Gore sexual assualt Follow

How many times do we have to say that we actually don't care that much about Gore?

Ted Kennedy was the darling of liberal Democrats. He's dead. We haven't decided on who's getting that title just yet, but it sure as hell wouldn't be Gore. He's not even a party leader any more; hasn't been for a decade. Howard Dean is more likely to be our favorite living Dem than Gore is.

Then again, Republicans consider Mrs. Sarah "I quit my job" Palin to be a spokesman for their party even though she no longer holds any elected office, so maybe that's why you guys are so confused.

Thankfully, YOU aren't in charge of what constitutes marriage. Tell ya what, go become a Supreme Court judge, then maybe your opinion will matter. It would be hilarious to watch your Senate hearing.

techno,



Funnier than watching that fat whale blubbering all over the place and recusing herself from the werewolf vs vampire trial?

People choose to shack up for a variety of reasons. Whether they choose to formalize the relationship (get hitched, make an honest man out of him, etc) is a decision which may hinge on financial issues.



Most people don't plan their lives that way. They meet someone. They fall in love. They move in together. And then maybe they think about marriage. Some percentage of those couples will result in children. Anything that makes the "go past thinking about marriage and actually get married" happen improves the statistical results for those children.

A whole lot of young naive couples will happily go into marriage not yet knowing all the trials they'll face as a couple. Put them in those trials, 6 month baby screaming every night, money problems, etc, and the odds of them getting married after that point drop to near nothing. Get them to take those vows before that stage and most of them will stick it out.




I'm not sure how you can conclude that. All one needs do is compare the statistics between married couples getting divorced within the first few years of having a child together and the number of non-married couples getting married within the first few years of having a child together to see that there's a huge difference. It's too much of a difference to just represent personality differences between the two sets. The most significant factor is whether or not they took those vows and committed to married *before* having a child. It's not even hard to understand why this is important. For most people divorce is seen as a failure. You stood before your entire set of family and friends and said you'd stick it out with this person for the rest of your life. That's an enormous factor. If you've never done that, it's a lot easier to simply walk away from the relationship as soon as things aren't fun and easy anymore.


Of course it's important to get young couples to marry before they have children together. It's critically important.

I'd like to state that I'm still waiting for gbaji to respond to my question as to whether or not he believes we should separate marriage benefits into "just for getting married" and "for being married and having kids" categories.

I mean, Christ, it's been nearly a page since I asked it and he's managed to say nothing of substance yet in that time. :-)

Fine. I'll answer you, you darn attention ***** you! ;)



Because I think you're looking at the issue incorrectly. It's not about "benefits related to having children" and "benefits not related to having children". It's "benefits granted by the state to those who marry" and "effects created naturally as a result of entering into a marriage contract in the first place". I suspect you are blending those together, and it's important to keep them separate.


The state mandated marriage contract contains a set of conditions which most people wouldn't choose to enter into if they had a choice. If you were free to write you own contract, you might not put all the same financial entanglements and responsibilities in there, for example. But the state wants people to enter into that full contract, so it creates benefits to try to get them to do so. If you want the benefits, you have to enter into "this" contract, not just any marriage contract you want to write up to define your relationship.

We define both sets of things together, because one is a pre-requisite for the other. Couples would have to be bound to the full set of conditions in the marriage contract in order for their marriage to qualify in the future for the set of benefits, right? If we delayed granting them those benefits until they had children, you'd be back in the situation where most people wouldn't choose to enter into that contract in the first place, figuring they'd wait until they had children (why take the negatives if you don't get the positives until later?), but then once they have a child, they will be less likely at that time to choose to get married at all.

Which benefits are directly related to children and which aren't is kinda irrelevant to the issue. And some of them are most relevant to couples building a life where they intend at some future point to have children. Certain home loan programs, for example. You might want to marry and buy a house *before* you have children, right? That would be ideal. But if you can't get the better loan rates until after you do, it kinda nullifies the whole thing. We'd now be encouraging people to have children before they are financially situated, which is not what we want to do.


Make sense?

Yup. I read the list of Justices and their positions incorrectly. My bad. It's still a dubious argument to make. Just repeating "but they found it to be a fundamental right" over and over fails to address two aspects which I have mentioned and which you have ignored:

1. The label of "fundamental right" does not mean that it absolutely cannot be infringed. The test for this typically is whether the infringement is necessary to the purpose of the law in question. Speech is a fundamental right as well, yet we penalize slander and perjury. If one can show that the purpose of the marriage laws require denying the benefits contained within to couples of the same sex, then the requirement of a couple consisting of one man and one woman isn't a violation of the constitution. And that argument most certainly can be made, no matter how much you don't like it.

2. The precedent for labeling marriage a "fundamental right" does rest on the principle of the right to bear children extended through various courses of rulings on contraceptive use, involuntary sterilization and into the cases we've argued about in this thread. It's very clear that the court has connected marriage rights with procreation rights through case history. To then arrive at an end point, simply quote a bunch of previous cases declaring marriage to be a "fundamental right" and ignore the context within which they made those statements would be fallacious at best.


If you've been actually reading those cases, and not just skimming them for key phrases you can repeat, you'll have noticed the frequency with which the decision rest with an examination of the "purpose" of a law, and the applicability and necessity of whatever restrictions are carried with it. It would be hard to read any state marriage laws and not conclude that the whole purpose of writing up a set of state mandated contractual requirements and then tying those (along with some other conditions) as a prerequisite for a set of state mandated benefits is to encourage people to enter into the specific contract defined by the state. There can be no other reason for the state to do this. From that starting point, it's really just a matter of examining other criteria to see if they fit with that "purpose". And when you start listing off things like "can't be in another marriage contract", "must be legally able to enter into a contract", "must not be within a certain blood relation to each other", the condition at question, "Must be a couple consisting of a man and a woman" certainly "fits" the purpose of the law itself.


Judicial decisions are made by doing more than just quoting out of context phrases from other cases and applying them literally to the case at hand. And while you love to say that I know nothing of the law, it's strange that you continually refuse to acknowledge this fact. Bad judges do it the way you think it works. And lower court judges quite often make horrible rulings by doing this. But to their credit the Supreme Court usually looks a bit deeper at the issue itself (some really bad examples excepted). It's not really about whether one likes or hates gay people. It's about whether someone looks objectively at our marriage laws, and asks "What purpose do they serve?". Most people would (or should!) conclude that they must serve some purpose beyond just giving benefits to groups of people we like while denying them to groups we don't like. And when you glean that purpose, it becomes pretty obvious that there is no unlawful discrimination by not providing said status and benefits to gay couples.


I know you don't like that fact, but it's there anyway.

Actually, in many of these threads, a detailed explanation was presented describing the evolution of the current marriage tax brackets based on an anthropological examination of shifting motives as society evolved. You, of course, quit answering questions in the thread at that point, or at best flat-out ignored these posts. And for some reason you keep pretending that when these laws were established, people sat down and said "Okay, we need these things to happen, how can we incentivize people to that end?" You're completely ignoring the fact that our legal system is not the result of careful planning and rational thought, but inherited codes from our British roots which we've built upon in complex and often irrational ways as our society evolved. The code wasn't written yesterday in a carefully plotted-out manner.

This is absolutely hilarious coming from someone who has consistently proven in this thread that he has little to no understanding of any of these cases, what they entailed, what the rulings or precedents were or what other cases were built on them. You just make a complete *** out of yourself by having no clue what the rulings in this case were and then actually lectured us about how your completely mistaken understanding meant that we should all stop assuming those court decisions had merit and instead join in on your own interpretation. It's obvious to everyone that, at best, you're just Googling for snatches of something you hope will pass as an intelligent legal refutation (such as when you cited Skinner without realizing that it was not, in fact, the foundation of the "marriage as a fundamental right" statement) and more likely just blindly guessing and hoping that if you speak authoritatively enough people won't notice that you're full of shit.


Of course not and I never have argued that it did. Nice strawman, though. I have actually argued multiple times that you should just admit that you are denying homosexuals their fundamental right to marriage because you think you have a valid reason to deny them this right. You won't do this because you're too wrapped up in the perfection of your ideology to admit that you are willfully denying someone their rights. The very cases that I've cited state that there may be a good reason to deny someone of this right. A 40 year old man and his 15 year old daughter have the fundamental right to marry but we deny them this right because we feel it's in society's best interests to do so. Get it? We deny them this right. Just as you are saying we should deny homosexuals the right to marry one another. Not that they don't have the right. Not that the right really means that they can just sign some half-assed contract unrecognized as marriage by the state. But that you wish to deny them their fundamental right because you think there's a good reason to deny them this right.

Your insistence that the legal rulings really meant "you have the fundamental right to get married so you can have babies" has already been addressed previously in this thread. The notion of marriage as a plain fundamental right (rather than one contingent upon procreation) has already been upheld in rulings. The fact that you don't like it and so insist that those are all the "bad" rulings made by judges who don't really understand the law like you do (well, you and the "good" judges) is just pathetic but that's really been the one common thread you've had in this debate.


Of course I have. I have multiple times. In fact, the last time I started citing various benefits and their origins you fell back on "Yeah but REALLY it was about babies!" just as I said you would.


(A) I've answered this in previous threads
(B) Even if I hadn't answered it, it wouldn't make your answer true. If this is the foundation to your entire argument, it should certainly be better supported than "You didn't have a better answer so mine is the right one!"


Both and neither. You're playing up the excluded middle fallacy when, in reality, our current laws, benefits and other legal wranglings regarding marriage are a hodge-podge of various legislation rooted in everything from ancient tradition to modern equal rights ideals. I would wager that the vast majority of modern changes to marriage and what it entailed revolved primarily around people wanting something for themselves now and with very little concern to how others would approach marriage in the future, much less if any given random couple would be further enticed to wed.


This is, in fact, entirely the reason why. Or rather to avoid admitting that your point has no support.

Edited, Jul 1st 2010 8:14pm by Jophiel

Right. It had to be because of babies. It wasn't at all an issue of equality or an issue of property rights or anything like that. It was ooobbbvviioouussslllyyyy because all the wives gave up their lives to raise babies.

Of course, even if this asinine proposition was the case, and they only wanted this because they had to give up their lives to raise new union members from the womb, it still wouldn't be evidence that they fought for and enacted those benefits to entice future generations to marry before having children. In fact, taking "this benefit is to entice people to marry before having kids" would be one of the stupidest things you could take from it.

Not that that's stopped you yet.