It’s merely unenforceable in the case of heterosexuals who can’t procreate. And YOU are the one asking for an exception to the ordinary, that we see homosexuality as equivalent to heterosexuality.
Sure, that’d be nice. To quote that post:
I can’t do anything about mswas’s feelings that society will slip into oblivion. I can only work with hard data.
Can you direct me to your father? I would like to purchase you for some quantity of goats.
Oh, so all traditions aren’t sacrosanct? Just the ones that shore up your biases, right?
The law enforces a contract on people who sign it. How does it enforce a contract on someone who didn’t sign it?
Not having children is a loophole? A post-menopausal woman or sterile man can only get married because a loophole?
It cuts both ways. You are appealing to tradition as well. The tradition that we don’t sell children for a quantity of goats. You’re going to have to do better.
So you are saying that hospitals don’t honor living wills now?
The idea of marriage is based on the family unit. You are arguing that it’s not that it’s based off of sex and affection.
I don’t feel that society will slip into oblivion, if actual data were important to you, you wouldn’t repeat what I have refuted.
If you care about truth why is it so important to intentionally misquote me?
But as I said before, you’re physically not my equivalent (I assume, and I’m not meaning this to be intimidating, just for demonstrations sake). And for thousands of years I had rights that you didn’t purely based on the fact that most men can beat most women bloody with little risk.
That’s insane. Our society has (largely) forgotten those times. We are supposed to allow everyone regardless of physicality the same rights. Why does your womb (whether it works or not) grant you the right to marry someone you love? And Ian McKellen’s nuts bar him from the same privilege?
First things first. Back in Post# 824 you claimed that an argument I posed previous to your post was “illogical”. I asked you to point to both the argument and, specifically to the logical flaw(s) therein.
Still waiting.
Well I’m not a woman, but ok. 
Because marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman. Why is a raven like a writing desk?
So far I am unswayed by the ‘some men and women are infertile’ argument. Marriage is based off of the potential for procreation, which up until recently wasn’t able to be judged accurately and still can’t in some cases.
Why not allow marriage in cases of incest or bestiality?
Wait a minute. The tradition of selling children for goats is older than the tradition of not selling them for goats. Hence, the only reason we don’t continue to sell children for goats today is because society decided to do away with that older tradition!
Absolutely ridiculous. Truly astonishing. I can’t believe you think there is any comparison between these and same sex marriage. We don’t allow marriage in cases of incest or bestiality because there is demonstrable harm or cruelty to one of the requisite parties.
Because “equality” is one of the founding precepts of our society, “status quo” is not. The Constitution guarantees equal protection, not protection so long as things don’t change. There is no legal, moral nor ethical reason for giving “status quo” any weight against liberty.
Your “establishment” is based solely on procreative vs. non-procreative sex. But since marriage is not, legally, predicated on procreation, nor is it solely or even mainly about procreation, your “establishment” has nothing to do with who should be able to access the privilege of marriage with the partner of their choosing regardless of their intention or ability to procreate. Marriage provides an environment in which procreation becomes more financially and legally responsible, but the point and purpose of marriage is not procreation.
There are more than 1,100 rights that become available to people (on the federal level) as a result of marriage, and there is no way to replicate the vast majority of them (especially those relating to interactions with the government) by private contract.
You can’t. But then, you can’t guarantee that with civil unions either. A year after civil unions were introduced in New Jersey, where they are meant to be essentially identical to marriage, 7 out of 10 couples who had one reported that they had experienced a significant matter in which a third party had refused to allow them benefits provided to married couples on the basis that a civil union is not a marriage, refused to acknowledge their legal rights as civil partners or simply refused to acknowledge their union altogether. This included multinational corporations like UPS, which chose to discriminate against civil partners in regards to insurance and disabilities, and numerous situations where civil partners’ right to make healthcare decisions or have hospital access were significantly delayed or denied.
And if I am being kept from being with my chosen in the moments of their death because a hospital will not acknowledge our civil union, or when my partner’s estranged mother comes in and makes an end-of-life decision that my partner would not want and my right as their legal next-of-kin is ignored, being able to sue after the fact doesn’t really help me or my loved one.
You’re a dude! How awkward! I always thought it was a play on missus… miss is… miss was… anyway.
I’ve been going easy on you to be all gentlemanly. 
Homosexual couples have the potential for procreation. Either by IVF or sci-fi she-spawning… or heck, give it a few decades, womb implantation in men. IVF does exist, adoption does exist. They can make families and some are driven to do so. I actually just did some photo edits for a female couple who are adopting a child. They appear to have as good a relationship as my wife and I.
Why are they not as much a family as two septuagenarians who meet in Florida?
Actually, it does appear to boil down to “fags are yucky” for the overwhelming majority of same sex marriage opponents. Only a tiny minority of them actually oppose divorce in any material way. Only a miniscule minority actually promote the idea that heterosexual sex must be procreative–birth control is well established among all the major groups that oppose same sex marriage.
Anecdotally, I have never heard a person who was not posturing in front of a camera declare that homosexuality is an abomination against God’s law. On the other hand, I have heard hundreds of variations on the theme that “fags are bad, m’kay.”
Are some arguments couched in religious terms? Yes, but not anywhere near a majority of those arguments and many of the religious arguments are brought out to rationalize the yuck reaction, not the other way around. The “gay agenda” was framed as an effort to lead young men to join gay society. There may, (or may not), have been a religious origin of the cultural opposition to homosexuality, but it has long since been simply absorbed by our society so that it is no longer religion-based on the personal level. It is simply an attitude that people grew up accepting and passing to their children for several hundred years and that has begun to be challenged only in the last half century. If the aversion was based on religious beliefs, then the various psychological associations would never have tried to define it as a disease; we do not define theft or murder or rape or the desire for abortions as diseases. (For that matter, more than one person in a hundred could actually point to the exact verse in Leviticus that prohibits male coupling.)
Now, any given person might have any one of several different responses to homosexuality. I am sure that there are individuals who are following religious tradition while other individuals are following mistaken beliefs based on misunderstandings of biology. Still others may be prompted by world views or beliefs that we have not even mentioned. However, collectively, the general opposition is driven by the yuck factor and then framed in different arguments based on the worldview of the person holding the view.
There is also, with regard to bestiality, the lack of affirmative consent.
The fact that someone is still bringing up bestiality in the context of a SSM debate in 2009 shows that there is no listening happening here. These are the same, stupid, nonsense talking points that have been regurgitated for the last fifteen years, and have been debunked time and time and time again. Such a question would never make it from brain to fingers to keyboard to clicking submit if even a moment of logical thinking was applied.
A marriage is a commitment between two people for any number of reasons. It’s clear children may or may not be involved and the commitment and the marriage is just as valid with or without them. Not to mention that gay couples have the same children or no children option and that’s been pointed out numerous times.
There’s glory for you.
I doubt that one person in ten thousand would agree to that “definition,” so even if you can find a citation for its abstruse use in some dusty theological argument, it is not worth much in this discussion.
Do they all, with the same consistency that they defer to spouses? Let’s assume they do, even hospitals run by religious orders. Because they can’t be married, the homosexual couple has successfully jumped one hoop. Now, let’s assume one of the contract-partners is charged with a crime. If he/she was married, there would be spousal privilege, which the courts must recognize and respect. Got a contract clause for that?
No, I’m arguing that as far as the law is concerned, neither sex nor affection is strictly required to form a legal marriage. I spelled out some of the legal requirements earlier on, and sex and affection weren’t among them. A hetero couple can currently get married even if there is no possibility or expectation of sex (i.e. one or both of the partners is a quadriplegic) and no-one will question it.
Even though they’re irrelevant to my argument, which hangs on equal treatment under the law, what’s wrong with sex and affection?
And the argument for that was already made. You are arguing to change things. Saying that something else was changed is not a sufficient impetus to change things further.
[qutoe]Absolutely ridiculous. Truly astonishing. I can’t believe you think there is any comparison between these and same sex marriage. We don’t allow marriage in cases of incest or bestiality because there is demonstrable harm or cruelty to one of the requisite parties.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t but the argument that there is a slippery slope is one of the arguments. It is also what you rely upon so heavily. “We have gone this far done the slope, we might as well go further.”, and then you ask why they don’t care about ‘divorce’ or ‘fornication’, the fact of the matter is that they do, they just lost those battles.
But what if incest is between consenting adults. Lets forget about a parent/child relationship, what about a sister and a brother? And with bestiality, lets say the woman is the human and it’s a male dog she is marrying. You can’t tell me that a male dog needs to be coerced to have sex with a human female with the amount of people who have had their leg raped by dogs on a daily basis.
Even if we accept this nonsense definition of “fornication” that’s been put forth, without something to back up the idea that fornication within marriage is legally accorded less merit in some fashion, it’s irrelevant within the context of the SSM debate.
Marriage laws in 2009 U.S.A. do not address the decisions of the couple in question regarding their sexual relationship or their procreative choices, period. Sex and/or the lack thereof and children and/or the lack thereof can come into legal play in the dissolution of a marriage, but not in the creation of one.
Marriage, in law, is not based on “sex and affection” nor on the “family unit” but simply that two adults are choosing to publicly commit to a relationship with one another and wish for that relationship to be publicly acknowledged in a specific way.