Elinda wrote:
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With the current state of marriage and divorces, along with foster, adoptive and surrogate parenting, there really is no reason *not* to allow it. Except for personal or religious grounds. Which should be entirely irrelevant.
It's not about "allowing" it, but "rewarding" it. There is no reason to reward /gay couples who marry.
Sure. In my scenario, we start with 100% liberty. Then we recognize that in order to have a society with more than one person, everyone can't have 100% liberty, so we must come up with rules to limit people's actions such that we focus on restricting those witch cause harm to others while not restricting those which do not. We recognize that the means by which we do this can be either positive or negative (ie: punishment for actions causing harm and/or rewards for actions which avoid causing harm). We also recognize that the act of taxation (technically any government action) requires direct reduction of liberty to those affected. So even actions which reward some people first penalize others.
We then recognize that sexually active couples consisting of a male and a female will tend to produce offspring. When the couple is enjoined in a legally binding marriage contract recognized and enforced by the state, the offspring are less likely to become burdens on society (and thus a net harm to the liberty of the rest of us). This difference is sufficient that the cost in liberty to create a state marriage status, complete with rewards to couples who enter into them, is less than the cost if we do not. We are avoiding a greater cost by spending on these benefits.
So there is a rationale under a "maximum liberty" scenario for providing marriage benefits to couple who might otherwise produce offspring. This rationale does not exist for couples who cannot. And yes, not all hetero couples will produce children. But the entire set of "couple's whose sexual activity will result in children" is made up of male/female couples. Not male/male, or female/female. So while we could argue that the set should be limited further (and balance that against the cost to more accurately determine this), there is no rationale for providing those benefits to gay couples.
More correctly, this rationale does not support that action. You're free to come up with your own rationale for marriage benefits if you wish. Can you? I can do this easily, can you?
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State sanctioned marriage has never been about reward, however. Nor is it singularly rewarding. Your approach to defending your discriminatory opinion is getting pretty convoluted.
You're once again starting at the end point (my position is discriminatory), instead of at the beginning. What is discriminatory? What makes that bad? Start at the beginning and then determine what is good or bad, and how to get there. You're starting with "gay marriage should be legal" and then condemning anything that doesn't get you there.
And if marriage benefits aren't about reward, then why do they exist? Why do we provide benefits to couples who marry if not as some kind of incentive for them to marry rather than just living together? I guess I'm just always amazed how we always get into this discussion and it becomes apparent that most people don't have any idea *why* a given status exists. They're sure that it doesn't exist for the reasons I give, but they can't give any rational alternative explanation. Which seems kinda weak.
