Quick, possibly irrelevant note: that notorious conservative rag Newsweek is, in its short notes, actually sympathetic towards Miss California, and shakes its head at Hilton.
Miss California to appear in new National Organization for Marriage ad (NOM NOM), entitled “No Offense” – link on CNN.
I can’t wait for the parodies.
Yes. It is an established fact that children do best when they are raised in traditional families, i.e. a mother and a father. It isn’t impossible to raise good kids in other circumstances, but it does greatly decrease the odds. Promoting a form of marriage which would deprive children of that advantage at the very outset is obviously not in the best interests of society.
The institution of marriage doesn’t exist simply to provide benefits such as tax breaks, inheritance rights, social approval, etc. simply because a couple may have a sexual relationship and a strong emotional bond. It has important social functions, and those functions are not served by extending marriage to include same sex relationships. You can redefine the word “leg” to include tails, but a dog still won’t have five legs.
Society has the right to prefer heterosexuality over homosexuality.
On this basis you could deny marriage to alcoholics, or even poor people. Are you saying we should deny legal rights to people because statistically they might not have the best odds at raising children? Should we only allow people to marry who have the statistically best odds at raising a child? That eliminates a lot of groups. Should we allow the top three to marry but deny all the rest? Five?
What social functions can a man/woman couple do that a man/man or woman/woman couple cannot?
But it doesn’t have the right to deny homosexuals basic human rights based solely on preference.
Er, you do know that two men or two women don’t make a baby, right?
The issue at hand is a political one. This requires participants to keep track of the distinction between “society” and “government”.
I figure at least one Miss Teen South Carolina mash-up will show up within a day or so…
Alcoholism, poverty, etc. are irrelevant.
Marriage is not a “basic human right.”
Declaring the evidence against your position to be “irrelevant” is the text equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and humming loudly, and equally convincing.
Oh? Then misegenation laws were unobjectionable, in your world view?
You do realize that marriage is about family, and family is largely about children, and that this fact makes same-sex marriage a sad joke, don’t you?
The issue at hand is a politcal and social one. All politics is ultimately about social issues. If both sides didn’t believe that same sex marriage has profound social consequences, then neither side would bother to argue about it.
He wasn’t presenting evidence against my position; he was merely introducing red herrings.
If someone could come up with a sound reason for it, yes I would find them unobjectionable.
Er, this is what you are required to prove to sustain your argument. You don’t get to simply postulate it.
He was providing examples of why your position is logically untenable. You stuck your fingers in your ears and hummed loudly.
Not according to your argument. You want to deny gays the right to marry because, according to some statistic I keep hearing about but have never seen, they cannot provide children with the absolute best chances at being raised. Why not deny other groups who do not provide the best chances for a child? Why just the gays?
Oh? Why not? What gives men & women the right to marry, but not men & men or women & women? Why do they have this special right?
There is no part of this paragraph that is remotely true.
When this fact was established, was it established by comparing traditional families to single parent families, or by comparing traditional families to families with two parents of the same gender? Has their been sufficient research done to really claim that traditional families are superior to two-parent same sex families?
Apparently Miss California believes in traditional marriage, but not traditional tits. Turns out the Miss California pagent payed for her implants.
I agree, but there is the question of proof. Numerous posters have asked about what statistical proof there is of these propositions, and while I have perhaps overlooked them in this thread, I haven’t seen it.
I’d surmise that there is no statistical proof because such propositions were taken as givens for so long that no proof was necessary. It seems fair to require such proof now that the matter is at issue.
At the same time, it seems to me incumbent upon those arguing for SSM that they need to provide proof on their side of the argument too, which they haven’t done either. They wave their hands and call it a right, but it is a right that seems to have appeared out of thin air in the last twenty years.
The comparison to slavery doesn’t sway me because at least as far back as the American Continental Congress in the 1770s there were delegates arguing that slavery was immoral. Yet it never occurred to anyone there that gays had the right to marry. If it was such an open and obvious legal right, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson et al would’ve thought of it, wouldn’t they?
Bill Nye The Science Guy used to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. At the moment we have no proof that I’ve seen (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, certainly) that SSM benefits society, as heterosexual marriage clearly has. If we’re going to radically restructure marriage, it would seem that extraordinary proof of why it is beneficial to society to do that is necessary.
Not that I blame you, but you can’t have read this thread very closely if you can say that.
The 14th Amendment, guaranteeing the right to equal protection of the laws, was ratified in 1868.
The framers knew there were rights they hadn’t addressed in the Constitution. That’s stated in the 9th and 10th amendments.
Under the right to equal protection, the burden is on the *government *to prove that there is a purpose to a discriminatory law.
We’re not. Where did you get that idea from?
No it isn’t. And if it were, it would be evidence in support of prohibiting gay adoption, not gay marriage.
I don’t put this forward as a legal argument; I just think it’s very elegantly worded. For what it’s worth I think it’s ridiculous to not apply the same scrutiny to discrimination based on sexual orientation.