Originally posted by: themusgrat
Don't be daft, only in recent times has marriage stressed love and companionship more than practicality and 1 male/1 female. I'm not appealing to your sense of what marriage traditionally is, I'm telling you that historically, marriage has been around for people to get married, have kids, and raise them. Find me some figure from the 19th century that thought that marriage was only about love and companionship, and that gay people raising kids would fit into their model of a "traditional" marriage.
We don't base our current laws on what figures from the 19th century thought. If that were the case, women wouldn't be allowed to vote, blacks couldn't use the same facilities as whites, and the Irish wouldn't be allowed into the country. This is the exact problem with the appeal to tradition; your entire argument centers around the belief that because something has always been done in a certain way, it must be the best way. But history has given us thousands of examples where the "traditional" method of doing something would be seen as barbaric by our current standards. Tradition can be wrong.
You say the fallacy of appeal to tradition applies because we're talking about the legality of marriage. No. The government has nothing to do with the meaning of marriage, it's rather unfortunate that they're involved at all, though I suppose it is necessary.
Wrong. The government confers certain privileges to married individuals, and marriage is seen as a legally binding contract that is specifically defined by the government. This definition has been updated throughout the years, whether it was through the repeal of miscegenation laws, updating the laws to reflect that women were not the property of their husbands, or the current battle over gay marriage. Given that the government specifically defines marriage as a contract that serves as a way to grant privileges, it is absolutely false to claim that the government has nothing to do with the meaning of marriage.
Still though, the government should be able to see that if today it's gay couples, 100 years from now it will be a man and his dog, or a dude and 10 of his crack whores or whatever.
Wrong. There is a fundamental difference between two consenting adults, more than two consenting adults, and animals (or inanimate objects, another argument given by opponents of gay marriage). Animals cannot legally enter into contracts in our society; the government's definition of marriage amounts to a contract. Explain how allowing more people to enter into this contract will invariably lead to animals being given the right of contractual consent down the road?
From a legal standpoint, you can safely assume that the traditional marriage is the setting that most families will be raised in, because it's also been proven to be the best setting for children to be raised in.
Wrong. The
American Psychological Association conducted a meta-analysis of studies on gay parents versus straight parents for the last 60 years and found that "not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents." Yes, more people are raised in one father, one mother households, but simply stating that it therefore must be better is not supported by any empirical evidence.
But I'm not even making that argument.
Then why even bring it up? That just doesn't make sense.
The idea of marriage is so fundamental to our society, in fact our society in many ways hinges on it, and most other societies are even more dependant on it. When you meet someone, eventually you're going to ask, are they married, do they have children, what do their parents do, etc.
And a person in a gay marriage could say, "yes, I am married." A gay couple can have children, through invetro, surrogacy, adoption, kidnapping (ok, that last one is a joke). When people ask what my parents do, I can say "they were both teachers; one of my mothers died a few years back, and the other recently retired." None of those questions are specific to heterosexual couples.
When you get vacation time for Christmas/Thanksgiving/summer/Veteran's Day or whatever, most people are going to spend it with their biological families, if it's at all possible.
If a lesbian woman gives birth to a child, she is the biological family. If a gay man fathers a child and raises him/her, he is the biological family. Adopted children don't run back to their biological families for holidays, regardless of who they were adopted by. This sentence makes the claim that the only real families are a mother and father with their biological offspring. This brands a huge section of the population (adopted people, orphans, people growing up in single parent households, remarried people, stepchildren, surrogates, gays and lesbians, etc.) as not real families, and that's simply not true. Family is more than just your bloodline.
The idea of everyone having a mom and a dad is so ingrained in every culture around the world, even American culture, that I think it would be a mistake to destroy that. Allowing gays to marry would not simply destroy it no, but it would start the degrading of it, over time.
How? You've already mentioned bestiality, which is an absurd argument. You've made the false claim that heterosexual families are better than gay families at raising children. You've made the false claim that only heterosexual biological families are real families. You've fallen back on an appeal to a traditional view of marriage from the 19th century, when women were the property of their husbands and marriage outside one's race was illegal. None of these false arguments lend any credence to a belief that gay marriage will inherently degrade marriage over time.
You say how is gay people raising kids against the spirit of traditional marriage? I ask you where in your family tree do you see a John and Bill adopting your great grandmother from an adoption agency, or Sue and Wendy raising your dad after being impregnated from a sperm bank. Does that sound like traditional marriage?
Again, the argument that an adoptive family is not "real." I was adopted before I was even born; I spent less than an hour with my biological parents. So according to you, I have no family tree; I can't use my adoptive family's and my biological one is a complete unknown. How sad for me, growing up with no family. Of course, the goverment recognizes my adoptive family as my family, and my adoptive mother is, for all legal purposes, my mother. But that doesn't matter if she's not my biological mother, right? This argument is complete nonsense, flying not just in the face of legal definitions, but also in the face of the common view of the family that contends that an adoptive family is still a family.
You present a wide series of arguments that have been discredited time and time again. You fall back on an appeal to tradition, then make the case that it isn't a logical fallacy since marriage has a tradition behind it, which is the definition of the appeal to tradition logical fallacy. You make the same tired claims about bestiality that are an appeal to fear and a slippery slope argument, both logical fallacies. You claim that any family that isn't one man, one woman with their own biological offspring is not a true family. You make the claim that the government should have no say in defining the legal term "marriage" when it refers to a legally-binding contract recognized by the government. In short, your arguments are both outrageous and completely untenable.
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