Posted on 05/15/2008 10:02:52 AM PDT by NinoFan
P.S. I really only care about your answer to the last question concerning the federal Constitution.
Have you ever heard of homosexuals reproducing any other way than via a donor?
One is in an opposite-sex marriage, one is in a same-sex marriage. In both cases, the child is biologically related to only one parent. Both children, I assure you, have the “new DNA” of which you speak.
And they got it from two people of the opposite sex. That's how it works, and we didn't have to explain it before our society was dumbed down.
How do you deny marriage to one of these couples, and allow it for another, if both conceived by the same means? You’d have to concede that the reproductive capabilities of the couple are not an issue. So, you’ve lost that argument.
Incorrect. 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. 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.
In your second paragraph, you say reproduction is not the only purpose of the marital bond. Then you channel Fred Flinstone for a bit, but that’s okay. You finally make this point: “ Even if a particular marriage doesn’t produce offspring, it’s still symbolic to our young people of the nature of humanity and the responsibilities we have to society.” That’s a very good argument for allowing gay couples the same rights we allow straight couples. It’s symbolic of the responsibility we have to treat people fairly and equally in our society. Good point!
No, it's symbolic of the relationship between men and women in society and its central role in directing male energies in a productive direction. 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.
That said, if the word “marriage” is what trips you up, as I’ve said before, I’m all for keeping the government out entirely. It’s a loaded term best left for religions to address. The government can grant equal civil unions, and people can get married in the church of their choice. Government recognition of the “marriage” is unnecessary.
Create a libertarian utopia and then get back to us. I find it amazing that so many people are attracted to an ideology that is essentially parasitic.
Maybe the government shouldn’t have civil unions. Maybe it’s better it simply recognizes contracts between couples (call them whatever you like), and is available to intervene in the event of a dispute over assets or custody. If children were adequately protected, I’d be open to that argument.
Is there any reason the word “marriage,” with it’s religious connotations, needs to be applied to any kind of state-recognized civil partnership?
I disagree that most non-Californians are worried about federal courts “shoving gay marriage” down their throats. Most Americans aren’t terribly concerned about gay marriage, and many Americans support it. Most Americans are against amending the U.S. Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. As it stands now, the federal government’s authority to require states to recognize same-sex marriage is up for debate, but I suspect the issue will be left up to individual states for a long time.
Younger generations are overwhelmingly more supportive of same-sex marriage than older generations. I think, 20 or 30 years from now, gay marriage opponents will be seen in the same sort of light interracial marriage opponents are today, gay couples will have the same rights as straight couples, and it will be largely a non-issue. We’ll see.
“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?
I'm not quite sure I understand your answer. If you're not married, you have to pay taxes on the transfer of property (I believe it's 11K a year taxfree and 650K lifetime or something like that). If you are married, you can transfer unlimited amounts of property between spouses. Also, when a spouse dies, the surviving spouse inherits everything tax-free.
This is not an issue of gay marriage per se because unmarried straight couples face the same tax issues. They do have a remedy available though, getting married :)
As far as I know with joint ownership you do not get the tax benefits. Again, this affects couples of any kind, not necessarily gay ones.
You raise a good point, and it’s one of the best arguments in favor of civil unions for all couples, and removing the word “marriage” from the government lexicon. I’m not completely decided on this, but lean in favor of it.
Ellen Degenerate and whoever her hot girlfriend is.
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.
Actually, I’ve suggested we stop using the word “marriage,” which has religious connotations, to describe civil unions, which don’t. The state shouldn’t be in the business of declaring things sacred, should it? Wouldn’t you prefer that be left to religious institutions?
You seem to be suggesting there’s only one definition of civil marriage. At the moment, there are many, and the definitions vary by state. Same-sex marriage is a reality in several countries, and now two U.S. states. It doesn’t matter what you or I propose, because “same-sex pairings” already qualify as marriages in some parts of the country. That ship has sailed.
The first part of the first paragraph is just nonsense. Yours was a very funny circular argument. So much that I thought you must be joking. Apparently you weren’t, but you still get credit for making me laugh.
I see you’re very keen on making a case for kangaroo marriage. Do you know what a “slippery slope fallacy” is? You just constructed an absolutely perfect example, so read about it, and pat yourself on the back:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
I’ll make it simple for you. This is what you did:
“The slippery slope as fallacy
The slippery slope argument may or may not involve a fallacy (see the discussion on the two interpretative paradigms below: the momentum paradigm and the inductive paradigm). However, the slippery slope claim requires independent justification to connect the inevitability of B to an occurrence of A. Otherwise the slippery slope scheme merely serves as a device of sophistry.
Often proponents of a “slippery slope” contention propose a long series of intermediate events as the mechanism of connection leading from A to B. The “camel’s nose” provides one example of this: once a camel has managed to place its nose within a tent, the rest of the camel will inevitably follow. In this sense the slippery slope resembles the genetic fallacy, but in reverse.
As an example of how an appealing slippery slope argument can be unsound, suppose that whenever a tree falls down, it has a 95% chance of knocking over another tree. We might conclude that soon a great many trees would fall, but this is not the case. There is a 5% chance that no more trees will fall, a 4.75% chance that exactly one more tree will fall (and thus a 9.75% chance of 1 or less additional trees falling), and so on. There is a 92.3% chance that 50 or fewer additional trees will fall. The expected value of trees that will fall is 20. In the absence of some momentum factor that makes later trees more likely to fall than earlier ones, this “domino effect” approaches zero probability.
Arguers also often link the slippery slope fallacy to the straw man fallacy in order to attack the initial position:
A has occurred (or will or might occur); therefore
B will inevitably happen. (slippery slope)
B is wrong; therefore
A is wrong. (straw man)
This form of argument often provides evaluative judgments on social change: once an exception is made to some rule, nothing will hold back further, more egregious exceptions to that rule.
Note that these arguments may indeed have validity, but they require some independent justification of the connection between their terms: otherwise the argument (as a logical tool) remains fallacious.
The “slippery slope” approach may also relate to the conjunction fallacy: with a long string of steps leading to an undesirable conclusion, the chance of all the steps actually occurring is actually less than the chance of any one of the individual steps occurring alone.”
You really need to reread that. You think you’re much smarter than you actually are.
“You’re dealing with a typical libertarian who would let this country turn to anarchy”
Today, I talked to a libertarian who was an anarchist, but i repeat myself.......
I probably do. So tell me, how does suggesting same-sex marriage legalization will lead to kangaroo-marriage legalization NOT constitute a slippery slope fallacy?
Enlighten me.
Where in the 50 states and DC does the government not recognize and stand ready to enforce such contracts?
Nowhere, that's where.
But it also recognizes marriage, civil unions, domestic partnerships, etc. Lots of unnecessary and troublesome distinctions.
Evidently you've never heard of people being married by justices of the peace and seaship captains. Not to mention that civil unions are simply marriages in all but name.
The state shouldn’t be in the business of declaring things sacred, should it? Wouldn’t you prefer that be left to religious institutions?
You're not leaving them up to religious institutions if you replace marriages with civil unions which have the same function as marriages.
You seem to be suggesting there’s only one definition of civil marriage. At the moment, there are many, and the definitions vary by state. Same-sex marriage is a reality in several countries, and now two U.S. states. It doesn’t matter what you or I propose, because “same-sex pairings” already qualify as marriages in some parts of the country. That ship has sailed.
That's pretty funny coming from someone who lectured us about Sharia law earlier. Following your reasoning, since Sharia law is already practiced in some jurisdictions, we may as well import it here. After all, that ship has sailed.
The first part of the first paragraph is just nonsense. Yours was a very funny circular argument. So much that I thought you must be joking. Apparently you weren’t, but you still get credit for making me laugh.
Well, you might want to save some of that laughter for yourself since you made the fatal error of accusing a debate rival of both circular reasoning and a slippery slope argument in the same post. So let's take a look at this logically (I'm doing this for the benefit of any lurkers, because I don't think you'll get it):
I said people of the same sex can't marry because marriage is defined as being the bonding of people of the opposite sex. You said that was a circular argument since the definition of marriage can be changed. You then said that it's a "slippery slope" erroneous argument to suggest that we might one day have human-animal "marriage" because such pairings don't fit the definition of marriage. Why not? Well, uh, well, you know, because marriage is between two people, not a person and an animal, and because marriage requires both parties to consent. But if that's the case, then why can't the definition of marriage be changed to include animals and non-consensual members? Are you suggesting that the definition of marriage can't be changed? If so, according to you, that's a circular argument.
You see, when you start defining things in ways that are contradictory to legitimate meaning, you open yourself up to a steady stream of Big Brotherish redefinitions. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Marriage is whatever the state says it is as of this morning.
I see you’re very keen on making a case for kangaroo marriage. Do you know what a “slippery slope fallacy” is? You just constructed an absolutely perfect example, so read about it, and pat yourself on the back.
I'm very well aware of what a slippery slope fallacy is. I should be since I was here at FR when the Lawrence sodomy ruling was handed down. I was accused by people like yourself of employing a slippery slope argument when I said it would lead to same-sex "marriage". Damn, it's a good thing I was wrong, huh?
That is exactly what the gay agenda wants to do! They want the church to be forced to marry them!
Ouch!
Actually we can't. You can only post two, both 4-3, one from Ultra-Left MA the Other from Ultra-Left Kalifornia, both based solely on a very "unique" interpretation of very expansive equal protection clauses in the respective STATE Constitutions.
By contrast, I can post decisions from MN, IN, AZ, NY, WA, KY, NJ, the D.C. Court of Appeals, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, a Federal District Court in Florida and a SUMMARY DECISION OF THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT, as well as the explicit Constitutional Provisions of no less than 27 States.
FYI: The Binding FEDERAL case law, the case which establishes FEDERAL Constitutional law in this regard is the UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT summary decision in Baker v. Nelson 409 U.S. 810 (1972).
You can't trump that one, because it is the law of the land.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.