Well again as Magellan and I both pointed out 15 years is a drop in the bucket compared to the revolutionary civilizational change that is being proposed. We won’t know what it means for a century at least because we need a period of time for it
To become widely accepted legally
To become widely accepted culturally
To watch the breeding patterns in the first generation where it is fully normalized.
So really it’s not until my daughters generation starts having kids that we’ll really know what this means.
DMC I know it may be irritating but arguments of discrimination don’t sway me in the slightest. We discriminate all the time, the very notion of law is based on discrimination, we discriminate that some behaviors are acceptable and others are not, and inevitably SOME cohort wants to engage in proscribed behavior. It is in the defining of a suspect class where this issue is interesting.
Hey, if a black person can marry a black person, then it’s not infringing on his rights to say he can’t marry a white person, right? Right?
On preview: a century? Wow. I guess we don’t know if it’s okay for interracial couples to marry. Better ban it for another half-century then.
You do understand the difference in fertility between a heterosexual interracial couple and a homosexual one right? That whole ability to breed thing isn’t lost on you?
I understand it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the question of whether the right exists or should exist. Do you?
The thing to remember here is that not all rebuttals work for, or even make sense for, all arguments. You have to kind of match them up.
As an addendum, lest you state that I brought a tangent of a different argument in by responding to your post, you have to state what impact the reproduction is going to make, given that the prospective couples are going to be sticking together and avoiding hetero sex whether or not they’re allowed to marry. Which means that we can reliably state that there will be no difference in reproduction rates between the gay marriage legal and gay marriage illegal scenarios. Which makes it completely irrelevent. (To *this *argument anyway.)
Then let’s go with the “suspect class” argument and apply the 14th amendment. Do you consider homosexuality “immutable”? Forgive me if you’ve answered this already. While I’ve read the entire thread, I certainly haven’t committed it to memory.
For the record, my answer to the above question is “yes”, far more so than religion, which is why I think sexual orientation should garner a suspect classification.
Right. You’re “expanding” it to include a right that previously did not exist. If it already existed, you wouldn’t have to expand anything in order to include it.
Oh? Nobody had the right to marry before now? That wpuld be contrary to what I would imagine any random survey of people would answer, and to the dictum of SCOTUS in the Loving case.
That people advocate extending the application of this right to same-sex couples may perhaps be what you mean. But there is not now, never has been, and never will be a “right to gay marriage” in the way that Shodan and a few others suggest is being proposed as a “newly created right.” Rather, the agelong right to marry is being applied to a class of people who previously were denied it, or at least denied it as it has generally been applied in America, that is, the right to marry the person of one’s choice.
And before we get into “the person of one’s choice” being a sister, a ten-year-old, a pet dog, or a house plant, that’s an entirely different set of topics, on a particularly gritty level surface (as opposed to slippery slope, that is).
Actually, while I used the term “expanding”, it was mainly because that was in the text I was responding to. In my opinion, all we need to do is recognize a right that already exists, via the 14th. Some day, in the near future, we’ll have SCOTUS that will recognize that fact.
Even if I prove to be wrong (I won’t), why in the fuck would you care if we “expanded” a right in the first place? Remember, you’re the one who actually wants to expand their rights.
Women voting were enjoying a right that previously had only been held by others. The right for a woman to vote had been created, hadn’t it? Do you need a hundred years to study the effects of that new right?
And it remains unclear that procreation will be impacted by gay marriage. Possibly it was affected by suffrage if women were out voting when they should have been at home submitting to their husbands, or voting for pro-choice politicians or something.
No, that homosexuals are persons. That’s the word in the 14th’s equal protection clause.
No, that personhood entitles a person to equal protection of the laws.
Please prove that homosexuals are persons? You’re *serious *about that? Wow. It’s getting very hard to see any value in continuing to engage you here, you know that, right?
It isn’t even about rationality, the remarkable notion that homosexuals are not actually “persons” notwithstanding. It’s about the law, and about the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law?
What does the phrase “equal protection of the laws” mean to you, then? Or the word “person”? :rolleyes:
Oh come on. You chose to opine on what mswas had written, and went on for a whole paragraph arguing for the expansion of rights. When your own logic was used against you to show the problem with your position you then claim the above. You’ve got to be kidding.
I’m all for expanding rights, as we see fit. After evaluating them. This little game you play trying to make that the default position, then claiming that rights are being denied, is weak, mswas has explained more than a few times.
:rolleyes:Nice strawman you’ve erected there. Mswas never claimed in any way that homosexuals were not persons. Here’s what she did say:
You may want to read this over a few times until you understand her position better, so you don’t inadvertently ascribe statements or beliefs to her that doesn’t hold.
It’s completely relevant. Either ALL people have the right to marry whomever they desire or they don’t. If it’s an existing “right”, they do, correct? But we do draw lines. Take polygamy even. If there is no line we can draw with homosexuals, then there is no line we can reasonably draw amongst siblings, Oedipal relationships, polygamists, etc.