well he didn’t say that the devil created gays, he said that god created them and the devil corrupted them. or rather he suggested that as an argument, he wasn’t advocating it.
presumably someone who believed that would not be terribly concerned about whether or not that viewpoint was offensive to gay people.
Are you going to be the one to tell this beautiful bride she can’t get married?
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/87/272266151_276139d713.jpg?v=0
Yes, I’ll be the one. she is welcome to mate and become a mother, but we traditionally don’t saddle dogs with the complicated obligations of marriage. That would be cruelty, wouldn’t it? I took on those obligations, but if I had a dog brain, it just wouldn’t be right. Woof?
My beagles are pure bred. How could they find a pure bred person. They are not ready to marry down. Beagles don’t settle.
Pictures?
Everyone has made alot of sense in this thread, and has helped to widen my narrow views on this subject.
One thing that I’m still curious about is about incest: what reasons are there for the laws against it? Somebody mentioned that genetic defects might be reason enough–but once the government starts making such decisions for people, where does it make sense to stop? What I mean is, would the law also be justified in investigating bloodlines with a history of heart disease, alcoholism, psychopathy…extreme stupidity? Ugliness? It could be argued that each of these are a “compelling government interest” (Atomiktom) to some degree, at least as much as genetic defects are.
Another reason brought up was the possibility of abuse or coercion–I fail to see how these things are much more likely occur in incestuous relationships than in any other. All types of marriages are liable to suck to varying degrees, and that’s why we have laws against those particular bad things, not against all marriages–I don’t understand why incest is singled out as one type of pairing that is so likely to go sour as to be made illegal from the get go.
There seems to be an innate aversion to sexual activity with your immediate family (at least, for most people). It applies to people you live together & grow up with. It isn’t genetic – it applies to step-siblings and adopted ones too, even though there is no actual genetic commonality there.
Presumably this provides an evolutionary advantage, in encouraging a diversity of gene mixing. That might explain the common case of a girl considered plain in her home town who travels far away and then is considered exotic and attractive. Also the old saying “opposites attract”.
I think the laws restricting incest were enacted due to these feelings, and then the explanations of avoiding genetic defects or abuse of power were created afterwards to justify this.
gonzomax, you haven’t read WhyNot much, hm? Or bothered read the post you quoted in its entirety.
That argument she was posting happens to be one from the creationist camp, where she doesn’t reside. It is, as she stated, not her belief - it is a belief that many creationists hold. “God created people clean and perfect, but (the Devil/society/economics) twists them” isn’t exactly a new notion.
Another problem with incest is in the parent/child case. Then you have a person in a position of authority shagging one of their subordinates, and a subordinate who may not have been able to consent or deny consent when the parent started getting cozy, either because they were too young or because, well, “it’s my parent, how can I say ‘get your hands off me’? And if I ask for help, who will believe me?”
(out of window)
If I say a teacher once tried to grab my ass, most people will instantly believe me. If I say it was a priest, the number manages to get higher. if I say some guy in the subway once grabbed my ass, we get about a 100% belief level. If I say it was my grandfather, how many people would believe it? Defending yourself from unwanted advances from a relative is a lot harder than doing so from a stranger.
This is not unlike the problems presented by the latest technology allowing conception without intercourse; conception by proxy; surrogate parenting; even pregnancy by a male. Very upsetting to a culture solidly built upon the only biology available until the 20th Century. But we’re solving it.
Anticipating a nightmare isn’t excuse enough to avoid sleep.
Incest is inherently a matter of uneven levels of control and relative dominance. Brother to sister, uncle to niece, there’s always someone who simply is higher in the family pecking order. It may not be a matter of ‘unable to consent’, like a ‘man and a dog’, but it’s a lot closer to ‘man and underage child’, where the control is completely with the older person in the relationship.
I give you the recent effed up mess in Austria as an example.
Well, they do identify a point about halfway down the slippery slope where “if gays are allowed to marry, next thing you know, we’ll have to let a man marry his dog.” Besides, John and Rover love each other!
And heterosexual bestiality has been around for centuries. “‘In Czarist Russia, horse rides you’ - Catherine the Great” 
I respond from the viewpoint of the gays. They do not think they are the devils work. They are just what they were born to be. Not a choice . Not evil. Even to suggest that 11 percent of our population are gay because they are twisted by the devil would be insulting.
Yet when it is suggested that we can grant all the legal rights, yet call it something else, that is unacceptable to most gays. In my experience on these boards and elsewhere anyway.
Leave the kennel door open when your bitches are in heat and you may be surprised.
For families who were raised and nurtured together from pre-puberty, yes, that’s true. Not true in other cases. Most cases of so-called father-daughter incest and rape are stepfather-stepchild (as well as murder).
The problem with polygamy is working out the transitivity. There’s no problem with a one-to-many relationship, for example a man marrying 3 women (group A), or a woman marrying 3 men (group B). The first problem is… are 2 women married to the same man considered to be married to each other? The greater problem is, do we allow one of group A to marry one of group B? It would be discriminatory not to, since presumably what’s good for the goose (the plurally married man) is good for the gander (any of his wives). These two would now presumably be married into both groups, and could double-dip whatever benefits accrued to that group membership. That’s no fair. Would the groups then be considered merged, with all the attendant legal headaches?
If you think laws could be written to easily and fairly accommodate that, I think it’s futurism on the order of expecting atomic-powered flying cars in the 1950’s. Laws accommodating plural marriage would, in some ways, need to be equally as arbitrarily restrictive as the current ones mandating man+wife. Such restriction would run contrary to the intention of allowing that kind of freedom in the first place. I think you’d inevitably converge back on some form of the 1+1 solution, i.e. somebody would be legally designated as the “primary spouse”, and the rest are just dependents/breeders/whatever.
Or, as has already been suggested, you have group marriages where everyone in the group has to consent to marry everyone else. So Bob can’t marry Sue without Cindy’s consent, and two years later, Cindy needs Bob and Sue’s consent for them all to marry Jim. Everyone gets 1/n of the property, inheritance or whatnot, unless otherwise specified in a legal document.
Or, as I suggested already, you don’t have any default expectations at all. If Bob and Cindy buy a house together, then they own the house and the profits from selling it, even if they marry Sue and Jim later. If they want to work new spouses into the property rights, they get a lawyer just like an expanding corporation would. Everyone chooses a person in writing to make medical decisions in the event of a disagreement. Everyone writes down who has parental rights, on a birth or adoption certificate and school paperwork, just like we do now with step-families.
Anyone who thinks we can’t solve these issues just doesn’t have the motivation or imagination.
That’s always sounded like a fair compromise to me, too. Then again, I wonder if it whispers of “separate but equal”, and its inherent inequality. Not in the tangible sense, as with schools, but with the proposition that merely be defining things as separate, you are creating an unequal hierarchy.
I take issue with the title of the thread. It’s my understanding that the recent SCOTSOCA ruling means that I have to marry my dog.
Which raises a problem, since I don’t have a dog. I could marry my wife’s guide dog, I suppose, but I think she has to marry him. Unless she has to marry a female dog.
Do spayed/neutered dogs count? And do we have to marry purebreds (way more expensive than I want to commit myself to), or is a stray mutt acceptable?