Please provide a cite that children do better in hetro marriages.
"In 2003, a U.S. Census study found that a record 19% of U.S. women age 40–44 did not have children (compared with 10% in 1976). "
- from wiki, for what it’s worth.
So assuming (generously) that lesbians are disproportionately (even uniformly) childless and they make up, say, 10% of the overall female population, their numbers are still equaled by straight women who are childless.
They don’t.
Please don’t swoop into debates. I said clearly that I disagree with this argument.
Interesting. I wonder how many of those childless women are married?
Well, feel free to tell anyone you know who agrees with that argument that we called them bigots.
And they smell bad.
I’m actually attempting to avoid a dead end by encouraging you to offer some kind of argument.
Yes, they can believe that. That’s a different statement from the one you asked me about.
You’re not defining the belief specifically enough for me to give you a real answer.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say here. But there are more childless or infertile straight couples than gay couples because gays are a pretty small percentage of the population. (Thank you, Bryan Ekers.) If you try to restrict marriage only to straight couples using the reasoning that any couple that could theoretically have children “on their own” should be allowed to get married, that’s deliberately defining marriage in a way that excludes gays and only gays, so that’s bigoted. If you’re saying only people who are fertile and intend to have children should get married, that’s stupid and pointless discrimination, but it’s not only discrimination against gays. It’s discriminatino against anyone who doesn’t want children or is unable to have children in a specific way. It’s anti-gay, but not only anti-gay. So I’m not sure the disproportionate impact concept applies there and my inclination would be to call it stupid rather than saying it’s bigoted against gays.
Which I’ve done too, like you just said you’ve already done.
We have lots of policies that favor only those with children. Start with the tax code. It’s a perfectly legitimate state interest. Nobody calls it bigoted.
I don’t support it. I think it’s dumb too.
It’s just not “bigoted.”
Let’s end this. Have a nice weekend.
So you are conceding that the claim that it is “better for children” is based on an intolerance for another lifestyle and not based on fact?
No, I’m saying that it’s not true. I did not say why it’s not true.
Do you really want to start this thread all over again?
I’m done here. Have a nice weekend.
I agree it’s about time to quit this. If you shift the goalposts any further or faster, I will need global positioning satellites to keep track of them.
When the question is about the existence of some thing, the default position is nonexistence and the burden of proof is on those who assert its existence. In this case the thing in question is a non-bigoted argument against SSM.
It’s not pre-judging. It’s judging based on past experience and evidence. I’ve never said I’m not willing to change my mind if they come up with the elusive non-bigoted argument.
(Actually, it’s extremely annoying to be told that I’m somehow obliged to listen to every person who has some bullshit explanation for why I’m an evil subhuman whose relationship is destroying society, in the vain hope that one of them has come across the mythical rational argument.)
Once again, I will point out that such an argument has been presented, by me, in this very thread.
::shrug::
Could you give the post number, so I can go back and look?
Actually, just contemplation the ratios, if homosexuals really are 7-8% of the population, you’d have to get fairly specific to find something they do that is not being done by an equal or larger number of straight people. Heck, even if the question was “Have you had at least one homosexual experience in your lifetime?”, I bet the total number of people who identify as straight and say “yes” is larger than the entire homosexual population, especially after you drop teenagers who realize they are gay but have not yet had a sexual encounter.
Further, it’s hard to find a classification for men that doesn’t exclude some men and include some women (and one for women without the same problem). You’d have to get down to very blunt terms, like “no marriages involving two penises” and “no marriages involving two vaginas”, which kinda runs counter to the notion that we should treat people as more than just life-support systems for their genitalia.
Just musing. I don’t get why anyone care who kinds of genital collisions occur in the marital bed.
Perhaps he means this one, from post 151:
This is not a non-bigoted argument against gay marriage. It’s not really an argument at all. It’s handwaving. He claims marriage isn’t a right, and I think practically nobody agrees with that. Further, quibbling about whether marriage is or is not a right fails to address the question of why society should recognize marriages of straight couples and not gay couples. That’s where bigotry becomes an issue in the first place: these groups are being treated differently on the basis of their identities.
Darn, the last sentence of my previous post should read:
Just musing. I don’t get why anyone cares what kinds of genital collisions occur in the marital bed.
It’s late, I’m sleepy.
Actually, this post:
Not a bigoted point in it. take, traditional marriage is the ideal situation in which to raise a child, laying out clear norms to guide sexual development, pick whatever you’d like. None of them bigoted.
So, perhaps, we can finally move away from the flagrantly incorrect claims that 1) there are no-non bigoted reasons to be opposed to SSM and 2) that none have been presented in tho thread.
At least we cleared that up!
This argument breaks down when you are asked to provide evidence that secular marrige was instituted to assist with the raising of children.
It totally falls apart when you fail to provide evidence that hetero parents can raise children better.
This leaves us with the argument that children should not be exposed to homosexual parents which without the first two is “protection” of a word because of intolerance, or as some call it bigotry.
Yes, bigoted. Traditional marriage was a pretty much a master/slave arrangement where a man owned a woman in all but name, and where interracial marriages were banned. But let me guess - you are using a custom definition of “traditional” where the only traditions that are so vital to protect just happen to be the ones that persecute homosexuals.
Claiming that same sex couples raise children worse is false, and claiming they do despite the facts is bigoted. Claiming that children need so-called “clear norms to guide sexual development” to avoid them turning out (shudders) homosexual is again false, and bigoted.
Thanks! I heartily disagree with the reasoning, but I did ask to see it.
In my opinion, it comes uncomfortably close to bigotry, by claiming that a gay couple cannot raise a child as well as a straight couple. But, even if I were to grant that it is entirely free of bigotry, I think the facts have, by this time, wholly belied the idea. There have been enough children raised by enough couples for statistical significance, and, as I understand it, no studies have shown any deficiencies in the sexual development of children raised by gay couples, as contrasted with children raised by straight couples.
(We also have a much longer history of children raised by single parents, and they seem to turn out about the same as other kids, too.)
As I understand it, a loving family is the ideal situation for child-raising, and that the sexual make-up of the marriage has been shown to be irrelevant.
You didn’t state it explicitly, but you did use the word “tradition,” and that, too, is not intrinsically bigoted. But this isn’t a complete defense, as, if there are no other arguments that are not bigoted, then simply defending the status quo on the basis of tradition is adhering to a bigoted situation. A defense of a ban on interracial marriages, solely on the basis of tradition, is in aid of racism, even if it is not, itself, intrinsically racist.
FWIW, I’ll back off to say that I have not heard any good reasons to ban SSM, and that most of the reasons presented by opponents have been bigoted.