“The fact that two people are of the same sex is complete justification for denying them the right to marry. That’s because they cannot marry, because they are not of the opposite sex from one another.”
That is a really precious example of a circular argument, and I thank you for the laugh.
“BTW, a female and a kangaroo could marry using your reasoning, and the female could have a baby that was related to “only one parent” via donated sperm.”
How do you get a kangaroo to consent to marriage?
“You’re defining fairness and equality in terms of treating relationships which are not equal, and in fact cannot be equal, as if they were. Homosexual relationships are not equal to heterosexual relationships.”
Says who?
Then you'd better declare every definition on earth to be a circular argument and announce the formation of a dictatorship. If words can be defined to mean anything, even things they cannot logically mean, then we're living in a world of 1984ish diktat. Which is precisely what you're aiming for here because you've failed completely and totally to defend the proposition that same-sex pairings qualify as marriages under the actual definition of the word "marriage".
How do you get a kangaroo to consent to marriage?
I knew that lame argument was coming the moment I read your first post. The stale libertarian argument is that animals can't marry because they can't consent to it, so therefore we have no reason to believe the left will ever advocate the legality and recognition of such "marriages". There's a rather obvious problem with that argument, and the fact that it flies right over the heads of libertarians shows that they really don't understand the social forces they're dealing with.
So I'll spell it out for you very plainly. Since when do we have to get animals consent for anything we do to them?
We can leash them, confine them, work them, collar them. We can brand them, buy them, sell them. We can take their eggs and milk without a written contract signed by them. We can kill and eat them.
And this never occurs to libertarians because they don't live in the real world. They live in a fantasy world where every human is a totally autonomous atomized humanity unit who only interacts with other people by mutual consent. They're so engulfed in this fantasy that they forget that it doesn't apply in the real world.
If and when the left decides to push for inter-species "marriage", the inability of one of the parties to sign a contract won't matter any more than it matters in regards to anything else we do to animals.
I wrote: “You’re defining fairness and equality in terms of treating relationships which are not equal, and in fact cannot be equal, as if they were. Homosexual relationships are not equal to heterosexual relationships.”
You responded: Says who?
It's called a value judgment based on several millennia of human history. And if you don't know any actual history (and believe me, you don't) then look around the world at what's happening in the regions that have bought into this argument that homosexuality is the equivalent of heterosexuality. Orwellian speech codes. Government by judicial fiat. Wonderful organizations such as the Boy Scouts hauled into court repeatedly and abused by government thugs. Ironically, the precise opposite of what libertarians would predict. But then, the libertarian crystal ball broke a long time ago, didn't it? That's why we've seen such an explosion in the size of government since we were (ahem) liberated in the 1960s.