Well, we don’t actually allow same sex marriages here… What we allow is a “registered relationship”… which is exactly like s secular marriage, with the same people officiating, and the same legal obligations and rights. Then again… a non-church marriage is a…“civilian union”. So marriage does have a specific meaning here…although possibly not for long as there’s been talk about stripping the whole right to marry people away from churches; their refusal to marry gay people seems to piss most people off. If they don’t want to play by the same rules, they won’t be allowed to play at all.
I think it’s a pretty effective argument. From what I gather people who yak on about the “sanctity of marriage” and “you can’t just redefine words” can either put up or shut up. Call the governmental arrangement marriage and let the gays in too, or “demote” all of it to civil unions (and also let the gays in).
Either way, I don’t doubt there are churches willing to marry you even if you’re a same-sex couple, so this whole religious/semantic argument is just bigotry pretending to be clever.
And its comments like this that degrade serious discussion. But feel free to list all the mammals that produce asexually.
Attempting to argue about the definition of the human term for the human institution of marriage in terms of animal interaction does nothing but degrade discussion. Animals don’t get married. Some (a small minority) pair-bond for life, but if humanity wanted to emulate they’d ban marriage for everybody and some people would just move in together.
Personally I think that comments that point out the absurdity of the supposed ‘natural world’ argument for the definition of marriage elevate discussion.
I’m not so sure it doesn’t have intent. Isn’t the intent of an organism to stay alive, at least long enough to procreate? And for us primates that means a man and a woman must be involved. Throw two men or two women on an island and the island will be vacant after they die. One man and one woman can start a civilization.
Limit marriages to opposite sex couples on deserted islands? That’s stupid.
I’m not surprised that you think that. If you’d like to argue that SS sexual bonding is as much the norm as OS sexual bonding, I’d love to hear it.
Your position is what I see as the height of unreasonableness. To not accept that male-female pairings are the norm in nature is absurd. BUt you go right ahead and not concede one teensy weensy obvious little point. You’ll sway and impress many.
I am not your strawman. SS sexual bonding is not the norm. Obviously.
But whether it is the norm or not is utterly and completely irrelevent to the discussion. We are talking about the definition of the word, here. And a black swan, despite not being the norm, is still a swan. Despite being OMG horribly unnatural hide the children and get the fainting couches for the women!!!
I’m sure we’ve done the “marriage is for procreation” thing more than enough times already. Unless you’re also advocating forbidding hetero marriages when one or both partners are sterile or just not interested in having kids, this argument makes no sense.
ETA: And to be consistent, you should also be willing to forbid adoption for anybody but married hetero couples, ban procreation outside marriage and possibly forbidding single parents, IVF and other means of procreation, some of which are currently already open to gay people. Good luck.
There was a time when answering the question “What are the biological imperatives?” on a science test at school, you were expected to answer
“survival and procreation”.
Even now, with the expansion to territorialism, competition, and quality of life seeking, scientist still regard any organism that lacks any of these imperatives is described as maladaptive by scientists.
Hey, all I’m doing is making a counter argument. I’m all for SSM.
I disagree. The correlation is high enough that we equate the two, even though there are plenty of instances of the two being discreet from each other.
discrete
Yeah, that too!
:smack:
So what to do with all these pesky people who fail to fall within “the norm” (you know, regular heterosexual married couples with at least two kids)?
You’re not arguing against SSM here, you’re arguing that ANYONE who doesn’t get married and procreate doesn’t deserve the same rights as the “normal people”.
We do nothing of the kind. People have and raise kids all the time without getting married. People marry and have no children. They marry, and adopt. They marry people who can’t have children and know it before hand. People marry, have kids then divorce and raise the kids without a partner.
Marriage is NOT about procreation, like it or not.
I would say that marriage is about children in the same way that real estate ownership is about having a place to live. That is, it is indeed the case that real estate ownership has indeed had a lot to do with housing, for pretty much ever - to the degree that it could somewhat legitimately be assumed that if the average person owns real estate, it’s probably a house. Of course, this doesn’t meant that all real estate ownership focuses around housing, and in fact there are many other reasons for which people could, and do, own real estate that have nothing to do with housing at all.
So: it is indeed the case that marriage has indeed had a lot to do with reproduction, for pretty much ever - to the degree that it could somewhat legitimately be assumed that if the average person its married, they’re probably interested in having kids. Of course, this doesn’t meant that all marriage focuses around reproduction, and in fact there are many other reasons for which people could, and do, get married that have nothing to do with reproduction at all.
The argument that real estate ownership is excusively tied to housing is a non-starter.
Apparently, couples who voluntary want to remain childless is trending up … about 7%.
It’s interesting that the childless-by-choice percentage is in the same range as homosexuals of the population. What that means, I don’t know.
Anyways, what’s the argument for allowing those 7% heterosexual-no-procreate couples to marry?
So folks who are in a marriage are married, but folks in a civil union would be…??
Sinners.
Civilians?