Jophiel wrote:
It is a violation of a sibling couple's rights to deny them marriage.
Wrong. It's a violation of everyone else's rights to provide marriage benefits to *anyone*. While there certainly is a right to "get married" (in the traditional sense), there is no right to receive benefits from the state because you married. Once again, you've got it *** backwards.
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But it's considered legitimate to take away someone's rights in the face of overwhelming social need.
Correct. So the overwhelming social need to encourage heterosexual couples to produce children within the bounds of a legally enforceable marriage contract justifies infringing on the rights of the rest of the population to provide incentives/rewards to those we want to encourage to marry. Since we *don't* want siblings to reproduce, there's no justification to infringe the rest of our rights to provide those benefits to them. Similarly, since same sex couples cannot reproduce, there is also no justification to infringe the rights of the people in order to provide those benefits to them.
I've explained this to you like a hundred times, but it's like you just can't wrap your head around the fact that it's the rights of those who are paying for the benefits that matter, not the rights of the recipients.
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So far, the courts have agreed that restricting siblings from marrying counts.
Because of the potential offspring, right? But if the status of marriage does not assume the possibility of children, then there should be no reason to restrict it from siblings.
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It doesn't bother me at all to say we're violating a sibling couple's fundamental rights to deny them marriage or that of a mother and son or an adult and a child, etc. Why should it?
It's not their rights we're violating though. What we're doing is choosing *not* to violate the rights of others in order to provide them marriage benefits. There's no law prohibiting siblings from engaging in any form of relationship they want, entering into any form of civil contracts they want, etc. We just don't reward them for doing so. Just as we don't reward gay couples for doing so. To me, the reasoning for both of those are consistent and logical.
It's only if you insist on ignoring that logical and consistent rationale that marriage suddenly becomes this arbitrary and unfair proposition. It's not. You're choosing to pretend that it is, and then ignoring any explanation that might clear things up.
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In those cases though, the perception is that there is a definite social ill when you allow those marriages. This is the same mindset that has prevented same sex marriage.
Half right. It's the same rationale, but you're still applying the social ill backwards. The ill is children born out of wedlock. The solution is to encourage the set of couples who produce children within society to get married. Siblings (and other close relations) are
exceptions to that because we don't want them to reproduce at all.
But we didn't start with "let's stop siblings from reproducing by creating benefits for everyone else, but not them". We started with "let's encourage people to marry before reproducing". Then we thought "let's *not* provide that encouragement to siblings". If the objective was just to prevent siblings from reproducing, we'd have passed laws criminalizing sexual behavior between siblings and never bothered to create marriage laws at all. The marriage benefits exist for a different reason. I've explained to you numerous times what that reason is, but despite the fact that it is the only explanation which makes any sense at all, you refuse to accept it because it doesn't allow for the political agenda you want. Which is kind of backwards thinking IMO.
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Not some retarded "Oh, but benefits are for children!" crap but that same sex marriages are icky and bad and harm the social fabric. At least people with the balls to argue from that perspective are understanding the point of the Perez argument instead of dopes who say "No one says it's violating siblings' rights not to marry".
You're using the word "marriage" in a broad sense though. We're only talking about who can qualify for marriage benefits. Nothing else. No one has a right to those benefits. Period. Not siblings, not gay couples, not straight couples. No one. Instead of focusing on why we might deny them to someone, you should be asking why we provide them in the first place. Because if you can't answer that question, then you can't possibly have an informed opinion on this topic.
