Excellent arguments, very enlightening. These are some of the best non-religious points of view I have heard.
I still don't think we should stop people from having a legal union, but at least you make a lot of sense.
No one stops anyone from entering into legal contracts of various types now to form any number of business, personal and social relationships.
I will admit that there are a few special relationships than cannot be acheived by other legal contracts (coercion of spousal testimony is one), but in the main, many of the benefits of marriage are easily achieved by other means.
The monetary cost to business by extending spousal benefits to same sex couples will spell the end of group insurance provided by employers. I predict that will be the first, most obvious unintended consequence of gay marriage. This will produce a clamour for universal health care and this will flush our form of government down the socialist drain like a pressure assisted toilet.
People who think this is all about fairness and singing Kumbayah will hate the monstor government this will spawn 25 years hence, but they will be completely unable to put their finger on what triggered the disaster.
I am amazed that you would find a simple "marriage is for the benefit of raising healthy children for society" somehow an enlightening argument.
You need a serious reconsideration of your whole concept of life and what gave rise to your present philosophy if post#24 was revealing to you.
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You're much more easily convinced than I am. Let's take some of Valpal1's points:
The purpose of marriage, in law, nature and tradition is to provide a stable relationship for the purposes of procreating and rearing children.
"Marriage" does not exist in nature, there is procreation. A relative few species are monogamous, the vast majority will procreate with a new opposite sex partner every mating season. Marriage exists in law and tradition only, with religion being the tradition part. Legalized gay marriage would only change the legal part, the traditionalists can continue to do as they please. As for the "procreating and rearing of children", we do not deny the benefits of marriage to heterosexual couples who have no intention or ability to procreate, nor do we remove the benefits of marriage upon the last child leaving the nest.
The benefits and protections the law offers to married persons are to reduce the burdens and encourage child rearing.
Again, joint tax return filing, reduced auto insurance rates, and spousal coverage under health insurance plans are not limited to those who engage solely in child rearing. We also have many homosexual individuals raising children, and no matter what you think of their gay parents' behaviors, are the children themselves not entitled to the economic benefits that their caretakers would derive from marriage?
Marriage is a procreative institution by nature, tradition and law.
When a man and a woman married pre-1960, there were only very ineffective conception control methods, and procreation resulted much more often than not, there being more fertile individuals than infertile ones. Science has now changed that, and fertility control is nearly 100% in the control of the parties to the marriage. The link between marriage and near-automatic procreation has been broken for more than forty years.
On the other hand, fertilization techniques have advanced to the point where a lesbian no longer needs to even be a friend of a man in order to become a mother. The FMA is going to stop neither form of science.
Judicial activism to redefine it may change the law and traditional culture, but it will not change nature.
No, but science is changing nature every day, and will continue to do so.
There will be ugly, unintended consequences for future generations as a result of this judicial tyranny and stupid social engineering.
This one's a bit vague, but everything has unintended consequences. I sincerely doubt that the availability of gay marriage will make heterosexual young men find heterosexual young women any less attractive, its a giant stretch to think that some sort of societal "approval" will change people's basic sexual proclivities. We will certainly, as a species, have enough of a breeding population to keep from dying out.
A lot of the posts on this, and other gay marriage threads are of "the sky is falling", "America is finished" variety. If that were true, then we should have vanished sometime ago, we've had court-legalized murder for well over thirty years from now. Abortion doesn't make America any better of a place to live, but it hasn't destroyed our ability to produce great people, even if we don't produce as many great people as we would have without abortion.
In the case of gay people, the only children that would not be produced are the ones that gay people, trying to live a socially acceptable straight life, produce before realizing that they cannot live a lie any longer. Those kids become the substance of the "carp about existing gay families" that Valpal1 decried.
If the voters of Massachusetts get an amendment to vote on in November, 2006, and the only thing they've heard is that the sky is falling, the fact that the sky is indeed still above them will cause them to dismiss the right as being wrong on this. If there are abuses of the gay marriage statutes in Massachusetts, conservatives need to play those things up; if civil unrest comes from the gay side, there's another point to make, but I anticipate more violence from the anti-gay marriage side. I hope it doesn't happen, we all know how the media makes devils out of abortion clinic bombings, and hurts the pro-life cause.