Derwood, you say incenstuous relationships will never be approved, even if plutonic but Willravel is already stating that the standard he has would allow it.
I have a sneaking suspicion he is far from alone.


The 'Interracial marraige' argument doesn't fly because interracial marraige still meant two people and a man and a woman. The guidelines for what marraige was considered at the time was one of the main supporting reasons for them to be allowed to marry.

a guideline that is arbitrary and unsupported by the Constitution. "Tradition" is a terrible reason to support anything

Aww crap, good point. Amendment: consent from any life form.
They may very well never be approved by law. Still, the main stigma attached to incest, that offspring would be genetically weaker, is demonstrably false unless incest has taken place over several generations. If that verifiable information can be made common knowledge, the only real objection to incest would be the same as homosexuality: namely religion and "the ick factor". I don't think either of these constitutes a good enough reason to outlaw social rights.

But this is just my opinion, and no it's not all that common. Most social progressives do not support legalization of polygamy or incestuous relationships. I'm in the extreme minority.

Edit: I should get some award for inspiring The_Jazz to type "sybian".

-- Just like Gay Marraige. Yet here we are.

You claim to be fine with gay marriage, yet you vehemently defend those who want it to remain illegal.

If marriage is a legal contract offered by the government, then they cannot use sexual orientation to discriminate who can/cannot enter into that contract.

Really? How sure of that are you? I've got actual historical records in the form of family archives stating that a scientific poll of several counties in Mississippi considered miscegination to be a crime against nature. I've got the actual polling data somewhere on a disk at home. If I can find it easily, I'll post it. When folks consider a black person and a white person to be entirely different things, the playing field changes.

Attitudes change, my friend. They always have. My great-great-grandfather, who was not a particularly good human being by anyone's definition (and was eclipsed in the son-of-a-bitch catagory by his son, my great-grandfather), participated in a lynching in Mississippi of a black man that got caught receiving the services of a white whore. My dad has the postcard that memorialized that particular event. I don't really share their believes on miscegnation, though.

I cannot conceive how people today say "well race is different than sexuality" when people made all the same arguments about interracial marriage not 50 years ago. I guess the bottom line is that nothing about this is logical. It's an emotional response, and you can't really reason with that. You just have to show it reason and hope it comes around.

As an aside, I have no problems with any consensual adult relationships. We have at LEAST two sets of members involved in long term, committed polygamous relationships that are as loving and stable as anything any straight couple could hope for. I can't conceive of any reason they shouldn't share the same rights and responsibilities that I share with my wife. I don't have any specific problem with consensual adult incestuous relationshps either. People can love and fuck who they want to.

Now...I don't think that private organizations should be forced to marry people they don't want to, but I don't think the government has any business limiting who can receive those benefits so long as the parties are both adults and there is no coercion.

three words:
"slippery slope fallacy."

If you are against gay marriage itself, then at least be honest and defend that position.

If you are against incest, bestiality and polygamy, then be against incest, bestiality, and polygamy by themselves. No need to prevent gay marriage to prevent that.

Thanks for being one of the few who use "slippery slope" correctly and recognize it as a fallacy rather than a justification for one's position.

Polygamy could get rather interesting. A single person with great healthcare benefits could marry many other single persons in a state, one way to achieve universal healthcare. I don't think love or sex is a marriage requirement even under today's laws.:)

I think you'll find that it's rare that anyone will admit to being against gay marriage itself, because it is a position that's impossible to defend without implicitly coming out as a bigot. Since most bigots are also cowards, many of them tend to cling to a rather long list of convenient, if skin deep, reasons for being against gay marriage.

For instance,

-God doesn't like it
-Then puppies will want to marry Italians
-Then zombies will want to marry vampires
-Marriage is only for procreation
-Gays can't raise kids
-Blllaaaaaargh State's Rights
-Gays are unnatural

These shallow lines of reasoning really only serve the purpose of helping said bigots deflect any sort of encroaching notions of how little they would actually be affected by the widespread ability of gays to marry each other.

Only really for exceptionally broad definitions of 'bigot'. It's definitely an authoritarian position, and I have difficulty seeing how it avoids being a theocratic position, but you have to water down the word to make it encompass the entire opposition.

I don't know how much farther you can expand it beyond either a biblical verse, "eww", or "Hannity told me so it must be true" (which isn't even a position so much as it is everything that's wrong with our species). I know it doesn't represent every single position, but it's a vast majority.

I combined all of the items you listed into one:

God doesn't like when Italian puppies marry vampire zombies. Marriage for procreation makes raising kids unnatural Blllaaaaaargh!
What?

Minorities have been through situations where the majority gets to decide their rights. It's happened before and the final outcome is probably going to be that we do get the right to marry. It's really a matter of time of when.

Was this a response to me? Yes, those three taken together probably make up the vast majority, but that first 'biblical verse' portion isn't implicitly bigoted. Again, unless you want to water down the term.

And I know he must have a decent-sized fanbase, but I've met maybe two or three Hannity fans in my entire life. Even friends who like Limbaugh or O'Reilly tend to regard Hannity as kinda stupid.

..

What I'm saying is that these people are bigots, and that they only embrace these ridiculous justifications for their bigotry to avoid admitting to being a bigot.

---------- Post added at 07:03 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:00 PM ----------

Can you give any reason why allowing gays to marry has anything to do with allowing incest?

As far as I can tell, the only thing standing in the way of incestuous marriage is popular opinion.

Gays aren't denied the right to marry because they're gay. If they were, that law would be struck down faster than it could reach a court, as it would signal out a specific group of people (Gays). Bans on marriages which don't adhere to the whole, "One man, one woman" mantra, while "discriminating" against gays, also equally "discriminates" against groups who do not fall into the "one man, one woman" category.

No, they can't be married because of who they're trying to marry, not because they're gay.

Correct. The issue is who they're marrying, not the fact that they're gay.

But why? Granted, I'm not saying that SSM is equivalent those other things, but you seem to be ignoring the fact that bans on SSM are equally "discriminatory" to gays as they are to, say, polygamists.

Because marriage is a social construct regulated by the state, not the church.

We've been over this before. If someone's relationship is only "legitimized" by marriage, then I'm not so sure they're relationship is real, anyway.

I can't.

And I couldn't care less. If someone wants to screw and marry his sister or his mom or his fifth cousin, that's not my business. If they want the rights and responsibilities that I gain from and owe to my wife, I'm happy for them to have it. All I ask is informed consent. I mean, I think it's strange. I don't want to do it, but a cursory search of pornography will show you that incest fantasies are downright common.

The "child" line is flexible and arbitrary, as you said, but there's something inherently different about children and their ability to make sexual decisions and adults, even if those adults make decisions you don't agree with. We call people legally children and legally adults based on when we as a society decide they can make informed decisions about their lives-which includes taking into account consequences and long term impacts. If some theoretical society decides that 9 year olds understand "sex" well enough to make decisions about sex, I guess that'd be strange.

But, I think that children, much more so than incest and polygamy, is a total red herring in the gay marriage discussion. The revulsion to pedophilia is much more common and much more extreme because so many more people recognize that it's scary and dangerous TO THE ABUSED CHILD. People don't worry about gay people being harmed by their relationships in the way you worry about a priest or a teacher or a random person abusing a kid, because it's a different concern. Likewise with adult, consensual incest and polygamy. Those relationships make people uncomfortable for, in part, historical reasons and social taboos, not because of a fear that someone is taking advantage of another who doesn't understand the consequences and long term impact of the situation.

Edit: After IL's post, you don't get to say "marriage is for the state" in a post like that. The reason the vast majority people are against gay marriage is religious. If Mormons don't want to marry gays in the Mormon church, that's one thing. I would defend their right to do that every time (though I still disagree with it).

It is an undeniable fact that the very effective campaign against Prop 8 was financed in no significant by the Mormon Church, not to deny gays the right to get married in their church, but to deny them legal rights as married couples. The fact is that churches and people thinking in the context of their church are making decisions that impact other people who are not part of their church. I'm not making a church/state argument, just that it's impossible to extricate the two, given how both individuals and church institutions react when same sex marriage is on the table. I cannot conceive of a legitimate reason that state marital privileges should not be extended to any consenting adults who wish to marry. All the examples people bring up have irrational "ew" connected to them, which means pretty much nothing to me. Governance should not be based on ew.

One could very easily read the Bible as a source of incredible bigotry without any watering down. It's blatantly sexist and racist, no two ways about it, and what little it does say about homosexuality isn't made clear beyond "it's an abomination". There's no argument made other than "God doesn't like it", and even those passages are highly suspect. Verses surrounding anti-gay verses are regularly ignored by all Christians (I don't need to repeat verses about shellfish), which leads me to suspect—though now know for sure—that the Bible is more often than not a thin veil covering just another case of "eww".
I intended to include all the idiot right-wing talking heads with that. ORly, Limbaugh, Beck, etc., anyone dogmatically spewing hatred as a representative of the dark far right.

I'm sorry but all the back and forthing on this issue over the years only leaves me with one conclusion: there is no reason to not permit gay marriage.

Whatever you wish to call it there is no justification for not allowing this that passes the sniff test... it's simple bigotry and foot dragging conservatism.

One thing that this thread is showing is that the "Gay Marriage will lead to Polygamy/Incest" meme is working on many people. If you continue to use the terms in the same sentence over and over, people start equating them all the time. It ceases to be "Gay marriage leads to incest" and starts being "gay marriage = incest"

If you're referring to me, then I think you miss the point. I simply don't care if adults want to get married to each other. And I don't care who those adults marry.

Coercion, rape, force, duress and etc. that occur in those relationships are all crimes and should be punished as such but if people have a healthy otherwise legal relationship, I see no reason to prevent them from getting married.

I don't think that's the point you were making, but just to put it out there.

IL:

Call it what you want. If a gay couple can't get married because of gender restrictions, it's discriminatory against gay relationships.

And I'm not implying marriage is a relationship requirement. I meant that denying access to marriage implies gay couples aren't legitimate couples. That's discrimination.

Are gay couples legitimate couples?

If yes, why can they not marry?

If no, isn't that discrimination?

Why must "marry" mean man and woman? Does God not want gays to form unions? Why or why not?

So why allow marriage at all? After all, following this slippery slope fallacy, regular marriage will lead to gay marriage which will lead to incest and all sorts of things.

At the end of the day, you have to use that because you really can't say what you really think, so you have to come up with these sorts of arguments. Still, you have not explained why gay marriage will lead to any of these things, and why fighting to stop gay marriage is the battle to fight.

---------- Post added at 05:21 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:15 PM ----------

I am sorry, but this is just nonsense.

So banning gay marriage is not discriminatory because they still have the right to marry people of the opposite sex? Are you seriously trying to make this argument?

Following your line of thinking, banning inter racial marriage is not discriminatory either, since everyone can still get married...

And I've yet to understand how same sex marriage leads to polygamy. Especially considering that most polygamous relationships are heterosexual in nature. Maybe we should outlaw straight marriage.

I don't see how.

No, it's not discriminatory because no one, gay, straight or otherwise, has the ability to enter into a same-sex marriage. It's not inherently discriminatory against gays.

The ability to marry a person of the opposite gender, which was available to some, was withheld from others. It'd be the same as if some of the population were allowed to enter into a same-sex marriage while another segment of the population was not for no justifiable reason.

Because if the courts deem that the gender of the person being married is arbitrary in deciding if two persons can be wed, then there is no basis under which they could logically claim that limiting marriage to two persons is any less arbitrary than limiting marriage to three, four or even five persons.

I find this funny, as it's inherently contradictory.

No, it's not discriminatory because no one, black, white or otherwise, has the ability to enter into an inter-racial marriage. It's not inherently discriminatory against blacks.

Seriously, it's not discriminatory because whites can't use the blacks' fountains either...:shakehead:

But interracial marriage laws never prevented anyone from marrying someone from the opposite gender. Everyone had the right to marry someone of the opposite gender, as long as they were of the same race. How is that any more or less discriminatory than bans on gay marriage? No one, black, white or Native American, had the right to marry someone of a different race, so it must not be discriminatory, following your logic.

Im sorry, but this is basically an admission that you have no solid arguments that a marriage should be restricted to one man and one woman, and so to prevent it you must link it to other, more unpopular types of unions, with the only link again being that you have no solid arguments to oppose those either, so they must be related, and thus must be stopped.

But if you haven't understood why a slippery slope fallacy is a slippery slope fallacy, here's a question:
if your concern with gay marriage is not gay marriage itself, but that it might lead to polygamy, why not simply pass an amendment against polygamy? Why involve gay marriage at all?

I thought you weren't playing the semantics game.

And you STILL haven't quantified (outside of your slippery slope fallacy) why people shouldn't be allowed to marry someone of the same gender.

Laugh all you want. It doesn't change the fact of the matter.

Even though you tried, this argument ignores the fact that some group of men/women had the ability to marry another group of women/men they "loved" (I don't really want to use that word, but I will), respectively, while another group didn't. And unless there was a valid reason for denying the second group the same ability as the first, then the restrictions on the second group must have be inherently discriminatory. Indeed, since those restrictions were based on race-- Which is considered to be a fully protected class under the 14th Amendment-- Then those restrictions were discriminatory and, therefore, unconstitutional.

The entire problem with your argument is that you first assume marriage is a right; that sexuality is a class protected by the Constitution; and by denying gays the ability to enter in same-sex marriages that we're discriminating against gays, when we're not. A heterosexual looking to enter into a same-sex marriage will be denied the ability to do so just as a gay person looking to enter in a same-sex marriage will be denied the ability to do so. Yeah, scoff at that argument as you will, but this fact alone keeps it from being an issue of discrimination.

To claim discrimination, a subset of the population must first be allowed the ability to do something while another subset of the population restricted. If you don't have that to begin with, then there-- By definition and by law-- Cannot be discrimination. Gays aren't disallowed from marrying because they're gay. They're disallowed from entering into same-sex unions because they are not consisting of one man and one woman. And until you realize this, then your argument becomes, essentially, moot because you're arguing something which is simply untrue.

See my response to Hektore.

You asked a question and I answered it. And, for the record, there's nothing wrong with there, either. Not only are slippery slopes not always a fallacy, but you're ignoring the fact that there's no reason the courts would have to determine one arbitrary distinction to be any more or less arbitrary than another distinction.

So let me ask you a question, specifically. Which is more arbitrary? Gender of the person you're looking to wed or the number of persons you're looking to wed. And why?

I'm going to reiterate this once more. A slippery slope is not always a fallacy. Understand? Just because you can throw out the term doesn't invalidate an argument.

But, anyway, it's not up to me to prove why same-sex marriage should be illegal, but you to show why it should be legal, since it is you who is trying to change the proverbial status quo. And, so far, the only reason you seem to have is "Because heterosexuals can get married!" which kinda' ignores the fact that gays can get married to-- Just not in the way they'd most like :P

Because a gay man marrying a woman is pointless? Because the status quo isn't always right? Because there is no reason to make one subset of people have to leap through a million hoops to do something that has no affect on you or me whatsoever?

There is absolutely nothing in the 14th amendment that makes race a "protected class" while denying the same for sexual orientation. As such, the first part of your answer is false.

The second part of your answer is not only false, but silly. The whole "but straight people can't enter into a gay marriage either" wins the cake as silliest reasoning. Following that same reasoning, we can not only outlaw interracial marriages, but we can ban anything that affects any group disproportionately, as long as it affects other groups as well. According to this line of thinking, we can outlaw the yarmulke (the Jewish skullcap), for example, and it wouldn't be discriminatory because gentiles wouldn't be able to wear it either.

The third part is not only false, but dishonest. To claim that it is not discrimination because a marriage is defined as a union between a man and a woman is circular reasoning, especially in the context of the approval of an amendment that defines it that way.


not all slippery slopes are fallacies, but this particular slippery slope is a major fallacy with capital F. You have not answered my question: if the problem is not gay marriage itself, but that it might lead to polygamy, why not an amendment that outlaws polygamy, and not gay marriage? What pisses me off is this transparent attempt to hide one's own bigotry: "you know, I have nothing against them gays, but if they get married the polygamists win." Fess up to your own reasons why you don't want gay marriage. No need to resort to "but it will lead to bigotry" arguments as that is the precise definition of a slippery slope fallacy.

And again with the dishonesty (or at least short memory): it was prop 8 that changed the definition of marriage. It was prop 8 that changed the proverbial status quo.

I guess two white people can enter an interracial marriage thanks to the 14th Amendment. That's pretty impressive.

It's the little things you learn online, will, that really make the biggest difference.

I find it impossible to believe that someone truly thinks that restricting marriage to just one man and one woman isn't discrimination.

Seriously you can't believe someone could have that opinion? Well I guess it's possible other people might not be able to believe that people in favor of gay marriage don't honestly believe it will lead to people marrying their dogs, cats or even the phone book. I thinks that's wrong and I think gay people should have the right to marry whom ever they love. Doesn't mean I think the other side isn't sincere in their opinions.

As for the trolling comments- maybe I'm missing it. I don't see a post where anyone's trolling. If you see it report it. I'll be happy to take a second look.

I think that Infinite_loser has done an admirable job of defending his standpoint. He is eloquent and well-researched. He has done an excellent job of representing an unpopular opinion.

Whether or not Infinite_Loser believes what he writes, he is presenting an excellent argument. I admire him for his choice to debate in this fashion.

If his standpoint is about parsing the semantics of the constitution, he's doing a bang up job. It's still unclear why he's arguing his case so strongly

I didn't say anything about rights. I was pointing out the incredibly obvious, that your argument is the same as the one used for the 'separate but equal' doctrine; that by your line of reasoning banning interracial marriage isn't discrimination. As long as nobody can do it, then there isn't unequal treatment, and when their isn't unequal treatment there isn't discrimination.

Yeah, I got that. And unless you're intently watering down the word, you're wrong.

You could rephrase your absolute to 'most of these people', but I don't see how you'd manage to support that, either. Opposition to gay marriage just doesn't require intolerance toward other groups or opinions. It just doesn't.

They surely go hand-in-hand for some significant portion of the opposition, but that's about as much as one can say without guessing.

We're not equating bigotry to "you shouldn't do that", are we? Because you shouldn't watch Carlos Mencia. Mencia is an abomination. Eww. Can you only be a bigot if you're intolerant toward something that isn't wrong?

It's certainly not a settled debate that the shellfish and homosexuality portions still had equal weight after the formation of the New Testament, but that's beside the point.

Invoking Bible verses does not in and of itself demonstrate bigotry. You can quote Leviticus all you want, but it's quite another thing to find Christians willing to carry out its advocated punishment. Given any one particular Christian, you might well make the case that they're cherry-picking from the Bible, but that's not equivalent to or implicative of bigotry. If they're still not displaying intolerance, they're still not displaying intolerance.

And here's a hint: intolerance can't simply mean disagreement put into political action at some other group's expense. Otherwise, just about everyone involved in politics - if not everyone - is a bigot. Intolerance has to mean more than that, or bigotry means too much and too little.



I intended to include all the idiot right-wing talking heads with that. ORly, Limbaugh, Beck, etc., anyone dogmatically spewing hatred as a representative of the dark far right.[/QUOTE]