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I already answered it, 99SESport.
I want to know what your heterosexual marriage brings to this nation that a homosexual marriage does not.
But that really is beside the point because it doesn't have to bring something to the nation to be made legal, it simply has to not take something away, as that is the cornerstone of something being illegal -- it has to take something away from someone.
That is the cornerstone of my argument, as you say.
And as I said before, taking away the moralistic integrity of the nation from your point of view does not count because that's only your point of view. It does count, however, if it is the opinion of the majority; that's the beauty of a democratic system rather than secular government that ignores the wants of its' people and rules by something written 2000 years ago.
Now, aside from your feelings being hurt because 2 gays are allowed to marry, what is your argument? You can't use the "degradation of morality" argument, because it's moot. Laws aren't based on morals, and certainly not on the Bible; they're made on the wants of the majority. Now you could have a problem with that, but that's a seperate subject entirely.
You can preach on and on all you want about how the Bible says it's not right, how Christianity says it's not right, how your Pastor says it's not right. But you haven't said a damn thing about where in the Constitution it says that it's not right.
Claim all you want about how the forefathers had Christianity in mind when they did this and did that, but they also had the Church discrimination of individuals in mind when they explicitly set up a seperation of Church and State to prevent exactly the kind of discrimation that you want to occur.
If the Government made laws based on morals and laws from biblical times, we'd be cutting off people's hands on street corners, not working on Sundays, not drinking alcohol, the list goes and on. And some people, like yourself, would probably prefer that. But that's not how this country works. We makes laws based on the desires of the majority as long as someone is not physically or significantly mentally harmed by the results of those laws.
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Originally posted by 99SESPORT:
Originally posted by 99SESPORT:
Let me ask you, what would "homosexual marriage" bring to our country? Give me evidence. If you believe in it, why do you believe in it? Seriously, what is your basis for your argument?
What does it bring? Happiness for a long-oppressed minority. We all have a right to that, don't we? Evidence? What evidence can there be when it is not allowed by law? Might have well asked blacks why they needed the right to vote, or women for that matter. Has the black minority or suffrage really changed this nation? Probably not in the big picture of things, but that would be hard to prove. What it has done is moved the Constitution closer to perfection in that MORE Americans were guaranteed the right to vote. In enabling homosexual Americans to join in a legal union such as marriage, it is an acknowledgment that they are indeed citizens with the same rights and privileges that a heterosexual American can and does enjoy. Equal rights and protection under law is what ALL Americans are entitled to.
Oh, and I already answered "why" in the previous paragraph.
You have not been able to demonstrate WHY homosexual marriage is detrimental to this nation other than fuzzy references to "moral degradation" and "sin". Concepts that particularly personal in nature.
And quoting family.org is a typical move of a Christian. I don't mean this in a demeaning way, it is just that family.org is a blatantly conservative Christian site. It is the same as the arguments by Christians against homosexuality. Your argument that homosexuality is wrong because it says so in the Bible holds no water for someone that does not believe in the Bible as a "divinely inspired" book. Especially when the person you are trying to convince thinks that the Bible is pretty much a document that twisted historical facts, called them "miracles" and used the alleged divine source as a method of mind and behavioral control.
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Originally posted by sigma:
If the Government made laws based on morals and laws from biblical times, we'd be cutting off people's hands on street corners, not working on Sundays, not drinking alcohol, the list goes and on. And some people, like yourself, would probably prefer that. But that's not how this country works. We makes laws based on the desires of the majority as long as someone is not physically or significantly mentally harmed by the results of those laws.
I think he was upset becuase I didnt answer a question targeted at me.
I answered him now, but that will not satisfy him.
P.S. The bible doesn't prohibit alcohol. Jesus turned water into wine for his first miracle, partook of wine during the last supper, and a later letter by Paul said "A little wine is good for the stomach". However, there are scriptures that strongly argue agaisnt drunkeness, with the principle being that it is the overindulgence that is sinful. Later interpretations such as the movement in the 30's that successfully resulted in a Constitutional amendment to ban alcohol except for...wait for it...religious purposes, were the sole creation of teetotaling busybodies.
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Since we are tossing out links to article that support our views, here is a link that challenges the "common conception" of marriage as being only between a man and woman. Quote:
The primary organization representing American anthropologists criticized President Bush's proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage Thursday and gave a failing grade to the president's understanding of human cultures.
"The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution," said the executive board of the 11,000-member American Anthropological Association.
Bush has cast the union between male and female as the only proper form of marriage, or what he called in his State of the Union address "one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization."
American anthropologists say he's wrong.
"Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies," the association's statement said, adding that the executive board "strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples."
The statement was proposed by Dan Segal, a professor of anthropology and history from Pitzer College in Claremont (Los Angeles County), who called Bush's conception of the history of marriage "patently false."
"If he were to take even the first semester of anthropology, he would know that's not true," said Segal, a member of the anthropological association's Executive Committee.
Ghita Levine, communications director for the association, said the issue struck a nerve in the profession.
"They feel strongly about it because they are the people who study the culture through time and across the world," she said. "They are the people who know what cultures consist of."
Segal pointed to "sanctified same-sex unions in the fourth century in Christianity" and to the Greeks and Romans applying the concept of marriage to same-sex couples, not to mention the Native American berdache tradition in which males married males.
UC Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader, an expert in anthropology and the law who played no role in drawing up the association's statement, called it a "correct assessment."
Nader, who is an association member, said Bush's proposal "serves the views of the religious right, and that has to do with getting votes."
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Of course, I don't know why I said alcohol. I was thinking drunkenness.
It dawned on me though, and I was trying to say this in what I said, but it didn't come out right, and perhaps I can say it better now....
We don't make things legal in our country. Meaning there's not a big book full of every little thing that you are allowed to do.
We make things illegal. And we make them illegal because they hurt someone or something either physically, mentally, or monetarily. We don't make something illegal because it makes some people uncomfortable.
So, in order to claim that someone should be or should remain illegal, you have to prove that it does one of the above. And, quite frankly, I don't see how you could do that with gay marriage.
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Oh, come on now, Beowulf, you should know that a good Christian would never heed a paper that has the term "Anthropology" in it.
Not to mention that the paper says the Romans practiced same-sex marriages... and if you read 99SESport's posts he often mentions that as the reason the Roman Empire fell.
Of course anyone with any concept of history could tell you that probably the most significant impact on the fall of the Roman Empire was not loads of anal sex orgies, but, ironically enough, the rise of Christianity and its' influence on the leaders and citizenry that caused the fall of the greatest empire the World has seen.
Now what was it you were saying about "If we don't learn from History we're doomed to repeat it," 99SESport?
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And just because I am in the mood now, here is a little historical precedent Quote:
More than a half-century ago, the California Supreme Court became the first in the nation to overturn a law banning interracial marriage, a prohibition that was then widespread and had strong public support.
The current battle over same-sex marriage, now before the state's high court, may depend on how the court compares present-day, opposite-sex-only marriage laws with the racially discriminatory laws of an earlier day. It's a point on which the opposing sides disagree sharply.
The ban on interracial marriage was based on the asserted "superiority of the white race,'' said attorney Jon Davidson of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, which has joined in the defense of same-sex weddings in San Francisco. At the heart of the current marriage prohibition, he said, is "an attempt to keep gay people inferior.''
John Eastman, a professor at Chapman University School of Law in the city of Orange, countered that the case against same-sex marriage "is grounded in human nature,'' the recognition "that men and women are different genders.'' The old racial laws, he said, derived from "a failure to recognize the equal humanity of blacks and whites.''
But during most of the nation's history, defenders of laws against interracial marriage also offered arguments based on human nature: that certain races were physically and mentally inferior, that mixed-race couples and their children would arouse antagonism and social tension, and that only the "dregs of society,'' as lawyers in the California case put it, were likely to marry outside their race.
Some version of those arguments prevailed in every court until 1948, when the California Supreme Court considered the case of Perez vs. Sharp.
Andrea Perez, a Latina, and Sylvester Davis, an African American, sued Los Angeles County Clerk W.G. Sharp after they were denied a marriage license based on a state law that prohibited "the marriage of a white person with a Negro, mulatto, Mongolian or member of the Malay race.'' The law dated from 1933, but similar laws had existed in California since 1850 and in other states since colonial times and were on the books in 30 of the 48 states in 1948.
The court acknowledged a long line of cases upholding race-based laws, including a widely cited 1869 Georgia ruling saying mixed-race procreation "is not only unnatural, but is always productive of deplorable results.'' But in a 4-3 ruling, the California court said such viewpoints, and the laws they supported, were discredited by science and were contrary to basic concepts of equality.
Marriage is "a fundamental right of free men,'' wrote Justice Roger Traynor in the rhetorical style of the day. "Legislation infringing such rights must be based on more than prejudice. ... By restricting the individual's right to marry on the basis of race alone, (the prohibitions) violate the equal protection of the laws.''
The ruling, though unprecedented, can be linked to other events at the dawn of the modern civil rights movement. Earlier in 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down racial restrictions on housing deeds, and President Harry Truman had ordered integration of the armed forces; a year earlier, Jackie Robinson had broken the color line in baseball.
It was nevertheless a daring court decision. Racial segregation was still legal and would not be outlawed by the nation's high court until 1954; laws against interracial marriage would not be ruled unconstitutional nationwide until 1967, when 16 states still had such laws.
The U.S. Supreme Court's unanimous 1967 ruling -- which declared that "the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the state'' -- was written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose grandson, San Francisco Superior Court Judge James Warren, refused last week to halt same-sex weddings.
There are other parallels between past and present marriage prohibitions -- and some differences.
Laws against same-sex marriage are even more widespread than the former racial laws and enjoy equally strong public and political support. The same- sex bans are mostly newer -- California's statute was passed by the Legislature in 1977 and reinforced by the voters in 2000 -- but they're based on much older policies that were rarely if ever challenged. Most important, both types of prohibitions were imposed on politically weak minorities with a history of persecution, the grounds traditionally cited by U. S. courts for intervening to curb oppression by the majority.
"Gays and lesbians do have to deal with discrimination in employment, discrimination in the military, in (child) custody ... the feelings of inferiority, the feelings of second-class citizenship, the feeling that somebody is going to beat you, shoot you ... based on how you look,'' said Bobbie Wilson, a lawyer for San Francisco in the same-sex marriage case.
"It's hard to compare discriminations,'' said Lambda Legal's Davidson. "The heritage of slavery is something that gay people, other than gay people who are black, don't share. But the reality is that gay people have a history of being under attack in this country.''
What's more, he said, many of the arguments against interracial marriage in 1948 are being used today, "arguments based on tradition, based on the impact upon children, what it would mean to our social fabric'' if marriage rights were expanded.
On the other hand, state and federal courts in civil rights cases have examined the nature and severity of discrimination faced by different groups and concluded -- at least up to now -- that sexual minorities do not require the same level of constitutional protection as racial minorities.
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned state sodomy laws last year, the justices relied on the right to privacy, not freedom from discrimination, and said they were not ruling on marriage. Even the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's ruling legalizing same-sex marriage under the state constitution stopped short of equating sexual orientation with race.
"You don't base a constitutional protection upon the sex partners that somebody may choose,'' said attorney Benjamin Bull of the Alliance Defense Fund, which has asked the state Supreme Court to halt San Francisco's same-sex weddings. "We fought a Civil War in which hundreds of thousands of Americans died to end race discrimination, to end slavery.'' By contrast, he said, "gays as a class ... have incredible freedom and rights. They have the same rights that I or any other heterosexual has. They can even get married. They just cannot marry a same-gender person.''
As a great great great grandchild of a legally married interracial couple in Connecticut, I believe that the rights of homosexuals to marry is exactly the same as the issue of interracial marriage was in 1948.
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Originally posted by Beowulf:
Since we are tossing out links to article that support our views, here is a link that challenges the "common conception" of marriage as being only between a man and woman.
Quote:
The primary organization representing American anthropologists criticized President Bush's proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage Thursday and gave a failing grade to the president's understanding of human cultures.
"The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution," said the executive board of the 11,000-member American Anthropological Association.
Bush has cast the union between male and female as the only proper form of marriage, or what he called in his State of the Union address "one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization."
American anthropologists say he's wrong.
"Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies," the association's statement said, adding that the executive board "strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples."
The statement was proposed by Dan Segal, a professor of anthropology and history from Pitzer College in Claremont (Los Angeles County), who called Bush's conception of the history of marriage "patently false."
"If he were to take even the first semester of anthropology, he would know that's not true," said Segal, a member of the anthropological association's Executive Committee.
Ghita Levine, communications director for the association, said the issue struck a nerve in the profession.
"They feel strongly about it because they are the people who study the culture through time and across the world," she said. "They are the people who know what cultures consist of."
Segal pointed to "sanctified same-sex unions in the fourth century in Christianity" and to the Greeks and Romans applying the concept of marriage to same-sex couples, not to mention the Native American berdache tradition in which males married males.
UC Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader, an expert in anthropology and the law who played no role in drawing up the association's statement, called it a "correct assessment."
Nader, who is an association member, said Bush's proposal "serves the views of the religious right, and that has to do with getting votes."
The author is twisting word usage to the breaking point here and pulling one HELL of a bait and switch. I HAVE taken Anthropology courses back in college and studied the Greek and Roman empires quite a bit (the Roman empire well enough to have a department head check his notes on a particular topic during an argument).
There is NO common and widespread connection or evidence that exists that shows a long-standing social/religious ceremony that strictly bonds a same-sex couple together to the exclusion of all others.
True, the practice of homosexuality was widespread among Roman and Greek elites and there were certain rituals developed around the practice, though I've yet to see ANY documentation or research that points to a WIDESPREAD and COMMON ceremony that was both held sarcosanct by the MAJORITY of the religious and secular populations in any meaningfully developed civilization that has lived on this planet.
Key word being MAJORITY.
Grabbing a few examples out of the past doesn't change the common definition of marriage that has lasted and survived millenia of social and religious change throughout any number of civilizations. That is a cold, hard FACT. Pagan AND Christian values/norms as well as human nature itself has defined marriage throughout the ages. Also pointing to Roman emperors condoning the practice should IMMEDIATELY set alarm bells off, as some of the beliefs and practices of the emperors and thier decrees were often the polar opposite of commonly-held social and religious norms held at the time.
I'm smelling a large load of BS with that article.
Don't get me wrong; I have absolutely no issue with gays and wish that the US would come to grips with this and offer civil unions as the solution. Marriage throughout all common religions of today (pick your poison: Christianity, Islam, Shintoism, Bhuddism, etc., etc.) and most societies involve (1) man and (1) woman, though.
I think civil unions should have an elevated status that equates marriage and all of the benefits thereof, reflecting a joining of same-sex couples; marriage should reflect man and wife, as it has done throughout the ages in 99.999% of the time.
It is splitting hairs to an extent (as a concept and defition of that concept is being argued here), but for the same reason most societies split hairs over other long-held religious and social practices.
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Originally posted by Beowulf:
Since we are tossing out links to article that support our views, here is a link that challenges the "common conception" of marriage as being only between a man and woman.
1) You are being a hypocrite. First you slam my link to family.org, then you link to gaycity.com, errr, I mean sfgate.com.
2) One of the articles I listed simply states that the study linking genetics to homosexuality was wrong, and it gave facts supporting the article. There was no bias to it. Since homosexuality is NOT genetic, then the gay activists have no basis for marriage.
3) The other article I linked to gives specific examples of how homosexuality is social, not genetic. Yes, the title may turn a you away, but the arguments in the article are real.
4) In your article, it lists specific instances of same sex marriages. I'm sorry, but it is not a "sanctified" or "Christian" marriage if it is same-sex. I don't care what the anthropologist says. The second example is hardly a good one, either. Are the Romans around today? I didn't think so. Why aren't they? They became obsessed with overindulgence.
Last edited by cpurser; 03/16/04 02:21 AM.
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JaTo, I always enjoy our discussions, but I want to clarify something:
You are considering a "civil union" and a "marriage" to be equal as far as rights and benefits go, so when I read that, I only read a simple change of vernacular.
And actually, the only real difference that I can see between the two terms, is the religious observance. Being that a 'marriage' is what is "traditionally" observed by religion and a "civil union" is the same thing, just observed by the government.
So, being that there is a seperation of Church and State, and being that we don't want to discriminate against anyone, shouldn't the government label your union as a "Civil Union", rather than a marriage, no matter what sex you and your partner are and leave the term "marriage" for the churches and the common vernacular (because it's just easier to say -- what's the past tense of "civil union")
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