There wasn't even gay marrage in Star Trek...it's not going to happen

not saying I don't think there should be..i could care less if there was, doesnt bother me, just saying, wont happen for awhile

Mormonism is hilarious.

I once had a sunday school teacher who told us about this time during his missionary jaunt. These two gay guys were goading him and his companion, until they kissed in front of the missionaries. This guy actually had the gall to deck one of them, and while he was telling us this, his face got as red as a tomato and you could see veins beginning to throb in his forehead.

Mormonism has a way of attracting massive homophobe douchenozzles, and I'm convinced a significant percentage are probably denying their own sexuality.

The pedophilia card in a gay marriage discussion is really kind of odd...it's like comparing skeet shooting to murder by gunshot.

By the way, yes this is Mormonism's fault. They all voted the exact same way without question. I miss when religions believed voting pissed off God and that Democracy was slang for Communism.

You're not old enough to talk like that, boy.

oh i am not saying that the mormon church did not contribute heavily monetarily. i just dont think their contribution to the yes on 8 campaign is what sealed the deal. unfortunately, i think the environment for prop 8 to pass already existed even if you cleaved the budget for the yes on 8 campaign in half.

Kirby and Deadman, you guys need to read my previous post in this thread. I guess I didn't make my point very well because you guys got caught up in the details.

Deadman, you're helping make my point. Who says the lines are already well defined? A few decades ago they were well defined saying that homosexuality was completely wrong. Now two adult men or adult women is okay, "but NOT 3, because it's still about two people!" Why is that, and who says so? My point is that it's not black and white.

Kirby, that brings me to your point, about how it's not about morality. Really? "Dependents" can get married. Here in Oklahoma if you're under 18 and want to get married, you're good to go if your parents sign off on it.

You said we should not bar the rights of homosexuals just because it opens the doors for pedophiles and polygamists. Well what is the difference? What is so special about homosexual OR heterosexual marriage? What is so special about it being a COUPLE? Why is homosexuality so okay to you and equal rights for it under the law must be fought for, but polygamy is "eh, whatever"? I'll remove the pedophilia from the discussion because that particular thing is covered pretty well by the idea that children are not fully developed, etc. That one is easy, you're right, but that's not the point. You can't totally accept one thing and totally disregard everything else out of hand without a sincere discussion about it. That's PRECISELY why homosexual marriage is currently such a problem...out-of-hand dismissal.

Like I said before, if you'll go back and read my other post: the problem is that government has endorsed a religious or cultural concept in providing benefits to "married couples". This is exactly why that is a bad idea. Do you see the point I'm making?

Edit: And for the record, I am completely for gay marriage, or more specifically as I outlined, completely for gay and straight unions separated from the religious idea of "marriage". Polygamy I could care less about, too. It's none of my business.

The problem with polygamy is that it typically involves the exploitation of women.

This may have been posted, I haven't read the whole thread.

Well, heterosexual marriages often result in abusive or subservient relationships, too. We can't eliminate someone's rights just because of what "typically" happens. What's the current statistic about divorce? Is it still over half of all marriages that end in divorce? If so, does that mean we should just get rid of marriage altogether since it typically doesn't work?

Polls had Prop 8 failing until the finals days before the election when the "super Mormon, Yes on 8" campaign barraged the airwaves. Never mind the fact that these ads were blatant lies about what voting no on Prop 8 would do.

ok i will concede.

I personally think we should raise children and run society more communally, but that runs into communism which is a bad word. If we look at our actual natural history, not the fake one religions made up, we see small communities of animals all raising or sharing the responsibilities of an infant, which in turn develops the animal very rapidly. My personal theory is that our modern world doesn't properly prepare a child for the "real world," simply because we are so limited to the beliefs of our parent's. In fact, I think that's why Churches work so well. The whole church raises a child, and thus they become more experienced, educated, and equipped for the real world.

At first you run into the issue that a whole country couldn't do that. Then I wondered if a small city could be more communal, and then trade/voting between the communities could be more liberal and democratic. This is a purely economic suggestion, not exactly an ideological separation of people.

Well if you believe that, then who is the government to stop you? That's the whole point of the united states. If you want to raise your children that way, no one should stop you. Democracy doesn't get you that. Democracy gets you the bigger city down the road voting that you're stupid and wrong and then crushing you. That's why we have the rule of law to protect our individual rights.

Consenting adults. Can we move on now?

We already did. But to move back to that, my point was the discussion, not the result. So do you mean any consenting adults? Does that mean you're against the quite common laws allowing people under 18 to marry each other? How many is too many in a marriage?

No, that's not what I mean. It's more than just domestic abuse, it's when crazy religious men (you never hear of women marrying more than one man) collect young wives...even if the women do get themselves out, they're left with nothing.

But those women make a choice to do that. Just like some women choose to marry abusive men. Polygamy doesn't HAVE to be abusive by its definition or anything.

When it comes to what we ought to allow, yes. But the gay marriage issue isn't just about what we ought to allow. It's about what we're constitutionally obligated to allow. And that's why your other questions are really beside the point.

Our laws require equal protection for all. A ban on polygamy doesn't offend that requirement, and neither do state limitations on marriage age. Allowing one segment of the population to engage in a legal marriage with the consenting, legal-age partner of their choice, and denying that to another segment of the population, certainly does. Determinations about how many people can get married and how old they have to be have nothing to do with that.

Why is reasonable polygamy wrong? I'm not talking about harems of people, but if 3 people want to engage in a relationship, why shouldn't they be able to?

That said, I do think the government shouldn't really base these sorts of things on relationships or "family values" like we have. Marriage, legally, should be abolished. A household should be made up of independents with their respective dependents, including homeowner(s), and this be the deciding factor for economic stability and benefits. Why a sexual or spiritual relationship based on morality needs to be involved baffles me. All of the independents engage in a partnership or shared assets or separate sub-households with independent assets that may have other extensive financial relationships.

To be more clear, a gay couple may have a child, and live in one of their parents' homes. The parents would be the joint household owners, renting to their independent son and his joint lover, and his dependent son from a former joint relationship. I'm not sure how that's different than what we have now for heterosexuals, but perhaps we need to make it less about relationships and more about households and dependency. I know elderly sisters who have lived together their entire lives, had husbands who have passed away, and they've been raising foster children together. They should be able to share assets and receive benefits like a married couple, regardless of the fact that they're perfectly straight women living in the same household and sharing all of their assets anyway.

Aw, my mom said they've passed away, within months of each other

By your own reasoning, Michael, homosexuals DO have equal rights. They can marry any legal age adult of the opposite sex, just like heterosexual people. They just don't WANT to. They want to marry under their own rules, according to their own lifestyle. Rightfully so, of course, but just because current law aligns with heterosexual viewpoints and not homosexuals doesn't mean they don't have equal rights any more than polygamists don't have equal rights, because polygamists just want to marry under their own rules, according to their own lifestyle, too.

It's not like we have a law that homosexuals aren't allowed to marry. They just have to marry in the same way the majority does.

Edit: ...and there we go, Kirby hit the nail on the head. Honestly the BEST solution is probably to eliminate government influence entirely in this area.

No. This argument didn't work when the issue was interracial marriage -- everyone has equal rights because they're equally prohibited from marrying someone not of their race -- and it doesn't work now.

No, you're completely missing the point. That IS a valid argument. Everyone DID have equal rights: the right to marry a member of the opposite sex within their own race. The PROBLEM is that the government keeps trying to legislate morality in personal lifestyle choices. It was the problem then, and it's the same problem now. Some group doesn't get to marry the way they want under the law, so they fight for the right to do so. That's not the government's place.

To summarize in a different way: The government is in no position to "give" anyone the right to choose a partner or partners and live the life they want to live. Whether it's a black guy and a white girl, or a white guy and a white guy, or 4 dudes who want to share an apartment to save money, or 4 dudes who want to share an apartment to save money...and have sex with each other all the time. It's none of the government's damn business.

What i'm saying is that first it was interracial that was viewed as wrong...then it was viewed as okay. Then it was homosexual that was viewed as wrong....and now it's shifting to being viewed as okay. Some day it will be some other group that is being oppressed that wants the right to live how they want, and for the sake of argument I use polygamists. You think it's wrong, but someday it may be viewed as okay. And then they'll have the right to do that. Then something else will come along. It's a never ending process, and it's a STUPID process.

Hmm, no.

Care to elaborate? I am not the Supreme Court. You're just another in a long line of people who think they know what's the right and wrong way for other people to live their lives. You're no different than those people who would fight for interracial marriage and condemn homosexual marriage, as far as I can tell.

They said in the decision that marriage is a basic civil right of man. Marriage is a religious concept, and every man should have the right to practice his religion. THAT is why it is a basic civil right. And BASED on that religion homosexual marriage is not allowed. Thus, interracial is supported by the religion and homosexual is condemned. But I'm going off on a tangent here. The point is, marriage is only a basic civil right of man because freedom of religion is a basic civil right.

I have to ask, are you ignoring the parts of my posts that discuss how this is exactly why government has no business anywhere near this and intentionally arguing the least relevant part of what I'm saying?

Sure. The problem with the argument you've posed about is that it ignores real import of marriage altogether. Marriage is emphatically not just a nice little bundle of government-administered benefits that people choose to share with whomever they'd like. It's the state's recognition of the legitimacy of a committed romantic relationship. Denying gays the right to marry someone of their own sex means denying them marriage altogether.



I'm at a loss to understand what I've said here to make you think that I'd tell (or advocate telling) anyone how to live their lives. I mean, I might offer advice if asked, but I certainly wouldn't use the state to enforce my idea of what people ought to be doing. I'm really not even sure what to make of this accusation.



I'll agree that it would be ideal if marriage was a strictly religious institution and the benefits presently associated with marriage were provided to all couples, straight or gay, through "civil unions" or something similarly inoffensively named. But the reality of the situation is that the state has been involved in marriage in this country for as long as we've had a country. Marriage is a civil institution, it's been a civil institution for centuries going back into English common law, and there's no sense pretending it's not or making ineffectual pleas for our government to extricate itself completely from marriage after all this time.

I understand what you want to happen, and I'll even agree that we'd be better off that it did happen. But it won't. State involvement in marriage is older than America itself and it's not going away.

Obvious tangent: When interracial marriage was prohibited by law, it was not widely thought to be "supported by religion." Consider this passage from the trial court opinion in Loving:

"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."



The parts that I'm arguing are the ones I see as the most relevant; I try not to nitpick minor details when I'm responding only to parts of a post. That may be the reason we're talking past each other here. You're talking about what ought to be; I'm talking about what the law says. Not saying one is more valid a topic than the other, but up to this point I think we've been talking about different things.

a legal definition of marriage that slams the door on polygamy, polyandry, pedophilia, and bestiality: "Marriage is a legal union between two human beings of consenting age." the definition of consenting age already having been defined in state constitutions.

the debate (at least in the news) has all been about the definition of marriage. heres one thats simple, allows for homosexual couples, and doesnt open the ridiculous arguments of pedophilia and bestiality. it really is that simple!

(note: i'm not saying the government SHOULD regulate these kinds of things, just that since it does, and has a hard time understanding that homosexuals are people too, they can use that definition.)

you still run into the problem of polygamy. if marriage is going to be defined and legislated as a legal and not religious institution then it has to be defined and will inevitably be exclusionary to some degree. i am not using that as an argument for not allowing homosexual marriage, i am just saying.
if the basis of the argument is that a consenting adults should be allowed to pursue the life that makes them happy so long as it IS consensual*, then the issue of marriage is literally open ended (or nearly so).

neither animals nor minors can legally "consent" to an intimate relationship so bestiality and pedophilia really do not need to even be brought up.

Reduction in genetic diversity. It leads to a decreased resistance to disease and an increased prevalence of common hereditary disorders.

Because it's in the best interests of a government and a society to encourage the activity of reproduction.

The Baby Boomers grew up without family values or an understanding of the importance of procreation, instead choosing to live their lives childless and hedonistically. Consequentially, the economy is stagnating, infrastructures are crumbling and the social programs they set up don't have any money in them because they never had any children to work and pay taxes. And when they die their heir-less estates will be auctioned off for next to nothing, causing the real estate market to bottom out again.

Society needs to encourage people to adopt healthy attitudes toward families and child-rearing. The government can't directly intervene in these activities without becoming overtly authoritarian, so offering financial incentives and a special legal status is a reasonable alternative. On a similar note, your property tax helps pay for public education even if you have no intention of ever having children.

Does the US not have commonlaw partner status for gay people? Very odd.

I would expect the Mormons to like it, considering the commonality of the polygamy slippery slope argument.



And there's no fixing it now. We can't afford to have 8 kids like our grandparent's did, because of the situation our parents put us in by only have one or two of us. Instead, we have to import our workforce, which erodes our national identity, ensuring not only that America falls economically, but that the ideas and values which America stands for will be forgotten.


If it did, would we be having all this trouble? Most people here are supporting adding that, even.

Hold out for peak-oil, then. When we can no longer afford to transport goods, those sort of communities will rise again, likely quite rapidly. Granted, it will also be very difficult for you to get your specific medical needs, and you will probably die. Goodbye.

Yes, because they're queer, they're here and we apparently have to get used to it. Half of the movement is because mommy and daddy disapprove so the fight won't stop until a pair of men can get married in St. Peter's Basilica.

I think we really ARE talking about the same thing here.

Let me try it this way: Marriage is a religious institution which is recognized by the state. As a religious institution, it is defined as a union between a man and a woman. That's the way it IS, right now. Where is it written, or what precedent or basis are you using, to say that marriage IS a romantic union between humans, no matter their race or gender, but that specifies it must be only 2 of them?

You have created an arbitrary rule based on your own values, that you wish to be made into law so that everyone has to accept it. That's where I got "telling people how to live their lives". Your own values say that homosexual marriage is okay, but polygamy is not, and so that's the way the law should be.

I understand and even agree with what you're saying. I also think marriage (or rather, any healthy and committed relationship, to get away from the whole religious idea since it doesn't apply anymore) should be between two people of ANY race, and of ANY gender. I don't think polygamy is right or good. But I also think it's not my place to make that value judgement.

Either marriage is a christian institution which is validated by the state, in which case it skirts on being unconstitutional (especially if other religious definitions of marriage are NOT validated), or it should be a religious institution that is NOT validated by the state at all.

I would say 80%. It should be a strong 4/5 majority.

Most states, CA included, have "common law" partner status for homosexual couples. The only thing that was banned by the proposition was the use of the actual word "marriage". Doesn't seem like a problem to me, since "marriage" is a religious establishment, and the religious people are the voters who made the change. Sort of like a "my house, my rule" thing. Don't come stomping into a religion and trying to change something that is considered "sacred." They invented the idea, they get to pick how it's used.

Note that this is not necessarily my view, just my interpretation of the situation.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/118378/Majority-Americans-Continue-Oppose-Gay-Marriage.aspx
new statistics

Isn't it up to the individual religion whether it's called "marriage" or not?

Except plenty of churches support gay marriage. Why can't they practice freely?

Also, stop talking about polygamy. It's the worst argument in gay marriage ever. Deal with ONE issue at a time. 'Slippery slopes' are never as slippery as people think.

What does wikipedia have to say about the history of marriage?




hrmmm





curious. i think i'm noticing a trend.



huh.



ah, so thats where it happened.

so....humans, even according to those crazies who think the earth is only 6,000 yrs old, have had no religious interference in marriage for the vast majority of our existance. the religious argument here is dumb.

tradition that *****es.

No I know your point completely, I just think you're either trolling or not as smart as you think you are, especially given:



Anyone with a modecum of logic and understanding of the modern world


Yeah... again you make ridiculous comparisons. Mankind spends it's entire existence going "we were so stupid just 10 years ago, what strides we have made since!" so comparing a more enlightened time to a more close minded time isn't helping you at all.


In some situations it's not so black and white, yes, but in other situations it's so damn simple and obvious you have to really wonder about anyone who still thinks theres shades of grey in this issue.



Wow... that's how you really think huh? You think ANYONE is out-of-hand dismissing the homosexual marriage? I'm certainly not totally accepting one thing and disregarding everything else, we have come a LONG way to get to the point where most of the population realizes the old points of view about homosexuality were retarded, you talk as if we stepped over a magically line that shifted everything from 'not ok' to 'ok'. Not everything is so black and white you know :p



That right there IS exactly the problem, let's have that separation of church and state already please.

yes! lets please do!
keep the state out of religious ceremonies (except for some obvious exceptions), and keep "religious" ceremonies out of state and federal policy!

First of all, I am hardly making a "slippery slope" argument, if you would read what I have written. In a way, I'm kind of arguing the opposite of that.

Also, you're being just as closed-minded as the people that I'm sure you hate, who think gay marriage is completely wrong, because clearly you consider polygamy vile and don't want homosexuality associated with it. Again, this is my point.



Apparently not:



That's exactly what I'm saying. Who's to say that in 50 years people won't be saying people like YOU are closed-minded and backward for thinking polygamy is wrong? You're making a value judgment about it based on YOUR views at THIS time.



There are always shades of grey, and I have to wonder about someone who thinks ANYTHING in this world is black and white.