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Originally Posted by 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.
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Well, the mainstream posotion here in California is different. Watch to see what blue states vote one way and what red states vote the other. This has a lot to do with the President trying to convince people that being a Christian means refusing to understand and allow homosexualism (not sure that's a word, but whatever). Those people don't speak for me, and their voting won't change my mind. I'll live to fight another day if we lose this round.
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Originally Posted by daswig
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.
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My ethics follow a combination of morality and logic (logic in the senser that it makes sense to me). My ethics tell me that these people don't deserve to be treated as any less than other people. Why should they be punished (and this does seem like a punishment)?
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Originally Posted by daswig
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)
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Well, we have to speak in averages in this situation, as case-by-case would make this very much more tedius (and some of the exceptions are so small that they become irrelevant in the scale we'ree talking aout, i.e. nationwide legislation). The average human adult makes a better parent for a human child than the average dog.
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Originally Posted by daswig
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."
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Well I was just mentioning to biological thing to cover all bases. The important point was the adoption (or insemination involving a third party). If the couple gets a child from with outside help, they are still just as responsible to raise that child as those who had a child without a third party.
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Originally Posted by daswig
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.
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We aren't just arguing on a strictly legal basis here. The movement behind the law is based on beliefs and social rules. You can't disregard that because of the ultimate decision will be in law. Law is based in (ta dah) ethics (logic and morality).
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Originally Posted by daswig
Is it the State's business to determine that the partners both have souls? PETA people probably DO think animals have souls.
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Well the religious right seems to be heading this, so I'd say that if they believe the bible so completly, they'd have to stick with the animals-sans-souls belief.
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Originally Posted by daswig
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.
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You also can't have sex with public property. Yikes as far as that having to be a law. Yikes.
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Originally Posted by daswig
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?
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The arm doesn't have a soul. Usually the part of the body connected with the brain and heart is considered the person. I still stand by what I said before: this (marrige rights for dead people, animals, inatimate objects, arms, puppets, etc.) is distracting from the real argument.