You haven’t given much in the way of explanations, you’ve just danced around trying to avoid giving any.
There is a simple reason it wasn’t discussed much before that is explained by this graph of fertility in the US.
To summarize we are getting on near 40 years with the fertility rate below ZPG. Frankly it wasn’t obvious before that we would have to bribe people to raise children. According to the 2010 census 3/4 of the population increase between 2000 and 2010 is from immigrants and the children of immigrants.
There isn’t very much to think about. You’ve made a bunch of assertions about the state of marriage, asserted they’re related, and asserted that legalizing same-sex marriage will make the debatable problems worse. You’ve made a bunch of claims about gay indoctrination and the gay agenda that are totally ridiculous. You’re welcome to your opinion but you haven’t offered much to support it or to make anybody change his mind.
What explanations? You’ve repeatedly stated that gay marriage will harm marriage and not provided anything to back that up. In fact you just responded to Bryan Elkers with “we can’t know”, “claims are premature” and my favorite “When the studies repeatedly show trends after a dozen to two dozen years, we will better know and can better figure it out”.
You have nothing.
I dunno, how has that been working out for you with marriage? Two divorces right? Perhaps that’s the real reason your girlfriend declined your offer of marriage.
If you can’t know, why assume gay marriage will make it worse? Besides, gay marriage won’t produce children (I believe that’s being used as an argument against them) so the parenting issues are of questionable relevance.
In any case, six years should be enough for some early warning signs of what I’d assume is the particularly egregious effect of gay marriage, assuming such an effect exists, no? And if it’s longer, like twenty or thirty years, how would we know what was the result of gay marriage and what was just the continuing slide already in effect for, as you say, the past seventy years?
Do you know of an example of a “very accurate” moment of social science? I’m curious if, say, 20 years of Internet access allowed social scientists to accurately predict the success of FaceBook, for example. As far as I know, social science is a pretty messy business not lending itself to “very accurate” predictions, though I’m no expert. Economics is a social science that has been studied extensively for several centuries, yet there is considerable and heated debate over where the economy will be just five years from now, let alone a decade or two.
What effects should we expect twelve to twenty-four years after gay marriage is legalized? Canada is almost halfway to that earlier estimate, is there anything we should have noticed by now?
Companies actually aren’t required to offer medical coverage to spouses now, so that isn’t a legal issue. I suggest you make sure your SO has medical coverage on their job.
Actually, in some Muslim countries, Sterility of the husband is the only reason a woman can get a divorce.
Actually the injured parties are single people who have to pick up the slack for their married deduction. Of course, the same applies to DINKS also.
I curious about the married people in this discussion, who have stated they have no intention to have children justify imposing on single people to support them which they are doing when they file as Married on their tax returns.
That conclusion doesn’t have a factual basis. You presume that it means that people consider marriage a “joke” but offer no actual provable evidence.
And whatever people’s attitudes toward marriage, that doesn’t provide any reasonable basis to refuse access to marriage to anyone.
Again, not a reason to refuse access to marriage to those who desire it.
But we do know that children raised in households with same-sex parents do benefit when their parents’ relationship is legally recognized. And we know that in absence of legal recognition, children have suffered. (Especially upon the loss of a parent.) But by your reasoning, we should wait and impose the penalties of being in unrecognized families on a few more generation of children in order to have some kind of studies to prove some point that you cannot even name.
Do you honestly not see the logical hole of that assertion, and more importantly see the human cost of it? Why is your assurance of whatever it is that you demand assurance of more important than the security of thousands of families?
And you can’t study the effect of something that doesn’t exist. But you would have it continue to not exist then proclaim that it can’t exist because there’s no proof that when it exists it’s okay.
Another logical hole big enough to drive a truck through.
Once more I challenge you: name an actual, definable harm that can or will arise from marriage equality.
Not a fear of some potential harm, not a digression about divorce or single parenting, not a tangent of completely erroneous assertions about laws, an actual, definable harm – by your own reckoning, anything that you would call harm – that would arise with full marriage equality in the United States.
My point was if I have nothing more to offer why ask twelve times?
I was addressing the logical flaw asserted previously that “it is proven that children of gay households are well adjusted.” No it isn’t proven. And I have repeatedly asserted I have no interest in keeping kids out of gay households. Repeated studies over and over have shown that natural nuclear families are best. Nevertheless any family practically is better than no family. You’re barking up the wrong tree.
If you were seriously interested in a debate rather than attacks on a particular point of view, you’d have treated my response as the response it was, which was to say another assertion can’t be claimed to be true because we are lacking the evidence.
What has been passing for debate here, with the exception of a couple posters, is ridiculous.
I agree with that completely. Marriage deductions should only belong to those with a hardship that society has an interest oin supporting. If anything, married and purposefully childless couples should pay more since their shared expenses are less.
They do. It’s called “personal exemptions”, in which having dependents gives you a tax break. But gays are not allowed to use the lower Married Filing Jointly rates.
Why assume gay marriage WON’T hurt? Since it is the gays asking for a change, it should be the gays who prove it won’t do any harm.
Too few participants at the moment to be accurate. We need thousands and thousands repeated, like they did with broken households vs. intact households.
Thanks for recognizing I am not talking about gay marriage alone but a cumulative effect of many things. One way to know is to ask people why they don’t marry. If they say gay marriage is a mockery of life and childbirth, then you know it is because of gay marriage.
It actually can be accurate depending on the area studied. No-Fault divorce critics and heartbalm critics succesfully predicted a rise in divorce and single parenting and people living together. Other social predictions have failed.
As far as the economy goes, with no one but Ron Paul suggesting measures necessary to fix it, its unlikely it will get better, and if it does it will be temporary before an even worse crunch comes. mean while the unwashed masses (as Cecil would say) are only interested in bread and circuses and voting themsleves some more entitlements.
If I knew I’d take a firmer stance on gays raising kids on way or the other. What I’d do right now is implement greater scrutiny in adoption and custody proceedings to determine if a gay couple is acting in the child’s best interest or, as activists, are merely acquiring children in order to generate numbers and prove the claim that kids are just fine in gay households. Using children as pawns for a political agenda is not in their best interest, and we should deny those if we can detect it. (Once again folks, the issue in this thread is gay marriages, therefore that’s what I am talking about. I’d do this in any straight couple’s proceeding too, if alerted to an agenda other than love for the child. Let’s have no picking on gays claims)
My claims about an agenda and indoctrination are opinions that say if this is occuring I am against it.
If that is ridiculous in your opinion, all it means is you have no respect for the opinions of others. And can’t understand the word “IF.”
I have also spoken about an agenda whhich is easily observably to all. Do I need to bring you a dictionary definition of agenda, or can you take care of that on your own?
I don’t understand this. Why should single people get a deduction, while married people should not? Why do you want to penalize married people? AFAIK, the standard deduction for married people is two times that of a single person.
Further, how is this relevant to same sex marriage? If you think marriage is suffering, wouldn’t it make sense to encourage people who are in committed relationships to solemnize their commitments?
Since it is the anti’s claiming that equal protection of the laws should continue to be denied, it is up to them to prove there’s a reason to do so.
The lack of equal protection does cause real, identifiable, serious harm for those affected by it. The pro-equality people (who, despite your apparent inference, are not all gay, nowhere close) have made that case. To prove the converse, that there wouldn’t be harm from ending that problem, which is what you demand, would first require being able to imagine what that harm might consist of. And nobody has been able to think of any such thing that can stand up to any sort of scrutiny.
Why don’t you provide some personal information for me to mock?
You are pretending that those statements are offered as proof against gay marriage. They weren’t. They relate to the question of whether children raised in gay households turn out well adjusted. I’m in favor of gays raising children, if you hadn’t noticed. But a claim has been made by others that it is proven that gay households produce fine children. This is not true, and the burden of proof lies on the one making it. My statements take issue with that false claim, and if you think that claim is true and want to spar with me over it, then it is on you to show me some good science that proves your point. You can’t do that because there have yet been enough people to study and there hasn’t been enough time. Because you can’t prove it you thouroughly mangle and twist my statements into something I didn’t say.
Extremely poor argument.
You keep mentioning this as if it were a widespread phenomenon in the gay community, but you have yet to provide any evidence that this is actually occurring. If you’re going to insist on asserting that gays, as a rule, adopt children primarily to acquire children to support their activist causes (as opposed to desiring to raise children), you are going to have to provide a cite.
Until you mentioned it and then repeated it several times in this thread, I had never heard of this.
Not my claim. My claim in that area is that there is no equal protection violation to begin with. Gays are not in the same position as straights. No unexpected child birth for one. Equal protection doesn’t mean the horse harness has to fit the goat too. Only if the goat is the size of the horse and does the horse’s work too must the harness fit.
The gays made the equal protection violation claim, they have to prove it, not me disprove it. If they fail I can remain silent and they still fail. You do not understand burden of proof, or perhaps deliberately ignore it.
How come nearly every freaking post misstates what I said?