Your point is well taken, Dio. Perhaps there would be less room for confusion if gay marriage proponents were to more often frame their arguments in that way instead.
But, we can all still agree that Guin is an idiot, correct?
Yeah, but the thing is, laws are necessary to delineate who gets to pursue happiness in what way, and up to now the laws governing marriage have been intended to join men and women together and establish a family foundation for having and raising children.
I don’t believe that most of the people who oppose gay marriage are really opposed to gays as people, they just think marriage is intended for men and women.
This view is changing, but like all things of this nature it takes time for people to change and accept a different view than the one that has predominated for most of their lives, and in my opinion honesty on the part of those seeking change is important. Otherwise you do more harm to your cause than benefit, and to me imputing motives to your opponents that they do not in fact have (‘they want to take away my right to marry’) is not an effective way to go about it.
I’ll just say that I don’t very often find myself in agreement with Guinastasia. 
:rolleyes: I hope you are doing your usual double-reverse sarcasm thing, but given your likely position on gay marriage, I doubt it. The preamble to the constitution most assuredly does not mean that there is a right to marry (or do anything else that makes you happy). Con law would have been a lot easier if it were that easy.
It may also have been easier if you knew the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble.
Or, to be less nitpicky and more relevant, the difference between an animating societal principle and a doctrine of law.
If you’re gay in Jamaica, you’re dead.
Now, when those evil whities were oppressing blackies in South Africa, what did we do?
When those evil Jamaicans kill gays, what do we do? Oh, that’s right. Nothing.
During the first half of the 20th century being gay was a mental illness and a crime. Do you really want to compare gays to blacks in the early 20th century? Gays actually got their own patch to wear in the concentration camps. I hear a few blacks ended up in concentration camps too, but there was no organized campaign to exterminate them.
I think gays deserve some persecution street cred.
I’d go further: according to Loving v. Virginia (the case in which anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional), “marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.” As far as I can tell, the reasoning in Loving v. Virginia applies, with very few changes, to gay marriage.
(Note that the Supreme Court has decided in other cases that the right to marry is a right, not a privilege that can be taken away for unrelated matters–see Zablocki v. Redhail for examples, and contrast against state laws that deny drivers licenses to 17-year-olds who have dropped out of high school).
I’m on record as preferring that the state do away with all state marriages. But I’d be almost as ecstatic if the state instead decided to recognize any marriage between two unmarried consenting adults.
Daniel
Blurp. Slip of the mind, sorry. My point still holds though that one cannot bring a claim against the government for not following its animating societal principles.
I wish Guin had called this thread “Reasons why brickbacon’s arguments are bullshit” instead of bigoted. He may or may not be bigoted, but his arguments against the gay rights movement being analogous to the Civil Rights movement were pretty absurd, and it wouldn’t have been hard to prove it. Lots of people were doing just that in the GD thread. Then she could have called him a fuckwit (obligatory Pit insult) and openly questioned his motivations for making such idiotic arguments if she wanted to, in the proper setting. Perhaps, if she or others were able to figure out why he was making such ridiculous arguments, she could have discerned if his motivation for making them was bigotry or what. As it stands, it could simply be a rhetorical exercise for him and not stemming from some deeply held beliefs.
First, just to nitpick again because I enjoy it, “animating societal principles,” can indeed serve as the basis for a substantive due process action when we’re talking about specific freedoms. Perhaps you recall the phrase “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” from your conlaw class? And there is, of course, Loving v. Virginia itself. Or perhaps Pierce v. Society of Sisters would be more to your liking (the right to educate one’s child as one sees fit).
But in any case, I think you’ve confused elucidator’s post for an action filed in court. Why do you think he’s stating that one can bring a claim against the government based on the Declaration of Independence? The more sensible reading is that he’s making a philosophical argument.
Putting aside the federalism issues, while the legislature may certainly get rid of the thing they call a civil “marriage”, they could not get rid of the plethora of rights that make up a “civil marriage”. The right to inheritance and distribution of property, the right to contract, the right to rear children, the right to grant power of attorney, the right to determine who makes medical decisions in case of incapacitation, and others are all rights that make up what is the “right” to marry. And the legislature would be hard pressed to get rid of those rights. Civil marriage is nothing but a collection of those rights and presumptions, and while the legislature could get rid of “civil marriage”, it can’t get rid of the rights that constitute marriage.
Why are you asking me? I didn’t make the claim. You did.
We can’t know whether you had a religious experience or a purely subjective experience that you’re claiming.
No, factual claims are claims that can be proven to be true or false. The claim that God exists is a true or false question. I dare you to prove it.
Since you haven’t proven your claim, it exists in the same realm as God exists, at least until evidence is provided.
If I told you that you were an ignorant bigot because you didn’t know that China had purple dwarfs, how could you show that you weren’t an ignorant bigot if your rules of proof prevailed?
btw, purple dwarfs are very secretive so don’t expect me to provide proof of them, you ignorant bigot.
He might have more than a passing interest. I don’t know more than that and I doubt you did either before you made your claim that he was ignorant about it.
A claim for which you have no proof except your post.
Please enlighten us.
But wouldn’t this be a right withheld (if it applied), not taken away since it wasn’t granted before?
Being black automatically equates with being active in the contemporary civil rights movement?
Not what I wrote.
You mentioned that he might have more than a passing interest in the modern civil rights movement and I assume what you quoted by him meant that was because he is Black. What I’m still interested in (and of course you’re free to say it’s up to him to answer this) is how that interest or involvement leads him to be able to unequivocally say, as he did in the GD thread, that gays are not interested in working to further that modern movement at all.
Not at all - it simply implies that there would have been less justification for righteous outrage* about it.
Is the fight for gay marriage analogous to the fight for miscegenated marriage? Absolutely. I wouldn’t argue about that.
Do gays have it as bad as black folk? Absolutely not.
My understanding is that brickbacon wasn’t speaking specifically of gay marriage, but about gay rights (and the struggle therefor in) in general.
*which would still have left plenty
And it’s not as if there aren’t those who are gay AND black, so they have the worst of both worlds. (Maya Keyes, daughter of Alan, comes to mind)
Really? That’s informative. I could have sworn a friend of mine got arrested and thrown out of the military for the crime of telling one of his friends he was gay. I also could have sworn that I, and a couple of his other friends were brought in and interrogated for associating with a gay, and compelled to testify against him. Must have been my imagination.
All those other gays I saw arrested, interrogated and fired from their jobs must have been my imagination too.
If you had read the whole thread, you’d know I’m talking about the plight of black people in the first half of the previous century (and some of the second half, too).
While your friends and their friends are doubtless suffering for their sexual orientation, I doubt any of your friends were hung from trees last week by people who’ll then spend a week or two in jail (if they were arrested at all).
Yeah, violence never happens against gay people, and when it does, the cops have always been incredibly sympathetic.