Don't Say Gay BillFollow

There's no political advantage at all. There is a principle at stake though. The principle is that if you create a set of benefits designed to encourage specific behavior among a specific group of people, it kinda makes sense to limit the benefits to the specific group and the specific behavior you want to encourage. Now, to be fair, if I were a hard core libertarian (which I'm not), I'd argue we shouldn't be doing this at all. But the fact is that we do this all the time. And, in fact, the left does this far far more than the right.

For example: Let's say that we see that there is a disproportionate percentage of poor people attending college. We might decide to create a program designed to encourage more poor kids to go to college, right? This might include scholarships, extra funding for college track classes at high schools with predominantly poor students, etc. Details aren't important, the point is that we create this program with a specific result for a specific group in mind. One might argue that it would be wrong to insist that since this is discrimination (which it most definitely is), that we can't exclude rich kids from receiving the same benefits. Yet that would defeat the purpose of the program.


Same principle involved. Our existing marriage status, including all of the government benefits attached to said status, was created with a specific group in mind: Opposite sex couples. Regardless of whether you agree on why the benefits exist, or what we're trying to encourage them to do (we've had this debate before and I don't want to rehash it), that was the group targeted when those benefits were created. There was some reason for doing so. So simply insisting that we should extend those benefits to another group, which was not considered at the time the benefits were created violates that principle. It violates it for exactly the reason that I've been talking about. If that's sufficient reason for expanding it, then the same argument applies for every single government program which exists, but which currently limits the recipients of the benefits of said programs.



You want to argue that this is about SSM, but it's not. If you were arguing that the Dodgers should win the pennant because they have the strongest pitching squad, you aren't really making an argument about the Dodgers, but about the relationship between strong pitching and winning pennants. If you insisted that the same argument can only be applied when we're talking about the Dodgers, then the rest of us can conclude that your argument is really irrelevant. You're just a Dodgers fan.

Similarly, if you are unwilling to extend the argument being made beyond just same sex marriage, then we can conclude that your argument is actually irrelevant. You are just a fan of same sex marriage. And just like a sports fan, that choice is purely arbitrary.

Edited, May 4th 2011 8:12pm by gbaji

Or maybe nobody gives a f*ck, and the people you are arguing with don't want to make the exact same point-counterpoint ****** debate that you seem so fond of having.

Spoiler alert: Gays only wanna get married for tax benefits, but if not, and if it's the principal of the matter, well, they can just have a symbolic ceremony and it's the same thing.

You... don't actually know what "arbitrary" means, do you?


Yeah, this one writes itself.

Should we allow 12 years olds to drive? Work? Vote? Why stop at 12? Let's let infants have at it too!

In during "What Joph said".

Gbaji says that anyone can pay a lawyer to draw up said legal documents.

Seriously: Read previous thread.

So you're saying that homosexuality is abnormal? Sorry. Couldn't help myself there.

You're still looking at it from the point of view of differences and discrimination. Think the other way around. Why create marriage benefits, and who should we target them towards?



Stop thinking in terms of why we *don't* provide something for a group and think instead about why we *do*. As I've said repeatedly so far, if you argue it the way you're arguing, then there is no end to the number of groups you can ask "why don't they get this?" about. And in each case you can say that the only difference is this, or that, or some other thing. It's a bad rationale.


Start with why we *should* reward gay couples who marry. Make a case for why I, as a single taxpaying homeowner should pay more taxes, more for health insurance, more for my pension, and more for my home loan so that a gay couple can pay less for those things (relative to their respective benefits of course). I can tell you right now why I should do this for heterosexual couples. But can you give me a reason why it's so important to me for that gay couple to get access to those benefits at my expense?



Completely different argument. You're now making the broad "all discrimination is wrong" claim. But that's clearly not true. Our government discriminates all the time. The question isn't whether it does when handing out some benefit (because they all do if we choose to look at it from that direction), but whether the group it's targeting for the benefit is appropriate for the purpose of the benefit itself.

There are a handful of actual government provided or mandated benefits which a "legal marriage" grants. Most of the rest of what we think of as marriage benefits are the result of the contract the two parties enter into. Honestly though, I've argued this part of the issue dozens of times, and don't feel a need to rehash it. In this thread, I'm not trying to be that specific or detailed (although I'm sure some of you will insist on dragging me into such detail anyway). I'm just trying to get people to change their viewpoint from "why not?" to "why?", and to understand why one of those approaches is a sane way to decide what government should do, and the other isn't.

And of course glossing over the tens of thousands of dollars only one of those two contracts costs.