religion = morality, gay rights = economic suicide

The BBQ Pit
1

From the St. Paul Pioneer Press opinion page:

Makes sense to me. If an organized religion has not condoned it, it must not be morally right. After all, only religious folk have morals, unlike those fag-enabling atheists. Socially right? Of course not, especially when we ignore frivolous details like the goddamn definition of the word. Economically right? Hell no! There’s no difference between two wo/men who love each other and live together and heterosexual Bob and Rob cheatin’ the system. Geez. What’ll these freaks think of next?

:rolleyes:

2

You think that’s bad? I was discussing gay rights with my Dad a few weeks ago, and he tried to convince me that allowing gays and lesbians to get married would hurt me economically.

His reasoning was that since all homosexuals are promiscuous (sp?), they would obviously be at higher risk for STDs, increasing my health care costs. Also, if we allowed more marriages, there would be an increase in divorce, which would mean that my taxes would have to go up to pay for the increase in court costs.

You know, as intelligent a man as my father is, he can be quite dense sometimes.

3

Someone needs to point out that there are many, many heterosexual marriages of convenience already. I don’t see the difference between that and same-sex MoC, really. If a man and a woman who don’t love each other and have no real intention to have children (or even be intimate with each other) can get married for economic reasons and the world doesn’t end, why the hell is it so horrible that two straight guys or women would do so?

Ashtar, I don’t quite see how gay marriage would even have anything to do with gay promiscuity. Did your father happen to explain his logic chain here?

And the straight folk seem to be keeping the divorce lawyers in Armani quite well all by themselves…

4

Well, since the Church condoned the Crusades, I’ll take that to mean that it’s morally right for me and a gang of thugs to go take over my neighbor’s house because… uh… one of Christ’s skin cells landed there after being blown across the globe on a jetstream. Yeah.

5

I assume he’s arguing that the system will be easier to cheat if we expand it to same-sex relationships. It doesn’t appear that he’s equating the cheaters with the genuine people, I think this is merely a practical problem he perceives.

Perhaps we should make divorce much more difficult, and that would cut down on most fraudulent marriage-for-benefits scams right there.

Maybe the best idea is to just eliminate all government recognition of marriages, then it wouldn’t matter in the slightest how people organized their relationships. Same-sex? Go right ahead. Polygamy? Why not? Polyandry? Sure thing! It would be solely the province of the people in the relationship to determine its shape and scope at that point. As long as the government recognizes marriage and gives it preference over other relationships, government will feel justified in determining the scope of marriage. Here’s how it would work:

Name anybody you want on your medical notification cards.

Everyone files taxes as single and claims their dependants, and any fraud in claiming a number of dependants could be investigated just as it is now (totally at random, through audits.)

Parental rights could be determined by courts beginning with biological heritage, and adjusted equitably on a case-by-case basis when the situation warrants including a non-biological parent.

Allow the company to define the scope of your insurance coverage. Suppose there’s no legal marriage. The company couldn’t specify marital partner. They couldn’t say “of the opposite sex” because that would violate already existing federal law. If they decide it covers one other person in your household, you pick the person. They probably wouldn’t eliminate coverage for partners altogether, because that would put them at a disadvantage in hiring.
You don’t need government recognition of any union, so long as no union is privileged. Remove all the privileges, restore the liberty free of government intervention to choose your own associations, and problem solved.

6

Brilliant idea, RexDart. It’s too bad that in order to implement the changes you may need to tear down society and rebuild it as a whole.

It seems the politician in the OP is just making speeches to appease the greatest number of voters, as usual.

7

The reason that the government is involved in marriage is because marriage is, in origin, something that deals largely with property law and inheritance. This is carried over into a lot of the modern legal changes that come about because of marriage. Do away with governmental recognitions of marriage, and large portions of property law have to be re-evaluated from the ground up.

Incidentally, the male-with-multiple-female-partners equivalent of ‘polyandry’ is ‘polygyny’, RexDart; ‘polygamy’ is properly a gender-neutral term.

8

“Polyamory” is even better, since it doesn’t connote throwback deep-desert renegade elderly Mormons buying 13-year-old girls from their parents to be brood mares.

9

Note to those with hypersensitive kneejerk reflexes: the word “renegade” is used to differentiate those types of Mormons from the real thing. Thank you for your forbearance.

10

When I was testifying in front of the same-sex marriage House of Commons travelling committee, one of the witnesses argued that it was only a few isolated Christians that approved of gay marriage.

I noted that the United Church of Canada, which approves of gay marriages (though some congregations don’t), is the largest Protestant denomination in the country.

11

Ah, but polyamory would imply “amor”, love, which I’m not sure I would want to imply. People have only been getting married for love for about 200 years or so, there could be other reasons for forming a stable relationship. My system would allow for two male heterosexual friends to form a household, and for either member of the household to do all the things I listed, such as list each other on their medical notification cards and so forth. And if you’re an insurance company extending benefits to one other person in the household, does it really matter if that person is having sex with your primary client or not? I’m going for the flexibility allowed when the government butts out. Interesting linguistic point though.

And thanks for the tip, Liliaren. Gyn being the root word for women, I should have remembered that. Probably wrote “gam” thinking too much about those ladies’ legs :wink:

12

I’m kind of surprised at this from Dayton, considering that he’s one of the most liberal dems in the senate…but then, he just came out in favor of the flag burning amendment too. The reps must have pictures of him with a moose or something.

13

Huh? Um, it was Dayton who was in favour of gay rights, if I’m reading the OP correctly, and some conservative editorialist was fulminating against him.

14

Diogenes, matt, just to clarify - the link in the OP explains the context of the quote a bit more. It’s a letter to the editor from a certain Art Wilde in Vadnais Heights.

I leave finding his address as an exercise for the reader.

15

Oops…that’s what I get for not reading the link. My bad. I thought it was out of character for Dayton.

16

WILDE?!

Sounds like that fellow Ronald Gay who shot up a gay bar in Roanoke, VA.

In other words: somebody has issues!

17

Forget issues, somebody has whole volumes…

Minnesota suffers from a kind of political multiple personality disorder. You have sober, somber Scandahoovian Lutherans whose traditions include hotdish, church suppers, and jello salad but somehow managed to elect Jewish Liberal Paul Wellstone as well as Wrestlemaniac Jesse Ventura. Then you have the virulent suburban and rural element that all but worships Robertson and Dodson and elects people like the former mayor of St. Paul, former gubernatorial candidate, and all-around dick Norm Coleman. I blame it on the lutefisk.

18

As a biologist, the following from the original op-ed piece kinda irks me:

The “propagate the species” thing is faulty. It is not as bad a misunderstanding of evolution as “if we came from monkies, why are there still monkies?”, but it still shows a lack of how humans evolved.

Why this is so faulty has been called “the uncle effect”, but I think a better illustration would be why women live beyond menopause. Post-menopausal women obviously can’t breed, yet they consume the same amount of resources as a fertile woman. If humans were a solitary species, they’d be useless.

However, humans are not a solitary species, but a social one. It took a bunch of cavemen to bring down a mammoth. We are pack animals. We function, and evolve, as a group. A tribe with some old women who have ammassed a lifetime of experience will outcompete a tribe that kills off it’s elderly, even though those old women don’t breed. They serve a different function. Survival of the fittest is not solely DNA; it is also behavior.

The “uncle effect” is a similar principle. The energies of a homosexual individual are not directed solely to it’s offspring (which is obvious, because it has none), but to the family group as a whole. Some have theorized that this is why homosexuality is so prevalent in mammals as opposed to say, reptiles or amphibians. A homosexual brother will aid his heterosexual brother in food gathering and survival, which in turns helps the heterosexual brother produce more healthy offspring, which then in turn helps the homosexual brother pass on some of his genes as he shares some genes with his brother. Hence “the uncle effect”. Children with a gay uncle have the luxury of two males hunting for them

In short, it can be argued that a species with a minority of homosexuals will out-compete a species in which all individuals breed. It sounds counter-intuitive at first, but if you think of the most social of species it pans out. Insects out-compete everything on the planet. Most ants and bees don’t breed, but rather toil solely for the group.

On a side note, I’m Christian, so let’s not go bashing religion as inherently anti-gay. (not that I’m saying anybody was, just that I’ve seen these discussions devolve into that)
did I just say “devolve”? I hate that word - it’s scientifically meaningless

19

Yeah those 400 or so of the Fortune 500 companies which offer DP benefits are really hurting because of it…

20

Well, in the interest of accuracy and because I don’t want Bricker coming after me with a sharp implement of any kind, the actual number of F-500 companies offereing DP benefits is around 200, not 400. But the higher the company is on the list the more likely it is to offer the benefits.