Proponents of gay marriage: what about bestiality?

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Oh, this is the most fun I've had on WP in ages. We should have more of these harmless, goofball topics, you know?

The Definitions Of:

Marriage: The legal union of a man and woman as husband and wife.

Husband: A man joined to a woman in marriage; a male spouse.

Wife: A woman joined to a man in marriage; a female spouse.

Homosexuals want to get married, but what are they to one another?

A man can never be a wife and a woman can never be a husband.

A woman, who's married to a man can introduce him to other people as "My husband."

A man, who's married to a woman can introduce her to other people, as "My Wife."

If a homosexual introduce the person they're married to anyone, what will they call that person?

Another thing, I know that people don't like to hear about bestiality, in discussion about homosexuality, but it won't be long before these people will want to get married as well.

People may say that animals can't consent to marriage, well I've read recently, where one man won his case to marry his pet goat. Their marriage is legal.

Bestiality is legal in some countries. Why allow people to have sex with animals and stop them from getting married to animals?

People that engage in incest will want to get married as well.

Many people believe that homosexuals should have equal rights. Be allowed to marry, but how will you feel when a homosexual woman wants to marry her daughter or homosexual man wants to marry his son? Many homosexuals are strictly in an incest relationship. If you see an older homosexual woman with a younger homosexual woman, you don't know that's someone she met or if that's her daughter. The same goes with a homosexual older man and younger man.

I've read recently, where a 51 year old man wants to marry his 25 year old daughter. He isn't married to her mother anymore and started having a relationship with his daughter, when she was 23. He wants a law to be pass that will allow incest marriage.

@Arch, can you put the Daily Mail down for a minute?

they would (i assume) introduce each other as husbands, or partners.

has this thread not been locked yet?

The definition of marriage varies from nation to nation. There is no absolute standard for it.



If I were married to another man, I'd call him my husband. Or my spouse. Either way, we'd work something out. Do you honestly think not knowing what to call each other would deter us from obtaining marriage licenses?



Until your dog can sign a contract expressing its consent to a marriage, then inter-species marriage will remain illegal in most industrialized nations.



Personally, I do not oppose incest, just as long as all parties involved gave their consent.

Arguments against gay marriage all consist of quoting one of the tiny handful of lines from the Old Testament anybody still listens to or not understanding the concept of rape.

Personally I think your argument would have more weight if you introduced the concept of polygamy instead of bestiality. The idea that one can argue that what goes on between consenting adults is no business of the state, while at the same time lobbying for legal recognition is also an issue.

From a conservative point of view. The case against Gay-Marriage is one of conscience and reflects the desire to protect the family unit. Many social conservatives see the government taking an increasingly anti-family, anti-life legislative agenda. This to some extent is true, for instance new unmarried mothers in Australia (where I'm from) get accesses to government benefits while the widows pension has been overturned. Things of this nature undermine the place of the family in the role of the state, something that conservatives value.

When laws that allow for gay-marriage are debated they often use a logic that is decidedly false as well. For instance, when bills were introduced into parliament allowing for partners in same-sex relationships to inherit property and superannuation from one another; it was argued to the nation that this was designed to reduce legal discrimination against homosexual individuals and couples. Inside the organisations behind the proposition it was intended to be a wedge issue that they could then use to get the legal recognition of gay-marriage through parliament. From a conservative perspective this seems to be evidence of the slippery slope.

This same logic has been used before, in relation to abortion. Secular progressives like to see abortion as separate from gay marriage, but this shows a lack of understanding of the conservative side. To the conservative, abortion was introduced into society in a similar way. It was argued that legalized abortion was necessary for the safety of individuals and for the mental health of women. What person would be against the termination of a pregnancy that endangered the life of a woman, or would want a child introduced into a world where the mother would be psychologically broken from the effort?

These arguments were quite persuasive. Conservatives however, watched this logic get slowly played out into a reality where the number of legal abortions steadily increased. The increase reflected a social tolerance towards abortion that did not reflect the arguments made during its legalization. This then ended up with the reality we have now, where the number of abortions reflects a belief that the procedure can be used for family planning, deciding at what point to have children and even in substitution for contraceptions. To conservatives, who wish to hold a line in societies values, the slippery slope is amply demonstrated by the reality of abortion.

To return to the issue of Gay-Marriage. My view is this, that since the state must recognize the legal relationship at work in the family unit, for tax and other purposes; the state is entitled to define marriage. It should however, be very careful to ensure that it does not recognize relationships that undermine that same unit. Opening the subject for debate introduces the slippery slope. For instance, some food for thought that might make you appreciate the conservatives concern. If marriage exists to protect the natural pair-bonding process necessary for procreation, how can one then justify legalizing gay-marriage. The arguments for legalizing gay-marriage often mention that same sex couples can raise children and therefor have a right to. If gay marriage was to be legalized how then could it function in accordance with the definition of marriage without allowing for same sex adoption or IVF access for lesbian couples. The problem I have is that the lobby behind gay-marriage clearly understands that legalizing gay-marriage will obviously beg the question; how then shall these new family units fulfill their societal role if they are legally discriminated against in relation to adoption and IVF? From the conservative perspective, this slippery slope leads to the degradation of the family (constructed from male and female, the only naturally occurring method of producing children) as the primary unit of raising children.

Also of concern to me is the fact that Churches will find themselves increasingly on the opposite side of the law on a great many issues. For instance what legal protection would their be for a preacher who refused to marry a gay couple? Or to the family that wanted their child to go to a heterosexual couple? Before you dismiss this as being impossible, use Google to find the doctors who are sued for not performing an abortion.

Since God violated the law against adultery when He produced Jesus, all bets are off.

I seriously doubt God had anything to do with it. What probably happened was this: Mary cried out -- Oh God! Don't stop now! Then the tale grew with the telling.

ruveyn

I'm still not ruling out the possibility that Mary was a hermaphrodite and self-impregnated.

That's a new one. I suppose I should be thinking more outside of the box.

Not biologically possible. A male chromosome is necessary to produce a male. Women don't have it.

In which case God had nothing to do with it.

ruveyn

A hermaphrodite is not a woman.

No, but it has been dead for two years until you decided to necro it.

It's probably obvious to you that your whole argument is more mocking than in good faith, but let's ignore the tone for a bit and make believe that you are actually arguing in good faith.

I think most rational people would agree that a non-human animal can give consent to things like marriage, sex, or contracts; if you want to belabor this point, I don't think you'll find much debate here. Even among human beings, our legal tradition requires certain things to be present before consent can be assumed. For example, minors usually cannot give full consent for things, and we do this as a protection against exploitation; the age of majority is somewhat arbitrary, but we draw the line somewhere. Other things like cognitive disability, psychosis or delirium, and intoxication can also affect ability to give consent. Sexual orientation, though, is not one of those things. From a civil-rights perspective, we see that marriage laws that define marriage as between one man and one woman discriminate based on an ascribed status (like race or gender). Now some ascribed statuses like pedophilia, we would not want to endorse, but the difference here is one of mutual consent and the no-harm principle: Pedophiles defy the former and usually the latter as well. Now it is true that these same arguments could be used to support polygamy (although not bestiality or pedophilia), and that's because the norm against polygamy is mostly based on tradition.

Returning to your tone, it's clear you dislike gay sex (hey, it's not for me either), but really sex and even procreation are not the defining aspects of marriage. Marriage is more a presentation to society of mutual love and support, or that's the ideal. Heterosexual marriage isn't really all about heterosexual sex. Some married couples are celebrate or nearly so; some choose not to have children; some physically cannot have children. I's not really for us to tell them how to live their lives.