When the portion of the “tradition” in question that is supposedly important is carefully selected to justify persecution a group while other parts of the same tradition that are equally as old and firmly held are rejected, that does make it bigoted however.
I don’t believe that. A given gay couple can no doubt raise a child as well or better than a straight couple. God knows, there are plenty of bad straight parents and wonderful gay parents. Some of whom I can personally vouch for. But I do maintain that the ideal situation is for a child to be raised be a married man and woman.
I wasn’t talking about the sexual development of kids being raised by gay couples, but by kids in general. Societal norms help.
I agree that "loving is the most important component. But the ideal is loving parents consisting of one man and one woman. Children get different things from different sex parents.
If that were the only reason, I’d agree.
And I thank you for a fair and logical discussion. This is where the problem usually happens. People claim to want a not-bigoted rational argument, but when one is presented, they deny it was given. That’s because what they really mean is that they want a reason they think is a good one. This, as you acknowledge, can be two different things. I appreciate you doing so.
No, not bigoted.
This has nothing to do with the points I made.
Guess again. I’m using a definition that comports with history, tradition, and nature.
Didn’t claim that.
Didn’t claim that either. As it is now, some kids have a hard time figuring out their sexuality. With clear guardrails, that confusion will just increase. Why would you want to increase the likelihood that kids would have confusion about their sexuality and mistakingly identify themselves as gay when really their touching/playing at a young age was simply normal sexual development?
Even if that was true, so what? That has nothing to do with marriage, and at any rate the number of children raised in an ideal home is zero. Everyone and everything has flaws.
No they don’t; if anything they tend to have no effect beyond traumatizing the kids who don’t fit those narrow norms.
Because you created a fake tradition that left out those details.
No, you’re using a twisted definition that ignores all three.
You did, and still are with your handwaving about “ideal” couples; which is another way of smearing same sex couples as inferior.
:rolleyes: That’s a ridiculous argument. The promotion of guilt and hatred like you are doing is what causes children with non-conformist sexuality trauma.
So tell us, dictionary-defender magellan, what other words (if any) have you ever considered worthy of defense against creeping redefinition, or is “marriage” the first and only?
Someone else may have to re-ask this on my behalf, as I suspect magellan is ignoring me.
Done.
Cite?
Otherwise, I maintain that the ideal situation is for a child to be raised by parents of the same race, and I’m no more bigoted than you.
“Racist,” perhaps, is another of the short list of terms that must be defined as narrowly as possible lest we risk a linguistic catastrophe, whereas terms like “socialist” are apparently so elastic they can expand to accommodate any meaning.
But if we keep allowing people to re-define words, then all communication may cease! Think of it, civilizations may collapse if we know that Bill in accounting is “married,” but we cannot immediately know that his spouse is a female person!
Chaos.
I hereby postulate that children should only be raised by themselves, since being raised by someone not exactly like themselves is apparently so traumatic.
I may agree. Because nothing is worse for a child than to learn from an early age that there are other people in the world, people who might have different ideas and approaches to life, instead of following the same “traditions.” Studies have shown that tolerance for others is easily gained after a person reaches voting age.
[/sarcasm]
This is post 347, for those following at home.
This isn’t an argument against same-sex marriage, it’s an argument about what to call it. And it’s not a rational or sensible argument, it’s just an appeal to tradition. It seems to come down to a request that gays be kept out of the marriage club - let them get married, just call it something else because mine is traditional and deserves some extra recognition on that basis. For what reason is that necessary, exactly? What happens if we don’t treat heterosexual marriage as the most specialest kind of marriage? As far as I can tell, the answer is nothing - except that people who aren’t too keen on gay marriage will be unhappy.
So “marriage = man + woman” can be understood by children, but “marriage = two people who love each other” is far too confusing and complicated?
I don’t think I get this. Kids sometimes engage in same-sex playing, so if they don’t know that marriage is for heterosexuals, then… what happens? They become confused about gender role because the only way they learn about those is through the concept of traditional marriage even though many children aren’t raised in one? They grow up to become pansexual nymphomaniacs? How does restricting the meaning of marriage do anything for children and what do you think will happen if the meaning changes?
I don’t agree, and it’s also nonsense.
We’ve already discussed these arguments more than once. I think this is the second time someone has asserted we need to start the whole thread again for their benefit. I posted about these arguments a page or two ago and I’m sure they came up early. Scientific studies have debunked the notion that children raised by a heterosexual family “do better” than kids with same-sex parents. I’ve never seen any evidence supporting the gender roles contention and it’s quite goofy anyway: children live with their parents but they see their extended family, teachers, friends, and a lot of other people and all of them can be involved in shaping gender roles. Even if you do wrongly believe that children of heterosexual couples are better off, that doesn’t require you to oppose gay marriage. You can fall for that incorrect idea and still think that even if a gay family is suboptimal, a stable and loving home is a good thing for a child under any circumstance. If your argument relies on factually incorrect statements, questionable logic and irrelevant assertions to justify the lesser treatment of a group of people, I am comfortable calling that argument bigoted. Particularly since the overall point it’s being used to support is definitely bigoted.
Sometime in the late 60s and early 70s my sister married a black man. It surprised me to find out which of my in laws were closet racists whom had never had cause to reveal it before.
They had two kids, and my sister made the comment that what they did as adults was thier business but it was a shame to bring two kids into the world knowing the hard time they’d have as mixed race children. It occured to me at the time that she was suggestng we cowtow to racism. In order to avoid the pain the kids would suffer at the hands of ignorant racists, the solution was to not have kids, rather than challenge the racists and ignorance, deal with the pain involved, and try to put that crap behind us as people and as a society.
It’s the same now. People feel they are imposed upon and harmed in some way because they are being forced to deal with thier own ignorance and bigtry about homosexuals. Remember ORielly saying something like “Well how do we explain that to our kids”
How about, “Sometimes men love men romantically and that’s perfectly normal”
How about teaching our kids real respect for our fellow humans and diversity, and to judge by character rather than labels and superficial qualities?
here’s a great clip of Al Franken taking down a distortion by a group promoting “families” making a claim that children do better in hetero couple families.
It seems clear to me that what children respond to is love and support which helps them feel secure and encourages them to develop. Healthy discipline and responsibility, reasonable boundaries. some guidence and being treated with respect as a unique individual with interests and minds of thier own.
It makes sense that growing kids need good role models of both genders, but it often isn’t , and doesn’t have to be, in thier home. Single Moms and Dads raise good kids because of role models in other parts of our lives. A Grandmother, or other relative. A teacher , or neighbor, or someone in the community.
The argument seems to be that we have to support the absolute ideal situation. It’s a completely bogus argument. Of course we do support the ideal… and we haven’t stopped supporting it , we don’t encourage it any less, by recognizing that reality is often not ideal and we often make something very positive out of a less than ideal situation.
And Hey, maybe one ideal is to promote equality and respect for our fellow citizens in our children.
magellan provides a pretty great illustrative example for lance. Here we’ve got someone who is convinced–CONVINCED–he’s offering a non-bigoted argument against SSM. When pressed, however, he reveals that at the core of his argument is a belief that “the ideal situation is for a child to be raised be a married man and woman” which, however he spins it, means that a same-sex couple is not an ideal child-rearing situation. This is a measure by which he considers same-sex couples to be inferior to opposite-sex couples (again, he denies this, but his denial is directly contradicted by the “ideal situation” quote).
Either his opposition is based on facts, or it’s not. If it is, I invite him to present those facts. If it’s not–well, let’s be incredibly generous, and pretend that he’s never been confronted on this belief before, and let’s start the one-week clock for him now. Give him a week to realize that his belief has no factual basis and to revise his worldview.
If he does, I’ll be first in line to applaud him. If not–if he obstinately maintains the belief about the inferiority of same-sex marriages in spite of no evidence for this belief–then surely we can agree that his position is bigoted.
(Once again putting in my disclaimer that I strongly support SSM and have argued at great length against Magellan’s position, as I find it to be wrong, wrong wrong…)
I think you’re oversimplifying things a bit. Is “children raised by gay couples turn out just as well as children raised by straight couples” such a clearly and firmly established fact, verified by so many different studies in so many different situations, over such time and with such historical significance, that to disagree with it can only be the result of willful ignorance? How many studies have there actually been on this topic? And it’s a VERY complicated topic, in that there are around a billion other factors to correct for, plus it’s very hard to assess the long term impact until the children have grown up to be adults. Plus you need lots and lots of data, and the number of SSM couples raising children wasn’t huge until recently, etc. All of which is to say that it would not at all surprise me if an objective expert, asked whether that statement was true, would say that the most accurate answer possible is that we don’t yet have enough data.
Which leads to a second question, which is whether believing that a straight couple is the ideal situation for raising children is, in and of itself, bigoted. And I’d argue that it isn’t… or at least, that it’s possible for it not to be. After all, men and women are clearly different, and not just physically. So even if you value men and women equally, and value straight people and gay people equally, it’s not preposterous to believe that the ideal child-rearing situation is to expose the child to both male traits AND female traits from loving parents. Now, I’m not saying that’s actually TRUE, I just don’t think it’s prima facie ridiculous, and I think it’s possible to believe it without being bigoted (although I’m sure the vast majority of people who do believe that gay parents are inferior ARE bigoted).
(Slightly tangentially, my disagreement with Magellan’s position is several-fold:
(1) even if the absolutely perfectly ideal situation for raising children is a straight couple, so that on a scale of 0 to 100, the absolutely perfect straight couple could raise children with a quality of 100 but the best gay couple could only get up to 96, that’s utterly inconsequential when compared to the indisputable fact that almost no one gets anywhere near that mythical 100 anyhow… so many straight couples are abusive or ignorant or unable to provide health care or unable to provide education or whatever, and thus ranging from 0 to 80 on that scale, that a tiny theoretical difference in maximum attainable perfection (even if it exists, and I don’t see any evidence that it does) is no reason to deny people fundamental human rights.
(2) his concern about the redefinition of marriage is silly… but he also has it exactly backwards. If he wants children to grow up valuing the word and the concept and the tradition of “marriage”, then when uncle Jeff and uncle Dave love each other and live together and provide an example to the young kids of what a stable and loving relationship should be, they SHOULD be able to be legally married. Seeing married gay couples isn’t going to turn straight kids gay. But seeing happy loving committed gay couples who can NOT get married WILL cause kids to question the meaning and necessity of marriage in the first place.)
Why do you think this is something that needs to be prevented? So Tommy and Timmy play doctor with each other at twelve, and Tommy spends the next four years thinking that means he’s gay. So what? And how does segregated marriage make that not happen? You keep insisting that your solution to the SSM debate is completely equitable to both gays and straights, and that nothing in your solution insists or implies on gay couples being in any way deficient compared to straight couples. If your characterization of your position is correct, how is a kid supposed to know that a heterosexual marriage is the model he’s supposed to follow, and not a homosexual civil union?
Anyway, your insistence here that gay couples are less than ideal parents, and your belief (stated elsewhere) that gay relationships are less fulfilling for their participants because it’s not “what nature intended” are both inherently bigoted positions. As I’ve said before, it’s an exceedingly minor level of bigotry, and I wouldn’t characterize it as “hateful” by any stretch, but your stance on SSM clearly stems directly from a misplaced assumption that gay relationships simply aren’t as good as straight ones.
Well, there’s something to be said about how children learn from the traditional role models of a “mother” and a “father”.
But before hetero marriage can claim any moral high ground, it needs to clean a lot of house.
As far as opposing same-sex marriage, the homo community needs a significant amount of house-cleaning.
One would be to distance themselves from the outlandish practices of “Pride” parades.
Two semi-nude men, one walking the other on a dog leash in a pair of asslesss chaps don’t convey to me that they want to be able to list one another as next-of-kin, let alone that small children should be left in their care.
Yes, because there are no straight couples who share a leather/dominance fetish.
I have neighbors that are hetro, the wife walks the husband on a leash every day.
I live next to a church that openly states that women should be subservient and the pastor has stated that women who take out student loans are actively stealing from their future husbands.
All of these are non-sequitur arguments as were your claims.
Is there? Then say it, please.
…and why would I care what it conveys to you? Because a dude at a spring break party sloshing beer everywhere and leering at a chick in a wet t-shirt doesn’t convey to me that they want to be able to list one another as next-of-kin, let alone that small children should be left in their care.
How much housecleaning vis a vis frat parties, spring break parties, etc. do straight people need to do? I say zero, because that’s really stupid.What do you say?