Don't Say Gay BillFollow

So you agree that it's about benefits?

If it makes you feel better about being a homophobe.

Edit:
I didn't want you to think you were being ignored, but your first three words had nothing to do with what I said, therefore I'm not bothering with the rest.

Edited, May 4th 2011 9:02pm by lolgaxe

Yep. We should legalize it.

I imagine insurance companies and some places of business won't like that much, but oh well.

And a gay person can marry someone of the opposite sex. I'm not clear on the distinction here. So if I choose not to marry a woman, I'm not being discriminated against, but if a gay male chooses not to marry a woman, he is? How does that work?

Let's start with the basic fact that everyone who is not married pays more in some way to provide the benefits which married couples get. So *everyone* who doesn't qualify for those benefits is being discriminated against. In the same way everyone who doesn't qualify for medicaid is discriminated against, and everyone who doesn't qualify for food stamps is discriminated against, and everyone who doesn't qualify for social security is discriminated against, and well... everyone who doesn't qualify for any of the thousands of various government funded or mandated benefits out there are.


It's an irrelevant statement. The correct way to view this is to ask "Why do we provide those benefits, and who should we restrict the benefits to?". Don't you agree? When you start viewing everything the government does within the context of discrimination against anyone not included in something, you're going down a nasty rabbit hole IMO.

Wow...

It's equally an argument against all government funded or mandated benefits. Why limit yourself just to marriage? My point is that if you follow that line of reasoning far enough, then the government should never ever do anything which costs one person more than another and benefits one person more than another. Which is an interesting position to take given that gay marriage is mostly fought for by liberals, who are by far the biggest champions of the same the sort of government discrimination which they would be arguing against.

If discrimination is always wrong, and discrimination includes the government providing benefits to one group but not to another (or costing a group more proportionately to the benefits received), then haven't we just concluded that pretty much the entire Democratic Party platform is wrong? I'm fine with that, of course, but I'm suggesting that if we use a logical argument that we apply it fairly instead of arbitrarily.

And for the record, I'd be perfectly fine with eliminating all government provided marriage benefits if at the same time we eliminate all those other programs. So no more welfare. No more medicaid. No more public education. No funding for planned parenthood, or npr, or pbs, or any of a thousand other organizations which receive funding with a specific mandate to benefits only a set of people in our society. No more affirmative action. Nothing. Heck. We'd eliminate our deficit problem at the same time! Bonus.



Somehow, I suspect that most liberals are more than happy to be inconsistent in the application of their own claimed principles. Because it's not really about principles, or ideals, or any sort of consistency at all. It's about picking groups of people to support and then trading benefits at public expense for those groups in exchange for votes. It always has been. They pretend it's about principles in order to sucker young ignorant people into thinking that the causes they're told to support are really worthwhile. But when you look closely, you find they really are just about supporting the groups that can support them back politically. Hence; unions, womens rights, gay rights, minorities, environmentalists. The list just goes on. Each of which is a group which can be organized into a voting block. If the Democrats could find a way to shoehorn teaching creationism in school with their existing set of supporters, they'd be championing that right now too. And they'd argue that it was a violation of civil rights not to teach it. And most of the liberals out there would buy it, pick up their signs, and march in support of it.

And if the argument was about all government funded/mandated benefits, you might have a point, but as it stands you still have no argument against just Same Sex Marriage.

You might as well say you're against SSM because of the ecological impact dairy farms used in the wedding cake have.

Edited, May 4th 2011 10:01pm by lolgaxe

Huh? The argument being used *for* same sex marriage on the grounds of discrimination applies equally well to all those other government programs. So by making one, you are making the other. Or at least you should, if you are honest about your reasons for insisting that marriage benefits be extended to same sex couples.


My point is that people make these arguments for what they want, but their arguments apply equally well for things they don't want. Thus, it's not really about the argument they are making but about "We want it this way because this is the way we want it". I'm just trying to get some of the people on this forum to realize this. This is not about consistent application of some ideology or principles with regard to discrimination within a society. It's a cherry picked issue chosen because there is political advantage to making it an issue and most people wont realize that they're being used.

Because they're not developed enough mentally to allow into that sort of responsibility. Not to say that 12 year olds are stupid (although most are), they're just kids. There's a lot of mental development that goes on after 18 as well, mind you.

No idea why you're trying to make a big point about this, it really isn't that hard to see the differences here.

Remember when I told you that it's a fallacy to assume that all of your opponents only hold their views because of indoctrination or some other form of adverse influence? You're doing it again.

Here's the kicker: it's actually Alma's old argument. That really oughta be a sign to gbaji that there's a lot wrong, but well, y'know.

So now there's a mental development test for marriage? Why?



Because it's not about the specifics. It's about the generalities. Why do we make one distinction, but not another? On what basis do we decide to reward people for entering into a state of marriage? Why do we do it in the first place? Why do we care? Most people seem to want to focus on who we're discriminating against and then try to justify discrimination against one group but not another. I happen to think that's the wrong approach. I think we should instead look at why we're including a group, and not why we're excluding a whole set of groups.

Why? Because if you do it your way, you then have to justify every single group you're excluding. If you do it the way I suggest, you only have to justify why you're including the one group. But of course, if we did it that way, then the argument for same sex marriage would evaporate, so the left chooses to do it the other way around. I'm just showing why that's the wrong approach since it allows for the same arguments to work for nearly every group. And at that point, it just becomes a matter of which groups we choose to argue in favor for.

It's because nobody gives a **** what kind of gbaji "gotcha!!!" you have planned. You get twice as boring when you start double posting in a thread because you have oh-so-many in your army of strawmen.