I’m not sure that I can help you out, but I’m not sure that it’s due to a failing on my part. Here is his analogy that you were defending.
Steve MB probably said it best with his reply:
Our resident “mild homophobe” was comparing things which can’t be achieved due to shortcomings of the individuals with something that can’t be achieved because homophobes apparently make up slightly more than half of the voting public in California.
Other than magellan01 and yourself, none of us can figure out exactly what is analogous, which is why I’m asking the question in the first place. Gays don’t have any shortcomings that prevent them from performing the act of being married.
So, feel free to demonstrate why the analogy works in any way, if you wish to continue defending it.
The “short people who aren’t tall enough to ride the roller coaster” bit comes closest to working as an analogy for gay marriage, because it’s about a policy that prevents certain people from doing a certain thing. People with albinism are perfectly free to sunbathe, it’s just a bad idea because of their lack of melanin. Very short people aren’t free to ride many roller coasters, it’s against the rules.
But height restrictions for amusement park rides are there for safety. It’s not just to protect the sanctity of roller coasters or something. If there were no such rules, short people could be injured due to safety bars being set too high for them, restraints too loose to hold them, etc. So this falls apart as an analogy for same-sex marriage, unless one believes that marriage directly harms gay couples (but not straight couples) in some manner that would otherwise be totally avoided.
A better analogy might be segregated amusement parks, where people with the “wrong” color skin weren’t allowed to enter because it made people with the “right” color skin uncomfortable. Even that may be giving Prop 8 supporters too much credit, though.
As loathsome as segregation was – and I have no problem with saying it was much worse than the current ban on gay marriage – from a bigot’s perspective it at least made some kind of sense. Segregation protected them from unwanted contact with people they considered inferior. A ban on gay marriage doesn’t even do that. It’s not like legalizing same-sex marriage forces everyone to attend gay weddings, or requires every straight couple that wants to get married to share a double wedding ceremony with a gay couple.
I didn’t realize that reality was defined by the legal code.
Regardless, you’re begging the question here. We know what the law says. We’re arguing that the law should be changed. You’re saying, in effect, “You can’t change the law because that would change the law.”
And yet, note the fact that while we call this basketball, and this basketball, and this basketball, and even this basketball, there’s still absolutely no confusion over whether this is basketball.
I admit to some personal flaw, I suppose, since I personally don’t see the word marriage defined as magellan01 claims it to be. To me, it’s two persons agreeing to share a life (and possibly even loving and respecting each other and other stuff). Much the same with basketball, where I think of a game played with somewhere between 1 and 16 people, using a ball of some sort and a hoop or two with boards behind them. And even that might be a bit restrictive. I could see two people in an office throwing wads of paper at waste paper baskets as a form of basketball.
I’m not maintaining it’s both - gay marriage in California wasn’t legal long enough to reach full “civil right” standards, I figure, by which I roughly mean that it hadn’t faded into the “[shrug] Of course” stage, for example:
Q:Should someone be allowed to express themselves?
A: [shrug] Of course.
Q: Should someone be allowed to have an attorney if on trial?
A: [shrug] Of course.
In the particular case of gay marriage, and allowing women to vote, and allowing blacks to vote, and allowing 18 year-olds to vote, the prohibition can no longer be justified by any rational means. Why not allow gays to marry? Can I get a good reason? What purpose exactly would continuing the prohibition serve? If a law serves no purpose, isn’t it a prerogative of a freedom-loving nation to discard it?
Well yes and no. For most things, we don’t need the law to tell us reality, but when you’re saying that the definition of marriage is what society tells us it is, then we need a basis for what society told us. For right now in CA, part of what defines marriage is what just passed as Prop. 8.
Exactly right. Except that I’m not begging the question since there is no question to ask. I’m saying that if you’re saying that marriage is defined by what society says it is and there was just a vote as to what society said, then there’s no valid question that asks what it should be. Because it should be what society says it is.
If there’s a “should” beyond what society decides, then you’re saying that there’s an external right and wrong beyond what society collectively says is right and wrong. Then you’re saying that morality is objective and it must be found in an objective source. What would be that objective source?
The rules of logic only come into play when there’s a legal question about the issue. And there may be a legal question if the CA Supreme Court decides to hear it, but at that point, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks because they’ll be deciding it. It won’t be up for a vote.
What’s your point with this? So we can call different things marriage even if they aren’t, but when we see what we normally mean by marriage, we’ll know it?
I think the point is rather that acknowledging the validity of same sex marriage will not in any way diminish the validity of OTHER REAL marriages, such as heterosexual marriages.
We’ve always called them REAL marriages. And for one brief, halcyon moment (well, five months worth of them), we got used to calling same-sex marriages REAL, as well.
Well yes, but they’re not opposed to fake marriages or anything. Either a marriage is real or not, regardless of how it is defined.
You really think people go around calling heterosexual marriages real marriages? Like pro basketball is to real basketball? If that’s true, no, I did not know that.
Much as we do in Canada, as well as in Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and South Africa, not to mention Massachusetts and Connecticut, without the sky falling in.
I mean, lest certain parties get too caught up with how this is completely unprecedented tinkering with the fabric of space-time.
The ridiculous position implied my magellan01’s argument is that the word “marriage” somehow has a small, fixed, and limited amount of power, and that if it is applied to same-sex unions then this somehow diminishes or eliminates the word’s ability to describe opposite-sex unions.
It’s a semantic equivalent to the religious argument that allowing gays to marry will somehow magically reduce the value and the love and the social utility of straight marriages, and it’s fucking retarded.
Is this supposed to bear any sort of connection to anything that anyone has posted in this thread? Because if it is, I sure can’t see it.
The question is, “Should we ammend the laws to recognize gay marriage?” Magellan says, “No, because we need a special and unique word that applies only to heterosexual unions, on account of how magical and sparkly we are.” This is a pretty dumb position, but it’s not inherently illogical. You have suggested that the answer is, “No, because the law says marriage is only between men and women.” Which is begging the question, because you’re simply restating on of the starting premises, without addressing the actual question in any way.
No, I’m not saying there’s an objective source of morality, and my argument in no way relies on one. Where on Earth did you get that from?
Logic only applies to the law? I suppose that tells us a lot about your debating style, but I don’t think that’s a widely accepted view.
You really don’t get the analogy there? Seriously? That’s rather astounding. Here, let me walk it through for you:
I linked to several different pictures of people playing basketball. In each case, there were some essentially superficial details that were different: a street pick-up game, a pee-wee league, an all female league, a bunch of guys in wheelchairs, and, of course, a professional NBA game. Despite the fact that there were stark disparities in the participants, all of these are instantly recognizable as “basketball,” and the fact that there are differences in composition between the teams does not make one type of basketball more “real” than another, nor does it detract from the “basketball-ness” of the other games. The obvious (and I mean, really obvious) comparison here is that marriage is still marriage, wether it consists of a man and a woman, two men, or two women, and the idea that calling them all the same thing somehow detracts or confuses the others is patently absurd.
Really, I can’t imagine how you couldn’t figure that one out on your own.
After a bit of research, I came to the realization that Heffalump and Roo wasn’t just defending magellan01’s analogy, but that he largely agrees with most of his arguments. It does make it easier to understand why he’s not getting the fact that the analogies being tossed out are crappy, when he shares the same “mild” form of homophobia as the person who made the analogy in the first place.
Did I mention that I play basketball? Real basketball even.
What’s your point with this? So we can call different things marriage even if they aren’t, but when we see what we normally mean by marriage, we’ll know it?
You were the one making the really odd analogy. I’m guessing that’s not what Miller meant at all, which is why I was confused.
