You realize you’ve spent a lot of time talking about sex between men and women, not children, right? Again, there’s no one-to-one link between sex and marriage or marriage and children. For example:
Some people aren’t able to conceive. They’re not just having bad luck; it’s actually not possible for them. Of course, nobody is checking one way or the other.
No, it isn’t. Not to anyone else, anyway.
[QUOTE=David42]
State-forced divorce? Never heard of that. Who’s to say they aren’t going to conceive the next day? It’s the idea that they might that is important.
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:dubious: There are plenty of man/woman couples who marry and never intend to have children. And there are plenty of man/man woman/woman couples who DO intend to have children. It’s pretty much blatant bullshit to insist that you have to be able to procreate within the relationship (even if you never intend to) in order to get all the legal rights and prerogatives of a ‘marriage’, and to so narrowly define it to just conveniently deny it to same sex couples.
Uhuh. But since there would be no realistic way to stop such marriages (or, marriages where the couple never intends to have a kid…or simply can’t have a kid due to biological factors), it’s pretty convenient to define it this way and then innocently claim that really there is no problem with same sex couples, but sadly, by (narrow, silly) definition that they can’t procreate (in their relationship, though they can using any number of other means), they can’t really be married or enjoy the legal or social prerogatives of others.
And the real annoying part is you actually think we are all too stupid to see this rather glaring point.
-XT
I suppose the obvious but unpleasant question from this paragraph is; why don’t you support rape, given that it has the potential to create life? You seem to be creating an exception there. Would rape that results in pregnancy be “elevated” over rape that doesn’t?
Well no-one should ever be forced into sex or marriage.
I’m afraid that doesn’t really answer the question, at least not fully. Is your meaning that, while creation of life is sometimes worthy of elevation, there are situations where it is not? That there can be extenuating circumstances in which the creation of life isn’t automatically worthy of elevation, because of some more important, more prioritised, principle?
Or you could read my post where I addressed that.
It doesn’t matter how easy the answer was to come by. You have some maxim of reasoning that all correct answers must be inconvenient?
Of course you could avoid annoying yourself by foregoing speculation on what I think. Let’s not raise the issue of who’s stupid or not, shall we?
Ok, someone please define what marriage is instead of all this dancing around about what it’s NOT. explain how that definition could possibly be meaningful to an entire society.
[QUOTE=David42]
Of course you could avoid annoying yourself by foregoing speculation on what I think. Let’s not raise the issue of who’s stupid or not, shall we?
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We probably shouldn’t, as you might not like how that turns out. The balloon popping might be quite startling.
I have this thing about folks who go through all these mental gyrations in order to arrive at the place where, interestingly enough, they were bound all along. Which is exactly what you are doing here.
Ah, the old ‘scroll back and see where I already addressed this’ dodge, ehe? I’d say ‘well played’, but sadly it wasn’t.
Easy. The legal and social union of two people.
-XT
Seems like the current definitions are fine. They have this in Merriam-Webster:
So call a marriage the state of being united to another person as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationships recognized by law. Children, as always, are optional. If there are children, their provenance is not relevant, as always. It’s the same meaning marriage already has in our society, it just includes gay couples as well as straight couples. As a bonus, nothing about these definitions includes a fixation on anyone else’s sex life and offers no commentary about shit on dicks.
(2) Then, if Sally puts her daughter Lucy up for adoption and if Sam and Herman, one of whom is a lawyer and one a doctor, adopt little Lucy and spend the next 25 years giving her a wonderful upbringing, the best schools, etc., you would still consider their non-procreative relationship inferior to the three-month marriage of Sally and her crackhead husband because the two crackheads had the power to procreate?
(3) Where do you class the relationship of heterosexuals who can have children but choose not to (there are such people). Are they demoted to the rank of gay couples in your value system, or do they keep their status because they CAN produce life? Would they keep their elevated status as long as their relationship CAN produce life, and would they therefore be demoted when the woman reaches menopause?
(4) Where do you class heterosexual relationships in which the couple CANNOT generate children much as they would like to, because of physical problems?
(5) Where do you class heterosexual couples who cannot produce children because the husband’s sperm count is too low, and who get the woman pregnant with a perm donation from an anonymous male, and then give the child a wonderful upbringing?
(6) What if the situatiion is the same as in question 5, but it is because they are two women. And one of them gets pregnant by a sperm donation froman anonymous male donor, and they give the child a wonderful upbringing.
[soapbox mode on] I’ve seen clear evidence that many dopers will simply skip long posts unless something in them attracts their attention while scrolling past. And as Aldous Huxley so insightfully observed concerning Polonius’s dunderhead remark that “brevity is the soul of wit”, “The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation.”
Highlighting key points in color attracts such attention, so I’m not going to stop. People who are so petty as to skip posts with any colored text at all just because there’s some color there are of no value as readers anyway, so I will not stop using color merely to placate them.[/soapbox]
So, again, what about elderly couples? Does that mean a widow past menopause should not get married, or that her relationship isn’t as “worthy” as that of a couple focused on having kids? :dubious:
The meaning one ascribes to phrases such as “gender identity” and “sexual identity” are so arbitrary and ambiguous that I hold that arguing about them is pointless. And if by “binary” you mean that bisexuality is merely a function of behavior rather than being an intrinsic sexual orientation, then, as I’ve already argued previously, the best current evidence tells us that orientation decidedly appears to be “binary”.
The main point here is that there’s a strong scientific consensus that homosexuality is not a choice, regardless of physiological gender or psychological factors. Here’s a 2007 statement from the Royal College of Psychiatrists:
Note also that there currently exists considerable evidence that shows that brain physiology as measured several different ways is reliably correlated to sexual orientation. Since a person’s choices or similar psychological processes cannot change fundamental brain physiology, sexual orientation cannot be a matter of choice (especially if we take this all the way into the realm of “free will”).
This IS Great Debates, you know. A GD thread isn’t a GD thread until the main point under discussion has been reduced to first principles and each of them worried away to a fine gritty powder, purified of all greater meaning.
Perhaps the hivemind understands issues as a kind of code, where the prime directive is to parse everything down to the last bracket, comma and space.
Yikes! You refer to older brothers as “risk factors”?! For the “disease” of homosexuality?! That’s arguably the most deplorable phraseology imaginable!
I stand by my previous response to you. You have no idea what you’re blathering about, and you’ve simply emphasized once again that you don’t understand statistical patterns and what even their mere existence means scientifically. Add some books on the philosophy of science to my previous list of books you urgently need to read on this topic.
Sweet Fictional Jesu, please re-read the OP a few more times! The issue here has nothing to do with “the legal status of gay people in the United States of America”, it’s about whether asserting the ludicrously bogus claim that homosexuality is a “choice” is scientifically accurate (I hold it’s not) and whether such ignorant assertions are harmful to the LGBT community (I hold that it is, to the extent that someone uttering such nonsense is considered a reliable source of accurate information in the wider society).
Anyone can view anything any way they want, but personal biases are essentially the only factors involved, so who cares? We’re not talking about anything objective there.
See? Nothing but personal bias and tastes are involved.
Here’s my own personal bias and taste: Symmetry is far more esthetically pleasing than complementarity, so, like two breasts, two penises are far more esthetically pleasing than a penis and a hole (any hole), just as two holes are more pleasing than a hole and something else. Holes strike me as mere empty space, so holes are also particularly dull and boring. So, to paraphrase your remark, the physical coming together of a man and another man has a beauty and natural elegance to it that heterosexual sex just doesn’t have.
So I ask you: Can those arguing against that point of view see that? Or see how that might be how others see it, and that that is not an unreasonable view?
Some citizens want to get married, there’s no evidence of harm, so what’s the point in stopping them?
As an afterthought, what difference does it make how “beautiful” heterosexual sex is? Conception can be accomplished in a petri dish. Surely it’s not the simple mingling of genetic material that matters, scientifically fascinating though it might be, but how good a parent one is in the decades that follow.
When I think about people opposing gay marriage these days and doing everything they can to prevent it I get this image (in black and white) of German Shepard dogs, young black kids and fire hoses for some reason. Isn’t that strange? I wonder how it’s going to work out…
-XT
Steve, you should have quoted the fuller context of my response to WhyNot as I just did. Your quotation served to obscure the fact that my response was a denial of WhyNot’s deeply absurd substitution of genetic with his factually false congenital “explanation”.
Your own response asserts the flagrant falsehood that there are no genetic differences between members of a given species. I cannot imagine why you would posit something to starkly counterfactual. Please try again.
Now that’s what I call irony.
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And that’s what I call completely non-responsive.