[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Great idea - tell me, are gays unable to execute a medical power of attorney putting their medical decisions, should they become incompetent, in the hands of their gay partner?[/quote]
Bad example. I meant go through ALL the rights afforded by marriage. Not every right given by marriage is even necessary for gay couples. Here are some more examples.
potential loss of couple’s home from medical expenses of one partner caring for another gravely ill one
higher cost of purchasing private insurance for partner and children if company is not one of 18% that offer domestic partner benefits
legal costs associated with obtaining domestic partner documents to gain some of the power of attorney, health care decision-making, and inheritance rights granted through legal marriage
higher health costs associated with lack of insurance and preventative care: 20% of same-sex couples have a member who is uninsured compared to 10% of married opposite-sex couples
current tax law allows a spouse to inherit an unlimited amount from the deceased without incurring an estate tax but an unmarried partner would have to pay the estate tax on the inheritance from her/his partner
same-sex couples are not eligible to file jointly or separately as a married couple and thus cannot take the advantages of lower tax rates when the individual income of the partners differs significantly
Not anywhere near as fragile as you make it sound. I accept that marriage is becoming less popular, but it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.[/quote]
It’s not just the popularity, it is the strength and function. I have pointed you to the disintegration of inner cities due to the breakdown in marriage and the legions of wayward, fatherless children, but in order to understand the problem, you’d have to take time out from staring at your navel to get that generations of children are being lost due to this problem.
You’ll also need to compare notes with gay marriage zealot Forlife, who insists that children need this flagging institution to be strong. Once again, either you are right, and he is wrong, or vice versa.
Curious, though - every time I bring this up, you vanish.
Bad example. I meant go through ALL the rights afforded by marriage. Not every right given by marriage is even necessary for gay couples. Here are some more examples.[/quote]
Of course.
These look like incentives for marriage. We would add those incentives for gay marriage only if we wanted to cultivate gay marriage.
To your point - advocates could go after each one of these incrementally, but I doubt they would get much traction, since all of them are generally tied to the presence of marriage (not necessarily so with medical power of attorney).
[quote]windex wrote:
Yeah, basically. Civil unions supply the rights and marriage is just a religious formality that you can have if you want.[/quote]
That makes sense to me. I couldn’t care less what the fundamentalist churches pronounce about the validity of my marriage, as long as the state grants us the same privileges and responsibilities.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Exactly. Forlife doesn’t live in a world where reasonable people can disagree - he lives in a world of two types of people: those that agree with him, and bigots.[/quote]
People don’t need to agree with me, but they do need to respect gays and acknowledge that being different doesn’t make us inferior, or any less suited to the rights and responsibilities granted to the majority.
Definition of a bigot:
I’m very tolerant of heterosexuals. I fully support their right to choose who to love and marry. I would just like to see the same tolerance returned.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
You’ll also need to compare notes with gay marriage zealot Forlife, who insists that children need this flagging institution to be strong. Once again, either you are right, and he is wrong, or vice versa.
Curious, though - every time I bring this up, you vanish.
[/quote]
Interesting for you to accuse him of vanishing when you still haven’t responded to my four key points.
One of which pertains to gay couples providing a stable, loving home to children who otherwise would statistically be a lot worse off. You still haven’t acknowledged this, nor how it deflates your concern about marriage only existing for the benefit of children.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
We would add those incentives for gay marriage only if we wanted to cultivate gay marriage.
[/quote]
Every major medical and mental health organization in the world states that gay marriage should be cultivated, because it benefits the couple, any children they may have, and society in general.
You still haven’t responded to this point, except by accusing the APA of political bias (and by extension, accusing every other of these organizations of the same bais).
People don’t need to agree with me, but they do need to respect gays and acknowledge that being different doesn’t make us inferior, or any less suited to the rights and responsibilities granted to the majority.[/quote]
Thanks for making my point crystal clear - “reasonable” to you isn’t coming to conclusions rationally and in good faith, even though they may differ from your conclusions, but rather “reasonable” means they must agree with you and support your policy preferences that grant you “the same rights and responsibilities as the majority”.
You said it yourself - and that sound you hear is your credibility plummeting.
[quote]Definition of a bigot:
One who is strongly partial to one’s own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.
I’m very tolerant of heterosexuals. I fully support their right to choose who to love and marry. I would just like to see the same tolerance returned.[/quote]
“Tolerance” isn’t the same thing as “acceptance”, but I have no idea why I would expect you to know the difference.
That said, “tolerance” at a minimum means accepting the idea that reasonable people can disagree, especially on complicated matters - I certainly respect the fact that gay marriage advocates can and do come to different conclusions as me, even if I differ - you’ve proven immune to the idea, and as such, your voice on the matter is shrinking.
Interesting for you to accuse him of vanishing when you still haven’t responded to my four key points.[/quote]
Oh, I have responded, over and over and over - too many times. There is no “vanishing” taking place, just a lack of patience with your childlike insistence on having the same thing explained over and over to you.
I acknowledged it - I said that the benefits of those arrangements were outweighed by the costs to divorcing marriage from the concept of coupling the biological parents of children. Marriage is designed to bring together the two adults responsible for the creation of the child - taking that incentive away, even to try and generate benefits in other areas - i.e., your scenario with foster homes, presumably - aren’t worth it in the aggregate.
I’ve typed it time and again - that we don’t want to wreck the incentives to encourage biological parents to get together in a legal union - and that prevails over other benefits that we think may occur at the margins from the alternative(s).
A fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward opinions and practices that differ from one’s own.[/quote]
That is precisely the attitude I have.
That is an easy one - the rights you speak of aren’t rights.
Moreover, what we have been debating are positive rights, not negative rights. I believe you have negative rights, which I am absolutely tolerant of, but you do not have positive rights in the case of gay marriage, and, as such, there is nothing to be “tolerant” of.
If you don’t know the difference, it isn’t my problem to fix.
I am permissive of your rights - I don’t think you should be punished for the way you live your life and I respect your choices and decisions. That isn’t what we are discussing.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
I acknowledged it - I said that the benefits of those arrangements were outweighed by the costs to divorcing marriage from the concept of coupling the biological parents of children.
[/quote]
You are pretty quick to dismiss the significant benefits to foster children from being raised in secure, stable homes, or at least to minimize those benefits in the name of encouraging straight couples to have more children.
You haven’t provided any rationale on why straight couples having more children is more beneficial to society than taking care of the children that exist without parents.
To the contrary, rather than cranking out more kids it seems to me that society would be better off by caring for the health and well being of the kids we already have.
You haven’t explained why gay marriage would in any way encourage straight couples not to produce or raise children. How does granting marriage to people without children make it any less likely that married straight couples would still have children? It makes zero sense and is a red herring argument.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Moreover, what we have been debating are positive rights, not negative rights. I believe you have negative rights, which I am absolutely tolerant of, but you do not have positive rights in the case of gay marriage, and, as such, there is nothing to be “tolerant” of.[/quote]
Your semantics games won’t do any good here. The definition of tolerance provided earlier isn’t restricted to “positive” rights.
Regardless, the California Supreme Court says you are wrong. They ruled that gays do in fact have the right to marry someone of the same gender and that denying us this right is discriminatory.
You may not consider yourself bigoted, but the policies you promote are clearly bigoted by the definitions provided and by the judgment of the judiciary.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
You’ll also need to compare notes with gay marriage zealot Forlife, who insists that children need this flagging institution to be strong. Once again, either you are right, and he is wrong, or vice versa.[/quote]
I could be wrong, he could be wrong. I’m still pondering this.
Your semantics games won’t do any good here. The definition of tolerance provided earlier isn’t restricted to “positive” rights.[/quote]
No, it matters - and your ignorance of the difference isn’t my problem, as I said earlier.
Why would I give a damn what a California court says? I don’t live in California, and I am not subject to its jurisdiction. And other states have disagreed - and their opinion is of equal worth in a federal system until the federal Supreme Court says otherwise.
Just because the “California Supreme Court” has an opinion on the matter doesn’t settle the question. It settles it for Californians - well, until Californians engage the democratic process and amend the state constitution to reverse the judicial usurpation of their democratic rights.
And so it ends, not with a bang, but with your predictable whimper of your banal “if you disagree with me, you’re a bigot”. Your pathetic overreliance on a state supreme court’s opinion - as if the California Supreme Court brought some tablets down from the mountaintop to settle the question for all - is hard to witness.
As is, this is over - and it’s a shame I have had my time wasted so much in what could have been a more productive debate.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
No, it matters - and your ignorance of the difference isn’t my problem, as I said earlier. [/quote]
Show me where, in the definition of tolerance, it says that one is only required to be tolerant of so-called “negative” rights but can still deny so-called “positive” rights and be considered tolerant.
You can’t, because the definition doesn’t allow for it. By the textbook definition, your policies toward gays are intolerant.
Supreme Court rulings in California have historically been a touchstone for similar rulings in other parts of the country.
More importantly, the ruling underscores the validity of the argument that gay marriage is in fact a right, despite your convolutions to the contrary.
Predictable and sad. Every time I engage in one of these debates, people like you run away once we drill down to the details.
It is easy to make sweeping statements like “Gay marriage destroys the traditional family!”. However, when you evaluate the underlying assumptions and reveal the lack of logical cohesiveness, the anti-gay crowd turns tail and goes home.
Maybe you’ll prove me wrong. Here it is again in case you can come up with a logical response. And don’t doubt I will call you on it if you provide another surface answer instead of directly addressing the points being made:
You haven’t provided any rationale on why straight couples having more children is more beneficial to society than taking care of the children that exist without parents.
To the contrary, rather than cranking out more kids it seems to me that society would be better off by caring for the health and well being of the kids we already have.
You haven’t explained why gay marriage would in any way encourage straight couples not to produce or raise children. How does granting marriage to people without children make it any less likely that married straight couples would still have children? It makes zero sense and is a red herring argument.