Someone explain to me how this loon would be forced into gay bondage if gays are allowed to marry? I would imagine gay marriage only affects you if you’re gay and want to be married. No gay marriage law I’ve ever seen would force straight folks into participating in bondage games with same-sex partners. You know, as far as I know. I could just be missing the laws that the right-wingers are trying to sneak through.
I just think it’s interesting that the more oppressed outgroups in the States tend toward being Christian, to give them some hope for their futures, and as a result, because of the large population of religious folks, another form of oppression — of gays — has taken the place of the overt oppression these same oppressed outgroups once faced.
Can anyone give me any good argument against homosexuality that does not depend on a) a religious proscription, or b) an absurd “if everyone was gay” reductionist argument? Seriously. I’d love to see if there even exists such an argument.
Okay; but don’t say you didn’t ask for it!
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Nope. I couldn’t think of anything either. Next!
Here are the two that actually are relatively less ridiculous then most. Before you jump on me, I said less ridiculous, because they are still pretty fucking retarded:
If we let gays marry then we have to let people marry their mothers or fathers, brothers, sisters, etc.
How is that one? It is stupid, but you know, so are all the other arguments against gay marriage.
Oh, and gays and straight people have exactly the same rights. Any straight person can marry someone of the opposite sex who meets the marriage requirements,and so can gay people. They have equal rights, damn you! eeeeqquuaalll rriighttts!!!!
There is nothing in the law about having the right to marry someone you love, or are sexually attracted to, only that they qualify to enter into the contract of marriage with you. Marriage is like a loan agreement, or an apartment lease, or a mortgage.
Just don’t tell my wife I told you that!
Ahahaha, well, there’s a good argument for making marriage nothing more than a contract, since legal contracts generally can’t gender-discriminate as far as I understand them.
The “slippery slope” thing is of course nonsense. And prohibitions against incest are only really beneficial for the purposes of maintaining a decent genetic base in your offspring, not for social contracts. I’m not advocating incest — I think the majority of us are hard-wired not to consider our “litter-mates” to be sexually attractive — but I’m saying incestuous persons do not make up 10 to 25% of our society.
Yeah, I’ve never understood that procreation argument. What about infertile men and women, must they not marry? What about men that “hath been wounded in the privy member or stones”? Those poor guys already get the shaft (so to speak) with not being allowed in temples of God as it stands.
I guess Zdenny did have some small utility function, other than leading you here and leading us to make one another’s acquaintance.
Ahh, but contracts must only exist between two parties that meet the qualifications of being able to enter into a contract, so males and females, transvestites, gays; everyone can enter into a contract, so long as the other party is qualified to enter into a contract with them. A gay man can enter a contract of marriage with a gay woman, just as easily as a straight man can. So there really is no problem with equal rights, the problem is with equal restrictions.
I avoided the marrying animals and children thing because those would contradict the contract argument. Yet these sad assholes still use that argument nonetheless. But marriage is not just about procreation, so the procreation argument is insufficient. We regularly allow women past the age of menopause to marry men.
I feel dirty arguing like the devil’s advocate on this, but you don’t have any Christian trolls to keep the thread running, and Daniel is way too rational to advocate an idiotic position like this…I think.
Only slight flaw in the contract argument is that (at least in the US, not sure about Canuckistan) legal age for a contract is 18, but I’m pretty sure at least in some states you can marry younger. But I do think it easily rules out gay marriage leading to marrying houseplants.
The only argument I accept as being valid is that gay sex is just icky. I don’t agree, but at least I can accept that it bothers people, and there are some things we don’t allow just because we find it icky. e.g. necrophilia, assuming the deceased willed it. Although ‘icky’ is an argument against gay sex, not against gay marriage. For more boundary pushing, check out http://friendlyatheist.com/2011/02/09/mostly-harmless/
Oh, there’s the “churches will be forced to perform gay marriages”. Which at least in the case of the court case that lead to Prop 8 in California, is patently false. The court addressed it in their decision and said nobody would have to perform a marriage against their conscience. But of course my Mormon cousin’s bishop said otherwise, so who you gonna believe, your bishop or some activist judge?
(and we know how the RC church has been forced to ordain women, right?)
While I’m on the topic, before the Nov ’08 election I overheard two guys: “all I know is, if anyone send my kid to a lesbo wedding, heads will roll”. The wedding he was talking about was one in which a teacher invited her class to her wedding to a woman. It was a field trip. All kids got signed permission slips. A couple who didn’t, didn’t go. Now, the kicker is that a Pro Prop 8 group used footage of one of the students, who’s parents support same sex marriage, in the campaign. That is, without the parents’ permission, they used the child’s image in an national ad campaign, taking a position opposite to that of the parents. Now THAT would piss me off. I don’t know why there was no lawsuit, but perhaps it was that the same footage had appeared on TV in a news segment, so was PD. I don’t know. ‘Legal’ or not, it, it flew in the face of any “they’re going to force our kids…” position.
sorry, I’m just fired up because I live in a conservative area of California, and just had this debate AGAIN online. My final position is that this isn’t a theocracy. I don’t care who you think is going to hell. We all have the right to go to hell if we wan to.
[…] I cannot think of a single good argument for disdain or outgrouping of homosexuals, though George W tried to play devil’s advocate once. Even his best, most rational arguments were wanting. (Not that religiously motivated ones are any […]