thier right to vote as upsetting the obvious natural order of things would still feel special, and women would be placated, wouldn’t they?
The thing is, it’s you inventing something new by presenting marraige as some ideal that needs protecting from the evil that is homosexuality. An ideal that can only exist in the hearts and minds of indiviuals , and can’t be protected by denying equality , denying equality to others
What I propose is that you and others create that ideal and set it apart from the marriage you say is in shambles and about to be tainted by SSM. It will have all the legal rights of shambles marraige but be a shining example of what a real marriage ought to be. You and yours can lead by example without denying legal equality to others and continuing to harm people who have done you no harm.
btw; Covenant marriage is not really new. It’s one of the forms of marriage that already exists, but feel free to change the name and improve on it as you will.
But according to you it isn’t just about gender right? It isn’t just gender that makes marraige so special that it deserves to be protected right?
Again, NOTHING to show this is true. What people have a feeling about is equality and justice. About harm done to innocent people who haven’t harmed others, and it is indeed based on facts, and our principles of equality. More people are aware and educated on the issue, and that awareness, those facts, those principles, causing more and more people to change thier minds and reject old prejudices.
I realize you’d like to paint the issue as all emotion and opinion on both sides, but that is simply false.
then you haven’t gone back far enough. The problem at this point is that so many previously held notions have been shown false that they don’t come seriously come up anymore.
Is homosexuality a personal choice?
No
Is it a mental illness?
No
Are homosexual couples able to raise healthy happy children, and make long term loving comittments?
Yes
Are homosexuals just as capable of making great contributions to society in general?
Yes
I guess the new tact is to try and paint it as just a difference of opinion and all about emotion raher than facts and reason. The goal , I suppose, is to try and even the field for the side that has ZERO facts to support thier opinions.
It’s not working.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA… and this fifth grade style response really sums it up.
Of course this is true. Justice doesn’t involve treating everyone equally; if it did, I’d need to be executed, because somebody else was executed. Justice involves treating people who are relevantly similar in a relevantly similar fashion.
The question here is whether same-sex couples are relevantly similar to opposite-sex couples.
Here are the relevant similarities: they consist of two unmarried consenting adults who desire a given set of mutual rights and responsibilities conferred by the government.
The question then becomes, are there relevant dissimilarities between SSC and OSC that would lead to granting dissimilar treatment to the two?
That’s what y’all are being asked to demonstrate. If you can demonstrate relevant dissimilarities, then you’ve shown that justice may be preserved if you treat them differently.
If you can’t, then denying marriage to the former group is unjust.
I understand. Post #432.
We’re talking rights, not implementation. Even in places with significant paternity leave allowance in the US few men take it, since it is considered to represent a lack of job commitment. But if Peru implemented it, it must have been thought of as a minor right.
So, what are they going to be? When I was a kid even the most blatantly gay entertainers pretended they weren’t. Now it is okay there, and sports figures are starting to come out. I’ve seen no ill effects, and plenty of good effects. And even without marriage there are plenty of partnerships. I lived across the street from a nice gay couple, whose relationship was far better than that of the woman next door who was on her third husband. How letting them get married would hurt anything is beyond me.
So, how will it? And if you want to protect marriage, shouldn’t we start with living wages and the like and not worry about SSM?
Well, I can certainly agree. This is as clear as your argument gets.
Just in cse anyone is interested , here’s the audio of the interracial marriage case that redefined marraige in 1967.
http://www.oyez.org/cases/1960-1969/1966/1966_395
They played the Virginia state attorney general on NPR the other day and it sounded like he was arguing agasint SSM today.
Just a bump, since Magellan is back now, so he won’t forget:
. . . unless, of course you actually are a platypus, with a uterus and fetus inside it . . . in spite of all the people who consider you a woman.
Not sure what’s so important or non-obvious about what my answer would be: if the couple is constituted of one male and one female, they get the marriage license. If it’s two people of the same sex, they get the civil union license.
Interested? Some. Interested enough to listen to an mp3 that’s over two hours long, no. Since you evidently think marriage between Blacks and White is so much like SSM, I’ll recommend this excellent post by tomndebb:
[QUOTE=tomndebb]
[QUOTE=Smapti]
There was never a time when one could not imagine same-sex marriages. It was, in fact, the thought of such marriages that prompted fearful straights in the U.S. to create the anti-SSM laws.
[/QUOTE]
Your playful parody is noted, but you are missing the point.
One argument put forth in favor of SSM is that the same logic was used to prohibit inter-racial marriages. I support SSM. I do not support poor logic or twisted history. SSM is new. Inter-racial marriages were perfectly fine for tens of thousands of years until someone first dreamed up the notion four or five races* and then decided that two of them could not intermarry.
[QUOTE=Smapti]
There has never been a time in the history of the U.S. when same-sex marriages were forbidden by the federal government or even by all the states. There have been periods where a majority of states prohibited such marriages, but there have always been states where they were permitted, so a claim that “marriage” excluded same-sex unions has no basis in fact.
[/QUOTE]
This statement is in error. There were not statutes that prohibited SSM only for the reason that no one would have ever considered two people of the same sex marrying. There are no statutes prohibiting marriage between humans and fence posts, but that does not mean that anyone applying to a state to marry a fence post would have been permitted to do so.
Again, the idea of SSM is new. It required multiple events to enter the public consciousness: the separation of marriage from procreation after science provided a chemical barrier that was +99% effective in the Pill and the ability to use IVF and surrogates to bring children into the world; the recognition that homosexuality was a human condition, and neither a choice of perverse pleasures nor a “lifestyle”; the recognition that people of the same sex could fall in love in the same manner that people not of the same sex fell in love and desire a permanent relationship recognized by law. All of those conditions were “unthinkable” prior to 1960 and all of those conditions have come to pass in the past 50 years.
Arguing for SSM is fine. Pretending that opposition to SSM is identical to opposition to interracial marriages and then re-writing history to support that argument is neither factual nor logical.
= = =
- The notion of race with which we currently live (and the use of the word “race” to identify it), comes from an earlier use of the same word to mean all the people of a notable ancestor. People could talk about the “race of Abraham” or “the race of Aeneas”. That notion was expanded to apply to “the English race” or “the Irish race” over the years, but it meant more of a national identity. The notion “black” and “white” only arose when Europeans traveling outside Europe began to encounter a lot of people with different appearances and borrowed the word “race” to identify them. Up until that time, there were no laws prohibiting marriage due to “race” aside from laws that prohibited marrying anyone outside one’s own tribe.
[/QUOTE]
magellan01, would an opposite sex couple have the option of receiving the civil union licence if they desired?
Assuming, hypothetically that your proposal is impossible to implement (due to lack of political will, constitutional issues or what have you preventing it) would you favourite gays being allowed to marry to gain access to the rights you agree they deserve or do you favor they not be allowed to marry even if it means they will never gain access to those rights?
Damned auto correct. That should, of course, read “would you favor…”
Ask him what should happen to any legislator who proposes changes to the “one set” of laws that will give marriages some extra privileges and/or give civil unions some extra burdens, i.e. proposing a law that recognizes that a legal distinction between the two states exists (as cannot possibly be otherwise under magellan’s proposal) that should be widened.
For that matter, what about legislation that adds burdens to marriages and/or extra advantages to civil unions? What if some state passes a law that relates to marriage but forgets to include the language covering civil unions? Is the law null and void?
I don’t care much either way. All I’m trying to do is preserve the meaning of a word that represents a special and important institution. Civil Unions, to me, don’t mandate the same concern. If gays wanted to come up with their own term and have it be preserved for them, I’d be fine with that. Though it wouldn’t be important to me as it is not diluting the meaning of word that symbolizes such a foundational institution.
For me, marriage would be constituted of one man and one woman. Period. The rights battle should be fought separately. And it is one that I would join in wholeheartedly.
Don’t know where you’ve been the past 60 years, but that meaning’s been diluted to nothing already.
But if, in the end, it came down that the only way to grant these rights is to allow them the right to marry you would deny that. Even if the public conscience embraced the term as including gays, you would still fight to keep the legal term separate, to the point you would deny these rights to others.
As long as I thought that there was a chance to preserve the word and have it be attached to its traditional meaning, yes.
Fine. Here we go:
- Post 281.
- Post 471.
If you have something in the law that says, " if the couple is constituted of one male and one female, they get the marriage license. If it’s two people of the same sex, they get the civil union license," then you have two separate sentences that describe separate treatment of couples depending on whether they’re gay or straight.
Thanks!