Gay Marriage.

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This is completely and totally irrelevant. Even with gay marriage, most children will be raised by straight couples, just as they are now. This will not change. And despite your protests to the contrary, you have yet to demonstrate how gay marriage will have the slightest effect on that. It's not like straight people are going to stop having sex with each other and making babies.

But as I said before, the reason why people get married is not relevant, a point you seem to keep missing:
- People get married for reasons other than raising children. Love, sex, companionship, social status, financial security... I would imagine that getting married specifically to have and raise children is not at the top of the list. So there goes your argument.
- People often have and raise children without getting married. It happens all the time.

I know you want to live in a world in which people get married only to have kids and in which kids are raised only by their two biological parents who are still together, and no one ever has kids without getting married. But the real world isn't like that, never has been, never will be.

(And you call gay people deluded???)

Then why not make a clear distinction between fetile and infertile couples? Old couples and young couples? Couples who use contraception and those who don't? Some couples don't even have sex. Why don't we start having marriages automatically annulled by the state if they haven't produced at least one child after 3 years?

Hey, don't encourage him. It might give him ideas.

Well, by that logic it makes no sense that they should be able to re-define a word the rest of us have used quite happily for hundreds of years. They obviously have been able to, so who knows what next.


Deluded to think they can have kids. Clearly they can't, unless ethically dubious procedures are used. That's just stating fact. If it offends you that's just tough. Many people can't have kids for various reasons; they just have to live with it.


More emotive reasoning from little evidence. My statements do not make it clear I'm anti-gay. Even if I was "anti-gay" that should have nothing to do with the discussion. I'm merely forwarding one point of view: that there's a clear distinction between homosexual and heterosexual relationships.


Why is it absurd? Can you elaborate a little?

Okay, so here it is in a nutshell:
- This is the 21st century. "Marriage" has long since ceased to be a strictly religious matter.
- "Marriage" is nothing more than a legal contract between two people in a conjugal relationship who want to formally cement their pair bond. Marriage would provide certain tax benefits, as well as announce to the world that they take their partnership seriously.
- Issues such as the ability to have children are completely and totally irrelevant, since the reason two people form a bond is their business and no one else's.
- It is impossible for someone to claim to support gay rights yet oppose the right of gay people to form the same partnerships and derive the same benefits thereof.
- Some would say, "Give them the benefits, just don't call it 'marriage'". But it it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck... if it's exactly the same as marriage, there's no earthly reason not to call it as such without being against gays to start with.

Yes, boys and girls, it really is that simple.

Gay marriage is a fact in five countries, and will be in more as time goes on. There is nothing you can do to stop it. So when that train comes through, you might as well get out of the way.

The definition of "marriage" has already changed without the help of gay people. Marriage in the year 2000 (before gay marriage) is nothing like marriage in the year 1900. Or did you miss that part?



And by your logic, you would deny them the right to get married, since your objection to gay marriage seems to be based on the ability to have children.



And we're saying that your distinction is both arbitrary and irrelevant.

That's what you and your leftist buddies want marriage to be, Xenon. It's true, the state have gradually chipped away at it, especially with divorce laws being as they are, making it a very convenient form of socialist-style wealth redistribution. However, it connotes a whole lot more, to most people, than just the state sanctioning a relationship.

And no one is saying that other people should have to view marriage differently or that, by letting gay people get married, heterosexual relationships will somehow suffer. What difference does it make if I can marry a woman?

Ascan, it is simply natural for people to seek absolution and formalization of their engagement with their lovers. This probably hasn't changed since we first walked the world as Man. It is also natural for people to have a drive to have and rear children, and this probably hasn't changed since we crawled out of the water. This is nature, and it is a stronger thing than words.

In spite of your irksomely cynical attitude toward the aspirations of the gay community, for which I would probably make you bleed if we were standing face to face, it isn't completely nonsensical for there to be seperate terms to specify the sexes of those who are to develop the ties associated with marriage. If there were a precedent for it or if marriage were a new idea in itself, I could see having sex-specific nomenclature for gay, lesbian, and heterosexual unions. The fact that there isn't such a precedent is the doing of people such as yourself, who were long determined to make us cease to exist. The gay community has been omitted from historical record for the past several centuries and their unions forced to be clandestine, so there is no appropriate term to describe the development of affinal ties between a man and a man or a woman and a woman. As a result, it is simply more practical for marriage to be a unisex term. If society were to take to calling them by other names by the natural development of the language, then we could start calling them by these names.

Besides, the only consistent difference between the three is the sexes of those involved.

You conservatives crossed my last nerve a long time ago. The lot of you, get on the first boat out of this country. This country was founded by and for liberal-minded, forward-thinking people, and people like you have no business here.

Your repeated insistence that this is the case doesn't make it true no matter how much you want it to be. Marriage, here and now, is legally nothing more than a state-sanctioned relationship. That does not prevent other people from attaching additional connotations that may be meaningful to them. Two devout Catholics who have a church wedding with a full liturgical Mass very probably have a different view of marriage than two athiests who go to city hall and register a civil wedding. To the Catholics, the mere existence of a civil ceremony not sanctioned by the church cheapens the idea of marriage as they see it. Yet, within the confines of the Catholic church, their own marriage still has the meanings that the Catholic church as attached to it. The presence of civil, non-religious weddings changes nothing. And by the same token, neither does same-sex marriage.

"Socialist-style wealth distribution"? What have you been smoking?

Here is a real-world example.

My dad remarried when he was in his late 50's, to a woman who was in her mid 50s. My dad's youngest child (me) was 24. His wife's youngest (she who became my step-sister) was 22. Raising more children was a physical impossibility, as she was post-menopausal and he had gotten a vasectomy when I was a little kid.

Ascan's argument about marriage appears to be based on the idea that heterosexual couples are able to have children, while homosexual couples are not. My dad and his last wife (he died ten years later, still married to her) represent a heterosexual couple who would be unable to have children. The distinction Ascan insists on making between a gay couple and a young, straight, fertile couple equally apply between a young, straight fertile couple and my dad's wedding at age 58. What I want to know is, how would Ascan justify my dad's marriage and not a gay marriage when the same situation applies to both?

The answer: When Ascan stated that gays would want children only as a fashion accessory, he was making an argument based on a bigoted stereotype. Ascan, you can tap-dance all you want, but that remark revealed your true, homophobic, attitude.

Welcome to the 21st Century.

But things of value to society go beyond mere law, Xenon. Politicians change laws at the drop of a hat to suit their own purposes, but the values and traditions that go with something like marriage transcend that. The popularity of church weddings is one manifestation of this. Though obviously even these things are subject to attrition when the state sets its mind to it. Of course, being a liberal I know you probably hate many things about your own culture and country (except that contrived by authoritarian leftists and foreigners) but not everybody is like that, you know.


I wrote Redistribution. Get divorced and you'll find out what I mean!


I've already been over that ground. Your dad's marriage was between a man and a woman. I've explained why marriage is important in terms of conceiving and raising children, and that the basic criterion for having children is that the couple are of opposite sexes. That's the most accurate, though as you point-out not infallible, indicator of ability to reproduce. In the case of older people there are also other societal reasons for remarriage that were more relevant some time in the past. It's still, however, part of our culture, and as such I have no objection to it. Anyway, the simple facts are that the only type of relationship capable of producing children (other than by ethically dubious means) is a heterosexual one. Just because some heterosexual couples can't have children doesn't detract from the fact that the bulk of them can, and do. This defines heterosexual relationships within our society, and marriage is considered by many, if not most people, to be central to that. Thus marriage is already defined, and has nothing to do with gay people. It never has had anything to do with gay people, as far as I'm aware, because even in societies where homosexuality was part of the culture, it was always considered of secondary value to heterosexual relationships because, I assume, the heterosexual relationship fulfilled the vital role of reproduction.

And the reason I've made such a point over the reproduction thing is because of your earlier naive assertion that there was no difference between the two types of relationship. Clearly there's a very big one: it involves one of the most important things any living being can do.


Really? Is it possible for one of you left-wingers to actually hold a conversation about a controversial issue without accusing your opponent of some heinous political crime like homophobia or racism?

Even griff concedes that some of my argument is valid:

Why should there have to be separate terms to distinguish between relationships between different sexes? I do not want to be defined by what sex I am. That is nobody's business but mine.

Because that's what the human brain does: it makes distinctions between various things. It's simply how our minds work. Despite what you may want, the first thing people will notice when they meet you is that you're female. I'm afraid millions of years of evolution can't be brushed aside by political correctness.

That's not always true actually. There have been times when people have been unsure as to whether I was male or female.
But that is not the point. I can tell if someone is black or white, but that doesn't mean we should have different terms for marriage between people of a different race.