The Medal of Honour is about bravery on the battlefield. Once you start giving it to people who didn’t show bravery on the battlefield, you diminish its value.
Once you stop celebrating the love that exists between a man and a woman by offering it to people not doing this, you diminish its value.
The concept is actually perfectly analogous in that sense, but yeah, I’ve been around debates long enough to know that when such counter-examples get pushed, opponents will, when no other arguement is available to them, pretend they don’t understand the difference between concept, compared with the articles in the example used to demonstrate it.
Do gay soldiers deserve the Medal of Honor? You cannot know if they are brave the same way straight people are brave-maybe they are “brave” in a certain way that doesn’t correspond to the way you think “brave” should be. Now, I’m not saying that what they experience is less than than bravery straight soldiers experience, but since we cannot know, why don’t we just give them the different(but equal-really!) Medal of Floogenwowsen?
Bullshit. In your example, if you give the Medal of Honor to every active serviceman means you’re giving that award to every serviceman whether they earned it or not. Of *course *that would devalue the Medal.
What you’re *actually *arguing for, though, is that giving the Medal of Honor to a black person somehow devalues the award given to a white serviceman simply because the Medal has historically only been given to whites.
It would be like issuing Marriage licenses to everybody(Parents’ Day), while marking on the form itself whether the couple was gay or straight(Mother’s Day or Father’s Day).
I will happily tackle these questions as soon as people lay out for me, with all their moral outrage fueling their keyboard fingers, how disgusted they are at the blatant discrimination going on between parents by separating their celebration in to two different days.
If the celebration Mother’s Day and Father’s Day resulted in differnt federal tax rules, different insurance benefits, or hospital visitation rights, then we would be trying to reform them.
But they don’t. And when different “celebrations” result in different treatments under the law, then it is time to examine them.
If what you’re proposing is that gay couples whose relationship has some sort of formal legal status get the exact same legal protection as different-sex couples whose relationship has some form of legal status and this alone is what they want, we’d have no debate, no arguement, no threat to traditional marriage and no thread.
Why? There are no legal ramifications to these holidays, no special privileges extended or protected by government agencies. The stakes are not high enough (arguably, the stakes don’t even exist) for moral outrage.
Meanwhile, Couple A can get a marriage license and all the attendant benefits just by applying, while Couple B cannot. Why?
The argument is still pretty silly, there is a huge difference between getting a “day” to celebrate on the calendar instead of access to a huge body of established rights and laws. But if celebrating the special love between a heterosexual man and woman is that important, let people have SSM and I will vote for SLBHMW day.
When you’re done giggling over the silly names you’ve created for the silly idea that people should fight for their rights, perhaps we can have as serious conversation.