I knew it was going to happen, but...Follow

And yet, I don't see you beating down the doors of big government, demanding that they lift the restrictions for marriage "rights" for siblings and second cousins. Strange, isn't it?



And?



It's not about taxes increasing (although even a small number would increase that total cost, right?), but about what my tax dollars are paying for. As a single taxpayer, I'm the one who foots the bill for the various benefits which married couples have. Thus, I have an issue with making sure that the targets of those benefits match the reasons I'm willing to pay for them. I'm ok with providing those benefits for the reasons I've stated before. If the benefits are extended to couples who can't reproduce, then I'm *not* ok with providing them those benefits. I see no more reason to provide them to a gay couple, than to any other random two people who decide to collectively apply for them, married or not.



it's not "about the children", it's about encouraging procreation in the best conditions possible. That was stated in absolutely clear terms in the example law we discussed earlier. You're free to dispute the degree to which it's about encouraging procreation within wedlock, but it's absolutely true that it is at least *part* of the reason.




And every step of the way, conservatives have argued against providing those benefits to single parents for exactly the reason that it would weaken marriage. So using those benefits as a reason to further eliminate the purpose of marriage as a state legal status isn't much of an argument. Don't you see how one step of the slippery slope is used to justify the next? Well... Now that we've provided a bunch of benefits which reward people who have children out of wedlock, we may as well just extend these now redundant marriage benefits to same sex couples because they can't really be about procreation anymore, right? Lol!

So *not* because they aren't fully human, right? So there are legitimate reasons to restrict marriage that doesn't involve assuming that those who don't qualify aren't human. That's all I'm saying.



Same sex couples can't reproduce. We're talking about the couple, not two individuals. You get that the point of marriage is to treat them as a single legal unit, right? You can't have it both ways.



Same sex couples can't reproduce. You really aren't getting this. The individuals can, but nothing they do with their partner facilitate this. Reproduction is *never* a natural outcome of a same sex relationship. Which is kinda the whole point.



Sigh.

Because neither group is part of the set of couples we want to encourage to marry and procreate. One, because we don't want them to procreate (siblings and first cousins), and the other because they *can't* procreate. You're making the mistake of starting at the benefits and asking "who would be benefited by this?". But if you start first by assuming that there is some social problem and marriage laws/licenses are the solution, then you should be able to noodle it out.


The problem is that heterosexual couples produce children. They produce them as a statistically unavoidable outcome of being couples. You have a sufficient number of heterosexual couples, and you will get some number of babies as a result. From a 15,000 foot level, you can't know which couples will reproduce, or when, but you can say that some number of them will. Some of them will get married. Some of them will not (marriage in this case just being the traditional social institution that's been around for ages). Those who don't marry, or those who enter into marriages which the state may not be able to enforce will likely result in single mothers raising children. Historically, social pressures and lack of mobility ensured that most sexually active couples got married and tended to stay married. With the rise of larger and more mobile modern middle and working classes, this became a problem. The state increasingly became involved in legal disputes over issues of marriage, divorce, property, paternity, etc and absent sufficient legally binding marriages, it was difficult to resolve them. Thus, It became in the state's interest to create a three party marriage contract with the state as a party, and then find ways to encourage couples to marry and to use that contract when they got married. In some cases, they applied those marriage laws even if the couple didn't officially file for it (common law marriage).


The point is that the problem being solved by state marriage laws is that of couples producing children out of wedlock. The benefits to marriage are intended to provide incentives for couples to marry, so that any children they produce after that point will be born within a legally binding marriage for which the state can control the terms and enforcement. That's the whole point to this. It's why the state would bother to create a marriage status in the first place. Otherwise, there's no reason for it.

The restrictions on who can qualify for that status flow logically from that purpose. If your purpose is to get couples who might otherwise produce children together to enter into a legally binding marriage, then you want to provide those benefits to just those couples who *may* produce children together. This automatically excludes same sex couples. While we can argue for more restrictions because some heterosexual couples may not be able to produce children, there is no rational argument for going the other way and extending those benefits to gay couples. Similarly, since we don't want siblings or other close relations to marry, we don't give them benefits either.


That's it. It's completely logical. It makes perfect sense. There's nothing about marriage and our marriage laws which doesn't fit within this context. Against this logical argument we have.... nothing. Just wild appeals to emotion. It's not about who we're discriminating against, but who it makes sense to provide the benefits for. We don't do it just for fun. We do it because there is a reason. We don't exclude gay couples from marriage benefits because we don't like them. We exclude them because [bl] they aren't the ones we need to encourage to marry[/b]. If they want to marry, they're free to do so. No one's stopping them. But the state issued marriage license and the laws and benefits associated with it are a legal construct created to address a specific problem which gay couples don't cause.


We have as much reason to provide those benefits to two random people walking down the street as we do to gay couples. Stop asking why we should deny them those benefits, but ask why we should provide them to them?

Absolutely. This does not in any way prove your point, however, only protect it from being immediately disproven. The proposition "some X have Y" does not create the leap to "this X has Y".

Hmmm I see your response and raise you



So you are choosing to ignore people who cannot reproduce but still are heterosexual and just focus on homosexual? How convenient for you. Also decided to lolwiki marriage and see if it says marriage is mainly for the children.



Hmm interesting... it's so obvious even lolwiki didn't get it right. It can't be that you're completely off on why people get married Gbaji. It's everyone else right?

That's not true at all.

They should be required to. Bad enough that old people are fucking; I don't need them doing it premaritally.

Hopefully, Obama can just put off repealing DOMA until after he's re-elected & leave the rest up to the States.

It won't shut Gbaji up about his theory, just like DADT didn't shut up Alma, but I'll feel better knowing pennies of Gbaji's tax dollars is going to support something else he doesn't believe in.

I thought X-Factor and American Idol were spinoffs from the UK.

Besides the fact that Gbaji will just continue to deny I've ever made an argument anyway, I don't feel too inclined to get worked up about this right now because the momentum is heading in my direction. Not perfectly and not without setbacks but each year sees more advances towards SSM and more acceptance and approval from the population at large. And each victory diminishes the other side's arguments that much more. Eventually it won't matter how much money the Mormons and the GOP throw at the issue, enough people will be siding with SSM that it's going to happen.

Edited, Mar 16th 2012 9:05am by Jophiel

I thought Real World was the archetype of modern reality TV. Did Big Brother predate that?

I guess I'm not really up on the birth of reality tv. Indeed, wiki credits Real World as kicking things off.

What he said. I hate reality TV. You're sitting in your house, watching people sitting in a house. Blegh.