So you say. Fortunately, I don’t depend on your noniexistent powers of observation or logic.
And now, in the spirit of what the Bush Administration should have done in Iraq, I’m declaring victory and retiring from the field. Feel free to pillage.
And all things that are legal or popular are right, and all things that are illegal or unpopular are wrong? So you’d be OK with laws like the Jim Crow laws, which were quite popular with the voting public at the time? And the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII was just fine, because it was popular?
The Founding Fathers deliberately set limits on what could be done by a majority vote, because they feared (among other things) that a majority of the people could take away fundamental rights from an unpopular minority.
So you’d support taking away the right to marry from:
couples in which the woman is past the age of childbearing
couples who don’t plan to have any children
couples with at least one person who is infertile
After all, those marriages won’t be producing children, so they have no value to society.
And why should we let people stay married and get those tax breaks after they’re unable to have children, or after they raise all the children that they plan to? Should divorce be mandatory when your youngest child has his/her 18th birthday, if the couple are not planning to have more children?
And what should we do with couples who plan to have children when they get married, but later change their minds, or something happens (such as radiation therapy to treat cancer) to make one of them infertile? Should they be required to divorce? Or, since they never did raise children to justify those tax benefits, should their marriage be annulled and they be forced to pay back any tax benefits they received?
How exactly does a straight marriage with no children and no possibility of having children benefit society in a way that a gay marriage does not?
The right to marry has never been conditional upon having children. Quite the reverse- some states allow first cousins to marry only if they are not able to bear children.
Why is it more wrong to deprive someone of the right to vote or own property than it is to deprive them of the right to marry the person of their choice? In fact, some states deprive convicted felons of the right to vote, even after they have served their sentences. They don’t, however, have laws restricting felons’ right to marry. Ted Bundy was allowed to get married after he had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He would not have been allowed to vote at that time. Sounds to me like the law regards the right to marry the person of your choice as more fundamental than the right to vote, not less.
< sarcasm > Your counterarguements have stunned and overwhelmed me. < sarcasm >
Do you have an actual rebuttal ?
No, I’m afraid you’re more like Bagdad Bob, declaring victory while the enemy tanks roll up to the palace.
I find it interesting : Marraige is greatly understood as the legal, public declared conjoining of two willing people.
I met my wife in high school - I fell in love - we dated - i asked her to marry me - We are still together 12 + years later, and going strong.
We are a good unit. To borrow from the awefully apparent ending of Jerry McGuire, She “Completes Me”.
And, just because a man is in love with another man, people want to deny them that public recognition?
I find it hilarious that people will condone a gay / lesbian couple living together, but shirk the idea that they be allowed to publically and legally get spousal benefits and general recognition of their commitment.
In a society where about half of straight couples end in divorce, I think ANYONE regardless of prediliction of emotion should be allowed to pursue their passions, as long as they are of legal age, since marraige, like buying a home or even a car, is a legal as well as social contract.
I’m probably coming in late on this but doesn’t allowing hetero couples to marry also, by the same reasoning in your previous post, cost *you * money? You must be really pissed at that! I mean, the right ot marry may have some benefit to you, but if you and your beloved want to set up joint bank accounts, name each other as beneficiaries in wills and insurance policies etc, what’s the difference. if it’s good enough for Bob and Steve, after all… so why not ban all marriages?
mm
I’m just rather bemused by the amount of time the OP apparently spends thinking about other people’s sex lives. I mean, it’s never occurred to me to think about what my friends do in their bedroom nor do I spend my time thinking about sexual activities I find gross and disgusting unless my attention is directly drawn to them.
Serket, you mentioned that you think anal sex is the main way that homosexual men have sex and that most men consider male homosexuality disgusting. What’s your take on female homosexuality? I’ve noticed that there seems to be a lot of porn directed at straight men which shows women having sex with each other. I assume if that were considered disgusting, it wouldn’t sell.
CJ
Moderator’s Note: Just a reminder, the rule is to debate the other poster’s ideas and positions, not the person.
But the differences in tax rate has nothing to do with dependents and deductions. The standard deduction is $5,000 per person. John and James can either claim that each separately, or one of them can claim both. It doesn’t change the amount of income removed from the tax pool, so it has nothing to do with deductions.
John makes $45,000 a year and plans to take the standard deduction.
James makes $45,000 a year and plans to take the standard deduction.
If they file separately, the calculations are as follows:
Gross Income: $45,000
Deduction: $5,000
Taxable Income: $40,000
Tax Owed: $6,671
Total Tax paid by both John and James: $13,342
If they file jointly:
Gross Income: $90,000
Deduction: $10,000 - Note this is the same as it if they filed singly!
Taxable Income: $80,000 - still the same as above
Tax Owed: $13,336
$6 is the “cost” to the government for allowing them to marry. A .045% decrease in revenue (ie, a drop in the bucket so to speak). Do you still contend that this is strictly a financial consideration for you? Would it be okay if we simply removed the $6 rounding error from the tax tables?
For the “cite” monsters out there, calculations were done using:
IRS Form 1040 -PDF
IRS Form 1040 Instructions - PDF
Oh, it’s a good idea, but it doesn’t go far enough.
Old-people sex squicks people out, too. There’s probably a biological repulsion toward it, because it can’t produce children. So we should not allow people over a certain age to get or stay married, because if we did they might have old-people sex.
In fact, everyone is offensive or disgusting to somebody, so nobody should be allowed to get married.
Ever take a look at the celebrity mags and supermarket tabloids? Apparently, a lot of people spend a lot of time thinking about perfect strangers’ sex lives, love lives, personal issues, etc. Bemusing, yes, but hardly rare.
Those who are squicked out by gay men having sex should be in favor of SSM. There’s certainly less of it now - eight years into our relationship. 
Ah, but since it’s sex that grosses people out, (sex by other people that is), marriage should be allowed, but not sex. Never again.
Kinda waitin for a response to this.
Number of African-Americans as of 2000: 36.2 million (cite, pdf)
Number of African-Americans who are the Reverend Al Sharpton: 1: (cite).
Number of African-Americans who were not the Reverend Al Sharpton as of 2000: 35,999,999.
If anyone can provide any updated figures, I’d appreciate it. I think we can all agree, though, that as of 2000, most African Americans were not Al Sharpton.
serket, I’ve got a proposal. It sounds as if you’ve got a lot of reasons for opposing gay marriage. As you can tell, this discussion is all over the place. Instead of discussing them all simultaneously, how about you choose what you think is the single best reason for opposing same-sex marriage and describe it, and then we can debate that one reason? If folks do convince you that this reason isn’t sufficient for opposing SSM, then you can offer your next-strongest reason for debate.
How does that sound?
Daniel
What about the laws banning interracial marriage? Would you have been in favour of repealing them? If so, what’s the difference between that and banning gay marriage?
zamboniracer, do you believe that adhering to the principle of justice (i.e., that the government should treat relevantly similar situations in a relevantly similar fashion) benefits society as a whole? That is, do you benefit from knowing that your government, when faced with the choice to be just or unjust, chooses to be just?
I absolutely believe that you benefit from this, and therefore believe that you ought to support SSM.
Daniel
So, statistics do indeed show that most African Americans are not Al Sharpton!
Who’da thunk it?
My thanks to LHoD for his hard work and diligence in ferreting out this obscure fact.
You have utterly failed to address the reason why the 19th amendment should have been passed in the first place. You merely note that it was passed.
The mere observation that it’s legally possible doesn’t address the wisdom of putting something into the constitution though. If you lived in a time before the passage of the 19th amendment, wouldn’t you have supported its passage?
It may not be justification, but it does deflate one argument against same sex marriage (that it will be abused by unscrupulous people).
Society as a whole benefits from granting minority rights for this simple reason: virtually every one of us is a minority of some sort (whether it be ethnicity, gender, political point of view, religion, the list goes on and on). So if you’re willing to support a government that discriminates against minorities the chances will increase that you too will be trampled upon by the majority one day.