New York approves Same Sex Marriage.Follow

They may not be far apart, but that doesn't change the fact that you are jumping to whichever one you please, even if the picture doesn't make sense.

Example? The way you just arbitrarily deduced that it's better for couples to stay together. It's WAY better for a child for their parents to get divorced rather than scream at each other all day long.

gbaji's even better than Alma at getting people to play with him. How much better is proven by the fact that he can get so many people to bite even after all these years.

Why does the government care about a stable environment for its citizens? Actually, could you explain what you mean by "stable environment"? Why would the government care if two people marry, or live separately, or live together without being married?

Let's approach this from the other direction and maybe it'll become clearer. Let's pretend that that we live in a magical alternative world in which new humans appear magically out of thin air, fully educated and capable of becoming productive members of society. Would society ever develop marriage? Would any governing body ever create some kind of subsidy to reward/encourage people to get married?

My answers are "maybe, but it'd be a lot less important", and "absolutely not".

What are you answers?



But is there sufficient benefit to the rest of society to justify the cost? Like I've said before, the child wants the cookie, and that's a good reason for using the gift of a cookie as a reward/incentive, but that's not sufficient reason to give it to him. There has to be some other reason which justifies what you're doing.

Put another way, as a single taxpayer, I accept that I pay a bit more relatively speaking for health insurance, loans, social security, pension (if I paid into a pension), and what not than married people because I believe that those things serve as an incentive to people to get married, and the alternative of me having to pay more to raise a ton of children born to single mothers is not as good. I'm willing to do that for that reason. I'm not willing to pay that extra relative amount just because it's a nice thing to do for anyone who wants it. Gay couples don't produce the problem of me having to pay taxes to help single mothers raise their children. I don't care if they marry or not. I do care if heterosexual couples marry or not.



So since you can find exceptions to the general rule and reasons I'm talking about, we should just give the same benefits to couples who can't possibly produce children together? That just makes no sense. There are some arguments to be made for further narrowing down who we grant marriage to, but you want to use that as an argument to go in the other direction. So, since the current system isn't perfect, we should just embrace imperfection and apply it in situations it completely doesn't apply to?



That just seems like really really bizarre logic. When your car gets a small dent, do you take a sledgehammer to it and put dents everywhere else as well? That's basically what you're arguing here. It makes no sense at all to me.

The reason can be as simple as "We want the kid to be happy with us" or even "Why the hell not?".

But usually it's "the kid was good today", or even "if you can stay quiet on the ride home, we'll give you a cookie" though, right? The point being that the parent's reason for giving a child a cookie is not the same reason as why the child wants the cookie. So we should conclude that arguing that married couples get shared pension benefits because they wanted shared pension benefits is missing the reason why the government decided to grant them that thing.

It certainly can tell us why the government chose that benefit to give to them (incentives and rewards work best if they're things people want, right?). It tells us nothing at all about why those couples getting married is so important to the state that it would spend the money to provide that benefit to them. For that, we need to look at this from the other side of the issue. And for that, you need to ask "What does the government gain if more people get married"? Of course, in a democratic system, that also involves asking "What do the rest of us non-married people gain if more people get married?".


As a non-married person, I can tell you what I gain right now (or at least what I'm trying to gain). And it's also why I oppose giving those benefits to gay couples. Because I'm the one who'll be paying for them. I see the benefit to me if more sexually active heterosexual couples get married. It's pretty freaking obvious. Gay couples? Not so much. Not even a fraction as much. There's no more benefit to me to reward them for marriage than to provide the same benefits to non-sexually-involved roommates. That is to say, pretty much zero.

But it doesn't HAVE to be, right? It can be anything. A whim, a bribe, a bit of joy at handing out cookies, whatever. You don't make the kid spell out his five point agenda at how you'll be benefited by his receiving a cookie.

See, rather than try retarded little "logic" (and I use that word loosely with you) games where you try to railroad people into agreeing with you, why not just show us some real, hard evidence of these reasons? Show us where Congresscritter Smith said we should enact a benefit because it'll benefit the state in this way or where Governor Whosit said at the bill signing that the state will benefit in that way.

Oh, that's right, I forgot... you can't. You've never once been able to. So instead you make up stupid analogies that aren't even accurate and say that any reason we have of giving a cookie doesn't count because it's just not good enough in your eyes but your reasons are obviously the only ones that matter.

Well, I guess just making stuff up and insisting it's real is kind of like having real evid--- no, it's not. It's just really pathetic.

I guess we'll find out the first time he has sex, because sex is only for procreation. ***** goes in ****** to make babies!



Cross thread shenanigans.

Oh, I don't fail to grasp that at all. It's one of the pitfalls us conservatives warn about all the time. Once a Democratic system falls into the trap of the majority of voters simply fighting over which group(s) get the biggest slice of the government pie, the country is pretty much screwed. Fortunately, in the US, this hasn't quite happened yet. The Left is trying really hard, but most Americans still vote based on what's actually best for the whole, and not just what's best for them.

Most American's understand that government shouldn't do more than the minimum it has to. Doing otherwise gets us into that trap of limitless government and everyone fighting for benefits for their own group (red/green game failure), which leads to everyone losing in the long run. That's why we'll tend to vote against things even when they benefit our "group".


So you're correct, but forgetting that it goes in both directions. The part of us that acts as the parent attempts to moderate the behavior of the part of us that is the child when it comes to government. Thus, we limit our own benefits to what is really needed (at least we try to). Of course, the Left is like the ID saying "Take what you want; more, more more!" because it wants us to be like children rather than like parents. I could expound on why that is, but the relevant point here is that even people who are married or think they might be married will still tend to act to limit the benefits marriage grants. It's not just about what will benefit them, but also what they're willing to pay for.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

If you are considering the gov't as something that exists separate from the people and does not take their wants into consideration, unless there is some kind of benefit for themselves, you have not described a peoples' government. You've described a dictatorship.



Your use of "understanding" and "should" here are amusing, because they are purely ideology. Personally, I think gov'ts should do EVERY thing they can to protect the rights, freedoms and equality of its people. You seem to think it's fine if inequality is widespread, if the gov't wouldn't fiscally benefit from eliminating it.



A gov't doesn't exist to moderate behavior. That's something that some (aka fascist) gov'ts do. The kind of gov'ts that respond to protests by throwing them all in prison.

What the left is trying to do is to protect the rights, freedoms and the equality of all its peoples, even when that doesn't directly translate into something beneficial for the gov't.

The thing is, they see that we are living in a system that inherently tries to **** over the majority of its peoples. The end result of their attempts to liberate the oppressed is often some stupid bandaid for the problem. But that's all they can do, because the other half is too invested in perpetuating the oppression of those groups.

If this is true, I can only assume your constant references to "the state" as though it were some sort of sentient alien being rather than a collect of citizens with the same thoughts, believes and motives as us non-"state" people are intentionally disingenuous.

Better off now? Only slightly. My children are ok either way (oldest is almost 21 and lives on his own, doesn't really matter). And why in the hell would I worry about everyone else paying in as an incentive to get married?? In case you don't realize this, I was paying into the system when I was single, too. I was paying my own way, I suppose. But I got a bigger tax break, and more options were open to me when I was single. I didn't take those options, but they were there. I don't have them anymore.

Well, at least he didn't link us clips from Beck and Limbaugh.