Texas is... progressive?Follow

Refuse to see what, exactly? How your logic stems from a magical world that would never exist?

No, no, we definitely see and understand that part.

Sigh... It's like I have to repeat myself every single time. See. You all insist that you understand my position perfectly, but don't agree, but then you ask questions like this:



Because the goal isn't for society to "help raise children", but to encourage those who produce children to do so in a manner which minimizes the amount of help the rest of us have to provide.

Marriage encourages people to marry before they have children. That is the whole freaking point. If you wait until after a woman gives birth, who's the father? Is he legally obligated at that point? How much time and effort does the state have to go through to try to get him to support and raise that child?

It makes much more sense to get them to marry before the woman gets pregnant.



No. Because then there's no incentive to get people to marry before they have children. Get it? It's not that complicated.





You're going in the exact wrong direction. Heterosexual couples will statistically produce children whether marriage exists or not. It's a natural result of sexual activity, and across a large enough population, it's a statistical certainty. Every year, X number of children will result from Y number of sexual active heterosexual couples. We can't say which couples will produce children, but we can pretty accurately predict how many will.


Society is better off if as many of those heterosexual couples as possible are married. Period. Since we can't know which ones will produce children, we have to provide an incentive to all of them. If they marry, they get the benefits we've attached to marriage (both social and economic).

Gay couples will not produce children as a consequence of their own sexual activity. And please don't talk about artificial insemination or adoption. That is *not* a result of the couple's sexual activity. If the lesbian wishes to marry the guy who's sperm she used to impregnate herself, she's free to. But there is no relationship at all between the person she wants to marry and the child she is producing, nor is there any chance at all of any future child she produces having anything at all to do with the person she wants to marry.


You have to look at it the other way around. Marriage isn't a set of benefits we created for fun and then arbitrarily decided to deny it to a set of people (gays in this case). Marriage itself is just a social construct. Marriage benefits exist as an inducement to get people who might otherwise produce children to do so while married. I have absolutely nothing against gay couples marrying. I have a whole lot of problems with the idea that those marriages should qualify them for state funded or mandated benefits. They simply are not the target for which those benefits were created.

And...? Did you have a point to make?

Interestingly enough, you just pointed out in another thread that "most" != "all", but here you are extrapolating some of our knowledge that we know your ******** inside and out to Ugly, who asserted no such thing.



Wrong, as pointed out time and time again you get the benefits regardless of if you have had children at the time of marriage. One time I decided to stay with your child-centric argument and made the incorrect statement that "Most marriage benefits are dependent on the presence of children." You quickly corrected a mistake I foolishly made by pointing out that this isn't true, and most marriage benefits have nothing to do with children.

Usually after this rebuttal you stop replying for a couple days, and then come back into the thread later and pretend that the rebuttal never existed.



At this point in the argument, someone points out that you're basically saying "Except for the cases where A is B, A is not B." They point out that you are willfully ignoring valid situations in order to prove your point. You never reply with why children already existing in homosexual relationships are not good enough for you other than to pretend your prior statements are valid enough reason.

You're still thinking after the fact.

Would there be more or fewer children in orphanages if more heterosexual couples married prior to having children?



Again. One method attempts to alleviate the problem and thereby reduce the cost, while the other pays for it after the fact. While we can't completely eliminate all conditions which might cause children to end up in an orphanage, it certainly seems like a course which will reduce the number who end up there in the first place would be a good idea...




I'm not sure what you're asking. If marriage benefits are simply applied to any heterosexual couple who marries, then the benefits can only result in an increased percentage of children being born to married couples. Unless you're arguing that somehow fewer people will marry if there are benefits than would if there weren't? Assuming that this can't be the case, then the only situation I can think of which fits what you're saying is if more heterosexual couples get married as a result of the benefits, and have children, but then break up, leaving us with a broken home and a worse situation than otherwise.


For this case to work though, you'd need to assume that those people who married because of the incentives and then divorced after having children would not have had children outside of marriage if the incentives didn't exist. The assumption I'm working on is a heterosexual couple will or will not have sex whether or not marriage exists, and that they may marry regardless of incentives, but will be more likely to if incentives exist. The same number of children will presumably be produced based on the number of couples in all cases. Thus, anything which increases the number of couples who marry increased the number of children born within marriage. Sure. They could divorce, but presumably they would have divorced or not gotten married anyway, so there's no real harm done by creating the incentives. The overall effect is positive.


Unless you're assuming that because of marriage and marriage benefits, two people who otherwise would not have become a sexually active couple will decide to get married and as a result of being married will decide to become sexually active? And then, after having a child, they'll divorce? I find that incredibly unlikely. If that's the case upon which your position rests, I'd look for something else...

Edited, Oct 5th 2009 8:14pm by gbaji

A point? no, just an observation.

There would be at least as many, and probably more. The ones we have now don't simply vanish when the next regressively smaller crop, made regressively smaller by whatever the hell marriage incentive principle you are espousing arrives handed down by congress, you twit. You need to fix a problem of orphans, who are already born and already in non-ideal living. You do not write off things that other people failed to prevent and say, "we'll try harder next time guys, promise, trust us, we're just going to make sure to really encourage marriage this time, you'll see!" And then nothing changes.

There's nothing wrong with combining preventative and curative care. You can't prevent everything, and even if you can, you often wont, or mayn't be able to.

Your entire model is totally fraudulent and I hope it's intellectually dishonest because the contrary would imply that you are a fairly non-sympathetic person, which is to say, barely one at all.

Besides the point, let's say I want to grant you your fantastical ideal of a marriage system in which no unwed mothers birthed, and no couples divorced. Aside from my own ethical condemnation of a system which would consider humans in relation to one another purely for their potential monetary contribution to sosciety, it's still not going to eliminate the orphans who have already slipped through the cracks, your cracks, from the republican parties' ridiculous vilification of sex as a condemnation of evil, ignoring the real "cause" of orphans: people get knocked up because condoms are evil and then they are excluded entirely from any possible redemption in contrast to those who did it right according purely to the ethic of some quite embedded protestantism in the Governmental structure.

And you fall for this hook, line, and sinker, every damn time. You arrive at your own conclusions of why marriage should be exclusive in an economic model, but no one whom I have ever talked to in my entire life has heard of that argument. Some can't even understand it when I explain it to them, because the reason that they are against homosexual marriage is because it is a sin.

I believe that you are not using the same reasoning as the rest of your Party, and I can sympathize, of having a point getting eventually amalgamized into the frothing mass of the republican ideal, because I too, have my own beliefs which combine into a part of the Liberal ideal and to a lesser extent, the democratic ideal, but I realize that no one really cares what I have to say according to that ideal. You seem to think as if you have some power, some ear on the going ons of the minds of the republican ideal, and you do not.

I'd been avoiding this thread, because it has Texas in the title. I was bored tonight, decided to click on it and see what Ari posted this time.

My first thought was "Oh, I guess it has been a while since we had a thread about gay marriage with gbaji."

You know what else we haven't done in a while? Hammered rusty nails into our *****. But just because it's been a while since we last did that isn't a reason to go ahead and do it.

Edited, Oct 6th 2009 12:56pm by zepoodle

Oh, I don't mean to pressure you, but your posts are always entertaining. The gushing stream of insane free association has a soothing effect, provided I don't try to think about it too hard.

Plus, your avatar is a woman wearing a string.

This is my problem with your theory, gbaji.

It obviously doesn't work. Because these benefits have been offered for a very, very long time, and we still have kids ending up in orphanages.

No, I do not believe that the benefits given in a marriage are enticing people get married before they have kids.

Also, any parent, be they single, married, divorced, or widowed, gets a tax break for claiming that child as a dependent. It is not a requirement that they be married to get that tax break.

Your theory that marriage is there to produce "natural" children and only to produce "natural" children is ridiculous, but let's pretend that it's true. It's not working, so it's time to scrap that reason for marriage, don't you think?


Edited, Oct 6th 2009 9:37am by Belkira

You don't speak for all of us.



Well, I think the real question here, Ari, is this: can you actually summon the vitriol to be really unpleasant to someone? I'm not sure, really. I mean, if you think you can, I encourage you to try - after all, what's the worst that can happen? But I don't have much faith in this succeeding. There's no shame in it, you know. I'm fine admitting that I don't have what it takes to be nasty to people, and conduct myself accordingly. It doesn't make you less of a poster, Ari. But, you know, as I was saying, it's like this: basically, what you should do is this: follow your heart, no matter what, unless this happens: someone will kill you if you do, in which case it's best to do this: ramble on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about any old thing, preferably in a single, long, twisting, byzantine sentence that no one will bother to read because it looks like a lot of *********

In summary, if you think you can do nasty, go for it. If you can't, why not just pad your word count with gratuitous use of the word "fuck"?