SPLIT--> California's Proposition 8 on Same-Sex Marriage

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Please explain how I fit into your paradigm. I married my husband fully intending to never have children. I made sure that would never happen six weeks after my marriage.

What paradigm? The quote -- as I've pointed out repeatedly -- says "Marriage is primarily a license to have children." Not exclusively, not solely. There are of course exceptions to the rule, but again, laws and principles apply to the rule, not the exception.

Most married people will at some point have children.
 
What paradigm? The quote -- as I've pointed out repeatedly -- says "Marriage is primarily a license to have children." Not exclusively, not solely. There are of course exceptions to the rule, but again, laws and principles apply to the rule, not the exception.

Most married people will at some point have children.



for someone who's greatly concerned about religious freedom, you don't seem too concerned about individual freedoms.

most married people marry not to have children, but to express their romantic love and choice of a partner. romantic love and personal choice are topics that are new to marriage. you know, despite thousands of years of the tough taskmasters of biology and stuff.
 
for someone who's greatly concerned about religious freedom, you don't seem too concerned about individual freedoms.

Democracy has equal restraints on all, doesn't it? Individual freedoms collide with social ones all the time, from limits on religious speech to the abundance of pornography. It's a tough old world.

most married people marry not to have children, but to express their romantic love and choice of a partner. romantic love and personal choice are topics that are new to marriage. you know, despite thousands of years of the tough taskmasters of biology and stuff.

Actually, an awful lot of people get married to settle down and raise a family, and that instinct's been around a whole lot longer than romantic love and personal choice. The rise in cohabitation rates amongst Americans in their 20s, and the later marriage age for both women and men, bear this out, at least in part. People don't get married to have sex, or to show who they're with. Generally speaking, these days more than ever, people get married when they start talking about kids.
 
Yes, but that doesn't account for the biological basis of homosexual behaviour, there are other gay animals out there as well as plenty which don't pass on their genes directly. The reality of homosexuality undercuts that line of thinking.

And just to remove ourselves from that what of IVF lesbians? They are able to reproduce and propagate the species (ignore adoption because those situations aren't real parenting).
 
Of course not. Read what I quoted again: "Marriage...is primarily a license to have children". It does not say "Marriage is ONLY a license to have children." If you want to disagree, that's fine, but you're going to have to show how it isn't so.


that's what i've been doing this entire thread. marriage is not primarily anything other than a contract entered into by two parties who have agreed to it's terms and conditions. often children are a part of that, sometimes they aren't, and *how* a couple has children isn't terribly important, is it? or are you going to inadvertently crap on adopted kids like the LA Times article does?

what continues to be lost is the fact that if you are going to allow people like martha to get married, people who are in their 60s and 70s who remarry, people who even want to adopt, then you cannot ban gay people from that institution without coming out and saying, yes, in all circumstances, straight relationships are by definition, always and in all ways, better than gay ones.

so just come out and say it.

As far as valuing a loving father and mother who love each other and their children, I'm only going based on precedent set by millennia of biological, chemical and social human development. Again, is there another precedent to go on?


since i have to go cook spaghetti and meatballs for my partner as we pantomime what a real relationship must be like and imagine just how much better the spaghetti would taste if it were informed by the irreducible and eternal mysterious and joyful differences between a penis and vagina -- the poor kids who ever have us as dads, the hours they'll spend sitting in the windowseat watching the rain and pining for mommy -- i'm just going to post an old quote of Yolland's that always springs to mind whenever the millennia argument is trotted out to, as ever, justify simple prejudice:


Romantic love, mutual personal fulfillment, and certainly any idea of who the prospective bride or groom would rather be intimate with were quite beside the question. This is not to say that something in some ways resembling our notion of romantic love did not exist; pretty clearly, it did (e.g. lucky Jacob and Rebekah, though who knows whether she also "loved" him after that one brief encounter)--but, as a hoped-for "bonus" that might develop with time and shared hardship, not as anyone's right to expect, let alone demand, of their parents as a precondition for marriage. Such a demand, as well as any other demand whose fulfillment might thwart the goals of marriage as conventionally understood (be fruitful and faithful, in the spirit of submission to the will of your parents and the greater good of Israel and its laws), would have been seen as at best laughably audacious, and at worst dangerously impious (how dare you put what pleases your own desires before your obligations to our customs?).

Happily for heterosexuals though, we've managed the trick of grafting a wholly foreign set of sensibilities about love, personal fulfillment, and individual autonomy onto this matrix which was never intended to accomodate it. And...3000 years and thousands of miles away from all that grim nose-to-grindstone stuff...doesn't it just feel oh, so right?




That's not the point of this thread. The point of this thread is whether people have the right to vote on such matters as part of a free democracy. Your inability to see how redefining marriage at the core level affects the values society places on gender and how society defines family aside, there are those who would like to vote on these matters and honor the time-tested principles of democracy upon which the country was founded. Is that a problem?


the problem is that it is perverse to vote on civil rights. certainly, it's a tactic, and Prop 8 will likely be defeated, and the largest state in the country and the 8th largest economy in the world will treat gay people like people. but the point remains -- the schools had to be desegregated by "activist" judges. so, it seems, does marriage.

but if you want to continue to argue that boys will be boys, and girls like pink dresses, go right ahead. most of us left that behind in the 1970s.
 
Democracy has equal restraints on all, doesn't it? Individual freedoms collide with social ones all the time, from limits on religious speech to the abundance of pornography. It's a tough old world.


and perhaps one day, you'll feel what it's like to be told that you, nathan, are a second class citizen and that you are, by definition, inferior to others.
 
Nathan, why do you keep pointing out an op-ed as your source as if it's the end-all-be-all?

And in what way does allowing homosexuals to marry harm the "reproduction and propogation (sic) of the species?"
 
Not me. :wave:

So, where do I fit in? You didn't answer my question.



this is, in just one way, why i'm glad we all had brunch.

we all known each other. i fail to see how the structure of my relationship is any different than martha's. we're four very different people. i'm sure that our relationships function differently. i'm sure we'd have vastly differing parenting styles (maybe). but how are we actually *different* -- and, thusly, said difference is enough to justify discrimination -- other than the genitalia thing. and other than the fact that she's married, and i can't be.

except maybe, just maybe, i want kids and martha doesn't. :ohmy:
 

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I have to ask this one question.

Define "all."

Could one be in favor of same-sex marriage but maybe still wonder what kind of Pandora's box "all" opens up?
 
DODGE

Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): dodged ; dodg·ing
transitive senses
1 : to evade (as a duty) usually indirectly or by trickery <dodged the draft by leaving the country> <dodged questions>
2 a : to evade by a sudden or repeated shift of position b : to avoid an encounter with
intransitive senses
1 a : to make a sudden movement in a new direction (as to evade a blow) <dodged behind the door> b : to move to and fro or from place to place usually in an irregular course <dodged through the crowd>
2 : to evade a responsibility or duty especially by trickery or deceit
 
sigpic14498_4.gif


I have to ask this one question.

Define "all."

Could one be in favor of same-sex marriage but maybe still wonder what kind of Pandora's box "all" opens up?

Why is "two consenting adults" so hard to grasp for some people?

There is no suprise box full of people who want to marry goats, cars, or robots...
 
Well there was that woman who was married to the Berlin Wall. If we let gay people get married just think of all the women who will want to marry walls (if they aren't already married to a man who acts like a wall). So we just can't allow that. Save the walls.
 
i definitely believe in equal rights.
gay people should be able to get married so they can be just as miserable as everyone else.
it's really not fair that gay people are so happy.
 
DODGE

Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): dodged ; dodg·ing
transitive senses
1 : to evade (as a duty) usually indirectly or by trickery <dodged the draft by leaving the country> <dodged questions>
2 a : to evade by a sudden or repeated shift of position b : to avoid an encounter with
intransitive senses
1 a : to make a sudden movement in a new direction (as to evade a blow) <dodged behind the door> b : to move to and fro or from place to place usually in an irregular course <dodged through the crowd>
2 : to evade a responsibility or duty especially by trickery or deceit

Nice edit to dodge something yourself. :rolleyes: Since your question has been answered here so much we're all ready to puke, I'll answer yours after you answer mine about families headed by single moms: Are they real families since they don't have an opposite gender parent at home?
 
Nice edit to dodge something yourself. :rolleyes: Since your question has been answered here so much we're all ready to puke, I'll answer yours after you answer mine about families headed by single moms: Are they real families since they don't have an opposite gender parent at home?



my guess is that it's not that they aren't "real" families, but that they are less than "ideal" -- and, obviously, since they aren't the ideal, and society can only be expected to protect and preserve and promote someone's idea of perfection, they don't count as much as do "ideal" families.

because there's only one way to ever do things. ozzie and harriet aren't so different from mary and joseph who aren't so different from tony and carmela. after all, these families are all exactly the same, aren't they? what was true 5,000 years ago is true today. dad comes home from work to mom and happy children and kisses her on the cheek and they all talk about their day. and ozzie and harriet and mary and joseph and tony and carmela are able to pass along their magical alchemy that comes from their heterosexuality, without which their children would be disadvantaged.

ultimately, this is what drives me insane, and always has. no matter the subject. that there's only one way to do things. that there is an ideal, and we bring ourselves to the ideal. and i guess that's a very Christian way of looking at the world. there's how Christ lived, and then there's how you live, and the gap in between is sin. and, thusly, our laws should only protect those who strive to be ideal/Christ-like, for anything that is different is, by definition, inferior and bad for us.

there isn't one way to be a man. there isn't one way to be a woman. there isn't one way to be a heterosexual or a homosexual. there isn't one way to be a father. there isn't one way to be a mother. we can point to several characteristics that might make successful fathers, or mothers, but that's not to say that there aren't a multitude of different ways to be a successful parent.

if you believe in freedom, if you believe in people, if you believe that people are capable of making decisions for themselves -- if you don't believe that people need to be guided away from sin/less-than-ideal by the government (and how ironic! the same people who decry government intervention in our markets love to use the government to encourage people to live more like they think we all should live) -- then you can't believe that there's only one way to do things.

take sex. you could argue that sex is "best" when it is between two married heterosexuals. preferably after they've showered and brushed their teeth. missionary position, too. however, we don't promote this ideal because it doesn't take into account wondrous human diversity nor does it even come close to covering the human experience. so, what we do, is that we make certain kinds of sex illegal because we know that someone is harmed. thus, we make sex with children and animals illegal. we make rape illegal. we can show clear, direct harm, and then that activity is made illegal.

what we don't do is say "all forms of sex that are not the ideal are illegal."

there are some conservatives -- Rick Santorum, for example -- who do think this. he thinks that we do have a vested interest in knowing what goes on in people's bedrooms. NBC argued for this as well. that whenever people have sex that isn't the "best" kind of sex, then someone is getting hurt somewhere. this is the Christian argument that the homosexual is hurting himself when he has sex (or falls in love, or has a relationship with) with a same-sexed partner. because this isn't ideal for people. because we need to propagate the species. because we must encourage reproduction. so we cannot condone any form of sex that doesn't (at least in intent) accomplish what some believe is the true "purpose" of sex -- procreation.

and this is what nathan's argument all boils down to. there's only one way that a marriage can be.

unfortunately, this ideal is based in a nostalgic, mystical past that never actually existed. and as with all ideals, it never comes close to applying to all people.

so what do we do? we let people decide for themselves, give them the tools to be successful at creating their own relationships, and we make illegal those things that demonstrably harm individuals or society.

if you want to argue that homosexuality hurts the individual and society as a whole, by all means. go ahead and do so.

but until you're prepared to do that. until you're prepared to say that the only ideal marriage has biologically produced children from a male/female pairing. until you're prepared to kick out people who don't match up with whatever said "ideal" actually is, then you don't have an argument at all.

you just have tortured prejudice. and *that* hurts individuals. and society.
 
I'm on deadline, so I can't respond to all of this.

I will say however that the whole issue of "real/legitimate" families and "fake/illegitimate" families is a false dichotomy. Read over all my posts again, and you'll see that I've never said that, because I don't think that. Despite martha and irvine's comments to the contrary (comments made out of understandable emotion and pain), the issue is actually much more complicated. The question at hand is whether laws of the land are meant to govern for the rule, or the exception. The laws of the land must hold to an ideal -- say, for example, "murder is wrong" -- and while there are extenuating circumstances in some cases of murder (self-defense, etc), the courts do not then say, "murder is no longer wrong because of the exceptions to the rule." The courts say, "murder is wrong, and here are the exceptions."

I do think that the best situation for families is a family where both the mother and the father love one another and their children. Of course there are people who get married without intending to procreate. Of course there are some lesbian parents who can be better parents than the Spears, to quote Irvine's favorite example. But again, laws aren't meant to govern the exceptions to the rule. Laws hold up the ideal. Those who don't meet that ideal have the right and the freedom to argue that their situation merits special consideration, but once we start to abolish the ideal itself, what are we left with?

I had a long conversation with a lesbian friend of mine last week about this very issue over coffee, because I'm willing to engage and be engaged on this issue. She ended our talk by talking about friends of hers who are in two different threesomes, and asked the question: "Shouldn't my friends be allowed to get married too?" The point being, if we allow people to define marriage however we want, can't her friends get married? Some may scoff and mock this question, but it is a real one. (And, for the record, it annoys me when stupid Christians start ranting and raving about people marrying their dogs, because that's a ridiculous non sequitor.)

I quote the LA Times Op-Ed piece because the author has actually spent time researching and studying the sociology and development of families throughout history, so he's in a position to know, and he's a self-described liberal, which takes this out of an easy partisan paradigm. And when he points out that the primary (though by no means exclusive) reason people get married is children -- a reason born out more and more by modern statistical data -- we get into the messy issue of whether gender matters in human development and whether having both a mother and a father should be considered essential for families.

Irvine's entire post is predicated on knocking those who believe there is "one way" to do things, and he connects that to Christians -- as if Christians are the only ones with ideals. Idealism isn't a Christian virtue -- rather, it is the backbone of our entire legal system. To say that having ideals codifies prejudice is ridiculous. (The Declaration of Human Rights is an ideal, for God's sake.) There are core principles, laws, and values which govern the land. When we begin to sacrifice the ideal -- whatever that ideal may be -- or redefine what the ideal is, or pretend that the ideal doesn't exist, we start down a slippery slope. If we are going to do so as a society, then in a democracy where principles of self-rule and self-governance dominate, I think we ought to be allowed the freedom to vote on such decisions. Otherwise, the ideal we're sacrificing is the ideal of self-governance and democracy. And that's not a hill I'm willing to die on.
 
Personally I think the only "ideal" is parents who love one another and their children. I think it's ridiculous to suggest that any majority of one man/one woman ever live up to some perfect ideal above all others. Gender has nothing to do with ability to love and to be a parent.
 
I will say however that the whole issue of "real/legitimate" families and "fake/illegitimate" families is a false dichotomy. Read over all my posts again, and you'll see that I've never said that, because I don't think that. Despite martha and irvine's comments to the contrary (comments made out of understandable emotion and pain), the issue is actually much more complicated. The question at hand is whether laws of the land are meant to govern for the rule, or the exception. The laws of the land must hold to an ideal -- say, for example, "murder is wrong" -- and while there are extenuating circumstances in some cases of murder (self-defense, etc), the courts do not then say, "murder is no longer wrong because of the exceptions to the rule." The courts say, "murder is wrong, and here are the exceptions."


you're comparing murder to marriage? one thing is a specific human action that has a demonstrable consequence, and the other is a legal contract that confers a variety of benefits and social status. it's an exceptionally poor comparison.

there are no "ideals" involved in marriage. and to try to suggest that there are, or that there should be, comes very close to social engineering, and that itself is the slippery slope -- 50 years ago it was argued that God created different races for a reason, that's why he put them on different continents, and therefore they shouldn't marry because of the mixed children they might produce. that's garbage, and we know that.

and, further, even if you believe that there are specific "ideals" (standards?) that all potential couplings must measure up to, i'd be curious to see how a gay couple couldn't measure up to your standards. what is the difference between marth and steve and irvine and memphis? neither couple can produce their own biological children, but so what? how is this necessary to the "ideal" marriage? further, how does not having one "ideal" mean that you are barred from entrance into this contract?



I do think that the best situation for families is a family where both the mother and the father love one another and their children. Of course there are people who get married without intending to procreate. Of course there are some lesbian parents who can be better parents than the Spears, to quote Irvine's favorite example. But again, laws aren't meant to govern the exceptions to the rule. Laws hold up the ideal. Those who don't meet that ideal have the right and the freedom to argue that their situation merits special consideration, but once we start to abolish the ideal itself, what are we left with?


this is incredibly vague. laws do not hold up the ideal -- in fact, i don't even know what you mean by this. and you're, again, ignoring the fact that not all marriages are interested in children.

i also don't think you're quite understanding how patronizing and insulting you're being when you talk about "ideals." you're saying that, through an unchosen involuntary characteristic, i am incapable of being in an "ideal" relationship. and that, logically, you yourself are in said "ideal" relationship. so what you are absolutely doing is judging people on their form, but not their content. you are judging a relationship on its form and not its content.

that's the very definition of prejudice.

and it absolutely fits in to the Christian analogy i offered. the Spears have the potential to be ideal, since they are heterosexuals all around, only they fall short of that through mistakes, shortcomings, etc. (i.e., sin) if they can repent and be better, they can be ideal. but Ellen and Portia are flawed from the beginning, no matter how good they strive to be, they are fundamentally flawed and should thusly be barred from said institution.

really, stop and think about this.



I had a long conversation with a lesbian friend of mine last week about this very issue over coffee, because I'm willing to engage and be engaged on this issue. She ended our talk by talking about friends of hers who are in two different threesomes, and asked the question: "Shouldn't my friends be allowed to get married too?" The point being, if we allow people to define marriage however we want, can't her friends get married? Some may scoff and mock this question, but it is a real one. (And, for the record, it annoys me when stupid Christians start ranting and raving about people marrying their dogs, because that's a ridiculous non sequitor.)


if people want to argue for polygamy, they can do so on it's own terms. to conflate it with the "well, then what's next?" question that gets tossed around with same-sex marriage is not just insulting, but it's fundamentally wrong.

if one of the members of those threesomes is heterosexual or even bisexual, then they can get married to a person of their opposite gender. they have access to the institution of marriage that i do not have. there is no discrimination there. any heterosexual polygamist can marry one woman of his choice. there is no discrimination there.

and polygamists are free to argue their case on it's own merits. don't drag same-sex marriage into that discussion, because it is not the same thing.



I quote the LA Times Op-Ed piece because the author has actually spent time researching and studying the sociology and development of families throughout history, so he's in a position to know, and he's a self-described liberal, which takes this out of an easy partisan paradigm. And when he points out that the primary (though by no means exclusive) reason people get married is children -- a reason born out more and more by modern statistical data -- we get into the messy issue of whether gender matters in human development and whether having both a mother and a father should be considered essential for families.


you can go back and read that thread to see the numerous holes kicked into that piece by every poster other than yourself. i can also point you to gays who are against same-sex marriage. that doesn't make their point of view any more illogical and ill conceived. there are lots of Auntie Toms to be found, and simply quoting one doesn't confer any legitimacy onto the point being made.

if you're going to say that marriage must measure up to "ideals" then i suppose it does follow that parenthood must measure up to "ideals" -- so what you're proposing, nathan, is that children be removed from families that have divorced, families where one partner has died, single parent families and children raised by their grandparents.

after all, laws promote the ideal, right?


Irvine's entire post is predicated on knocking those who believe there is "one way" to do things, and he connects that to Christians -- as if Christians are the only ones with ideals. Idealism isn't a Christian virtue -- rather, it is the backbone of our entire legal system. To say that having ideals codifies prejudice is ridiculous. (The Declaration of Human Rights is an ideal, for God's sake.) There are core principles, laws, and values which govern the land. When we begin to sacrifice the ideal -- whatever that ideal may be -- or redefine what the ideal is, or pretend that the ideal doesn't exist, we start down a slippery slope. If we are going to do so as a society, then in a democracy where principles of self-rule and self-governance dominate, I think we ought to be allowed the freedom to vote on such decisions. Otherwise, the ideal we're sacrificing is the ideal of self-governance and democracy. And that's not a hill I'm willing to die on.


you've really misunderstood what is meant by ideals.

the Declaration of Human Rights is not a list of aspirations -- what i think you really are talking about when you say "ideals" -- but a list of crimes that human beings have the right not to be subjected to on the basis of their humanity.

you want to make marriage an aspirational union. that's fine.

just make sure you understand that what you're saying.
 
you're saying that, through an unchosen involuntary characteristic, i am incapable of being in an "ideal" relationship. and that, logically, you yourself are in said "ideal" relationship. so what you are absolutely doing is judging people on their form, but not their content. you are judging a relationship on its form and not its content.

That's just it, form vs content. It's the CONTENT of a marriage that matters. My parents' marriage-well the content was/is horrible on many levels but boy oh boy it's a man and a woman. I'm just wondering why that didn't amount to a hill of beans for me.

If some straight people spent half as much time worrying about the content of their own marriages, rather than the form of the marriages of people they don't even know anything about, well marriage would be safe and strong and sanctified for all eternity.
 
If some straight people spent half as much time worrying about the content of their own marriages, rather than the form of the marriages of people they don't even know anything about, well marriage would be safe and strong and sanctified for all eternity.

On this we agree. The problem is that Prop 8 is before us, and any such discussion here on the prop is two-fold: there are those who think this shouldn't even be an issue for the voters (which I disagree with purely on democratic principles, which no one has yet addressed), and there are those who are passionate on both sides of the issue. Because any discussion on this matter is bound to end in a stalemate, the fundamental question left to argue is whether the citizens of a democracy founded on principles of self-governance have the right to vote on an issue that carries substantial social ramifications.
 
there are those who think this shouldn't even be an issue for the voters (which I disagree with purely on democratic principles, which no one has yet addressed)

When the "ideal" marriage changed from transfer of property, the woman, to a loving relationship based on companionship and love, who voted on that?


I asked this question.
 
Because any discussion on this matter is bound to end in a stalemate, the fundamental question left to argue is whether the citizens of a democracy founded on principles of self-governance have the right to vote on an issue that carries substantial social ramifications.



so the majority gets to vote on whether or not to extend basic equal treatment under the law to a minority (who already have a long history of social, legal, and political oppression).
 
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