Read some gay literature. There have been calls by the activists to show the world stable gay families. Other than that, I have stated my opinion that if it occurs we should have a safeguard. Because I don’t have any proof and do not think it is widespread, I AM IN FAVOR OF GAYS RAISING CHILDREN. So long as they act in the child’s best interest, and that applies to any couple gay or not. or single adopter. The only thing to debate with this is whether or not it is good, IF IT HAPPENS, for children to be used as pawns in a political agenda. Address that please and stop asking for evidence of my opinion. My opinion is easy to prove, I can do so merely by stating it.
If you support gays to the point you think they are perfect and no single gay would ever not act in a child’s best interest, you have a bias. If you think it’s possible that there is a gay out there who is not a very good person, then maybe we can rationally discuss the use of children as pawns.
As it stands it sounds like you are in favor of it if it advances the gay cause. But if I am wrong then please correct me.
This “can a gay family raise children” argument is a red herring and is just tap dancing around the real issue, which is that gay marriage will cause no harm whatsoever to society, and denying it is denying a civil right for absolutely no reason other than that people like you find gay people “icky” (although apparently not so icky that you weren’t willing to give it the old college try yourself at one point).
In 8 pages of discussion – OK, you came in around page 3 or so, so I’ll give you 5 pages of discussion – you still haven’t managed to prove anything other than that you have some very strange ideas about the “gay agenda” and “the gays” in general. You have also effectively demonstrated that you cannot construct a working metaphor, as shown a few posts up with your weird goat/horse thing. So far you have compared gay people to fecal sewage and to goats. I await with breathless anticipation your next blithely offensive comparison.
It was a digression and not directly relevant to gay marriage alone.
Married people have fewer expenses due to shared resources. If they were single they’d have two houses and sets of bills. If they are married they have one. Most tax breaks for married couples are in recognition of the huge expense of raising a child. If you deliberately never raise a child then you have no need and should pay your fair share of taxes like other people. Keep in mind that is my opinion.
Keep in mind I never said penalize married people. Please don’t change what I said and then argue with it. You’re really arguing with your imagination when you do that and attributing one side to me. Before I go along with that, I’d like to see a more active and creative and fair imagination. If you think up something really really smart and attribute it to me I might not mind, though out of modesty I generally don’t go along with it and give credit where credit is due.
You aren’t making sense. The lack of evidence for every claim you make plus the inconsistencies in your position create a huge chasm and the rest of us keep pushing you over that cliff.
You claim that gays shouldn’t have the right to marry because they can’t have children; however, there are plenty of married straight people without children and some gay couples with children so things aren’t as black and white as you seem to believe. When someone points out that plenty of married straight people can’t or don’t have children, you backtrack since you aren’t prepared to state that any straight couple should be ever be denied marriage rights. When the other half of that argument is rebutted by the fact that there are gay people who do have children, you distinguish between “artificial” and natural children, yet you have no evidence at all that those so called natural children are in any way different from the “artificial” ones. It’s a false dichotomy anyway since plenty of straight parents have “artificial” children too. So out comes the nugget of gays raising children and how you believe that is harmful, yet again there is no evidence. Sprinkle in some feces and goats and the ever present meme that “gays are icky” and the whole argument stinks.
So far as I can tell, no one here has correctly laid out the process of Equal Protection analysis as a matter of law.
For example, David42, any time the law creates a classification of any kind – treating gays differently than straights, for instance – it may be assessed under Equal Protection analysis.
When the class created by the law is a suspect class, such as race or gender, heightened scrutiny is applied to the law. If the class created by the law is not a suspect class – we might imagine a law which treated left-handed people differently – then we apply what’s known as the rational basis test.
The rational basis test is applied by the court as follows: the court asks if there is any rational connection between the law and a legitimate government objective.
This test confuses people mightily.
People seem to mentally transform this test into asking whther the law does a good job, or the best job, of furthering the government interest. For instance, they ask, “If encouraging procreation is a legitimate government objective, then why does the government not test for fertility before issuing a marriage license?”
That’s asking why the government doesn’t use a better method of furthering their objective. That inquiry has no place in rational basis analysis.
Countless times I have said the children thing does not address my gay marriage arguments. The problem here is what you will accept as evidence, more or less, and a deliberate refusal to even try to understand metaphor.
What if the gays were the horses? Horses v goats just illustrates DIFFERENCES, nothing more. I compared feces to food, not gays. To compare gays to feces, I’d have to say “gays are like feces.” Comparing things does not mean they are alike. You can compare things to show how unalike they are as well. A comparison is exactly setting two things side by side and observing how different or alike they are. It is you who has made the conclusion that gays are like feces and goats, not me.
If you want be fair and think about that post a bit, you might realize that it can be taken a bit more generally as our general mindset as a nation. Its crap. Bread and Circuses and voting oursleves some more benefits regardless of how broke we are and shirking our responsibilities. I intended to show that the mindset of the people in general and has a relationship to good thinking is similar to the realtionship feces has to food.
Why did you automatically jump to the conclusion that I said gays are like feces? I think it is because you can’t get past a stereotyped and false image of me as a “hater bigot homophobe” and filter everything I say through that.
I can say one thousand things and if I say one thing you don’t like you ignore the 999 things that agree with you and twist them around to prove how mean I am. I would never say any kind of person is akin to feces, and never have.
If the children thing doesn’t address your gay marriage concerns, then perhaps you could stop bringing it up in a thread devoted to discussing gay marriage.
I’m glad to hear you don’t consider gay people equivalent to feces. It was still a shit metaphor, however, if you’ll pardon the pun.
Yes I am well aware of the test, and suspect classifications, rational basis etc. Just like you said it confuses people. For the benefit of simplification, I have said that equal protection does not allow for groups in the same or substantially similar to be discriminated against for arbitrary reasons which do not affect the interest involved. They can continue to discriminate if a legitimate goverrnment interest outweighs the harm done to that group.
I say group, you say suspect class.
I simplified for better understanding. Most people thinks it means Joey has a lollipop so I get one too.
Saying things in a simple straightforward way that most people can understand is not a quality many supreme court justices is known for.
Now I would ask: do you know of a law that makes gays a suspect class that the supreme court has not struck down? The sodomy laws are an example, but they are gone. Which law discriminates against gays, and does it pass the rational basis test?
Anyone who says the laws in 29 states stating marriage is between one man and one woman do is wrong. It is a legitimate government interest to encourage procreation, whether you think that is the core meaning of marriage or not.
“Straights can do it so we can too” is “Joey has a lollipop, I have to have one too.” it doesn’t work like that.
Thanks for the clarification, if the clarification isn’t too confusing, and you’re right: You have done a better job with an outright quote of the supreme court than I did.
Right. The rational basis test is, by and large, a bullshit test, because you can almost always come up with a reason a law was passed, even if it’s a stupid reason and even if the law doesn’t do a very good job in fulfilling its goals. From a practical standpoint, this is probably a good thing, because you don’t want every law being challenged in court for equal protection reasons.
Most of the people who want to apply an equal protection argument to sexual orientation argue that laws that affect sexual orientation should be held to a higher standard than rational basis; either intermediate scrutiny, which is the level of scrutiny held in laws that discriminate based on sex, or strict scrutiny, which is the level of scrutiny held in laws that discriminate based on race.
The courts, as of yet, have been reluctant to do so, although the Supreme Court in Romer v Evans* (a case striking down a Colorado law that would prevent towns from including gays under their non-discrimination policies), and O’Connor’s concurrence in Lawrence v Texas] (a case striking down Texas’s sodomy law), while they claimed to rely on a rational basis test, seemed to apply a higher standard than is usually applied for rational basis tests.
Those laws do discriminate against gay people, and they also have a rational basis. The question shouldn’t be, is there a rational basis for antigay laws or does there a government interest in passing laws that negatively affect gays. It’s whether gays should be considered a suspect class and whether some higher standard than rational basis should apply.
shit metaphor, ha ha. I like you Ms. Whatsit. Like the name too, I loved Madeleine L’engle when I was a kid and still do.
As I said, other people first made a claim here that gay households are good. If it doesn’t belong in the thread, why not ask them to take it elsewhere, rather than tying my hands to respond?
They made a statement, I addressed it, isn’t that fair? Or is fairness letting them claim something and not allowing an opposing or partially opposing view?
Amazingly, Captain Amazing, you failed to properly understand equal protection. But its not really that amazing, as was said, since it is difficult to grasp.
Here is an example: A housing law puts a higher burden on people with green hair to show they are financially secure and makes them pay all rent up front.
This situation will result in the law being struck down because there is no connection between green hair dye and ability to pay rent. There is no government interest to justify it, and therefore an equal protection violation occurs.
Why would you think it’s occurring? It’s just silly, and it’s a smear that has been used against gay people for decades. It’s one thing to be mistaken and another to repeat a damaging and baseless falsehood.
Sorry, but what you’ve said is flat out ridiculous. It does not deserve respect. I respect your right to have an opinion, but that doesn’t mean I have to respect everything you type. Particularly given the content of what you’ve said.
If gays have an agenda, it’s that they don’t want to be beaten and discriminated against, and gay couple want the same rights straight couples have. That’s about it, and I think that’s very reasonable. They’re asking for basic respect. They’re not trying to destroy your family (you appear to be projecting about that) and they’re not trying to destroy the concept of marriage. They’re not trying to convince anybody to try gay sex. (How would that even work? You could nag me all day and I’m not going to have sex with another guy.) What’s the problem with that agenda?
See the equal protection discussions below. Childless straights have nothing to do with an equal protection analysis, as Bricker has pointed out.
You’re also making an unwarranted assumption and false claim that I said gays are like feces. I didn’t do that. I asked you to think of a world where people think feces is food. Thats a comparison between feces and food. its you who assigned gays the label of feces and then shoved it in my mouth. Please stick to what I actually said.
I never said that gays raising children is harmful. I said the gay claim that it is good has not been proven, and until it is proven otherwise, I am in favor of gays raising children. Maybe its not optimum, but any parent is better than none.
Well, first off, see Purkett v Elem (it’s ok to dismiss a juror because the prosecutor doesn’t like their hairstyle), and Missouri v McFadden (it’s ok to dismiss a juror because she has “crazy looking red hair”), and while I don’t think your higher rent for green haired people has law been litigated yet, I don’t know that it’s 100% certain it would be overturned. It might be, though. But I will say that overturning based on the rational basis test almost never happens. The only cases I can think of off the top of my head where it did happen were Clairburne and Romer, and I don’t think there are that many more.
But I think you’re missing my point. The point I’m trying to make is that people who argue that laws discriminating against gay people should be struck down under equal protection tend to know that under a rational basis test they won’t be. They argue that they should be struck down under equal protection because they believe that sexual orientation should be held to a higher standard than rational basis.
Anyone who has read gay literature or even the news knows that gay activists have made calls for gay parents to participate in studies so they can end any claims that gay is bad for kids. The fact the call is made is reason to believe it MIGHT be answered.
When you treat my opinion as a fact and try to make me look stupid by demolishing the “fact,” you have absolutely no respect for an opinion. If you respect my right to assert my opinion, you treat it as an opinion and say your opinion is different.
Thanks for recognizing the agenda. After recognizing it rather than denying, it is now possible to debate whether that agenda is good or bad.
BTW I support the gay agenda almost all the way. But I will not accept a mockery of procreation to be treated as such. When you try to tell me that gay sex is the same thing as straight sex, that’s a mockery.
Like a shack with nothing going on that is claimed to be a ford factory, it mocks the ford factory.
Why won’t you recognize that the inability to have children is a significant difference between straights and gays? Generally.
There is no evidence or logical train of thought to suggest that gay marriage would be harmful to the institution of marriage. Even if extending marriage benefits and definition to include SSM represents a change to marriage, the claim that such a change would harm the institution of marriage is the extraordinary one.
That is the claim that requires defending and evidence.
Whether marriage is deteriorating, whether there is a gay agenda to promote child rearing and gay marriage, whether the history of marriage is to promote and protect child rearing, whether gays are a protected class etc are all incidental and distractors to the real question. The real question is: in what concrete way does allowing gay people to marry harm straight marriage? There is none.
Maybe you are missing the point that it fails under strict scrutiny as well.
I utterly fail to see why you think juror dismissal cases have precedent to argue equal protection. Is it your position that dismissed jurors are a suspect class?
At any rate, in my opinion those are ridiculous opinions, people with dyed hair can think as well as any ordinary person.
Of course there’s no law like that. I made it up as an example. I didn’t use any group actually in existence that is persecuted to avoid bringing up all the people spouting off about in favor or against, but chose something ridiculous so that everyone would agree. I guess I was wrong, ha ha.
This mockery of procreation stuff is a red herring, just like I said a few posts up, and has absolutely nothing to do with the question of whether or not gay marriage should be legalized. If you want to discuss whether or not gay sex “mocks procreation”, feel free start a new thread on that – which, by the way, I think would go very well for you, so you should totally do that.