No kidding. My mom got married when I was 4 and he adopted me. His feeling of being my father was so strong that he has said things like ‘I remember changing your diapers!’ even though he didn’t even know my mom when I wore any.
If there was ever any difference in the way he felt about the 4 of us then no one, including him, knew about it.
I mean the arguments aren’t valid: by turns they’re tautological, unsupported by evidence, flawed, or simply unconstitutional.
Entirely irrelevant since the effect is the same.
I already acknowledged this.
You rarely see your statements as denigrating anyone. Perhaps you should ask other people how they feel about your opinions instead of deciding by yourself how they can feel about them. Anyway: they say they love their children equally regardless of their provenance. Do you believe they are wrong and they actually love their bio-kids more? If so, why does that mean a relationship that can hypothetically produce those kinds of children (even if it won’t) deserves a kind of status that other relationships can’t have? Do you think biological parenthood deserves that kind of status because it’s just superior?
See above: if you don’t believe parents love their biological offspring more, why does this matter?
I do acknowledge it, and I’ve never denied it. I just don’t care about it, and you can’t produce a logical reason that I should.
I also don’t know that I won’t be mauled by a unicorn tomorrow. Unless someone produces credible evidence that it might happen for a logical reason, I’m not going to act as if it might happen.
You know what might help? Letting gay couples get married.
Yeah, people who feel that adopted or stepchildren aren’t REAL offspring just amaze me in 2014. For a very long time, that was assumed to be true, and the facts of someone’s adoption were kept secret. But it’s freaking 2014! Try to keep up!
And the word is “comprised”, not “compromised”.
From now on, you cannot say you love your children. Only mothers can do that. How you feel towards your child, or wife, or anyone else, will now be referred to as “nardle” because its inherently different from what women can feel towards their children. You may not nardle it, but that’s the way it is
Let’s put it this way. The evidence in favor of this happening is much less than the evidence in favor or global warming causing environmental calamity. I leave it up to you to decide whether this means we should take actions to prevent both or neither.
(and no I’m not trying to hijack this thread into a global warming debate)
The marriage-is-for-raising-children claim is a recent invention, developed in response to the “threat” of letting the queers act normal. The claim has no historical basis, and marriage has never been treated legally as if it were a factor at all.
But it’s all they’ve been able to dream up that has any respectability at all, so we keep getting it.
But the *debate *is over, there being no respectable “anti” arguments remaining to discuss. What is happening now is a mop-up operation, like finding a few holdout Japanese soldiers in an island cave and showing them the war is over.
Was that type of marriage ruined or lessened in any way when wives were finally allowed to have their own bank accounts, own their own property, have a pension(there was a time when a woman’s job classification went from permanent to temporary once she married)…have some sort of status that wasn’t “pregnant, barefoot and in the kitchen”? Scratch the surface of this “tradition” of man + woman and what you get are marriages of convenience, marriages of necessity, arranged marriages etc. usually arranged for the benefit of the man to the detriment of the woman. For the greater part of western history there was no “man + woman”-There was “man acquiring woman + dowry + any properties she may have owned and properties she will inherit in the future”.
As has been explained to you five bajillion times, separate-but-equal schools, in which students access exactly the same education just through different institutions, is no more separate than your separate-but-equal unions, in which couples access exactly the same legal privileges just through different institutions. If one is separate-but-equal, so is the other. THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE.
You’re trying to claim there is by comparing the establishing laws in your proposal to the created institutions in the other, or by comparing the hoped-for effects in your proposal to the created institutions in the other. The correct comparison is either between the created institutions in both, or the establishing laws in both, or the effects in both.
For most people it’s not natural. For them. For me, the unnatural thing would be to be with someone of the opposite gender. I have no interest in stopping them from marrying each other.
Does “traditional western marriage” include the original Mormon version? Can’t get much more western than that.
When it’s being used to sell cars, I’d say the debate is over:
And yet, the legal status of “parent” applies equally to mothers, fathers, and adoptive parents of either (or any) sex. They have the same legal rights and responsibilities of guardianship, and they are equally entitled to the legal designation “parent”. Hmmmm.
So magellan01, why aren’t you advocating for a special legal designation called “mother”, applicable only to the woman who had the person in question growing inside her for 9* months, while fathers would have the same legal rights but a different official designation**? Why are you willing to tolerate the devaluation of motherhood by legally lumping it together with other forms of parenthood, instead of demanding a unique legal status for it reflecting its traditional unique importance?
Except it isn’t. Certainly sexual dimorphism has been one of the defining features of the custom of marriage in human societies, but it hasn’t been universally observed. That is a fact.
For instance, the intersex/homosexual/transsexual/“third sex” hijras of South Asian society traditionally have occasionally married men. Some same-sex partners in imperial Rome participated in public marriage rites and were socially considered married, despite not being listed as such on official state registers of families. Same-sex spouses were recognized in some North American traditional societies.
In short, while opposite-sex marriage has overwhelmingly been the norm throughout the history of marriage customs, it’s simply false to claim that no other form of marriage has ever been socially recognized until very recently.
*Actually, anywhere between 6 and 10, of course, but magellan01 is pretty big on reductionist generalizations.
**Say, “nardlers” (thanks, YogSoSoth!).
Yep, the free market LOVES gay marriage.
Ditto. I was going to attempt to reply to this garbage from my phone but you beat me to it. As part of a family with biological siblings, half siblings and step siblings that made me want to vomit. So… ditto.
This! I raised the same point in another thread. If we have freedom of speech, then gay couples are going to say “We’re married.”
(I know people who are still whining about the “loss” of the word Gay. But what is there that they could do about it? Alter the First Amendment?)
I wouldn’t go that far. My feeling is that this is more like after the battle of Normandy, where it is clear that sooner or later that allies are going to win, but there is going to still be some hard fighting against entrenched forces before its all over.
I daresay the end of war in Europe was determined before Normandy, arguably after Stalingrad.
Now it’s up to homophobes to decide who to surrender to.
No. You just realize the futility of your analogy if people recognize its actual meaning and persist in pretending that it differs from “separate but equal.” I have never claimed you argued for two sets of laws, only that you wish to re-instate the error of one set of laws first put forth in Plessy v Ferguson.
The separate school facilities were based on one set of laws. The separation of marriage and civil unions would be based on one set of laws.
“Separate but equal” was not coined during the arguments over Brown. The phrase made it into the legal language as the result of Plessy v Ferguson when the Supreme Court ruled that it was OK to treat people differently using the same set of laws as long as the people were treated separately but equally. Brown reversed Plessy noting that when the laws state that something is “separate,” the reality is that they will eventually lead to “unequal.” Whatever might happen in the first year or decade under your plan, human nature and the history of law indicate that the two conditions will never remain equal.
One characteristic of Law is that if two words are used, they are presumed to mean different things. That is why so many laws include multiple words indicating similar things–so as to cover the law from a condition where a lawyer argues “My client was doing A, and the law prohibits B.” For example, consider this Ohio law:
Property and services and obtain and exert control over are linked in identity so that a lawyer could not argue that his client never removed property even if he found a way to deprive the owner of that property’s services.
Threat and intimidation are both identified so that no one could argue that a threat was not actual intimidation or an act of intimidation did not include an actual threat.
Now consider “marriage” vs “civil union.” The moment that such a law is passed, an opponent of gay rights is going to note that two separate words are used, draw the logical and historically supported conclusion that they mean different things, and propose a new law that offers each situation “equal” treatment that is not identical–treatment that will turn out to be unequal. As with Plessy, it is pretty much inevitable.
No one is mischaracterizing your argument; we simply recognize facts that you will not or cannot recognize.
= = =
And all of this to provide some sort of protection, that you cannot even explain, to a word that has already changed in meaning in the English language. Same Sex Marriage is already recognized in Canada, England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and South Africa and is accepted in Scotland although the law is on hold pending the details of the severing of the Union.
In the English speaking world, only Australia and some U.S. states are actually resisting the movement. Within a few years, without any changes to U.S. law, SSM will be accepted, at least as far as language is concerned, throughout the English speaking world.
As to your appeal to the "special"status of marriage, you have failed to ever point out just what is being lost. The U.S. is already home to millions of couples who set up house together and have children without ever seeking a legal acknowledgement of their situation. It is also home to millions of people who marry and divorce on a semi-regular basis, thus providing no inspiration to future generations that marriage is “special.” I would think that you would want to embrace SSM on the grounds that it demonstrates that a public and legally recognized commitment was a good thing for people, regardless of their respective genitalia.
How exactly is more people getting married unhealthy for society’s longterm welfare?
By this “logic”, it would be even better if only left-handed blue-eyed Albanians were allowed to get married.