One of the main functions of a constitution is to enshrine certain legal principles so that they are beyond the will of the majority.
Arguably, this function is most important when it comes to minority rights, because minority rights will by definition otherwise be very vulnerable to derogation by the will of the majority.
This in turn is something that I see as indispensable to the Freedom that Americans cherish so much. America is a beacon to the world of everyone being free to have and express their political views, their religious views, etc.
As soon as the majority can decide to take away rights from a minority, then you have lost the foundation of your freedom.
I wouldn’t argue with any of this.
There is a limit to freedom of course - one cannot be allowed to harm others through the exercise of one’s freedom.
And that, I think, is where the real issue about same sex marriage is found. Some thing that such marriage IS harmful to society, and others do not.
Of course it’s harmful. How could it not be.
Now - sex with children, with animals - those are harmful behaviours. Tolerating or recognizing consensual adult same sex relationships does not mean you also have to accept those things.
You’re right. I could tolerate thievery or prostitution, but that doesn’t mean I tolerate murder. Great point. :roll:
Go to law school. It will change your mind.
Go to business school. It will change your mind. Go to med school. It will change your mind. Seriously, frood.
Do you have $50,000 to give me and will you be able to give me a couple years of my life back? Didn’t think so. No thanks. I learned enough law in general education to find my way around the constitution. It’s bordering on offensive when you talk like we know nothing about the constitution. I mean, OBVIOUSLY the constitution and our law is supposed to protect the minority from the majority. When I said 1/6 isn’t enough to remove the “In God we Trust” saying, I didn’t mean that the majority can steamroll the minority in every aspect. But the majority still does rule. Except when you have 7 people out of 3 million who decide that gay marriage in Iowa should be a legal right, and they’re not in the legislature. Once again, why don’t you acknowledge my point, by agreeing or disagreeing? I just want to know if you guys think my reasoning is sound (that is, that the Iowa judges far exceeded their position and ability - basically, abuse of power).
Merriam-Webster defines sexual intercourse as:
noun, involving penetration of the vagtia by the penis.
Or, looking at the definition of coitus, by Merriam-Webster:
physical union of male and female genitalia accompanied by rhythmic movements.
And the definition of deviant, by Merriam-Webster is:
departing from some accepted standard of what is normal.
deviating especially from an accepted norm.
By the above definitions, homosexuality, beastiality, pedephilia, necrophilia, sodomy, cunnilignus (sp?), etc, etc, etc… are all deviant (abnormal) behaviors.
Now, some of them I personally agree with, however, we are not talking about what I agree with, we are referring to why the government (any government) has a moral and ethical duty to interfere with a non-deviant, socially acceptable status for no real benefit to one party and detriment to another party.
Now, I have no problem - per se - with a government dictating that you can get a civil union with anything you want, your dog, your son, your mother, your best friend of the same gender, your marble boulder at the end of your driveway, your white picket fence, whatever. I do not think anyone in the world really gives two hee-haws if the government allows this or not. What people care about is taking a historically, and typically religious term and applying it to these unions.
The only good solution to this problem, that is a win-win (in so much as gay people cannot sue a church because they refuse to perform the ceremony, or in that no one gets pissed off about it) is to require all parties interested in getting government recogonition of their sexual behavior to get a civil union and have no governmental benefits at all (including punishments) regarding marriage. This reserves the religious ceremony of marriage as the union of a man and a woman before God and before witnesses back in the hands of the church and only the church.
Point in history, the only real reason government was ever involved in the unions of man and woman was to foster a stable environment for the creation of future (biological) tax payers, laborers. If this was unnecessary, I dare say that no ancient time lord or king or town bully would have given a rat’s arse and we would never have had governmental influence on marriages. If we strip the role of government of fostering a stable environment to raise biological offspring, then government ceases to have any vested interest in the union at all and thus, should be completely removed from any such relationships (including managing divorces.)
PS: Let us remember that the recipient of sexual intercourse always takes damage. Vaginal/Anal tearing, emotional/mental damage (welcome or not.)
Since marriage is a religious institution, that obviously means that atheists shouldn’t be allowed to marry and get governmental benefits, right?
Also, do you really think that men never suffer emotional damage when they have sex?
Also, heterosexual couples can also engage in “deviant sexual behavior.” Furthermore, many of them will never have sex at all. Should they be prevented from marrying?
Since marriage is a religious institution, that obviously means that atheists shouldn’t be allowed to marry and get governmental benefits, right?
Also, do you really think that men never suffer emotional damage when they have sex?
In regards to the former:
Atheists should not be allowed to MARRY.
Atheists, Wiccans, Homosexuals, Heterosexuals, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Polytheists, whatever should all have equal opportunity to receive a government issued Union Certificate by the local magistrate. Further, only this certificate should be valid for government benefits and only the dissolution of this certificate should be mediated by the government or their proxy.
In regards to the latter:
If the man is on the receiving side, yes. If the man is on the pitching side, no.
There is a psychological event that happens when someone physically enters your body that most men cannot grasp (because they have never experienced it.) It is to this event I refer. The event can be horribly disfiguring as in the case of most rapes, or it can be an enormous blessing as you engage in sexual behavior with your significant other. In either event, it is an event one just cannot understand unless one has had the sexual organs of another physically enter your body.
Sorry, I misunderstood. Your position is that anyone can get a civil union, which gives governmental benefits, while marriage has no legal meaning and does not confer any governmental benefits?
Sorry, I misunderstood. Your position is that anyone can get a civil union, which gives governmental benefits, while marriage has no legal meaning and does not confer any governmental benefits?
Correct.
The government offers a civil union (or call it something else if you prefer) to any group it deems fit to receive said union whether it be:
Whatever the government decides should be permitted to attain civil unionship, can get civil unionship if they so desire.
Meanwhile, marriage ceases to have any legal definition in the eyes of the government and is akin to getting your child christened by a church - a beautiful ceremony but one that has no legal bearing what-so-ever.
Whoa. Jenn, you are way out there. And your logic defies logic, IMO anyway (as it did many times in our A&A games :lol:).
At this point I will “exit stage left”. I guess I’m just speechless. :-o
Let’s see if I can make an A&A move without my trusty calculator, now… :|
Lol, sorry. The idea is, if the government wants to sanction civil unions between non-traditional couples, then they should stop calling it marraige. Then they can sanction whatever union they want without opening the door to lawsuits against those who do not want to perform marriages to non-traditional couples and not put a (in the minds of the religious) negative spin on the institution of marriage.
In this way, if they wanted to legalize the union of a dog and a cat, they could without sullying the institution of marriage. I don’t particularly think my German Shepard should marry a Siamese Cat, but hey, what you do in your bedroom is between you and God, right?
Anyway, a second wife around here really would rock! No more back breaking labor, I can divvy it up! Kids? Live in babysitter babe!
Jenn:
First, I do appreciate that you are proposing a decent compromise that would have the government no longer discriminating in this area.
But, an analogy: Just as you think only certain relationships qualify for proper marriage, I have my own definition of what passes for proper logic and reason.
While I don’t think that what others call logic others passes muster, I don’t feel that civilization will collapse if others are allowed to claim that their arguments consist of “logic”.
Similarly, I think social conservatives should get a grip and realize that not everyone is going to share their definition of “marriage”, and maybe that’s not the end of the world either. If two gay guys (or gals) want to consider themselves married rather than unionized, what’s that to you? Marriage is about SOCIAL validation of your cherished love. Gays and lesbians do not want to feel that their unions have a 2nd class status socially and legally.
What blows my mind is the inability of social conservatives to see the parallels between their views and those of the Taliban - to impose your moral code on everyone else. That is tyranny, no matter who wrote the moral code.
The rejection of tolerance and scientific rationalism is why Islam went from being intellectual leaders in the middle ages to now lagging behind the west in every kind of development. The US is on the verge of making the same transition.
I am not conservative and I am not liberal. I am a veteran and an American citizen. In my mind, that means I should fight for the individual liberty of all persons unless there is so much evidence that even the most stubborn of us see that we need governmental interference. For example, murder needs governmental interferance. Speed limits do not. Germany has done just fine with no speed limit on the Autobahn that it disproves the need for governmental interference by counter-example.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I just did not want to be called a social conservative.
I fail to see how if (not yelling, just emphasizing) EVERYONE has to get a Civil Union in order to have government recognition of their relationship this can be seen as making gays and lesbians second class citizens. Marriage is a RELIGIOUS term, not a SOCIAL term.
Anyway, I need more clarification on why you think gays and lesbians will think their unions have a second class status socially and legally. I fear you may not understand what I am trying to say.
What I envision is this:
Governments no longer have the term marriage found anywhere in their legal or social codes. The term is replaced with Microsoft Word’s wonderful feature: “Replace” in all documents and immediately replaced with the phrase “Conjunction of Personalities” or “Civil Union between…” or “Melding of …” or whatever term is finally agreed upon.
The term marriage is forever relegated to the chruches. You can have a marriage ceremony in your church with your pastor and friends in attendance to make a committment to God of your love. This committment, however, has absolutely no legal bearing at all. The wife would even be prohibitted from changing her surname to her husbands because nothing, in the eyes of the government, has changed.
Instead, these couples would now have to have the religious ceremony in a church AND get a union before a magistrate or just skip the religious ceremony altogether and only have the magistrate’s unionization of their lives.
If anything, this punishes the religious. They now have to rent a church, hire a pastor, get the crew together for the ceremony AND make an appointment with the magistrate and pay for that as well. Gay’s and lesbians are not getting a second rate deal here, Christians and Catholics are (and Jews, and Muslims, etc, etc, etc.)
FYI, adults can legally change their name whenever they want.
It seems you are a libertarian.
FYI, adults can legally change their name whenever they want.
It seems you are a libertarian.
I do not want to be pigeon holed into any specific political party. I think they are all thieves and bastards regardless of party. Anyway, I doubly hate the thought of being lumped into the same party as a certain evil that should not be named, but most of you remember anyway.
Back to civility then…
I suppose they could change their name whenver they want. But why would they? And are there not some safe guards that you have to have a reason to change your name, or is it like divorce in my uber-aweful state where all you need is someone who wants to do it, in order for it to be done?
(That’s another thing, I think if you are married or have a civil union or whatever the legal name of your relationship happens to be that is mathematically equivalent to marriage today, you should be required to stay with that person except if they cheat on you, if they beat you or if they stop having sex wtih you.)
I disagree, Jenn.
I am 100% atheist, and I consider myself 100% married.
Marriage is a social institution that is found in every culture around the world, and it takes many different forms.
Marriage is a social institution that is legally recognized. It is also a social institution about which many religions have many different things to say. The state has to have a definition of marriage and this definition should be a secular one.
Your proposal is an interesting one but it is not going to happen anytime soon and so it is not a realistic way of giving everyone equal treatment under the law. Your proposal also would not protect traditional marriage because, with the law out of the picture, SOME churches would start performing same-sex marriages.
Conservative christianity does not have the patent on “marriage”. Do you think Muslim states would be correct in prohibiting marriage between muslims and non-muslims? Government should be secular.
Your proposal could be achieved much more easily by simply saying to yourself that true marriage is in the eyes of God. The state can call marriage whatever it wants, but this is not “true marriage”. God and his institution of marriage are safe because no one can rewrite God’s laws. God (and Christians) are not harmed by the inaccurate use of terminology by others. State-sponsored marriage would just be seen by you as the civil union you are proposing, and true marriage in your eyes would be the one performed in a church in front of God. The state just uses the term “marriage” because it is shorter and correlates to a universal human institution that does however take many different forms.
Think of another social institution: education and graduation. You could take the view that one is only “educated” when one has learned something of the “truth”. There may be all kinds of people “graduating” from university who have not learned anything good and maybe even a lot of wrong ideas. Should we say that only certain kinds of learning should be included in the term “education”, and that those with a degree in Creation Science or in Climate Change (depending on what you think is wrong) should not be allowed to call themselves “educated”?
It’s just a word. A word for which you have a very important personal religious meaning, but a word that is used differently by different people. Misuse of a word can’t harm you or your God.
By the way, the situation in Canada is this:
The government recognizes same-sex marriage, and justices of the peace as public servants have to perform them if asked.
However, churches are protected from having to perform same-sex marriages. So, if you want to get a same-sex marriage in a church, you have to find a church that will accept this.
To me this seems a pretty good approach. Conservative christians and muslims don’t have to go along with it in their churches and mosques, so their religious customs are not threatened, they are not forced to do anything against their beliefs. All they have to do is accept that the state does not use their definition of marriage.
This is just like the Amish not insisting that everyone live without electricity, the Jewish not insisting that everyone get circumcised, and the muslims not insisting that no one drink alcohol etc.
Similarly, I think social conservatives should get a grip and realize that not everyone is going to share their definition of “marriage”, and maybe that’s not the end of the world either. If two gay guys (or gals) want to consider themselves married rather than unionized, what’s that to you? Marriage is about SOCIAL validation of your cherished love. Gays and lesbians do not want to feel that their unions have a 2nd class status socially and legally.
What blows my mind is the inability of social conservatives to see the parallels between their views and those of the Taliban - to impose your moral code on everyone else. That is tyranny, no matter who wrote the moral code.
You think you’re so smart, but you are missing it by a mile. You think by labeling people like me a “social conservative” you can label and shelve me as “intolerant” because I have standards that I will not compromise on.
Marriage is about a lot more then social validation of your cherished love. Marriage and family are the most basic units of government. If you want anarchy, just break down the family unit and devalue marriage so that a rock and a dog can get married. I’m not going to go to the trouble of defining all that marriage is, because it would take a lot of time and thought, but it is so much more than what you are making it out to be.
I have never “imposed my moral code” on anyone else. All I’ve ever done is communicate in congruence with my core beliefs and experiences, and vote according to my beliefs. The vast majority of “social conservatives” do the same. So we’re like the Taliban?
It’s pretty simple, really. People like you resent people who have standards that are higher or more restrictive than your own, and you will say whatever to voice your frustration. Next thing you know, you’re calling good people “Taliban” “Nazis” “Bigots” whatever. Be careful with those labels you’re throwing around. They’re offensive, they’re inaccurate…… just stop.
What’s ridiculous is for the adherents of bronze-age mythologies to enforce their moral code on everyone else.
One of my best friends is lesbian and she is one of the most moral people I know. Of course, as an atheist, I realize you probably think I’m not entitled to make any moral judgments whatever.
Freedom has to be freedom for all or it is a very shallow freedom. Gays and lesbians want to recognize and celebrate their committed relationships to their life partners as “marriage” and not have to call it something else because some people are disgusted by their lifestyle. So let them. That, or just get it over with and declare the US a theocracy just like the Taliban. You have many of the same religious beliefs about sex and marriage, and apparently also a similar belief about the role of religious morals in the law of the state (unlike your founding fathers). Not quite as extreme, you are not advocating stoning, but it still causes stigmatization and 2nd class status based on a part of people’s identity that they can’t change.
You have an ideological commitment that I don’t think I will ever be able to reason you away from, so I give up.
I’ll be posting news about AACalc soon.
Frood,
I don’t think we are trying to force our morals on everyone else, I think you are trying to devalue something we cherish because it either feels unfair, you do not like it, you want to hurt those of us with religous beliefs or whatever the reason is.
That is why, generally, when you say the government should do a full pull-out of the institution of marriage and just make it’s own institution with absolutely no religous connotation what-so-ever, those trying to get same-sex “marriage” (with the term) scream bloody murder.
I honestly do not feel that most proponents of same sex marriage really want same sex marriage, they want the word “Married” so they can either sue the church for non-compliance and bigotry or just sully the institution to the point no one bothers to get married anymore.
On a related subject:
I do not feel I would ever get married again. Honestly, if you have ever had a husband and had to yell at him over and over and over again about getting his underwear off the fraggin floor and into the gosh-darn laundry basket already…you would not want to get married either!
And I know it is not just me! This is a plight of women everywhere! And why in the 9 levels of hell would anyone want to get “married” anyway! Monogendered or dualgendered it does not matter! It’s a nightmare and a half to open a bank account, it’s that squared if you want to buy a house! Booking a flight for your spouse is akin to pulling teeth without anesthesia now. Frack that. With the marriage penalty coming back in January, I honestly think about getting a divorce and just co-habitating with my husband. God knows the score, why does the government need to know?
Please stop telling us our motives. I do not care if a church denies a marriage, since (if same-sex marriage is legalized), they can get married wherever they want, including a more liberal church. I am not for forcing churches to marry any couple.
Also, men also have many problems with women, such as nagging over small things.
Also, men also have many problems with women, such as nagging over small things.
:-) This keeps getting better and better. You and Jenn both have good points…. :-)
Jenn, I NEVER leave underwear on the floor - it always goes straight into the laundry basket. I also don’t “shoot baskets” with my underwear, leaving it on the floor when I miss.
My wife is irked by the amount of time I spend playing games. She thinks games are nearly worthless - a way to pass an hour or two per month with the children, perhaps. One of our biggest battlegrounds is the # of hours I spend playing games. My position is that I am who I am - I have always loved games and always will, and I wouldn’t be nearly as happy or fulfilled if I banned game-playing in my life.
But Jenn and Calvin, you’ve nailed 2 of the top 10 things that irk husbands and wives, I’m sure.
Husbands - irked by nagging (we are not your project - accept us as we are and we’ll all be much happier)
Wives - irked by crudeness/rudeness (one of my cousins used to say, “do you know what the difference between rude and crude is”? Rude is throwing your underwear against the wall. Crude is when it sticks there)
