I've had a few hours to think about things, and I'm leaning toward entirely removing incentives for marriage. In the present state of affairs - it is time I accept that I live in a society that generally does not "think it is prudent" to encourage stable procreation and maintain that "bridge" between generations. Let’s just move to some sort of flat tax model and I’ll be happy.
don't be ridiculous. so come down off the cross AEON, we need the wood.
society loves children, loves marriage, loves it when people get married, and yes, the government should absolutely encourage this kind of behavior.
it just should include gay people as well. in fact, gay people can procreate. you've heard of sperm donation and surrogacy? you've heard of adoption? a gay marriage blends families as well as any straight marriage.
again, and no one's been able to answer this for me, what can straight people do that gay people can't, and how does this tie into the critical definition of marriage.
Irvine, you mentioned the need to limit government’s role in marriage – how will that work for you?
i was pointing out INDY's hypocrisy. he talks endlessly about how health care reduces choice by increasing government in our lives and thus becoming tyranny, but he's perfectly happy to create and maintain an entirely separate category of relationship. the small-government thing to do is simply to open up marriage to gay people.
and we get all these contortions from you two, and very little substance -- you still have not answered the question about what it is that straights can do that gays cannot.
i am sadly becoming forced to conclude that, for all your words, you have nothing to offer on this front other than the following: all straight relationships are better, in all ways and always, than all gay relationships.
so just come out and admit it?
Child bearing may not be a requirement for heterosexual marriage but it IS, if not the whole point of, quite often the result of such a union. The same cannot, however, be said of homosexual unions and no amount of wishful thinking would make THAT so.
i know some lesbians who are about to bear a child. many gays adopt. many gays have children from previous relationships.
all those gays have more children than martha, and yet she's married.
you've also glossed over the infertile, the post-menopausal, those who marry late in life, and those who choose to have no children.
by your own logic, INDY, we need to divorce them all, post-haste.
I don't say that to be mean or to suggest that the inability to reproduce in any way speaks to the individual worth of a person. It most certainly does not, but it does illustrate why many feel gender -- "male" and "female," "husband" and "wife" -- is not insignificant in defining marriage the way ethnicity, religious creed, et cetera, ultimately is.
but you just did?
do you at least now realize that these traditional understandings of how gender functions in a marriage is now incomplete to address reality? while childbearing often goes with marriage (just as people often marry people from the same race), it is not a requirement of marriage.
and, further, gays and lesbians can and do have children. why should those children be deprived of married parents?
can we please think of the children?
Now I know the meme that says gender roles are interchangeable goes all but unchallenged in feminist theory, postmodern philosophy, pop culture and in liberal circles today, but the majority of Americans remain very skeptical of the idea.
do you even know what postmodernism means?
yes, at the ballot box, you are right. it is something new, and the pace of progress has been swift, but not perfect. but considering this was unimaginable 10 years ago, and considering it was almost 10 years from Selma to the Civil Rights Act, and considering that there's no way that the voters of Alabama would have voted to desegregate the University, do you really think that mob rule over minority rights -- itself hugely suspect, and the reason why we have courts to begin with -- is a particularly admirable model to hold up as some sort of validation of your position?
