Gay Marriage.

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The Birdcage was enough. Torrent Power, ACTIVATE!

Oh, so that's where that connection comes from. I guess this also explains why some people are still convinced that it's contagious. Very well-made, certainly well-intentioned, but highly destructive. Yikes.

I can understand how people with A.S. might sympathize with the gay cause, seeing gay people as, like themselves, people outside conventional society.
As a social outcast myself, it does feel a bit odd to sit down and articulate po-faced traditionalist viewpoints.
One thing that does get to me though is how many NTs – i.e., people who are biologically better adjusted to society than I am – seem to believe in what I consider to be socially damaging drivel.

So maybe I should be ranting in some NT forum. But I will try to put my view across once more – this time in response to miku, the last poster to respond to me directly.

So? It is largely this fact that motivated me to post on this thread.
Isn’t it a bit strange that no society in the history of the world has ever sanctioned gay marriage, and yet when people in the West oppose the idea of gay marriage they are smeared as ‘bigots’?

I would have hoped that the fact that no society in the history of the world has ever sanctioned gay marriage might at least make people stop and think that there might be a good reason for it.




In these few sentences right at the end of your post you have very succinctly explained to me where our disagreement lies. I believe you have things completely the wrong way round.

“Society” (as it once was) did not say that “being able to reproduce should be required for marriage”; it said that “being married should be required before two people decide to reproduce”. For any society (any people, any tribe, any race, any culture) to survive, its people need to reproduce. It also needs to see that its children safely reach adulthood, and are taught in the ways of its people. Marriage is the institution that sees to this. It grants the married couple certain rights, and confers upon them certain responsibilities, one of them being that they actually stay together.

That you have instead described marriage as you have suggests to me what I suspect to be true of many modern liberals: you put the actual survival of a people and their culture below the immediate (sexual) gratification of the individual. Or rather – below the explicit expression in law of the absolute equality of all desires.

To put it in even simpler terms – marriage exists to ensure that children grow up with their mother and father. It doesn’t exist to prove which sexual activities we’re “cool” with.



I’m not surprised you question this. It seems liberals fail to see how any social arrangements can be socially damaging unless they involve the direct infliction of harm (or “imposition of will”) on another person or persons. Liberals are usually so in love with their good intentions, they fail to look two steps ahead, or take human nature into account. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind (and other cliches).

Firstly, I’ll explain how marriage has already been undermined in Britain, with disastrous social consequences, thanks to the work of liberals who thought they were doing a good thing.
Once there was a great stigma attached to women who had children out of wedlock. And many of them had to give their children away because they couldn’t afford to look after them. The state decided that this situation was unnecessarily cruel, and that these women should receive some financial aid from the state.
Now, though, the social stigma has disappeared, and state benefits have gone so far that many women have worked out they will be financially better off living as unmarried mothers. This is not just the paranoia of the dreaded “right wing” press; it is the truth.
The result is that hundreds of thousands of youngsters are growing up without proper families, dependent on the state, and with no concept of self-reliance.

What’s more, divorce has gotten easier decade after decade.

You have provided me with further evidence of how the institution of marriage has been undermined by demonstrating that you don’t actually understand its original purpose. Marriage exists to ensure that people are married before they have children, and that once they are married, they stay married, so that ultimately children are brought up by their parents. These things are becoming less and less common; the divorce rate rises, and more and more children are born out of wedlock.

As I mentioned above already, as far as I can see you seem to think the point of marriage is for society to demonstrate which sorts of sexual activity it is “cool” with. By giving gay marriage – an arrangement that by definition cannot produce children - the same status as heterosexual marriage, you are only reinforcing this view and undermining marriage’s original purpose. By undermining marriage still further, you are condemning even more children to be brought up without a proper family.



I maintain that it’s not an irrelevant argument. My explanation was not very clear.
My argument here stems from what I perceive to be the liberal view of what marriage is and the directions in which that sort of thinking can lead. As far as I can see, the liberal view of marriage is that it’s a piece of paper from the state that says “we, the state, on behalf of society, are cool with your living arrangements, so we will give you these rights to prove it”.

Here’s a hypothetical conversation:

Person 1 says, “I object to gay marriage. Conventional marriage is not actually forbidden to anyone. If people want to choose a different way to live their life, let them live an unmarried homesexual life. Why should society suffer the consequences just because a small minority want to have their cake and eat it?”
“I am gay”, says person 2, “But I didn’t choose to be gay. God made me this way. I could marry a woman, but I would be unhappy because of how nature made me. Why should I have to choose between the unhappiness of living with someone I don’t love and the possibility of raising a child? Why should I be denied the possibility of raising a child in a happy marriage because of the way God made me?”
“Hang on”, says person 3, “I have Asperger’s Syndrome. I find it difficult to find a partner. Why should I be denied the possibility of raising a child, along with the other rights of marriage, because of the way God made me?”

So if you were person 2, would you have answered in a similar way? If no, then what would you have said, and if yes, don’t you then think person 3’s question is fair?

On the other hand, I can see that this was an incorrect analogy for me to express my view

My view is that liberals (am I allowed to use that word?) are unable see how anything can be socially damaging unless it involves a person (or persons) directly inflicting harm upon another person (or persons). (This often includes “emotional” harm, hence the common liberal fondness for criminalising certain emotions, such as “xenophobia”.)

I would like people to see beyond this simplistic view. I can see though that an unqualified doctor falls under the category of “inflicting direct harm”, and so was not a correct example to use. I might instead have asked the rhetorical question of whether people thought we should also legalise drugs and incest, but judging by the responses on a related WP thread, many people would probably say yes.




That’s a bizarre choice of example to refute my assertion. I wouldn’t suggest the invention of HDTV was politically motivated.

When I was talking about the traditions of the West (ie, what make the West what it is), I wasn’t talking about television. I was talking about things like the ethno-nation state, the nuclear family, the church etc. All these things are under constant attack by cultural Marxists.

Television, by the way, is one of their tools – a modern institution that they have infiltrated. I guess it makes little difference to them whether their victims are watching HDTV or regular TV, just as long as there are as many of them out there as possible.



You are creating confusion with vague language. If gay marriage is sanctioned, the concept of marriage is completely redefined, not “expanded upon”.



That might be the case with yourself when it comes to the subject of gay marriage, but you are unwittingly helping the cause of people with far more malevolent aims.
A tactic radical Marxists have used for decades is to attack the traditional family. They loathe the idea of the family acting as an alternative source of authority to the state.
Gays and feminists (along with ethnic minorities) have replaced “the workers” as the oppressed people who will bring about the Marxist social revolution. The cultural Marixsts make progress by appealing to the modern liberals’ unexamined, vague sense of “tolerance”.



Charming, but irrelevant. You’ve told me I use bad analogies. With respect, this one is really, really bad. The institution a society adopts to ensure its own perpetuation is qualitatively different and more important than what berries some dude decides to put in his pie. If this is the level of analogy we’re using, your fable about blueberry pie could be used to justify any social reform whatsoever.
It could also, with a bit of tweaking, be used to justify taking certain rights away.
Imagine a guy eats blueberry pie every day for 20 years. Then the supermarket refuses to stock it, and he has to go without. He notices how much better he feels. He didn’t realise how ill he’d been all these years! The moral of this story? Free speech ain’t all it’s cracked up to be!




Liberal thought is based too much on emotion, in my opinion. Still, it’s rare for a proponent of gay marriage to concede there are logical reasons to oppose it.
Perhaps, in this day and age, those logical reasons are not so easy to articulate – at one time people just intuitively understood what marriage was.
The arguments require a little more time to articulate than is often allowed these days, when a debate can be shut down with a well-timed accusation of “bigotry”.

It can be quite wearing having to logically explain certain viewpoints that were seen as just common sense 50 years ago. In fact, there are certain other things we’re supposed to believe in these days that are not just revolutionary (like gay marriage), but utterly nonsensical, such as how gender and race are “socially constructed”. It seems like the more ridiculous these arguments are, the more wearing it is to refute them.

This is all related to another cultural Marxist tool, by the way, namely something called Critical Theory. It’s basically a way of wearing people down with philosophy. Quite a clever tactic. After all, Descartes agonized for years over the question of whether he actually existed or not, and Bertrand Russell once took a thousand pages to prove that 2+2=4. But that’s another story.

I presume you're thinking of the words and actions of people like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, among others. I don't much like what I've heard of them. Bashing liberals seems to be their only purpose. I would describe them as neo-conservatives rather than conservatives, and I would say most neo-conservatives are basically right-wing liberals. They're all in favour of waging war in the Middle East, but when it comes to their own country being overrun with Third World immigrants, their views are just the same as the liberals they spend so much time slagging off.
Strange how it's less socially acceptable to advocate enforcing your own border controls than it is to advocate invading another country.

Of course, other people might use different labels again for Coulter and Limbaugh. I'm just distancing myself from the worldview they seem to promote.

No country opposed the 'domination' of men over women. Every country opposed atheism. Most countries didn't oppose slavery. If this is your big reason to be against gay marriage, you apparently believe men>women, everyone must believe in a god and slavery is a good thing.

I'm pretty sure the natives might have.

re-read most

So, you've got nothing against gay people, it's just that we should avoid aiding the vague Marxist conspiracy? Uh-huh.

I've noticed that some people on this board believe in some seriously bizarre conspiracy theories to justify their personal prejudices.

No, I don't think in such simplistic one-purpose terms like you do. Yes, there was one original intent of religion, but in the current reality, there are multiple "points" of marriage. And you have still failed to explain any way in which homosexuals being allowed to marry each other would harm ANYTHING in ANY way whatsoever. Your views seem to all stem from insecurity and fear of communists and ninjas trying to change something you already like the way it is.

Your dialogue with aspergers still makes no sense. Are you seriously just talking about the aspie's difficulty in finding someone willing to marry him, or are you talking about some fictional setting in which aspies aren't allowed to marry? If it's the latter, then, yeah, I'd think what he said is fair, and if it's the former, I'd say get the hell out of our conversation, this is about legality, not ability. I have aspergers and have had multiple boyfriends and girlfriends. It's not impossible to find a mate.


I'm sick of gay people who want to marry suffering because people like you are afraid of what might happen if we tinker with the supposedly perfect, divine decisions made by those who lived in an earlier, simpler time.

Quick follow up..

One day, you will be very disappointed. It's only a matter of time before gays can get married. It won't happen overnight, it's a gradual process, which has already started. It starts with less and less people hating gays. Then some people start talking about the idea of gays being allowed to marry. Then certain countries actually legalize it. Then a while after that's happened, and people against the idea can no longer argue that it will undermine the institution, due to there (by that time) existing a large pool of evidence against that idea, more and more people become receptive to the idea. More youngsters form realistic beliefs and their parents die off. Etc.

Marriage exists to ensure that we survive, you say? We would survive without marriage. We would survive if half the population turned gay tomorrow. We are in absolutely no danger (discounting other causes such as nuclear war, a meteor impacting the earth, etc) of extinction.
People thought it would undermine the institution of voting if blacks could vote. It didn't. Same with women voting. "I don't have anything against women," some would say, "I just don't think they should be able to vote, what with being more prioritized to things like emotion and caring for young, than for logic and understanding of things."

So, you can believe what you will, but eventually, in your place will be a different person, who doesn't care more about institutions and their original intent, than they do about reality and justice.

no, he's gonna say that gay couples can't adopt kids either because: a. they'll sexually molest the kids, or b. the kids will grow up gay.


both of which are scientifically unfounded and actually with the first one, the opposite has been proven by most psychological surveys.


at least i'm guessing that's what'll be said...it's the "conservative" rhetoric.

I actually don't think he's gonna say either of those.. Even if you hadn't posted that. He's one of those "look how logical and unique I am" type of conservatives, and they usually specialize more in the overall art of argument than things like outright bigotry.

To Codarac:

In hopes of improving the quality of this discussion, I will first address the fashion in which you articulate your views.

Your criticisms of liberalism are based upon a poor understanding of liberalism. You're operating under the false assumption that liberalism is anti-intellectual. You are not very useful to this discussion if you cannot be bothered to gain a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter.

I find your posts pedantic and incomprehensible. You could improve this by organizing them more systematically. You could also improve comprehensibility by devoting less time to moralizing. Moral ideas like "good intentions are useless if ill-thought" can be condensed into a single sentence, but you composed a lengthy rant on the subject in one of your posts at the expense of your central idea. Furthermore, you spend far too much time agonizing over tangential political subjects. Due to poor organization and misdevoting time to tangential concerns, you have failed to properly address the central subject of concern. If you were to improve your posts by organizing them more thoughtfully and limiting the extent to which you pursue tangential subjects, your posts would be much more conducive to productive discussion.

Another thing that annoys me is that you seem to rely far too much upon personal ridicule and ad hominem. Although you do so in a very extensive and detailed manner, it is still quite the same tactic as saying "your views are so stupid that I can't be bothered to address them" or "you are wrong because you are a Marxist." You do seem to be convinced that you have done otherwise in having done so very eloquently, but eloquent ridicule is still ridicule and alike for arguments ad hominem. I don't feel that you are stupid, but I feel that you have become too impressed with your ability to express your thoughts well to realize when they have severe central errors. This actually happens quite often in intelligent people who have received far too much positive feedback from expressing flawed thoughts in a convincing, attractive way, and the tragedy is that they become so confident in their views that no force can deviate them from the path of error. Many great minds have gone to waste because of the hubris that you have become a victim of.

Now I will support gay marriage with the assistance of a comprehensive argument in favor of liberalism.

Your objections to liberalism seem to be based primarily upon your objections to individualism, and the basis of your argument seems to be that the greater good of society should be held to be more important than individual gratification. What you seem to be positing is that the greater good of society is seperate from individual interests. What liberal philosophy posits is that society is made up of individuals, and the greater good of society is acheived by allowing or facilitating the liberty of these individuals to pursue their diverse interests. If a society has acheived a high rate of individual satisfaction, it is successful. Even if you are thinking in the long-term, you are still operating under this precept.

Thinking in terms of long-term success, a society is unsuccessful when there is a low rate of individual satisfaction primarily because the individual's natural reaction to dissatisfaction is to attempt to change the state of society from one in which they are dissatisfied into one in which they are satisfied. This can take a variety of forms, and violent revolution is probably the most dysfunctional. The least dysfunctional is probably civil movements, such as in the case of the gay rights movement. The gay rights movement's success is a demonstration of how a dissatisfied group can acheive satisfaction through non-dysfunctional means.

If another group of people were to become dissatisfied as a result, it would be their prerogative as well to pursue satisfaction through non-dysfunctional channels. For example, conservative Christians who are dissatisfied because society no longer values their standard of marriage to the point of exclusion are going about the same process. This is why we should not be alarmed that some states in the US have passed laws against gay marriage: although it is unpleasant for the gay rights supporters, it is a sign that the overall system is working in the way that it is supposed to.

One key feature of a liberal society is a drive for toleration and social inclusion. The reason for this, ironically, is that homogeneous societies tend to exhibit a higher degree of social health. When people feel that they are different or set apart from the remainder of society, the result is the dysfunctional behavior based on which many people misguidedly argue in favor of homogeneous cultures (this would require isolationist states, which can result in rampant paranoia toward other cultures), and the reason that social inclusion is beneficial is that included groups tend to take up the values and beliefs of societies in which they are made to feel that they belong. The liberal society demands toleration because this serves to mitigate the negative consequences of society inescapably being composed of groups that have a natural difficulty in having a sense of familiarity, and this demand is manifested in the voices of particular groups, such as the gay community, actively promoting tolerance on their own behalf, often with the assitance of sympathetic groups. Gay marriage, specifically, works very well because it creates an atmosphere in which gay men and women feel that they are a participating and equal part of society; it says to them that they aren't really all that different from straight people, which ultimately results in the gay community picking up on mainstream and acceptable values and beliefs. Beautifully, all of this is driven by individual initiative.

In essence, a liberal society turns out to be a self-repairing organism. The conflicting interests of society sort themselves out via the route that inflicts the least possible damage to other interests, so, in the end, it comes to resolution very cleanly and enduringly. Liberalism also promotes a very optimistic society, and this is ultimately very conducive to the kind of positive work ethic that is required for a truly robust economy. I posit that liberalism is a very superior philosophy, and I repudiate your charges that it is based upon emotional impulsivity. Also, I posit that the advent of gay marriage is a fine example of liberalism at its best.

Last edited by Griff on 28 Apr 2007, 8:16 am, edited 2 times in total.

I look at it more as a fine example of the type of ridiculous legislation politicians will introduce in order to satisfy a vociferous minority at the expense of the silent majority.

I hope that is sufficiently succinct for you.