Ruth Institute Blog

The problem with Blankenhorn and all of the witnesses on your side was very simple. To be considered an expert in a subject matter you have to use certain scientific principles to gain those facts and your work has to hold up to scrutiny from fellow academia. It was obvious that neither was the case. That was science is. But sadly when it comes to the light of day it cannot hold up to the scrutiny. The reason being is anyone can claim to have proven something or shown this or that exists doesn’t make it true. The findings need to hold up under a microscope. Sadly his research has not.

I don’t think there is anything anyone on the defense side could have said or written that would have swayed Judge Walker from his predetermined opinions. What did the judge say about Baker v. Nelson, which would seem to be the controlling precedent? We have judges to have law courts, not science courts.

The opinion is a sham because it is based on applying a rational basis test to a set of “factual” findings that are contested in the political and social science spheres.

Would you be willing to let one judge decide all the “facts” in a contested issue like global warming, the just and rational way to deliver health care, the rationality of tax policy, or any other scientific or economic controversy? Is this how we will now set public policy in this country? If so, it will be easy for future judges to overturn not only the votes of the people (as in this case), but the votes of legislatures. As in this case, the people will not be allowed to amend their own constitution because their opinions could be declared irrational if they did not agree with the judge’s determination of the “facts.”

Sounds to me like someone doesn’t understand the Daubert standard for expert testimony in federal courts. The judge didn’t define expertise narrowly, the U.S. Supreme Court did. Sorry, but he applied the standard exactly as it is supposed to applied. But good luck trying to appeal on that basis! Blankenhorn’s opinions were not based on sound scientific methods and principles. He used data from single parent households and divorced heterosexual households to try to argue that parenting by two people of the same sex would be harmful to children. Obviously, one does not compare apples with oranges, and since every reputable organization vehemently disagrees with such slanderous claims, the judge easily saw through his pseudo-scientific “opinion.” Your side had the chance to prove its case. It failed, not only because it didn’t try hard enough, but because the anti-equality position crumbles when one takes away religious bigotry and moral disapproval. Hundreds of thousands of kids raised by same-sex parents are doing quite well, mine included.

But I do have to chuckle when people who are not attorneys or judges try to analyze and second-guess the legal analysis of someone who is trained in the law. I suppose that would be a bit like conducting a surgery without being a surgeon, huh?

I believe in all fairness the good judge made the right decision considering there is no such thing as citizens who receive first class treatment and those who are denied the full benefits of being an American citizen under the ignorance of a bunch of angry bigots who are not happy with their own lives. As a proud lesbian I am thrilled to have a chance to marry the one I love and be protected under the same benefits of you lovely people who call yourselves compassionate. You have no compassion for life in general and if sexuality could so easily be taught and there were no natural biological forces behind who one spends their lives with, there would be a purely heterosexual society. Don’t hide behind children, this is not an issue about maintaining a just and orderly society for the foundation of the American family, but more to deny others their right to be recognized under the full extent of the constitution. It clearly has been found unconstitutional, seriously you people need to find hobbies.

King George III would be laughing if he saw what is happening today in America. Judges governing against the will of the people. Threats to take a Governor’s decision to veto a bill to court.

What next, perhaps elections overturned because a judge thinks that there is no rational basis for voters to vote for a certain candidate? Or maybe lawmakers votes thrown out in court because their values are formed by their religious beliefs? These ideas are not that far-fetched if you carefully read Judge Walkers ruling. If allowed to stand his ruling puts in jeopardy many of the principles of democracy and representative government.

Tom, please go back to school and learn how our system of government is intended to work. We are a constitutional republic, not a pure democracy. Majority doesn’t rule when it comes to constitutional rights, and legislators can certainly form their values based on their religious beliefs, but when they act as our government, they are required to have a legitimate secular purpose for legislation and other acts. Acting solely upon religious values is against our Constitution, which applies to ALL citizens, not just the Christians and Jews. The Constitution even protects the atheists in this country. If you truly want your legislators mixing religion and government, you are in the wrong country friend, because our founders specifically drafted the First Amendment to our Constitution to prevent religion-based rule in this country. And thank God for that. I’d hate to see what would happen here if the holier-than-thou types were running the show.

Actually, Heidi, Blankenhorn reviewed social scientific evidence that easily meets the federal court standards.

You agree with what Walker did — that’s no surprise since like you he writes as an advocate rather than as an impartial arbiter – but there is no principled basis for it.

Readers will note that once again you cited your own example as yet another attempt to hyper-personalize. It is useless information when discussing this aspect of this case.

The fact is that the vast majority of children in same-sex households are children of divorced or estranged parents. There is no paucity of social scientific evidence on such scenarios, contrary to your gaycentric view of the subject. Likewise, there is ample social scientific evidence and analysis on scenarios where either mom or dad is absent. Plenty on adoptive and step-parenting scenarios, too.

Blankenhorn’s testimony is well-supported.

It is a scientific fact that no child raised in such scenarios (including the gay subset) was born of only women or only men. The anthropological and historical records provide loads of social scientific evidence that supports Blankenhorn’s forthright testimony regarding the birthright of children and the societal response: i.e. responsible procreation and sex integration.

Millions of people live in same-sex parenting scenarios; the vast majority are neither gay nor lesbian. Yet you pretend that same-sex sexual attraction, romance, or behavior is a special ingredient that sets your favored subset apart from all the rest. That approach of yours is antithetical to everything you claim to hold dear — including the scientific method and the federal court standards.

The standard by which all parenting scenarios are compared and fall short is the intact mom-dad duo in a low-conflict marriage. Again, Blankenhorn’s testimony on this score is very well-backed by a wide social scientific consensus.

Meanwhile you are showing your ignorance or your outright disregard for the truth. Blankenhorn did NOT testify that parenting by lesbians or gay men harms the children in the care. He has taken pains to be specific and clear: he has referred to the conflict of goods and yet you, and other SSMers, continue to tell your false narratives. He has not made a religious argument, contrary to your continued cheap shots against religious beliefs that happen to align with the social scientific evidence.

It is hard to consider you as a grown-up on this subject. Your behavior is so very childish.

Also, when an SSMer attempts to lecture readers on “how our system of government is intended to work” and talks of what the Founders intended, well, remember that the same SSMer also sees in the US Constitution a supposed constitutional right to force society to replace the marriage idea with the SSM idea.

This is a conflcit over two very different ideas. But the SSMer imagines that it is about setting Government against religion and religious people. The SSMer imagines that the defenders of marriage who use the amending process to affirm the man-woman basis of marriage are somehow expecting “pure democracy” to rule.

The abuse of judicial review — which is NOT how our system of government is intended to work — is what SSMers depend on, utterly, such that they cannot manage to make coherent arguments that rely on the principles of good governance that are in the text and framework of the Constitution — and of state constitutions. The truly horrible spectacle of SSMers lauding such abuse of judicial review is closely analogous with the blatant endgaming that occured in the name of white racialist identity politics in the past.

Democracy, representative government, balance of power between three overlapping branches of government, individual liberty, federalism — all of this is found in the written — WRITTEN — constitutions of this country. Text does not rewrite itself. There is an amending process in the very same text.

But no where in the written constitutions will a citizen find that a judge’s policy preference decides constitutional questions. Yet that is what SSMers insist is “how our system of government is intended to work”.

Readers may note that not only does the SSM campaign attack the social institution of marraige, but it also routinely and maliciously attacks good governance. The corruptive influence of the SSM idea cannot be underestimated; each passing day — especially those days in courtrooms — reveals yet more corruption upon corruption.

Walker should be drummed out of the federal court system. His pro-gay bigotry might be tolerated in the role of common citizen, but not when it comes to his pressing his policy preferences into the law of the land.

Heidi,
How is it constitutional to say that a Governor does not have a right to veto a bill that she disagrees with, for any reason? Yet that is exactly what the ACLU and Lambda Legal are saying by suing Governor Linda Lingle over her veto of HB 444. Veto powers are written into the constitution, along with the provision for legislative override. But because the supporters cannot get a veto proof majority the ACLU & Lambda Legal have filed suit claiming that “the Governor won’t honor her oath to uphold the constitution.”

When taken with logic given in Judge Walker’s ruling the implication is that the votes of the people, legislators or executives (Presidential or Gubernatorial vetoes) will only count if they hold certain ‘accepted’ values. This is the danger, beware because history tells us that once a precedent is set like this it usually comes back to haunt the very people who set it in the future. (In other words, it might help you today and could be used to hurt you ten years from now).

As to my needing to learn about our system, you should note that I mentioned representative government (which means constitutional republic). But you also might note that California, along with several other states) also practices direct democracy in the form of ballot initiatives. While that is not pure democracy, it is the closest thing to it in a republic.

Hey guys, our Constitution explicitly mentions a right belonging to each citizen to the equal protection of the laws. This is not a right that can be voted away by a majority of citizens or vetoed by a governor, especially when the grounds for doing so involve arbitrary discrimination against a group of people that you do not like. And the SCOTUS has repeated over and over again that the right to marry the person of one’s choice is a fundamental constitutional right. Your preferred definition of marriage may be one man/one woman and that’s perfectly fine, because we all entitled to freedom of belief and conscience in this country. Since this is your belief, I would suggest that you not marry a person of the same sex because that choice would plainly go against your belief system. But to tell me that I cannot marry the consenting and non-related adult of MY choice is to deprive me of my fundamental right to marry and to the equal protection of the laws. Seriously, if you do not like the concept of liberty and justice for all, by all means, live your life accordingly. But please, stop trying to deprive your fellow citizens of liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and equal protection of the laws of this country.

And Chairm, I suppose that you would make divorce and remarriage illegal, right? After all, it harms the children! Adoption and step-parenting don’t fit your ideal either, so I suppose we should outlaw those situations. Wow, you type an awful lot but you don’t seem to make any real sense. You make a lot of claims without actually backing them up with any logical argument. You engage in the logical fallacy of ad hominem attack and you call me childish for trying to explain our system of law and constitutional protections for individuals. That’s definitely mature behavior! I’m sorry, but comparing the children of single and divorced parents with the children raised in intact families headed by same-sex couples is just plain dumb. BUT, more importantly, please explain how allowing couples of the same-sex to marry will in any way impact the children of heterosexual parents. How will marriage equality prevent heterosexuals from marrying and raising children within those marriages? How will denying marriage equality prevent same-sex couples from raising children? You don’t get to decide whether I will go to a fertility clinic and become artificially inseminated and then raise my child with a same-sex partner. So, please, do tell how you are preventing children from being raised outside of the married heterosexual norm by denying same-sex couples the equal protection of the law? Your arguments just don’t make any sense and are clearly driven by your desire to impose your religious/moral beliefs on everyone else, something that is thankfully forbidden by the very First Amendment to our Constitution. Thank goodness our founders had the foresight and wisdom to prevent the theocrats from running this country.

Heidi, you told falsehoods earlier and you were corrected. He did not make a religious argument. His testimony is well-supported by social science and hard science. He did not say what you said he said about children raised by gay and lesbians persons.

So naturally you kept your blushing off-screen and then you moved on to add a few more falsehoods hoping that no one will notice your hiding from the corrections.

Another Heidi falsehood: “SCOTUS has repeated over and over again that the right to marry the person of one’s choice is a fundamental constitutional right”.

It has not said it even once, Heidi. You are clipping the precedents to misrepresent SCOTUS. That’s not how a real constitutional argument is put forth.

You have been repeatedly corrected in the past so noe you are either displaying incompetence or an avowed mission to decieve readers. Besides, you keep missing the reasons that this is a fundamental right in constitutional jurisprudence.

Consent is not a trump card but you have conceded, with a shrug, that consent trumps the line against polygamous marriage, in your pro-SSM view. You have not bothered to justify the line drawn against some related people but not all related people; so your own definition is arbitrary and actually contradicts your own rules of SSM argumentation (such as the 100% guarantee rule you always use against the centrality of procreation).

And given your inability to plainly state what marriage actually is, well, the consent trump card idea — intrinsic to your SSM idea — undermines, if not destroys, the existing basis for drawing the line against some underaged people (but not all underaged people). Something that limits lawmakers, and that limits the judicial role as well, is the following principle: that to which consent is given is what matters. And it matters most when discussing marriage law, Heidi, and that is where you are profoundly handicapped.

While society can justify discriminating between the husband-wife union and nonmarriage, you have failed to justify discriminating between your SSM idea and the rest of nonmarriage.

It is you, Heidi, who advocates the arbitrary exercise of governmental power; and you do so in the name of your favored identity group. Not liberty. Not justice. Not the constitution. You told a falsehood about SCOTUS without blinking an eyelid. That’s emblematic of how the SSM campaign operates in the public square.

All of that is just an example of how your view is not so clear-eyed. You depend on a pre-drawn conclusion rather than a rational basis for imposing the SSM-merger on all of society. That’s what the following quote from you really means: “to tell me that I cannot marry the consenting and non-related adult of MY choice is to deprive me of my fundamental right to marry and to the equal protection of the laws”.

1. You attack the basis for this fundamental right. You would cut it adrift.

2. You can’t justify your consent trump card. SCOTUS has not done it for you even if you wish to tell falsehoods about SCOTUS.

3. You can’t justify the limitation regarding relatedness. (Which, by the way, is far more obviously an inborn characteristic than same-sex sexual attraction. And which, by the way, touches on genetic sexual attraction that easily fits your own SSM idea’s emphasis on attraction, romance, and such). That is irony for you: relatedness is embedded in the responsible procreation part of the core meaning of marriage.

Suddenly you would revive the centrality of procreation in your own replacement definition.

Heh.

For the record, Heidi you said stuff about the gay version of same-sex parenting and you said it to trot out your false narrative about Blankenhorn’s testimony.

You, not he, has mispresented the available social sciencific evidence. Now you runaway from your previous remarks and make an equally decietful characterization of my own comments.

Readers will note the dishonesty with which you treat those with whom you disagree.

* * *

No scenario in which a child is raised by two persons of the same sex — homosexual or not — is an intact family. Either the mother or the father is absent. In your version of “same-sex parenting” the sexualized context is paramount, as per your emphasis on lesbian and gay persons. No two persons of the same sex become parents of the same child without at least two pre-requisites: 1) parental loss or relinquishment; and 2) government intervention to assign a substitute for the deceased or estranged parent. This applies to adoption; this applies to the pre-emptive relinquishment in the use of “donated” sperm/ova.

That is true regardless of your gaycentric emphasis.

Perhaps you have a replacement definition for “intact”? A nonintact arrangement which is gaycentric.

Meanwhile most children (by far) living in same-sex households got there when they migrated with one parent from the parent’s previously procreative relationship (i.e. a two-sexed relationship, usually marriage). You can check with the HRC if you like. Gates reported that only about 5% of these children were adopted and that estimate is padded by so-called “second parent adoption”. So if you were to study the very scenarios you keep going on and on about, you cannot exclude children of divorced and estranged parents as they represent the vast majority.

Likewise the small portion of this child population who were adopted.

Excluding more than 98% of this segment of the child population might not seem very dumb to you, but such exclusion would not show much respect for the available social scientific evidence.

* * *

What would you be left with to study?

Maybe you would focus on the use of ARTs/IVF?

Well the vast majority (something like 93%) of all married people who use these novel technologies — do not resort to “donated” sperm and/or ova. Their children are raised by their mom-dad procreators. I’ve already explained this elsewhere, by way of correcting your false narrative, so maybe you meant to emphasize something else?

Perhaps you’d rely on the one-sexed scenarios in which an individual impregnates or becomes impregnated via “donated” sperm/ova. Of course, single individuals are a very large segment of this practice. Maybe you think they should be excluded, too, even though either mom or dad is absent.

You mgiht object that two adults makes all the difference. But the vast majority of one-sexed scenarios are not comprised of gay and lesbian persons. Indeed, given your line of thinking, even more children are raised in trios — related at that. So what makes these scenarios different from your favored subset, really, is not just the number two.

Your view of the social science evidence has been shown to be very narrow. But you have not explained how your favored gay subset of the non-intact family category somehow stands head and shoulders above the rest of that category. So, not only do you not have the evidence you pretend exists, you do not even have a plausible explanation for your reaching your conclusion. That sheds a harsh light on your certitude. Not even in a speculative form in which it could be measured and tested.

You’d exlcude the vast majority of adopted children, the vast majority of children born of ARTs/IVF, and the vast majority of children living in same-sex households. There is a pronounced paucity of evidence that there is some hugely positive outcome changer based on the same-sexed sexualized context of your favored subset.

Don’t bother trying to defend your narrowed focus. No matter what you’d say you’d still be relying on excluding far more evidence than is applicable.

Heidi, neither I nor Blankenhorn in his testimony and his writing has made a religous-based argument for the marriage law’s man-woman basis.

You may wish to keep writing your false narratives but more and more your tactics are revealed as deliberately decietful. I mean, readers might have given you the benefit of the doubt, believing that you might sincerley be uninformed of the actual arguments about the actual disagreement. Readers might have thought you were misinformed by the SSM campaign’s misleading propaganda. But you’ve been at this blogiste long enough, and have partcipated in enough discussions, to have learned that the SSM rhetoric does not address the points and reasoning offered by those with whom you’d disagree.

And that, frankly, is dumb, because how can you disagree if you don’t really understand the disagreement? You have not accurately represented our comments and certainly you have blatantly told falsehoods about SCOTUS and Blankenhorn and much else. You keep getting caught doing it. And since you persist in the same poor behavior, over and over, it can’t be taken as your being uninformed or misinformed. The signs are there that you are doing this with intent to deceive.

I’ll point out how your latest comment does that in your announced conclusion.

Heidi said: “So, please, do tell how you are preventing children from being raised outside of the married heterosexual norm by denying same-sex couples the equal protection of the law?”

Prevention?

The marriage idea is not a government mandate to dictate what goes on outside of marriage. Neither is it a government mandate to force married people to procreate. The marriage idea makes normative 1) sex integration and 2) responsible procreation.

I think you miss this because you reject the starting line for marriage law: marriage itself. And marriage is a social institution. As such it is a coherent set of principles and practices that influences all of society, one way or the other. It is a societal response to the sexualized type of relationship that, through its form, is the basis for the optimal type. The marriage law arises not from individualized rights (whether fundamental or newly demanded) but from what marriage actually is — before the label and before the license and before the special status. It is not a government creation. It is first and form a social institution of civil society and as such is far more fundamental and foundational than its legal shadow.

That which is promoted, in aid of preventing something else, is not usually made compulsory via the law.

Oddly, you imagine the world is upside down.

Anyway, I should point out that, once again, you have used the euphemism “same-sex couples”. The same-sex category of relationships is far broader than the gaycentric subset. And there is nothing about the SSM idea that naturally limits to twosomes much less to sexualized twosomes. I say that because your own comments have failed to justify your use of this euphemism.

If you mean to say The Homosexualized Relationship, then, say as much in candor. Of course, you will then immediately concede that no place where SSM has been imposed does the government prevent same-sex sexual behavior outside of SSM, same-sex parenting outside of SSM, or even the use of “donated” gametes outside of SSM. Indeed, The Homosexual Relationship tends not to be popular, in terms of low participation rates, under the SSM laws, anyplace.

In light of your own SSM idea’s lack of prevention, you might reflect more thoughtfully on your own set of questions and how you have again misrepresented the argument you admmit you do not understand.

Legal arguments aside, I find it simply appaling that there are some people who profess to follow a faith that teaches kindness and compassion, yet have intentions and follow paths of inherent meanness.

Well said Christienne. I have to wonder whose civil rights Jesus would have voted against. Again Chairm, you fail to make any logical sense. I would encourage you to read some SCOTUS precedent on marriage and the right to privacy. You might find what I was talking about in some of those cases. Start with Griswold v. CT, and work your way up from there. We don’t have a father in my household, but we sure do have an intact family. Just ask my beautiful and happy kids! But in any event, your comments do not even merit a response–they are rude, they rely on logical fallacies, and I am tired of reading your rants that are intended only to be disrespectful to me. Sorry, but I only converse with people who make sense, don’t put words in my mouth, and don’t engage in personal attacks. I feel sad for you that you would limit the deeply wonderful idea of marriage to procreation and opposing body parts. How demeaning.

Heidi, your encouragement is misleading as you attempt to suggest I have not already read the US Supreme Court precedent regarding marriage and have already confirmed that you are misrepresenting it.

You made a specific assertion about precedent that is not supported by Griswold. Your pose is fraudulent.

As predicted you’d redefine intact. Very logical, considering that this came up regarding the available social scientific evidence that you find very inconvenient to your political rhetoric.

Don’t read my comments, Heidi, but you will continue to be challenged whenever you pedal falsehoods as you have in your narrative about Blankenhorn. Your behavior easily qualifies as rude and as a decietful and disrespectful personal attack on Blankenhorn. You put false words into his mouth.

You accuse others of doing precisely what the record has shown you do without the least hesistation when it suites your political aspirations.

Meanwhile you claim that the idea of marriage is “deeply wonderful” even as you have offered only a superficial notion that does not withstand your own rules of argumentation — political and legal argumentation — and which is not supported by the social scientific evidence that even the anti-8 litigators hoped to present in the “expert” testimony of SSM advocates.

Your penultimate sentence in your comment above is yet another misrepresentation of the argument that you have now openly admitted to not understanding. Instead of seekingn to understand that argument, through vigorous discussion, you continue to runaway from engagement on the actual disagreement between those who affirm the marriage idea and those who reject it in the name of the SSM idea.

If for you the SSM idea (or in your version of reality the marriage idea) is deeply wonderful, you might do a better job of distinguishing it from non-marriage. You have failed utterly in this most basic of tasks, Heidi, and this crushes your entire complaint against the man-woman basis of marriage and marriage law.

You play rought with those who disagree with you. Yet you whine when you are challenged thoroughly and consistently and persistently. If your SSM idea is better than the marriage idea, then, you ought not need to resort to falsehoods and personal attacks, as you have done against Blankenhorn here.

I think Charles Cooper bears most of the blame for the disastrous results of the Prop 8 trial (disastrous from the marriage discrimination’s viewpoint). The lead defense attorney controls his witnesses and what they say. On cross-examination, Blankenship helped the plaintiffs by noting that society would be better off, and “America would be more American” if same-sex couples were allowed to wed. No judge could have reached any other conclusion in this case, given the utter lack of evidence of harm in legalizing same-sex marriage.

I also think that children raised by same-sex couples would be much better off if their parents were married: they’d be more secure. Research by Maggie Gallagher shows that the children of married parents fare much better in life than the children of unmarried parents. It is probably just a matter of time before some children of same-sex parents sue for the right to have the same advantages (legal, social, etc.) that the children of married parents have.

Cudos, Heidi. But, its much like the saying “pearls before swine”. People such as ChairM lack a basic understanding of liberty and how this country is structured. He is also painfully ignorant in regards to what makes a family or marriage. Procreation seems to be a fundamental part of his definition yet, many people who are unable to procreate are granted licenses and there are no laws that say a couple must reproduce to stay married. And its back to “think about the children”. Well, scientific studies do NOT support some of the “testimony” Blankenhorn presented. Children do best in a loving, secure home, period.
Even the pro-Prop 8’s own attorney said he didn’t need to present evidence to support their claims. They are desperate people who realize they have lost because when their lies are shown in a court of law, they crumble. So they merely shift the argument.

My fiance and I will be getting “opposite-sex” married soon (in Vermont, since it is a marriage equality state). We will never have children because he has generously gone through surgery to prevent that. Our marriage will in no way be about procreation. Ever. Yet we are allowed to marry while my lesbian friends who have adopted children and are giving them a beautiful, loving home are not allowed to marry — and somehow this is “all for the sake of the children.”

The problem with Prop 8 is that it is “under-inclusive.” To achieve its state goals of preserving the procreative aspect of marriage, it would have to deny marriage to infertile straights, to elderly straights, to procreation-disinclined straights, and it would also have to take some steps to make divorce illegal.

If Newt Gingrich can divorce multiply partners and infertile straights can get married, preventing SSM seems a little like a drop in the bucket of what is “damaging” traditional marriage. I’ll believe that the Protect Marriage crowd actually cares about their “traditional marriage” when their legislative action targets infertile/non-reproducing straights and divorce as well as gays and lesbians. For now, with only gays and lesbians as the targets of their social policy, it looks a lot like homophobia to me.

The state has every interest in legalizing the relationships between adults raising children. If marriage was created, as they say, to foster a stable family environment for children, why would that interest not apply to the children of same-sex couples?

The ugly underbelly of the anti-same-sex marriage crowd appears to be one of exclusion: we’re better than they are, and we want our heterosexuality certified by the state to be superior to homosexuality. If that’s not homophobia, what is?

Jeffrey, Mark, and Comrade Svilova: RIGHT ON. Oh and Chairm, the fact that you can’t figure out what would distinguish a relationship that would lead to marriage from any other type of human relationship just shows how obtuse you really are. Here’s a hint: I don’t have sex with my same-sex friends or celebrate our anniversary. I don’t want to marry my mother. DUH. Same-sex couples want to marry for the exact same reasons that straight couples want to marry. Imagine that. Having been in both heterosexual and homosexual romantic relationships (yes, I am bisexual and have been since as far back as I can remember) in which marriage was/has been discussed and desired in each, I can tell you that the ONLY difference between those relationships is the “plumbing” of my ex and current partners.

But Mark really is right that I shouldn’t throw my pearls before swine. You are much more interested in argument for its own sake and in engaging in the personal disparagement of your “opponent” than you are in honest argument intended for its role in reaching truth. Either that, or you really can’t see how your arguments make no logical sense. Like the apostle Paul who finally saw the light, may the scales fall from your own eyes and may the ice of your heart melt to allow you to embrace the love that truly makes a family.

@chairm
Yes, chairm, Blankenhorn “reviewed social science evidence,” – meaning he repeated stuff he read, applied no standards of critical review, and refuses to write for normal, peer-reviewed journals, preferring instead, to self-public among his own kind, who are used to accepting information as truth as long as their authority figures claim it is so.

I know, believe me – I grew up in a Mormon home, and we got lots of this kind of information, presented by people – oops! I mean male people – dressed in suits and speaking opinion as fact. If you read the opinion, which I have repeatedly and carefully, and if you read the transcript of Blankenhorn’s testimony, which I have, you’ll know that there was no way Blankenhorn qualifies as an “expert witness.” That is a federal evidentiary standard, and Judge Walker has no choice about it.

@Jeffrey
Blankenhorn’s statement that America will be more American the day we have same-sex marriage rights was something the prop. 8 attorneys had zero control over – because it was in a book that Blankenhorn wrote.

David Boies merely asked him if he wrote it and if he agreed with it. The point of all this is that Blankenhorn should NEVER have been called by the Prop. 8 side. Unfortunately, all the other potential witnesses chickened out when Boies cross-examined them in the depositions, and they realized that they were going to make fools of themselves on the stand if they testified.

And why is that? Because, as Judge Walker stated, there is NO basis for the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage except that the religious and the ignorant think being gay is bad, and bad people can’t be allowed to pollute a holy institution. Charles Manson can get married in California tomorrow, but my partner and I cannot. How would you feel if you were in our shoes and your government made a value judgment like that about you?

It is extremely insulting to upstanding gay Americans: a drug kingpin and his prostitute girlfriend can get married tomorrow; a convicted murderer and his victim’s wife can get married tomorrow; a woman in Indiana can get married for the 24th time and so long as she marries a male, she can get married tomorrow. Yes, marriage is so very sacred!

I wonder why no one from NOM testified in the Prop 8 trial. It seems reasonable to think that a group devoted to stopping legal same-sex marriage might have a thing or two of importance to add to the debate. What’s that you say? They don’t have anything of value to add?!

@Kevin
Someone might have asked them who pays their bills.

@Heidi
Very, very well said. Outstanding and scholarly.

gee willikers. do you suppose that the real reason you lost this case is the fact that all of your so called information against gays is so incredibly biased and known to be fact free? could it be that when exposed to the light of day it goes up in flames like a vampire? all you have is religion and anti gay hate. that is not justification to violate the constitution and take way a right that was already granted. people didn’t testify because if they did they would have had to purger themselves. look what happened when they didn’t lie.

i fully expect to get a brand new flood of spam emails offering me money making nonsense and special offers. it happens every time i comment on one of these sites against the right wing propaganda anti gay hate machine.

isn’t ruth like that woman from the bible who was in love with another woman?

I think you are all missing the point. Obviously, the government prints marriage licenses using ink extracted from a soon to be extinct animal. By allowing gays to marry, we will soon run out of marriage licenses. Hence, gay marriage harms the institution of marriage.

@rickster
Uuuuuummm….No.

@Ardie
Don’t know where this one came from, folks!

You will be disappointed.

yes ruth IS the woman in love with a woman in the bible. google it.

I think YOU need to google it. Are you referring to Ruth’s mother-in-law whom she goes to live with when her husband dies? And from there she meets her second husband? Sure, she loves her mother-in-law, a foreign concept nowadays, I know, but she is not IN love with her.

Heidi said: “Chairm, the fact that you can’t figure out what would distinguish a relationship that would lead to marriage from any other type of human relationship just shows how obtuse you really are.”

Oh, I know what marriage is but I have asked you to plainly state the essentials of marriage such that it can be distinguished from nonmarriage. You have failed to provide an answer that stands up to your own rules for attacking “traditional marriage”.

Besides, you have in mind something that is one-sexed and which is a subset of nonmarriage. I say that because, again, you have failed to plainly state the essentials of SSM such that it can be distinguished from nonmarriage.

As you said, a type of “relationship that would lead to marriage”. So before you pin the label on it, before you insist that society license it, before you demand that society accord this type of relationship the special status on par with marriage, you carry the burden of providing an answer that does not transgress your own rules for attacking, for one big example, the centrality of procreation in marriage.

Your failure is on the record. Even your fellow SSMers have invoked rules that destroy your weak response to my comment. A comment which merely turns the table and asks you to live up to your own stated standards.

* * *

Also on the record is your falsehoods regarding Blankenhorn. And your falsehood regarding the US Supreme Court. In the former you disparaged an opponent, maliciously, by telling a lie. In the latter your misrepresented the basis for the fundamental right to marry. Indeed in both instances you have failed, utterly, to make a case that lives-up to your own stated standards regarding intellectual honesty and civility in public discourse.

Readers are not as easy to fool as you might hope. Yet you wish to brazen it out anyway. That others pat you on the back for this behavior reflects poorly on them.

Mark, you have misrepresented Cooper’s words in Walker’s courtroom. That you have dones so may be a result of your being misinformed by the SSM campaign’s propaganda. Cooper’s team did provide loads of evidence. You have used a clipped version of what actually transpired. Check it out yourself and see if you’d correct your previous comment. Thanks.

Mark said: “Procreation seems to be a fundamental part of his definition yet, many people who are unable to procreate are granted licenses and there are no laws that say a couple must reproduce to stay married.”

It is not my definition, Mark. The core meaning of this foundational social institution is not defined at whim, contrary to the SSM campaign’s rhetoric.

Also, you have just invoked a big rule of SSM argumentation. Here is how it applies to what Heidi said:

Heidi feels that romance is fundamental to the definition of marriage. Yet there is no law anyplace that SSM has been imposed by which romance is mandatory. Indeed, if you rely on the relatively modern tradition of romance, then, you do not have sufficient reason for enacting SSM in the law because tradition alone does not suffice.

Meanwhile Heidi has simply declared that what she wants is what makes marriage, marriage. She did not actually say anything that could withstand your own rules of argumentation against the core meaning of marriage (i.e. the combination of sex integration and provision for responsible procreation).

Note that sex integration is a legal requirement, vigorously enforced. Note that consent to marry entails the legal marital presumption of paterniity, which also is vigorously enforced. These express the universal features of the social institution that the law recognizes. Marriage is not redefined one-person nor one-relationship at-a-time, contrary to Heidi’s misrepresentation of the constitutional precedents of the US Supreme Court.

Jeffery said: “The ugly underbelly of the anti-same-sex marriage crowd appears to be one of exclusion: we’re better than they are, and we want our heterosexuality certified by the state to be superior to homosexuality.”

1. One-sexed relationships — gaycentric or otherwise — are not illegal.

2. There is no heterosexual criterion under the man-woman basis of eligilbity to marry.

3. The gaycentric identity politics of the SSM campaign demands that special status be accorded the gay subset of nonmarriage over and above the rest of the nonmarriage category. And does so without justification.

The ugly face (not underbelly) of the SSM campaign is the asserted supremacy of gay identity politics.

Comrade Svilova said: “I’ll believe that the Protect Marriage crowd actually cares about their “traditional marriage” when their legislative action targets infertile/non-reproducing straights and divorce as well as gays and lesbians.”

The lack of the other sex is not infertility. Would you really equate gayness or lesbianism with a disability?

The tradition is to accord special status to the type of relationship that integrates the sexes and that provides for responsible procreation — and does both in coherent combination. That’s the social institution of marriage’s core meaning.

Note there is no straight criterion for eligiblity to marry. And no gay and no lesbian criterion for SSM anyplace where it has been imposed — and no such legal requirement is proposed by the SSM campaign. So that basis of your complaint is fraudulent.

Also, according marriage its special status, on behalf of society, is not a Government mandate to make procreation compulsory. The defense of marriage, here at the Ruth Institute and elsewhere, does not make the argument you pretend it makes. You need to recalibrate so that you can address the actual disagreement. Thanks.

And it should be remembered that the original blogpost by Dr J was about Blankenhorn’s testimony. Misrepresenting what he said does not advance the merits of the SSM side’s viewpoint. It actually detracts from it.

The standard of “Truth” in a court of law is verifiable, consistently demonstrable, empirical evidence. Science adheres to this standard by subjecting all theories and demonstrations of reality to verification first by presentation for peer review, to be combed over and picked apart by colleagues in a field of expertise, and for proofing experimentation to be repeated for verification of results, and to have alternative testing applied for independent confirmation of whatever ideas were presented for peer review.

The only witness testimony allowed in a court of law is direct observation. Reports that somebody else said or somebody else saw something is heresay, and is not available for verification or falsification, thereby failing the definition of objective proof.

Every objection to homosexuality as a state of being, every complaint about the place of LGBT persons in society, is based on traditional opinion handed down through the generations. Its roots are in religious condemnation and intolerance. The fact is that there is no proof that any religious assertion is, indeed, fact. Religious doctrine, aside from a minority of actual historical figures and events that give context to religious claims, is actually no more that heresay, generally accepted stories repeated so often as to become accepted as common sense, surrogate to actual truth, but in reality no more weighty than any unfalsifiable opinion. Read: myth or old wives’ tales. It is faith, absent proof, that keeps religious notions alive. Even the strongest faith doesn’t prevent religious doctrine from evolving with society. It is the application of fear and guilt from an early age that so ingrains these notions and prevents, under pain of death and eternal torture, open examination and the rigors of scientific investigation from being applied to religious claims of how the Universe works. That’s why religion applied to society makes it take so long to progress from barbarity to enlightenment.

Science is systematically, in a repeatably verifiable manner, disproving large swaths of religious claims. Religion began as an attempt to discover and explain human existence in the context of the environment in which we find ourselves. Religion tried to fill the void of human inquiry and wonder in the absence of science, without the tools and technology, the background knowledge and combined observation of hundreds of thousands of keen, disciplined, trained minds we now enjoy. Small wonder religion falls short in accuracy. Science is seen as the great threat to religion simply because it is better at accurately pegging what’s really going on in the world around us.

Religion is varied and different sects concentrate on specific issues dear to the hearts of each catechism’s adherents. There’s something for everygody, each to his own level of comfort and reassurance. Each claims superiority. In that regard, only one can be correct, and all the rest are dowager pretenders.

Religion has no place regulating peoples’ lives in the civic sphere. Until religion is able to offer proof of its assertions, until religion is able to demonstrate to a legal standard the accuracy of its claims, courts will continue to strike down religious dogma instututionalized by statute which forces those who do not share loyalty to articles of faith to behave as if they did, Until religionists can prove to a legal standard what they claim by faith to be true, you will not, you shall not, you may not make me act as if you know what you’re talking about.

Nothing Blankenhorn claimed in defense of Prop 8 met the legal standard of truth. Little to none of his presented works were anthropologically or sociologically peer reviewed. Just claiming something is so doesn’t make it true. Collecting a large number of opinions and compiling them into a body of work does not make any of them truth. Nothing you can say in a court of law counts unless demonstrated it can be proven it’s so in a repeatable fashion. Blankenhorn failed to present any data that meets the standard. That’s what the judge said. That doesn’t indicate prejudice or any agenda. That’s just how the courts work. Every court, every time. One may get away with acting as if unprovable assertions were reality in everyday life, but it just doesn’t cut it in a court of law. Whigning that being proven mistaken and meritless is causing injury is childish and dysfunctional.

Oh! No, You Don’t!

Same-sex marriage should be legal so that same-sex couples can enjoy the many legal benefits that opposite-sex couples do. Those benefits have nothing to do with gender differences so it doesn’t make any sense to not give those benefits to same-sex couples, too. Acting like marriage is to reward reproduction is laughable. There are plenty of new babies brought into the world with and without marriage? Marriage is really society’s way to reward the creation of a stable family unit, not procreation.

That’s nice of Ms. Morse to defend Charles Cooper’s horrible defense of Prop 8 but let’s be honest here: Cooper put on a terrible defense. In pre-trial motions he said he would present 23 reasons why marriage must be limited to opposite-sex couples. He didn’t. His own witnesses ended up supporting the plaintiff’s case of discrimination, including Mr. Blankenship!

That this wasn’t televised is a darn good thing for Prop 8 defenders. And Ms. Morse clearly does not understand federal evidentiary standards: facts offered in a federal court MUST be backed up by evidence, not hearsay or opinion. Unfortunately for the Prop 8 supporters, Judge Walker DID understand the federal rules of evidence!

It is quite un-American to so falsely accuse a federal judge of misdeeds doing a trial, and by extension, smear our nation’s legal system. Charles Cooper is the man you should be vilifying, not Judge Walker, Ms. Morse. Cooper didn’t take this very seriously, did he?!

Chairm, why do you seem so bitter and unhappy????? Sean, I’m not a fan of Cooper but, in this trial, he just had nothing to work with. The truth is that the vast majority of the voters voted against marriage equality because they feel homosexuality is wrong because of their religious beliefs or because of society’s bias against it. And that simply is not a rational basis for changing the law and taking away rights that people already had. Keep in mind, it was prop 8 that tried to change the definition of marriage as put forth by California’s constitution.

“The truth is that the vast majority of the voters voted against marriage equality because they feel homosexuality is wrong because of their religious beliefs or because of society’s bias against it.”

Is there a study proving this somewhere?

Betsy, Garry may be taking some liberties with the reasons why voters voted against marriage equality in California. For some it was homophobia; for others, religious beliefs. When Prop 8 looked like it might fail, its supporters started running advertisements suggesting kids would be taught to be homosexual in schools. In other words, knowing it wasn’t enough to appeal to voters’ dislike of gay people or to their religious convictions, Prop 8 got pushed over the top by some people’s fear of how schools would or wouldn’t handle material about homosexuality. The scare tactics, as dishonest as they were, worked.

Lacking any rational reason to prohibit same-sex marriage, it’s not unreasonable to ascribe voter motivations to homophobia, religious fervor or fear.

Okay, thanks for the honest explanation. But as far as your school comments, stuff was happening in schools. It was in the news. Maybe not where you were, but I remember a teacher taking her class on a field trip to her lesbian wedding, for instance. Or King and King being read in Kindergarten. Stuff like that really truly was happening. I think there is a lot of reason for people to not be okay with that. Children should learn about those lifestyles from their parents at a time of their parents choosing, I believe. And clearly I’m not the only one.

Southpaugh, contrary to what you just said about truth in courtrooms, evidence need not be excluded if it is not firsthand observation. That you imagine the constitutional questions at law in the Perry case are about what science can prove, or rather not prove, is a testament not to your opinion of religion but to your ignorance of the legal system.

Sean, the Cooper legal team did indeed provide “facts offered in a federal court MUST be backed up by evidence” that Judge Walker decided to disregard and which the SSM campaign, including the Olsen legal team, have applauded while misrepresenting the evidence that the Cooper legal team did present in a highly competent manner.

Garry, I am delighted to defend marriage; and I am very happy to do so here in a blogsite that SSMers bring their best so-callecd arguments but fail, utterly, to defend those arguments based on their own stated standards. I am glad to allow SSMers to shoot holes in their own complaint against the marriage law.

Your powers of perception have failed you if you think my comments suggest that I am other than delighted, happy, and glad. In other words I am gaily rebuking your trite ad hom attack.

Sean, the SSM campaign’s accusations of bigotry is itself one big phoney scare tactic.

No, Betsy, the dishonest ads from the Prop 8 side were specifically denied by school superintendents but it was too late. Children were NOT being taught how to masturbate or other such personal topics! Prop 8 never would have passed without the dishonest ads. It has been very revealing to see the lengths to which homophobic and religious people will go to force their views on the rest of us.

I honestly didn’t see any of the ads. I only knew of what WAS happening already, even before the vote was made.

Chairm, the Cooper team failed to produce evidence….they presented hearsay testimony, in clear violation of federal evidentiary rules. Judge Walker had no choice but to dismiss these kinds of statements. He realized that appeals courts are stuck with using the evidence presented at trial; he was obligated to make sure the evidence was actually evidence and not hearsay or statements with malicious intent or worse, simply falsehoods.

It’s nice to say that children need a mother and a father: it makes for an easily digestible soundbite. But the fact is, no one’s parenting skills were on trial. The trial aimed to answer the question, can the government grant marriage licenses to opposite-sex couples but not to same-sex couples, without violating the US Constitution. Cooper, and, evidently, you, failed to approach the trial with that in mind.

Betsy, what was or was not being taught in school is irrelevant to the case. It is another smoke screen put up by opponents to SSM.

Chairm: you define marriage in a single sense: one man and one woman, and claim that this has always been the way when history shows it was not. You defend marriage by denying others the chance to marry? Your logic is flawed, your reasoning is circular and your attempts to play the victim (“SSM campaign’s accusations of bigotry is itself one big phoney scare tactic.”) is just pathetic. You will go down in history along with others like George Wallace who attempt to justify your injustice.

I don’t know how you can say it wasn’t relevant. Perhaps you think I’m just someone who fell for it, but my point was it WAS happening during the Prop 8 campaign, and looked very likely to be a sign of more to come.

Sean, the first thing to note is that the evidence provided by the Cooper team was on the relevant and decisive constitutional questions.

They were focussed the judicial review of those questions and not on Walker’s possible policy preference. Walker was not there to decide policy so perhaps you are misunderstanding the issue of evidence here.

Walker self-appointed himself the role of polcy-decider and transformed his courtroom into a one-man legislative commission. Applicaton of the rules of evidence were distorted by this abuse of judicial review.

Mark, your namecalling does not advance the discussion of the substantive disagreement on marriage.

Where do you start with your definition? If it is the SSM idea, then, you are making a departure from the anthropological and historical records. Which is okay, but you have a blank slate on which to tell us, plainly, what makes your SSM idea different from the rest of the types of relationships and types of living arrangements that are neither SSM nor marriage?

1. Do you agree that society may discriminate between marriage and non-marriage?

2. On what basis would such discrimination be considered non-bigoted, in your view?

* * *

I pointed to the big scare tactic of the SSM campaign; I did not say I was a victim. I defend marriage, gladly, for what it actually is. The SSM campaign attacks marriage for what it is not. Indeed, the SSM campaign does not defend the SSM idea for what it actually is, either. The SSM campaign’s accusation of bigotry is a common tactic of assertions of supremacy such as that made in the name of gay identity politics on this and other issues.

Betsy, SSMers routinely say, So Wht?, if these things are taught and promoted in public schools. So they should not complain that the imposition of SSM would make that almost impossible to oppose in the school system. And they do not complain, in fact, but rather they applaude.

So it becomes pointless for the SSM campaign to offer up a Superintendent who temporizes on what the SSM campaign clearly hopes to implement, not by means of the legitimate policymaking process, but by force of the police power of the Government.

Chairm, Actually, if you read my response, there is no name calling going on. In answer to your questions:
1. Do you agree that society may discriminate between marriage and non-marriage? I ask a question back – what is the benefit to society to discriminate? Is it to promote a certain behavior? Then there must be proof that that behavior is preferred or beneficial. If it is merely punitive, no.
2. On what basis would such discrimination be considered non-bigoted, in your view? It is is non-bigoted if there is scientific proof to support such discrimination (i.e. not allowing sibs to marry due to increased risk of genetic defects) but it would be bigoted if it were based on here-say and feelings.

And those who support SSM are not engaging false accusations of bigotry. Those would want to deny equal protected rights to other fellow citizens who are unable to prove why other than that’s how they feel are being bigoted. We saw the same argument when discussing inter racial marriage.

Mark, nothing I have said justifies your labelling me another George Wallace. Namecall as you wish, but it does not advance the discussion of the substantive disagreement on marriage.

On the other hand, you have just violated your own stated standard regarding bigotry.

* * *

Your reply to item #2 is a blatant contradiction.

According to well-established hard science (see human physiology and biology) there is zero risk of pregnancy and thus zero risk of “genetic defects” due to whatever an all-male or an all-female arrangement might do sexually.

So you have not justified the line against some one-sexed scenarios. That means bigotry, on your part, Mark. You just told me so.

You would use “heightened risk” and you would use “genetic defects” when it comes to pregnancy. Of course, that cannot apply to one-sexed scenarios in terms of sexual conduct within such scenarios, however, it does apply to all such scenarios that partake of the novel technologies combined with donation procreation. The science on this is emerging after years of attempts to minimize such risks. That ought to give you pause.

Meanwhile, there is clearly a heightened risk of pregnancy in the sexualized two-sexed scenario. That is in contrast to the absolute absence of such risk in all one-sexed scenarios — sexualized or not.

But there is no proposal that in a merger of SSM and marriage that sexual behavior, much less procreaton, be mandatory. Indeed, siblings could form a nonsexualized union and adopt or do donation procreation and thus carry no more risk than each and every one-sexed sexualized scenario.

Yet there you are, standing there opposing their equal treatment.

* * *

The man-woman basis of marriage — and the core meaning of the social institution — provides the justification for drawing lines of eligiblity regarding relatedness. Mark, you just conceded as much.

But you can offer no scientific proof that this applies to one-sexed scenarios (gay or not). You can only attempt to mimick marriage even as you reject marriage in marriage law.

Mark your response to item #1 is evasive but I think you are trying to figure out your own thinking on this so I will persist with you on this item.

Item #1: Do you agree that society may discriminate between marriage and non-marriage?

Perhaps it would help you to think in terms of discriminating between SSM and non-marriage.

Please note that not all opposite-sexed arrangements and relationships are marriage; indeed, the non-marriage category is vast and diverse. So your task is to distinguish between the type of relationship (by its essentials) that you have in mind and the rest of the non-marriage category.

Now, society does say there are two categories: marriage and non-marriage. The SSM campaign makes it clear that they consider SSM to be a subset of marriage rather than non-marriage. They do so before they make the equal protection argument. If they did not do so, they’d have no such argument to make, right?

So, let’s just say that SSM = marriage, for the sake of discussion. Now, what is it about SSM/marriage that merits special treatment — before the license and the special status is pinned on it?

Tell us, “what is the benefit to society to discriminate” between SSM/marriage and non-marriage? If it helps, imagine the day when the merger of SSM and marriage is complete. Then provide your own justification for the continued discrimination between marriage and non-marriage.

Tell us, “Is it to promote a certain behavior? Then there must be proof that that behavior is preferred or beneficial.”

Tell us, would lines of ineligiblilty be “merely punitive” or does science decide the lines?

Thanks.

By the way, Mark, the core meaning of the social institution of marriage provides the very thing that justifies society discriminating between marriage and non-marriage. If there wasn’t a marriage category (i.e. the social institution) there would be no non-marriage category. In other words, the lines of eligilbity are drawn around the core of marriage and are justified by societal concerns about that core meaning.

Item #1, as it is unpacked here, is not a challenge to the lines drawn on the man-woman basis, but an affirmation of those lines. However, this will also challenge your thinking on the SSM idea because to define something is to identify its essentials and to then set limits based on societal regard for those essentials.

I will conceded readily that it is up to society to decide how to respond to the core of marriage. One option is to reject all concerns for it. And to replace the marriage idea with the SSM idea. The really hard job of SSMers is to argue for the replacement rather than to argue against the marriage idea. Is it superior, really, (as the SSM campaign assumes) or is it a conceptual mess (as I think it is)?

Put another way: some SSMers will ask “why not” but they actually need to ask “why” impose the merger of SSM and marriage on society?

Chairm: You continue to talk circles. Society does in fact distinguish between marriage and non-marriage, giving certain benefits (financial, legally and otherwise) to those who choose to marry. To not allow same sex couples to choose to enter in such a relationship is discrimination, PERIOD.

Your comment to my answer to your item #2 is just wrong and rather confusing. It is only a “blatant contradiction” in your mind, not in reality.

You ask “what is the benefit to society to discriminate” between SSM/marriage and non-marriage?” That is not a clear question. Marriage versus non-marriage is one comparison. SSM is another aspect. Marriage recognizes two individuals who wish to share and build a life together. Agreeing to be there for one another, physically, spiritually, financially and all the other ways two people come together. Not all same sex (nor opposite sex couples) wish to enter such an agreement. But, in a free society, that chose must be open to all consenting adults.

But, you ask why: studies show that health is improved in marriage, satisfaction with life is improved in marriage, children benefit and flourish when parents marry. For these reasons alone, society should support marriage. For those who are capitalistic, there is a lot of money to be made in any wedding ceremony so it can increase local income.

You, on the other hand, have YET to give a reason (outside of your beliefs and “its always been that way” – which is untrue) why SSM should not take place.

You can become defensive about being compared to a bigot (my apologies to George Wallace) but please, then refrain from name calling yourself.

Mark you missed the actual query.

Before you pin governmental benefits to it, or even the name to it, you need to distinguish SSM from the rest of nonmarriage. You are thinking backwards and assuming that the governmental benefits exist prior to the thing being accorded special status.

If you think the Government owns civil society, fine, sayso. If not, then, please reread and respond directly to the query as asked. Thanks.

Mark, due to your missing the actual query, and thus missing the actual disagreement, your first paragraph is circular. Plain and simple.

Consent is not a trump card, Mark, even when you consider your own readiness to prohibit some related people or own those who’d form polygamous families. Likewise with underaged people. You have yet to justify those lines based on your SSM idea. That is your debt to this discussion.

You said that science decides and yet your line against related people of the same sex is not justified by the risk you cited of genetic risks due to procreation. Indeed, you propose no requirement that people engage in sexual behavior together so your line is not justified even for opposite-sexed relationships.

Furthermore, science cannot predict actual genetic defects due to relatedness for this or that particular couple. But it can clealry predict zero defects for all one-sexed arrangements regardless of whether or not the arrangement is sexualized.

Your own standard declares your opinon to be bigoted.

You agree that there is marriage and that there is non-marriage. But you have yet to acknowledge marital status is a special status that is denied to all of non-marriage.

You may be stuck on the notion that some people cohabit outside of marriage in a sexualized relationship of some sort or another. The non-marriage category is way broader than that. Broaden your outlook to match this reality.

Like most SSMers, you use the term “same-sex couple” as if it was infused with magical powers. I assume you expect to impart the notion that the arrangement is sexualized. But according to your argumentation, if something is not made mandatory in the law, then, it is not definitive of marriage at law. There is no legal requirement for same-sex sexual behavior anyplace where people can show-up for a license to SSM. So “same-sex couple” is not as narrow as you might wish to pretend. Nor does the SSM idea justify the limitation of “couple” as in the number two.

Thus, romance or sexualization does not distinguish SSM from the rest of the nonmarriage category. SSM is a subset of nonmarriage; it does not stand apart from it. At least, you have failed to justify the discrimination you propose between SSM and nonmarriage.

Mark, you said that ” studies show that health is improved in marriage, satisfaction with life is improved in marriage, children benefit and flourish when parents marry.”

The integration of the sexes combined with responsible procreation is the context of those studies, not the mere word, marriage.

By your standard, if you would allow incestuous marriage, then, people in those arrangements would also gain all of these advantages. Why would you deny them that? Especially if they attain children via adoption or third party (i.e. donation) procreation, just like the gaycentric subset of nonmarriage that you favor so readily?

Likewise the polygamous and polyandrous people? Or even single people who are flying solo? Stick the word onto their arrangements and Presto! you cannot deny them those benefits, according to your viewpoint.

I have not name-called, Mark.

* * *

However, when you insist upon a standard it is fair to test your SSM idea, and your own defense of that idea, by challenging you to live-up to that standard. Your own comments have fitted what you said is bigotry.

If that does not convince you to recalibrate your thinking, then, your own talk of bigotry is empty rhetoric.

Mark said: “You, on the other hand, have YET to give a reason (outside of your beliefs and “its always been that way” – which is untrue) why SSM should not take place.”

The historical and anthropological records support what I have said about the social institution of marriage. And my argument is not based merely on “it’s always been that way”. That said, there are givens that have not changed in all of recorded human history.

Now, sure, you may be here to demand that society disregard those things, but that does not contradict that these are things that have been and continue to be there to be regarded or to be disregarded by civilizations across the millenia.

* * *

Marriage is a foundational social institution. At its core it integrates the sexes and provides for responsible procreation. Society shows preference for this core of marriage; but I suppose society could abandon that core as verbotten, as per SSM argumentation, for some superior reason.

SSMers do not provide a superior reason. Indeed, they insist that marriage be replaced with the SSM idea and that requires that marriage mean less and less.

On the other hand, you have yet to provide the special reason(s) for the special status of marriage in civlizations across the spectrum. That is what would justify the lines drawn for eligiblity and ineligibility. Hence the queries about nonmarriage versus marriage.

Heterosexuality is not the jusification for marital status. Think about that for a few moments. The core meaning of marriage applies regardless of your emphasis on the politicized homo-heterosexual dichotomy.

By the way, Mark, I have not argued that SSM should not take place. I have argued against merging SSM with marriage — in the law, tradition, customs, and culture of our civilization.

Mark, I have not “become defensive about being compared to a bigot,” however I pointed out that you have not justified your namecalling and also that your quick resort to allegations of bigotry does not advance the discussion of the substantive disagreement.

Your “apologies to George Wallace” where given in light of the SSM campaign’s promotion of sex-segregation and sexual-orientation-segregation under the auspices of the social institution that integrates the sexes and that disregards sexual orientation as a criterion for eligiblity/ineligibility.

In contrast, there is plenty that you have written here that justifies the observation that your SSM argumentation, steeped in the primacy of gay identity politics, is closely analogous with the racialist identity politics that George Wallace once advocated in the name of his version of selective sex-segregation based on racialist criteria. Both would misuse marriage for an unjust nonmarriage purpose.

Chairm: Sigh, it really is hopeless to discuss this with you. You ask me a question and then change the question to suit your views.

Your definition of what marriage is, is at best, a product of your imagination. Throughout history the reasons and even the definitions of marriage have changed. Historically, marriage’s only connection to procreation was to assure a name/blood line. Even there it is not absolute. That is why in the Jewish religion, it is a matriarchal line as the only definite parent was the mother. Marriage has been a form of barter, securing wealth and a host of other reasons. In ancient Egypt, marriage in royal lines was between siblings to keep the royal lineage pure.

As far as your attempt to discredit my responses to you: if genetic defects were a reason to ban sibs from marrying than you are right, same sex marriages SHOULD take place because there is zero chance of a genetic defect occurring.

And your comments re: George Wallace are just, well strange and complete illogical.

And please, just ONCE answer someones question without typing 5000 words. Or better, type the 5000 words but ANSWER THE QUESTION.

Mark, sure, there are variable features of the social institution, but that does not negate the fact that there are universal features.

Thank you for conceding that your thinking on SSM eliminates the line against related same sexed scenario.

You insisted that the law treat the same-sexed scenario exactly the same as the opposite-sexed scenario. Also, you say that procreation is not mandatory and soit is not a legitimate basis for prohibiting people from entering marriage. That means that your version of the perceived genetic risk does not justify ineligilbity to marry. Besides, you do not propose a legal requirement that would make sexual behavior mandatory — not for SSM so not for marriage.

Please be forthright, do you agree that your stated standards, when applied to the opposite-sexed scenario, eliminates the ineligiblity line that is drawn based on relatedness?

If yes, please sayso. If not, please explain.

* * *

I’ve answered all of your questions; some from multiple angles. The definition you pretended to be in search of was provided more than 10 days earlier. Read with more care and you might discover that your questions are not piling up unanswered.

* * *

You advocate a change to the marriage law that depends, utterly, on the primacy of identity politics. This you have in common with the suporters of racialist identity politics who promoted anti-miscegenation in marriage law in the past.

You still have not stated what are the essential(s) of SSM such that it can be distinguished from nonmarriage. This is the fatal flaw in your complaint against the man-woman basis of marriage law.

The incest marriage example serves to illustrate that flaw.

By the way, Mark, your obsession with word count is amusing. Content, focus on content instead of form.

Clearing the underbrush takes more effort on my side because SSMers throw lots of contradictory stuff at the wall and hope that some of it will stick without being contested. So thoroughness is important when responding to that tactic.

Unlike most SSM supporters, you have not scurried away from your own stated standards at the first hint that your argumentation might suffer if those standards are used to challenge the SSM idea.

On that score you deserve credit. You are standing firm on the standards and letting the chips fall where they may.

My previous comments have been thorough. So I will point you back to those comments, for the sake of brevity and in honor of your word count thing.

Mark, where did I ask you a question and then changed the question?

You may be mistaking me for you: you attributed a statement about religion to me and demanded an explanation and later this transformed into a demand for a definition, retroactively.

Ask your question clearly and I will answer as best as I can. But stop with the misrepresentations and the bluffs, okay?

Mark, illustrate the “complete illogic”, as you put it, of the comments regarding Wallace. Strange to your sensibilities, perhaps, but the analogy is on target.

Chairm: I can’t imagine you even understand half of what you are write. (this one, for example: “Thank you for conceding that your thinking on SSM eliminates the line against related same sexed scenario.”) The sentences might as well be in French. You seem to spend a great deal of time trying to justify your bigotry.

This issue is an extremely simple one. We currently allow marriage in this country between one man and one woman who consent and are of age. With marriage comes thousands of state and federal rights. Same sex individuals simply want that same right, just as interracial couples did 50 years ago. People are born gay or straight just as they are born black or white. To deny an individual in this country the same rights as others does not gel with the Constitution.

Mark, I understood you correctly when you said: “if genetic defects were a reason to ban sibs from marrying than you are right, same sex marriages SHOULD take place because there is zero chance of a genetic defect occurring.”

You said that in the direct context of the line drawn based on your concern about procreation and genetic defects. If that is not really your concern, okay, please say as much.

That concern is applicable to the union of husband and wife, according to you, but inapplicable to the full range of one-sexed arrangements, again according to you.

You have also insisted that procreation is not mandatory. So your concern is irrelevant to the SSM idea as applied to the full range of opposite-sexed arrangements, including the union of husband and wife. You wouldn’t bar people based on a non-requirement, right?

That said, you can clarify. What would be the justification, if any, for a line against related one-sexed arrangements? Would you bar only opposite-sexed arrangements comprised of related people even if they’d adopt or use third party procreation?

Keep in mind that people are born related. And those related by affiliation are usually related by the choice of others rather than their own choice. And one of the emerging trends that have arisen from the increased use of donation procreation is the greater visibility of genetic sexual attraction among those who find siblings or parents or other relatives.

Why would you deny some people the government bennies that you demand for your favored gay subset of nonmarriage? It cannot be only about homosexualized relationships, surely.

Your false charge of bigotry, Mark, does not advance the discussion of the substantive disagreement on the SSM idea.

I support the marriage idea. I disagree with the proposal that society replace the marriage idea with the SSM idea. From you I have sought your explanation for the SSM idea. Your stated standards are on the record so it is fair to test your explanation against those stated standards. Or is that unfair?

These are not the criteria by which one can reasonably accuse another of bigotry. But perhaps you have clear criteria by which you are judging my comments. Please state them now and we can assess your own comments on that same basis. Thanks.

Chairm: This statement “I support the marriage idea. I disagree with the proposal that society replace the marriage idea with the SSM idea.” Is one of the type of statements I question. It sounds as if you are saying, “I like blacks I just don’t want living next to me”. Its an attempt to justify a hatred / fear / lack of understanding. As I have said NUMEROUS times “on the record”, there is no “SSM idea”. Its just marriage. Allowed to adults regardless of whether they are black, white, straight, gay, Catholic, Jew or whatever their differences happen to be.

It a reasonable assumption to say that a person who works so hard to block such a BASIC situation is acting as a bigot.

Rather than making the accusatory “sounds like” (aka a hunch-dressed-up-as-incontestable-fact), you could simply state the objective criteria by which one commenter might reasonably assess the comments of another commenter.

That way your own comments can be assessed with the same criteria. What something “sounds like” to Mark is hardly the sort of criterion that can be used by others to reasonably assess your own comments, Mark. Please acknowledge that.

You said that there is only one idea. But when queried, you cannot distinguish SSM from the rest of nonmarriage. If you cannot do that basic thing, then, you cannot claim that the SSM idea is one and the same as the marriage idea.

Blocking the replacement of the marriage idea by this vague SSM idea is to serve society as a fair and thoughtfully concerned citizen. It is responsible to question the attack on the social institution of marriage that some work so hard to press forward day-in and day-out. But I am not doing so based on a hunch about your motivations; I am doing so based on the content of your argumentation and other commentary. It is the duty of good citizenship to oppose the supremacy of identity politics — whatever version.

Putting aside accusations of bigotry one might look at the actual disagreement and the actual arguments made.

There is a clash of ideas here. You openly reject the marriage idea. You openly advocate for the SSM idea which depends on your own emphasis on the gay identity group. Your accusation of bigotry illustrates your emphasis. You might operate on the premise that the SSM idea has already supplanted the marriage idea, however, that leads to the circular thinking you have displayed of late.

Both your accusation of bigotry and your favoritism toward the gay identity group, as per the content of your own comments, remain unjustified by yourself. That comes as no surprise since the SSM campaign and its argumentation have failed to supply SSm supporters this basic justification.

As it stands, you have a single criterion for an accusation of bigotry: disagreement with you about SSM and marriage.

SSMers often disparage circular thinking — except when they depend on it so very much.

Chairm: Sigh, you make SO many assumptions about what you (in your own mind) think I am saying and then formulate arguments against those assumptions. Again, a lot of time to try to justify your own narrow, petty ways.

The difference between SSM and nonmarriage is the EXACT same as the difference between OSM and nonmarriage. Marriage (period – gay or straight) is a commitment between two people that is recognized by the state. This commitment could be out of love, for profit, to produce children or for any number of reasons.

There is no attack on the institution of marriage. I, personally, do not “reject the marriage idea” either openly or in private. I think marriage is a wonderful institution that science has shown benefits the participants. It was once restricted to whites only in many countries, then only to members of the same race (often only the same religion). It is now restricted to OSM. All the previous restrictions were done away with and the institution persists.

But, not to worry. As I have said before, your backward, narrow minded thinking will go the way of the dodo. SSM will be accepted in the US soon as it has in most of the industrial world (without harm, I might add). You can still attempt (unsuccessfully) to try to justify why it is so important to youself to work to prohibit two adults who wish to commit to each other. Sad.

Mark, you said that the difference between nonmarriage and SSM is exactly the same as between nonmarriage and marriage.

And in aid of your formulation you said that “marriage is a commitment between two people that is recognized by the state”.

You must know full well that there are many different types of consensual arrangements that involve commitment that the state recognizes. You have failed to identify the essentials by which nonmarriage can be distinguished from SSM.

On the other hand, I have pointed to the legal requirements that recognize the opposite-sexed basis for marriage and its societal significance; this is what merits the special status of marriage. You reject that in favor of a fuzzy conceptual mess called the SSM idea.

And you latest comment has confirmed that you do so with your emphasis on your favored identity group. That is very narrow indeed, even if the SSM idea is so wide-open as to destroy the difference between the marital type of relationship and the vast range of the nonmarriage category of relationship types.

You just made a claim about science and marriage. Yet the social scientific evidence on marriage has been accumulated based on the context of sex integration and responsible procreation. You are playing games, again, by wrapping your bias in supposed scientific neutrality.

There is one human race and its nature happens to be two-sexed, not one-sexed. So you can stop pretending that the racial analogy applies to the sex-segregative type of arrangement you have in mind. The racialist system that barred some marriages is closely analgous with your proposed SSM idea since it would also impose the primacy of identity politics on marriage law. You, as an SSMer, are the racialist by analogue.

Marriage is opposite-sexed. It is not “restricted” in that way. It is inclusive. Indeed, unlike the SSM idea which would segregate by sexual orientation, marriage is neutral on that, as is the man-woman basis of the marriage law. So even on your emphasis you are the racialist by analogue.

Your SSM idea is regressive to a time when marriage lacked its special status; but as a foundational social institution of civil society it has become embedded in civilizations across the globe and throughout history and across cultural and religious (and panreligious, nonreligious, and athiestic) lines for millennia.

The SSM idea is an aberration and not progressive, really. As an SSMer you are the dodo analogue.

If you, as you pose in your latest comment, are all for the eligiblity of “adults who wish to commit to each other”, then, you have already inflected a wound to your SSM idea when you proposed restricting marriage based on procreation even as you insisted that procreation is not the legitimate basis for your SSM idea. Your double-standards have been on display. You are the sad hypocrite in this conflict over the marriage idea and your SSM idea.

Meanwhile your sole criterion for making an accusation of bigotry is your gay identity politics which dictates (and provides not justification) that disagreement with the SSM idea is bigotry. That makes you look very foolish indeed, especially when citing the racialist identity politics of the past which misused marriage for an explicity nonmarriage purpose.

It is astonishing how the lack of self-awareness among those who argue in favor of the SSM idea is so prevalent among those SSMers who comment in the blogosphere. This may account for their attack on marriage and their pretense that their SSM idea is superior to the marriage idea such that they assume that the merger is a fait accomplis and there can be no difference to discuss. Remarkable, I think, considering how SSMers pose as having science on their side and pretend that their falsehoods are the legitimate basis for utilizing the no harm principle.

You are fooling yourselves, Mark, with your circular thinking and your brazen attempt to impose what you have failed to justify, even in your own terms.

Chairm: I fail to have seen in the pages of diatribe you type where you mentioned the “legal requirements” for marriage. Is it the baby thing? If that is the definition, then my parents who are far beyond the child bearing age should be forced to divorce, right? Because they no longer fit the “legal requirements” for marriage. And, its another, uh, error you made by stating that I “have already inflected a wound to your SSM idea when you proposed restricting marriage based on procreation even as you insisted that procreation is not the legitimate basis for your SSM idea.” Lying does not help the discussion.

“Marriage is opposite-sexed.” FINALLY you come out and say it! You are aware that in this country’s past marriage was once defined only if both parties were white? So now you have another definition. Swell. Its still wrong.

As far as scientific data is concerned, there is actually a 25 year study which shows that children growing up with two mothers do just as well as kids growing in traditional families.
Of COURSE that study is suspect because it doesn’t jive with you narrow minded views.

The reason the term “bigot” fits for you is due to its definition: “a person who is intolerant of any ideas other than his or her own, esp on religion, politics, or race “. You have defined marriage in one narrow way, no different than others have in the past. You refuse to consider anyone else’s ideas.

Let me asks you some questions:
1. Are people born gay?
2. can people be converted to not being gay?
3. Please show any research / studies / information to support these views.

I can assume how you will answer (although you probably won’t).

Mark, I have stated at least two legal requirements and have explained these thoroughly. You must have skipped over them in your haste to pivot around your predrawn conclusion.

1. The man-woman criterion stands for sex integration.

2. The legal marital presumption of paternity stands for responsible procreation.

3. The sexual basis for 1 and 2 is not all there is to 1 and 2, since these combine as a coherent whole, i.e. a foundational social institution of civil society.

4. That sexual basis is why marriage is a public type of relationship rather than a merely private type of arrangement.

5. That sexual basis is not a mandate to force people to procreate, as you have been informed many times. It is directly expressed in relatively non-coercive provisions in our legal system: see the coital basis for sexual consummation, for grounds for annulment, for grounds for adultery, for the marital presumption that the father and mother are both the parents of the children born to the wife during their marriage.

6. Since marriage is first and foremost a social institution, one which society via government licenses and accords a special status, those who enter the institution do not do so partially for the consent to all that marriage entails. Consent to this is the key to the legal requirement for mutual consent to marry. Societal consent is key to the licensing and the special status.

In another comment section I asked what is the societal significance of same-sex sexual behaviior such that it could possibly merit a special status over and above the rest of nonmarriage. No SSMer has deigned to answer even though several had jumped into the discussion to offer their own shrugs. Where you not also a reader of and a participant in that discussion?

Mark, what is the justification for the ineligiblity of some related people even as other related people are eligible?

We had this discussion, I am quite certain, but here you have the opportunity to again provide the basis for distinguishing between nonmarriage and marriage; indeed for distinguishing between nonmarriage and SSM. Go for it.

Mark said: “my parents who are far beyond the child bearing age should be forced to divorce, right? Because they no longer fit the ‘legal requirements’ for marriage.”

The totalitarian impulse lies just beneath the rights-based rhetorical veneer of SSM argumentation.

I said nothing about age. But if you want to use age as proxy for something else, okay, then, you would concede that the man-woman basis, at the very least, is as useful a proxy for the same thing. So I will count that as yet another concession on your part.

On the other hand, your totalitarian fantasy only points to a demand, at least in your own mind, that the eligilbity lines be drawn more tightly for two-sexed scenarios and that would still preclude all one-sexed scenarios — gay or not. If that is the direction you are heading, go for it to its logical conclusion.

In your view the Government owns not only the social institution of marriage but also each and every conjugal relationship. Thus, in your view, Government is empowered to unilaterally divorce this or that husband and wife. Never mind the conditions or the criteria you have put forth — this is your bottom line.

It is not much distance between that bottom line and the prospect that the SSM idea means that Government would likewise become empowered to enforce the primacy of gay identity politics should SSM become merged with marriage.

Meanwhile the sexual basis for marriage, at law, is not forced on people by Government. The core meaning of the social institution is recognized rather than imposed. Government does not own the foundation of civilization.

The conflict between the marriage idea and the SSM idea is profound.

Mark, I have been saying that marriage is opposite-sexed from the getgo. It is a public type of relationship because it is a sexual type of relationship that merits preferential treatment in our culture and laws.

You’ve been asked to justify preferential treatment based on same-sex sexual behavior. You have failed, utterly, to provide justification on that basis. You have failed to distinguish nonmarriage from the SSM idea. You are demanding special treatment based purely on gaycentric identity politics and the assertion of the supremacy of that.

Maybe you have not really thought this through and have prematurely bought the rhetoric of the SSM campaign, I dunno.

It is the SSMer who is endlessly working to drag a sex-segregative notion under the auspices of a social institution that has always integrated the sexes. It is the SSMer who relies on the supposed societal priority of segregating by sexual orientation under the auspices of the social institution that is neutral on this, they key, to your complaint against marriage.

The SSMer’s argument is the racialist analogue in this discussion.

Mark said there is “a study”. And that, he claims, is the science upon which he stands. A study. He would not make a conclusive assertion based on preliminary evidence but he would do so in the name of identity politics, sure.

* * *

In the meantime, Mark, based on a study you have now asserted that for 25 years the all-female scenario has been doing as good as marriage without the licensing and special status accorded marriage. If so, your own claim stands against the complaint that these scenarios need special status to do as well as marriage.

This is not so for the two-sexed scenario. There is a mountain of social scientific evidence for the wide consensus that tells us that the optimal structure is the union of husband and wife raising their own offspring in a low-conflict relationship. Other structures — two-sexed or one-sexed — fall short of this standard, on average. That’s what the science tells us.

But you can rely on the dogma from the SSM campaign for transforming preliminary evidence into conclusions that undermine the rhetoric of the SSM campaign, if you really want to.

I’ve sought clarification of the SSM idea. If, as you claim Mark, the SSM idea is identitical to the marriage idea, fine, you have had ample opportunity to explain how your idea (call it SSM or marriage) is distinguishable from nonmarriage. You have failed to do so.

Mark you have insisted that there is no conflict between the SSM idea and the marriage idea and that there is only one idea.

Yet, with unintended irony, you would accuse me thusly: “You refuse to consider anyone else’s ideas.”

* * *

Mark, I will assume that your answers to your own questions are as follows (please confirm, correct, or clarify):

1. Are people born gay? — YES.
2. can people be converted to not being gay? — NO.
3. Please show any research / studies / information to support these views. SHRUG.

My answer is as follows:

Same-sex sexual attraction is not one and the same as a socio-political identity (a group identity). While such an attraction may, or may not, be inborn, no socio-political identity is inborn; that is learned, chosen, constructed.

A person might orientate his life toward a socio-political identity and make the group identity his own “true identity”. This has been done in racialist communities as well as in intensely intnra-ethnic and intra-religious communities; but the priority necessarily shifts from the content of the individual’s character to the the extrinsic demands of the identity group.

Can people be converted to a socio-political identity? Yes. Can they drop that identity and reorientate their lives? Yes.

But when it comes to gay identity politics the answers are insistently NO and are dogmatically so without scientific justification. For its adherents, the identity group demanss conversion in only one direction and there is no choice on the part of the individual. The group identity owns the individual’s “true identity”.

The onus is on those who would assert that this socio-political identity is inborn. The scientific evidence for that is nonexistent. So they instead transform the internal sexual feelings into supposed objective criteria for making a scientific claim about homosexuality. They switch from homosexuality to gay identity with rapidity, frequency, and sleight of hand. This is how a scientific assertion is converted into a socio-political assertion.

The history of gay identity politics within the the psychological and psychiatry professions is well-documentated.

Meanwhile, even if we took Mark’s answers (in the affirmative and negative and Shrug) at face value, this has zero bearing on the core meaning of marriage.

Under the man-woman basis of marriage law, membership in an identity group does not constrain an individual’s right to form a marital relationship. Likewise, same-sex sexual feelings are not a criterion for ineligiblity to marry, at law.

The gay identity group insists that the choice to marry (i.e. to form a conjugal relationship of man and woman) is no choice because it precludes the formation of a one-sexed arrangement that is sexualized and equated with the husband-wife union. They are arguing not about homosexuality but about equating the SSM idea with the marriage idea. But their argument is couched in the socio-political assertions made in the name of identity politics which includes the sleight-of-hand regarding same-sex sexual attraction.

They go further: society has no choice but to impose the SSM idea as superior to the marriage idea. But they offer no justification for constraining society in that precise way. Instead they insist that there is only one idea and they have the only idea that the Government may enforce on all of society.

Defenders of marriage, such as myself, have explained the societal significance of marriage, the social institution, and have been very open to the SSM idea’s basic non-gaycentric complaint about protections. In fact, I’ve raised the issue of nonmarriage because SSMers keep trying to demand protections based on gayness that they assume are not merited for the rest of nonmarriage. So it is the SSM campaign which is against equality within the nonmarriage category and it is the SSM argumentation which attacks the special reason for the special status of marriage in our society.

And, along the way, SSMers tell falsehoods about marriage, about sexual attraction, and about our system of good governance. These are all harms done in the name of theprimacy of identity politics. We’ve seen it before when racialist identity politics misused marriage.

We don’t need to repeat history even if SSMers believe there is no future but for the unjust future they would impose on us.

Chairm: Being gay is no more a “socio-political identity” than being straight. Sexual orientation is inheritant in a persons very being.

So, your definition of marriage is: “sex integration” (whatever that means), “presumption of paternity stands for responsible procreation”, and “sexual basis”. Sounds like its all about the two people who enter in to such an arrangement. So, children have no place in a discussion regarding marriage. Done.
So, what exactly is the social need for marriage and how does it differ for SSM?

And, please, refrain from saying such lies as “SSM campaign which is against equality”. There nothing further from the truth. And, face it, NOM is not about preventing SSM but for preventing gays and lesbians from having equal rights in this country.

Oh, and please share some of the “mountain of social scientific evidence” to support your claims because the attorney’s supporting Prop 8 sure couldn’t show any.

Mark, straight and gay are both socio-political identities. The latter, by necessity, required a bookend and “straight” serves no other significant purpose than that.

Sexual attraction, whether same-sexed or opposite-sexed or otherwise, may or may not be inborn. But it is not one and the same as a socio-political identity. Different things. But in your response you took the political line and deliberately equated the individualized feelings with the political identity group. I carefully described that very thing in my previous remarks.

* * *

Mark, responsible procreation contradicts your absurd conclusion that “children have no place in a discussion regarding marriage”. Perhaps you misread. Perhaps you miswrote. Please clarify. Thanks.

You asked: “So, what exactly is the social need for marriage and how does it differ for SSM?”

Backup the truck, Mark.

You still owe this discussion a plainly stated meaning of SSM such that it is different from the rest of nonmarriage. If you can’t provide that, then, you can not reasonably claim that your SSM idea is identical to the marriage idea.

You reject sex integration. You reject the sexual basis for marriage and its special place in society. You reject responsible procreation. None of that distinguishes SSM from nonmarriage, certainly, so what might do the trick, Mark?

* * *

Mark when you accused me of a lie you deliberately clipped what I had actually said. That is your own falsehood.

I said: “I’ve raised the issue of nonmarriage because SSMers keep trying to demand protections based on gayness that they assume are not merited for the rest of nonmarriage. So it is the SSM campaign which is against equality within the nonmarriage category and it is the SSM argumentation which attacks the special reason for the special status of marriage in our society.”

1. The nonmarriage category exists and SSM is a subset, even according to you own comments in which you have failed to distinguish SSM from nonmarriage.

2. Within the nonmarriage category there are legitimate calls for protections; since SSM is a subset of that category, the call for protection equality would contradict the demand for special status for SSM based on gayness alone.

3. The SSM idea would haul itself up onto the back of marriage for a free ride; but the SSM campaign, and argumentation such as your own here, attacks the special reason for the special status of marriage and so you attack that special status as well; so your demand is for special status, not equal status, within the nonmarriage category. Why should any subset of nonmarriage be accorded the special status of marriage? You don’t say.

The demand for inequality is front and center in the SSM campaign; the rhetoric of equal rights is belied by the lack of justification for special treatment base on gayness. And, you know what, given that the SSM campaign is in a huff about removing sexual orientation and gayness (i.e. a socio-political identity) from consideration in the law, it is a blatant case of hypocrisy that the SSMers demand that homosexuality and gayness be emphasized in changing marriage law. Especially when one considers the obvious fact that neither homosexuality nor gayness is a criterion for ineligiblity to marry under the man-woman basis of marriage law.

I would refrain from pointing out the obvious when commenters such as yourself acknowledge it forthrightly.

Equal rights exist now under marriage law. SSM is an unjust call for inequality based on the supposed primacy of gay identity politics.

The Walker game was about pretending that he was a policymaker and that the litigants were there to give him an excuse to abuse judicial review. The Cooper legal team made the Olson-Boise team look foolish in regards to the actual constitutional case at hand. The policymaking game was rigged since 1) Walker is neither competent nor posiitioned to make policy on behalf of the country, and 2) the issue was not which policy to talk about but rather the evidence and analysis that would decide the district court’s judgement on the controlling precedents set forth by the higher courts.

It was a show trial and that should concern you, as an SSMer, very deeply since the role of the judiciary is something upon which your SSM campaign claims to depend so very dearly. If, as it turned out with Walker, that dependancy is one of enabling abuse, then, this will not go unnoticed during the appeals process. And that, Mark, from a purely political calculation would be a setback for the courtcentric SSM campaign.

In the meantime, Walker, and those who slap his back with political gratitude, are corrupting the reputation of the judicial role and the public’s trust in our system of self-governance.

And for what? For a hasty shot at imposing the supremacy of your favored version of identity politics on the entire country, that’s what.

Mark said: “Sounds like its all about the two people who enter in to such an arrangement.”

Well, to the extent that people consent to what marriage is, sure, it is about that very much so.

But what is SSM? You rely on legal requirements that make stuff mandatory for all who’d show-up to SSM. What are those definitive legal requirements, Mark? Can’t be love, nor sexual attraction, nor sexual behavior, nor membership in an identity group. But that is what the SSM side and its argumentation emphasizes at the cost of plainly stating the definitive legal requirements.

If, as I pointed out before, you do not really abide by that rule of argumentation, fine, sayso and move on.

But, as you indicated in the quote above, you acknowledge that marriage is all about that to which people consent, then, plainly state the essential(s) that differentiate the SSM type of arrangement from the rest of nonmarriage. Surely it is not gayness; surely it is not same-sex sexual attraction; surely it is not same-sex sexual romance; not if you mean to remove such criteria from consideration as the legitimate basis for lawmaking, as per one of the most prominent themes of the SSM complaint against marriage law. Discrimination base don that stuff, SSMers insist, is unjust and bigoted.

Would you read that stuff into the law of SSM or would you do The Shrug and acknowledge that nonmarriage and SSM are not significantly different afterall?

Chairm: “Equal rights exist now under marriage law” this is a blatant lie. That is what this discussion is all about.

“straight and gay are both socio-political identities” Really? Can you please identify your source? I have NEVER heard them described as such, EVER.

And for HEAVENS sake, define what you mean by “sex integration”. It has no meaning.

“You reject the sexual basis for marriage” Uh, wrong again. I feel sexual relations are very important in a marriage. You do know that the early Christian church recognized SSM because at that time, sex outside of marriage was considered the wrong thing.

“You reject responsible procreation” Again, you make a grievous error. While I am not exactly sure of what you mean by “responsible procreation” (you are, as always, using terms without defining them), you seem to indicate that procreation IS important to your definition of marriage. I, personally, do not feel that procreation is essential to marriage. Otherwise, my great aunt and uncle should never have been married although they loved each other very much. So, should there not be laws against anyone marrying who can not procreate or should not society force a couple to divorce if they have not produced a child within, say, 3 years of getting married?

Please, just be truthful, you don’t like gays. That is all this issue comes down to: people trying to prevent two loving individuals from creating a life together merely because they are different. This is why it is similar to interracial marriage. And all the verbiage you waste will not change that fact.

Mark, what is “the gay community” if not a group identified by gayness? Certainly the SSM campaign and Judge Walker know that they mean a group identity. They use the notion of straight in this way, also. Have you not also done so with your repeated and insistent emphasis on gayness? Yes, yes you have.

Mark, I have described and defined responsible procreation. I have pointed to the legal expression of responsible procreation — you even noted it — when I pointed to the sexual basis for the marital presumption of paternity which is vigorously enforced in our legal system. If that is not enough for you, then, I suppose you can continue to disregard that which stands right under your nose. But at the same time you will keep stumbling into it as you try to justify your attack on the core of marriage.

You said: “I feel sexual relations are very important in a marriage.”

Whatever you feel about “sexual relations”, you have insisted that unless something is mandatory it cannot restrict consenting adults who’d marry. The sexual basis for marriage is not one-sexed nor is it sex-neutral; the marriage law reflects that, as I have previously explained at length. You reject this sexual basis.

The social institution has a sexual basis; the marriage law that recognizes this social instituton also has a sexual basis; each and every conjugal relationship entails a sexual basis because the conjugal relationship, as a type of relationship, is distinguishable by the societal significance of 1) sex integation and 2) provision for responsible procreation and 3) these combined as a coherent whole.

The sexual basis is not just what you, Mark, feel about this or that particular married couple, for instance, but it is about what society responds when it protects, privileges, and regulates this foundational social institution. Societal regard for the institution, Mark, trumps your private regard for the private aspect of this or that individual’s relationship.

And then you ran off the tracks when you referrred to the early Christian church.

Mark, be honest, if your totalitarian impulse was to be followed, as you strictly insist, then, the law would be hostile to the social institution of marriage.

You fantasized: “So, should there not be laws against anyone marrying who can not procreate or should not society force a couple to divorce if they have not produced a child within, say, 3 years of getting married?”

Sadly, you come across as very vindictive with that nonsense.

In your version of reality, the Government would own not just the institution of marriage but also each and every marital relationship under its thumb.

Marriage does not force procreation. Only SSMers imagine that such coercion would be required for the sake of responsible procreation.

And, as I have said, responsible procreation (you keep dropping the responsible part for some unstated reason) is combined (you keep dropping this part too) with sex integation to form a coherent whole (i.e. a foundational social institution). Marriage is not a bunch of odd bits and pieces. Marriage is not a list of things that Government owns or forces upon people. Marriage is actually one of the most essential buffers between the naked individual and the power of Government.

The last paragraph in your latest comment is emblematic of the identity politics of the SSM campaign and its argumentation.

Readers might reluctantly note your inadverntently flagitious self-immolation:

You said: “That is all this issue comes down to: people trying to prevent two loving individuals from creating a life together merely because they are [gay]. This is why it is similar to interracial marriage.”

Let is be truthful, Mark.

If you had an argument, or even a good solid idea, with which to compete against the argument that stands for the marriage idea, you would not need to attack motivations. You would simply make the independent case for SSM — apart from whatever you feel or think about marriage and its defenders.

Instead you have declared that there is only one idea. That to disagree with your declartion is itself an act of bigotry. That the remedy to your emphasis on gayness is to read into the marriage law a gayness criterion; and to impose SSM based on the nonexisting gayness criterion.

If you had somethng other than animus toward marriage defenders, and something other than a rejection of the marriage idea, you would focus on making the independant claim for enacting SSM.

You would say, this is SSM and here is how it is different from nonmarriage. You would say, this is the legitimate basis for a policy that accord SSM a special status. You would say, the core of SSM is such-and-such and that will be expressed in the SSM law. You would say, these are the lines drawn around that core of SSM and this is the justification for where and how those lines are drawn.

You might even say, the marriage idea is inferior to the SSM diea for this reason and that reason. You might even say, this is how SSM is foundational to civil society. You might even say, apart from motivations, the defenders of marriage are our fellow citizens and their constitutional rights, in our republican form of government, are not subject to the abuse of judicial review.

But you have not done any of that.

What you have said is gay this and gay that and nothing that could justify your defense of the SSM idea and your attack on the marriage idea.

Chairm: Your responses are a demonstration of those who have a real problem with SSM. I have already answered everything you have asked but you don’t hear, you don’t want to hear. Once again, SSM is the EXACT same thing as marriage. The ONLY difference is it involves members of the same sex. People who advocate for SSM are the true defenders of marriage, not those who want to restrict and limit it. But you work so hard to draw lines, to make it “us versus them” and to what end? To restrict marriage to a select few. And the benefit? None. No harm is done to OSM when a country allows SSM.

Sadly, you are also apparently ignorant about basic principles in this country. We have a balance of power to protect the liberties of all our citizens. This is not an example of “abuse of judicial review”, it is a perfect example of how all rights are protected.

Every time you describe what “marriage” is to you, and I question that definition, you come back with the argument that that is not what marriage is. You use nonsense phrases such as “sex integration” and “responsible procreation” which are meaningless because you haven’t defined them. When I discuss your use of “responsible procreation” as a definition of marriage, you say marriage isn’t about procreation. Then you say marriage involves “sex integration” (again, you have yet to define this term) but thats not what marraige is.

SSM IS fundamental to the basics of our civil liberties and the freedoms for which this country was founded. Denying certain members of our society the same rights as others enjoy is the antithesis of what America is all about.

Mark said: “. I have already answered everything you have asked but you don’t hear, you don’t want to hear.”

Untrue on all counts. Your remarks have been taken at face value precisely because you have not provided an argument in depth. And even at that, the face value of the content of your comments does not withstand the scrutiny, such as it is, that you believe you have put marriage under. I’ve used your own stated standards to challenge your own SSM idea.

Mark, you have been blatant in making the discussion about “Us” (i.e. the halo-wearing gaycentric advocates of SSM) and “Them” (the bigots). That is where your argument, such as it is, begins and ends. With very little in-between that respects the actual disagreement and the actual arguments made.

I’ve asked you to state the difference between marriage and nonmarriage. I’ve asked you to state the difference between SSM and nonmarriage. I’ve asked you to state what makes marriage and SSM identical. You’ve failed on all three queries to provide anything that could provide a legitimate basis for drawing the lines as you demand: 1) to differentiate SSM from nonmarriage and 2) to merger SSM with marriage.

This is a profound problem for your viewpoint. It becomes apparent that you do not realize the conceptual mess that SSM provides; the demand for the merger of SSM and marriage is actually the demand that marriage be merged with nonmarriage. Indeed, the demand is that society be forced to disregard what makes the social institution of marriage a social insitution in the first place — it coherency derived from its core meaning.

So you have been asked to provide the core meaning of SSM. That you can provide nothing that withstands your own invoked rules of SSM argumentation can mean only that the SSM idea is hollow. And given your emphasis on gayness, it becomes apparent that this hollow center is deliberately empty so as to be filled with the assertion of the primacy of gay identity politics — in our laws, culture, and traditions. No society on earth has been handicapped by such an absurdity and yet here you are acting like this is no harm to society. It is the means to an end — unjust means and unjust end.

Mark, I have explained sex integration, responsible procration, and the core meaning of the social institution of marriage. I have explained how this is embedded in our legal system, since you are so focussed on changing the marriage law. And to no avail: you have failed utterly to engage the actual disagreement.

To be clear, I did not say that marriage is not about procreation. You misrepresented me, again. And, regarding integration, ask yourself what is meant by racial integration and then try harder to imagine sex integration as analogous. To do that you might have to detatch yourself from the presumption of bigotry by which you imagine that sexual orientation is a legal criterion of integration in the laws governing eligiblity to form the conjugal relationship. So it might take some courage on your part to open your mind and heart on that score. You demand it of me and others — display it yourself here.

There is one human race and its nature is two-sexed, not one-sexed. The nature of human procreation is opposite-sexed, not sex-neutral. The nature of human community is both-sexed, not sex-exclusive. The union of husband and wife, of father and mother, of man and woman is the foundational community upon which civilization is built and sustained.

SSM is not foundational to civlization. As a practice it is marginal (in whatever form — including same-sex householding registered or not) even within the adult homosexual population. No one-sexed arrangement — gay or not — can provide sex equality since one or the other sex is excluded. The SSM idea is based on segregating people by sexual orientation; it is based on organizing society on the basis of identity politics rather than the nature of humankind, human procreation, and human community.

And so your SSM idea and demands are closely analogous with the racialist identity politics that used marriage to corrupt society. The anti-miscegenation system also disparaged responsible procreation; also disparaged integration and, indeed, relied upon selective sex segregation through the racialist identity filter; also entrenched the primacy of identity politics into the legal system and even into constitutional jurisprudence.

Marriage unites fatherhood and motherhood. It brings together the great halfs of humankind — man and woman. It provides the context for societal regard for the liberty of man, woman, and children.

Now, SSMers might romanticize passing all of this through the gaycentric filter. But what comes out the other side is not marriage. And that’s a problem for your viewpoint, Mark. A very big problem for society, too, should your viewpoint be imposed on all of society as you demand.

Mark, what is your justification for treating SSM as superior to the rest of nonmarriage? If you insist that SSM and nonmarriage are different (and readers will note we still await Mark’s justification for even that belief) then your viewpoint does exactly what you say is unjust:

You said: “Denying certain members of our society the same rights as others enjoy is the antithesis of what America is all about.”

Chairm: LOL, you are unbelievable. I answer questions, you decline to read them. I ask you questions and you say “I’ve already answered them”. You would never had won a debate in high school, that’s for sure.

So, if marriage is partially defined by procreation, you still have not justified how it can be called “marriage” for OSM who are unable to bear children.

“I have explained sex integration, responsible procration (sic), and the core meaning of the social institution of marriage. I have explained how this is embedded in our legal system”
Other than saying “its the law” and “its the way its always been” (which is not true), you have NOT defined these terms so its impossible to discuss them.

“I’ve asked you to state the difference between marriage and nonmarriage. ”
In our society there is only the legal difference: a recognition by the state. However, many people would consider themselves married even if the state won’t recognize it.

“I’ve asked you to state the difference between SSM and nonmarriage.”
As above, “nonmarriage” (this is such a ridiculous term) differs from SSM by the legal status.

“I’ve asked you to state what makes marriage and SSM identical.”
Once again, pay attention, its a commitment between two people.

Let me ask you another question (I won’t hold my breath that you will answer since you have failed so far to answer any questions): should a woman who was born a man but had a sex change be allowed to legal marry a man? Except for the procreation component, they seem to meet all your other criteria.

Mark, provision for responsible procreation is combined with sex integration to form a coherent whole, i.e. a social institution. You might like to break this whole into bits and pieces, but that woul only serve to destroy the justification for the boundary between marriage and nonmarriage.

Your question about the ability to bear children is amusing. Are you demanding that the marriage law — or government — enforce a 100% guarantee? It appears so. If so, then, that standard would destroy your pro-SSM complaint since no SSM law has ever required, much less forced government to enforce, a compulsory same-sex sexual attraction, same-sex sexual romance, same-sex sexual behavior.

This reveals, as I’ve noted earlier, that you do not really stand on your own stated standard. You apply one standard — as severe and as totalitarian as your fanasties conjure up — against the marriage idea and a soft and fuzzy non-requirement on our SSM idea.

The altenertive is that you are simply stuck on stupid since such a 100% guarantee, if applied to challenge your SSM idea, would destroy the gay-based complaint against the marriage law. It would destroy your demand for special status based on gayness. It would even remove all reasonable application of the principles of lawmaking, much less constitutional interpretation.

* * *

You said that the SSM idea and the marriage idea are identitical. I asked, and you failed to answer, what makes nonmarriage different from SSM/marriage. You still owe the discussion some justification for society discriminating between nonmarriage and SSM/marriage. If you can’t do this much, then, your “LOL” amounts to self-mockery.

* * *

The law requires the participation of a man and a woman; the law requires that those who enter marriage consent to all that marriage entails — including the vigorously enforced marital presumption of paternity; both of these have a sexual basis — a basis that is not sex-netural nor sex-exclusive but sex-integrative. A sexual basis both in terms of coital relations and in terms of uniting the sexes and providing for the common sense priority that protects the birthright of the offspring of the man-woman duo.

Your hostility toward the marriage idea is well-noted and on the record, Mark.

Mark said: “In our society there is only the legal difference: a recognition by the state.”

And the basis for that legal difference is … ? You have yet to say.

Mark, you said that what makes marriage and SSM identical. is “commitment between two people” but if you had been paying attention you might have noticed that I pointed out the obvious: that this criterion is present in the nonmarriage category.

Besides, it is present among polygamous people who consider their committed relationships to be marital but unrecognized by government. Likewise for some related people and some underaged people. Yet what is the basis for discrimianting between these types of relationship and these kinds of arrangements and marriage?

You have yet to say.

If it boilsdown to the arbitrary exercise of governmental power, as your latest remarks strongly suggest, then, you have just knocked the knees out from under the SSM campaign’s complaint that the man-woman basis of marriage law is somehow arbitrary.

Afterall, if the government says it is man-woman, then, who are you to complain. Yet you do complain about legal requirements and standards that distinguish between marriage and all the rest. You do emphasize gayness and you do demand a special status based on that emphasis — without justification thusfar. And that means you would impose an arbitrary exercise of governmental power just to entrench the primacy of the gaycentric version of identity politics — on all of society.

Mark you asked a question that is in search of an apparent exception:

“[S]hould a woman who was born a man but had a sex change be allowed to legal marry a man? Except for the procreation component, they seem to meet all your other criteria.”

The criteria I’ve discusses is for the special status of marriage and for drawing the lines of eligiblity and ineligiblity. You now would switch from the general to the particular; and in so doing you are again revealing a totalitarian impulse in which the SSMer imagines that the Government must apply a ruthless 100% guarantee. Since you do not apply such a standard to your own SSM idea, you are not sincerely proposing that such a standard be decisive in this matter. Indeed, you have no criteria on offer that would justify a licensing scheme for SSM much less a special status on par with marital status.

Anyway, regarding your search for a decisive exception:

A woman is not born a man.

Surgery to make a man appear more like a woman does not change that man’s sex.

Amending the person’s legal designation from man to woman based on such appearances, for the sake of a compassionate accomodation, is optional for society and not required of society. Wisely, our legal system treats exceptions as exceptions, apparent or not.

Society might enact legal fictions to accomodate the scenario you cited, Mark, however, such apparent exceptions do not lead marriage law around by the nose. You are still left with the basic problem, within your own viewpoint, of justifying the special status of marriage — with or without the potential for the apparent exception you cited above.

Note also that this apparent exception depends, utterly, on the societal significance of sex differentiation.

The SSM idea also depends on sex-differentiation. The all-male scenario is sex-specific and is not sex-neutral. Likewise the all-female scenario. You wouldn’t deny the claimed significance of sex differentation even within the gaycentric complaint against the marriage law, right?

Unlike the accomodation for the pre-requisite legally fictive “sex change”, in which a man is identified as a woman for social purposes, and in which at least the appearances of sex difference is acknowledged on compassionate grounds, the SSM idea demands that the all-male scenario be recognized not for the sex of the participants but for the “sexual orientation” or even the gay identity of the participants.

Your offer of an apparent exception does not overturn the man-woman basis of marriage law. But it reminds that you are still stuck on justifying special status based on the difference between man and woman. And if you think this difference is only superficial, then, you are stuck trying to justify your own offer of that potential exception.

In brief, there is a man-woman basis for marriage law that you have not overturned by pointing to a legally identified woman marrying a legally identified man.

Typo correction: “The criteria I’ve discusses are for the special status of marriage and for drawing the lines of eligiblity and ineligiblity.”

Chairm: As I have said, you would NEVER win a HS debate (let alone a grade school one). All of the arguments you make against SSM, one can also make against OSM. You are just so blinded and opinionated you can’t see how ludicrous you are in your arguments.

If, as you have said, marriage is “responsible procreation (is) combined with sex integration to form a coherent whole” and since SSM cannot result in any kind of procreation, then society has an obligation to assure procreation to allow marriage. This is not a totalitarian notion but simply, abiding by the definition YOU put forward. If it cannot be “100% guarantee(d)”, then even YOU admit there are holes in your definition.

I cannot respond to your question regarding “sex-differentiation” because, again, it is a made up word.

“A woman is not born a man” But there are a various genetic and hormonal issues that result in a person being raised as the incorrect gender. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (an XX individual – female who resembles a boy), 5-alpha-reductase deficiency and Androgen insensitivity syndrome (XY individual – male who resembles a girl) – are some examples. I would assume, by your comment, that you feel the chromosome makes the man (or woman). So, again, how do you deal with a XY individual who has been raised all their life as a female wanting to marry another XY individual who has been raised all their life as a male? You may say this is muddling the issue but, as I believe any two people who wish to make a commitment to each other should be allowed to do so, determining sex is not an issue. You, on the other hand, who have based your definition on one man-one woman need to explain how to deal with these variations.

Mark, provide the best two examples to illustrate your claim that , “all of the arguments you make against SSM, one can also make against OSM.”

Accusing some one of having and expressing opinions in a contest over ideas is, well, not the curse you might imagine it to be. Heh.

* * *

Mark said: “since SSM cannot result in any kind of procreation, then society has an obligation to assure procreation to allow marriage. ”

Huh?

Just because no one-sexed arrangement can procreate, you imagine that society is obliged to force people to engage in premarital coital sexual relations and premarital childbearing. That is a totalitrian view, Mark, of government and of society.

It is your view, not mine.

Regarding sex differentiation, it is not my word, made-up by me, nor is it beyond your demonstrated understanding of sex. In your own comment you refered to a sex change. So there is the essential notion of sex difference, at the very least, right there in your own search for an apparent exception.

Similarily, you keep going on about “same-sex couples” so you are not unfamiliar with the difference between the all-male scenario that lacks the female sex and the all-female scenario that includes only the female sex. You also have gone on about gayness so you are aware of sex difference even when it comes to identity and sexual attraction, as per the SSM campaign’s central theme.

Grade school? High school? I dunno. Pre-kindergarden kids kinda get that there are two sexes and that there are sex differences.

Mark, the way to deal with exceptions is to treat them as exceptions rather than as the general rule.

Accomodations might be made but the sort of accomodation you are trying to transform into a gaping hole in the core of marriage is, well, all about the eligiblity of a lawfully identified man to marry a lawfully identified woman.

You listed genetic abnormalities and illnesses and even suggested that someone might be born a man by mistake, or somesuch, and you pointed at a possible remedy for assigning a sex to such a troubled person.

If you are demanding that such an accomodation be abandoned, foreclosed, withdrawn, or whatever, in exchange for marriage to remain marriage, well, you are acting like a hostage taker. And, if you are demanding that such an accomodation be transformed into a club with which to destroy marriage, as marriage, well, again, that’s thuggery not rational discourse on your part.

Maybe you can do a bit better at explaining how the man-woman criterion of marriage law is overturned by that.

Normally, I would doubt that an SSMer would propose that a lesbian twosome become eligible by sex reassignment surgery, but perhaps that is where your thinking carries you.

Also, readers can note that Mark has confirmed his reliance on the rule of 100% guarantee when it comes to the law of SSM (as well as the law of marriage). This absolutism is on the record and confirmed. His SSM idea is thus vulnerable to the same sort of absurd deconstruction and Mark will just have to live by that, his stated standard.

Chairm: Please do not take my words out of context (although I realize this is an attempt by you to further muddle and confuse the issue). My comments regarding procreation come directly from YOUR definition of marriage in which you say it is an essential part of defining marriage. It either is, or it isn’t. You cannot have it both ways. If it is essential to marriage, then, as you propose, society has an obligation to assure couples procreate. If this is not the case, then your definition of marriage is a falsehood.

You use absolutes such as “its the law” to support your definition of marriage and then you admit its not absolute. So, if its not absolute, how is SSM different from all the other exceptions you make? The only difference i can see is your apparent dislike of gay individuals.

As far as the genetic disorders I mentioned, let me put it more simply. What makes a man a man and a woman a woman? Again, if that (man-woman coupling) is a PRIMARY portion of your definition of marriage, then there should be a clear definition of how to define the sexes. I will tell you my thoughts: I believe a man is an XY chromosomal individual and a woman an XX. How do you define them? Yes, grade schoolers can tell the difference but if you ask them, many would say a woman wears a dress and man pants. Is that your basis as well?

I will agree with you that the term “sex differentiation” may not have been made up, by you. But, prior to using a term or phrase, you should have at least a basic understanding of what the word means. I have given up on the idea you have any knowledge of the definition of terms such as “sex differentiation” or “responsible procreation” as you fail over and over to give the BASIC definition of the terms. Keep using them though, as you wish. Its a great way of deflecting questions regarding the holes in your definition of marriage, because someone discussing the issue with you has no understanding of the words you use. Its an easy out.

It is fascinating to read your responses. As I move more away from the stand SSM arguments, you get angrier and more fractionated. You continue to comment on, but not answer questions.

I have no reliance on 100% guarantee regarding marriage (another lie of yours, oops, misunderstanding, perhaps). However, it is part of this discussion: if you wish to deny basic Constitutional rights to a segment of the USA citizenry, your definition MUST be exact and you must be able to show POSITIVE proof that retaining this restriction is beneficial to society. So far, you have failed miserably on both accounts.

Mark said: “If it is essential to marriage, then, as you propose, society has an obligation to assure couples procreate.”

If this is your thinking, then, okay, go ahead and tell us what the Government will enforce with the 100% guarantee rule on all who’d show-up to SSM?

Not same-sex sexual behavior, nor same-sex sexual romance, nor same-sex sexual attraction. Nor even membership in the gay identity group.

You have also conceded that this stuff is not essential to your key term, same-sex couple. And, as I pointed out, the number two — as ‘couple’ — is not intrinsic to the lack of the other sex. Your key term by your own words is neither gay nor sexual nor rooted in the marriage idea.

Pay attention: commitment is not exclusive to the gay subset of the large and diverse category of types of relationships and types of arrangements that are in the nonmarriage category.

Also note: there are polygamous, polyandrous, underaged, related types of relationships that feature commitment but remain ineligible to marry.

So commitment does not do the magic tricks you imagined.

Mark, you demanded legal requirements. I pointed those out to you. You object that this is absolutist. It is a marvel how self-destructive your comments have become.

Mark, you cite genetic disorders even as you missed the part about how society might make a compassionate accomodation for such troubled people. In your argument you would use them as hostages to your political demands.

Anyway, a lawfully designated woman who marries a man does not transgress the man-woman basis of marriage law.

Do you deny that the nature of humankind is two-sexed? Do you deny that the nature of human procreation is opposite-sexed? Do you deny that the nature of human community is both-sexed?

If, for the sake of your SSM cause, you’d answer yes, you deny all of this, then, okay. Put it on the record. Then reconcile that with your emphasis on gayness.

Mark, you accused me of taking your words out of context even as you misrepresent that which you claimed to be citing back from my comments.

At one point you quoted me regarding “provison for responsible procreation” (readers will acknowledge the sexual basis for the legal marital presumption even you will not) but then you chose to reduce it to “procreation”.

And then you injected Government force into procreation and that transforms what I said into your totalitarian fantasy.

Angrier and fractionated? Heh.

I’ve been smiling and gladly responding to the comments of someone I had thought was engaged in a sincere effort to learn more about the pro-marriage side of things. Yet all this time that I was calmly and coolly considering your remarks and engaging you on your own stated standard, you have imagined yourself in an overly-heated encounter with the temperature rising.

I wonder what might account for the discrepancy.

Mark said: he does not rely “on 100% guarantee regarding marriage”.

But he did invoke that guarantee several times in our exchanges. Indeed he insists that it is decisive.

On the other hand, he now has attempted to distance himself from the application of that standard against his own SSM idea. Thos double-standard is intrinsic to his argumentation, as Mark has just admitted.

* * *

Also:

Mark has set forth his rules about what is an is not constitutional when it comes to eligiblity to enter marriage in our legal system:

“if you wish to deny basic Constitutional rights to a segment of the USA citizenry, your definition MUST be exact and you must be able to show POSITIVE proof that retaining this restriction is beneficial to society.”

Mark has not done this for his SSM idea. He imagines it to be immune to the sort of scrutiny that he claims is of the utmost importance.

Readers will remember the example of people born related”

Mark justified ineligiblity based on procreation even as he claimed that procreation is not a legitimate basis for lawmaking because Government does not force people to procreate.

Using his own thinking, as per his comments, to sustain the line on relatedness, Government must either force people to procreate or remove the line.

Yet Mark offered the “PROOF” of heightened risk of harm to children (i.e. genetic defects) even though there is no 100% guarantee of such harm in each and every instance.

Indeed, there are nonrelated people who carry a heightened risk but who are still 1) eligible to marry. So, according to Mark’s rule, these people must be made ineligible or related people must be made eligible.

But to sustain Mark’s rule, Government would be empowered to put such people on probationary marital status in case they do procreate. And the Government would unilaterally revoke their marital staus only if there is “PROOF” of a child harmed by genetic defects.

Indeed, all marriages would be probationary and subject to Government oversight for such defects. That means all inherited health risks.

On the other hand, see Mark’s insistence that the Government would have to force procreation even though his thinking would require Government to micro-manage procreation in each and every marriage — all made probationary.

But that contradiction is compounded since no one-sexed arrangement can procreate without going outside of the relationship. And use of ARTs/IVF has heightened risk for harming the created children.

Mark’s fantasy is anti-marriage, anti-freedom, and certainly unconstitutional.

Whew, Mark’s newlt stated standard betrays him.

Correction:

On the other hand, see Mark’s insistence that the Government would have to force procreation but does not even though his thinking would require Government to micro-manage procreation in each and every marriage — all made probationary.

Chairm: You CAN’T be this clueless! The ideas around procreation are YOUR arguments. As I have said, I feel procreation (“responsible” or otherwise) is not essential to idea of marriage. You seem to make it one of your central provisions for marriage and yet, don’t expect it to be checked or enforced. Interesting.

I did not miss the part about a compassionate society making an exception. I did notice, however, that once again you did not (unable? refused?) to answer a direct question: what makes a man a man and a woman a woman?

“Also note: there are polygamous, polyandrous, underaged, related types of relationships that feature commitment but remain ineligible to marry.” You forgot “bestiality” in this list that most people who oppose SSM use. Can you not follow a simple train of thought? I have said over and over, it is two consenting adults (not 20, not children) who commit themselves to each other. But, you can’t stand logic so you, again, muddle the waters.

“Your key term by your own words is neither gay nor sexual nor rooted in the marriage idea.” There’s that “gay” word again. You JUST can’t let you bias stay hidden.

I don’t imagine myself in an overheated encounter. I see a discussion where, every time I counter you narrow definitions, you make up words and change the question. When I ask you to define where you stand, you write several paragraphs that, with the exception of “responsible procreation” (which may or may not be important, and if it is, not important enough to make it happen) there is no difference between OSM and SSM.

Meanwhile, in the realworld, Government does not own the social institution, despite Mark’s affirmation that he believes otherwise; and Government does not own each union of husband and wife, again contrary to Mark’s shrug; and Government does not micromanage procreation within marriage.

Society, through governing authorities, vigorously enforces the marital presumption of paternity which is part and parcel of what people are required to give their consent, joining the commitment of each other and of society, to the principle that children have a birthright to know and be raised by the man and woman who together created their offspring.

This is the default position to which people consent when they enter the social institution; and the sexual basis for this is expressed in the laws regarding sexual consummation, grounds for annulment, grounds for adultery, and so forth.

And, to bring this back to relatedness, that same sexual basis applies to the marriage law regarding the ineligiblity of incestuous opposite-sexed twosomes.

All of that has managed to become embedded in civilizaton’s foundational social institution despite the lack of Government breathing down the necks of married couples, the lack of Government enforcers peering into marital bedrooms, and Government b’crats revoking marital status unilaterally.

The marriage idea is non-coercive but the SSMers would fantasize that the only way such an idea could pass constitutional muster is for Government to act unconstitutionally otherwise. How very convenient that the same standards of argumentation are somehow deemed inapplicable to the SSM idea.

But the SSM idea is indistinguishable from the rest of nonmarriage. Hence the rules that apply to the deconstruction of marriage are designed not for the SSM idea but for attacking the core meaning, and the special place, of the social institution of marriage.

Chairm: Never once have I said Government owns marriage but then, your “stories” are just throwing stawmen into the mix.

“Society, through governing authorities, vigorously enforces the marital presumption of paternity which is part and parcel of what people are required to give their consent, joining the commitment of each other and of society, to the principle that children have a birthright to know and be raised by the man and woman who together created their offspring. ”
Uh, wow. I would love to ask most of the people I know who are married and ask them if the presumed to have children.

Face it, Chairm, for you it comes down to having kids. PERIOD. Why? Because SSM does not usually produce children. But then many other OSM don’t either. But that’s OK, because those people aren’t gay. You dislike gay people, there is no other explanation.

But, since you are unable to provide BASIC definitions to support your definition of marriage (other than “its always been this way” – which is not true with) you accuse those who support SSM as somehow destroying marriage. Course, you can’t come up with any reasons to support that “theory” either.

It truly is sad. That you and people like you work SO hard to deny fellow citizens there equal God given rights in this country. First, it was interracial. Now its SSM. No difference other than 5 decades. Pitiful.

Mark, I will give you the same clue that has been under your nose throughout this discussion.

You said about my comments: “You seem to make it [provision for responsible procreation] one of your central provisions for marriage and yet, don’t expect it to be checked or enforced.”

It is expressed most prominently in the marital presumption of paternity which is vigorously enforced. It even has an overflow effect outside of marriage to statues on unwed procreation. It is expressed, also, through various limitations on eligiblity to marry.

But it is not a standalone. It is combined with sex integration. Clearly, society has an interest in the unity of fatherhood and motherhood, even if government is not empowered to exact a 100% guarantee.

Government is not all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful. Contary to your odd misrepresentation of the pro-marriage argument against which you have offered zealous (almost religous-like in its fervor) rhetorical protestations.

The husband and wife are both presumed the parents of their offspring born to the wife during their marriage. The sexual basis for this is intrinsic to the legal presumption and to the cultural presumption of marital paternity. This is neither a requirement nor a prediction of procreation.

You need not rush to misrepresent that with which you’d voice disagreement. Represent the marital presumption accurately and then disagree with it, if you must.

* * *

Readers will note that in a parrallel discussion in another comment section on this blogsite, Mark has conceded that he can offer no reason that would suffice to justly limit marriage, at all, even when it comes to sexually incestuous marriages.

He can come up with no good reason to accord special status (marital status is a special status in our legal system) based on his SSM idea. He cannot justify discriminating between nonmarriage and marriage, much less between nonmarriage and SSM. He decries his own emphasis on gay this and gay that. So he cannot, actually, justify the SSM campaign’s central complaint against the defense of the foundational social institution of marriage.

His latest comment amounts to yet another Big Shrug from yet another SSM supporter.

Typpo correktion: “It even has an overflow effect outside of marriage to statutes on unwed procreation.”

Chairm: “It is expressed most prominently in the marital presumption of paternity which is vigorously enforced”
Really? In what ways?

LOL, and its really fascinating how you completely dismiss questions about your definition. Spouting out meaningless terms such as “sexual integration” and “responsible procreation”.

But you are right – I see no reason to limit marriage. And you, have provided NO legitimate reason for limiting marriage either.

But, let me tell you what you have said in common, understandable terms:
1. Marriage is one man and one woman
2. marriage has always been this way, its never been defined as anything else
3. Procreation is central to the definition of marriage (although, society “presumes” paternity based on the marriage state). Responsible procreation, I guess, is procreation that occurs within marriage. A very circular argument.
4. Anybody who disagrees with these definitions are out to DESTROY marriage.
5. While there are THOUSANDS of federal and state laws referring to marriage, we can deny that basic institution to a select group of people.

In a nut shell: gay people stay away.

“He cannot justify discriminating between nonmarriage and marriage, much less between nonmarriage and SSM. ”
Sigh, in numerous posts here I have defined this over and over but you are so closed minded, you cannot or refuse to see. Please, stop the lies.

Mark, that list of misrepresentations does not accurately sum-up my comments, but it does illustrate the odd rules you’ve invoked in your argumentation; these end-up defeating your own SSM idea and your own complaint against the marriage law.

At this late stage of this particular discussion, your bizarre summation provides a moment, as good as any, to invite you to have the last word here.

Chairm: As I have said all along, I have nothing against marriage. And, although you call them “misrepresentations” they are a clear description of your thoughts. Your beliefs are your own and I no doubt believe you feel very strongly about them. But they are wrong. While you hold them in your heart, I can respect them. However, when you project them out, to prohibit fellow US citizens from enjoying all their God given rights, I must intervene. I pray, some day, that you will understand. And open your heart.