Man, that’s a lot of typing and bizarre logic. It’d be a lot easier to just say “LOL FAGs.”
Personally I am against gay rights because of the dictates of my masters, the Star Gods.
Please explain why allowing SSM would erase the lines between genders completely.
It’s been about ten years since gay marriage was legalised in Holland and it hasn’t made a blind bit of difference to them.
I’m curious, what exactly do you think will happen once SSM is legalised in America? How will the downfall start?
No, I don’t think your line of thinking is right, because the concept of marriage has changed in modern times. In most premodern societies, people married for political and economic reasons. Marriages were arranged by families to guarantee economic security, to tie themselves closer to each other, and to produce legitimate heirs. And the legal effect of a marriage is that the woman, who in most premodern societies wasn’t seen as a fully responsible individual of her own, but instead, legally, as a permanent child who always needed a male guardian, would stop being the responsibility of her family and pass under the responsibility of her husband’s family.
Under such an understanding of marriage and of gender roles, same sex marriage wouldn’t make much sense as an institution. Men couldn’t bear children, men could inherit and hold property in their own right, and men could responsible for themselves. So, even in societies that accepted same sex relationships, there wasn’t any point in same sex marriage.
We have a different understanding of marriage now in modern western society. Marriage serves other purposes. Marriage in our society legitimizes sexual activity, it’s chosen by the partners themselves because they love each other and is a reflection of that love, and it brings together two households. A woman is responsible for herself nowadays. She can represent herself legally, she can make money and own property in her own right, and now when a woman marries a man, she’s not passing under his control, but she’s coming in as an equal partner to him, and the power relationship in the marriage is something to be negotiated between the two people.
Because of that, same sex marriage makes more sense in modern society. Same sex couples want to legitimize their sexual activity, do love each other and want their love commemorated, and want to come together as one household.
I meant this in the context of relationships. In which case it seeks to ignore the genders involved. There are zero examples of societies doing this. The man-woman union that we know to be marriage would be replaced with a person-person union. The institution would be gender agnostic.
To reference an analogy I made upthread, banana+apple does not equal banana+banana. Add some ice cream to either and in the first case you get an apple-banana shake. In the second case, a banana shake. To different things.
I agree with most of this. Yes, marriage has changed over the generations, but I think you probably overstate (unintentionally) the case for it being a legal maneuver, sans love. I think the higher in society you go, the more the extra-love factors played a role, but the basic idea was always that two people wanted to spend their live with each other. Even so, I don’t see how the fact that marriage has evolved makes my thinking wrong. I think it actually supports it. Marriage has taken MANY forms (many experiments), but in thousands of years not one of them thought that SSM would be, or was, a good idea.
As far as your last sentence, I agree and think that it is right to allow them to do so. That is why I support civil unions, with all the benefits of marriage.
So…who gives a shit?
We got along fine without science or medicine for thousands of years, I see no reason to start the tolerance of these pernicious evils now.
I, for one.
You really couldn’t figure that out for yourself, huh?
So all you give a shit about is the word “marriage”? That’s demented.
I just can’t figure out why. Although I guess I’d go out of my way to try to rationalize my bigotry when called on it, as well.
Actually, this just highlights how unusual marriage is in that it’s one of the very few aspects of government in which gender is significant at all. Over the last century or so, gender barriers once thought of as unbreakable natural law have fallen, allowing (among other things) women to vote, women to hold elected office, women to be Senators, Supreme Court justices, cabinet members… A woman hasn’t (yet) been Vice-President or President, but I can easily imagine it within the next 20 years. There was a time, not too long ago, when any of this would have seemed utterly ridiculous and unfathomable. It turned out, though, that the barriers ultimately served no purpose. What purpose does the barrier you support serve?
Apple-banana shakes will still exist unchanged, though, and will remain (by far) the most common flavour of shake through the foreseeable future. How the addition of banana shakes changes this remains unclear. As far as I can tell, it just makes life easier for people who don’t like apples, and I’m not sure sure why we should oppose that.
Why is anyone even engaging magellan01? He proved that his opposition to ssm is impervious to any kind of logic or calls for compassion in the monster ssm thread we had right after Prop H8 got passed in 2008. He’s just a hateful bigot who doesn’t care who he hurts as long as he’s not subjected to seeing icky things. Or being forced to deal with the fact that somewhere someone is doing icky things, out of his sight.
If he were in here making similar claims about race or interracial marriage, he’d be on ignore by everyone in the thread. But he makes these claims about GLBT people and everyone keeps feeding the bigot his bigot bites.
I long ago determined that neither magellan01 nor Shodan has anything useful to say on pretty much any subject, but especially not on the subject of GLBT issues or SSM.
I know they don’t, but I feel I do, which is why I continue.
Fair enough. Lay on, MacDuff!
I fully support same sex marriage, but I draw a line at laying on crime dogs.
I’m not saying that love didn’t play a role, but that love wasn’t the purpose of marriage in most premodern societies.
If your proposed civil unions have all the benefits of marriage then they are marriages. If gay marriage is harmful to society, then gay civil unions that are identical to marriage will be just as harmful to society. Contrapositively, if gay civil unions that are identical to marriage are not harmful to society, then gay marriages won’t be harmful to society.
I’m all for letting both flavors of shake exist. I’m an advocate of both. As long as we don’t try to call a banana-banana shake a apple-banana shake.
Why? Do you think someone will be tricked into buying the wrong shake? And they’re both “shakes”, right? We don’t need to call one a “partially gelatinated non-dairy gum-based beverage”, do we?
We can’t call them both by the same general name. Words have meanings! And, what’s more, feelings! You wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings, would you?
Focusing on the word “purpose”, I’m more inclined to agree with the statement. But I don’t see why that is the only, or most important, metric. Looking at the association love and marriage, I think it to be very strong. The more you look at societies where arranged marriages are the norm, I’d agree that the less love has to do with it.
They are marriages only if we agree to call them marriages, even though they may enjoy the same benefits. Me and my friend Joan enjoy all the same rights and privileges, the US offer, but that doesn’t mean that having the word “man” and the word “woman” is without value. Bananas and apples are both fruits, but having unique terms to refer to each is quite helpful.