I don't recall using either of those terms. And you're missing a pretty big point here. We're not talking about how you personally view something, we're talking about people who feel compelled to try to band the things they don't personally approve of. To use your Russian food analogy, not everyone has to like Russian food, but that doesn't mean it's OK for you to try to close down all the Russian restaurants in your city.
I don't recall using either of those terms. And you're missing a pretty big point here. We're not talking about how you personally view something, we're talking about people who feel compelled to try to band the things they don't personally approve of. To use your Russian food analogy, not everyone has to like Russian food, but that doesn't mean it's OK for you to try to close down all the Russian restaurants in your city.
ya i realize that, but i am just offering my ideas on why so many have a problem with supporting something (marriage) they feel to be a green-light for an act that disgusts them on the guttural level.
I see what you're saying, but since when does a free society operate like that? It's not our job to "green-light" things involving consenting adults, what a gay couple does or doesn't do should be between the couple. You don't have to be comfortable with it, but I don't think they should be required to get your approval, either. And honestly, the only reason I think most people don't care is that it's not their bedroom the government is peering into. If it was, I imagine most of them would change their tune pretty quickly.
Edit: Sometimes I feel like this is really two different debates. There is the first debate about whether or not gay relationships are good and whether or not gay marriage is good. And then there is the second debate about whether or not it's the government's job to be the bedroom police, or whether that's just none of our business.
The first debate is going to be impossible to solve, personal beliefs are personal beliefs. But depending on the answer to the second debate, it might not matter.
yup. i think it is important to reveal and understand the psychological undertones associated with the opposition, before resorting to an argument of who is more intellectual.
why for example, do some nations (some Muslim, Hindi, others) completely forbid gay relations and even allow murders, beatings, and exile of gay people. lets face it. there are a lot of people that HATE gays, and I am not convinced that it is a matter of religion or culture. religion and culture are merely a manifestation of a society's impression of itself.
i dunno, it just trips me out when I think about how much the act seems unnatural to me and how nearly the whole world agrees with me in spite of different religion or culture.
I wouldn't characterize myself as homophobic at all, I'm just leery on letting two males adopt kid(s) without some types of larger credible analysis (of which the only choice is to let many samples of gay male and gay female unions raise kids) and look at what the outcome's are. Rushing into something for the sake of PC'ness isn't homophobic, it's prudent. It's hard enough for traditional marriages to raise kids, let alone the added social and internal pressures gay unions are going to encounter. We then have the aforementioned going against nature thing...I believe in evolution (or that aliens seeded earth, both hold some type of weight), and there is absolutely 0 natural way two gay females or 2 gay males can produce offspring. F'ing with mother nature should not be discounted....
I never said they weren't as valid, they certainly are. The simple fact is that straight couples have been using the term marriage for a few thousand years now. Straights by a massive margain outnumber gays. I think it's unreasonable for straights to have to change their definition of marriage just because gays don't like it....that's just to d@mn bad for gays. They have the advantage of coming up with whatever term - other than marriage - they want to use for their joining into a life committment with each other. The can call it Supercalifaggotlesbialidocious for all I care, but straights got to "marriage" before gays - by a couple thousand years at least.
Chuck
I agree, they shouldn't be able to just because they don't like it. They should be able to because it's unjustified discrimination, a violation of their human rights not to.
We shouldn't have given women the vote just because they wanted to change that tradition. We should have done it because it violated their rights not to.
Need more examples?
At least you're 90% of the way there. That last step takes a little time, if my own experience was any guide (I used to be in the 'civil union' camp myself, as I evolved on the issue). Eventually the question stops being worrying about the sensibilities of the people offended, and starts being 'wait a second, what justification DO we have to 'protect' the word marriage from them - the very idea that it's protecting the word implies gays are second-class defective people, and that's the point, they're not'.
I respectfully disagree. The issue gays are going to face when they talk to a normal straight person as myself and try to convince me that they should be allowed to "marry", is that "marry" to me is a man and a woman joined together in "marriage". At no point do I think gays are second-class defective people, I just know that because they are gay, they will not satisfy my view of marriage as being between a man and a woman. Because of that, I am not for gays being allowed to "marry", since that would require me to change my view of the term "marriage". As I've said before, given that the huge overwhelming percentage of people in the US are straight, and the term "marriage" has been understood to be between a man and a woman for thousands of years now, I really don't think it's that unfair for gays to just come up with their own word for their equivalent of "marriage".
This isn't some restriction of activity of benefit, it's a word. Pick a different one.
Chuck
Gay sex is 'disgusting' to me too, other than on the level of understanding that it's two human beings who are doing the same thing in their view straight people do.
That's where principles come in. Where white people who had a 'reaction' to black people (and at some level that's natural as anything 'different' can get a reaction' had to stop indulging in letting that reaction let them abuse their power as the majority to discriminate, and had to instead operate out of principle and say 'those are equal human beings who deserve equal rights'.
I don't think your approach of 'understanding the psychology', unfortunately, may pay off - the southerners who wanted segregation were never so much convinced otherwise, as forced at gunpoint to accept the change and then they came to see it differently. Similarly, in Massachussetts early polls showed huge opposition to gay marriage, until it was legal for a while and the opposition greatly declined.
There's actual psychology, rather than on bigotry, on how people adapt to change, and that's relevant to how to end the discrimination on gay marriage.
Looking at myself as an example, it was an evolution with multple phases to finally reach the conclusions that changed my original opposition, because I was used to how it was.
Principles require education, which is why I hope repeated threads like this slowly have some effect.
Bad argument after bad argument has to be torn down and exposed in the process to finally having people ask the 'right' questions on the issue and end the discrimination.
One interesting thing, though, is how I think most bigots don't realize they're bigots while they're bigots - it's after they see things differently they can say 'oh'.
I recall the 'ah ha' of one southerner I read late in the civil war, who said she had begun to question their beliefs in how wonderfully happy all the slaves were, because why would they have fled the good master they had to fight for strangers in the north, if they were happy where they were?
We can laugh and call her an idiot for not realizing why someone would not like being a slave, but it misses the point, that she was a perfectly reasonable person - in a culture.
And the revulsion I think most naturally feel for the idea of gay sex, which you describe, doesn't help people to ask the right questions. I think it's largely an issue of people being inconvenienced enough to bother to ask whether it's fair, instead of leaving the issue as it is, that's the problem (those in fundamentalist churches have an additional problem). It's little different than it taking 150 years for women to get men to ask the questions on their right to vote - and they had 'leverage', they finally put to use.
Thanks for the civil post. Here's how I'd lay it out to you.
The first is to ask you not to insist on continuing the word marriage only because 'that's how it's now defined'. If you are not willing to entertain the idea of asking the question on changing your view, then you're not willing to have a rational discussion on the issue, but I don't hear that being the case from you.
So I'd then ask you to break down the issue - ask what marriage really means, ask what gay people are really about.
If you're like many people, one of the phases you would go through is to think 'marriage is about having and raising kids, and gays can't do that'. But then you might realize 'wait a second, people who can't have kids - say, the elderly - get married too, and we don't object to that'. And poof, one of the leading reasons people who just react to the issue have for opposing it goes away.
You may come to a more general idea of marriage that it's about allowing two people who love one another to have the societal recognition of their partnership, the right to be 'a couple' formally - and you might realize that making some people use a 'special word' for it defeats the whole purpose; imaging if we said black people had to use a different word for their marriages, but claimed it wasn't a second-class thing, it's just that we want our word for white marriages. That analogy might help you see the discrimination involved.
(And yes, there is an issue in our history following slavery where this sort of debate occurred.)
You might eventually come to see the burden of proof on the people who want to deny exactly the same treatment, including the word, on gays, rather than the burden being on letting people perpetuate a long-standing discrimination longer. Or maybe you come up with another view and convince me differently.
Sorry, but marriage only has meaning between two persons who have a relationship, and if you married your goldfish, only the goldfish is advanced enough for that.
But it's always nice to see you compare a person who is gay to a goldfish, and some people still ask why we say there's boggling, idiotic bigotry in our country against gays?
I understand what you're saying here, except that it is reasonable to assume that old people won't be having kids, so they're not really in the kids picture. As far as a traditional married couple not being able to conceive, the potential was there for them to conceive, nature just didn't put it in their cards. Through modern medicine, some of them luck out. Contrast that with typical marriage age gays, and there is no Too old to have kids argument, nor a cruel twist of nature to not be able to naturally have kids. They flat out cannot have children if they're men, and for gay women, they need sperm from men to be able to fertilize the eggs they carry. This is the whole nature angle, and it's hard for me to get around it because it directly gets into child rearing and should gays be allowed to adopt.
(And yes, there is an issue in our history following slavery where this sort of debate occurred.)
Your definition was spot on, however where I stop is when you change "two people" to "two people of the same sex". Once you do that, we've broken nature and we've broken a few thousand years of tradition/understanding. The black angle doesn't really do anything for me, as obviously blacks around the world can traditionally marry... I understand gays feeling discriminated against, however weighing that against the Billions who see marriage as one man one woman (and then throwing in the nature angle too), it seems like that scale is impossibly weighted to one side.
You might eventually come to see the burden of proof on the people who want to deny exactly the same treatment, including the word, on gays, rather than the burden being on letting people perpetuate a long-standing discrimination longer. Or maybe you come up with another view and convince me differently.
What I - in the end - keep coming back to is that gay unions violate nature (and this isn't some bible thumper BS, I'm definitely not one of those), which adds up to strike one for marriage, and it violates the long (we're talking thousands of years long here) universal understanding of marriage being between a man and a woman, which is strike 2. Strike 3 is an extremely small number of people wanting the whole rest of the US to change that understanding just because they happen to not like it. I don't know if I can go along with that, despite myself fully supporting gay unions having the full rights of traditional marriages; with the exception of adoptions...it'd help to seem some large long term studies on that.
I just have this overall perception that if gays asked for civil unions - and agreed the term marriage would not be used - to be made legal and recognized, they would garner a much more large acceptance. I'm maybe 25% there on the marry thing (as your definition was very good)....then the fangs out part of me wonder WhyTF I'm having to even think about this when they could just pick another g/d word and we could all call it a day...
Chuck
I was talking about two people who get married at the age of 70; about two people who get married where one or both are infertile, and unable to conceive, for example.
The point is that you recognize that even without any chance for children, marriage is legitimate - and removing that as a requirement blocking gays.
It's even easier when you then realize that the picture is yet more gray - gays *can* conceive, naturally or artifically with the help of a friend or donor, they can raise families, as millions have, with adoption - and you compare heterosexual couples who adopt to gay couples who adopt, and you see the studies showing no difference in how the kids do, and you come to realize 'what the heck is the reason for making a stink about gays again?'
But that's not a rational argument, counting the numbers on each side - would a 98% rate of white Mississippians in 1860 supporting slavery make them right?
It's not the gays who have 'broken nature', it's nature that has 'broken nature'. Remember, *gays are natural*. They are born that way. Nature has decided that something like 5% of human beings are going to be gay - for the sake of not getting into the details of more gray case areas with the compliexities of human sexuality, clearly, gays generally fit that description. It's not intuitive to get past the 'people are supposed to reproduce so gays aren't natural' line of analysis, but you need to face the facts on gays biologically.
And you then need to recognize that your not doing so has kept some very nice gay people who have other needs for equality and relationships from being treated justly.
You might eventually come to see the burden of proof on the people who want to deny exactly the same treatment, including the word, on gays, rather than the burden being on letting people perpetuate a long-standing discrimination longer. Or maybe you come up with another view and convince me differently.
What I - in the end - keep coming back to is that gay unions violate nature (and this isn't some bible thumper BS, I'm definitely not one of those), which adds up to strike one for marriage, and it violates the long (we're talking thousands of years long here) universal understanding of marriage being between a man and a woman, which is strike 2. Strike 3 is an extremely small number of people wanting the whole rest of the US to change that understanding just because they happen to not like it. I don't know if I can go along with that, despite myself fully supporting gay unions having the full rights of traditional marriages; with the exception of adoptions...it'd help to seem some large long term studies on that.[/quote]
I won't repeat the issue on how homosexuality *is* natural, just as albinos *are* natural but unusual - but consider this: those same thousands of years have also opposed 'civil unions' or other equal rights for gays - should that prevent you from holding that opinion? If not, why let that history shape one view and not another? Similarly, if more in the US opposed civil unions, would that be a 'strike' justifying you having a different opinion?
I just have this overall perception that if gays asked for civil unions - and agreed the term marriage would not be used - to be made legal and recognized, they would garner a much more large acceptance. I'm maybe 25% there on the marry thing (as your definition was very good)....then the fangs out part of me wonder WhyTF I'm having to even think about this when they could just pick another g/d word and we could all call it a day...
Chuck
I'd like to criticize that argument but I once shared it, until I saw why I was asking gays to do something unfair.
The whole point becomes, on the word - why DO we insist so strongly they not use it, why are we justified in denying it to them?
The only answer seems to be a bigotry, a discrimination, nothing else - and then you see why leaving the word another word simply continues the wrongful discrimination.
It's symbolic second-class treatment. It's simply that it's hard to get used to the broader use of the word marriage, not that there's justification for keeping it away from gays.
well i think its important to first recognize that it does violate nature. i don't take anyone seriously that doesn't recognize that point. IMO, the rightful debate is how we decide to act on our instincts. if we follow them, we deny incorporating gay partnerships into society. if we suppress them, we allow it.
You don't deserve to be taken seriously at all, with your level of ignorance on the biology.
Can you even define the word 'naturally' in a biological context at all? Can you apply it to homosexuals in any meaningful way? Of course not.
Why don't you talk about whether it's 'natural' for people to be born infertile? Why don't you apply your 'logic', cough choke, to whether infertile people should be 'allowed to marry'?
You just don't get that nature can decide for about 5% of the population to be homosexual (recent research suggesting, more precisely, to be born with a trigger to be homosexual).
But guess what - there's no democratic group going around shooting pregnant women with 'gay darts' making the fetuses born that way, 'unnaturally'; they're born *natural*.
I'll fix your quote:
IMHO, the word "marriage" has historically been a religious term in Western Civilization. For centuries, the Church wielded great power and influence over the people and governments of Europe. It demanded that it be the final authority on what constituted "holy matrimony". They even tried to deter divorce by refusing a divorced person the right to be re-married in the church; the implicit penalty thereby being that the re-marriage was not sanctified. They made it clear that marriage was God's business. Even governments were made to comply with the Church's wishes on the subject.
Even after the Church fractured into various denominations and the power of the Church over governments waned, the governments continued to use the word marriage as a convenient, easily recognized reference to 2 people legally bonding. The legal boundaries of marriage have changed radically over time. It is now acceptable for people of different faiths and races to join together, it is OK to legally separate the bond, young children are forbidden to participate, you cannot be forced to marry, etc..
I think it is time for another change. Let the word "marriage" signify a union sanctioned by your church. All others should be called something generic by the people, and the government should always the generic term for all unions. Civil union works for all practical purposes, but another term might work as well should we decide to come up with one.
Allow everyone their personal choice for a partner in the union, and apply all restrictions and benefits conferred by the government equally.
Even after the Church fractured into various denominations and the power of the Church over governments waned, the governments continued to use the word marriage as a convenient, easily recognized reference to 2 people legally bonding. The legal boundaries of marriage have changed radically over time. It is now acceptable for people of different faiths and races to join together, it is OK to legally separate the bond, young children are forbidden to participate, you cannot be forced to marry, etc..
I think it is time for another change. Let the word "marriage" signify a union sanctioned by your church. All others should be called something generic by the people, and the government should always the generic term for all unions. Civil union works for all practical purposes, but another term might work as well should we decide to come up with one.
Allow everyone their personal choice for a partner in the union, and apply all restrictions and benefits conferred by the government equally.
you take things very personally. its hard to maintain an objective viewpoint IMO when you write and think angrily.
males don't have vaginas. can the use of the word 'natural' be any simpler?
It's not about taking things personally - don't hide from the issue behind that. There's no lack of objectivity in my views.
So, males don't have vaginas.
Now, can you actually reason that out to be relevant? I have my doubts, but let me try to help.
So, *any marriage* which is not about pro-creating, is not a legitimate marriage, right? The only meaning relevant to your men and vaginas fact (putting aside the small number of people who are mismatched with their bodies by gender) would be the issue that the lack of a vagina prevents their conceiving children.
So, of what relevance is the vagina of a 70 year old woman who can't conceive? Of a 30 year old woman who had a hysterectomy and can't conceive? No marriages for them?
And what part of, say, about 5% of the human race being born different on sexual orientation being *natural* is hard for you? The word is simple - but you get it wrong.
It is a *natural* occurance that people are born that way. How they are treated by society - burned alive, banned from marriage, jailed - that's not 'natural'. Homosexuality is natural.
If it's not natural, why don't you point me to the man-made cause of it? To the evidence that the millions of gay people who say they did not choose it are lying? To the evidence contradicting the countless studies, such as those which find that certain characteristics in 5 year olds have an extremely accurate of predicting homosexuality?
Give me a break, you are not having any rational interaction in this thread, just spewing ignorance.
I'm bigoted against bigots, and cand defend that. You are bigoted against gays and cannot defend that.
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