I’ve not ignored it. There is an ideal: H. Marriage. There will be plenty of marriages which degrade from that ideal, i.e., military service, death, divorce, etc., and remove one of the parents from the situation. In those cases the person left will seek to bring in those elements that are now missing. (My friend asking me to spend time with her son.) Gay couples who adopt would, hopefully, take similar steps. In all cases they are attempting to approximate the natural ideal. That’s good. That does not mean that is is not good to identify the ideal and hold it as such.
If you’ve read the thread you should know by now that I am fully in favor of gay rights, save marriage.
I’ve addressed this this evening. More than once. I’ll have to ask you to find it for yourself as repeating myself is getting annoying.
I saw it. It does NOT support his position, Read what he claimed and what I pointed to for him that had to be cited. And you ask ME to apologize to HIM? HA! I suggest using the hookah one hose at a time.
And I have to sign off soon. Just to let you know.
You still haven’t answered the question that I’ve asked you repeatedly: please articulate the material, concrete harm that will be done by gay marriage.
They can call it whatever they want. There’s only one word they can’t call it. Given the creative talent present ion the gay community, I’m sure they could come up with something.
I’ve done so. Scroll back if you’d like. Or not. If my answer is not “concrete” enough, I’ll have to ask you what type of thing you’re looking for. I took it to mean “real”. And I never claimed the harm would have to be “material”. I don’t accept that as a criterion.
Right. We’ve been at this intersection about 3 times now.
Again (acknowledging that I do not agree with your principles of what is “ideal”, but I’m going along because I can logically disprove your arguments without having that debate) my response to this has been that “equal rights” include the same benefit of the doubt that is inherently built into the combination of cultural/moral/legal sytems for the “less-than-idea” heterosexual situations, are applied equally to same sex couples/individuals.
Further, until such time that heterosexual single parents have a constitutional amendment dictating that the cannot do something because 52% of the registered voters turned up and voted it into place, I want you to acknowledge the double standard that further supports this movement as a civil rights movement.
I think there’s some interesting stuff in here, but I’m not quite clear as to what specific position(s) you hold that you want me to respond to. Can you please rephrase. Thanks.
So are you arguing for your view of reality or are you arguing for purposes of this particular discussion? There’s nothing you’ve posted so far that suggested that your argument only holds for this thread. In fact, you’ve proclaimed your argument to be the real-world ideal. Both myself and Jenaroph were very much posting about real-world conditions. No matter what the law itself calls the eventually recognized same-sex relationships, we (and almost everyone else) are going to be calling it marriage within a decade. Since we’re talking about reality, we simply assumed that your response was also about reality, rather than some Platonic ideal.
If you really thought that I really think that people can be stopped from using a word in common parlance, we have deeper problems than I feared. I’ve been arguing what I think should be that case, and given real world reason. You know, kinda like in a debate.
I saw it. Forgive me for restating your point; sometimes saying the same thing in different terms can get through to a person. Sometimes not.
It’s perplexing that he has convinced himself that gay people wanting to use the same term for the same legal status is an attempt to create an “us vs. them” mentality. If anything, I would think it would help foster acceptance of the equality of gay couples. Isn’t that supposed to be the goal?
The language in that response is very, very telling as people have pointed out.
I found whatever answers you gave to be rather abstract, theoretical, and not based on anything you are able to prove. No one is harmed by gays using the term “marriage” to describe their unions. But gays ARE harmed by the denial of this right. I wish you could see that.
Feel free to contort my position to serve any purpose you desire. A fair reading, even of the angry response you chose, would not be what you have here. But it gets old, so, knock yourself out.
How? Keep in mind my position is that they have all the rights, sans “marriage”. They can then love who they want, live with who they want, grow old with who they want, and enjoy all the legal/financial benefits that married couples do. So how are they “materially” or “concretely” harmed. Or harmed in any way?
If you’re going to sit back and argue that the word is so unimportant, then why not let them have the word and save the government money on printing different forms?
But they DON’T have those rights. Prop 8 made that denial of rights the law of the land in CA. You support measures like Prop 8; therefore, you support harming gays because of what you say is mere semantics. However, it is worth considering that your opposition to the use of the word marriage is rooted in your belief that gays are deviant and abnormal, a view you share with those who supported Prop 8. IMO, that is indefensible.
HOW does that harm gays? Let me turn it around: how does marriage benefit straight people? Depriving gays of those benefits is harming them. It also shows that they are second-class citizens in America. To me, that’s not very American.