And again the question rings out: “So what?” This is another pointless quibble because what cosmosdan said made sense and it was accurate. He said being gay is normal. Quoting from dictionary.com: “regular,” “not unusual,” “natural.” All of those apply. Most people are straight, some are gay. Both are normal.
Anyway doesn’t this obviate your concern about kids becoming confused about their sexuality? You say most people don’t feel same-sex attraction, so allowing gay couples to marry and calling it marriage shouldn’t change that, should it? I’m still waiting for you to explain the problem this is going to cause.
And no, the nuclear family is NOT ideal, an involved extended family tends to improve outcomes. Should we require grandmothers to live within 3 miles of their grand-kids? And if they don’t their children will be denied hospital visits and survivor-ship benefits?
magellan01 claimed that if same-sex marriages are called marriages, kids who are merely experimenting with same-sex physicality will get confused and think they’re gay. Because… something about guardrails.
This! Even if I were to believe that a SSM “isn’t as good” as the “ideal” mixed sex marriage – why employ the awful and majestic force of law to ban it? It does more harm than good! It deprives thousands (?) of children of a two-parent family, which is (aren’t we all agreed?) better than a one-parent family.
“They said we’d be leaning on them all day!”
Anyway, I note magellan cannot (or at least has not) offered up any other words that have needed dictionary-defense. As always, his is a general argument that applies to exactly one specific instance.
No, I got briefly lost in the quagmire of this thread and had assumed that your “ideal” environment was tied to not wanting to allow SSM.
It is funny that you would allow adoption and not marriage, though. Shouldn’t we call adoption by gays ‘child guardianship’ so as not to dilute the meaning of the word adoption?
Are we going to allow gays to dilute the meaning of the word “parenthood”, just like they want to dilute “marriage”? I propose we give gays all the rights and privileges of parenthood, but in the name of preserving the meaning of the word, they should call it “concierging.”
… and, therefore, it is better for those young people to know by definition and law, that their same-sex relationships are not in any way equivalent to any opposite-sex relationships they may have during the experimentation phase. Because, a child mistakenly self-identifying as gay is traumatic, while a child being told that any same-sex attraction is inferior (wrong or somehow shameful) is good for society. Or something.
Now, I have watched a lot of videos on the internet, and it seems that many, many young college-aged women have consensual lesbian experience while on Spring Break, and then go on to consensual heterosexual relationships; often in the same video! They don’t seem traumatized at all, but they do seem to be much louder than any woman I’ve been with. And more shaved.
I see. You’re saying a term can mean more than one thing without causing any major chaos or confusion. So if marriage means state-recognized long-term opposite-sex and same-sex relationships, there shouldn’t be a problem. Right?
I don’t think you are following through on the implications of your own argument here. I’d also like to see you try answering my questions and explaining what exactly is going to happen if (when) “marriage” refers to these relationships regardless of the sexes of the people involved and exactly why it’s going to change anybody’s behavior or identification. If anything it sounds like it would make people less judgmental about sexuality, and I’m having a hard time seeing that as a bad thing. As I said earlier, your argument would make more sense if you were arguing in support of anti-sodomy laws. While those laws had not really been enforced anywhere in recent decades, criminalizing same-sex behavior might actually, you know, affect people’s behavior. “Don’t call it marriage!” doesn’t seem likely to affect anyone’s behavior, particularly that of people who aren’t really thinking in terms of sex or marriage.
Well it is obvious what the problem would be, the ‘ideal’ scenario of a one man and one woman marriage would become rarer because…erm…well dammit I can’t see how allowing a small subset of the population to call themselves married would influence this ‘ideal’ scenario at all.
magellan01 is not only a bigot but also a coward. Some bigots are too dumb to realise they are bigots and from his posts here I think we can conclude he isn’t dumb. Some people are proud bigots who shout their bigotry from the roof tops, these people are mostly morons. Then we have our cowardly bigots who know what they espouse is bigotry but try all sorts of mental gymnastics to convince themselves, and consequently others, they are in fact not bigots.