We should certainly base public policy on your cowardice whenever possible.
Allow me to sum up: You don’t know what will happen. You don’t have any evidence anything will happen. You think it will happen decades from now. Did I mention you don’t have any evidence?
What else are you afraid of? We ought to get right on enacting the Magellan is a Hysterical Bitch Act. We may have trouble getting it through the Senate, though.
[quote=“magellan01, post:419, topic:549433”]
No, it’s not a fact, and I won’t acknowledge it.
I again refer you to the Perry decision, page 17:
“Psychologist Michael Lamb testified that all available evidence shows that children raised by gay or lesbian parents are just as likely to be well-adjusted as children raised by heterosexual parents and that the gender of a parent is immaterial to whether and adult is a good parent.”
The judge writing the decision goes on to outline challenges to this assertion, and pretty much shoots them down for lack of evidence.
I gather that you’d LIKE it to be a fact that heterosexual marriages are better for children, and those opposing SSM have clung to this as a reason for their stance. But it doesn’t appear to be so. Even if it were, there are so many single parents that it still wouldn’t make sense to exclude gay and lesbian parents on this basis.
This is the kind of stupidity I’m talking about. He has arbitrarily decided that the sole important defining characteristic of “marriage” is that it include 1 woman and 1 man. Never mind that many people have thought that other things were equally important at various points in history. Never mind that other cultures at various times gave legal recognition to same-sex relationships. “Marriage” must contain (at least) 1 woman and 1 man, therefore any legal relationship which has that meets the criteria, and any legal relationship which doesn’t have it doesn’t meet the criteria and can be hand-waved away. It’s a completely circular definition.
“Opposite-sex marriage”. If three words is too many, perhaps “heterosexual marriage”. The basic point of language is that, if there is a need for a word or phrase, that need will be filled. If the meaning of a word is changed, and if there is need for further differentiation, again, society will pretty much come up with something.
And here we have as clear a statement of bigotry as you’ll ever find. If you give equal rights to people, the people who previously had the privilege become less special. magellan01 would have been one of the Sneetches who was horrified that the other Sneetches now had stars on their bellies.
And yet, where SSM already exists, there is no basis whatsoever for finding any sort of deleterious effect on OSM’s. None. Nothing comparable to the “breakup of the black family”, something which even you know is hardly the result of their own civil rights finally being recognized by “normal people”. :rolleyes:
Could that be why you’ve moved the goalposts out to a comfortingly long timeframe? Hope for vindication despite the evidence?
Just realized I fouled up the coding in my last post and mistakenly quoted Mhendo when it should have been Magellan01. Apologies to both.
What sort of decline do you expect and how do you expect it to occur?
Gamble on what? What’s scary? What’s the risk?
How so?
I gamble every time I get in my car. There’s a chance some hidden flaw in the brakes will cause them to go out, or a drunk driver will blast through a red light and T-bone me. There’s a hundred ways I can kill myself just going out for dinner. That’s a pretty fuckin’ scary downside. But it’s worth the gamble, because it means that I can transport me and whoever else I want the couple of miles it takes to get to the restaurant in 5 minutes rather than 2 hours. Hell, given the risk I put my life in and those of my passengers, that’s not even a really big upside.
The upside of expanding the concept of marriage to include same-sex couples is that we are able to treat a not-insignificant percentage of our populace as equals rather than second-class citizens. Given that that ideal is what our country is ostensibly based on, that’s a pretty big fuckin’ upside. So what’s the potential downside? Well, I’ve been following these discussions for the last few years, and you have shown ABSOLUTELY NO DOWNSIDE except to say that there could be something down the road, and that it’s “too scary” for you. But you have NOTHING besides some vague, undefined boogeyman.
The generous interpretation is that you are a coward. The not-so-generous interpretation is that you are a bigot of the same stripe as those misogynists who felt that giving women the vote would ruin the country and those racists who felt that allowing blacks and whites to intermarry would ruin the country, and you are simply using cowardice as a facade. Neither of these is a commendable position.
Darn tootin’ you don’t have it. Please explain why you believe that OS couples will ever stop taking advantage of the tangible benefits of civilly-sanctioned marriage, even 300-400 years from now.
Ha, “gamble”… as if the queers were getting plutonium as wedding presents.
Then you’re a sad, scared, bigoted little man. Despite numerous opportunities, I’ve been given absolutely no reason to assume anything else about you.
Relevance to gay couples, most of whom won’t have children? Or was their inability to have children a reason to oppose SSM?
Assuming you are married to a woman, or one day might be, how does this diminishing of specialness manifest if you and she visit an SSM state or an SSM country? If you and she were vacationing in Toronto and one of you was seriously injured, are you harbouring even the slightest doubt that the hospital will defer to the uninjured spouse? Are you under the mistaken impression the locals guffaw behind your back when you and your wife visit the CN Tower or the Skydome or… some… other Toronto thing… I dunno, visit Montreal next time, we have the jazz festival.
Of course we will. “Marriage”. Are you claiming it will no longer apply to hetero monogamous pairings? A few posts back you were accusing me of stuff because you couldn’t handle “rational basis” having a legal and a lay meaning. I even offered to use “grue” in deference to your inability to handle words with several meanings. Of course at this point, I’m prepared to write off this ailment of yours as a form of hysterical blindness.
Boston, America, 1820, a bar.
“… and I’m telling you, it’s majorities over the ages. It is my belief that slavery has existed for those past 10.000 years, and during that time there were countless societies and civilizations that figured how to deal with it. Some thought it A-OK (and still do) and whip their slaves on a daily basis. Others have been more accomodating for this other expression of human freedom. But even in those where some slaves were eventually set free, slaves were never fully emancipated. So, even if we take Christianity out of the equation, and look at times when societies were most benevolent, slaves were given a special status. Given the thousands and thousands of little experiments over the ages, it seems logical to conclude that either it was tried and completely abandonned, or as a society neared freeing its slaves, they prevented it from happening. One other possibility I see is that there were, indeed, small societies that might have granted freedom to every man, woman and child. But if so, none of them have flourished to a point that history is aware of them…
I’m telling you, Mr. Lincoln, I see no reason to take that gamble. The downside is just too scary to me.”
Get it ? Got it ? Good.
Thanks for playing.
But slavery ended because of the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Not a judge’s decree - not even a presidential decree. Despite your invocation of Lincom, the Emancipation Proclaimation didn’t free a single slave. So the slaves were freed by majority action.
No one disagrees that if the 28th Amendment passes, and it forbids states from restricting marriage to only opposite sex couples, that this will be a proper exercise of the sovereign power of government.
How’s that vote coming?
I’m not talking about the legal aspect of it, you lawyerly twit. I’m mocking the attitude he’s displaying, and the silliness of invoking how the Ancients did things as good, reliable guidelines for how to do things now.
ETA : and if the majority’s espousing the same thought process, the majority are idiots. Wouldn’t be a first - it is my belief that for over 10.000 years, the majority has had its head up lodged firmly up its arse, and…
I can appreciate the effort, but I kind doubt Abraham Lincoln visited Boston when he was 11, let alone patronized its bars to engaged in bull sessions about slavery.
No-one over the past few pages of this debate has been talking about the legal process. We have all been talking about what we believe to be the appropriate way for society to treat homosexual couples.
You’ve managed to do it yet again: take a conversation where people are talking about principles and beliefs and notions of what they think is right, and answer them as if they were making legal arguments.
Will you never cease?
…and desist?
Seriously, Brix, you’re a handy guy to have around when misconceptions about the law start popping up (helped along mightily by fictional treatments in film and television), but you sometimes have this curmudgeonly grumpy-old-man affect where liberals are hypocritical scum, yadda yadda and such.
What I get is that you’re another not smart person who has a very high opinion of his intellect. Yeah, I get that.
Now, you might want to consider that while one looks back on history, even from 1820, and can see plenty of examples of societies without slaves. So, we have zero examples of societies which extended SS partners the same rights and status as OS couples, and numerous examples of societies that did not allow slavery. Indeed, some of these examples existed in the late 18th and early 19th century, and any American politician would have been well aware of them. So, this oh so cute little exercise of yours falls flat when scrutinized even a little bit. Great job, champ.
And if you can steal a synapse from one of the other posters here who suffer from the same delusions of intellect and double your capacity, you might understand that the chattel slavery found in the U.S. is unlike most of the slavery that existed in the rest of the world. Not even the two strains of slavery are really analogous when you get down to what was so ugly about slavery in the U.S.
Now, let’s hope you got that.
Bleat, bleat, bleat. You’ve been given the examples many times. You just hand-wave them away or change goal posts.
This post is even more helpful.
It demonstrates even more clearly how your beliefs are based on nothing but a nebulous sentiment about “acknowledgement,” without even the vaguest sense of what harm might befall society if the definition of a word is expanded to encompass a few more people.
You have offered no argument about what practical purpose this acknowledgement serves, or about how the critically important man/woman union in our society would be in any way disadvantaged or discouraged by the change.
Implicit in your whole position is an assumption that the man/woman union is so fragile and precarious that simply changing the scope of the word “marriage” will endanger heterosexual unions and bring about the ultimate collapse of society.
Incredible.