True, he’s merely said that gays are abnormal. Since he didn’t specify, he may feel we’re abnormal in a clean, non-degenrate way.
Well, it’s a well put together argument even if it doesn’t hold up.
There is zero , I mean** zero** to indicate that allowing gays to be married in terminology will do anything to to dilute the term for hetero couples and society in general. In fact all the evidence discussed in this thread shows exactly the opposite. {Thanks** Tom** for that latest contribution }If a loving committed hetero couple doing society their great service by raising healthy kids seriously thinks the quality of their relationship and their child rearing will be damaged because down the street two women or two men are also married then they have an emotional weakness that needs to be corrected not catered to.
If you have one tiny shred of evidence that what you call the dilution of this special term for men and women will harm society or the traditional family in any way you haven’t presented it. Why? **Because it doesn’t exist. ** You have a reasonably coherent argument that crumbles to dust when you try to bring it together with that last paragraph.
Now maybe you think regardless of whether there’s a shred of evidence or not the majority should be able to dictate those terms just because they’re the majority. If so please answer my question.
Awww does that mean you won’t /can’t answer my request? Well, perhaps Shodan will stop by again to preform that service, but I doubt it.
One of my problems with your argument, magellan, is that by defining marriage as being between a man and a woman, you legally recognize a difference between the sexes. I recognize that there are plumbing differences, but as a matter of law, I don’t think there should be any difference. By law, IMHO, a citizen is a citizen. I know that people haven’t always thought that way, and that we actually ended up requiring a constitutional amendment allowing women to vote, but we shouldn’t have, and I’m hoping we know better now. If the law knows no gender, then the law has no business stating what genders participate in a marriage.
But ultimately, what everyone is arguing about comes down to this: do we define our society by “everything that is not explicitly prohibited is allowed” or by “everything that is not explicitly allowed is prohibited?” Basically, magellan is asking “Why?” while pretty much everyone else here is asking “Why not?”
I find it ironic that the political viewpoint that claims to want less government seems to prefer to ban anything not specifically allowed: hence the claim “Activist Judge” for any jurist who can’t find a legal reason why a particular person shouldn’t do something, and therefore allows them to do it.
That’s a pretty good line of demarcation, actually, you’re right.
But he has specified - see his multi-paragraph post above, the one Lobohan was responding to, where he specifies (quite clearly, at least to me) that the specialness he’s talking about is the ability for a couple to have biological children. Plus Lobohan’s point wasn’t solely that magellan does feel that way about gay people, but that that is the only possible interpretation of someone feeling that including gay couples into marriage “dilutes” it.
Right. And that’s the Marriage School.
But if you say that students from north of the tracks can continue to go to the Marriage School, as they’ve always done, and students from south of the tracks can go to the Civil Union School, which is the name given to the Marriage School for the students from down there, so as not to offend the old fuddy-duddies who are alumni of the Marriage School back when it was restricted to students from north of the tracks – what’s to say that the school board can’t decide that Civil Union School students can’t shower in the Marriage School showers, or eat lunch in the Marriage School cafeteria, or attend the Advanced Placement classes available to Marriage School students. Right, by your definition you didn’t start it that way – there was no real difference between Marriage School students and Civil Union School students except the names their schools were called. But they can do it.
Here’s another: the old Marriage School, back when the tracks actually defined who attended it, had a national reputation for excellence. If a student’s family moved, a Marriage School transcript was good as gold – no school anywhere would ever hesitate to accept its credits awarded for classes as good as its own. But students attending the Civil Union School will have their transcripts looked at skeptically, and may not be awarded credits, because nobody anywhere else has ever heard of the Civil Union School – even though they took the same classes and were graded by the same criteria as students at the Marriage School.
With a little effort, other examples of how such an arrangement is ridiculous could be advanced.
======================
Finally, leaving that analogy and the bus one completely alone, let’s look at what the Golden Rule does.
Suppose we say, hypothetically, “All right, if the gays want access to the term marriage so much, we’ll give it to them – in fact, we’ll abandon it to them. Henceforth, all same-sex matrimonial unions will be termed ‘marriages’ but all opposite-sex matrimonial unions will be termed ‘civil unions’. That preserves the distinction people want, while giving them what they insist on.”
Obviously, that’s not a workable solution. But if you can define in your mind why it isn’t, you may get a better handle on what the other side’s issues are.
“That which you would not have done unto yourself, do not do the same unto others.”
This is comical. YOU bring up the turning of the tide, I counter it with an example, and you say that I bring up a strawman? No, not quite.
Well, by “reason” I meant something arrived at through reasoning, i.e. logic and objective evidence and lack of counter-evidence and such. I might have a “reason” to avoid stepping on sidewalk cracks, such reason being the uneasy feeling that doing so will injure my mother’s spinal column, but it isn’t something I’d expect to be able to argue to a skeptical audience who employs critical thinking.
It’s a tenuous relevance at best, though. Criminals get incarcerated after they’ve been duly convicted of doing something that caused harm to an individual or to society, and not simply because the majority voted to lock them up. First the majority, through their elected legislators, had to define the crime and the guideline for sentencing people who broke it, and then judges had to pass those sentences. There is a multilayered buffer between the accused and the masses, which is how it should be. Referendum-based constitutional amendments remove these buffers, which I figure removes protection of individual rights. Some of the time it doesn’t matter; this time it does.
So? Just in the last few decades we’ve created or redefined or abandoned thousands of words. Bit has a new meaning in the computer age that has nothing to do with biting. What if one definition of marriage is:
MARRIAGE: (noun) A legal status entered into by two consenting adults in which each designates the other as primary next-of-kin and primary beneficiary, to the exclusion of all others.
That’s pretty much a monogamous marriage, isn’t it? The participants have to be consenting and they can’t maintain any previous marriages to other people while entering this new marriage. You’d have to make it more complicated by specifying gender.
What is there is no intent or capability of a married couple to have children? Does that kind of marriage deserve a distinct word, as you say polygamy does? If I can find an example of a marriage that took place 1000 or so years ago in which the participants knew no children would result (essentially, any marriage in which the woman was menopausal though I’m sure other examples exist), does that modify your position?
Are homosexuals incapable of “desires of the heart” ? Are they capable of appreciating and respecting “marriage-type ceremonies” in which each vows to, for example, “love, honor and cherish and behold 'til death do us part” the other? Just how different do you think a homosexual’s emotions are from a heterosexual’s?
Are marriages that don’t raise future generations unworthy of the term? Are marriages that raise future generations, but don’t do it very well (i.e. the household is abusive) unworthy of the term?
I fail to see what relevance heterosexuals abandoning the concept of marriage has to do with homosexuals who want to embrace it. Besides, if homosexual marriages cannot produce children, then what’s the relevance of this “role model” stuff? By your argument, there won’t be anybody to role model to. Is homosexual marriage going to increase the number of abandoned babies, somehow?
Is it in society’s best interest to discourage that which does not harm it? It’s unclear to me how homosexual marriage will in itself decrease the number of babies (arguably, it might increase the number, since a married lesbian couple with greater financial legal stability could opt for artificial insemination to impregnate one or both partners, but without this stability they may decline). Favouring individual rights, as I do, the burden is on society and the state to prove harm before it bans something, especially if the ban only applies to one segment of the population and not another.
What harm could gay marriage cause? Does it make straight marriage less likely? If so, I do not understand how and ask you to explain it. Is it your theory that if gay marriage is available, there are people who will choose it who otherwise would have chosen baby-producing straight marriages? I do not understand the logic of this. If this is your position please explain it. If it is not your position, please explain your position.
Please explain, please explain, please explain. I’m an intelligent person (who is neither gay nor married) who can’t see the harm of gay marriage and is waiting for someone to explain that is does cause harm, and how. If baby production is a compelling state interest, then how is baby production affected by gay marriage? I’ve read you entire post and while you frequently mention “society’s interest” quite a bit, you haven’t explained how society’s interests are being harmed, or even affected, by gay marriage.
Diluted… how? Marriage is not exclusively about starting a family. If it was, we would make child production a requirement of marriage. What about the young hetero couple who is madly in love but doesn’t want children? Does their marriage cheapen (i.e. dilute) the marriage of the hetero couple that does?
And how can something be “more” exclusively? Is child production a necessary element of marriage or not? Is a marriage with children legally distinct from a marriage without children? Is a heterosexual marriage that cannot produce children (for some biological reason) different from a homosexual couple who also cannot have children (for a more obvious biological reason)? Are you under the impression that people choose homosexuality primarily to avoid having kids?
If this interpretation of “society’s interest” is the best argument you have against gay marriage, then you have no argument at all. Some of my fellow Canadian citizens want to enjoy something already enjoyed by other citizens and I have no good reason to deny them, so I will not oppose (and in fact my respect for individual freedom compels me to support) gay marriage in Canada. It’s happening in the more progressive U.S. states and eventually across the entire country as a whole, because some U.S. citizens want it and there’s no compelling reason (that I have seen) to deny them.
It’s been said before but old people getting married, people never intending to have children, or parties where one or more have a natural or surgical sterility also can’t have children. If those people diluting marriage are allowed to be grandfathered in, there has to be some substantive difference between them and same sex couples, right?
I don’t want *them *in my club, is the basis of his argument. Why are same sex couples any different than allowing Jews into a country club or blacks to drink from your water fountains? The idea is that they are beneath you and don’t belong in your group.
That’s certainly what I would consider a problem with his argument, and i’ve asked him that question upthread.
In those cases, yes, but simply because there are cases of exclusion based on those idea does not mean that every single case of doing so is necessarily because those wishing to exclude consider the excluded to be beneath you, or filthy, or unclean, or degenerate. You’re quite correct; some cases of exclusion are based on those things. If that had been your point, I would have had no complaint. But your point was that in all cases is it so, which is complete nonsense, and that **magellan **holds these views, which I have seen no indication of and in fact has given alternative reasons for thinking as he does.
Another example, simpler: A Men’s solcial club suddenly is forced, or decides, to accept a few Jews. Is not that membership diluted in regard to it being a white men’s club? Of course it is…
Is that more clear to you? I tell you what, replace Jews with homosexuals and read it back. Implicit in your argument is the idea that the people you’re excluding aren’t worthy. Why are homosexuals unworthy of marriage?
Your language arguments are beyond pathetic. Marriage changes. Women can get divorced, people of different races can get married, you can choose your partner. All of those were things that were illegal, some as recently as the previous century. It’s simply stupidity or bigotry to deny expanding the marriage rolls to same sex couples.
Bryan Ekers has some points as to why Magellan’s argument rests on false premises–but it’s also easy to point out how it fails even within its own framework.
Let’s take our imaginary young heterosexual couple of 2029. Cute, aren’t they? I’ll call them Alice and Bob.
They really like each other, and are trying to decide what to do with their lives–how to structure their long-term relationship. How do they decide? They are going to look to how other people around them live their lives—friends, other couples, families, in general social influences–to see what they have done, what works. I don’t think magellan would disagree–I think he’d agree that that is exactly the influence he hopes will influence them.
I hate to break it to Magellan, but this couple will have gay friends. That’s right–there will be gay people in 2029, and they will be in relationships. Alice and Bob will have gay friends with partners, with families, and who are in exactly the same situation as the heterosexual families our young couple looks to–they will be some of the people Alice and Bob will be thinking about when wondering how to structure their life together.
So now I ask–what will devalue marriage more: Alice and Bob seeing that some of the families that influence them have two men married to one another, whereas if they got married, they’d be a man and a woman?
Or would marriage be devalued more if Alice and Bob saw that some of those families have two, loving, caring men who have lived as life-partners, raised three cute children—and managed to do all that without the institution of marriage.
What message will that send? It may be the clearest way of telling Alice and Bob that marriage is unnecessary in a modern world–that families work just fine without it. That will be the result of banning gay marriage.
On the other hand, I think it’s clear what Alice and Bob will take away from the fact that all their peers (even the gay ones) want to be married, think that marriage is special and relevant, and want to raise families through the institution of marriage.
so from that perspective, perfectly reasonable within the framework magellan proposes we should be using, gay marriage actually strongly strengthens marriage. Opposing it will lead to influences that will actually hurt marriage–whereas supporting it leads to families with two daddies who are married to one another (and we’re all still waiting to hear exactly how that is claimed to hurt heterosexual marriages).
Do you even know any actual gay people? What the hell do you think our relationships are like, as opposed to your own “special, unique and appropriate” relationships? My partner and I have been together over 21 years, and our relationship is "AS special, AS unique and AS appropriate . . . if not more so . . . as any straight couple we know. Your argument, weak as it had been, has sunk to the level of blathering.
A couple able to have children (and having children) is the norm. That is what defines the concept of marriage. That much is plain. I see no need to further slice that group as to whether or not they have children. The exceptions do not get in the way of what our understanding of marriage is. You want proof? Go back thirty or forty years. There were infertile couples back then. And people got married late in life and were unable to have children. Where there ANY confusion as to what constituted marriage? No, there wasn’t. This microscopic slicing is done now as to create a door for SSM. But the past proves that the definition not by applicable at all times on ALL criteria. But, again, look to the past, or recent past; the main criteria were one man and one woman.
Now, I fully understand that the word could be expanded to include SS couples. The question is not can it, but should it. While I see the benefits of going that route, I still think it’s a bad idea, for the reasons I’ve listed in this thread and others. I really don’t beleive that most of the gays that show up in these threads ask the right question, or any question other than “why not?”. They simply WANT. The question that people should be asking is , “what is best for society?”. And that just doesn’t mean today or this year. What will the effects—good and ill—be on society over the long term? But the long view I don’t see being discussed. It’s just, “why cant I have the ability to marry like a hetero has?”. I find the arguments extremely self-serving and shorsighted. I responded to CannyDan with an example of a well-intentioned policy that had drastic long term effects. I think when we seek to change something as foundational to our society as the concept of marriage, that the long view deserves s least as much airing as the immediate benefits. I see problems in that long view. Can I be wrong about them? Of course. But we have a route to pursue that gives SS couples all the legal protections, benefits, and privileges without the longterm downside. At the same time, I think it would actually help diminish whatever rift exists between gays and straights because it shows people that the institution they view as being hijacked and changed needn’t be threatened if gay couples are afforded all the privileges that their marriages gives them. It would also show them that gays respect the fact that many of them hold marriage sacred (both in a religious and secular manner) and are not merely insistent in shoving SSM down their throats.
I think it would be a very healthy compromise position. But I can just imagine the frothing the myopic SSM militants are undergoing as they read this. Which, kinda proves my point.
I have no doubt that magellan may not admit to himself why he’s taking up this cause. But he’s otherwise rational, if almost always on the wrong side of an issue. His argument isn’t rational in the least. It’s stupid and without merit.
Given the lack of a rational reason, I assume an irrational.
Perhaps, but it strikes me that there are less offensive ways of saying that than kvetching about the gays’ desire for a “shroud of normalcy” (see post #261). Of course that does make his hypersensitivity about gays giving bigots a “poke in the eye” by appropriating the word ‘marriage’ even more amusing. (Though not yet as amusing as his insistence that his “straights get to marry, gays have to settle for civil unions” plan is a unitary system instead of separate but equal.)
Again, a lot of text with no rational arguments. What is the longterm downside? Please spell it out specifically.
Are you sure everybody here coming in to argue for same-sex marriage vigorously is gay? Seriously?
Fortunately, I just did address the long term issue. I think gay marriage will strengthen marriage in the long term. Here’s the key part (not that it’s hard to look up about six posts):
Glad to see you finally came around in favor of same-sex marriage (since as has been pointed out every single time you mention this, tons of same-sex couples have children).
Thanks for your support.
I’m afraid I don’t understand. If there are societal strengths coming from marriage involving a couple being able to have children, surely those are the reason to further slice up that group? To quote you;
If we want marriage to stand as much as possible for that, it only makes sense for us to slice it further so that infertile couples and the like are not included. It would mean “marriage” stands more for that. If it is enough of a reason to exclude gays, why is it not enough of a reason to exclude infertile couples?
As far as self-serving arguments go, i’m not sure you necessarily have that good an indication - I know I, at times, will phrase my desire to see gay marriage happen in terms of my own personal possible future, but that doesn’t mean i’m only concerned about myself, just that it’s a useful way of stating matters.
As far as the long view goes, I could turn it around and point out that I think you’ve missed out on a particular point. You place value on the traditional definition of marriage because it has been around for so long and known to mean a certain thing (though i’d disagree with you to an extent on that), but allowing gay marriage would itself become part of that tradition. In 200 year’s time, or whenever, we could have a tradition of inclusive straight or gay marriage, worth more because of that inclusivity. And you seem to feel that wanting to join in an institution, contribute to it, is not the highest kind of respect a person could show for something. And, in all honesty, I feel your characterisation of gay people in these threads is inaccurate.
As for all the same rights and so forth, I do disagree with your idea working on that front, but i’m pretty sure i’ve bored you with my arguments on that before, so i’ll not trouble you to read them again. 
No more than they imagining you howling with glee at putting down those damn dirty fags is. Both, I believe, are caricatures.