The Answer is Civil Unions…There. Now, Shut Up. (Surprise BARF alert!)

I’ll say it. Might even be one of the few conservatives that will openly cede that homosexuals are discriminated against in America, and it’s truly a shame.

Rights granted to us under the Constitution are not meant to be selectively issued. As much as I believe in state’s rights, I do not believe it is a inherent right of a group of people to collectively restrict the rights of another group of people.

The problem with the anti-gay marriage argument is that no matter the route you take it, it seems to always come back to a particular religious view or set of “values.” In America, we weren’t intended to legislate morality, we do it all the time, but we weren’t meant to do it, because morality and personal values are relative to each person.

For example, I think it’s morally wrong to eat a domesticated animal that is viewed by many as a member of the family. Barack Obama would disagree with me. Therefore, I will carry on with my life and not eat a dog, whereas our President may or may not enjoy the occasional shish-ka-poodle. So, instead of wasting time and money by drafting some strange overreaching bill that touches very few people, to avoid the pointless fighting, and to preserve our own personal rights, I will not eat a dog, and our President, who shall remain nameless, will eat his dog, in the privacy of his own home. There. No harm, no foul. Not such a “BFD” as Joe Biden would say.

Might even be one of the few conservatives...

Not to turn this into an exercise in semantics, however you can't simply say I'm a conservative that believes in gay marriage. The terms conservative and liberal have had their meanings changed over time to be almost unrecognizable, however some tenets of the two meanings remain in the area of morality. A conservative is one who holds to traditional moral values as opposed to liberals who are more willing to see change. This much is true even back to the period of the classic liberals (Locke etc). At that time a liberal was one who stood for Liberty. Modern liberals have kept the lose moral ideas of the enlightenment and continued to march on with them while at the same time embracing large government. Libertarians, the group to which your argument really belongs, are in many ways the modern version of the classic liberals. So, based on his position and argument the author is not a conservative.

So you think a child can make informed consent to sex in the eyes of the law? I think not.

I think most people realize a child should not have sex with an adult whether they consent or not. Be careful here not to equivocate between what consent actually means, and the admissibility of consent in legal decisions.

And I’m pretty sure animals can’t make informed consent to anything at all.

Animals can certainly consent and not consent to things. As further evidenced of you throwing in "informed", it seems you are indeed determined to equivocate on some level, although I suspect you are not fully aware of it yet...so I am here to help. Lets break it down: although ethics and legality are related, they are not the same thing, and although basic materialistic facts are related to both, they are not the same thing...

In a basic literal sense both animals and children might consent, not consent, or be more or less indifferent toward some action taken with them, and that is all that I was pointing out with my former post (although I suspected then you were confusing the legal sense with both the moral sense and basic material sense while not realizing it).

In a legal sense the consent of an animal or child to a sex act is (as understood by this layman) not permitted as a valid defense against the charges of sexual crimes.

In an ethical sense then (the sense upon which both human behavior and human laws ought to be based, rather than merely a convention of what our behavior and laws actually are), it seems clear to most that pedophilia and bestiality ought be made illegal even in cases where there was consent. A sloppy way of saying this (and of thinking about it) is to say, as you have that this actually means they can't consent.

But lo, the distinction between the ethical question of bestiality and pedophilia on one hand and gay sex on the other can not rest on the concept of consent. Only the distinction between rape and the other three can be.

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