BostonBarrister wrote:
For that matter, why is an informed consent requirement rational?
Makavali wrote:
Because without it, there is nothing to stop people from taking advantage of those who don’t know any better i.e. children, animals, mentally handicapped.
And strictly speaking, why should we care about protecting animals?[/quote]
Why should we not care about protecting animals? I am not an animal rights activist and I love meat but that doesn’t mean we should be cruel to animals. Strictly speaking why should we care about protecting the mentally handicapped?
Marriage is a contract between two humans, you can’t make a contract with an animal. With the polygamy argument it is really just hypothetical I highly doubt the practice would become very widespread and there is no way to know how it would turn out in this day and age unless we allowed it, I think like gay marriage it would much smoke with no fire.
Exactly - marriage is a contract. It’s not an individual right. If it were an individual right, it would no longer be a contract. It doesn’t fit in the individual-rights framework, and jamming it in there creates problems.
mharmar wrote:
I think those legal duties is more why marriage is falling than anything else, why should a man or woman for that matter be forced to stay with the mother/father of their child, you can take an active hand in child-raising without being married. Also what is more psychologically damaging growing up with no father/mother or having one that despises being around you. Not to mention in many ancient cultures the father didn’t have much to do with the raising of the child until it hit a certain age. The whole concept of both parents actively having a hand in raising the children is actually a relatively new one.
The research seems to indicate that kids coming out of broken homes are worse-off than kids coming out of two-parent homes overall. Whether any particular case would be improved by removing a bad father or bad mother can’t be the basis of a broad policy decision - at least not unless you want the state making that determination in each case…
As for the certain age thing: I do think it’s most important to have the father around for older boys - say, 11 or so through adulthood. They need adult males as role models, and to act as a control on their behavior.
I also agree that the duties are what makes marriage more unattractive - particularly to males. Which is why there generally need to be the incentives - and the societal pressures - on males to marry. Particularly given geographic mobility today, there need to be strong ties of males to their offspring.[/quote]
Who makes the decision what worse-off means? So called experts? Or is it societal norms that decide what worse-off means? So now we are trying to pressure men into marriage like that is a good thing? I think the reason there are so many broken home is because we do put to much pressure on men and women to get married, have kids, live a “normal” life.
[quote]
BostonBarrister wrote:
For that matter, why is an informed consent requirement rational?
Makavali wrote:
Because without it, there is nothing to stop people from taking advantage of those who don’t know any better i.e. children, animals, mentally handicapped.
BostonBarrister wrote:
And strictly speaking, why should we care about protecting animals?
mharmar wrote:
Why should we not care about protecting animals? I am not an animal rights activist and I love meat but that doesn’t mean we should be cruel to animals. Strictly speaking why should we care about protecting the mentally handicapped?[/quote]
You said earlier that “We could work something out for polygamists if we tried.”
However, above you said that “no it cannot because of the administrative burden (bureaucratic nightmare)”.
Which is it? Are you claiming that it is possible to administratively support marriage for gays and polygamists or not?[/quote]
When I said “we could work something out…”, I meant that we could draw some arbitrary lines and make a system that recognizes a man with, say, up to three wives. But, the point was that such manufacturing such creation is still a denial of equal rights - we have left out men who want four wives, or women who want two husbands, or whatever an individual wants. As such, there is no way to create a system that can accommodate all consenting adult relationships - we would have to engage in arbitrary line-drawing, per the polygamy “working something out” - but our efforts would deny someone their rights.
[quote]By the way, you still haven’t answered the two questions I asked in my earlier post:
Don’t you agree that the children are more likely better off with parents that are bound through the moral and legal constrictions of civil marriage? [/quote]
As a general rule, yes, but not if such a civil marriage undermines the point of traditional marriage. Here is the problem: an alternative civil marriage encourages children outside of the parents to take place. We don’t want to encourage that - we want to encourage and incentivize binary of the biological parents.
Granting a gay marriage does exactly the kind of thing that traditional marriage is designed to prevent - it encourages and incentivizes something other than a child being raised by the actual, biological parents that created the kid. It doesn’t augment or somehow complement the traditional role of traditional marriage - which is designed with bringing together the two responsible for the child together through incentives and shame - it hurts that role by providing an incentive for someone to have a child and not join together into a union.
An alternative civil marriage says this: “go father kids, but don’t get together with the mom” - the exact opposite of what we want as public policy.
So, I don’t think it is a viable option on the basis that the cost is too high to the more important public policy.
You can read above, as Makavali asked essentially the same question.
But, I will note - you are the victim of a myopia that says the harm to marriage would have happened overnight, and since it didn’t, there must not be any harm. It is incorrect - the issue is what will happen over time.
Open-mindedness has exactly zero to do with a preferred outcome, it has to do with a willingness to receive and process information and opinions before coming to your own. Whether or not one comes to the conclusion that gay marriage is ok isn’t a measure of an open mind, and you would do well to reject that juvenile approach.
And let’s look at the alternatives - the way we have chosen to do this is to “pressure” men into marriage by providing financial incentives for them to marry. There are also cultural pressures that have evolved more naturally (like one’s mom asking when one is going to get married and give her grandchildren, for example). It’s not exactly draconian coercion.
The more draconian stuff comes in when a man has kids and isn’t married - court ordered child-support payments (assuming you establish paternity - though there is some disturbing stuff about guys who were tricked by the women that they were the father, and then being legally obligated to take care of the kid even if they weren’t - but that illustrates how important society thinks this topic is).
[quote]Mick28 wrote:
thunderbolt23 do you feel like your trapped in a never ending circle? It seems that the gay advocates just can’t legitimately counter the facts that you’ve presented. You reach a certain point in the debate and they start once again from the beginning.
[/quote]
And you do not even start, for lack of intestinal fortitude…
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Nothing I wrote in the post you responded to argues that. You’re just grasping, and not even trying to make sense.[/quote]
You keep bringing up this thing about keeping men around to raise their kids and other such crap. What was I supposed to infer from that?
[quote]Incorrect - there is no “social status” afforded a couple inherently. What exactly was great about the “man and wife” union in the ancient cultures that came up with marriage that had nothing to do with the physical union that produces children?
The reason we wanted people to “pair up” was to come together for purposes of taking care of their child.
You made up an answer out of your ass - and not even a decent one.[/quote]
Marriage for the purpose of raising ones own social status? What you’ve never heard of that happening?
And I never said it had NOTHING to do with creating children, but don’t treat children as a REQUIREMENT of marriage when they clearly are not.
[quote]By what logic are you talking about? Logic doesn’t point to that outcome.
Marriage isn’t contingent on such fine-tuning - as I stated, and you completely ignored (predictably), marriage has to be overinclusive. A eunuch’s marriage is plenty valid because marriage naturally overincludes “men” as a category.[/quote]
Then why exclude gays? Gay men can still impregnate a woman, gay women can still have children.
I didn’t ignore your “overinclusive” argument, I figured of your talking so much about men raising children then you must only be referring to couples that can have children.
No, that’s right. It was all considered marriage until Christians outlawed it. It’s not a myth and you know it.
Christ. You were inferring that the increase in gay marriage was what was causing “traditional marriage” to fail. I proved you wrong.
Strengthening marriage isn’t going to happen just because you decide to deprive specific groups certain rights. If you want to strengthen marriages, you have to work on the issues that caused the breakdown. People don’t look down on marriage because of gay people getting married.
The government involvement isn’t the symbolic aspect of marriage, which for most people, is the most important part. If you’re so concerned about gay people destroying marriage, then campaign to have them stop using the word.
So you’re saying they shouldn’t be allowed to adopt a practice that will help ease the “devastation”? Because your already failing standard might be affected?
[quote]You need to coordinate your information with other gay marriage advocates, Makavali - you are actually making arguments against their cause.
Oops.[/quote]
No, I’m not. You conveniently twisting my words to suit your own agenda. But that’s OK, I expect no less from you now.
You keep bringing up this thing about keeping men around to raise their kids and other such crap. What was I supposed to infer from that?[/quote]
How about the painfully obvious point that we want, as a public policy matter, a systematic arrangement to encourage men to stay with the woman they fathered a child with?
[quote]Marriage for the purpose of raising ones own social status? What you’ve never heard of that happening?
And I never said it had NOTHING to do with creating children, but don’t treat children as a REQUIREMENT of marriage when they clearly are not.[/quote]
Who treated children as a REQUIREMENT of marriage? Who said that? I didn’t. My argument expressly detailed that marriages didn’t have to even produce children to still be a part of assisting the policy at stake - civilizing men.
And, social status is certainly a part of marriage, no one said otherwise - what you said was that the main thrust of encouraging coupling was social status, as compared to child raising, which was my point, which you were disputing by saying “social status”.
It’s nonsense.
Good Lord, Makavali - do you have Swiss cheese memory?
We have 40 pages explaining why we ought not extend the franchise to homosexuals. You don’t have to agree with it, but stop asking the asinine question over and over when that is what damn near every post has been about.
Overincluding men - even ones that don’t wind up procreating - is a necessary condition of creating a broad policy of marriage. Extending that to men (and women) that don’t, as a rule, procreate doesn’t advance that policy of “civilizing men” at all. It doesn’t add anything to that public policy.
And, given that such extensions undermine the public policy that is hard enough to try and achieve via traditional marriage, there is even less of a reason.
Well, then there is your mistake. I already pointed out the benefit of keeping men, even ones that don’t procreate, “off the market”, so childless marriages still add to the benefits of the public policy we desire from the general arrangement of marriage.
You keep peddling the myth that it was “commonplace” and recognized as a ordinary institution in ancient society. That’s false. Start with the Greeks, who did not have high opinions of exclusive homosexual relationships.
Why the constant triumphalism? You didn’t prove anything at all, except that our society has a problem with infidelity. And?
We don’t have gay marriage on any kind of broad scale, chuckles - the whole discussion surrounds whether we should allow it - so you can’t possibly have proved that gay marriage hasn’t harmed traditional marriage.
Enough with the straw men. My point was simple,as related to the issue you raised - traditional marriage is already cracking for other reasons than gay marriage…and gay marriage looks like the straw that could break the camel’s back.
Where to begin? First, they aren’t rights.
Second, and I have gotten bored typing it, when you expand the marriage franchise in a way that emphasizes the wrong purposes - i.e., coupling versus child raising - you dissolve the ability of the original franchise to generate the set of incentives it was originally designed to do.
The “breakdown” of marriage has its genesis in the “if it feels good, do it” revolution that operates on the moronic principle that any social institution that hindered a person’s ability to engage in unvarnished hedonism was presumptively “evil” and therefore suspect. We’re still trying to repair that damage.
Now, with a weakened institution, we are faced with a challenge that it will defined out of existence, and thus finished off, in the name of sentimentalism.
That means it is all the more important - since marriage is already battered, bruised, and broken - to be skeptical of frivolous experimentation. We already know the costs of the weakening of marriage - it’d be plain stupid to invite its possible disintegration.
The disintegration of which, by the way, [i]you have already acceded to[/i] and thought it was okey-dokey, some 20 pages ago. It wasn’t long ago Makavali agreed that the introduction of alternative marriages would get rid of the public recognition of any kind of marriage at all, and Makavali said “hey, that is a good thing!”.
Thing is, you and I both agree that the disintegration of traditional marriage as a publicly protected institution will occur with the introduction of alternative marriages - you said so yourself - we just differ on whether that is good or not.
They can use whatever word they want - why would I care? I only care about whether other relationships get privileged the same as traditional marriage. Homosexuals can enter into whatever unions they want - I have no objection to that.
Who said they couldn’t “adopt the practice” of permanently committing to one another?
To the issue of whether we should allow a legal privilege for gay marriage in hopes of mitigating infidelity, go back and re-read 40 pages of arguments as to why I don’t think the benefits outweigh the costs.
See, this is what is confusing - you have already said you think the introduction of alternative marriages would put an end to legally sanctioned marriage, and you thought that was a good end result. Why, suddenly, are you arguing the opposite?
I am not putting words in your mouth - you’ve been all over the map. One of the main arguments for gay marriage by advocates is that such marriages would improve fidelity in homosexual relationships. You flatly said marriage relationships do no such w/r/t infidelity.
So, are you right, and gay marriage advocates wrong? Or are they right, and you wrong?
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
How about the painfully obvious point that we want, as a public policy matter, a systematic arrangement to encourage men to stay with the woman they fathered a child with?[/quote]
You say: Marriage is to make sure men father children and stay with their partner to raise said child.
I say: Infertile men marry women too. Does the fact that they have no ability to produce a child invalidate their marriage?
And you come back to this outdated notion that men HAVE to be tamed and have no attachment to their children. Men are biologically programmed to ensure their child gets to ~3 years old before buggering off.
[quote]And, social status is certainly a part of marriage, no one said otherwise - what you said was that the main thrust of encouraging coupling was social status, as compared to child raising, which was my point, which you were disputing by saying “social status”.
It’s nonsense.[/quote]
OK, does marriage for money/power make more sense to you? That’s what I was talking about.
[quote]Good Lord, Makavali - do you have Swiss cheese memory?
We have 40 pages explaining why we ought not extend the franchise to homosexuals. You don’t have to agree with it, but stop asking the asinine question over and over when that is what damn near every post has been about.
Overincluding men - even ones that don’t wind up procreating - is a necessary condition of creating a broad policy of marriage.[/quote]
Men that don’t wind up procreating… like gay men?
Wrong again, gay men can still sire children via surrogate, and lesbian women can have children via sperm donor.
[quote]doesn’t advance that policy of “civilizing men” at all. It doesn’t add anything to that public policy.
And, given that such extensions undermine the public policy that is hard enough to try and achieve via traditional marriage, there is even less of a reason.[/quote]
See above.
See above.
And then the Romans who had the first recorded homosexual marriage. And the Egyptians (see previous posts).
Wait, what?
I showed that increase in gay marriage was not directly responsible for breakdown in “traditional” marriage.
Should I type that slower for you?
[quote]We don’t have gay marriage on any kind of broad scale, chuckles - the whole discussion surrounds whether we should allow it - so you can’t possibly have proved that gay marriage hasn’t harmed traditional marriage.
Enough with the straw men. My point was simple,as related to the issue you raised - traditional marriage is already cracking for other reasons than gay marriage…and gay marriage looks like the straw that could break the camel’s back.[/quote]
I very much doubt that. Gay marriage has been legalized in other countries, and “traditional” marriage has not suffered because of it.
[quote]Strengthening marriage isn’t going to happen just because you decide to deprive specific groups certain rights. If you want to strengthen marriages, you have to work on the issues that caused the breakdown. People don’t look down on marriage because of gay people getting married.
Where to begin? First, they aren’t rights.[/quote]
What? You must be joking. The privileges conferred on married couples = rights.
And I’ve gotten bored reading it.
People marry for many reasons, but usually one or more of the following: legal, social, and economic stability; the formation of a family unit; procreation and the education and nurturing of children; legitimizing sexual relations; public declaration of love; or to obtain citizenship.
While raising children is part of marriage, it is not required nor is it the central pillar of marriage.
So now you’re equating gay relationships with hedonism?
[quote]Now, with a weakened institution, we are faced with a challenge that it will defined out of existence, and thus finished off, in the name of sentimentalism.
That means it is all the more important - since marriage is already battered, bruised, and broken - to be skeptical of frivolous experimentation. We already know the costs of the weakening of marriage - it’d be plain stupid to invite its possible disintegration.[/quote]
And again I see no reason given why gay marriage would disintegrate “traditional” marriage. Unless you think that allowing gays to marry somehow makes your own (Potential? Or are you already married?) marriage somehow “diluted”.
PUBLIC recognition? I said getting rid of governmental recognition would be great.
Ha. Now your putting words in my mouth. I said getting rid of Governmental interference would be good. I never said introducing alternative forms of marriage would spell the end of marriage altogether.
So it’s more of “I don’t want to share my rights with faggots” ?
You’re the one saying that if the rights given to couples in traditional marriages were to be taken away, traditional marriage as we know it would be destroyed. So, I’m suggesting that by giving those rights to gay couples, they would have the same incentive to stay in their marriage.
You say: Marriage is to make sure men father children and stay with their partner to raise said child.
I say: Infertile men marry women too. Does the fact that they have no ability to produce a child invalidate their marriage?[/quote]
And I have answered that multiple times - it does not invalidate their marriage.
Utter nonsense - there’s nothing outdated about it. Don’t believe me, have a look at inner cities. Are fathers “ensuring their child gets to 3 years old before buggering off”? Of course not - we are seeing the disintegration before our eyes in slow motion, as men father children right and left with multiple women, wiyno attachment to the women, and no attachment to the children.
Of course, the children suffer the most in this situation - with no father and no family - but hey, let’s not ruin Makavali’s manufactured illusion that men no longer need to be tamed by social institutions, that is an outdated notion! Your father will return, just you wait!
Absolutely gay men are overincluded in the definition - a gay man is perfectly eligible to get married.
Oh, they can - that’s not the issue - but their relationship doesn’t naturally produce children. We’ve settled on the importance of preferring the biological parents of a given child coming together to take care of that child - when a homosexual decides to have a child outside of their relationship, we are outside of that arrangement, and as a natural result, we don’t want to encourage, even if it does occur. That is the point.
And no one has claimed that the breakdown in traditional marriage up to this point is the fault of gay marriage. Thanks for proving a point no one is contending otherwise.
It is self-proving - gay marriage doesn’t exist outside of isolated pockets. And, no one is arguing traditional marriage has been destroyed by gay marriage - the discussion is over whether it will be destroyed if introduced and whether it is worth the risk to find out.
Read up on Norway.
They aren’t rights in that the government can decide to give them to and who not to give them to.
You shouldn’t, because no matter how many times I type the same stuff over and over, it is like it is brand new every time you read it, based on your recurring amnesia.
[quote]People marry for many reasons, but usually one or more of the following: legal, social, and economic stability; the formation of a family unit; procreation and the education and nurturing of children; legitimizing sexual relations; public declaration of love; or to obtain citizenship.
While raising children is part of marriage, it is not required nor is it the central pillar of marriage.[/quote]
This has become cartoonish. First, you rip a quote, but again never say where you got it.
Second, you say raising children…in not even a central pillar…of marriage. That is historically a false statement. It’s bunk.
You think if you repeat it enough, it will somehow make it true - it won’t.
Good Lord.
What I said was, of course, no such equation. I said marriage has been under attack because the counterculture principles of the 1960s. I said expressly such ideas have weakened marriage.
I then noted that gay marriage - a different institution - might very well take it down even further. I wrote:
[i]Now, with a weakened institution, we are faced with a challenge that it will defined out of existence, and thus finished off, in the name of sentimentalism.
That means it is all the more important - since marriage is already battered, bruised, and broken - to be skeptical of frivolous experimentation. We already know the costs of the weakening of marriage - it’d be plain stupid to invite its possible disintegration.[/i]
My God, how do you come up with equating the two based on what I wrote?
Well, the arguments have been made over and over. You don’t have to agree, but to say “no reason given” is not quite right.
Go back and reread - I never said it would get rid of “marriage”, I said it would get rid of the public privilege of marriage as privileged by law. You said that made sense, and was a good development.
Don’t get confused out what you actually wrote. I am not putting words in your mouth - we agree that the introduction of alternative marriages would be the end of public, legally privileged marriage - you acceded to it, and thought it a great idea.
Oh, and I notice you conveniently skipped this section of my post, so I will repost:
[i]One of the main arguments for gay marriage by advocates is that such marriages would improve fidelity in homosexual relationships. You flatly said marriage relationships do no such w/r/t infidelity.
So, are you right, and gay marriage advocates wrong? Or are they right, and you wrong? [/i]
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Kurtz isn’t confusing the two - his position is that causation should be assumed with this kind of correlation unless it’s disproved, because of the importance of the subject. I agree with him.[/quote]
Assuming causation based on evidence of correlation is bad science. If anything, the “importance of the subject” demands caution and constraint rather than jumping to unfounded conclusions.
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
In this case, the CA Supreme Court made stuff up. It’s not even a hard case in which to make that conclusion. The text hasn’t changed in 100 years, and absolutely no one is making the argument that anyone who passed the original Constitutional language had any intention to create, or any understanding that they were creating, a right to marriage.
[/quote]
The Constitutional right to marriage was invoked decades ago in litigation related to mixed racial marriages. It isn’t surprising to see the same right invoked today in litigation related to gay marriages. It wasn’t “made up” during the civil rights movement for equality based on race, nor is it “made up” during the civil rights movement for equality based on sexual orientation.
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
In the case of gay marriage, if it changes underlying attitudes about the importance and function of marriage, particularly in the younger generation, you will have a greater likelihood of the type of problems people bring up w/r/t marriage rates and stability.[/quote]
How would gay marriage detrimentally change underlying attitudes about the “importance and function of marriage”?
Encouraging same sex couples to commit to a lifetime union rather than cycling from one relationship to the next would improve stability in society, not diminish it. It would emphasize the importance and function of marriage to an even greater degree.
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Why? In both cases it’s essentially being disallowed from claiming a particular government-created benefit that attaches based on satisfying a precondition. It matters not a whit whether you choose your sexual orientation.[/quote]
I wonder if you would make the same comparison if marriage was denied you. You are living in an ivory tower, pontificating about tax brackets with no idea what it is like not being able to marry the person that you love and want to spend the rest of your life with.
So we should pass hundreds of individual laws granting the same rights to gay couples, rather than one simple law allowing them to marry? If you want to talk about administrative burden, the former is far more complex and resource intensive than the latter.
[quote]I admit that I’ve already thought about this issue quite a bit, so unless you tell me something new you aren’t going to change my mind by bringing up what I’ve already considered. So, if by open-minded you mean I have no opinions, I’m certainly not open-minded. If by open-minded you mean willing to listen to and include new information, then yes I am open-minded.
[/quote]
What would it take for you to change your mind on the rights of gay couples to marry?
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Don’t think so? Ask Forlife or any other gay marriage advocate - one of the main reasons they want gay marriage is that it will help promote fidelity and monogamy in a culture where the consequences of not being faithful have been devastating.[/quote]
Exactly. Don’t you agree that promoting fidelity and monogamy for gay couples is a good thing?
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
When I said “we could work something out…”, I meant that we could draw some arbitrary lines and make a system that recognizes a man with, say, up to three wives. But, the point was that such manufacturing such creation is still a denial of equal rights - we have left out men who want four wives, or women who want two husbands, or whatever an individual wants.[/quote]
Ok, that helps me understand your stance better. So your view is that it would be administratively impossible to accommodate all varieties of polygamy. You might be able to administratively support some forms of polygamy, but not all.
Given that, don’t you agree there is a qualitative difference between polygamy and gay marriage? Polygamy is an administrative can of worms, fraught with complexity, and impossible to support in all its varieties. By contrast, gay marriage is simple and straightforward. Unlike polygamy, it can be administratively supported and is being administratively supported in countries around the world (as well as in two of our own states).
I think that sufficiently addresses the slippery slope argument. In order to support legislation for a form of marriage, two preconditions must exist:
The marriage must be a consensual contract between informed adults
The marriage must be administratively supportable
The first applies to both gay and polygamous marriages, but the second does not. Only gay marriage meets both preconditions.
I’m glad you agree that gay marriage would benefit the children directly related to the gay couple. That is a strong point in favor of gay marriage, and can’t be ignored.
It seems your concern is more related to what you see as the general effect of gay marriage. What are the alternatives? Is it better for a kid to grow up in a foster care facility or to be raised by a loving gay couple?
I don’t take a myopic view. I simply disagree with the foregone conclusion you seem to be making about the effects of gay marriage on straight marriage. If the jury is still out and not enough time has passed, why not remain objective and open minded rather than insisting that gay marriage will hurt civil marriage?
I seriously don’t understand the logic. How would my marriage affect your marriage in any way?
Exactly. Are you willing to stay open to the possibility of gay marriage being good for society before coming to a final conclusion (i.e., to have an open mind by your definition) or have you already reached a conclusion that you are unwilling to change?
[quote]
BostonBarrister wrote:
Kurtz isn’t confusing the two - his position is that causation should be assumed with this kind of correlation unless it’s disproved, because of the importance of the subject. I agree with him.
forlife wrote:
Assuming causation based on evidence of correlation is bad science. If anything, the “importance of the subject” demands caution and constraint rather than jumping to unfounded conclusions.[/quote]
Assuming no causation, based on nothing, is worse science.