How many IQ points are you smarter than me?
(Remember I tested as GENIUS! in 2nd grade when I took my IQ test.) ;p
That is a religious sentiment. The very notion of inalienable rights has no basis from a purely secular point of view, as all rights are merely granted by the will of the populus. If rights can be taken away then they are not inalienable right?
Yes, we have an inalienable right to love whomever we wish, but we unequivocally DO NOT have an inalienable right to marry whomever we wish as marriage is a social construct and is subject to the recognition of others outside of the binding contract.
That’s a silly argument. ALL rights, by definition can be violated; otherwise they’d be a physical law, not a right. And rights are granted by law, often AGAINST the “will of the populace”.
And God is irrelevant; his opinion has no bearing on whether something is a right or not (even if he existed ). God has no more right to declare something right or wrong or for it to be a legal right or not than does any other random person. Call back when he’s appointed to the Supreme Court.
As has been repeatedly pointed out, marriage is recognized ALREADY as a fundamental right in our own body of law. Claiming that this right doesn’t apply to gays is no different than pretending it doesn’t apply to blacks or left handed people.
If they can be violated then a distinction between rights and privileges is just silly. The point of a ‘right’ is that they are not granted but exist naturally. If it’s ‘granted’ then it is a privilege not a right. If it’s against the will of the populace then it is undemocratic.
Your opinion on God doesn’t interest me. If there are such a thing as inalienable rights, either prove objectively that they exist and demonstrate their cause or forever hold your peace.
Yes, it is recognized that way, ‘as defined’. But I am not even talking about that at this point. I am questioning the very notion of, ‘rights’. What differentiates them from ‘privilege’ if they can be infringed? If it can be granted or revoked by the state then it is a privilege not a right.
Well, since you asked, I had you pegged as stubbornly misguided, as opposed to Carol’s determinedly stupid.
Dearest Carol,
Cite that 95% of the US population is opposed to gay marriage?
Actually, fuck it. I’d rather just stream on you.
You guys are forgetting one thing in your application of Loving v. Virginia: context. In order to apply that ruling to the current situation, you have to verify that it really meant what you think it meant. I see no evidence that the judge had same-sex marriage in mind back in 1967 when he said that all men have the right to marriage. If not, then clearly all men have the right to marriage, but not necessarily to other men.
Anyways, I think that if it was just a matter of applying existing laws completely without any interpretation, it would have already been done. It may look simple, but it isn’t.
I’ll accept that. 
So is the Bill of Rights. Were you under the delusion that America is a pure democracy ? Or that it should be ?
Then don’t bring up religion.
Priviliges can be granted or withheld on a fairly arbitrary basis; rights are basic assumptions in the law. Your argument that it’s not a right if it can be abridged is stupid, since if they couldn’t be abridged there wouldn’t be any point in writing them into law.
Wrong. By that logic we could forbid women or blacks to have free speech, because the Founding Fathers probably didn’t mean it to apply to them. What the judge thought doesn’t matter.
Of course it’s simple. The problem is a collective lack of will, and the deeply held bigotry of our society. The actual changing of the law is trivial.
Caring about whether your debate opponents habitually get their facts wrong is hardly trivial.
Yay! Progress…
That you make up facts and don’t check your sources is hardly a strawman.
That’s not a point I disputed. Talk about strawmen. I disputed your interpretation of Marx’s position on religious belief.
I’m hardly obsessed. If you stopped making shit up to suit your arguments, I wouldn’t constantly be reminded of it every time I interact with you. But you do, so I am.
Bullshit. The “why” of Marx’s point matters just as much. If the reasoning of the Soviets was not in line with Marx’s theories, then it would stand to reason that it was not Marxist ideology that was responsible for Soviet religious oppression. BOOM goes every little Christian Culture Warrior’s favourite retort to the problem of Institutional Christian Evil. And I can assure you you will not find any Marx quotes on sending the religious to gulags or oppressing the proletariat if they hang on to their opium. That’s all Stalin’s idea, not the ideology.
You said Marx said religion was a tool of control. I showed that to be false. How you think that counts as “support”, I don’t know.
“slightly misinterpreted” is not what you did. You went with the “common knowledge” version of what Marx meant, which has squat to do with reality. You actually committed the exact same mistake as the Communists did by banishing religions outright. Nice going.
Understand, it’s not supposed to be a criticism of your larger (ass-backwards) point about so-called atheist regimes. It’s a criticism of your methodology - the lack of fact-checking, reliable cites or any intellectual rigour in your arguments.
You didn’t have to. You said “the elite”, which amounts to the same thing in Marx’s day - Marx (whom you were referencing) didn’t use “the elite” anywhere in the quote, but you did.I used Marx’s term, not yours. That you think that acts as some kind of gotcha is quite pathetic. But anyway, nice attempted deflection from actually answering the question. I’ll rephrase - where in the Marx quote does it say anything about “the elite” using religion as a tool to control the masses? Where does it make your point for you, as you are so quick to trumpet?
I see you’re showing your real intellectual level at last, idiot.
Want to get SSM laws passed in every state? I think we are going about it the wrong way.
Why don’t we go undercover to the fundamentalist churches and complain that homosexuals are openly living together in sin and thereby setting a bad example for our young people?
Then plant the idea that instead of laws banning marriage, there should be laws requiring marriage before homosexuals can live together.
Plan demonstrations and marches, pass out materials, call out to hand-holders on the street: “Marriage Now! Marriage Now!” (Do this for all ages and sexes so as not to be obviously discriminatory.)
BTW, it’s unalienable rights you…you…third graders!
A couple of problems - [ul][li]If the DoI has the force of law, then God is the source of rights in the US.[*]Do you agree that the definition of marriage used in Loving is definitive?[/ul][/li]
Regards,
Shodan
Sure God may have inadvertantly given gay people equal rights. But I’m sure plenty of fundamentalist Christians would be quick to explain that God didn’t have all the facts when He did that.
Since God doesn’t exist - and even if he DID exist is dead silent, that’s simply wrong. If the DoI used the word Sauron instead, that wouldn’t make Sauron the source of rights in the US either, for the same reason.
Ah, no, says “endowed by the Creator”. It should not be forgotten that the deism of many of the Founders represented the very acme of rationalist thought in its time, in the framework of their time, it made vastly more sense than it might to us. It was simply another, albeit poetic, way of saying that these rights were natural and inherent.
Of more interest to me is the prefacing clause “we hold these truths to be self-evident”, which is to say, not dependent on proofs and evidence. A secular dogma, a statement of faith, if you will. We’re not going to argue, we’re not going to depend on any authority but our own, these truths are so obvious, they do not need such authority.
Works for me.
The DoI is poetic and all, but isn’t the key phrasing from the beginning and end of the Constitution’s preamble: “We the people of the United States… do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.” It’s the republic itself that will define its existence; it doesn’t ask for nor need the recognition or approval of any outside agency, including God.
Well, one might reasonably quibble that the phrasing I refer to directly defines the basis for human rights, whereas the Constitution is about how those rights might best be served in a governmental structure. Theory, application.
No, that’s not what you care about. You care that I do not have perfect knowledge of every little thing that I say, and that I sometimes make mistakes. I mean it’s funny how every nitpick you’ve ever come at me with I can drop without altering my argument. You just pick on some irrelevant bit of minutiae. OMG De Sade coined it not Marx, I’ve lost the debate. :rolleyes: So I appreciate you pointing out to me that Marx saw religion as a condition of oppression and not the cause of it, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Soviet Union banned traditional religious practice. Just like the Druids and the Source, or my typing Akhenaten when I was talking about Aten, you have picked on something that is just wholly irrelevant to the point I am making, that doesn’t change it in any way at all. I dropped the Druids and the Source thing because I realized I was quoting dubious secondary sources, and didn’t want to get into a nitpick with you over the value of my sources. The Akhenaten thing was by far the most ridiculous aspect of your irrationalia hate-crush, and this one, well this one is by far the most interesting of them, but it’s still pretty fucking pointless.
Funny how much this resembles arguments about Christianity no? Thanks again for making my point for me, which was originally about the irrational hate of Christianity. You have here demonstrated that it wasn’t the ideology but practitioners who wanted to commit murder that caused the suffering. Hmm…sounds an awful lot like the argument I was making. But go ahead, continue to act like you are in disagreement. You are making my case much better than I did. So I thank you for the clear and concise demonstrations of exactly the point I was trying to make before you came in and started arguing as though you actually disagree with me.
I’m glad we are in agreement, and am sorry that you are too stupid to see it.
MrDibble BTW, your misquoting of me was exactly as significant as the detail you are nitpicking over. That’s also the entire point of me bringing it up. So again in the entirely accurate spirit of your harassment…pwn noob. 
I was wrong, gay marriage is only available in 3 states (MA, CT, IA) so it’s not a right in 94%, not 95%, of the country. My bad.