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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (71245)	8/1/2003 4:49:01 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

You did not adduce the purpose of marriage as an issue, you referred to sham marriages. Now, you are putting it on a different level. Even the church does not say that procreation must be in play for a valid union, though, it says one should not intentionally subvert the procreative purposes. Another reason for marriage is to fullfill the desire of intimacy, and increase natural affection. By itself, that would not preclude homosexual unions, if it were not the view of the church that homosexual acts are themselves wrong, and therefore could not form a basis for a legitimate union. But lay the church aside. The problem with homosexual marriage is that, by putting homosexual unions on the same footing as traditional marriage, it goes too far in normalizing homosexuality, further eroding our ability to make moral judgments about sexual behavior. Things are hanging by a thread as it is, do we really want people legitimizing their promiscuity or pedophilia by referring to the innateness of their desire, on the analogy of homosexuals pleading that they cannot help themselves? Civil union is reasonable, and it preserves the distinction. If the parties want to, and can find a sympathetic minister, they can even have a wedding. But forcing society to recognize the marriage is an assault upon both normality and any kind of standards.......

To: Lane3 who wrote (71245)	8/1/2003 7:22:52 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

But there's no reason why Bush, while he's in the process of defining marriage, has to single out homosexuals He didn't proactively single them out; he reacted to the homosexuals singling themselves out by pushing their agenda. If the man-boy love folks were pushing their agenda that hard and had gotten a ruling from the SC saying that government couldn't outlaw sex between adults and minors, I'm sure he would be speaking out on that. If the polygamists were pushing their agenda with marches and Hollywood star appearances and got a SC ruling that the government couldln't limit the rights of folks who wanted multiple-love relationships and there were suits in several States trying to establish that prohibitions on polygamy were unconstitutional under state constitutions, I'm sure he would be speaking out on that. Personally, if the homosexual bar to marriage is dropped, there is IMO no longer any justification for prohibiting polygamous marriage. And I'm sure you'll agree with that. Right?

To: Lane3 who wrote (71245)	8/1/2003 7:42:16 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

The only arguments I've heard are: 1. Yuck. 2. Marriage is for raising families. 3. We've always done it this way. 4. God said so. Those are really the basic arguments for many moral positions. Taboos against public nudity and public sex. Taboos against adult-child sex. Taboos against defecating in public places, as long as you clean it up so it's not unhealthy (after all, dogs go in public). Taboos against voluntary prostitution. Lots of taboos basically face the same essential arguments. Actually, you missed two other arguments. One maybe you consider part of #3, but I think it deserves its own line, and that is simply that society has found over many, many years of experience that it works better this way for social order. There are many things we as a society do which can't be justified on purely logical grounds but which we do because we have found that they work out best that way. For example, the strong presumption that children should be raised by their parents instead of given at birth to the people at the top of the list of availble parents judged on the basis of education, resources, influence, etc. It is certainly logical to argue that a child would have a better life if raised by Bill and Melinda than if raised by a crack-addicted single mother on welfare. But we don't as a society follow the logical argument there. We have found as a society that certain ways of organizing society work, and we should not, IMO, abandon those unless we're sure as a society of what we're doing. Certainly some of those things don't work in practice and do need to be changed -- slavery being one easy example -- but in general, I believe that the collective wisdom of people often can't perhaps be logically justified but has nonetheless a value. The other argument quite simply is that biologically there is a purpose of relationship between one man and one woman which, whether you decide to have children or not, is nonetheless a simple biological relationship which can't be duplicated by any other relationshi. It's just the way either God or evolution made us, whichever you believe in. But either way, that's the way humans are created.