Vermont Legislature Legalizes Gay MarriageFollow

Ash,



I'm not saying they shouldn't. Or that I would do anything to prevent their pursuit of happiness. What I am saying is that our society has certain social mores and norms that should not be ignored simply because a very small class of society feel they are being discriminated against. I'm a single white man, welcome to the club.





Edited, Apr 15th 2009 2:56pm by hangtennow

So you'll cast a "yea" vote to legalize same-sex marriage?

Excellent!

Oh. So the "I won't do anything to prevent their pursuit of happiness" **** was lip service.

Gotcha.

Ah, good point.

So, Varrus, you'll just abstain from voting on that issue, right?

Someone getting married infringes on your rights?

Ash,



I don't mind if they get married in their church. What I mind is them forcing me, we the people, to openly recognize a behaviour my religion tells me is immoral.

I wish you would apply some of this logic to the tax debate.



See how that works?

The government currently tells me that I'm not free to marry anyone I want, whether I am gay or straight, based on your religious beliefs.

So my problems with your sentence: A) you're not "the people." B) you're being asked to "recognize behavior" is much less of a hassle than someone being told they can't marry whom they choose. C) The paltry, imagined amount of taxes you are supposedly going to now be forced to pay "in support of gay marriage" is laughable, and a poor argument.

First off, there's technology in testing that allows a child to be born from two egg cells.. But far simpler than that, when two homosexual people use a surrogate parent, it's a child that would not have been produced otherwise.

Way to ignore the context there...

You, like most others, are still looking at this backwards. Stop looking at it from the perspective of the individual trying to obtain equal benefits based on actions they *might* take. Look at it from the perspective of the entire society and which groups will all by themselves, with no special medical intervention, produce children.

The fact that a gay couple could finagle a way to come into possession of a child is not the issue. They wont *ever* have one unless they make an active choice to do so. Not just a choice to be a couple. Not just a choice to have sex. But actually choosing to go beyond those things to end up with a child.

Take all the heterosexual people in the world. Pair them up. Take all the homosexual people in the world. Pair them up. With no medical intervention, which group will produce children and which wont? It's not complex. It's basic biology. We're not trying to give special benefits to people who choose to do something, but to avoid a negative effect on society as a whole which will occur as a natural consequence of people forming into couples and having sex with each other.

We don't know which heterosexual couples will produce children, but at any given time a statistical number of them will. And if we don't create something like "marriage" and use some mechanism to try to get those heterosexual couples to bind themselves together prior to producing those children, society as a whole will be negatively impacted. That's the objective here. That's why we have this thing called marriage.


We didn't create it because we like straight people more than gay people. We created it because straight people having sex will result in babies. And if we don't have some method to ensure that the father of that child is legally bound to support that child, then the rest of society will have to bear the cost (as well as the mother).

I just don't understand why I keep having to repeat this very obvious fact over and over and over. Do you really think the benefits for marriage are just arbitrary? We just randomly decided we want to reward people for becoming couples and that's it? Sheesh!




Huh? And if Dr Moreau creates a child in his lab, that's a child that wouldn't have been produced otherwise, but I'm not going to give him tax breaks and special benefits either...


The point is to make sure that the fathers of children are legally bound to help with their care and support. A lesbian using a turkey baster to get knocked up and then insisting that we legally recognize her girlfriend as the child's second mother isn't a very valid argument IMO. Surrogacy is irrelevant. It's the biological father and mother who are. We want to encourage as many children to be raised by their biological parents as possible. The fact that this doesn't work 100% of the time is no reason to apply the incentives we have for this to relationships which deliberately attempt to break that objective.


The tires on my car occasionally go flat. But that does not lend me to go into the shop and tell my mechanic to slash my tires. Your argument is essentially the same. I'm sorry. It's not about hating or liking a given group. It's about recognizing a societal objective designed to maximize the quality of the environment that the children of our society grow up in. That's really it.

At the risk of answering for Varrus (yikkes!), it's not about the "freedom to oppress homosexuals", it's about the freedom to not have to pay to subsidize someone else's life choices/orientation/whatever.

The second you are asking me (and everyone else) to provide benefits in return for two people marrying, it becomes my business who those benefits apply to and why. I'm paying for a gay couple to marry, just as I am for a straight couple to marry. I can see a valid reason why paying for the straight couple makes sense. I see zero reason for paying for the gay couple.

And for the umpteenth time (and yes, I know you were responding to Varrus), it's not oppressing someone's rights to not provide them with a financial benefit. Can we please stop making this characterization?




No. You are insisting that the rest of us must sacrifice some of our liberty so that a group of people can feel a little better about themselves.

You, and most people, simply view things completely backwards. No one has a "right" to receive any benefits, no matter who else receives them. You may argue that it's unfair, but don't say that anyone's rights are being infringed. The only rights being infringed upon are those of the people who are forced to subsidize those relationships.

Except that in this case, the only reason you oppose blondes marrying is because you don't want more blondes in the world. So it's pure bias against blondes. Even then, you certainly have a right to oppose marriage benefits for blonde couples if you want, but others have a right to call your views anti-blond, or blonde-biased.



They are completely different, and no amount of insisting they are the same makes them so. Interracial couples (of opposite sex) can and do produce children. Gay couples do not. The societal need to provide incentives for interracial couples to marry are just as legitimate as those between two white people. The same need does not exist with regard to gay couples.



No. The loudest voices (or at least the ones given the most air time) are those who oppose gay marriage on some form of moral ground. But that's a strawman. Even if there are 10,000 really bad reasons to oppose gay marriage and just one good one, you need to argue against the one good one if you want to prove your position is the right one.

No matter how many people oppose gay marriage by stating that "Homosexuality is a sin!!!", it does not change the fact that the reasons for which we fund those marriage benefits simply do not apply to gay couples at all. And yes. You can argue that they don't apply to all straight couples either, which is a wonderful argument for further tightening restrictions on those benefits, not for loosening them to add a group for which the benefits are 100% unnecessary.

Edited, Apr 15th 2009 8:39pm by gbaji

Er? So is everything everyone else is writing in this thread. Or do you think "not letting gay people marry is a violation of their rights" isn't also an opinion?

The difference is that I'm backing up my opinion/position with a whole set of logic and reason, while most people are just repeating their opinion over and over.



Except that the issue at hand was economic. It was about the fact that two people sharing expenses would spend less between the two of them, thus having more to spend on other things, and thus benefiting the economy.

Whether the two people do that for social interaction or purely for financial reasons is absolutely irrelevant to the rest of the society. The impact is identical in either case. Which was my point...



Again. The only aspects of the relationship I'm considering are the ones which affect the other people in the society. That's because the benefits need to be justified based on some positive effect generated to them, not the people in the relationship.



That's your opinion (hah). But I'd love to hear you explain how I am affected in any way by whether the two people living in the apartment down the street are married or just roommates. Now, if you can come up with anything significantly different between those two which does not involve children in anyway, I'd love to hear it.

Edited, Apr 15th 2009 9:01pm by gbaji