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.”