[quote]forlife wrote:
Hold on, cowboy. I didn’t say you arbitrarily defined marriage (although that is a discussion we can have at some point if you like). I said that you arbitrarily defined the reasons for marriage. Who are you to say why marriage exists, and to categorically exclude other valid reasons which pertain to the health and well being of the couple, their children, and society? What is your authority outside of your own narrow agenda?[/quote]
I’ll address this line by line.
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Defining marriage and defining the reasons for marriage are the same thing. Marriage exists and has existed to serve certain organic purposes native to our society. The reasons I listed aren’t my interpretation - the precede me by thousands of years and hundreds of generations. That you wish the reasons were different for marriage - that marriage wasn’t so tied to a liefstyle you aren’t a part of - doesn’t change history or meaning.
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You keep defining marriage as promoting the “health and well-being of the couple, their children, and society”. You parrot this boilerplate language mindlessly - the problem is, you keep producing the wrong definition, intentionally so.
Welfare benefits promote the “health and well-being of couples, children, and society” - but that isn’t the proper definition of welfare benefits. Welfare benefits are specifically targeted to acute problems in society (poor people), not just “health, couple…zzzz”. Otherwise, based on that foolishly broad definition, rich people should get welfare benefits - after all, hey, welfare benefits help them too (free money) and help promote “couple, children, and society”.
We know it would be foolish for rich people to get welfare benefits, because welfare benefits are designed to address a very specific public policy issue - the needs and problems of poor people. Not everyone who would like them - poor people.
Same as with gay marriage. You continue to try and redefine marriage into a bland “good for couples, kids, and society” - when there isn’t a single public policy that doesn’t fit that useless description. You know you are doing it, and no doubt it is completely intentional - you need to control the definition in order to make your arguments. But you aren’t - and it’s easy to see.
- As to your hilarious question of “who are you to decide?” - well, damnation Forlife, who are you to decide, for that matter? Whatever answer you come up with is the same as my answer. Your postmodern stupidity is getting you nowhere - because it applies to you, too, genius.
It is simply hard to take you seriously.
It’s not lame, and you wouldn’t know it, because you have no understanding of the issue. All this has been covered - you simply don’t like the answer. We overinclude all the time - witness the example of selecting a voter minimum age.
And, do you know why the country would be in an uproar? Because they understand that the overinclusiveness principle is a political trade-off for certain government non-interference in our private lives. It’s useful, and it is commonplace - see the voting minimum age.
Again, you don’t like it, but you don’t have a good argument against it. You keep attempting to make an argument that goes like this:
We don’t prevent infertile people from getting married, so child-raising must not be the primary point of the public policy of marriage.
Plainly stupid and illogical, because the primary point of the public policy of marriage can be child-raising (which it is) and we, as a society, simply choose not to screen infertile individuals because of public policy sentiment independent of those issues (convenience, privacy, whatever). Just because marriage is about child-raising, society is not required to prevent infertile couples from marrying if society doesn’t want to for other reasons.
That is why your logic is so slipshod - it assumes that once society determines to enact a marriage law because of child-raising concerns, that society must exclude those that don’t or can’t have children from marriage. Completely illogical and false - it is a faulty “if-then”.
Here is your other problem - you tell yourself that anyone who thinks differently than you is wallowing in fearmongering. Whatever makes you sleep at night.
We have been through the trade-offs over many pages - your convenient amnesia is not my problem. So either make a counterargument, or stop requesting that your opponent repeat arguments that have been given to you a hundred times over.
Translation: I don’t have good responses. I never said my marriage was threatened by gay marriage - that is a straw man (maybe I should start keeping score of your errors, but I don’t have time for data entry into an Excel spreadsheet). I believe that gay marriage threatens to undermine traditional marriage by incentivizing activities that are outside the scope of what marriage is about, and in some cases, diamterically opposed.
Traditional marriage has already taken a beating - thanks, 1960s - it needs to be reinvigorated because we need the end results of marriage reinvigorated (union of biological parents, ordering, etc.) now more than ever.
Anything that would undermine those priorities should not be a part of marriage.
Nope, you’ve consistently harped on the benefits being denied you with the brainless boilerplate after.
Marriage seeks very specific ends - none of which gay marriage accomplish. Want an institution that accomplishes the ends you desire? Invent one - it ain’t marriage.
This is rich - a man who claims homosexuality is natural and therefore could only produce children by way of something artificial thinks that the eons-old priority of trying to get the originators of a human being to take care of the human being and provide a father and mother relationship (equal to none) in the household…is artificial?
You’re being laughed out of the room.
I’ve explained to you the trade-offs - we need to disincentivize children being raised outside of the biological parent household. That isn’t a utopian policy - we’ll never be able to get perfection - but we have to set one category above all others to encourage more of it.
It isn’t a battle of good versus evil - it is a battle of trade-offs. A policy of gay marriage undermines the very incentives that traditional marriage is supposed to provide - gay marriage encourages children, however produced (artificially, of course), to be raised outside the two biological parents. Your policy undercuts the policy of traditional marriage, as seen above, despite your suggestion to the contrary.
It produces social stability among the most important areas where there is potential for instability - sex among heterosexuals when there is the potential for children out of wedlock.
And this canard about marriage preventing the spread of life-threatening diseases is unpersuasive - if individuals aren’t responsible enough to behave responsibly in matters of sex on threat of death, marriage won’t help. They need pschiatric counseling, not wedding cake.
Let’s stop there for fun - you have both called me a “bigot” and said that I “hate gays”. How exactly did I put words in your mouth?
A homophobe is someone who is irrationally afraid of gays. I am not irrationally afraid of gays. I have gay friends. I simply believe that in a world of trade-offs, protecting traditional marriage makes the most sense to the best benefit of society. I believe other alternative arrangements provide the wrong kinds of incentives for certain, important behaviors and that alternative forms of marriage do not complement traditional marriage.
I start with the basic question surrounding the purpose of marriage - does the policy promote children being born and raised by the two biological parents that created them? If the answer is no, then it isn’t a policy of marriage.
You are a wreck - you simply can’t believe that someone could be rational and disagree with you. That approach is a strange brew of insecurity and hubris at the same time - either way, I have learned not to care. You always run out of rope on arguments and attack your opponent as having bad faith. It reflects poorly on you and your cause.
The irony, as stated before, you actually undermine your own Crusade - you want to change minds (the only way to see your dream realized), and you are terrible at it. If and as minds change on gay marriage, rest assured that those minds will be changing despite you, and not because of you.