Why Proposition 8 Was A Victory For Liberty (A Libertarian Defense Of Traditional Marriage Alert)

Culture11 ^ | 11/23/2008 | Mike Thomsen

[Valpal1]

You have an expansive view of inalienable rights. There is no right to marry any more than there is a right to health care or a right to an education. All of those are liberal creations.

Society has no public interest or concern in regulating the unions of homosexuals as they do not produce children. The purpose of marriage is to regulate heterosexual unions to provide certain protections and define responsibilities and to encourage propagation of the species.

Demanding government regulation and sanction for gay marriage is a non sequitor.

[nufsed]

You ignored half of what I said. The right is liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is your burden to prove the necessity to restrict it; not mine to prove it exists.

I addressed this earlier to someone esle. There is no legal link to marrying and having children. There is no fertility test. There is no contract to do so. There is no requirement to pro-create, people past their child-bearing years are allowed to marry. People who have childen are allowed to divorce. Do you see that your statement just doesn't hold up. It is a nice goal, which is not bound in reality.

Please don't misinterpret this to mean I don't think a father and a mother is the best situation. It's just not even close to what society is doing, nor should it be the business of government that you must be married to have children. It may be preferred, but not required.

PS some homosexuals are parents.

[Valpal1]

No, government regulation of marriage interferes with liberty, free association and property (forces you to support children born into a marriage).

The necessity of government to interfere in heterosexual unions is the public interest in protecting and providing for children that are commonly born of such unions and the fact that children do better if the biological parents remain together to raise the child(ren). That is the public interest that justifies the interference.

There is no public interest that justifies interfering or regulating homosexual unions because they do not produce children.

As for the quibbles about fertility tests, requirement to reproduce, those are all silly quibbles. Marriage has developed the way it has through social traditions that operate on economies of scale.

Fertility tests, etc are all artifacts of technology, something that has not always been present in history. It simply is not nor ever will be cost effective from any social control or regulatory standpoint to ascertain the fertility potentials of every set of marriage applicants and there is simply no public interest served by over-regulating the process of human pair bonding and reproduction.

Children come from heterosexual unions and marriage is the minimal regulatory scheme developed over eons of human history to deal with that simple biological fact.

Heterosexuals do not HAVE to get married in order to have children, marriage and it’s attendant benefits and perks is intended to cause them to voluntarily enter into the marriage contract in order to assert some level of social (government) control into the activity.

Humans have romanticized a utilitarian social institution to the point that they have forgotten what it’s true purpose is, which is government oversight of procreation.

[nufsed]

Your first sentence is correct. Have a child and you're responsible. If you don't want that government restriction, leave the kid at the drop-off pioint, as they now allow and the government will raise the kid, or accept the responsibility. So what? That doesn't mean that being married requires people to procreate. You are making an illogical construct as if it matters to the original point.

Your second point is already overidden by current practyice. Homosexuals are raising kids all over the country. Even Dennis Prager says that if you can't have a father and a mother in the home, homosexuals may be better raising kids than single parents or none at all. Yiour point is also illogical, since having children does not require one to be married. Homos can have kids even if they're not married or are we not to vote on that?

Government is not overseeing procreation. It is overseeing child protection after birth. You already lost on the marry-to-procreate argument. Please don't keep trying to beat your horse. It died two replies ago.

[puroresu]

You mentioned people marrying animals and I attempted a joke. Seems you are not only devoid of any commitment to protect the rights of others, you also do not have a sense of humor. Get it, ladder, ghiraffe.

Sorry, but when someone such as yourself can't tell the difference between the sexes, it's not incumbent upon us to assume you're joking when the issue of human-animal "marriage" is invoked.

Your inability to distinguish between two human marrying and you marrying a tree or a giraffe indicates the anti-intellectual characteristic of your position.

Wrong answer, because if marriage is nothing more than the fulfillment of individual desire, with no societal consequences, then there's no logical reason for the state to refuse to recognize marriages between humans and animals, or plants or inanimate objects. Are you suggesting that if someone loves a tree and wants to "marry" it they should not be allowed to do so, with state recognition? Why not? Now, I can state that they should not be permitted to do so, because I recognize the actual purposes of state sanctioned marriage. You do not. You assert that it's to fulfill each individual's right to happiness. So it seems you are the one who is being intellectually inconsistent.

Here's a historical perspective on human rights, people with power took away the rights of others. We don't do that anymore in the US, except when a group of people can muster ebnough votes to try to do so.

Homos never had the right to "marry" in the first place because the California court simply made its ruling up out of thin air, in violation of their oath of office.

That's why we have courts. As happened with school desegration, and a republic form of government which recognized voting and other rights.

You might want to do a little historical research on those issues before you equate same-sex "marriage" (an issue never discussed in relation to any provision ever ratified to the U.S. Constitution) to racial issues that are explicitly addressed and which dominated the ratification battles over several amendments.

You're merely on the wrong side of the issue. You stand with the tyrannts of the past and history will prove you wrong, sooner or later.

Well, history isn't being very kind to you even as we speak. In the few jurisdictions which sanction same-sex "marriage", or even civil unions, tyranny is already expanding over the populace, who are losing legitimate rights in order to promote the right the courts fabricated. In Massachusetts, Catholics have been told they have to get out of the adoption business unless they agree to change their religious teachings on placing children with same-sex couples. E-Harmony, a private business founded by a Christian, has been ordered in New Jersey to expand their service to include homo dating, or be shut down by the state. In New Mexico, a Christian photographer was fined because she wouldn't tape a lesbian commitment ceremony. In Canada and many European nations, you can be fined or even do prison time for disapproving of homosexuality. In all those places, children are now taught the homosexual lifestyle in the public schools regardless of the beliefs of their parents.

I think we got to this point on another thread and you are devoted to restricting the rights of homosexuals, regardless of history, logic or anything else you are told. So have a good one and feel the vendication of the victor, for now. You have put those homosexuals in their place.

Actually, homosexuals themselves are better off in the closet. Once upon a time, they were forced by societal pressures to maintain normalcy in public. Now they wallow in their perversion 24/7, which cannot be healthy. They demand constant positive reinforcement precisely because they themselves know their behavior is aberrant. This is why, once uncloseted, they cannot permit dissent and seek to force everyone to acquiesce to their perversion. A single negative comment can have the effect of exposing that the emperor has no clothes, so they must restrict any right (speech, religion, property, self-government) the exercise of which even so much as expresses disapproval of them.

[Valpal1]

What part of "marriage and it’s attendant benefits and perks is intended to cause them to voluntarily enter into the marriage contract in order to assert some level of social (government) control into the activity." did you not understand.

Marriage is not a right, it is a civil institution designed to regulate the unfettered coupling and reproduction of heterosexuals. Of course, the weakening of laws that used to surround and support the institution of marriage like no fault divorce have made it a nearly meaningless contract that either party can abrogate at will and mostly without penalty.

[nufsed]

You are crossing over your argument from the strengh of marriage to marriage for procreation. This is an indication that you are pinned down and need to change position.

I will say this a third time and no more in our exchanges. You either are avoiding it or you don't understand or you think it's okay to restrict the rights of others for no particular good reason. The right is liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Next you'll be telling me I don't have the right to walk outside, eat and sleep when I want and on and on. Where does it say I have that right on your list. But, you see, I do.

[puroresu]

Next you'll be telling me I don't have the right to walk outside, eat and sleep when I want and on and on. Where does it say I have that right on your list.

I was unaware that any of those activities were societal institutions created for specific purposes, and given state sanction as part of society's protection of that institution.

Marriage is a socially created institution (walking, eating, and sleeping are not) for the purpose of celebrating the sexual bonding of people of the opposite sex, which is something people of the same sex cannot do. There are many reasons why society created this institution, which is a gender specific institution. People of the same sex cannot marry because marriage is a sexual bonding between people of the opposite sex. That's why the institution was created. That fact is what differentiates it from other human bonds.

People in older times noticed (as people tend to do in absence of PC ideology) that there are two sexes which are normally attracted to one another and are capable of mating biologically. This is a good thing because it allows children to be born, and it's even better if the parents are BONDED together and provide a stable home life for the kids. Even if a marriage produces no children, it still serves as an example for the children of the community, who learn from adults how to become men or women, and how to relate to the opposite sex.

Marriages are not sanctioned because they fulfill the gratification demands of the lustful. Nations didn't pass marriage laws so that people of the same sex could imitate normal heterosexual bonding. Parents hoped that their son (for example) would find a nice girl who would help him become a man, to become someone who understood the obligations of a man, and to produce offspring who, in turn, would learn from their parents what it means to be a man or woman. Even if there were no children in their marriage, it would still serve as a symbol of opposite sex cooperation and commitment to the community. Even if a percentage of the population never married, that percentage learned from those who did how to relate to the opposite sex.

Parents didn't say that their desire was for their son to bring home someone of any gender and "marry" them. That it would be just fine if he brought home a bearded man and said, "Hey, mom and dad, I've been sodomizing Lucretius for a few months now and enjoy the sensation, so we're getting married." Surely no one could expect such a thing to be regarded as a real marriage, or expect that children or anyone else have something to learn from that, or that society has any reason to value it, or for that matter, not to be appalled by it.

[Valpal1]

Civil marriage is not a right, it is a restriction on rights or freedoms. I don’t know how more plainly I can put it.

You are convinced that a restriction of freedom is the freedom itself. An Orwellian concept if there ever was one.

[Yaelle]

Well, good, at least you are consistent.

The activists here in H’wood acting like fools do not get it. They want government out of their lives ONLY when it’s an issue they want. The gay agenda is bad, because no one wants ANY agenda.

And one needs to respect the voters of California as well. They voted Obama and traditional marriage. And for a bunch of other cr@p that we can’t afford.

[nufsed]

You are convinced that the goverrnment is resrticting people by NOT prohibiting them from doing it. That’s a very odd interpretation of rights. It’s strange that all these people are asking the government to take away their rights.

[nufsed]

I am not fighting activists. I am deciding on issues based upon my values. Freedom, pursuit of happiness, and life. They are not revokable because some activist jerk is pushing an agenda or some idiot shows their butt in a parade.

Homosexuals are individuals with rights, just as we are and as blacks were when Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton were espousing hatred. Did that mean blacks didn't have rights because of those activists?

I am a California voter. Don't know where people get the idea we can vote away the rights of other people. Can't do it. Homosexuals or not.

[Valpal1]

Civil marriage is a contract that proscribes certain behaviors (promiscuity) while prescribing others (mutual support).

A contract is not a inalienable right, although it does create contractual rights and obligations.

My point here is that the purpose of a contract is to regulate the behavior of the contractual parties and to spell out the expectations and obligations being agreed to by contract. It is a voluntary agreement to modify or circumscribe one’s own freedom in exchange for something else of value.

You are making a category error when you claim a (marriage) contract is a right.

[rob777]

"Marriage is clearly not for the sole intent of having children. Where did you get that idea?"


First of all, I did not say that marriage was for the sole intent of having children. What I said was that the possibility of having children was the factor that turned a purely private affair between two individuals into a matter of public interest. Second, I did not come up this idea. It a well known notion among those who have done a lot of sociological and anthropological studies.

For example, in her new book, “The Family in the Modern Age: More than a Lifestyle Choice”, Brigitte Berger, Professor emerita of sociology at Boston University, reminds us that the nature and destiny of a civilization is determined in large part by the norms and structure of its family arrangements. She begins by noting that every society in the world has organized sexual intimacy, procreation, childrearing, and the economic life of the household around the institution of the family. This institution depends upon a range of social norms encoded in law and convention that guide people in their roles as spouses, parents, and children.

[nufsed]

I find nothing in your post that would necessitate a governmental ban on gay marriage.

[happygrl]

This is the best essay I've read on the issue of Prop 8.

Thanks for posting it.

[goldstategop]

That's exactly what the author said. As long as the government sanctions morally offensive behavior - then yes, my rights and my values are threatened.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[MaineConservative]

It is highest form of convolution language to deny people the liberty to do something and then call it a victory for liberty.

I agree. This is BIG GOVERNMENT CONSERVATIVISM at its worst. It is not a victory of LIBERTY, it is a victory of SLAVISM.

To me, Conservativism is for SMALL GOVERNMENT and States Rights (and the states of Massachusetts and Connecticut are using their rights of being a state for gay marriage), not for Big GOVERNMENT that tells you what you can do in your house.

Personally, I'm not for gay marriage but gays should have to RIGHT to visit each other in the hospital and to adopt OLDER kids.

This issue is what is causing us to lose elections IMHO>

[puroresu]

I agree. This is BIG GOVERNMENT CONSERVATIVISM at its worst. It is not a victory of LIBERTY, it is a victory of SLAVISM.

No, it's the people of California exercising their right to self-government and taking back their state after four unelected dictators on the Supreme Court took it away from them.

To me, Conservativism is for SMALL GOVERNMENT...

Then tell me how adding an additional class of beneficiaries for assorted benefits reduces the size of government. Also, tell me how the accompanying laws mandating that private dating services and other private businesses "accommodate" gays reduces the size of government. Tell me how the accompanying speech codes, civil rights laws, and state mandated diversity training reduce the size of government.

...and States Rights...

How does it violate states rights for the voters of California to overturn a state court ruling? And you do realize that the reason "gay rights" advocates wanted California so badly was so they could get a large state on their side and use it to force same-sex "marriage" on all the states that don't permit it, via federal decree?

...(and the states of Massachusetts and Connecticut are using their rights of being a state for gay marriage), not for Big GOVERNMENT that tells you what you can do in your house.

In both of those states the state court re-wrote the state constitution by fiat and imposed something on the voters that they never approved of. The politicians then used procedural maneuvering to block the voters from responding. Also, and I'll repeat, how does adding a new class of government beneficiaries, accompanied by government mandates for private citizens to "accommodate" them, qualify as activity in the privacy of one's home?

Personally, I'm not for gay marriage...

Then why are you denouncing opposition to gay "marriage"?

...but gays should have to RIGHT to visit each other in the hospital and to adopt OLDER kids.

The former is something to be worked out by the legislature, not the courts. Homosexuals should not be permitted to adopt, period.

This issue is what is causing us to lose elections IMHO

How do you figure that? The anti-same sex "marriage" side has won every referendum ever held on the issue (and there have been dozens of them) except for one in Arizona a couple of years ago. In that case, the pro-same sex "marriage" forces ran a series of false ads misdirecting the voters. This year, the issue was on the ballot again and with the misinformation corrected the voters of Arizona easily approved the ban. Not only has the conservative side won in every state where the voters were allowed to vote on the issue, but it was usually by huge margins (often in the 70 or 80 percent range). Also, in every state, the votes for the ban have exceeded the GOP vote. For example, Obama won California easily but the voters approved the ban on same sex "marriage". That means that not only did virtually all the McCain voters support it, but so did a huge chunk of Obama voters. Four years ago in Oregon, voters approved the ban 57-43 while voting for Kerry. In Florida this year, the voters approved the ban 62-38 while voting 52-48 for Obama. So how do you figure that opposition to same-sex "marriage" is a drag on the GOP?

[puroresu]

Here's a challenge to any supposed conservative who supports state-recognized same-sex "marriage". You repeatedly tell those of us who oppose such "marriages" that we are Big Government Conservatives. Therefore, I challenge any of you to explain how state-recognized same-sex "marriages" would REDUCE the size and scope of government. If opposition to such "marriages" is BIG GOVERNMENT, then support for them should constitute a reduction in government size. So, please explain to us how that is to be accomplished. How does state-recognized same-sex "marriage" reduce the size of government, so much so that those of us who resist it are accused of being proponents of BIG GOVERNMENT.

Now, here's a ground rule for this challenge. You can't cop out by saying you don't think government should be in the business of recognizing or sanctioning marriages at all. You're free to hold that position, of course, but it isn't germane to this debate. The allegation is that traditional conservatives are supporting BIG GOVERNMENT by not agreeing to add state-recognized same-sex "marriages" to the existing state-recognized heterosexual marriages.

If you wish to assert that no marriages should be state-reconized, that's another issue. In fact, it's completely contradictory to the claim that opposition to state-recognized same-sex "marriage" constitutes big government. The loopy argument seems to be that:

A) It's BIG GOVERNMENT for the state to recognize or sanction marriages.

B) It's BIG GOVERNMENT not to add same-sex "marriages" to the existing marriages already recognized or sanctioned by the state.

So there's an elemental failure of logic when someone supports state-recognized same-sex "marriage" while simultaneously arguing that the state shouldn't be in the business of marriage in the first place. The first result of state-sanctioned same-sex "marriage" would be to increase the number of people eligible for a state program and its accompanying government benefits, i.e., an increase in the size of government.

But it doesn't stop there, of course. Same-sex "marriage", or even civil unions, are inevitably accompanied by a whole host of new laws restricting private conduct. Private dating services are hauled into court. Christian photographers are dragged before "human rights commissions". Kids, and even college students, are subjected to state mandated diversity training where they're told what they're permitted to say, or even think, about homosexuality. Private Christian landlords are ordered to rent to the nice gay couple who wear leather and carry whips.

So, when have state-recognized same-sex "marriages" or civil unions ever resulted in a decrease in the size of government? How is it even possible that that could happen?