daswig

The strongest possible argument that I can give you that your position is out of touch with the mainstream in the US is the results of the 2004 election. The people had their say, and they were heard, loud and clear. Now who LISTENS to what they said....well, that's another matter entirely.

So, your specific ethics say that homosexual marriage is OK, and that the law should be changed. OK, you certainly have the right to think that, without having to offer ANY justification to back it up. But the evidence keeps piling up to indicate that the vast majority of American people (well, ok, people who actually voted in those 11 states on the various referendums) do NOT feel that way.

I've known dogs who would be much better parents for children above the age of, say, 5 years old than their actual biological parents made. Of course, I've seen some pretty good examples of so-called "parents" who shouldn't have been allowed anywhere NEAR a child, and had a small part in depriving them of their liberty for the rest of their natural lives (with due process of law, of course)

Ummm...I'm pretty sure that, biologically speaking, same-sex couples have exactly the same odds of naturally producing a child from their union as a human and an animal have of naturally producing a child from their union, which is exactly zero. That's not bigotry, that's biological fact. Until cloning/DNA technology advances, this will remain the case. Of course, once molecular biology advances to that point, I'm thinking that it will shortly be possible to create a hybrid being from a human and another species, provided that we're not talking porcine and elephant donors, since we all know that pig and elephant DNA "just don't splice."


Marriage in the sense we're talking here is quite literally a legal construct. Is a relationship any different because there's a piece of paper from the State involved? In my book, it isn't. My wife and I were together for seven years before we legally married. Honestly, the actual marriage part was a huge pain in the ass...we had to have a big party, everybody got frazzled, there was the whole prenup thing, et cetera. The WORST fight my wife and I EVER had was on the way to the rehearsal dinner the night before the ceremony over where it was located. No other fight before or since even came close. Once the "festivities" were over, our lives returned to normal.

Is it the State's business to determine that the partners both have souls? PETA people probably DO think animals have souls.

But it IS illegal, in a completely non-hypothetical sense, even in California (which just passed the law banning it, since apparently it had never come up, and then did). The law may not explicitly state "it is illegal to marry a corpse and have sex with it with the consent of the corpse before it became a corpse", but there are various other statutes that cover it, such as "abuse of a corpse". That's a real code section, which tells you how twisted our society is becoming.

Now here's an interesting (if somewhat silly) scenario (I know it's a complication, Halx, but that's what the training does to you). What if, say, a person had their arm severed. What happens if the potential spouse wants to marry JUST the severed arm? Now technically, the person is not dead, right? The person that the arm was a part of could consent to the marriage, right? (I'm picturing the ceremony, when the priest or official asks "who gives this arm to be legally wed?") It's a human-human match, so the animals/soul thing wouldn't apply, right? Procreation as a requirement is out the window, right? What result?

/sings "Twiddle-de-de, one two three, Eric, the Half a Bee!"