Wall of the Words
Marriage:
The foundation of every single society is the nuclear family. A nuclear family consists of one father, one mother, and any number of children.
Extended family provides an important support mechanism, but the mother and father do the heavy lifting.
Marriage in the most basic sense exists to reinforce the nuclear family.
Even if I agree with you here (and I don't consider a 1 mother, 1 father family to be a requirement of society), there is still something you are overlooking.
There are about 115,000 children awaiting adoption in the U.S. alone. There are over 500,000 children in foster care. Somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of all foster children become homeless within a year of turning 18. Less then half of children who grow up in the foster system receive a high school diploma.
If your argument is that a stable family is good to raise children, I'd agree there. However, a homosexual couple is better than foster care, which is why I don't understand why anyone would want to ban them from adoption (and by proxy, marriage, because, at least if they agree with you, a married family is generally better at raising children than a single-parent home). Do you have any insight on this?
Marriage is about the protection and support of children, not "what two consenting adults" want. If gay parents want the provisions given a married couple to tend to their children, I see no problem with granting a civil union that confers these rights and benefits. A child who does not have both a mother and a father is already disadvantaged in life, and the system should take that into account and not handicap them further.
That only works if the state only gives out civil unions to
everyone, regardless of whether they are homosexual or heterosexual. I'm reminded of Brown vs. Board of Education, in which the verdict ruled that,
"Segregation of students in public schools violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because separate facilities are inherently unequal."
3: (Global) The legalization of gay marriage:
In every nation where gay marriage has been legalized, the overall number of marriages has declined. When marriage means anything it means nothing. Add this to the declining populations in Europe and you can understand why gay marriage would be a well-liked option. When your society is stagnant and dying, you don't tend to care much for preserving the key insitution which maintains it.
We should ban white people from marrying. We should ban blonde people from marrying. Anyone under 154 pounds should be banned from marrying. The more exclusive it is, the more valuable it becomes to those who are allowed to partake in it.
It's not gay marriage that has caused the decline of European population, as you imply, but industrialization. Industrialized nations tend toward social liberalization, which includes equal rights for minority groups, and industrialized nations tend toward lower birth rates. I'd like to see the data where you decided that gay marriage implies decline of society.
Anywhere gay marriage goes, regular marriage crumbles, so the argument "gay marriage doesn't affect regular marriage" doesn't pan out.
If someone else getting married affects your marriage so much, then it seems to me like it never meant a lot to begin with. This reminds me of Stephen Colbert's comments on Meet the Press:
COLBERT: Marriage is the basic building block of society. And if gay men get married, that threatens my marriage immediately because I only got married as a taunt toward gay men because they couldn’t.
RUSSERT: So it makes you feel insecure.
COLBERT: Well, I just don’t know else—why I got married other than to rub it in gay people’s faces.
The fact is that the gay lifestyle, as displayed at the Folsom Street Fair, is base and animalstic.
The fact is that the heterosexual lifestyle, as displayed every year at Marti Gras and every day on MTV, is base and animalistic.
Fact is, this depravity is part and parcel to the gay community.
Fact is, this legalized prostitution is part and parcel to the straight community.
This is their big event in San Franscisco, and more interesting still is how the advertised it: with a Last Supper scene where the food and other items were replaced by sacriligious dildos, among other things. I eagerly await the gay community's condemnation of this insensitivity. Good thing I'm not holding my breath though, I'd be dead already.
This is their big event in Mexico / New Orleans / tons of other places, and more interesting still is how the advertised it: with the promise of giant beads for flashing people or performing sexual favors, among other things. I eagerly await the straight community's condemnation of this insensitivity. Good thing I'm not holding my breath though, I'd be dead already.
The following link provides details about STD's and/or AIDS and young gay men:
(Note: Don't even start with the holy roller bullcrap, this site is about as socialist and pro-gay as you can get without running into a propaganda site like HRC.)
Perhaps you should look up similar statistics on lesbians. They have the lowest risk of AIDS transmission. You are assuming that because gay men are at high risk, all homosexuals must be, and this is simply not backed up by fact. This was brought up to you in the Shoddy chat a few days ago, so you are either willfully ignoring it, have selective memory, or are being dishonest in your presentation.
First that AIDS does in fact discriminate, and second that homosexual activity is inherently dangerous for it's practictioners. Since AIDS is a reliable indicator for other sexually transmitted diseases, one can infer other diseases are also transmitted.
Let's take a look at why this may be the case. There isn't some homunculus in HIV saying "Oh, this guy is gay, I'd better infect him!" In reality, there are a few things that are different. First, anal sex is riskier than vaginal. A male and a female engaging in anal sex have the same risk of transmission as two males doing the same. Second, because there is no risk of pregnancy among homosexual sex, the use of condoms is significantly lower. This means you also lose the side-effect of reduced risk of transmission of various diseases. So no, HIV / AIDS doesn't discriminate, it's based on the practices.
What two people do in the privacy of their own homes is nobody's business.
As a conservative, I agree with this statement. However, legalizing gay marriage is giving government benefits and therefore public acceptance and approval to the practice of homosexuality and any resulting relationships. This means that gay marriage has nothing to do with what people do in their own homes and everything to do with a legal system that applies to and affects everyone everyone.
There are already public benefits to heterosexual marriage. My view is that the government shouldn't be involved in marriage, anyway, but if they promote heterosexual marriage, homosexual marriage ought to be given the same benefits, rights, and protections.
If homosexuals want to get a marriage ceremony they can certainly find someone willing to take their money for the event. What they want is the public recognition of the validity of their arrangement, as well as the assorted government benefits granted to the married. Civil unions solve the latter problem without compromising the sanctity of marriage. Marriage is and always will be superior to a civil union, married couples in nearly all healthy instances can bear and raise children and thereby continue society. A gay civil union is a conference of benefits recognizing only that two men or two women are getting it on and they want to call it love in public. The state only has a vested interest in these civil unions if there are children involved.
So you admit that a civil union
would not solve the problem of inherent equality.[/QUOTE]
4: Fact. Every European nation is reproducing below replacement rate and the only reason their populations remain stable is an inflow of immigrants from the Middle East and other Muslim nations. Their culture and values are slowly being supplanted by a demonstrably inferior ones, or would you like to argue about the moral, ethical, and technological advancement found in Muslim nations relative to Western ones?
Demonstrably inferior? Please, demonstrate it.
Play Devil's advocate all you want, but those aren't arguments.
Better a Devil's advocate than an actual devil, which is what I would be if I went against my beliefs that all people, regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, deserve to be judged by their character, and are thus afforded equal rights.
The Greeks had limited scientific capacity to understand disease at that point in history. What amazing marvels in psychological research have occurred in the last 50 years that lend credence to the idea homosexuality is not a disorder, especially given its propensity to encourage negative behaviors? Only politics have changed in the past 50 years, and politics isn't science.
Psychology was (and still is) a limited science. What makes you so sure that the DMSIV was influenced by politics, and not the DSMII? However, you asked a legitimate question, so I feel I should give a legitimate answer, rather than another question.
Early 'psychology', as characterized by Freud and other psychodynamic theorists, was not, strictly speaking, psychology. Psychology is defined as the scientific study of human behavior, and psychodynamic theory is not scientific (it's not falsifiable). In the 50s, there was a move toward making "psychology" truly a science of behavior, as the name implies. Men like Skinner, Watson, and other behaviorists took a more scientific approach. Value judgments (which is what the entry on homosexuality, or, as it was called, "Sexual Orientation Disturbance", was) have no place in science. The removal of "Sexual Orientation Disturbance" in favor of "Ego-dystonic sexual orientation" in the mid-70s in the change from the DSMII to the DSMIV should be regarded as a move toward more objectivity and scientificness, not as a political ploy by the "far left loons", as Bill O'Reilly would call them.
For those unfamiliar with the terminology, ego-dystonic sexual orientation is when a person is homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual, and wishes that it would be different, and this disparity between how they feel and how they wish they were causes emotional distress. It does not state that the orientation itself is bad, but rather, the distress caused by it.
Well I suppose grown men fucking each other in the streets doesn't impact anyone's life. Would you like to live in a country where people fuck in the streets on a daily basis though? Would you like that to be your neighborhood, where men could be fucking in broad daylight, possibly in front of children? One of the depraved loons brought one of their children to a Folsom Street Fair a previous year. They were actually castigated by another participant.
I wouldn't want anyone to be fucking in the streets, regardless of who their partner is. To characterize all homosexuals as the exhibitionists / voyeurs of Folsom is like saying all Christians are in the KKK, or all black Americans support bringing back the Black Panthers. It's a straw man, and you know it.
Take it from John Kruse:
"Father of two, John Kruse said it is an educational experience for children. He said there were conservative parents against having kids at the event."
So remember kiddies, if you don't support men masturbating and fucking in the streets, you're a close-minded bigot!
Yes, because John Kruse is a well respected spokesperson. I, too, could find quotes from someone no one has ever heard of to support a tenuous claim, but I won't, because it would mean nothing.
Non-sequiter: Black people do not self-identify by their desire to have sex with anyone of a particular gender. Saying you are homosexual implies you enjoy homosexual sex, since male-to-male sexual contact is the leading cause of AIDS infection, your retort falls on its face.
Male-Female sex is the leading cause of AIDS infection by pure numbers.
Even if parents happen not to be blessed with children, their marriage serves as what an example of what proper adults should be doing, and aids society in that way. Heterosexual marriages serve as a guidepost for what is right and proper. Homosexual marriages, if recognized, would pervert that purpose and give implied approval for more self-destructive paths of behavior.
This line reveals your true intent. If, in fact, the goal is to raise children, then homosexual marriage would be just as wrong as the marriage of a person capable of having children with one who is incapable, or of two people incapable of having children. Shouldn't homosexual marriage be a guidepost for others, too? It shows that, even though they are unable to have children, they are willing to commit to each other.
That brings me to another contradiction. You argue against homosexuality because of the perceived high risk of AIDS infection. Then, in the same post, you argue against homosexual marriage, which would actually decrease the risk of AIDS infection by having both parties agree to a monogamous relationship, which decreases the risk of infection to 0 if neither party has it.
Once again, Homosexual marriages are done entirely for the purpose of glorifying the life choices of two adults. They have no other value to society and the negative lifestyle choices they reinforce by approving them can do no good. Homosexual marriage is vanity; Heterosexual marriage is purposeful and useful to society. That moral difference can never be erased and should never be forgotten.
That doesn't explain the heterosexuals incapable of having children. Is marriage for them vanity? Or perhaps it's love. Homosexuals are, in fact, people, just like you and me. They are capable of love.
Amazing Ampharos should realize that's not even close to an argument, and furthermore should realize that, much as he is loathe to admit it, stating "correlation does not equal causation" is not a refutation of evidence.
Essentially what you're trying to argue (without actually putting into words because it makes you sound ridiculous) is that while homosexuality is heavily correlated with various negative effects that do not effect to the same extent what would amount to the control group, heterosexuals, is not sufficient evidence to conclude homosexuality causes those effects.
Yes, that is exactly what he is saying, because it's true! There are a few ways this could be perfectly logical, which I will explain with some actual statistics.
Shoe size is highly correlated with scores on a test. This is not because large feet causes people to be more intelligent, but because adults have larger feet than children, and because adults score better on most tests than children. In other words, it's possible that when two things are correlated, they are both caused by yet another variable.
There is a strong positive relationship between sunburn and the intensity of sunlight. This doesn't mean that being sunburned causes the sun to shine. In other words, it's possible that when two things are correlated, one does cause the other, but you cannot always make a statement as to which caused which.
Lastly, there is a surprisingly large amount of people named Chris who visit Smogon. In other words, if you look for relationships long enough, you're bound to find one, even though there is no causal relationship whatsoever: it's pure coincidence. If you throw the darts before you draw the targets, it's easy to get bull's-eyes every time.
While as a writer and reporter I will never say that the length of an argument dictates its weight, a single sentence is nearly always insufficient to come to any conclusion.
It can also be indicative of a deeply rooted problem in the data used to support the conclusion.
m0nkfish: Gay marriage encourages homosexual behavior.
How? I've never heard of anyone thinking, "Well, I used to be attracted to the ladies, but after seeing Bob and Steve get together, I really thought that homosexuality thing was the way to go. I mean, all the cool kids are doing it!".
Homosexual behavior has demonstrably negative effects on its participants.
What's the negative effect on the female participants?
Gay marriage is currently not the law of the land. What benefits will gay marriage bring to America that could possibly outweigh the clear negatives associated with homosexuality?
Equality. Freedom. The removal of arbitrary distinctions that likely cause much of your statistics on suicide rates and depression. Those seem like pretty good reasons to me.
