Any Dudes Wanna Get Married?

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
503

[quote]Edevus wrote:

[quote]Cortes wrote:

[quote]Edevus wrote:
I don’t want to dive into an empty swimming pool and I can’t read all posts, but, I want to take part. First, I want to ask something :

Are we taking the approach that marriage is of Catholic/Christian origin?[/quote]

As far as I understand we are talking about marriage in the general sense, with an emphasis upon the government recognized/sanctioned/fostered variety.

Like when you see a hot girl and then notice she has a wedding ring and go, “Oh, that sucks.”

;)[/quote]

Thanks. I’ll ask something else : Is the main “con”, according to some of you, the possible negative influence of man/man or woman/woman marriages upon their children?
[/quote]

No.You’re better off reading starting at least 7 or 8 pages back. The answer to your question is what we’ve been attempting to establish over pretty much the last couple hundred posts.

504

[quote]Cortes wrote:

[quote]Edevus wrote:

[quote]Cortes wrote:

[quote]Edevus wrote:
I don’t want to dive into an empty swimming pool and I can’t read all posts, but, I want to take part. First, I want to ask something :

Are we taking the approach that marriage is of Catholic/Christian origin?[/quote]

As far as I understand we are talking about marriage in the general sense, with an emphasis upon the government recognized/sanctioned/fostered variety.

Like when you see a hot girl and then notice she has a wedding ring and go, “Oh, that sucks.”

;)[/quote]

Thanks. I’ll ask something else : Is the main “con”, according to some of you, the possible negative influence of man/man or woman/woman marriages upon their children?
[/quote]

No.You’re better off reading starting at least 7 or 8 pages back. The answer to your question is what we’ve been attempting to establish over pretty much the last couple hundred posts.
[/quote]

Ok, thanks. It seems I will have to read through it then…better tomorrow at work.

505

[quote]Edevus wrote:

[quote]Cortes wrote:

[quote]Edevus wrote:

[quote]Cortes wrote:

[quote]Edevus wrote:
I don’t want to dive into an empty swimming pool and I can’t read all posts, but, I want to take part. First, I want to ask something :

Are we taking the approach that marriage is of Catholic/Christian origin?[/quote]

As far as I understand we are talking about marriage in the general sense, with an emphasis upon the government recognized/sanctioned/fostered variety.

Like when you see a hot girl and then notice she has a wedding ring and go, “Oh, that sucks.”

;)[/quote]

Thanks. I’ll ask something else : Is the main “con”, according to some of you, the possible negative influence of man/man or woman/woman marriages upon their children?
[/quote]

No.You’re better off reading starting at least 7 or 8 pages back. The answer to your question is what we’ve been attempting to establish over pretty much the last couple hundred posts.
[/quote]

Ok, thanks. It seems I will have to read through it then…better tomorrow at work.
[/quote]

Eh…I wouldn’t bother if I were you. It’s the same old crap.

506

[quote]Cortes wrote:

[quote]Grneyes wrote:

[quote]Cortes wrote:

[quote]Grneyes wrote:

Child bearing and rearing is an integral part of marriage

[/quote]

Thank you yes you could have stopped here.

You have all you need to understand the issue in its entirety right here in this one little sentence. You have to extrapolate from it, though, to get there.

Child bearing and rearing is an integral part of marriage WHY?

Again, WHY?

Well, because if there is no child bearing and rearing going on then our society ceases to exist.

Indeed, marriage in the traditional sense ensures our society possesses the integrity to function at it does. The role it serves is easily as important as the role the heart plays in a human body. The job the heart is responsible for is so important that indeed the body cannot exist without it.

THAT is the difference between you and your husband’s relationship, and forlife and his partner. Any other kind of romantic relationship CANNOT fill that role, and so you are going to have to come up with some pretty compelling other reasons why they should get all of the benefits that hetero couples do. [/quote]

So, you choose to ignore the rest of my post and concentrate on the part of it that agrees with you? Love that logic…

[/quote]

Uh, no. I brought us to the point.

Haha! I love it. Yes, your analogy works perfectly. I completely agree with you. I really do!

So, answer me this question: Let’s say they are giving away free heart transplants down at the Mayo clinic. Absolutely everything you could possibly need, from pre-op care to post-op follow-up and any related care is covered, and the operation will be performed by the best surgeon in the country along with his hand picked team. They’ll even take you to and from the hospital in a limousine. Sounds like a pretty good deal, right? You gonna sign up? Would you sign up anyone in your family?
[/quote]

Now, when something sounds too good to be true, it probably IS. I’m pretty sure there’s a catch in there…like maybe that surgeon likes to start his day with a double on the rocks of Johnny Walker and likes to operate slightly non-sober as he feels this gives him an edge during surgery. Or that maybe the heart that is going in my body wasn’t as vetted as it should have been and was procured on the black market from a Colombian drug lord that the anesthesiologist owes money to for his last batch of cocaine. Would be pretty stupid of me to go blindly into something like that without researching it, right?

507

[quote]Grneyes wrote:<<< work ethic >>>[/quote]As I figured you missed my point by a couple hundred million light years. Work ethic is merely a happy consequence of what I’m talkin about. Not even close to the thing itself. FAMILY produces work ethic. What was a family when this nation was on it’s meteoric rise no longer is. Hence the rapid decline that we are now in. What happened? I’ll have to repost my earlier post again for I think the 4th time now. I don’t have a ton of time now.

508

[quote]Cortes wrote:
In other words, there are all sorts of societal ills that could use righting, but we have to decide if one is really so compelling that it requires us to radically redefine the core familial structure of our society. We’re not talking about breaking a few eggs here. We’re actually talking about tinkering with an institute that has withstood, relatively unchanged, 5000 years of human societal upheavals across all continents and circumstances.[/quote]

I didn’t ask for generalized abstract henny-penny catastrophizing. I asked for a specific logical argument on WHY allowing adoptive gay couples to marry would have any effect whatsoever on the birth rate of out of wedlock heterosexual unions.

Please help me out here, because every time I ask this question nobody can provide a real answer.

It’s completely illogical. It makes no sense. It’s nothing but scare tactics to insist that straight couples are suddenly going to have more children out of wedlock because we allow gays to marry. Seriously?

There are many thousands of children out there just like your close friend. Do you not agree those children with gay parents are better off with the stability and security that marriage provides? It is a real social issue, and gay marriage offers a real solution to that issue.

509

[quote]Cortes wrote:<<< He was still talking about marriage and its degradation as an institution being a symptom of a disease afflicting our modern society. >>>[/quote]Actually I’m saying that the degradation of marriage and family IS the disease of which absolutely EVERYTHING else is a symptom, including exploding government, crime and the disastrous economy. [quote]Cortes wrote:<<< And the bitterness was in reference to your caricatured description of religious folks. Not all of us are a certain way, and some of us do try and use the brains God gave us :wink: >>>[/quote] I love using my brain and thinking is one of the most rewarding and satisfying aspects of my existence. BECAUSE I do both in self conscious, grateful, willing submission to the mind of the living risen Christ as revealed in His Word. Folks continuously mistake my refusal to think in autonomous independence from the God who designed me (and them and everything else) with a refusal to think at all. Nothing could be further from the truth. [quote]Cortes wrote:<<< Sorry, I honestly wasn’t trying to be rude. [/quote]This isn’t addressed to me, but I agree. You are one of the politest and easiest to get along with guys around here.

510

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just have to. ‘Rights’ (obviously, privileges) for ‘non-marital ways of loving’ equal to that of marriage, coming up as the next big activist feel-gooderest movement! Let the circus sideshow keep on rolling.

511

[quote]MikeTheBear wrote:
What came first: the legal relationship or religion?
[/quote]

Well, according to our Jewish brothers, religion. Adam had a relationship with God before he had a relationship with his wife Eve.

512

[quote]forlife wrote:<<< There are many thousands of children out there just like your close friend. Do you not agree those children with gay parents are better off with the stability and security that marriage provides? It is a real social issue, and gay marriage offers a real solution to that issue.[/quote]I most emphatically do not agree. There is no magic in the number 2, that is, one less than 3 and one more than 1. The magic is in children growing up with THEIR OWN biological parents, one man, one woman completing the image of God together as examples to children of both sexes by both sexes.

Any other arrangement while either biological parent is alive is doomed to overall disaster and we are living proof of that as this country swirls down the moral/social/economic toilet as I type this. Almost nothing could be a worse idea than putting children in gay households. That’s like dousing a fire with gasoline in an attempt to save the house.

513

[quote]therajraj wrote:

[quote]Brother Chris wrote:

[quote]therajraj wrote:
So is there a valid non-religious argument against gay marriage?

I haven’t seen one presented in this thread yet.

EDIT: If we re-name gay marriage to shmarriage (since marriage is a heterosexual union) is there any other non-religious reason to withhold these rights?[/quote]

Yes, economical. It will force small businesses to have higher over head they didn’t agree to.[/quote]

Care to elaborate?

Even if the net economic effect is negative (which I’m not conceding it is) it’s still not good enough reason to deny people certain rights.[/quote]

You own a business, and you are contractually obligated to offer your employees a health care and pension program. Now, in the contract you state if they are married, that you are obliged to cover the man’s wife on both programs. Now, with this in New York, those companies in NY are now required to cover a man’s husband or a woman’s wife.

Now, if you have had a person working for you and he gets married to his boyfriend, you are required to cover him, as well. Not including the hazardous life of homosexuals, small business now are having to cover even more people they may not want to cover. This isn’t such a problem for big companies as they have slush funds and the per person cost of insurance is much lower. However, for a small company, say they are a 15 person operation, and say they have already been forced by state laws to cover 25 people (say ten of them are married to their wives). Now, say for example’s sake, that the other five are homosexuals and they get married. The new NY laws will require that the business cover the other five persons they are now paying insurance for 30 adults instead of the 15 adults that actually work for them.

514

[quote]Tiribulus wrote:

[quote]forlife wrote:<<< There are many thousands of children out there just like your close friend. Do you not agree those children with gay parents are better off with the stability and security that marriage provides? It is a real social issue, and gay marriage offers a real solution to that issue.[/quote]I most emphatically do not agree. There is no magic in the number 2, that is, one less than 3 and one more than 1. The magic is in children growing up with THEIR OWN biological parents, one man, one woman completing the image of God together as examples to children of both sexes by both sexes.

Any other arrangement while either biological parent is alive is doomed to overall disaster and we are living proof of that as this country swirls down the moral/social/economic toilet as I type this. Almost nothing could be a worse idea than putting children in gay households. That’s like dousing a fire with gasoline in an attempt to save the house.
[/quote]

That’s not what I asked. Tens of thousands of children are going to be raised by gay parents, regardless of what you think is desirable. The question here is whether those kids are better off with the stability and security that marriage provides.

515

Oh My!

http://www.discussanything.com/forums/showthread.php/76249-Experts-Worldwide-Find-Gay-Adoption-Harmful-for-Children

516

[quote]Cortes wrote:

[quote]Grneyes wrote:
Wait…so my response to his post is way off topic but Trib’s original post wasn’t? WTF?

And I didn’t know saying this country rocks was considered bitter…
[/quote]

He was still talking about marriage and its degradation as an institution being a symptom of a disease afflicting our modern society. And the bitterness was in reference to your caricatured description of religious folks. Not all of us are a certain way, and some of us do try and use the brains God gave us :wink:

Sorry, I honestly wasn’t trying to be rude.[/quote]

If anything, she was caricaturing Tirib and people like Tirib. Anyone who even casts a cursory glance at this board will know Tirib is in his own little playland.

517

[quote]Tiribulus wrote:

No, the individual produces work ethic. This is more proof that you are indeed very detached from reality. The family may help on occasion, but more often than not, it is the individual. Everyone knows of the family with one genius talented sibling and the other sibling is a lazy slob.

I know the idea of individuality scares you, cupcake, but try not to make blanket statements that are false.

518

[quote]ZEB wrote:
Oh My!

http://www.discussanything.com/forums/showthread.php/76249-Experts-Worldwide-Find-Gay-Adoption-Harmful-for-Children
[/quote]

In light of a pending vote in the Spanish Senate on same-sex marriage HazteOir, together with the Spanish Forum for the Family and the Institute for Family Policy, has published and distributed an in-depth report

Just once, you should link a study done when there is no pending vote or policy shift, and try to make it a study done by people who don’t have a vested interest in skewing results one way or the other.

I’m not going to trust the word of the Spanish equivalent of Focus on the Family or some other kooky group, just like I’m not going to trust the word of a gay rights group publishing a similar study.

519

[quote]ZEB wrote:

[quote]Edevus wrote:

[quote]Cortes wrote:

[quote]Edevus wrote:

[quote]Cortes wrote:

[quote]Edevus wrote:
I don’t want to dive into an empty swimming pool and I can’t read all posts, but, I want to take part. First, I want to ask something :

Are we taking the approach that marriage is of Catholic/Christian origin?[/quote]

As far as I understand we are talking about marriage in the general sense, with an emphasis upon the government recognized/sanctioned/fostered variety.

Like when you see a hot girl and then notice she has a wedding ring and go, “Oh, that sucks.”

;)[/quote]

Thanks. I’ll ask something else : Is the main “con”, according to some of you, the possible negative influence of man/man or woman/woman marriages upon their children?
[/quote]

No.You’re better off reading starting at least 7 or 8 pages back. The answer to your question is what we’ve been attempting to establish over pretty much the last couple hundred posts.
[/quote]

Ok, thanks. It seems I will have to read through it then…better tomorrow at work.
[/quote]

Eh…I wouldn’t bother if I were you. It’s the same old crap.[/quote]

Lol.

520

[quote]Grneyes wrote:

[quote]Cortes wrote:

[quote]Grneyes wrote:

Going with the heart analogy, ever hear of a heart transplant? Replacing someone’s original nonworking heart with another person’s? Works just fine, doesn’t it, given the donor is a close match? You can equate gay marriage with a heart transplant. I’m pretty sure, given time, that it too will work just fine.
[/quote]

Haha! I love it. Yes, your analogy works perfectly. I completely agree with you. I really do!

So, answer me this question: Let’s say they are giving away free heart transplants down at the Mayo clinic. Absolutely everything you could possibly need, from pre-op care to post-op follow-up and any related care is covered, and the operation will be performed by the best surgeon in the country along with his hand picked team. They’ll even take you to and from the hospital in a limousine. Sounds like a pretty good deal, right? You gonna sign up? Would you sign up anyone in your family?
[/quote]

Now, when something sounds too good to be true, it probably IS. I’m pretty sure there’s a catch in there…like maybe that surgeon likes to start his day with a double on the rocks of Johnny Walker and likes to operate slightly non-sober as he feels this gives him an edge during surgery. Or that maybe the heart that is going in my body wasn’t as vetted as it should have been and was procured on the black market from a Colombian drug lord that the anesthesiologist owes money to for his last batch of cocaine. Would be pretty stupid of me to go blindly into something like that without researching it, right? [/quote]

No no. No need to second guess me. This is simple and logical. There are no catches.

Just think about this as if it honestly happened in your life. If somebody came to you today and told you you could have a heart transplant, free of charge, absolutely no strings attached,would you take them up on it?

You will, of course, have to exchange your present heart. But this is the modern world, heart surgery techniques and artificial heart technology are now state of the art. Trust us. Leave everything to us. What could go wrong?

Do I need to continue?

521

[quote]Cortes wrote:

[quote]Gambit_Lost wrote:
I’m a bit drunk now, so bear with me…

Cortes, are you saying that you believe state marriage is equivalent to religious marriage in your mind? And I apologize, but did you answer about civil unions? [/quote]

Not equivalent by any means, but hopelessly intertwined.

Again, due to the benefits issue discussed above, I don’t really see a compelling interest in the government, particularly the federal government, sanctioning either gay marriage or civil unions. However, I’d probably be a whole lot less vocal if the word marriage never entered the discussion and the term civil unions was employed.

And no, that is NOT just a semantic distinction, it is a conceptual one. [/quote]

Thanks for your response. I am going to try to type up what I understand your argument to be, and perhaps ask a question (if that is okay). I’m trying to better understand your perspective. Please let me know if I understand you properly.

…

I do understand that you are now arguing for “justified discrimination.” For you, proponents of gay marriage must show, unequivocally, how gay marriage would be a “net benefit” for society. Further, you believe that expanding the word marriage to include even more couples with no capacity to have children is a huge negative for the reasons you’ve stated above. As such, for you, you must see a logical demonstration of a huge benefit before you could support gay marriage or civil unions. However, because of your conception of marriage (that many others share), you are extremely vocal about gay marriage. If the discussion were simply civil unions, you believe you would still disagree, but wouldn’t feel compelled to comment so much.

Further, you are not against gay families adopting children. Is this true for some of the other “extreme” things we’ve heard on this forum (such as banning the very word gay from public junior high schools)? Would you say being gay is immoral? Are gay acts immoral?

Thanks again for your time. I hope you enjoy the day, looks like its going to be hot as hell.

522

[quote]Makavali wrote:

[quote]ZEB wrote:
Oh My!

http://www.discussanything.com/forums/showthread.php/76249-Experts-Worldwide-Find-Gay-Adoption-Harmful-for-Children
[/quote]

In light of a pending vote in the Spanish Senate on same-sex marriage HazteOir, together with the Spanish Forum for the Family and the Institute for Family Policy, has published and distributed an in-depth report

Just once, you should link a study done when there is no pending vote or policy shift, and try to make it a study done by people who don’t have a vested interest in skewing results one way or the other.

I’m not going to trust the word of the Spanish equivalent of Focus on the Family or some other kooky group, just like I’m not going to trust the word of a gay rights group publishing a similar study.
[/quote]

Don’t like what you read huh? He he. I’ve not seen one unbiased legitimate study in the USA which can contradict this.