Posted on 05/14/2004 4:42:47 PM PDT by pollywog
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to intervene in the same-sex marriages law in Mass. Truly a sad day for America.
More "change is good"? Or are you subtly equating opposition to gay marriage with racism? You keep doing that -- arguing just what a seminar poster would argue.
The analogy isn't valid, because gender difference is the basis of marriage, in a way that racial difference was not. Laws banning miscegenation were foundational to segregation, not to marriage.
As an aside, do you think it's valid for the Supreme Court to deal in tergiversation based on what they think they can "get away with" politically? That's how the liberal "penumbra" factory used to work. It's legal positivism, which IMHO has no place on the bench, in the courtroom, in law, or in America. IMHO.
Said the Visigoth to the Roman, as the Emporium burned. The Vandal, standing nearby, laughed out loud and agreed heartily. "Next!", he called out.
They've been On Message as reliably as a presidential campaign, ever since the Massachusetts Iscariots handed down their betrayal. That night on Nightline, the woman from HRC who's all over the networks whenever something happens -- she was on again Tuesday -- recited that argument almost verbatim. I was watching her forked tongue flicker in and out as she did so.
Flag on the ad hominem "you're narrow, ignorant, vulgar and vile" stuff.
In a word, No. But if you make a Left argument, well, I'll call it like I see it.
Not so, Mitt Romney's spinning to the contrary notwithstanding. His claim to be able to debar citizens of other States from getting married in Massachusetts probably wouldn't stand up in court.
Anyway, the rubber meets the road for real, when a couple from another state moves to Massachusetts for a while, gets married, and then goes home and sues their original home state under Article IV. Those lawsuits are probably being prepared as I type, with gay couples all lined up months ago ready to sue, sue, sue.
One thing I'd like to know is......where is all this money coming from? There's a literal ocean of money floating a fleet of law firms and NGO's all dedicated to queering the country.
I never said all change is good. I just described the gay marriage movement as change, and that in the abscence of compelling reasons against change, it ususally tends to happen in our society, if there is enough motive force behind it. If people who are anti-gay-marriage wish to stop or contain this change, then they had better come up with the aforementioned compelling reasons. So far, the ones advanced by the right have not been sufficient. There's a general unease among heterosexual people in the mushy middle about gay marriage, but it is rapidly dissipating, and arguments about religion and tradition seem to fall on deaf ears in this group.
Or are you subtly equating opposition to gay marriage with racism? You keep doing that -- arguing just what a seminar poster would argue.
I am comparing the reaction that people have to gay marriage to the reaction people had to interracial marriage. It probably isn't a valid comparison in the case of the religious right, since they have holy books that seem to clearly condemn homosexuality. I only heard really fringy religious opposition to interracial marriage while I was growing up, probably from members of a church that would be philosophically aligned with members of today's Aryan Nations sect. But it is crystal clear that religious justification was used by the original trial court in the case of Loving v. Virginia, the case the SCOTUS used to overturn state laws prohibiting interracial marriage.
In short, it was held by the Supreme Court thirty-seven years ago that even sincerely held religious views could not define civil marriage. That's the precedent that is going to be cited in any eventual Federal court cases involving gay marriage. Other reasons besides religion, and the tradition that flowed from it will have to be cited.
By the way, this "seminar poster" stuff -- forget about it, I joined FR many, many years ago. If I ever voluntarily went into a room where Al Franken was, it would only be to flip him off. I've had various discussions with some of the most ardent posters on the gay marriage threads, and while we've disagreed, we've always done so respectfully, and they've as much as said so. I've always framed my discussions with the idea that I have seen no compelling reason to oppose gay marriage, and I have asked fellow FReepers to show me a reason I can accept. I've gotten versions of "God says it isn't right," "We've always done it this way," or "Marriage is only for procreation," and I've tried to answer with my differences from these points.
If I've helped conservatives hone their messages when they talk with people who are in that mushy middle, then I've helped their cause. If I haven't helped them to change the substance of their argument, then they will know why they've not been successful when gay marriage comes to their state. Numerous people on various topics have helped me to argue solid positions on conservative issues, it just hasn't happened with this particular subject.
As an aside, do you think it's valid for the Supreme Court to deal in tergiversation based on what they think they can "get away with" politically? That's how the liberal "penumbra" factory used to work.
I'll confess, I had to look up the word, "tergiversation". I'm willing to do so, but most people in the mushy middle wouldn't bother. I've long insisted that William F. Buckley would have been far more influential if he had stooped to the linguistic level of the average person a bit more often. Back to the point, I assume you mean the definition being "The act of practicing evasion or of being deliberately ambiguous".
Lawyers are trained to do this, therefore, I expect them to do this, not only when they are arguing before a bench, but when they are wearing the robes behind it. That's why the other side hires its professional tergiversationalists to analyze just what is trying to be gotten away with. This process works well in a legislative setting, and less so in a judicial setting, that's fundamentally why conservatives are more comfortable with legislatively-enacted law than with judicially-created law.
As for the penumbra factory, let's remember when the ground was broken for that particular structure. The so-called "right to privacy" hiding in the shadows of a penumbra was "discovered" in Griswold v. Connecticut. As you may recall, that was a challenge to a state law that forbid the sale of contraceptives to even married couples. If the Roman Catholic Church had not tried to make its religious strictures the law of the land, we might have avoided the whole shadowy business of penumbras for quite some years, perhaps many generations. The reflection of purely religious doctrine in law becomes the Achilles heel of said law, and leads to its downfall. If you want to see full marriage remaining only as between a man and a woman in the rest of the US, and to even turn back the tide in Massachusetts, then come up with reasons that are understandable by the mushy middle, they're the ones you need to get Constitutional amendments passed.
Depends. If it can be shown that the old MA law was to avoid upsetting apple carts in other states that didn't like interracial marriage, then you're right. If it can be shown to be used to keep people from marrying in violation of some other reason in another state (such as cousin marriage), maybe that's a point. Certainly, the use of a lie (such as certifying there's no impediment to marriage in the home state) in filing an affidavit can be held to invalidate the ceremony and certificate, expect this to be used in states that have an explicit DOM statute or amendment.
You're probably right about the lawsuits, especially for those who were bona fide residents of MA, who move. About the only thing I can think of to defend against them is for each state to pass a civil union statute, that provides that any same-sex relationship that comes from MA will be recognized as a civil union, only. It leaves the courts an out to avoid imposing an injustice on the former MA couple. If you give courts an escape hatch, they are more likely to use it, if you back them up against a wall, expect them to push back your way.
One thing I'd like to know is......where is all this money coming from?
My guess? It's coming from gays who are not raising children, who have more disposable income than people who are raising families. Be glad its not going to the Kerry campaign, or other Rat candidates.
Concur. However, the Constitution does not provide a remedy for the attack the homosexuals are fashioning on the States. They will use Article IV successfully to overturn the marriage laws of all 50 States, once their shackups are extended the protections of marriage in one State. The problem is insuperable without a remedy at the same level as the problem.
The Founders gave the power to define marriage to the States simply by not giving it to the Federal government, so my argument is follow the Constitution...
That's quite right, your logic is impeccable. However, Article VII also provides for amendment, when unforeseen problems arise that do not admit of solution to the People's satisfaction under the law as it exists. That's why the XIIIth Amendment was necessary, if the preexisting and legal institution of slavery were to be abolished. The same thing is true of the establishment of the income tax and woman suffrage.
If homosexuals wanted to proceed in a manner that is honest and not mischievous or damaging to the institutions of society, they would petition the legislatures of the 50 States for amendment of the institution of marriage by statute or by amendment to the States' constitutions. They are not doing that. Instead, they have created a constitutional crisis by the operation of a cabal in shopped forums before conniving judges. Their initiative is extraconstitutional, inasmuch as it involves the enunciation of new national laws as edicts from the bench of a single State.
......your argument is change the Constitution to suit the issue.
Yes, that's quite right. The homosexual cabal has parsed their attack correctly, and it will succeed unless the People clear their throat and act to secure the situation.
That's the second time you've said that, and I hope I've communicated adequately, that the discussion in the forum can't lead to valid consensus if only one side is presented, and if the audience is presented only with a farrago of one-sided propaganda. I thought I had made my processual concerns plain.
That's an admirable sentiment about Franken, but I think my original point stands. Boiled down to essentials, you're making the gays' case for them, and the point I was addressing is one of the seminar posters' favorites.
Be defensive if you like, or not; but the point stands. You're posting on their side, which is understandable given your aversion to any but secularist policy-oriented cost/benefit analysis or legalistic arguments.
I would think that, if you took a dispassionate look at your own position, that you might be led to reassess your antireligious or morality-averse premises, if they lead you to conclusions that put you in the company of the catamites and pederasts. I realize that's a reverse-bandwagon argument, and I'm not offering it as a proof, but only as a reality check.
If you wind up in bed with the Left and their shower buddies, I think you might at least begin to wonder how you got there, rather than settle in comfortably with that kind of company.
I see. Well, I disagree with you about "solidity", but if you factor out or discount various other arguments and find none that satisfy you, that is your privilege.
Let me try to satisfy you on strictly policy grounds. I concur with these arguments I'm about to propound, but I must confess that they were made by another person, who posted them on Salon three or four years ago. The poster is Chad McClung, a Boeing computer-security worker at the time ("sysop"?) who posted against the gays on Salon's "TableTalk" forum to the point of elenchus on the subject of single-sex marriage. Since the arguments are his more than mine, I hope you won't mind if I quote him.
Here he discusses, in a thought experiment, the impact on family life and children's upbringing, of the introduction of single-sex marriage.
Assume there are 500 people of marriageable age. They live in a society where 1) marriage is strongly seen as the normal behavior for adults, 2) out of wedlock birth is considered a very shameful thing, 3) the social benefits of marriage are discussed by all of their relatives all of their lives, 4) people who abandon their spouses are considered pariahs, and 5) divorce is illegal without a showing of major abuse or adultery, and even then, divorced people are shunned.15 of those people are gay (500*.03). Half of them get married anyway, to fit in.
50 of the rest of the people (500*.10) are too ornery to get married. Half of them have a child out of wedlock (25 kids).
The rest of the people pair up and have two children. That leads to 204 couples with 408 kids.
20 of these marriages (204*.10) fail, leaving 184 successful marriages with 368 kids. Including the never-married, we have 65 children in unstable homes, and 368 in stable families.
One in six kids lives in an unstable home.
Now, of the 184 intact marriages, some portion are only marginal, and will fail if less support is provided. Let's assume that 80% of those stable marriages would have formed and stayed stable regardless of social encouragement or sanction. The other 20% are evenly divided between needing each of the 5 types of encouragement or sanction. Thus, for each of them that is removed, 2 percent of the marriages will fail to form, and 2% percent of the marriages will fail. Childbearing will remain as in the previous example.
Removal of even one social support results in 176 intact marriages with 352 kids, 3 additional divorced couples with 6 kids, and 8 never married people, with 4 additional kids, for a total of 75 in unstable families.
One in five kids lives in an unstable home.
Removal of all of the reinforcements leads to 147 intact couples with 294 children, and 36 more kids from divorce and 18 more kids from single parent homes, for a total of 119 kids in unstable homes.
One in three kids lives in an unstable home.
Lets assume that in this less restrictive society, all of the gay people marry other gay people and each couple adopts a pair of kids from an unstable family. That moves 14 kids from the unstable to the stable category.
One in three kids still lives in an unstable home, even though most of the population is in lifelong stable couples. Of course, the real world is much more complex than this. There are a lot more reasons that people stay married, and the function of incremental failure of marginal marriages is much more complex. The divorce rate is higher than 40% and the proportion of children in single parent homes is higher too. And it is rather unlikely that a high percentage of gay couples will actually adopt a lot of kids.
But any decrease in the encouragement to breeders to marry before breeding and stay married after breeding leads to some decrease in that behavior. And even a very small decrease in encouragement has negative social results that outweigh any demonstrated theoretical advantage from improving the social support for gay couples.
Hmm, blame the Catholics, eh?
It seems you are complaisant about procedural and constitutional outrages, if you feel you don't have a dog in the fight, or if you don't like the guy who lost.
I understand it appears that way to you, but I'm trying to illustrate the case the gays are making to the general public. If there are rebuttals to that case, then conservatives need to know how a fellow conservative (not predisposed to being anti-gay) evaluates that case. Call it playing devils advocate, if you wish, but in order to defeat the other side, I often find it useful to see how they think.
I would think that, if you took a dispassionate look at your own position, that you might be led to reassess your antireligious or morality-averse premises, if they lead you to conclusions that put you in the company of the catamites and pederasts.
I've heard of pederasts, but I had to look up "catamite". Again, if you want to persuade people of your position, don't leave them confused with exceedingly rare words. I don't see the pro-gay-marriage side using them.
If not having a religion makes me antireligious in your eyes, then so be it. I can be quite neutral on the issue of people's peaceful practice of their religions, I only get violently upset about such practices when they manifest themselves in the actions of the radical Islamists, and such activities. Calling my position morality-averse just means that it doesn't match up either exactly, or close enough to your definition of morality. I'm sure that if we sat down, we'd find way more agreement than disagreement on moral issues. I believe that a person can behave in a moral manner without regular membership in a recognized religious philosophy. I respect your right to disagree.
I think you might at least begin to wonder how you got there
Oh, I have. Twenty years ago, I was as anti-gay as anybody here, and I was more than willing to do it publically, as there were no Internet pseudonyms to hide behind in those days. Somewhere along the line, I got to know a few gay people, some lesbians at first, and some gay men after that. They were family members of friends, or friends of family members. When you get to know a even a few individuals, and realize that they're not all refugees from a Castro-district SF gay pride parade, then maybe you realize that all you've seen and heard about before were mere caracatures. Yes, there are certainly freaks and weirdos who call themselves gay, but judging all homosexuals by them is like judging all heterosexuals by Bill Clinton's behavior.
Like I said, if there's a compelling reason for these people to not have the benefits that my new wife and I have (we're both completely out of the baby-making game, and have absolutely no desire to adopt) I'd like to hear it. If the benefits of marriage are to be a special help only to those raising the next generation, then perhaps we should strictly limit the benefits to those people only. And some of them will be gay people.
What doesn't seem to follow after the mathematics is his conclusion that "even a very small decrease in encouragement has negative social results that outweigh any demonstrated theoretical advantage from improving the social support for gay couples." He doesn't state how social support for gay couples translates into a decrease of encouragement for straight couples to marry, stay married, and raise their own children.
Besides, as you point out, he's a Boeing computer security worker. Being quite familiar with Boeing's corporate culture, and having a degree in computer networking, I do recognize this as the social analysis of a person of his occupation. He's probably still single at this point.
Bad guess. Very married, very Christian, very with-children. In fact, the sodomites on Salon were upset with Chad, and one of the things they tried to do to get him to blow his cool (and out of exasperation with his rational defense of his position) was to send gay porn links to his teen-aged son, inviting him to "come out". This initiative earned the homofascists some strong rebukes from their liberal breeder allies, but they refused to apologize or to forethink their offense to Netiquette and common decency -- with which, after all, they had declared themselves at war, one of them having already adopted the tag line "Gay PC terrorist" just to underscore the point.
I've known gay guys my age since I was about 14, and the girl I took to the senior prom turned out (later, I guess I was slow on the uptake) to be the class lesbian. Another lesbian schoolmate turned up in Houston after I moved over here -- I didn't know she was gay at the time, but apparently she and her girlfriend were a known quantity (to other people) at the time; I think she was a couple of classes behind me. At college, my roommate's cousin was very gay, as were his two roommates, one of whom chased a bunch of pills with a bottle of cheap vodka while we were still there, which is when we figured it out. Turns out that a biology instructor had formed a harem, and Tommy was one of them. Something went wrong, and he tried to kill himself. I formed a very low opinion of college instructors who mess with students at that time -- another being the heterosexual German instructor who.....well, never mind. Let's just say he liked to advertise.
Then there are other gays I've known since then, three of whom later died of AIDS, at least in part because the gayocracy successfully fought initiatives at the Centers for Disease Control to formulate epidemiological measures to contain the spread of HIV.
So you've been entertained by the charm offensive, and you've formed a mild opinion of gays as people. That's your prerogative, but I think what we are talking about here is public policy, and the entrained consequences of same. To formulate a public policy you have to have some idea of what The Life entails, and that is what the Gay Cabal (aka the HRC, as they call themselves) has strained to control, viz., the information we have in hand about homosexuality and the lives that homosexuals lead.
There has been a very large degree of deceit and manipulation in the homosexual activists' campaign, and it is principally that outrage to republicanism and good faith among a compacted people that has led me to oppose strongly the initiatives of the gay cabal. I despise cabal as a deadly species of deception with consequences for the community that ramify into thousands of areas of importance to public and private life.
As a sampler of the consequences of losing this war, try this:
Canada has already adopted laws that Christian ministries fear may lead to law-enforcement action against ministers who preach Levitical rejection of homosex.
If homosexuality is "mainstreamed" successfully in the United States, expect pederasts to seek restraining orders against parents of boys they've targetted for seduction.
Expect pederasty scandals in the public schools dwarfing anything the Roman Catholic Church has experienced.
Expect public persecution of "non-reconciling" congregations and individuals by vindictive homosexuals determined to eradicate, if not the moral blot of homosexuality, then the churches that teach about it. Think not? Remember what Laura Schlessinger and Anita Bryant experienced.
We are dealing with a cabal whose chosen weapon in dealing with its challenges is political power. People who work with political power can be expected to fall in love with it -- especially since gays have already evinced a taste for decree law, since all their appeals have been to the bench, not the legislature (in Vermont, they didn't approach the legislature until they were armed with a court order).
This taste for a fascist approach to dealing with others will predictably translate into brute oppression of straight dissenters from the gay PC message. People who do not clasp the rainbow flag and beg for mercy will be crushed. That is, if the cabal gets what it wants.
Okay, you didn't like the thought experiment -- you might explain what you meant by "toothpaste out of the tube", while you're at it. I can't believe you've passed by all the links put up by scripter and EdReform on these topics. Are you discounting everything they post as the mutterings of cranks? Just wondering.
The first and best argument for traditional marriage is that it provides the best environment for raising children.
Men in a committed relationship with one or few women give much better care to their children than wandering rogue males obeying the selfish sociobiological imperative, to spray as much genetic material as widely as possible without regard to outcomes.
Commitment and settlement of the father is good for the children and for the women who are trying to raise the children and who need the help. It's doubly good for the children in that the two genders provide different kinds of nurture, and children need both. For example, boys get their knowledge of how to handle a gun (a requirement of real citizenship) from their fathers as a rule; they get other kinds of support from women.
Society has a stake, furthermore, in not only a sexually varied and stable parentage, but also in the sexual fidelity of the partners to one another. Homosexual men in particular are notoriously promiscuous, as are some lesbians -- in part, because they see themselves as outlaws to, and therefore untrammeled by, pledges of fidelity exchanged in marriage. To expect SSM to change that gay outlook on fidelity is naive: Andrew Sullivan has already scotched that idea (quoted above), as has the Village Voice's Michelangelo Signorile, who at other times is a Sullivan critic.
Gays are hugely promiscuous. Not all of them are, but as a group, they are. Do you want me to post links and numbers already linked by scripter et al.? But that is a first benchmark of their unfitness for, and their lack of commitment to, the kind of stable family environment that children need. And keep in mind the first point as well, that variety in nurture and in role models is important for children. Too, consider the further case of a heterosexual kid who needs a straight role model -- as is likely to be the case, given the ratio of straight to gay people (and therefore children). What is his situation going to be, growing up in an absolutely fabulous apartment with little knowledge of, concern about, or effectual guidance to interaction with, the opposite sex? In fact, at this point it's necessary to admit that many gay men are misogynists, and that many lesbians likewise have "problems" relating to men -- as witness some lesbians' benchmark screechiness and hostility toward almost the entire male sex.
Your complacency in the face of these problems, and your insistence on seeing same-sex marriage exclusively as a civil prerogative of the parents -- which is how the Gay Cabal insists other people must see it -- seems purblind, given these obvious socialization problems that will be faced by the children of gay couplings of whatever description.
And I haven't even discussed the ramifications of disease and other problems that are consistently found much more often in homosexual relationships than in heterosexual ones.
It isn't my intention to call people to gee and haw to the chapter and verse of religious teachments. My interest in it is, as I said before, Straussian, i.e., concerned more for society's overall welfare and willing to commit myself to following norms myself which I recognize are rooted in someone else's value system, even on points I don't share, for the benefit of society overall. Private behavior is one thing, but care must be taken when we start talking about society's mores, norms, customs, and laws.
The Gay Cabal's insistent attempts to drive out religiously-based social mores from the forum are understandable given their interest, but they are wrong, and what they are doing is bad, given that the Judaeo-Christian ethos they want to drive out has given us very many salutary rules of public moral and intellectual hygiene.
I am averse as well, therefore, to the scientific-materialist and ACLU drive to secularize rigidly the public space and to "cleanse" it of the influences of Christianity. Pious Jews misguidedly participate in this forum-clearing enthusiasm (as I have pointed out to them on FR, Salon, and elsewhere), out of a desire to vindicate their own faith and honor it in the face of the Christian majority. Their own desire to settle for a secularized public space is therefore pious, but feeds the materialist meme to the eventual ruin of their own faith. I cannot get them to recognize this, however, since the affinity influence of the secularized Jews behind People for the American Way, ACLU, and so on, who are intent only on attacking Christians as The Enemy and characterizing them as ayatollah-wannabes, is much greater.
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