alchemist19 on March 17, 2013 at 7:59 PM

There is only one line that needs to be debated. What is good for the children. As it is the children for which Marriage exists. Any two consenting adults can do what ever the hell they want behind closed doors for a second or a lifetime. But when you bring children into the world, society has an obligation to work to make people bear the responsibility of raising them.

Gays have nothing to do with the creation of children and thus have no business attempting to subvert the institution of marriage. It is just that simple. It is not a RIGHT for heterosexuals, it is a CONSTRAINT on their lifestyles because the children have rights, and among them is the right to have a stable family to be raised in.

Gay marriage would do nothing to accomplish this and everything to thwart it. First, by moving further from the equation children.

the prohibitions on incest, pedophilia, and the rest of the parade of horribles I’ve seen in the thread so far is that those future consequences all have a reason for being prohibited beyond the moral justification alone.

alchemist19 on March 16, 2013 at 6:30 PM

The reasons are simply justified because of societal stigma. Once bigots like you stop stigmatizing people that you think are icky, then people will see that there are no “horribles”.

The slippery slope argument that legalizing gay marriage will lead to incest, pedophilia, rape, murder or whatever else being legalized is a poorly-thought-out drivel

Tell that to the Australian incest lobbyists who are pushing for legalisation of incest between consenting adults using the exact same playbook as has been used by homosexuals over the past 30 years or so (After The Ball by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen – google it).
They pop up on TV every so often with a father and daughter or mother and son with faces pixellated and voices disguised by willing media and they say all the usual stuff like ‘who are we hurting? we love each other. Who are you to condemn our love?’. Then they slip back out of the spotlight for a year or so and pop up again then. It’s water dripping on a rock, two steps forward one step back tactics with the same kind of appeals to emotion over sense that are typical of homosexuals. BTW, homosexuals are 1% of the population but represent 40% of pedophiles.

Logically, they are reasoning from the specific to the general, with not very much data.

Clearly Portman can not be trusted to focus on an important national issue. Stopping gays from whining is neither possible nor relevant to the issues facing us.

Ah yes, Big Judiciary. Yes, you are a fan of unelected judges handing down the law to us peons, aren’t you?

A brief aside first. When did “Big” become a pejorative, and who is responsible for it?

Anyway, when “Big Judiciary” is doing their jobs and protecting people’s Constitutional rights then, yes, I’m fine with it. I was fine when “Big Judiciary” upheld the Second Amendment in the Heller case, and I was fine when “Big Judiciary” ruling in favor of the freedom of speech in the Citizens United case. If you think I’m wrong for applauding those then we’re just going to have to agree to disagree.

Here’s an item: Can you make a case that development B is inevitable from development A without it being a slippery slope–mainly because somebody disagrees on the inevitability. If “inevitability” is a meaningful property of a development, does it exist only when two parties agree on inevitability? Or isn’t it possible that Abe sees assess the inevitability one way and Barry another and one of them may be more right than the other.

I will concede it’s all but impossible to know with absolute certainty what is and is not inevitable, especially in matters of interpreting the law.

Thus for inevitability to have any defense against the accusation that it is simply a slippery slope, we must come up with a better distinction between the two. Frankly, I’m stumped. My best guide to how to construe words that refer to unobservable concepts is to refer to my best understanding of common expectation. Otherwise, one persons inevitability is the skeptics slippery slope. And you know how skeptics decide when two people believe two different things about an unobservable event? They discount it.

So perhaps there is no referent to the template statement “X has the property of inevitability”. In that case nothing is inevitable and the lack of inevitability in the case of the legalization of polygamy is simply stipulating a universal.

Of course, with nothing be inevitable, or provably inevitable, from where we stand currently, gay marriage is not an absolute inevitability either. So you’ve said nothing about polygamy that doesn’t also exist in some form for SSM.

As the set of all inevitable developments would arguably be the empty set, it specifies nothing significant of legalizing polygamy. You haven’t really said much about the case for polygamy being advanced or withstood, you’ve simply stated that 1) there is resistance and 2) resistance sometimes prevails. Which again is pretty trivial for discussion of political developments.

Now, one could say that sun’s coming up tomorrow is “inevitable”, and outside of extreme cases that’s an acceptible case for “inevitability”, but as political processes don’t have the verifiable cyclicity of regular natural occurrances, you’ve simply said for the most part that no development in changing the definition of marriage is a regular natural event. So that’s not universally trivial, but trivial for disputes of law or political developments, all the same.

So I’m wondering where we get a special case for inevitability of political development that makes the lack of that inevitability anything significant for legalizing polygamy. And indeed, should everything cited as “inevitable” be vulnerable as a slippery slope argument, how that word could have any import that you don’t busy yourself about throwing the fallacy flag.

Can you say more for the guards against polygamy other than they will not inevitably be overturned or that people hold objections O_1, O_2,… which have the right to be reviewed as relevant–well not by the people–but by the distributors of personal justice in the future?

Again, your schoolmarmish slapping people with rulers on the basis of slippery slope invites a question of how integrated your theory is when you can casually trot out an assumed case for “inevitability” out of which set the legalization of polygamy clearly falls.

And your slavishness to the modern day elite ministers of personal freedoms according to a perfectly flat legal space that the layman cannot see or understand simply recommend you as an authoritarian.

[Sorry for the length, but in my experience, it takes a lot of words to disabuse some people as to the quality of their arguments, especially when they simply debate by stipulation.]

Axeman on March 17, 2013 at 2:12 PM

Distilled to its essence, you feel I’m playing too loose with things that I make out to be inevitable, yes? If so then OK, I will concede that neither myself nor anyone else knows for sure how the nine justices on the Supreme Court will rule and ergo I can’t say with 100% absolute certainty that Ruling B will or will not happen because of Ruling A, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take educated guesses. Most of the people on the Court are known quantities; it’s not like I’m flipping a coin nine times and saying “Ok, for Scalia it came up tails so he’ll vote to strike it down, heads for Thomas so he’s vote to uphold…). Given the composition of the Court and their past rulings (Romer and Lawrence in particular come to mind) it strikes me as extremely likely. As likely as the not-inevitable sun coming up tomorrow morning? No. But I still think highly, highly likely.

As to polygamy, I can’t say with absolute certainty that the court couldn’t strike down the prohibition on that today regardless of the gay marriage issue. The real question is whether it will become more likely to strike down the laws against polygamy if the laws against gay marriage are struck down. It will, of course, depend on the ruling (assuming there is one that legalizes gay marriage). My expectation based of my intelligence guided by experience and my understanding of the law is that a ruling in favor of legalizing gay marriage will lean heavily on the Lawrence ruling, which was based on Due Process, and thus leave polygamy laws no more likely to be struck down the day after than they were the day before. If the majority in Lawrence had joined O’Connor’s Equal Protection argument then maybe I could imagine an increased likely but they didn’t. I freely admit there are better lawyers than me out there so it could be my understanding of the relevant case law isn’t as good as some others, and it’s always possible for someone on the Court to do something I don’t expect at all that throws my analysis on the ash heap, so if you think you’ve got a better read on the situation and its likely outcomes then I’m interested in hearing it.

First off, the plans for the removal of laws barring plural marriage are already loaded up and waiting to pull the trigger.

They can bring challenges if they want to, it doesn’t mean they’re going to win them. Like I laid out, with what the courts have ruled so far it’s very easy to draw a line between same-sex marriage and polygamy.

Meanwhile, the leadership of the gay and lesbian community has already endorsed pedophilia, insists age of consent laws are discriminatory, and is demanding that pedophiles be treated as any other “sexual minority”.

Is this a majority position or are you picking up the words of one nut with a microphone and assigning their views to everybody? And what does any of that have to do with gay marriage?

And as we see here, all one needs to do to twist people like alchemist19 and Rob Portman into pretzels to support whatever they want is a good rousing Alinsky chorus of “bigot, bigot”, and they fold like a cheap suit.

Marxists are taught to look for useful idiots. We’re seeing that in spades here.

northdallasthirty on March 17, 2013 at 12:57 PM

I’ve already explained where the legal line is drawn and the logic for drawing it there. If you’re going to try to argue in bad faith then there’s not much I can do with it. I disagree with Axeman but so far he appears to be attempting to argue in good faith, you should try to emulate his example.

You can still keep prohibitions on polygamy in place once gay marriage has been legalized. For starters we’ve got legal precedent in place (Lawrence in particular) that establishes homosexuals are the legal equivalent of heterosexuals. No such current status exists for polygamists …

alchemist19 on March 17, 2013 at 4:27 AM

You’re an idiot.

Many people like to have sex with more than one partner. This is well established, and only an idiot would attempt to argue otherwise. There is not other “status” needed.

Regardless, bigoted laws need to be changed.

It’s disgusting that you support bigoted laws.

I imagine that Portman wants to avoid the hypocricy label. Sigh. When one of your family is gay and wants to live the lifestyle there isn’t a thing that you can do about it especially if it is your child. Are you going to stop loving them? No. That isn’t possible. So the Left puts you in a box, the Alinsky box, and beats you over the head until you submit to them.

BetseyRoss on March 17, 2013 at 10:41 AM

Well said. Yes, there would be coverage as the public debated and decided for Portman whether or not he “loved his son” until some new Emmanuel Goldstein came along to fuel another 24-hour hate.

Unfortunately, conservative politicians are hybrids, part popularity-chaser, part representative of conservative voters–if sometimes only to get their vote to be re-elected. They are not creatures of McLuhan’s media the way Dems are. Libs progress by enthusiasm and excitement and intensity of the political experience. Slogans to chant and bad guys (“fatcats”, “The Man”,…) to fight, and the feeling of being “involved” and “momentum”. When we do it, we’re “fascists”, and they see progress and enthusiasm by conservatives as goosestepping or riding out in white hoods.

I think the most effective thing one can say about Alinskyan method is that it is disingenuous. It relies more on the who-wants-to-be-called-a-hypocrite scape-goating and outlet for tribal-esque shaming, then it does an honest, open discussion of the trade-offs in a change of course.

But the text of liberalism is never touched. For example that it is wrong to shame others for values they don’t hold. Calling shame “ridicule” hides the conflict, which never comes into question as people get used to being fed their motivations from the media stream. It’s just something that they don’t do and we do and,…well….shame on us.

You can still keep prohibitions on polygamy in place once gay marriage has been legalized. For starters we’ve got legal precedent in place (Lawrence in particular) that establishes homosexuals are the legal equivalent of heterosexuals.

Ah yes, Big Judiciary. Yes, you are a fan of unelected judges handing down the law to us peons, aren’t you?

Here’s an item: Can you make a case that development B is inevitable from development A without it being a slippery slope–mainly because somebody disagrees on the inevitability. If “inevitability” is a meaningful property of a development, does it exist only when two parties agree on inevitability? Or isn’t it possible that Abe sees assess the inevitability one way and Barry another and one of them may be more right than the other.

Thus for inevitability to have any defense against the accusation that it is simply a slippery slope, we must come up with a better distinction between the two. Frankly, I’m stumped. My best guide to how to construe words that refer to unobservable concepts is to refer to my best understanding of common expectation. Otherwise, one persons inevitability is the skeptics slippery slope. And you know how skeptics decide when two people believe two different things about an unobservable event? They discount it.

So perhaps there is no referent to the template statement “X has the property of inevitability”. In that case nothing is inevitable and the lack of inevitability in the case of the legalization of polygamy is simply stipulating a universal.

Of course, with nothing be inevitable, or provably inevitable, from where we stand currently, gay marriage is not an absolute inevitability either. So you’ve said nothing about polygamy that doesn’t also exist in some form for SSM.

As the set of all inevitable developments would arguably be the empty set, it specifies nothing significant of legalizing polygamy. You haven’t really said much about the case for polygamy being advanced or withstood, you’ve simply stated that 1) there is resistance and 2) resistance sometimes prevails. Which again is pretty trivial for discussion of political developments.

Now, one could say that sun’s coming up tomorrow is “inevitable”, and outside of extreme cases that’s an acceptible case for “inevitability”, but as political processes don’t have the verifiable cyclicity of regular natural occurrances, you’ve simply said for the most part that no development in changing the definition of marriage is a regular natural event. So that’s not universally trivial, but trivial for disputes of law or political developments, all the same.

So I’m wondering where we get a special case for inevitability of political development that makes the lack of that inevitability anything significant for legalizing polygamy. And indeed, should everything cited as “inevitable” be vulnerable as a slippery slope argument, how that word could have any import that you don’t busy yourself about throwing the fallacy flag.

Can you say more for the guards against polygamy other than they will not inevitably be overturned or that people hold objections O_1, O_2,… which have the right to be reviewed as relevant–well not by the people–but by the distributors of personal justice in the future?

Again, your schoolmarmish slapping people with rulers on the basis of slippery slope invites a question of how integrated your theory is when you can casually trot out an assumed case for “inevitability” out of which set the legalization of polygamy clearly falls.

And your slavishness to the modern day elite ministers of personal freedoms according to a perfectly flat legal space that the layman cannot see or understand simply recommend you as an authoritarian.

[Sorry for the length, but in my experience, it takes a lot of words to disabuse some people as to the quality of their arguments, especially when they simply debate by stipulation.]

northdallasthirty on March 17, 2013 at 12:57 PM

And to think Charlie Horse calls you a troll because he used both his braincells to google your username and found someone else somewhere else with the same moniker. I wonder if he isn’t a sockpuppet for the little f@ggot who googled my name and ‘found’ me on a rather disgusting site.

Meanwhile, the leadership of the gay and lesbian community has already endorsed pedophilia, insists age of consent laws are discriminatory, and is demanding that pedophiles be treated as any other “sexual minority”.

And as we see here, all one needs to do to twist people like alchemist19 and Rob Portman into pretzels to support whatever they want is a good rousing Alinsky chorus of “bigot, bigot”, and they fold like a cheap suit.

Marxists are taught to look for useful idiots. We’re seeing that in spades here.

For violating anti-discrimination laws that are totally separate from the gay marriage debate?

And can you prove the person you were responding to is a liberal who wants to tear down the Judeo-Christian influence or are you just engaging in hyperbolic supposition?

alchemist19 on March 17, 2013 at 4:37 AM

How are they separate from gay marriage when it is the ceromonies of gay marriages that will be making the people face the discrimination? Oh yeah, look over there!

That is one example out of dozens of Christians persecuted. But you pretend it’s an isolated incident since you’re a liberal who wants to tear down the Judeo-Christian influence.

MelonCollie on March 16, 2013 at 10:50 PM

For violating anti-discrimination laws that are totally separate from the gay marriage debate?

And can you prove the person you were responding to is a liberal who wants to tear down the Judeo-Christian influence or are you just engaging in hyperbolic supposition?

One is one too many, I think. I find it creepy.

Do I only have permission to find the situation creepy if it were 25 photographers involved, or 50, or 100, or 500, or 1 million?

TigerPaw on March 16, 2013 at 10:44 PM

One is too many but your issue is with anti-discrimination laws and not gay marriage. I’m for gay marriage but I think any photographer, baker, or whatever other person you care to name shouldn’t fear any legal repercussion from refusing to provide their services to a gay wedding that they object to on religious grounds. That’s why I oppose anti-discrimination laws, but I keep the issues separate. The example you mentioned about the church who wouldn’t rent out their gazebo was the Methodist Pavilion issue in New Jersey that I responded to above. See:

alchemist19 on March 16, 2013 at 2:07 PM

It’s another example of the problem with anti-discrimination laws.

I’m going to disagree with you on the guy who got fired for his Facebook post. Boss can run their business however they see fit.

For all those who are in favor of homosexual marriage I would like your opinion. Since we are redefining the definition of marriage shouldn’t we include legal marriages between 3 or more people as well? Shouldn’t multiple people have the same rights to enter into their own marriage contracts as they see fit? Doesn’t failure to include them equate to dictating who free adults can legally love? Can’t consenting adults love more than 1 other person and shouldn’t they be allowed to have their unions recognized by the state as marriage contracts? Why doesn’t every argument used to justify homosexual marriage apply to them?

Dollayo on March 16, 2013 at 10:22 PM

You can still keep prohibitions on polygamy in place once gay marriage has been legalized. For starters we’ve got legal precedent in place (Lawrence in particular) that establishes homosexuals are the legal equivalent of heterosexuals. No such current status exists for polygamists and I don’t think it’s very likely for such an equivalence to be established; homosexuals are only attracted to other members of the same sex but it’s harder for someone to make the case they are attracted only to polygamy, or only their close relatives if you want to switch to the incest argument. Ultimately I expect prohibitions against gay marriage will be struck down under the reasoning SCOTUS set down in the Lawrence case, and I think the line holding back whatever other things people have expressed concern over will ultimately be upheld because of the distinction between homosexuality and polygamy/incest/whatever that I laid out.

Also legalizing gay marriage will be relatively painless legally; you stop worrying about the sex of the participants and you’re there. Legalizing polygamy would create some legal hurdles. Just as one example spouses get to make end of life decisions (remember the Terri Schiavo case?). That will remain relatively straightforward once gay marriage is legalized. If polygamy were ever legalized is it a majority vote of the wives or does it have to be unanimous? What if it’s a tie? That’s just one off the top of my head.

And, of course MellonCollie is still upset over that one photographer that was sued for refusing to photograph a gay wedding.

SC.Charlie on March 16, 2013 at 8:28 AM

Yeah, Freedom of Conscience is so 200-years ago!

So it is that you missed me explaining why your argument is nonsensical. Well then I’ll repeat it for you.

alchemist19 on March 16, 2013 at 6:30 PM

You didn’t address my argument. You addressed other people’s argument. My argument that you thought you could comment on was addressed to chumpthreads statement that “The arc of justice bends towards equality.”

Again, it already assumes a progression, so simply putting equality in terms of a progression, shouldn’t be a “slippery slope”. If “justice” as chumpthreads put it is a thing to be pursued then we must not resist its progress. Therefore is not saying that the next step is inevitable, which a slippery slope does–it discusses the next step in the progression.

I re-quoted chumpthreads and I gave a little expansion of his argument the way I read it and reprised my counter. That might have been a clue that you should address chumpthreads statement–or my expansion somewhere in your “argument”.

The slippery slope argument that legalizing gay marriage will lead to incest, pedophilia, rape, murder or whatever else being legalized is a poorly-thought-out drivel because the prohibition on gay marriage is based strictly on a moral decision and the prohibitions on incest, pedophilia, and the rest of the parade of horribles I’ve seen in the thread so far is that those future consequences all have a reason for being prohibited beyond the moral justification alone.

No they’re not. If siblings get married and have no kids–perhaps they sign a contract that says that every child they conceive will be aborted–what is left is simply a feeling that brothers and sisters marrying is wrong. After all, the purpose of marriage is not to bear children anymore. It makes the prohibition against siblings even less cogent than before. Besides, like gay couples they can always adopt.

In addition, I can’t see much beyond a cultural or moral judgment that makes us want to prohibit group marriages.

I don’t think you have the first idea on the parameters of a moral behavior. Any abstract concept with a recommendable value is a moral value. Equality, for example, is a moral value. You can’t really see it in the natural world, but it remains an infatuation of men.

As was stated in the majority opinion in the Lawrence case, a law must serve a secular purpose and not be grounded in “I just feel it’s wrong.” I certainly hope you can come up with reasons to oppose murder beyond a moral objection, at least.

Nope. Not a one. And end to life is simply a biological event. Our horror of or loss at that event is what makes us want to regulate it. Even the idea that murder could destabilize our society is only significant in that we want a stable society. A stable society is a good thing. Civil order is a good thing.

With gay marriage there is no objection beyond the moral one, or if there is such an objection then I’ve never thought of it nor has anyone ever been able to tell me what it is.

And that’s why legalizing gay marriage isn’t going to lead to legalized pedophilia.

Anything else I can clear up for you?

alchemist19 on March 16, 2013 at 6:30 PM

When the progress of equality is removing distinctions and stipulations–you can make all the dinstinctions and stipulations that you want. That is no guarantee that somebody won’t make an argument toward equality by removing those stipulations and distinctions.

In addition, the thing that has made “wholly secular in intent” supersede the previous standard of an “excessive entanglement with religion” is based on a type of argument that resembles a slippery slope argument. And neither of those are still “Congress shall make no law,” which was what was ratified.

Do I only have permission to find the situation creepy if it were 25 photographers involved, or 50, or 100, or 500, or 1 million?

TigerPaw on March 16, 2013 at 10:44 PM

Fun fact: “Charlie” is an old British word meaning “fool”.

For that matter, how Americans have to get droned by Obama the judge-jury-executioner before we have SC’s permission to be worried?

Good luck trying to win an election with a pro-bigotry stance.

thuja on March 16, 2013 at 8:55 AM

Forcing people to accept homosexuality, especially threatening to sue them or get them fired if they do not, is a form of bigotry.