Cliffs

I wish I could visit all of them before my death but didn’t get a chance to see any.

Cliffs of Moher, Ireland

Beachy Head, England

Preikestolen, Norway

Half Dome, Yosemite

Ronda, Spain

Étretat Cliffs, France

Al Hajjara, Yemen

Positano, Italy

Santorini, Greece

Classical Music Pieces

1) Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro.
2) Mozart: The Abduction from the Seraglio.
3) Mozart: The Magic Flute.
4) Mozart: Don Giovanni.
5) Beethoven: Fidelio.
6) Rossini: William Tell.
7) Rossini: La Gazza Ladra.
8) Rossini: The Barber of Seville.
10) Rossini: L’italiana in Algeri.
14) Offenbach: Orpheus in the Underworld.
15) Bizet: Carmen.

Russian composer Tchaikovsky. Some of the works included are:

1) Piano Concerto No.1, Op.23, 1st Mvmt
3) The Nutcracker, Op. 71 March
5) The Nutcracker, Op. 71 Trepak
6) The Nutcracker, Op. 71 Waltz of the Flowers
9) The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66 Waltz
10) The Sleeping Beauty, Finale
12) Swan Lake, Scene: Lake in Moonlight
13) Swan Lake, Op. 20 Waltz

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Brandenburg concerto No. 5 for violin, transverse flute, harpsichord, ripieno violins, viola, cello and violone in D major BWV1050

Ludwig van Beethoven: Für Elise

Chopin Nocturne in D-flat Op.27 No.2 — The Flight of the Bumble Bee

Vivaldi – Trio Sonata in D Minor “La Folia” RV63 or Op. 1 No. 12 RV63

Jascha Heifetz plays Paganini Caprice No. 24 (Auer Edition with Schumann accompaniment).

Karl Orff’s Carmina Burana: O Fortuna.
Carmina Burana is a scenic cantata composed by Carl Orff between 1935 and 1936. It is based on 24 of the poems found in the medieval collection Carmina Burana. Its full Latin title is Carmina Burana: Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choris cantandae comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis (“Songs of Beuern: Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magic images.”) Carmina Burana is part of Trionfi, the musical triptych that also includes the cantata Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite. The best-known movement is “O Fortuna” that opens and closes the piece.

Ravel – Bolero – Daniel Barenboim

Pablo de Sarasate, Zigeunerweisen Op. 20, “Gypsy Airs”

Rachmaninov – piano concerto No.2

Brahms – Intermezzo Op.116-4

Alfred Eric Leslie Satie – Gymnopédie No.1

Homosexuality

http://www.apa.org/topics/sorientation.html
Answers to Your Questions
For a Better Understanding of Sexual Orientation & Homosexuality

Sexual orientation refers to an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions to men, women, or both sexes. Sexual orientation also refers to a person’s sense of identity based on those attractions, related behaviors, and membership in a community of others who share those attractions. Research over several decades has demonstrated that sexual orientation ranges along a continuum, from exclusive attraction to the other sex to exclusive attraction to the same sex. However, sexual orientation is usually discussed in terms of three categories: heterosexual (having emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to members of the other sex), gay/lesbian (having emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to members of one’s own sex), and bisexual (having emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to both men and women). This range of behaviors and attractions has been described in various cultures and nations throughout the world. Many cultures use identity labels to describe people who express these attractions. In the United States the most frequent labels are lesbians (women attracted to women), gay men (men attracted to men), and bisexual people (men or women attracted to both sexes). However, some people may use different labels or none at all.

Sexual orientation is distinct from other components of sex and gender, including biological sex (the anatomical, physiological, and genetic characteristics associated with being male or female), gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female),* and social gender role (the cultural norms that define feminine and masculine behavior).

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/sexualorientation.html
Sexual Orientation

Dr. C. George Boeree

First, there may be genetic foundations for homosexuality. J. Michael Bailey and Richard C. Pillard, for example, discovered that 52% of the identical twins of male homosexuals were also homosexual, compared to only 22% of non-identical twins. Likewise, they found that if one identical twin is lesbian, in almost 50% of the cases studied, the other twin is lesbian as well, in comparison to 16% of the non-identical twins.

People always ask: If homosexuality is genetic, how does it get passed on to future generations? Homosexuals do have children, of course, but at a considerably lower rate than do heterosexuals. So why hasn’t it “evolved out” of us? There are a number of possibilities, but the most obvious one is that the genes responsible for sexual orientation are similar to those simpler genes that account for sickle-cell anemia: If you have a sickle-cell gene from mom and a sickle-cell gene from dad, then you will get sickle-cell anemia, a deadly disease. But the sickle-cell gene remains a part of the population because, if you only have one of them you will be more resistant to malaria!

In the same way, if you inherit a “full dose” of genes for homosexuality, you may be less likely to reproduce. But a “half dose” may actually make you more likely to survive and reproduce. Women with some characteristics more associated with men (men’s assertiveness, perhaps?) may do better than their more feminine sisters. Likewise, men with some characteristics of women (perhaps more affection for their children?) may do better than their macho brothers.

Even with a genetic component to homosexuality, we need to understand that genes are only responsible for the making of proteins, and we still need to explain how a protein can influence our sexual behaviors. One fruitful path is, naturally, the “sex hormones,” especially testosterone and estrogen.

Click to access rinehartcartoon.pdf

Anti-gay Commissioner in Oklohoma

“You said that gays were not out to change religions – but you are.”

Saying ain’t so and who is “you”? I am not gay and very comfortable with my sexuality. Drop the holier-than-thou attitude and get off your high horse; assumption is mother of all f*ck ups. I might disagree with you on religion but I do know that it’s your right, as a citizen of this country, to follow your path and I do mine. Seeking equal rights for a disfranchised group of people does not mean that you have to change your scripture.

“The entire fabric of our society is based on Christianity and its beliefs.”

Put that Bible down son and stop blowing too hard onto your toot. You mean the choice we have between McDonald’s and Burgerking? Or Pepsi and Coke? Or… Ya, it’s not based on religion but rather free market and consumerism. This is not your tight-a$$ monthly gathering of church to spew any pabulum of garabge and expect it to stick.

“If you don’t believe that, study Islam. Their fabric is based on their beliefs and they are not similar.”

What? The hell are you babbling about? Try to surmise a coherent idea for once. Who said anything about Islam? What are you smoking, can I have a puff?

“Many of yur own beliefs are also set by Christianity. Sorry, but it is a fact!”

Again, saying ain’t so! There is an enormous difference between morality and faith, “beliefs” and “values.” Your myopic world view brands you a neophyte who is undeserved of any rational response.

“Even many of our laws are based on it such as beastialty.”

Ancient laws vis-a-vis beastiality were devised because back then the domestic animals were an integral part of everyday life. It has no place in the contemporary civilized world of today. Your lack of rudimentary understanding of world in the context of history is disturbing.

“You can’t say that you want it totally out of your life if you plan to live in the U.S. And if you did have it out of your life, you probably wouldn’t like it, since much of our training on honesty, etc. is based on it too.”

I never asserted that religion would be entirely out of citizen’s everyday life. I simply do not wish to have religion, in particular a singular one, to dictate how people should or shouldn’t run their lives, period. Ever heard of religious hucksterism? Evangelical money laundry feeding off of gullible people who seek celecsial “salvation?”

“What you want to do is pick what you want – and everyone else must live as YOU pick, not how they want to do it.”

No pumpkin, I simply seek to eliminate the yoke of one-shoe-fits-all scheme. You can believe whatever you want to as long as you respect others’, which you don’t. Yet you waltz in here, skiing on everyone’s pi$$ while expecting to be obeyed without criticism. What you do is your business, what someone else does is his/hers. It is YOU who project your ideology onto others, not the other way around.

“Our country is based on allowing others freedom as long as we are allowed freedom too. You want to change our freedoms by insistng we only follow what you want.”

Exactly, your premise is to limit the freedom to your own set of belief system while whining like a disgruntled child when you’re accosted to such oppressive views. Allowing a black child to have a same equal opportunity does not equate with taking away the same set of rights from a white child. Same goes with gay marriage — you and I can still follow our line of inalienable preference. This does not take away the fact that such right should not be granted to people with different set of sexual orientation. Your logic is faulty and it shows.

“May I make a suggestion? Since the U.S. is not going to change to accomodate you, check around the world to find a place where it either will or already has changed. But that is the problem, isn’t it? There isn’t such a place.”

A monkey on 45caliber’s shoulder shrieks… Your juvenile hissy proves to be nothing more than a cow mooing while taking a dump the size of the dinner plate. There are two states which permit gay marriage. Given that, perhaps, I could equally state that the US does not accommodate your need so you might consider a well-deserved country of Saudi Arabia for your lifelong destination. Va-salamo Alaikom va rahmatollahe va barakato.

“I have friends who are gay – and did have a relative (passed away now). I got along well with them. But neither we nor they go around insisting that we have to change what we do. You are insisting that.”

You buffoon. Again, what you do is your business and your right still persists. You want to believe blacks should be segregated or gays should not be allowed to marry, that’s entirely your prerogative. We are talking about constitutional and equal clause. Gay marriage does not alter your life style. Your bruised ego should not be a reason to strip a group of people from the same aspiration and right to pursue happiness. Moreover, no one is speaking about coercing any religious institution to grant such rite to same sex partners. If a church or a mosque does not perform such ceremony, that decision must be respected. No one is asking you to change the cardinal laws just don’t mix it with government’s ability to govern its people.

“You have civil unions that give you the same legal rights that I have. But that isn’t good enough. You want the same WORDS as we use, not because they will make things better on your end but because they will anger us and attack our religious beliefs.”

No they are not. In addition, you can call it something else, “gay marriage” for all I care as long as it grants the couples the exact same rights as the rest of the population — civil union does not produce an equivalent of “marriage” license, does it? Call the new licenses gayrriage but with the “equal” and “comprehensive” statute. You can keep the precious name to yourself.

“The stated end result of the gay movement is to change the religions of others to eliminate all references to gay sex being a sin.”

No, that would be an infringement of First Amendment and no one is seeking that. Your lame brain strawman was noted.

“That will not put you into heaven. We don’t control that; God does.”

You can believe in your space daddy all you want. We are talking about reality not your desert religion huff and puff even though I respect your misguided world view as a right that you or anyone else should have without constitutional interference. This simply means that I cannot take away the right for heterosexual couples not to be married and same for homosexuals. In addition, a homosexual’s right to marry should not infringe the right of a heterosexual to enjoy the same prerogative and vice versa.

The point is, that certain rights given to married spouses are not offered to other couples. In the United States, being married effects Social Security benefits, veterans’ benefits, health insurance, Medicaid, hospital visitation rights, estate taxes, retirement savings, pensions, family leave, and immigration laws.

Marriage has become a term used to describe committed couples under law, and under law married couples are granted rights not given to other couples. If two people of the same sex fall in love here in Canada, and one is not a Canadian citizen, they can become a citizen when they get married. That is just one example of how this is a matter of civil rights. Its about full equality before the law

Re-occurring issues like homosexuality, birth defects, etc.. These are just part of the equation as our genes are imperfect and the copying process is flawed, so you expect what we see in humans, regards to homosexuality.
That’s an even more frightening view of homosexuality. So homosexuals are just genetic mistakes or birth defects? Yikes…

I’ve read some convincing arguments by EO Wilson and others that homosexuality is actually where alot of humanity’s altruism stems from, as they traditionally have taken care of their kins’ children without having any of their own.

How about the religious folk come up with a new word for religiously sanctioned unions and the rest of us use “marriage”? Maybe you can call it “A Threesome with God”, since apparently he is so involved in the whole thing that merely to contemplate using the same word for the unholy union of two same-sex people makes baby Jesus cry.

Or, the religious could just pipe down and stop trying to tell people what words they can and can’t use to refer to their relationships. Your right to religious freedom doesn’t include forcing everyone else to adjust to your vocabulary.

Do you think the ancients used the word “marriage” – obviously not, since it’s English, not Hebrew or Greek or freakin’ Sanskrit. So when you say we can’t use the word “marriage”, you’re not upholding a tradition lost in antiquity, you’re trying to control language for the purpose of setting up two levels of union: the religiously sanctioned kind which you prefer; and the civil kind that you see as lesser. Well, too bad – the 21st century is here and everyone gets to play in the same sandbox now.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/172653

“Marriage” in America refers to two separate things, a religious institution and a civil one, though it is most often enacted as a messy conflation of the two. As a civil institution, marriage offers practical benefits to both partners: contractual rights having to do with taxes; insurance; the care and custody of children; visitation rights; and inheritance. As a religious institution, marriage offers something else: a commitment of both partners before God to love, honor and cherish each other—in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer—in accordance with God’s will. In a religious marriage, two people promise to take care of each other, profoundly, the way they believe God cares for them. Biblical literalists will disagree, but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history. In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should.

If the bible doesn’t give abundant examples of traditional marriage, then what are the gay-marriage opponents really exercised about? Well, homosexuality, of course—specifically sex between men. Sex between women has never, even in biblical times, raised as much ire. In its entry on “Homosexual Practices,” the Anchor Bible Dictionary notes that nowhere in the Bible do its authors refer to sex between women, “possibly because it did not result in true physical ‘union’ (by male entry).” The Bible does condemn gay male sex in a handful of passages. Twice Leviticus refers to sex between men as “an abomination” (King James version), but these are throwaway lines in a peculiar text given over to codes for living in the ancient Jewish world, a text that devotes verse after verse to treatments for leprosy, cleanliness rituals for menstruating women and the correct way to sacrifice a goat—or a lamb or a turtle dove. Most of us no longer heed Leviticus on haircuts or blood sacrifices; our modern understanding of the world has surpassed its prescriptions. Why would we regard its condemnation of homosexuality with more seriousness than we regard its advice, which is far lengthier, on the best price to pay for a slave?

Paul was tough on homosexuality, though recently progressive scholars have argued that his condemnation of men who “were inflamed with lust for one another” (which he calls “a perversion”) is really a critique of the worst kind of wickedness: self-delusion, violence, promiscuity and debauchery. In his book “The Arrogance of Nations,” the scholar Neil Elliott argues that Paul is referring in this famous passage to the depravity of the Roman emperors, the craven habits of Nero and Caligula, a reference his audience would have grasped instantly. “Paul is not talking about what we call homosexuality at all,” Elliott says. “He’s talking about a certain group of people who have done everything in this list. We’re not dealing with anything like gay love or gay marriage. We’re talking about really, really violent people who meet their end and are judged by God.” In any case, one might add, Paul argued more strenuously against divorce—and at least half of the Christians in America disregard that teaching.

http://www.buzzflash.com/theangryliberal/04/02/tal04002.html

Marriage isn’t about procreation. Hey, I’ve been to a few weddings in my time, including my own. Never have I heard a line in a marriage vow that includes a requirement that the couple have children. The vows typically consist of stuff about love, honor, cherish, in sickness and in health, well, you know the rest. While many expect a marriage to produce offspring, the legitimacy of an American marriage is not measured by the number of children produced by the couple participating in it. Therefore, anybody who argues that marriage should be limited to heterosexuals because homosexual couples can’t reproduce is wrong vis-?-vis marriage and reproduction. This argument would necessitate the denial of marriage licenses to infertile couples, and I’m guessing that movement isn’t gathering much steam.

Gay marriage would not “threaten the sanctity of the institution,” whatever the hell that means. That’s right. Since marriage is about taking and honoring vows, the only folks who threaten the sanctity of the institution of marriage are those who break their vows. If Americans wish to protect the sanctity of marriage, they could very well start by denying marriage licenses to Republicans. Dubya’s own brother, Neil, recently completed a messy divorce from his wife, Sharon. Adultery played a factor. Then there are Republican icons Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich, with one and two marriages ended via affairs, respectively. In short, until the pro-marriage folks do something about their own, who have been wiping their backsides with their marriage vows, they have absolutely no business talking about anybody else’s marriage threatening whatever sanctity that the institution of marriage may still possess. Any couple, straight or gay, that can make and honor marriage vows is upholding the sanctity of marriage. Period.

http://secularright.org/wordpress/?p=1940
(3) There really is a slippery slope here. Once marriage has been redefined to include homosexual pairings, what grounds will there be to oppose futher redefinition — to encompass people who want to marry their ponies, their sisters, or their soccer team? Are all private contractual relations for cohabitation to be rendered equal, or are some to be privileged over others, as has been customary in all times and places? If the latter, what is wrong with heterosexual pairing as the privileged status, sanctified as it is by custom and popular feeling?

(4) If you have a cognitively-challenged underclass, as every large nation has, you need some anchoring institutions for them to aspire to; and those institutions should have some continuity and stability. Heterosexual marriage is a key such institution. In a society in which nobody had an IQ below 120, homosexual marriage might be plausible. In the actual societies we have, other considerations kick in.

(5) Human nature exists, and has fixed characteristics. We are not infinitely malleable. Human society and human institutions need to ”fit” human nature, or at least not go too brazenly against the grain of it. Homophobia seems to be a rooted condition in us. It has been present always and everywhere, if only minimally (and unfairly — there has always been a double standard here) in disdain for “the man who plays the part of a woman.” There has never, anywhere, at any level of civilization, been a society that approved egalitarian (i.e. same age, same status) homosexual bonding. This tells us something about human nature — something it might be wisest (and would certainly be conservative-est) to leave alone.

(6) There is a thinness in the arguments for gay marriage that leaves one thinking the proponents are not so much for something as against something. How many times have you heard that gay marriage is necessary so that gay people will not be hindered in visiting a hospitalized partner? But if hospitals have such rules — a thing I find hard to believe in this PC-whipped age — the rules can be changed, by legislation if necessary. What need to overturn a millennial institution for such trivial ends?

No thoughtful, humane person wishes any harm to homosexuals; and if harm is done, it can and should be punished under long-standing laws. Let people live and love as they want. Human nature is what it is, though, and no-one of a conservative outlook can take lightly an attempt to carry out a radical overhaul of a key human institution, in a direction pointed directly at widespread (though I think normally mild) human emotions of disdain and disgust.

http://www.kgw.com/news-local/stories/kgw_042309_news_ohsu_gay_couple.10244ed9a.html

#6 “But if hospitals have such rules — a thing I find hard to believe in this PC-whipped age.” Try again. Gay man forced out of dying partner’s room at Oregon Health and Science University hospital” This is from a week ago. A woman in Florida, carrying documents, was kept out of the room while her partner of 18 years died. While their children stood by, no less. Why do people continually bury their heads in the sands about these things? “Oh, I can’t believe that people are so cruel!” It happens. We know it happens. We have documentation that it does. You know what stops it? The universally-understood bond of marriage.
The other major flaw with your agument is you never explain why extending marriage rights to gay couples will “mess” (with), “redefine” “overturn” or “overhaul” marriage. You simply assume your argument throughout. When marriage changed from a property arrangement between a father a prospective husband, when women were changed from essentiialy chattel to equal partners, when marriage was changed from multiple wives to one – all of these did far more to change marriage then changing the gender of the two people involved in today’s civil marriage laws.
Last – “people who want to marry their ponies, their sisters, or their soccer team?” I thought equating homosexuality with bestiality and incest was limited to the religiously motivated. Disgusting. As for polygamy – marriage used to be that way in many cultures. Perhaps you had better ask historians why we changed away from it rather than ask the gays why they should have to preemptively defend against something for which they’re not asking.

More generally, it seems to me that secular arguments against gay marriage have to engage in a great deal of special pleading. If we’re granting that people have a presumptive right to gay marriage, then the burden is on the anti-s to not merely offer ideas that might constitute good reasons to oppose gay marriage, but to offer actual reasons to oppose gay marriage.

That’s the problem with anti-Minoritarianism. No one thinks that anti-miscegenation laws were justifiable on those grounds. No one thinks that sodomy laws are justifiable on those grounds. Why gay marriage?

The same is true for (2) – why is gay marriage an intolerable affront to tradition whereas inter-racial marriage was not? Whereas abolition was not? Whereas secularism was not? Doesn’t the same argument tell us that we should work to encourage religious feeling in society?

(3) is self-defeating – you acknowledge that we’re just drawing an arbitrary line between heterosexual and homosexual marriage. You say “what is wrong with heterosexual pairing as the privileged status”. Well, what is wrong with consensual adult pairing as the privileged status? You’re offering a reason not to care about gay marriage, not a reason to oppose it. A lot of secular conservative opposition to gay marriage seems to me to be like this – the idea is that whether or not we have gay marriage just shouldn’t be a big deal, and so we might as well oppose it.

(4) begs the question – sure, if heterosexual marriage were a key institution required in order to keep the cognitive underclass in line, opposition to gay marriage would be justified. But I’ve never seen a good, empirical argument that this is the case – I’ve only seen the same kind of reasoning that we all recognize as having been horribly mistaken in the case of inter-racial marriage.

(5) is similar to some of the previous – how do we know that gay marriage is such a threat, and why are you right when people who reasoned in the same way were deeply mistaken about so many other things?

The big problem with all of these is that it was exactly the same kind of thinking that fueled secular opposition to inter-racial marriage and innumerable other civil rights issues. The burden is on the people espousing such arguments to explain why this kind of reasoning is valid now. But we never seem to see that. Sure, people point out that even inter-racial marriage was still man-woman marriage, while gay marriage isn’t, but that’s ducking the issue. There’s always a reason why “things are different this time”. You wouldn’t give someone proposing a planned economy the time of day, even if he had hundreds of pages of analysis explaining what had gone wrong last time and why his proposal avoided those pitfalls. He’d need something huge.

I agree with (6), actually. The best reason to support gay marriage is to uphold equal protection. It’s a principle thing. Separate bathrooms for blacks was also something worth fighting. It’s not that the white bathrooms are any cleaner or any more accessible, but that the clear message sent by drawing those kinds of distinctions is that black people are second-class citizens.

Also, the existence of secular arguments against gay marriage doesn’t mean that virtually all opposition to it is not pre-rational/religious/bigoted. There are secular arguments for creationism – that’s what Intelligent Design is, after all.

The question is how believable those secular arguments are if you’re not already disposed to endorse a society that discriminates against homosexuals (or if you’re not already disposed to accept a view of history that requires a creator). And given the amount of special pleading required to make them at all convincing (in both cases), I’m inclined to think that most people who subscribe to these arguments don’t believe that gay marriage is wrong because of these arguments. Like Intelligent Design, they’re almost always just a flimsy rational gloss on a religious/moral view.

(1) Our Republic is in place not only to enforce the will of the majority (the legislative branch) but also to protect the rights of the minority (the judicial branch). That is checks and balances and also why the people elect the legislative branch, but do not elect the supreme court.

(2) I agree with Dave, the author misses the point of the “slavery” argument.

(3) Slippery Slope is a logical fallacy in and of itself. Arguing “slippery slope” is a convenient way to avoid talking about the merits of the issue at hand. The point is that along each step of the way there are different arguments for and against any specific action. The arguments for and against gay marriage are NOT the same arguments for and against marrying your dog. I’m reminded of Scott Adams who framed this fallacy nicely when he wrote about taking things to their illogical conclusion; “If you let a barber cut your hair, next thing you know he’s going to be loping limbs off!”

(4) I really don’t understand your argument either. We should make dumb laws so dumb people are placated?

(5) You conveniently fail to mention homosexuality is also part of human nature, as well as many other species natures. People don’t choose to be gay, it doesn’t make sense (why would someone choose to possibly alienate their friends and family and subject themselves to ridicule and harassment) Anyway, homophobia is not an innate human quality, it is socially constructed. I am not homophobic, am I less human? Am I rejecting part of my innate human nature?

(6) borders on a non sequitor, but there are concrete legal concerns – not just flimsy hospital policies – that have real implications for two married gay people.

Even granted every one of your severely fallacious points, none are strong affirmative arguments for harms that will occur should we give gays the right to marry. At best they are flimsy, traditionalist, “what if” arguments made out of fear more than anything else. At worst, they are shoddy fronts for prevalent religious objections for gay marriage.

As conservatives, we should be at the forefront of demanding individual rights and responsibilities – not circulating fear about change.

Promotion of gay marriage and the win for personal freedoms should be the hallmark of a true, ideologically unbound conservative.

It seems as though you could simply replace “gay marriage” with “women’s rights” and it would look like an argument defending Saudi treatment of women. Why do women need to be able to vote, or even drive? Men have always been drivers, and a woman can always get her husband or a male relative to take her somewhere. Who invented this newfangled concept of women being able to have their own bank accounts and have a decision in who they wish to marry? New rights invented out of whole cloth or dangerous judicial activism threatening the foundations of society?

And this point:
(4) If you have a cognitively-challenged underclass, as every large nation has, you need some anchoring institutions for them to aspire to;

…seems to be arguing for some sort of caste-based society in which everyone knows his or her place. There’s an upper class and a servant class; the role of gays is for amusement but they’d best keep to themselves, out of public view (sort of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, something that allows folks to pretend something doesn’t exist).

I once heard an old man weeping because he thought the success of Tiger Woods was going to mean black people would “take over and redefine the game of golf”. He was visibly upset because, what had always been a white privileged sport was now open to minorities. His final argument was, “Can’t we just have our one sport? They have other sports they can play, there’s no reason they have to be on our greens.”

It’s not that gays object to calling their marriage civil unions. It’s that when states have tried civil unions or domestic partnerships, they didn’t work. Two reasons: I’ve cited above the cases where partners have been banned from hospital beds and the like. Claiming, “I am his/her partner or “union…thing” meant nothing. People assigned it no weight. Everyone, however, knows what marriage means. Second, many legal rights and some private benefits, are reserved for spouses only. Some companies expressly refused to offer benefits to partners, as they were only for spouses. Civil unions were demonstrably and clearly less than equal to marriage.
“Perhaps what they really want is for religions to accept their marriages”… Perhaps you’re just mind-reading and assigning nefarious motives to people? Perhaps you’re just bigoted and like to see the worse in people? Of course, I don’t mean that, but before you start playing the “perhaps” game and assigning motives to what’s in people’s heads with no evidence to support you, you could try research? No one can use state power to force a religion to do anything; this is the worst kind of religious-right fear mongering. Are you sure you are on the right site?
Frankly, when discussing gay rights, the fact that you leapt immediately to the bedroom shows a wee bit too much focus on sex, which seems to be another tip-off to the religiously-minded; reading Free Republic shows more focus on gay sex than craigslist.There is more to gay people than sex, you know (I assume you know).

1. On upholding tradition just because it’s tradition: simply ridiculous. The fact that something has been done for any length of time does not mean that it’s the best way to go. And the comparison to slavery is not about degree of brutality, but about the simple continuation of a tradition. It’s obvious that slavery was both a tradition and one that very few of us can stomach today. Degree of harm is not the issue. The issue is that the existence of a tradition over time does not serve to justify its own continuation.

2. Majorities have rights. Yeah, okay. Do those rights include the popularity-based right to ban anything that they disagree with, for whatever reason (including: it’s icky)?

3. The less intelligent people need some sort of anchor. So what, we just set up rules for the sake of having rules? How about having rules based on considerations of reason, the Golden Rule and considerations of if the shoe was on the other foot? Why not aspire to have ALL of our anchors be having policy based on reason and compassion – which are concepts that you don’t need a 120 IQ to understand. And even if you did, it still beats tyranny of the masses. I’d rather have reason and compassion-based policy that a certain segment of the population did not fully understand than otherwised-based policy that they would not understand.

4. And the human nature argument. Wow. Y’know what else is human nature? BEING GAY! Some people are gay just as naturally as the rest of us who are straight. And there is also evidence for racism being part of our natural inclination – something we can fall into with relative ease in many circumstances. So is rape.

5. On the slippery slope. Maybe there would be, maybe there wouldn’t. It would depend on what we consider the modern day point of marriage to be, the privileges and responsibilities marriage comes with, what exactly a marriage is and what it requires, and so on. Some of these considerations are no longer exactly the same as they were a long time ago. For example, with regard to animal marriage, what would the point of it be if the animal has no inkling of what it is apart of? It’s not like the animal can make a promise like this. About considerations of prenup – it would make more sense to have someone else ensure that, upon one’s death, a certain segment of the person’s wealth be used to ensure the animal has what the person wants it to have. Then of course there’s the issue of consent of the animal. Marriage to an animal just seems utterly untenable by virtue of what marriage is – a set of promises from informed consenting sentient beings.

It’s hard to get into all this now, though, as to really consider what sorts of things could follow and which ones may warrant serious thought in terms of granting marriage status to, we have to consider such things as I mentioned above.

So gay marriage is wrong because it’s a slippery slope? Should straight marriage be disallowed as well because it could very well lead to gay marriage?

since most polygamists are hetero-, isn’t state sanctioned “opposite” marriage (as Miss Calif calls it) a slippery slope to polygamy?

If you can produce a pony that is capable of informed consent to a marriage contract, more power to you, and I hope your life together is a happy one.

Regarding incest (and bestiality for that matter), the state does have a public health interest in preventing it. There is no public health danger in allowing homosexuals to marry – in fact, if a homosexual is in a committed relationship, one might expect this to help prevent the spread of STDs.

The case for polygamy is a little less clear-cut. The state already can’t prevent consenting people from living a polygamous lifestyle. If a man wants to have a relationship with several women (or a woman with several men), and they all are aware of (and committed to) the relationships, there’s no law stopping them from doing that. What they can’t currently do is file joint tax returns, or have the same automatic rights and responsibilities that marriage confers. (Well, Spouse 1 and 2 can, but Spouse 3-X can’t). But inheritance and debt laws alone would be completely screwy if more than one person was allowed into a marriage. If Spouse 3 dies owing debt, do the others still owe? Who’s required to co-sign for debt and purchases? That said, I’m not completely sure the same logic that’s being used for legalizing homosexual marriage couldn’t be applied to polygamy.

Polygamy is a voluntary social arrangement (and one that in the Mormons’ case leads to the abuse of women) but sexual orientation is innate and unchangeable, according to mainstream science.

Polygamy also presents a secondary problem in that our legal, tax and benefit system is predicated on monogamy. Recognizing polygamy would mean that government agencies and business would have to provide additional benefits for multiple spouses and dozens of children, which would cause tax and benefit premium increases for everyone else, including those who don’t practise polygamy.

You also have the problem of vastly complicated legal survivorship, property rights and other custody arrangements. Does wife #1 get an equal share to property if the husband dies as wife #2? What if they were married at different times? Which wife has the legal authority to pull the plug if husband is in vegetative state? What if they disagree?

Gay marriage already fits into the current structure. Not much has changed except the gender of the spouses.

1) Currently, some states have more people in favor of gay marriage than opposed. Once the entire country has a majority of people in favor, will your argument change to “the minority has rights too?”

2) So many things wrong with this argument. First off, when you were in college, inter-racial marriage was still illegal in some states. That didn’t make it right, even if a majority of the people supported it. Second, your anecdotal evidence that ‘nobody minded them’ is completely meaningless in the fact of documented incidents of hate attacks, a la Matthew Sheppard, not to mention documented cases of gay people being being forced out of the room of a dying loved one. (link here: http://www.kgw.com/news-local/stories/kgw_042309_news_ohsu_gay_couple.10244ed9a.html) Lastly, you can’t reconcile “minding your own business” with not allowing someone else the same rights you have. That’s the definition of “I’m better than you.” Which, unfortunately, is another anglo-saxon personality trait.

3) You argument about homosexual marriage will lead to people marrying their dog or their sister or their soccer team is disingenuous at best. First off, we have historic and/or scientific evidence that marrying your sister, or your dog, or more than one person is a bad idea. Why would two men or women who love each other be any different than a man and a woman?

4) Do you have even a shred of data to support anything in this paragraph, or are you just making stuff up? “Other considerations” smacks of “I don’t know what I’m talking about, so I’m just going to make something up.”

5) There are many things that are in our natures that we struggle against. How many times a day do you get the urge to beat the crap out of someone who insults you, cuts you off in traffic, or acts like an idiot? Also, if conservatives ran the world, we’d still be paying people to take our daughters off our hands and using our wives as so much chattel. After all, these were cherished institutions for thousands of years, as hetero marriage is today. Luckily, it is also in the nature of human beings to change, and try to become better tomorrow than we are today. Supporting gay marriage is just another step in a long chain of social advances.

6) I can’t even agree with your premise on this one. Allowing gay marriage will in no way change your or my marriage in any way. Can you tell me one real, empirically demonstrable way that your marriage will be harmed by allowing gays to marry? Also, gays are denied visitation rights all the time. See my link above for the proof. That happened LAST WEEK.

There is no secular reason to deny gay marriage. “We shouldn’t change marriage because it’s an institution and we fear change” isn’t a reason, it’s just people giving into their own misguided fears.

Assuming that homosexuality is innate — and most psychiatric organizations would agree that it is — then same-sex couples can not “aspire to” a definition of marriage that only includes heterosexual couples. No amount of aspiration, hoping, behavior modification, suppression of emotion, or anything else will make this possible.

Why can’t we encourage commitment and stability by letting this “cognitively-challenged underclass,” as you put it, aspire to monogamy and the contract of marriage?

The best way to establish the secular case for giving preference to heterosexual unions is to do the following:

Establish 3 categories of civil unions –

1. Heterosexuals who intend to raise children (Marriage)
2. Homosexuals who intend to raise children (Homarriage)
3. All others (Personal Partnership)

I believe that government should discriminate in favor of heterosexuality in one important sphere: child rearing. For this reason, I think that married heterosexual couples should be given priority for adoptions over similarly qualified homosexual couples.

Adoption agencies currently discriminate on the basis of race by favoring African American couples for adoptions of African American babies, all other factors held constant. I believe that sexual orientation is another factor meriting discrimination. For child-rearing, the liberal assumptions of racism are suspended even by liberals. Therefore, they cannot tar traditionalists as bigots with giving preference to heterosexuality.

In cases where a gay uncle and his spouse wants to adopt his nephew, I’m in favor of giving him priority over non-blood relatives. So I’m not homophobic. However, I believe that homosexuality is not entirely genetic. To the extent that role models could encourage homosexual experimentation or bi-sexuality, I want to minimize those influences.

Also, society has a right to insist on building laws around an ideal husband and wife household where role models of different sexes are present. It may not always be achieved, but that doesn’t make it any less of a worthwhile goal. You might disagree with me and call me homophobic for insisting upon that ideal. I’ll accept that criticism. Let me just say that I prefer a society that has a 4% homosexuality rate to one that has 0% and also to one that has 20%.

OK, so I’ve stated a rational and narrow reason for discrimination. However, once you confer the word “marriage” on homosexual unions, the nature of our legal system will not permit this discrimination. All marriages will have to be treated equally.

Also, I think other forms of discrimination should be permitted. Insurance contracts and a myriad of other contracts in the market should be permitted to distinguish between heterosexual and homosexual unions because there may be real behavioral differences that merit different pricing distinctions.

I recommend creating Homarriages for homosexuals that want to raise families. These unions will have all the same legal attributes as traditional marriages. However, society reserves the right to discriminate between marriages and homarriages. Perhaps, a homarriage of two lesbians should be given preference for adoption or foster care of a lesbian teenager?

Andrew Sullivan brings up a good rhetorical point about heterosexual unions between men and women past their child bearing years, or for those who have no intention of having or adopting children. For them, I think there should be a third kind of contract and legal framework distinguished from marriage and homarriage. I call it a Personal Partnership. For example, there would be no spousal support in cases of divorce. However, property could be held in joint name with rights of survivorship passing to one spouse in case of death of another. All visitation rights, tax benefits, and government benefits given currently conferred upon married couples would be in force for Personal Partnerships. And Homosexuals could also get Personal Partnerships without distinction from Heterosexuals.

The radical left of the marriage debate insists that there should not be any discrimination whatsoever on the basis of sexual orientation. The logical extension of that position is that society cannot lawfully make the distinctions I outlined above regarding child rearing. That represents an attack on the ideal of the husband and wife headed household as the best model for raising children. In our guts, that AND NOT RELIGIOUS BELIEFS is what motivated 95% of the people who voted for Proposition 8. Liberals make a big mistake by assuming that reserving the word “marriage” for heterosexual unions is at its core an expression of bigotry without any social merit.

If the Yes on 8 crowd starts running commercials showing gay biker dudes in black leather walking out of an adoption agency with a baby boy while a dejected, wholesome heterosexual couple watches them go by, they will unleash this hetertofore hidden social assumption.

ou are doing an admirable job of explaining how some notions of masculinity are a big ole problem in this culture. You are doing a very poor job of explaining how contemporary fatherhood is a problem or how gay people are a problem.

It seems that these “very masculine men” might be buying into a notion of gender identity that is antithetical to the kind of social responsibility that conservatism is supposed to endorse. (I you think this notion masculinity is somehow born into these dudes then I suggest you get out more. There is no relationship between one’s testosterone levels and one’s attitudes toward social responsibilities. And that’s what you are talking about. Taking care of you kids doesn’t make you less of a man. It makes you less of a meathead.)

If anyone is not willing to become the kind of father that (from what I gather) you are trying to be (Kudos by the way), they don’t BELONG in a marriage. I think you’re right- some of us have constructed a notion of masculinity that equates being a responsible participant in a family as being a “fag” or being “whipped” or being some other misogynist term.

It SOUNDS like the fags are campaigning for the power to participate in traditional social institutions. It SOUNDS like they are mounting a campaign that is AGAINST some of the more irresponsible notions of gender floating around out there. (Like being a man means you have to act like you are in a Judd Apatow movie so people won’t think you are a “fag.”) Seems like the fags are on your team here. You should know an ally when you find one.

Torrentprime’s point is one I was gonna make but decided not to. Gay people have been having religious marriages for decades now. Not commonlaw arrangements, but religious services. They can GET married now, but they can’t get legal recognition.

And anyway, I thought conservatives were against using the law for social engineering. We should make a legal decision based on whether the grown up fratboys at the park will think you’re a fag for being a decent father? We should discriminate against 2% of the population because you worry about the effects it would have to play fair? The question of whether gay people should get married has only to do with whether or not its discrimination not to allow them to get married. I don’t see how its reasonable to conclude that it isn’t. The fact that doing so would help to detach the conservative movement from the culture wars and allow it to make better social critiques and the fact that doing so would promote social stability is gravy.

You probably shouldn’t comment on things you don’t know anything about (whatever your fantasy life may include): Long-term committed gay relationships are one of those things.

“I think this recognizes a reality that is ignored the public debate. A long term homosexual relationship consigns one man to what is generally regarded — even privately by liberals — as a somewhat humiliated role.”

– Leaving aside the patently asinine idea that someone has to “play the woman” in a gay relationship for a moment: It takes a really twisted view of sexual intercourse to assume that the receptive partner is necessarily humiliated by the act. Do straight men regularly humiliate their wives? I thought women actually enjoyed sexual intimacy too – are all women are masochists?

“It’s striking that homosexuals are extremely reluctant to acknowledge in public the reality of “tops” and “bottoms”, which they discuss frankly among themselves in a matter-of-fact way.”

Again, what do you actually know about gay sexual proclivities and what gays “discuss among themselves”? I am gay and I am quite capable of topping and bottoming. Many of the gay men I’ve met are the same way. There are certainly preferences for one or the other – but your insight is actually just a caricature. Reducing subtle human diversity into inhuman stereotype is the standard modus of the bigot (whether self-aware or not).

I must, however, thank you for being honest enough to voice the very suspicious infatuation with “who gives and who receives” that so many conservatives (usually male) against gay marriage are reluctant to admit. Most sexually and mentally healthy adults see that attaching moral status to the sexual choices of consenting partners is silly – but it’s always important to remember that not everyone is so lucky.

1. Which are not harmed or limited. You have the freedom to marry. Nobody is taking that away from you. And when rights compete, your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. So, while you have the right to whine, and nobody will take that from you, you don’t have the right to hit the lives of others with your bigotry. Even though you think you do.

2. That’s a fallacy — Argumentum ad antiquitatem. We’ve always done it thus, therefore it is the way it must be. You would make as much sense arguing for the abolition of airplanes because “if God wanted us to fly, he’d have given us wings and we walked for thousands of years…”

3. Another fallacy, which you kindly point out by using its name: The Slippery Slope. This argument states that should event X occur, so will other harmful events even though there is no casual connection or proof that X will cause Y. For example:

“If we legalize marijuana, then more people would start to take crack and heroin, and we’d have to legalize those too. Before long we’d have a nation full of drug-addicts on welfare. Therefore we cannot legalize marijuana.”

Ironically, this is the very argument used to criminalize marijuana and keep it criminalized. Yet, countries that have decriminalized marijuana have not seen the slippery slope under their feet. Rather, quite to the contrary.

4. An appeal to bigotry? I don’t even know where this incredibly bigoted, moronic fallacy is coming from. If we all had IQs of 120 or higher, the author might get his foolish self laughed at even more than he is…

5. People made this argument about the Divine Right of Kings. They’ve made this argument about slavery. And homophobia is not a rooted condition in the nature of man. I’ve never been homophobic. My children aren’t homophobes. My wife is not homophobic. The condition stems from conservative, controlling religions and societal indoctrination of those values into its members.

6. Then the same thinness, but for your ignorance of it, applies to heterosexual relationships. But, for the record, it’s more than hospital rules. It’s about equality, real equality in society, not your “separate but equal” equality. After all, as we all know, “separate but equal” only means “separate.”

http://thefaithfulpenguin.blogspot.com/2009/05/unhinged-over-rated-nut-job.html#links

Mormon, Republican science-fiction writer and board member of NOM, Orson Scott Card goes off the rails:

The first and greatest threat from court decisions in California and Massachusetts, giving legal recognition to “gay marriage,” is that it marks the end of democracy in America.

These judges are making new law without any democratic process; in fact, their decisions are striking down laws enacted by majority vote.

Two paragraphs and he’s showing his complete lack of understanding about our Constitutional democracy which gives the Court the ability to tell us what the law means and to protect the all the people from the tyranny of the majority. Mr. Card is, in fact, a beneficiary of that system as it comes to the practice of his particular brand of religion. He may be blind to it. But he is, nonetheless, a beneficiary of the Constitution. Eisenhower says it best:

Dear Ed: I think that such answer as I can give to your letter of November first will be arranged in reverse order–at least I shall comment first on your final paragraph.

You keep harping on the Constitution; I should like to point out that the meaning of the Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is. Consequently no powers are exercised by the Federal government except where such exercise is approved by the Supreme Court (lawyers) of the land.

But beyond the obviousness of the Constitution and how government actually works, pro gay marriage is now polling at 49%, with 46% against and 5% unsure. That’s the electoral majority process, Mr. Card. Something by which, when the shoe will be on the other foot, because you’re losing this battle, you’ll be the first to the Courts to protect your belief on “how it should be” and all this “democratic process” will be dropped faster than the Pet Rock fad hit the skids. Anyway, the unhindged one then trots out the slippery slope fallacy:

The pretext is that state constitutions require it — but it is absurd to claim that these constitutions require marriage to be defined in ways that were unthinkable through all of human history until the past 15 years. And it is offensive to expect us to believe this obvious fiction.

It is such an obvious overreach by judges, far beyond any rational definition of their authority, that even those who support the outcome of the decisions should be horrified by the means.

We already know where these decisions lead. We have seen it with the court decisions legalizing abortion. At first, it was only early abortions; within a few years, though, any abortion up to the killing of a viable baby in mid-birth was made legal.

It was actually privacy and self-determination rights that were upheld. The same “rights” also give women the right to purchase birth control when single (they often weren’t allowed to) or without the consent of their husband (once again, they weren’t allowed to in many states). But, beyond that, he has the modern obsession with abortion that was not shared, even in this religious country, one-hundred years ago. And certainly not by his religion. The bible, except for Exodus, is silent on abortion and has this to say:

“And if men struggle and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage, yet there is no further injury, he shall be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him, and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.”
Exodus 21:22-25

Further injury, in this passage, is to the woman not the foetus. If he kills her, he dies. If he burns her, he is burned. If she looses a tooth, so does he. But for the foetus? A fine. And, it’s not a big a fine btw. In other parts of the bible you find that children do have a pecuniary worth, and it is low, and class-dependent.

Not only that, but the courts upheld obviously unconstitutional limitations on free speech and public assembly: It is now illegal even to kneel and pray in front of a clinic that performs abortions.

You’re not “innocently praying.” Besides, holy-roller that he is, he should know God doesn’t hear those prayers anyway:

Matthew 6:5 And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

Matthew 6: 6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

Matthew 23:14 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

Matthew 6:7 But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. 8 Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.

They are, in fact, engaged in political speech and disruptive conduct. And, as we know, the “right to free speech” is not an absolute. One that Mr. Card enjoys through copyright, slander, libel, hate-speech, fighting-words and other provisions, of the civil and criminal codes. Should I (hypothetically) take up a slanderous life against Mr. Card and manufacture “evidence” of horrific conduct, such as he’s the leader of an on-going homosexual pedophilia ring, to destroy his ability to earn an income and general reputation, Mr. Card has redress. Which is why, besides my being a far better human than he, I don’t do such things. But still, there is far more slippery slope to explore…:

Do not suppose for a moment that the “gay marriage” diktats will not be supported by methods just as undemocratic, unconstitutional and intolerant.

Already in several states, there are textbooks for children in the earliest grades that show “gay marriages” as normal. How long do you think it will be before such textbooks become mandatory — and parents have no way to opt out of having their children taught from them?

What textbooks? There are only five textbook manufactures in the US market. None of them would touch this with a ten-foot pole because they have to deal with Texas and their State Board of Education which is populated by Christian Zealots. There are BOOKS, like Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s Roommate, but they’re not textbooks.

And if you choose to home-school your children so they are not propagandized with the “normality” of “gay marriage,” you will find more states trying to do as California is doing — making it illegal to take your children out of the propaganda mill that our schools are rapidly becoming.

The Judge didn’t make homeschooling illegal. That’s just some idiotic right-wing crap that got into World Nut Daily, etc. and has become an “Internet fact” when it is no such thing. What happened was some crazy, child-abusing fundamentalists who were, frankly, severely abusing their children were forced to send their kids to public schools. This was to protect the children from the secrecy of the child-abusing, homeschooling parents who’d been in trouble with DCS for nearly a decade and the Court finally got tired of their abusive crap. No other families were affected by the decision.

Now for some hysterical hypocrisy:

How dangerous is this, politically? Please remember that for the mildest of comments critical of the political agenda of homosexual activists, I have been called a “homophobe” for years.

This is a term that was invented to describe people with a pathological fear of homosexuals — the kind of people who engage in acts of violence against gays. But the term was immediately extended to apply to anyone who opposed the homosexual activist agenda in any way.

A term that has mental-health implications (homophobe) is now routinely applied to anyone who deviates from the politically correct line. How long before opposing gay marriage, or refusing to recognize it, gets you officially classified as “mentally ill”?

Orson Scott Card is a Mormon. They believe in the Tabula Rosa of human development. Their psychologists preach that homosexuals are, in fact, mentally ill because it is “impossible” for people to have inborn personality and orientation characteristics. Even though we know that it’s biological at this point though we don’t know the complete and exact mechanism behind it…

So, it’s okay for the Mormon’s, like Card, to assert gays are mentally ill, morally bankrupt and sexually deviant because their religion tells them this is the case. Further, I should point out that Card’s definition is a strawman’s definition and when he’s called homophobic for being homophobic it’s because the shoe fits:

1. Fear of or contempt for lesbians and gay men.
2. Behavior based on such a feeling

So, the hypocrite can bash and attack, but it’s not okay to point out that his actions towards gays is, by definition, homophobic? Hypocrite, thy name is Card. Now, onto another strawman:

Remember how rapidly gay marriage has become a requirement. When gay rights were being enforced by the courts back in the ’70s and ’80s, we were repeatedly told by all the proponents of gay rights that they would never attempt to legalize gay marriage.

It took about 15 minutes for that promise to be broken.

First, who made this promise? Second, who died and gave him/her the actual authority to make this promise? Seriously, there is not some “National Gay Organization” that has the right to speak and bind all gays. It’s not like the AMA… Oh wait, they can’t do it either… How about the APA? Nope… AICPA? Nuh uh… Well, if national professional organizations can’t do it for there members… I don’t see how it can be done for gays, either. And, third, who’d be stupid enough to believe it anyway?

Let’s move on because we have a lot more stupidity to cover. Next up is classic misrepresentation of the application of the rule of law:

And you can guess how long it will now take before any group that speaks against “gay marriage” being identical to marriage will be attacked using the same tools that have been used against anti-abortion groups — RICO laws, for instance.

The RICO laws are applied to anti-abortion groups that are committing crimes, like bombing clinics. RICO is a statute to punish the conspiracy to commit a crime, like those engaged in by PETA or the KKK. They’re not otherwise used to stifle free speech, like quasi-similar organizations along the lines of the Audubon Society or Sons of the Confederacy. Even if you’re crankish enough to think they should be… And we continue with Card’s semi-incoherent rant:

Here’s the irony: There is no branch of government with the authority to redefine marriage. Marriage is older than government. Its meaning is universal: It is the permanent or semipermanent bond between a man and a woman, establishing responsibilities between the couple and any children that ensue.

No, here is the irony. You are using a logical fallacy known as the appeal to tradition. Appealing to tradition is how we justify continuing the horrors of the past. Even though we don’t have any substantive logical or moral grounds to continue those practices. Card, of course, goes on to make the argument “marriage was created by God” without actually saying it as he knows the reader (it’s in the The Mormon Times) will “get it:”

The laws concerning marriage did not create marriage, they merely attempted to solve problems in such areas as inheritance, property, paternity, divorce, adoption and so on.

Mr. Card, like all the Christinistas, seems to forget that marriage is present in virtually all cultures, regardless of religion. There is no special privilege for the judeo-christian belief that God made marriage. Even though he tries to create it. To support this argument Card goes right to the bad analogy, comparing a physical attribute to a human construct:

If the government passed a law declaring that grey was now green, and asphalt was specifically designated as a botanical organism, would that make all our streets into “greenery” and all our parking lots into “parks”?

Mr. Card, marriage is defined by humans. It has been since we invented it and the priests stole it. Whereas Green is merely a label we use for an inherent physical property of something. And, if you think marriage laws are about things like inheritance, property settlements, etc., then why the opposition to other enjoying the full protection (and responsibility) of the law? Let us continue:

If a court declared that from now on, “blind” and “sighted” would be synonyms, would that mean that it would be safe for blind people to drive cars?

No matter how sexually attracted a man might be toward other men, or a woman toward other women, and no matter how close the bonds of affection and friendship might be within same-sex couples, there is no act of court or Congress that can make these relationships the same as the coupling between a man and a woman.

Well, beyond the absurd analogy where a physical property is equated with an intangible concept, we get to Card’s real issue. He seems to be implying rather strongly his objects really come about be he thinks gay sex is icky. Well, here is a clue Mr. Card: 47% of Americans engage in anal sex. So maybe you need to give Ted Haggard a call and give that a shot. Maybe it’ll loosen the stick in your ass a bit and you can start thinking.

This is a permanent fact of nature.

No, homosexuality is a permanent fact of nature:

Homosexual and bisexual behavior are widespread in the animal kingdom: a 1999 review by researcher Bruce Bagemihl shows that homosexual behavior, has been observed in close to 1500 species, ranging from primates to gut worms, and is well documented for 500 of them.

Not marriage. I have yet to see animals get married, unless they have weird owners…

(In another column I will talk seriously and candidly about the state of scientific research on the causes of homosexuality, and the reasons why homosexuality persists even though it does not provide a reproductive advantage.)

There is no natural method by which two males or two females can create offspring in which both partners contribute genetically. This is not subject to legislation, let alone fashionable opinion.

Human beings are part of a long mammalian tradition of heterosexuality. No parthenogenic test tube procedure can alter what we, by nature, are. No surgery, no hormone injections, can change X to Y or make the distinction nonexistent.

That a few individuals suffer from tragic genetic mixups does not affect the differences between genetically distinct males and females.

That many individuals suffer from sex-role dysfunctions does not change the fact that only heterosexual mating can result in families where a father and a mother collaborate in rearing children that share a genetic contribution from both parents.

Oh boy. I’m looking forward to more crank pseudo-science (which will likely be from the Mormon hacks who really like to pump this crap out) while ignoring real research, no doubt. Also, the part in bold, it’s a crock. My ex-wife was a horrible mother and I terminated her parental rights. My current wife is a bazillion times better and adopted the child. I know scores of other cases similar to mine, all of which easily disprove that idiotic assertion. But let’s continue:

Married people are doing something that is very, very hard — to combine the lives of a male and female, with all their physical and personality differences, into a stable relationship that persists across time.

When they are able to create children together, married people then provide the role models for those children to learn how to become a man or a woman, and what to expect of their spouse when they themselves marry.

When a heterosexual couple cannot have children, their faithful marriage still affirms, in the eyes of other people’s children, the universality of the pattern of marriage.

When a heterosexual couple adopts children who are not their genetic offspring, they affirm the pattern of marriage and generously confer its blessings on children who might otherwise have been deprived of its benefits.

Some marriages are better than others; some fail utterly because of the malfeasance of one or both of the partners.

That only makes it all the more vital that the whole society combine to help husbands and wives succeed at marriage.

Everything there, except for straight-up reproduction, can also be said in a positive manner for gay marriages. We know, for example, that gay foster and adoptive parents are at least as good as heterosexual ones. We know that children raised by committed-relationship gay parents have equal (or better) marriage results than those raised in heterosexual marriages of the same duration. I find this part of his rant to be just weird. Like he had column inches to fill, or voices to placate:

We need the same public protection of marriage that we have of property. If we did not all agree that people continue to own things that are not in their immediate possession, then you could not reasonably expect to come home and find your house unoccupied.

We agree, by law, to make it a crime to take what belongs to others — even when you need it more than they do. Every aspect of our lives is affected by this, and not for a moment could a society exist that did not protect the right of property.

If property rights were utterly abolished, and you could own nothing, you would leave that society as quickly as possible — or create a new society that agreed to respect each other’s property rights and protected them from outsiders who would attempt to take away your property.

Marriage is, if anything, more vital, more central, than property.

I feel like he’s dancing around the issue of “women are property.” Which, knowing he is a Mormon and that is the pervasive culture in Mormonism…

Oh, and it looks like my feeling was right. Here we have it:

Husbands need to have the whole society agree that when they marry, their wives are off limits to all other males. He has a right to trust that all his wife’s children would be his.

Wives need to have the whole society agree that when they marry, their husband is off limits to all other females. All of his protection and earning power will be devoted to her and her children, and will not be divided with other women and their children.

These two premises are so basic that they preexist any known government. In most societies through history, failure to live up to these commitments has led to extreme social sanctions — even, in many cases, death.

Well, in many primitive societies, death was the punishment for disobeying your parents. So I wouldn’t put much stock in what bronze-age fools thought was a good idea… You need something better than an appeal to barbarism to carry the day.

I will say I find the second precept to be funny. Many Mormons, especially the splinter sects, still practice forms of polygamy. They just do it quietly instead of sanctioned by the Church. Additionally, since Mr. Card has argued for the traditional marriage of one-man, one-woman, I find it hard to reconcile his “traditional” view considering the traditional view of his church, and the biblical days from which he takes his traditional view, included polygamy as a normal marriage practice. It’s like he doesn’t recognize HIS version of traditional marriage is much newer than his bible and not supported by his religious texts in the manner he believes. Yet he makes, essentially, (besides the very bad “natural” argument) a religious argument from the fallacy of tradition and then seemingly starts to argue against himself by pointing out that heterosexual marriage, and heterosexual life suffers from a lot of ills without any help from gays and gay marriage:

Seen in this context, we are fools if we think “gay marriage” is the first or even the worst threat to marriage.

We heterosexuals have put marriage in such a state that it’s a wonder homosexuals would even aspire to call their unions by that name.

Divorce is “no-fault,” easily obtained on any pretext.

A vast number of unmarried men and women have such contempt for marriage that they share bed and home without asking for any formal recognition by society.

In an era when birth control and abortion make childbearing completely optional, the number of out-of-wedlock births shows the contempt that many women have for marriage.

Yet most of these single mothers still demand that the man they chose not to marry before having sex with him provide financial support for them and their children — while denying the man any of the rights and protections of marriage.

Men routinely discard wives and children to follow the nearly universal male biological desire for diversity in mating. Adultery is now openly expected of men, even if faithful wives deplore it.

With “gay marriage,” the last shreds of meaning will be stripped away from marriage, with homosexuals finishing what faithless, selfish heterosexuals have begun.

Marriage, to be worth preserving, needs to mean not just something, but everything.

Faithful sexual monogamy, persistence until death, male protection and providence for wife and children, female loyalty to children and husband, and parental discretion in child-rearing.

If government is going to meddle in this, it had better be to support marriage in general while providing protection for those caught in truly destructive marriages.

And how would gay marriage attack/solve any of this? Where is the causality? Do you have any stats? The divorce rate in Massachsetts didn’t spike beause of gay marriage. People in Iowa aren’t getting divorced over gay marriage. By-and-large, except for crybaby victems of offense, it’s not affecting anyone all besides those who got married.

There is no logical reason to believe that gay marriage will, somehow, wreck straight-marriage and cause the collapse of Western Society. Really, except for your intentioal wallowing in being offended, gay marriage will do NOTHING to you, or anyone else, who isn’t somehow directly part of the specific gay marriage in question.

Because when government is the enemy of marriage, then the people who are actually creating successful marriages have no choice but to change governments, by whatever means is made possible or necessary.

Society gains no benefit whatsoever (except for a momentary warm feeling about how “fair” and “compassionate” we are) from renaming homosexual liaisons and friendships as marriage.

In other words, gays can’t love. It’s just horny time. Blech, you make me sick, Mr. Card.

Married people attempting to raise children with the hope that they, in turn, will be reproductively successful, have every reason to oppose the normalization of homosexual unions.

It’s about grandchildren. That’s what all life is about. It’s not enough just to spawn — your offspring must grow up in circumstances that will maximize their reproductive opportunities.

Oh, so my marriage is pointless because it’s “all about the grandchildren” and I don’t have any? That means any marriage that doesn’t end in children is pointless? You think that’s what marriage is about? Kids and grandkids? How fucking 18th century of you, Mr. Card.

Why should married people feel the slightest loyalty to a government or society that are conspiring to encourage reproductive and/or marital dysfunction in their children?

They’re not. They say nothing about it at all. Screaming idiots like you make sure of that.

Why should married people tolerate the interference of such a government or society in their family life?

Oh, the irony, it burns. You want government to discriminate, thus interfering in their family lives, yet you pretend it’s the government interfering in yours if they take away their current, actual interference.

If America becomes a place where our children are taken from us by law and forced to attend schools where they are taught that cohabitation is as good as marriage, that motherhood doesn’t require a husband or father, and that homosexuality is as valid a choice as heterosexuality for their future lives, then why in the world should married people continue to accept the authority of such a government?

It doesn’t happen, you twat! There are no re-education camps!

What these dictator-judges do not seem to understand is that their authority extends only as far as people choose to obey them.

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.

Biological imperatives trump laws. American government cannot fight against marriage and hope to endure. If the Constitution is defined in such a way as to destroy the privileged position of marriage, it is that insane Constitution, not marriage, that will die.

There is no biological imperitive to marriage. There is a biological reality of homosexuality. Marriage is a social construct and we, as humans, have the right to change it to fit our socially evolved sense of right and justice.

No matter how much it offends those who do not wish to move forward.

Note: I know the article is from last year. But with the recent Iowa decision, these talking points (including by Card) have been recycling and I feel it needs to be re-addressed.

1. “The majority has rights, too.”

In a democracy like our own, the majority possesses something much greater than rights: The majority rules. That’s why the rights of minorities, like homosexuals, must be protected from the bigotry and discrimination of the majority, rather than the other way around.

2. “the occasional slights suffered by homosexual couples are microscopic”

It may only seem microscopic because it never happened to you. Nevertheless, throughout the history of the United States, suspected homosexuals have been beaten up, raped, or often murdered. Even today, FBI statistics for 2001 show that sexual orientation-based hate crimes constituted 13.9% of all reported bias incidents, making it the third highest ranked category. In addition, gaybashing incidents are largely underestimated because of the shame involved, because they are often classified by authorities as sexual assaults rather than hate crimes, and because many states do not have hate-crime statutes that include sexual orientation. In one survey, ninety four percent of out-of-the-closet gays and lesbians report having been assaulted or harassed in hate-related incidents, usually more than once.

3. “There really is a slippery slope here.”

There really isn’t. Comparing marriage between two men to bestiality might seem logical only because you feel the same kind of revulsion. But there is no logical connection.

4.“If you have a cognitively-challenged underclass…you need some anchoring institution for them to…have some continuity and stability.”

That’s what the Roman Catholic Church rationalized when they finally got around to sanctifying the institution of heterosexual marriage 1,200 years after the death of Christ. But there is no evidence this cut down on sexual promiscuity. It is also arguable that forcing homosexuals into heterosexual marriages causes far more social and emotional disruption than allowing them the freedom to make their own choice – even if they don’t have a high IQ.

5. “Homophobia seems to be a rooted condition in us.”

Homophobia is a condition rooted in fear and ignorance and rather than fatalistically giving in to it, it needs to be educated and overcome. Homosexuality is a sexual orientation, rooted in early developmental biology, and it has always been found in a certain percentage of the population, regardless of cultural discrimination.

6. “the proponents are not so much for something as against something.”

A civil marriage contract is not only between two people, it is also between them and society. For instance, our society does not approve of relationships between prostitutes and their customers, or between adults and children, which is why these sort of relationships are not sanctioned by the law. Homosexual marriage says that, unlike prostitution of pedophilia, a committed homosexual relationship is not something that people need to hide or be ashamed of as if it were a crime – it is something that the rest of society should begin to honor and respect. It doesn’t mean that homosexuals are looking for the personal approval of everyone who still opposes the ‘homosexual lifestyle.’ The important thing is whether society and the law will recognize their freedom and basic right to marry the person of their choice and pursue their own happiness.

Dave, Paul and others have addressed quite well the logical fallacies of Derbyshire’s argument, but fewer have tackled convincingly his argument regarding the unchanging nature of human nature. He wrote:

Human nature exists, and has fixed characteristics. We are not infinitely malleable. Human society and human institutions need to ”fit” human nature, or at least not go too brazenly against the grain of it. Homophobia seems to be a rooted condition in us. It has been present always and everywhere, if only minimally (and unfairly — there has always been a double standard here) in disdain for “the man who plays the part of a woman.” There has never, anywhere, at any level of civilization, been a society that approved egalitarian (i.e. same age, same status) homosexual bonding. This tells us something about human nature — something it might be wisest (and would certainly be conservative-est) to leave alone.

This is actually two distinct arguments:

(5a) that homophobia is an essential constituent of human nature, and therefore homophobia should be encouraged and reinforced by social institutions, and

(5b) that heterosexual normativity is an essential constituent of human nature, and therefore heterosexuality itself should be affirmed via heteronormative marriage.

In my recent (2007) book, “Soulfully Gay”, published by Shambhala/Integral Books, I, Joe Perez, argue for what theologians would call a gay-inclusive theological anthropology. In fact, in the past year, the book has been incorporated in the curriculum of some divinity school courses including those from a Roman Catholic perspective (however, I am a former Roman Catholic).

Basically I argue that human nature is not so much pliable as gradually evolutionary, consisting in both permanent universal structures and adaptive expressions. In other words, the essential attributes of human nature have undergone significant changes in how they are conceived in the past decades, and continue to evolve. In my philosophy, both “heterophilia” and “homophilia” are the “two prime directions of Love”, corresponding to Eros and Agape in the Christian tradition, and–more saliently for a secular audience, the principles of self-transcendence and self-immanence in systems theory). Human sexual variations are essentially equally valid expressions of an underlying universal human nature.

On this argument, replying directly to Derbyshire, I would say:

(5a) homophobia may be a universal feature of human nature, but then so is heterophobia, and both of these are “sins”, or immature expressions of Agape and Eros respectively, and therefore irrelevant to the debate over gay marriage. Sins, including phobias and hatreds of any kind, should not be reinforced by social policy.

(5b) both heterosexuality and homosexuality are equally valid expressions of human nature, both based on longstanding religious and philosophical traditions (however, historically, the homophiilic traditions have been relegated mostly to esoteric aspects of those traditions and are only recently coming into greater recognition and acceptance). Therefore, the argument that human nature *demands* heterosexual normative social institutions is fallacious — it “begs the question” of human nature. A more convincing argument would need, at a minimum, to engage my “pro-gay” philosophical anthropology with a convincing case that natural law required an “anti-gay” view. My book has been published for two years, and no such response has been forthcoming from either a religious or a secular perspective, and so forgive me if I consider my own view tentatively to have a certain highly tentative presumption of victory.

Note that neither my response in (5a) or (5b) requires acceptance of any particular religious conception of human nature. Although my book “Soulfully Gay” articulates a Christian (or, some would say, post-Christian) theological argument, the philosophical grounding is not tradition but rather the holonic tenets of the general theory of evolution as defined by systems theorists working at the interdisciplinary intersections of the human sciences.

Illogic is like the spam in that Monty Python sketch — changing the proportions of the dish doesn’t address the fact that I don’t want any.

Looking at the varieties of spam in more detail, we find:

1. “Anti-Minoritarianism. The majority has rights, too.”

The linked essay is a hodge-podge of “rights” claims, from the reasonable (the right not to have one’s money spent to accomodate people who can’t be bothered to learn English after coming to America) to the absurd (the “right” to not be offended). Alas for this argument, it rests squarely upon the latter, which is to say it rests on nonsense.

2. The social recognition of committed heterosexual bonding has been a constant for thousands of years. No-one of a conservative inclination wants to mess lightly with that. Counter-arguments like “so was slavery” are unconvincing, as the occasional slights suffered by homosexual couples are microscopic by comparison with the injustice of human beings buying and selling other human beings.”

The argument about relative degrees is irrelevant. If accepted, it leads to all sorts of obviously preposterous results (e.g. you have no redress if your pocket is picked, because your slight is… what’s the word I want… ah, microscopic! compared to that of someone who lost their life savings to a con artist).

The list goes on to the slippery-slope fallacy, the notion that we ought to embrace stupidity in order to accommodate the stupid (presumably, points 2 and 3 are so placed in order to provide sufficient padding between mutually exclusive points 1 and 4), etc. However, I already had a headache before I started reading this, and I don’t feel the need to aggravate it further.

Traditionally marriage is the transfer of property (a woman) from a man (her father) to another man (her husband). In ancient societies like Greece only Greek men were citizens. Women, like slaves, were the property of citizens and were there to bear children as more workers for the field, and were an important source of sexual pleasure among many legal and acceptable sources of sexual pleasure for the citizen (male and female prostitutes, cortesans, his male and female slaves). Often a Greek or Roman had a wife for children, and a mistress for love. There was the non-egalitarian institution of pederasty but it wasn’t really a romantic relationship and both partners usually went on to marry women. On the other hand, there were adult male couples who lived together and who were at times “tolerated” like in your English village and at times celebrated, like Achilles+Patroclus. But there was no gay marriage movement because marriage was defined as a citizen owning non-citizen female property, there was no institution for an egalitarian relationship between two citizens. Relationships between two women were not considered legal or illegal because women were not citizens. It’s only really in the 20th century that women’s social status was elevated to that similar to men and marriage began to be considered a freely chosen, egalitarian relationship between two adult citizens, closer to the dynamic of the classical romantic gay couple anyway.

‘Homophobia seems to be a rooted condition in us. It has been present always and everywhere, if only minimally (and unfairly — there has always been a double standard here) in disdain for “the man who plays the part of a woman.” There has never, anywhere, at any level of civilization, been a society that approved egalitarian (i.e. same age, same status) homosexual bonding. This tells us something about human nature — something it might be wisest (and would certainly be conservative-est) to leave alone.’

This is patently untrue. One need look no further than our own continent to see couples composed of people who were what we would now classify as LGB or T. Many, if not most, native american tribes respected and revered their Two-Spirit people. (Two spirit is a modern term for this old societal institution; you can find a good starting point on Wikipedia.)

But if you go out beyond that, many African tribes (pre-colonization) had a similar societal role for people who are called LGBT today. Again and again when we look outside of western tradition we can find it.

Well, actually I should correct myself. We CAN find the same thing within western tradition. To quote some historical background from Daniel A. Helminiak’s book on the Bible and homosexuality,

‘A millennium ago, Western society was rather indifferent to homosexuality and even supportive of it. A gay subculture thrived. Clerics and nuns wrote love letters and poetry to one another. All of Europe delighted in the romance of Richard the Lion-Hearted of England and Philip, the king of France. Students at the newly founded Christian universities regularly debated the pros and cons of straight versus gay love. And no law codes in Europe (except in Visigoth Spain) included prohibitions of homosexual acts.

‘By the middle of the eleven hundreds, things began to change. Peter Cantor campaigned for condemnation of gay love affairs among the clergy. Contrary to all precedence, he restricted the term sodomy to refer to same-sex acts…’

I think you get the picture. If you still need some more remedial work, have a look at the late Yale historian John Boswell’s book about gay people in western civilization, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century.

I simply could not stand idly by while the historical record was not merely distorted by completely contradicted in what was supposed to be a ‘logical’ argument based on ‘fact’.

the highest rates of homophobia correlate with the lowest rates of heterosexual marriage, so let’s encourage hetero marriage by enshrining homophobia in law.

This doesn’t make much sense. Virtually no law that we’ve made in human history can be guaranteed against negative unintended consequences. Ought we make no laws, then? Of course not. We try instead to make laws on the basis of reasonable, considered benefits to the law against reasonable expectations of what we are trading off.

Or perhaps it’s that you have a different framework for considering the role of the government and individuals. You seem to speak of marriage as if it’s a benefit that the government discretionarily hands out to individuals. Therefore, before we extend that benefit to more citizens, namely gay citizens, we ought require a compelling case to be made that such citizens are worthy of the right, including proper consideration of the potential negative consequences a detailed plan — a guarantee in fact — that these consequences can be avoided.

If that’s your default operating framework for government, it seems to me decidedly not conservative. For I believe the conservative position starts from the basis that individuals have a natural right to freedoms in their affairs, and that the essential role of government is to protect these rights, imposing limits upon them only when such rights can be shown to interfere with the rights of others or the collective good.

In the case of marriage, then, I think your assumed default position is exactly counter to a conservative stance. The onus should be those who seek to restrict an individual’s right to marriage to demonstrate why such a right interferes with the liberty or well being of the collective as a case against it. Failing such a compelling argument, the government ought take no position. Here you seem to be arguing for the opposite: an activist role for the government in regulating marriage, with your fundamental point being that we ought subject the freeing of some of the regulation (the prohibition against same sex partners) to higher scrutiny prior to agreeing to it.

I will say this: in a debate filled with arguments repeated ad infinitum ad nauseum from both sides, you’ve come up with an argument I haven’t heard before. It would never have occurred to me to discriminate against one minority group in order to teach another one a lesson.

“First, it sends the signal that marriage is simply about numbers: it is an institution that binds two (for the moment) people who are in love. It erases completely the significance that marriage is THE context in which the children of biological parents should be raised.”

I don’t understand this argument. Many gay couples wish to get married precisely in order to start and raise families, while enjoying legal protection for those families. Denying benefits to same-sex couples and their children, or indeed, preventing same-sex couples from even adopting children, sends the message that the government cares more about discriminating than making sure children are raised properly.

“What are the chances that gay marriage would further doom marriage among blacks? I don’t know. Again, if someone can persuade me that the chances are zero, then I would be much more sanguine. But anything more than zero, I am reluctant to risk.”

I’m rather amazed at this statement. You would perpetuate the 100% chance that LGBT people experience continued discrimination in fear of a 0.1% chance that marriage among blacks becomes further eroded? What about the possibility that black marriage becomes strengthened instead? Your opposition due merely to a poorly-substantiated fear suggests that you have more going on than concern over the welfare of black Americans.

Slavery was considered eminently “natural” by the greatest thinkers for most of recorded human history. The fact that it lingered monstrously in the modern world in the U.S. testifies to how “natural” it seemed.

Jesus refers to slaves without even hinting there’s anything wrong with institution itself; Plato, Aristotle, and all of the ancients are unanimous in believing it as “natural” as anything else.

My point is only that the concept of “natural” gets you very little work done.

Conservatism used to adhere to a rigorous epistemological skepticism.

You miss my point — or, rather, you unwittingly make it for me. I was merely arguing that a practice’s or institution’s apparently “natural” existence doesn’t fully legitimate it.

The fact that slavery is now considered monstrous and unnatural after five thousand years being considered eminently natural merely illustrates the limits of “arguing from nature.”

Are men and women equal in the fullest sense of the word? If so, then equality implies fungibility — the two things are interchangeable and one may be substituted for the other in any circumstance whatsoever. (La mort à la différence!) Therefore, it is of no consequence whether I marry a woman or a man.

The fantastical project of yesterday, which was mentioned only to be ridiculed, is to-day the audacious reform, and will be tomorrow the accomplished fact.

This is why so many of those who would defend traditional marriage find themselves unable to form a coherent argument, because traditional marriage is based on the assumption that men and women are fundamentally different, and hence, unequal. Traditional marriage assumes a complementarity of the sexes that becomes absurd if you deny that “man” and “woman” define intrinsic traits, functions, roles.

To declare men and women unequal, however, puts one outside the law — you are guilty of illegal discrimination if you say that there is any meaningful difference between men and women. Yet if you refuse to argue against sexual equality, you cannot argue effectively against gay marriage, and find yourself subjected to lectures about “accessing the positive social norms” with nothing important to say in reply

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=4th&navby=case&no=945065p#footref6
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbulk.resource.org%2Fcourts.gov%2Fc%2FF3%2F80%2F80.F3d.964.94-5115.94-5065.html&ei=mOYKSuCRCM3ktgfv7YyjAQ&rct=j&q=64+USLW+2691%2C+44+Fed.+R.+Evid.+Serv.+281&usg=AFQjCNFXbVBaIWw8MPs2dTWEl4JB6olX5A

In Loving the Court ruled that Virginia’s

antimiscegenation statute violated the Equal Protection and Due Pro-

cess Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Con-

stitution. Loving , 388 U.S. at 11 -12. The fact, however, that nine men

on the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s antimiscegenation stat-

ute did not result in attitudes changing overnight in Virginia, a state

where for over 300 years there had been strong social, legal, and sex-

ual taboos against interracial marriage. The Virginia antimiscegena-

tion statute was on the books in 1967 because a popularly elected

legislature had not acted to repeal it.

Without doubt attitudes have changed over time. However, deep-

seated sexual taboos of the sort at issue here take time to dissipate.

In 1968, the Gallup Poll Organization asked the public how it felt

about interracial intermarriage. At that time, 72% of Americans disap-

proved of interracial marriages. 7 While attitudes have somewhat

changed since 1968, a significant percentage of the population still

holds negative attitudes about marriage between blacks and whites. In

1991, according to a Gallup Poll, 42% of Americans disapproved of

marriage between blacks and whites. In the South the percentage of

disapproval was shown to be 54%

George Gallup, Jr. and Dr. Frank Newport, For First Time, More

Americans Approve of Interracial Marriage than Disapprove, The Gallup

Poll Monthly, Aug. 1991, at 60-62.

8 Id. Gallup defines the South as including Alabama, Florida, Georgia,

Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee,

Virginia , Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas.

The results of the Gallup Poll are based on telephone interviews of 990

adults, eighteen years of age and older, conducted June 13 through 16,

1991. A total of 303 interviews were completed with black individuals,

with the national random sample being supplemented by a sample tar-

geted toward areas known to have higher densities of blacks. Six hundred

and fifty interviews were conducted with whites, and 36 with individuals

who identified themselves as “other.” The question posed to respondents

was “Do you approve or disapprove of marriage between blacks and

whites?”

The Gallup Poll organization reports that “[f]or results based on the

total sample of 990, one can say with 95 percent confidence that the

errors attributable to sampling and other random effects, could be plus

or minus 4 percentage points. For the black sample, the comparable fig-

ure is plus or minus 6 percentage points. In addition to sampling error,

question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can

introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.” Id. at

61.

http://www.pbs.org/weblab/lovestories/digdeeper/pressinfo6.shtml

Press Contact: Fisher Company
914-674-6164

LAWS OF THE LAND:
A Brief History of Interracial Marriage and Race Classification in America

The upcoming PBS series, AN AMERICAN LOVE STORY, reflects how far
Americans have come in pursuit of freedom and identity – and how far we still have to go

In America today, there are millions of people whose families, homes and personal backgrounds embrace more than one race, religion or culture. But rarely has the reality – and naturalness – of their everyday lives and family loyalties been explored on television. Until now. When AN AMERICAN LOVE STORY, AMERICAN PLAYHOUSE’s new 10-hour documentary series about an interracial family in Queens, New York, debuts Sunday, September 12, 1999 through Thursday, September 16 from 9 to 11 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings), the lives and loves of millions of families of multiple identities will be symbolically represented. And while the four members of the Wilson-Sims family don’t claim to speak for anyone but themselves, the very fact that their family’s story exists and is now being told in a major TV documentary is literally a triumph over hundreds of years of anti-interracial American history.

The High Court’s Ruling in the “Summer of Love”

The general media invisibility of interracial couples and their children is directly linked to the historic social taboo, as well as illegality, of mixed marriage in America. It was not until June 12, 1967 – just as the famous hippie “Summer of Love” was beginning – that the U.S. Supreme Court put an end to miscegenation laws, calling them unconstitutional. Until then, more than 40 states had at one time outlawed legal unions between blacks and whites, and by the time of the High Court’s decision, more than 15 still did.

Although there were a miniscule number of recorded interracial marriages prior to the Civil War, they were, not surprisingly, extremely rare. And while there were some voluntary pre-War love matches between persons of different races – not the least of which is the only-recently-acknowledged long-term affair between President Thomas Jefferson and a slave, Sally Hemmings – the majority of interracial encounters were comprised of the rape of black women by white men, both slave masters and others. Indeed, part of the longstanding objection to interracial marriage by some African-Americans is a visceral response to this history of violation.

In the years after the Civil War, it was an eagerness to “preserve the integrity of the white race” by preventing the birth of mixed-race children that in great part motivated states to pass miscegenation laws. Some states, like California, chose to specifically prohibit “intermarriage of white persons with Chinese, Negroes, mulattos, or persons of mixed blood descended from a Chinaman or Negro from the third generation inclusive.” In 1869, a Georgia judge blocked the marriage of a white Frenchman and a black woman by saying, “The amalgamation of the races is not only unnatural but is always productive of deplorable results. Our daily observations show us that the offspring of these unnatural connections are generally sick and effeminate.” And a Missouri judge in 1883 prevented an intermarriage, because, “It is stated as a well authenticated fact that if the [children] of a black man and white woman, and a white man and a black woman intermarry, they cannot possibly have any progeny, and such a fact sufficiently justifies those laws which forbid the intermarriage of blacks and whites.”

In contrast to the ignorance that muddied such racist rulings, the clearer prejudice of Virginia’s Judge Leon Bazile in the famous 1959 Loving case (in which a black man and white woman were sentenced to prison for trying to circumvent Virginia law by marrying in Washington DC) is almost refreshing. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Maylay and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” he said. “And but for the interference with His arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriages.” The 1967 federal law superceded state statutes, but it took decades for all states to officially remove these laws from their books; Alabama did so just this year.

The Measure of the “One Drop Rule”

The first Gallup poll conducted on the issue of interracial marriage was in 1958 and showed that 94% of whites opposed such unions – and while disapproval has lessened in recent decades, it’s hardly been a 180-degree shift. But mainstream America has been more consistent about how it chooses to view the multi-racial children produced by these marriages. When it comes to people who are part white and part Asian, Hispanic, Native American, or anything else except African-American, there seem to be no hard and fast rules and society often seems content to “tolerantly” view such persons as “exotic.” But when it comes to the progeny of whites and blacks, the decision is clear: only white is white. Black is everything else.

This distinction is rooted in the infamous “one drop rule,” which holds that if you have “one drop” of African-American blood in your heritage, you are black. This standard was devised by slave owners in order to swell their slave ranks, as well as to avoid legal challenges to family entitlements by mixed-race offspring, such as surnames and inheritance. The “one drop rule” went from convention to law when it was endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court as a result of its landmark 1896 Plessey vs. Ferguson ruling, in which Homer Plessey, who had one black great grandparent, was denied the right to ride in a railroad car reserved for whites, so long as there were “separate but equal” accommodations. However, definitions of what constituted a “drop” could vary from state to state. At one time in Florida, a person was “legally white” if he or she had no more than one non-white great, great grandparent. But that same person was deemed black in neighboring Georgia. And in Arizona, persons of mixed race of any kind were prohibited from marrying anyone, even each other.

This insistence on making race a matter of legal formula, rather than personal identity based on one’s cultural and family experience, has been a source of pain, shame and confusion for mixed-race people for generations. And it’s not only whites who have created the turmoil. In the black community, antipathy still exists between African-Americans of lighter and darker complexion. This rivalry also dates back to slave days, when lighter-skinned slaves (frequently mixed-race persons) were often “rewarded” with assignments to house duties rather than fieldwork, and sometimes given special privileges. In the years after the War, a color caste system developed among blacks that mimicked the values of the white power structure: darker blacks were viewed as inferior to those who were lighter. A paradoxical parallel to the “one drop rule” emerged, known as the “paper bag” rule, namely, if you are darker than the shade of brown of a paper bag, you are deemed “too” dark. This phenomenon, which still exists in some quarters, is virtually never discussed by blacks with whites – and explains why, for example, Spike Lee’s breakthrough film, School Daze, a satire of color distinctions on a black college campus, was a commercial flop; it made little sense to white audiences and greatly discomfited black viewers.

The fact that nearly all African-Americans can claim white or Indian blood somewhere in their background, and that about 15% of white Americans would completely fail a one drop test, has done nothing to smooth the path of identity for multi-racial Americans, many of whom reject blood drops, paper bags and other divisive devices in their search for a broader sense of self. Traditionally, interracial couples raise their children to view themselves as black, knowing that this is the default identity assigned in a society that will regard them as black, whether they see themselves as such or not. And ironically, some African-Americans have in essence reclaimed the “one drop rule” as their own, in an effort to foster black pride and hold onto as many persons in their demographic coffers as possible.

It is for these last reasons that the decision by the U.S. Census Bureau to respond favorably to years of formal and informal requests by mixed-race persons for a racial category that expresses their diverse origins is being less than welcomed by some black critics. They charge that a “multi-racial” distinction is similar to the South African apartheid divisions of black, white and colored, and therefore encourages increased racial separation and prejudice, rather than promoting unity and acceptance.

But for many of the millions of multi-racial Americans and interracial couples who are weary of conventions and categories defining their lives, this step by the Census Bureau seems like one in the right direction. And, like the premiere of AN AMERICAN LOVE STORY, the first-ever major television series to mirror their lives and family experience, it may feel like a turning point in history.

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July 1999

take a woman who goes into shooting adult films. and say she works in that industry for 20 years, all the while her ideas of right and wrong and self esteem are completely skewed. she may have made the rational choice to do this, she may have not. Either way, the path she chose and lived is an outcome of her own life, that includes her predispositions, her desires, her family and other enviromental factors. since her life may or may not of been a choice, am i supposed to welcome that into my life and society as a norm? after all gay stigmas have been removed is something like this next to be pushed down our throats.
civil rights injustices that were built into our society in the past have been rectified, i just dont think we should label something that the Majority of our current society, as well as every major religious institution in history has deemed as moral degradation to fit under the umbrella of a civil or human right.

The vital flaw in your example is that the woman of who you’re speaking is working in the adult film industry for decades and is exposed to a system of morals that is different from your own. It is that exposure that influences her.

In the vast majority of cases, homosexual children are raised by heterosexual parents. Yet they still turn out to be gay, even when raised in extremely religious environments.

Bad analogy.

Also, just because a belief has been around for a long time or is embraced by many people doesn’t make it correct or good. Slavery was condoned by many major religions until relatively recently, as was/is the concept of women being the property of men.

So we’re supposed to create laws so that you don’t have to put up with lifestyles you aren’t even involved in? So we’re supposed to follow the dictates of religious institutions even though there’s separation of church and state?

If you aren’t gay, you are not going to become gay. No one is expecting you to participate in the gay lifestyle. Religious institutions still have the right to not marry people. My husband and I weren’t allowed to be married in the Catholic church because I was currently unaffiliated with a parish. It’s their right. No one’s taking your rights or religious institutions’ rights away. The point is to merely allow gays the option of a legal option to bind their relationship. It has nothing to do with you.

ttp://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2009.04.24.001.pdart
The Institution Formerly Known As Marriage
by Jennifer Roback Morse
April 24, 2009
The Iowa court’s recent decision does not simply broaden marriage, it radically changes its nature. While marriage previously served public purposes of attaching mothers and fathers to their children and one another, now marriage merely serves as affirmation of adult feelings.

The Iowa Supreme Court recently proved that the critics of same-sex “marriage” are correct: we are not being urged to make marriage more inclusive, but to radically redefine the nature of marriage itself. With its decision, the Iowa Supreme Court covertly but profoundly changed the meaning of marriage. The Court abolished the essential public purpose of marriage, and replaced it with a new understanding of marriage that is neither essential nor public. The Institution Formerly Known as Marriage will be an empty shell in Iowa. As the movement to redefine marriage spreads across the country, citizens should look to Iowa to see what this actually entails.

The essential purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another. Absent this purpose, we would not need marriage as a distinct social institution. Human beings are not born as rational autonomous actors, they are the immature products of sexual relations between a man and a woman, and they need the assistance of adults to survive. Marriage exists, in all times and places, to solve this social problem. If our offspring were born as adults, ready to live independently, or if we reproduced through some form of asexual process, we would not need anything like marriage.

Marriage also has a profoundly social purpose. Marriage creates its own small society consisting of mother, father, and children. That small social unit contributes to the larger society by creating a functioning future—the next generation. Everyone benefits from having a next generation that can sustain the society and keep its institutions going. Even when I personally am old, and even if I have not had any children myself, I benefit from the fact that younger people are building cars and houses, providing medical and legal care, starting new businesses, and running old ones. In modern developed countries, the family also saves the state a lot of money by taking care of its own dependent young, rather than foisting that responsibility onto the taxpayers. Thus, the benefits of marriage go far beyond the benefits to the individual members of the family.

So, what did the Iowa Supreme Court have to say about the purposes of marriage? Did they view the requirement that marriage be between a man and a woman as a violation of the principle of equal protection? Indeed. As the Court argued, “Equal protection demands that laws treat alike all people who are ‘similarly situated with respect to the legitimate purposes of the law.'” If the Court can convince itself that the dual gender requirement bears no relationship to the State’s purpose in having a marriage statute in the first place, then that requirement violates the Equal Protection clause of the Iowa Constitution.

It should be evident that if the purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another, then the dual gender requirement is perfectly permissible. Same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples are not the same with respect to this purpose. The Court had to come up with a very limited understanding of the purposes of marriage in order to maintain that opposite-sex and same-sex couples are in fact similarly situated.

The Court enumerated several purposes directly. Marriage provides an institutional basis for defining relational rights and responsibilities; marriage allows people to pool their resources; marriage recognizes people’s commitments; marriage provides comfort and happiness; marriage is a status, not a contract.

But these reasons do not explain why we need marriage in particular. I have a relationship with my next-door neighbor. My family pools resources with other members of a boat club. I have commitments to my employees and business associates. A pet brings me comfort and happiness. We do not need the unique relationship called marriage for any of these purposes.

The Court alluded to several other possible purposes, without including them within its list of state purposes. “Therefore, with respect to the subject and the purposes of Iowa’s marriage laws, we find that the plaintiffs are similarly situated compared to heterosexual persons. Plaintiffs are in committed and loving relationships, many raising families, just like heterosexual couples. Moreover, official recognition of their status provides an institutional basis for defining their fundamental relational rights and responsibilities, just as it does for heterosexual couples.”

The Court does not seem to realize that if these purposes really exhaust the list of legitimate state purposes of marriage, then there is no reason to have marriage as a distinct legal structure in the first place. Moreover, these are all private purposes, not public purposes, of marriage.

The same-sex couples before the Court claim to be committed and to love each other. Why do we need marriage for that? I’m committed to my sister. I love my best friend. Are we second class citizens because we are not married to each other? There is no state purpose whatsoever to be served by my having some legal statement or affirmation attached to my love for my sister. Besides, who really wants the Court, or the state or anyone else saying that our love is important to the state? People’s feelings are none of the state’s business.

The Court seems to understand this, for it gently and subtly elides the key issue of marriage law when it goes on to say: “Society benefits, for example, from providing same-sex couples a stable framework within which to raise their children . . . just as it does when that framework is provided for opposite-sex couples.” But wait a minute: How in the world does a same-sex couple obtain a child that is “theirs?”

This is precisely the way in which same-sex couples differ from opposite-sex couples. No child is born from a homosexual union. A child born to one of them has another parent who has been quietly escorted into the lab or the backdoor, to make the conception possible. That person is quickly escorted right back out the door, before he can claim any parental rights, or the child can claim any relational rights. Some of us believe that these two people, the child and the opposite-sex parent, require and deserve some protection. But the Court of Iowa does not think them even worth mentioning.

The social purpose of marriage has always been to attach mothers and fathers to their children, and to each other. This universal social purpose does not even make it onto the Iowa Court’s short list. The reason should be obvious: opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples are not similarly situated with respect to that purpose of marriage. If the Court found that attaching children to their parents and parents to one another is a purpose of marriage, they would be unable to sustain their claim that man woman marriage violates the principle of equal protection under the law.

Society needs marriage because children have rights to care from their parents, rights which they can not defend on their own. Societies create marriage to pro-actively protect the legitimate entitlements of children, and to provide for the future of the society. According to the Supreme Court of Iowa, these provisions for children are no longer the purpose of marriage. We are left to guess as to how this truly essential public function will be performed, now that the Court has surreptitiously removed it from the list of marriage’s jobs.

Iowa is a relatively homogenous and prosperous state. This newly created lacuna in the purposes of the law may not harm Iowa much at first. But other states have more diversity of opinion and practice about socially acceptable behavior, as well as greater economic and social stresses on married life and childrearing. In those states, the cost of redefining marriage is likely to be more pronounced and immediate.

In sum, the Court has elevated the private, inessential purposes of marriage to the highest point in the hierarchy of values of marriage. Given this new understanding, neither the longevity of marriage, nor fidelity within marriage can remain as important values. By the time the opponents of conjugal marriage are finished with their redefinitions, marriage will be little more than a five-year renewable-term contract. The Institution Formerly Known as Marriage will be nothing but a couple of individuals, loosely stapled together by the state.

Advocates of natural marriage, as opposed to genderless marriage, believe that society needs marriage to be a child-centered, gender-based social institution. We have been arguing all along that same-sex “marriage” will be a gender-neutral institution, in which children are only a peripheral concern. When the Supreme Court of Iowa established same-sex “marriage” by judicial decree, they proved our point for us.

Public Discourse, The Institution Formerly Known As Marriage, by Jennifer Roback Morse (13 May 2009)

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“Head and Master” laws were a set of American property laws that permitted a husband to have final say regarding all household decisions and jointly owned property without his wife’s knowledge or consent, until 1979 when Louisiana became the final state to repeal them. Until then, the matter of who paid for property or whose name was on had been irrelevant.

The law existed on the basis that the legal definition of marriage, during the period the laws were in effect, delegated husband’s role as supporting the family and the wife’s as housekeeping, childrearing, and providing sex.

Historical Example

In Louisiana, 1974, Joan Feenstra had her husband incarcerated for molesting their young daughter. To pay his lawyer, he mortgaged their home, which the law did not require his wife’s knowledge or permission to do, despite the fact that the wife herself had fully paid for the house. Feenstra then dropped the charges, legally separated from her husband, and returned to court to challenge the constitutionality of the law. The Supreme Court invalidated the mortgage, concluding that the statute was, in fact, unconstitutional.

I believe that the meaning of marriage is ultimately owned and defined by its participants in myriad ways for different reasons, so I reject the assumption that some social institution or policy has to be defined by some bullet-pointed list of “core” sociological principles or desired effects in order to be justified. However, I do think the question is interesting enough that I’d like to attempt an answer. I don’t think it’s the sort of answer you’re looking for, but in my opinion it strikes at the heart of the matter under discussion.

I think that, at it’s core, same-sex marriage is the attainment of equality for same-sex couples. That is, its full meaning cannot be derived independently, or only from universal features of human nature, but instead stems from three things: 1) the historically established existence and nature of opposite-sex marriage (including the privileged status and benefits that this institution confers), 2) the discrimination and inequality experienced by gays and lesbians throughout practically all of human history, and 3) the presumption that citizens in a democracy should enjoy freedom and equality under the law.

In the same way that, as you said, the nature of humankind is two-sexed, and the nature of human procreation is opposite-sexed, it is also the nature of humankind to have a minority of members that are attracted to those of the same sex. That minority, due perhaps in part to an orientation that was not conducive to procreation, but due also to ignorance, bigotry, and religious dogma, has suffered a vastly inferior social status throughout nearly all of human civilization. Its sexual behavior was considered obscene (and often criminal), its relationships unspeakable, its members invisible.

But with the advent of concepts such as “democracy”, “human rights”, and “equality”, there finally arrived a time when members of that minority sought to gain a status fully equal to their peers. This sought-after status comes in different forms, such as legal protections (i.e. employment nondiscrimination) and social acceptance (i.e. being “out” to friends and family). But a large part of what defines this minority is their relationships, and for this minority to be fully equal, their relationships have to be equal as well. Hence same-sex marriage.

You’re correct: at its core, same-sex marriage is not about love, sexual orientation, or attraction. It’s not unique or independent; in the absence of opposite-sex marriage, there would probably be no push or desire at all for same-sex marriage. And it’s definitely not foundational, since it relies on certain civilizational developments that occurred only recently in human history. It is, at its core, about equality. The true meaning of same-sex marriage is that it corrects a historical injustice by granting to its participants a status that is equal to that enjoyed by their heterosexual peers. Gaining that status, however, requires that it meaningfully resemble its counterpart in every possible way. Thus, it seeks to adopt the values and traditions that have become part of opposite-sex marriage: love, sexual attraction, weddings, monogamy; for the same reason it also seeks the same legal benefits and responsibilities. The only difference, as far as its advocates are concerned, is that its participants are couples of the same sex. And thus, as you requested, it becomes both “gay” and “marriage”, distinguishable from other relationships.

From this starting point you proceed to reify your “universals” into a theory of marriage that has little connection with its history, anthropology or current sociology: a classic logical fallacy. Historically, marriage has been a form of property management among men of the means of production when these where primarily in the hands of the extended family. That property, of course, included women and children. The industrial revolution and changes in the status of women have radically altered that socical context and consequently the meaning of marriage in modern society.

But let’s put inventive social theory aside and search for a concrete argument, and we find: “Where the nonmarital trends are highest, it is most clear that increased sex segregation has led to social pathologies; and the disconnect with responsible procreation has been both a cause and an effect of these pathologies. Marraige is the solution, but merging it with “gay marriage” would deny us of that solution.”

This is in fact identical to the proposition that Heather put forward, and falls victim to the same critique, exhaustively rehearsed by many posters above. In summary, gay marriage can hardly be held responsible for the huge increase in single parenthood, and no one has yet provided a shred of evidence that it would have the slightest effect on this long-term phenonemon, among urban blacks or anyone else.

To which I might add that the highest divorce rates are consistently in the most socially conservative areas of the US (deep south and Appalachians) as are the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs. Some analysis of these empirical trends might be a better starting point for those concerned about responsible procreation, rather than working up a lather about marriage equality which, at most, is of marginal significance to this problem.

Marriage does have a core meaning that is expressed in different cultures, across time and geography, in terms of certain universals. There are variables, too, but these are what the advocates of “gay marriage” have emphasized over the universals.

In simple terms marriage, at its core, is a combination — 1) sex integration, 2) provision for responsible procreation, and 3) a coherent whole (a social institution) that is foundational to civil society. It pre-exists government and is not reliant on government; but government, on behalf of civil society, accords marriage a preferential status based on its core meaning.

So-called “gay marriage” is sex-segregative, non-procreative, and is not a foundational social institution. Due to this, it is fragile and utterly dependant upon Government to maintain.

The core meaning of marriage is expressed in our legal system. The man-woman criterion stands for sex integration; the marital presumption of paternity stands for the provision of responsible procreation. These are combined as a coherent whole and around this core we have variable lines of eligibility. This core is not mere tradition but universal.

People who support “gay marriage” (an oxymoron) deny there is a core meaning of marriage. Indeed, they generally presuppose that Government owns marriage and that it is only through state endorsement that marriage exists at all.

But marriage is first and foremost a social institution. It has social and legal status. This is a preferential status. It is not merely tolerative nor is it merely protective.

When, in an under-class, the message given and received is that marriage is disconnected from procreation, and from uniting the sexes, the nonmarital trends rapidly rise and stay high. In other words, if you keep telling people that marriage and babies are seperate things, then, people will act as if that was true.

The arguments for “gay marriage” tell that false story. But “gay marriage’ attacks the core meaning of marriage. First, of course, it directly attacks the man-woman criterion in the law and the man-woman basis in the culture. Next, it deeply undercuts or seeks to abolish the sexual basis for marriage: the marital presumption of paternity which arises from the sexual type of relationship of husband and wife. This presumption (culturally and legally) is largely the reasosn that the conjugal relationshp is a public type of sexual relationship. It is two-sexed.

Advocates of “gay marriage” emphasize sexual orientation but marriage is indifferent to that. There is no sexual orientation requirement in the law; neither to make one ineligible nor to make one eligible to marry.

Advocates talk about love but that is a relatively recent modern tradition; advocates disdain appeals to tradition despite their heavy reliance on the notion of romance and love. When an advocate talks of love or romance or commitment, he is not distinguishing marriage from non-marriage, at least not in the law. Instead he is using love and romance and commitment as euphemisms for sexual attraction and sexual behavior.

But consider the attack on responsible procreation. Advocates will insist that there is no legal requirement that each and every marriage be forced, by the government, to procreate. Then they fold their arms and say this must mean there is no legitimate connection between marriage and babies.

Yet the marital presumption of paternity is part and parcel of that to which each person who marries consents. It is a rebutable presumption, for sure, but even its criteria for challenge is based on the opposite-sexed basis of marriage and does not apply to the one-sexed scenario.

In addition to these two obvious legal requirements (man-woman, presumption of paternity) this sexual basis is expressed in provisions for consumation, adultery, annulment, and so forth. but the man-woman criterion and the marital presumption are clearly definitive of marital status.

But what of this rule of arugment that says something must be a legal requirement to be an essential of marriage?

Well, no legal requirement for love, nor for sexual attraction, nor for romance, nor for sexual orientation. Yet advocates of “gay marriage” emphasize all of these as if these were definitive of marriage in the law.

Obviously, their stated standards are used only when attacking the core of marriage. They throw those standards aside when asserting their own notion of “gay marriage”. This is unreasonable and reveals a profound flaw in their arugmentation.

At root they are opposed to the arbitrary use of government authority. Yet they depend on such arbitariness. They argue for rewriting the boundaries of marriage to expand the idea and make room for people based on sexual orientation. Yet the marriage law does not test for sexual orientation nor does its boundaries depend on what advocates insist is at the center of “gay marriage”.

Boundaries run around the core of marriage. Not all consenting adults may marry. This is true in all societies. The line-drawing is variable but the core is not.

Due to societal concerns about sex integration and responsible procreaton, we draw lines against some related people, but not all related people; against some previously married people, but not all previously married people; against some underaged people, but not against all underaged people. And so on.

The lines are based on the combination of uniting man and woman, according to our public moral standards and our esteem for the social institution of marriage. These lines serve to outline what for our society is preferred in family formation: integrating fatherhood and motherhood and encoding the principle that each of us, as part of a procreative duo, is responsible for the children we create and bring into this world (barring dire circumstances or tragedy).

Ask an advocate of “gay marriage” to justify these lines and they will either abandon the lines or resort to citing the very concerns that are at the core of marriage — arising from the man-woman basis rather than “love” or “commitment” or whatever.

Merging marriage with ‘gay marriage’ means gutting marriage of its core — of what distinguishes marriage qua marriage. It means eraising the lines — or making them unsustainable — such that the vast range of nonmarital arrangments and types of relationshps would be equated to the union of husband and wife.

No sexual behavior requirement in “gay marriage”? Then on what possible basis would a line be drawn against more than two or against some related people or against people whose social age is higher than their chronological age? The line-drawing business of government is rendered entirely arbitrary or, worse, dysfunctional.

The stated standards of the “gay marriage” argument, as highlighted in both the sexual orientation emphasis and the attack on the centrality of procreation, are self-defeating. That is, if you turn those standards on “gay marriage” and test its so-called essentials, you will discover that these standards destroy the claim for “gay marriage”.

It destroys the special status — the preferential basis — for the institution that advocates claim they wish to expand. It flattens marriage to a merely protective status. It reduces marriage to government bennies. That is, instead of accorded bennies based on the core meaning that is preferred by society, the advocates reverse engineer and claim bennies are definitive of the thing being recognized.

All of this corrupts society’s cultural and legal support for a foundational social institution.

The most vulnerable are those within subgroups where the marriage idea has already been battered with misleading notions that seperate marriage from procreation and from sex integration.

Where the nonmarital trends are highest, it is most clear that increased sex segregation has led to social pathologies; and the disconnect with responsible procreation has been both a cause and an effect of these pathologies. Marraige is the solution, but merging it with “gay marriage” would deny us of that solution.

On the other hand, a simple system of designated beneficiaires — with no sexual basis — has long existed in our society. This is not marriage and is not supposed to be marriage-lite. It is an alternative to those who’d form nonmarital arrangements or who’d choose to live outside of marriage.

The choice to form a nonmarital arrangement, such as so-called “gay marriage”, is a liberty exercised, not a right denied.

The anthropological record includes the marriages of landless peasants and people with little if any property to manage. The history of the extended family is based on the union of husband and wife. You have offered an inventive retelling of the historical record.

The exhaustive rehearsals upthread do not address the substantive point. Marriage integrates the sexes and provides for responsible procreation. Gutting marriage of this core meaning removes the solution to the social pathologies that stem from increased sex segregation and decreased procreation of the responsible kind.

If the solution is not marriage, then, please point to the plausible solution you feel is in the offing.

Where marriage participation is high, the rates of divorce may also be higher. No marriage is an island and the marriage culture has certainly taken a beating these past few decades. Pointing to premarital sexual behavior (strongly associated with higher rates of STDs) underlines the point I made earlier about the core meaning of marriage being the solution rather than the problem.

Your bumpersticker, “marraige equality”, does not substitute for an actual argument in favor of imposing “gay marriage” on all of society.

Within a one-sexed arrangement, sexualized or not, there is no sex equality. Excluding one sex does not integrate the sexes. Segregating fatherhood and motherhood does not provide for responsible procreation.

Now, sure, you can argue in favor of abandoning the societal concerns for this core of marriage. And many who advocate for SSM do so insistently.

But what is the core of “gay marriage”? Plainly state its meaning.

If you emphasize sexual orientation, then, please point to the legal requirement for homosexuality where people show-up for a license for their one-sex relationship. There is none, of course.

If you emphasize love, then, point to the love requirement. There is none. Point to the sexual attraction requiremnt. None there either.

When stripped of its reliance on gay identity politics, the argument for “gay marriage” is neither about gay nor marriage. It becomes a more conservative and straightforward call for protections based on certain vulnerabilities experienced by nonmarital families.

And these families are not defined by sexual orientation nor by sexual attraction nor by sexual behavior. Protections should not be limited by criteria that are irrelevant.

It is important to distinguish marriage from nonmarriage. We do this by idenitifying the core of the social institution of marriage. Then we draw lines around that core which are sustainable and justifiable.

Since “gay marriage” is advocated without a core meaning (apart from the assertion of gay identity politics) it is not distinguishable from the rest of the nonmarriage category for that reason alone. But the need for protections do provide a core meaning for a subset of the nonmarriage category.

So protections, or even a formal protective relationship status, might be justifiable and sustainable but not on the sole basis of gayness.

On the other hand, marital status is a preferential status because of the core meaning of marriage. And both the man-woman criterion nor the marital presumption of paternity are indifferent, or neutral, in terms of sexual orientation. Indeed, most of those who have formed same-sex households (the Census term for households presumed to be headed by homosexual couples) have been previously married (i.e. in unions of husband and wife). And where there are children in such households, most, by far, migrated from those previously procreative relationshps of either mom or dad. So they demonstrate that the man-woman criterion is not a barrier to the gay person and the marital presumption of paternity protects the gay parents and their children.

Now, if your radical proposition can be justified, without resort to an assertion of the supremacy of gay identity politics, go ahead and make your case — in principle and also with empirical evidence.

The societal concerns for responsible procreation and sex integration are to be muted, for the sake of “gay marriage”, but the huge emphasis on identity politics is to be amplified at the same time, right?

Distinguish the relationship type you have in mind from the rest of the nonmarraige category, if you ca. And point to the legal requirements that define what distinguishes. Further, justify the boundaries around those essentials, if there are any, without pointing back to the core of marriage, as I have described it.

And if you can find any exmaples from the historical or the anthropological record for “gay marriage”, go ahead, supply all that you can pull from your vault. Afterall, you must justify your certitude.

Also, regarding the divorce rates, these are inflated, unfortunately, by the minority who marry-divorce-remarry serially. Denying the core of marriage does not provide a solution for higher divorce rates. But the radical reform of unilateral divorce does provide lessons for those who seek yet anoher radical reform of marriage — both in the law and in the culture. Where divorce becomes very common, their children become more prone to divorce even though they may hold marriage up as an ideal for romantic emphasis. This is the emphasis of those who advocate for “gay marriage”. Likewise, those advocates will point to examples of extramarital procreation such as the use of “donors” by lone individuals. That’s another example of segregating fatherhood from motherhood. Indeed, this is extramarital procreation even when married people partake of the practice. It requires the pre-emptive relinquishment of parental status. This is the inverse of the marital presumption of paternity. Also, in practice, statistically, it is the inverse of the core of marriage.

These are not sociological theories.

The marital presumption of paternity is both about rights and obligations of marriage to which those who enter the social institution give their consent. That is not based on whatever an all-male or an all-female arrangment might do romantically or sexually.

If this vigorously enforced legal presumption is not evidence, in your view, then this explains your anemica account of the historical and anthropologocial record.

I asked for the core meaning of “gay marriage” and you offered none. That comes as no surprise, frankly, because advocates generally run away from the very notion of a core meaning by which this type of relationship can be distinguished from other types of relationships and living arrangements. The lack of a distinction means you do not recognize marriage; you recognize something else for which you seek to appropriate the label (and the social esteem) of marriage.

Please note that I did not ask about private motivations.

Marital status is both a social and a legal status — indeed a preferential status — based on a type of public relationship.

It is a type of relationship that is public. And it due to the sexual aspect that is two-sexed and which is indeed expressed in legal requirements of which two are 1) the man-woman criterion (integration of the sexes) and 2) the marital presumption of paternity (provision for responsible procreation). The third factor at the core of marriage is that it is a foundational social institution of civil society. The first factor is not a standalone, as advocates of SSM pretend. It is combined with the second factor to form a coherent whole, i.e. a social institution.

Both the first and the second factors arise from sex differentation. If you see “gay marriage” through the lense of sexual orientation, as does the SSM camaign and its argumentation, then, you would not deny the significance of sex differentation in the emphasis on sexual orientation. So this fact of differentiation is not a mere quibble.

It certainly is highly relevant and of utmost importance when it comes to the marital presumption of paternity. This clearly makes of marriage a sexual type of public relationship. This is found in the law and in the culture. It is not a mere quibble. And it is not arbitrary. The presumption is vigorously enforced. It is a rebutable presumption, in most places, but that is based on the opposite-sexed nature of human procreation.

None of that is merely a theory — sociologically or otherwise. I am stating the plain facts of the matter.

The social institution of marriage is not defined by private contracts nor is it defined by private motivations. It has a shared public meaning and its core is directly expressed in legal requirements that you seem too ready to push aside.

The nature of humankind is two-sexed; the nature of human procreation is opposite-sexed; and the nature of human community is both-sexed. From this, the foundations of civilization arise. Marriage is foundational precisely because it is a universal human institution with universal features.

You might wish to emphasize variable features and deny that there are any universals. That’s okay. It is done everyday by advocates of “gay marriage”. But then by doing so you owe society a core meaning of “gay marriage” by which it can be distinguished from the rest of the nonmarital category of relationship types and kinds of living arrangements.

If you cannot do this, then, you have no business talking of marriage, much less “gay marriage”, as an authority on what is and is not supported by the available evidence. Instead you’d rely on an arbitrariness that is supposedly denounced by SSM argumentation itself.

The task is quite simple, given your certitude: plainly state the core meaning of “gay marriage”, that is its essentials without which it would be neither gay nor marriage. Then, draw the lines around that such that this relationship, by type, will be distinguishable from others. If these lines are sustainable, provide the basics of how the lines arise from the core or the essentials around which these lines are drawn.

This can be done for marriage, as I’ve described, but it appears to be an insurmountable obstacle for those who insist that “gay marriage” is about enjoying equal rights and status with marriage.

“Gay marriage” is not foundational and is not evident in the anthropological and historical record, except perhaps rarely and very recently. Yet even at that — in places like Canada or Holland — the nonmarital trends have risen while partcipation in “gay marriage” has declined.

Your comment did hint that participation rates are highly relevant, one way or the other. You said, “a proportionaly small number”, when you should have said that “gay marriage” — even in the more expansive form of “same-sex householding” — is a marginal practice within the adult homosexual population anyplace it has been enacted or imposed in the law. It is not normative even among that segment of the population.

I don’t know what kind of empirical evidence you expect, but you offer precious little yourself — and nothing of significance in terms of a principled basis for the proposed reform in the law and in the culture.

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/05/27/culberson-makes-everyone-dumber-on-gay-marriage/
http://www.studentsandleaders.org/john_culberson.html
Rep. Culberson Offers Incoherent And Illogical Stance On Gay Marriage

Last night, C-SPAN aired the lasted segment of Students & Leaders series, with Rep. John Culberson (R-TX). Addressing a group of D.C. students, he repeatedly emphasized the need for less government interference in Americans’ lives. “I’m very focused on eliminating — shutting down as much of the federal government’s functions as I can,” Culberson said, while espousing state and local control.

However, when a student asked Culberson about state control over gay marriage, Culberson rapidly descended into incoherence. He began by declaring, “It’s up to the states.” But by the end of his rambling answer, he tried to explain why the federal government “cannot permit” a state like Vermont to make its own rules. All this while repeating that people’s “privacy is fundamental”:

CULBERSON: Well under the 10th amendment, the states have a first responsibility for providing for public safety, public health, public morality. All issues that just affect the people within that state. It’s up to the states. And you either follow the constitution or you don’t. […]

Federal law cannot permit — if one state, Vermont, wants to do that, you can’t let that cross state lines. You’ve got to let — frankly, a lot of these issues have got to be left up to the states. But the federal government cannot permit for example — The federal government has a legitimate role in interstate commerce. And that’s where the federal government comes in. I think the federal government can’t recognize — shouldn’t recognize it, it’s just a bad idea. And uh — But fundamentally, the right of privacy’s fundamental. I’m not interested — what people do at home’s their own business.

Culberson’s response reminded ThinkProgress of a famous scene from the movie Billy Madison in which a debate judge tells Adam Sandler’s character, “Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to” your “rambling, incoherent response.” Watch our compilation:

At one point in his answer, Culberson tried to frame the question as one of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment:

If you provide federal civil rights to an individual based on one particular type of private sexual behavior, under the Equal Protection clause, I’m obligated to provide civil rights protection to any other type of private sexual behavior. Think about that.

Of course, the government already provides civil rights to one particular type of sexual behavior — heterosexual behavior. By Culberson’s own argument, therefore, the government is “obligated” to protect homosexual “behavior” as well.

It’s no wonder that Culberson has earned a a zero percent rating from the Human Rights Campaign every year he’s been in office.

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=9877267&postID=8415573477955465528&page=1
http://www.sailorette.blogspot.com/

“Offer easily verifiable, no-commentary statements that don’t even mention homosexuality, such as “@n@l sex has a higher risk of STD transference” and you’ll be called a homophobe.”

The issue is not that the statement is merely a tautology when it’s centrifugalized against its own torque, but rather how it has been utilized as a club to beat down homosexuality and vilify the very nature of one’s sexual orientation. Second, what does one’s preference when it comes to sexual activity, which can equally be juxtaposed with heterosexual venture (i.e. porn industry and incessant fascination with anal sex), have to do with gay marriage or even straight marriage? As a heterosexual male, I do not have to adore gay sex nor be obligated to censure lesbian “action” just to sanction gay marriage. I can entirely understand if a gay or a lesbian couple show no fondness to my sexual life style but neither of us should have a right to suppress the other for being different.

By the way, do you also reprimand cunnilingus where two woman perform such act on each other? If so, do you abstain from such activity in your sexual behavior? How maliciously flagrant to see people discount lesbianism when the discourse is on sexual behaviors while the discussion solely is diverted to male-to-male conduct.

“I don’t think homosexual sexual activity is healthy, normal or good. Neither does my family. Ditto for serial divorcées, sex outside of marriage, substance abuse, clinical obesity, etc… a gal my folks have been friends with for nearly 15 years invited them to her “wedding”– religious ceremony only (gee, and without forcing everyone to give gov’t support!) — and got quite angry-hurt when they refused.”

Demonize then expect a Charlie Goodvibe to show up at your door, “accept” you for “not accepting” him — how perspicacious of you. Your logic is a bit inverted. You can’t hope people not to be disturbed by your lack of understanding of their plight. You seek friendship while marginalizing the very core of one’s innate actuality. if your folks deemed her life style so offensive that they had no other choice to reject an invitation to the ceremony which almost every person in the world considers as one of the most important day of his or her entire life, then perhaps, they should have severed their acquaintanceship.

Of course, once again, a congenital idiocy reveals itself in the most grotesque fashion: A wedding is a celebration of one’s relationship with a significant other and not their “bed time” behavior. I don’t remember going to any wedding and wondering to myself that the main reason for my attendance is that, at some time in the future, there would be a penis and vagina greeting each other. Perhaps, your folks need to be reminded of that very fact. But no, let’s rub it on her face by playing a pious self-righteous indignation — “we don’t hate you, we just can’t accept you for who you are.” Note how self-defeating the truce that’s being offered embellishes itself. In a way, the underlying message is, “don’t call me a hater me for not accepting you.” Read on…

Another piffle surmised from your gist is a parallel equivalency between, i.e. clinical obesity, and homosexuality. First and foremost, such juxtaposition draws resemblance from Biblical and religious dehumanization of gays where a mere existence of individual is equated with other “characteristics” of sinhood [sic], e.g. rape, murder as oppose to being a lair — harmful criminal action vs. nefarious undesirable trait which homosexuality, supposedly, falls in the latter category.

Unfortunately, your conclusion lacks any meaningful persuasive clause and should be discarded for being a mere speculation (“I have an opinion therefore it must be right”). Even if you manage to somehow make the case, the issue is bound to fail when it comes to the constitutional imprimatur that grants people their right to pursue happiness and enjoy an equal right protection under the law. You can hate on an obese person all you want, but it doesn’t yield you any right to suppress a path he or she desires to take on.

“I don’t like thought crimes. I don’t care if someone is attacking me because I’m white, because I’m a woman, because I’m small…”

Right… as long as the government doesn’t exactly join the fist fight. For as long as the government is actively sabotaging your right not to be harassed because you are “white,” “woman,” and “small,” you’ll be crying for clarion of equity too. Don’t soot your horn yet.

tautology –
needless repetition of an idea, esp. in words other than those of the immediate context, without imparting additional force or clearness, as in “widow woman.””Anal sex has a higher risk of spreading STDs” is not a tautology.

Demonize then expect a Charlie Goodvibe to show up at your door, “accept” you for “not accepting” him — how perspicacious of you.”I believe you are wrong” is not demonization.
Also, “perspicacious” means “keen insight.”
Might want to look up the meaning of the words you’re abusing.

Of course, once again, a congenital idiocy reveals itself in the most grotesque fashion: A wedding is a celebration of one’s relationship with a significant other and not their “bed time” behavior.Having fun masking your lack of reason with big words?

A wedding is a formalization of the basic unit of society; the involvement of the gov’t is because said gov’t has an intrest in making the society as solid as possible, and it’s well known that children raised in stable homes are better citizens on the average.

Unfortunately, your conclusion lacks any meaningful persuasive clause and should be discarded for being a mere speculation (“I have an opinion therefore it must be right”).Seldom have I seen someone sum up their own flaws so nicely! And you even used all the words correctly….

12:37 PM, May 29, 2009
Blogger Foxfier, formerly Sailorette said…

BTW, is the linked one you, or are we just that lucky to find two of you?
http://cutelildrow.livejournal.com/1771470.html

http://lifewithmonkeys.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/05/and-tango-makes-three-awwww.html#comments
I love how the initial line somehow attempts to exonerate the author’s flagrant homophobia. Let me say it loud and clear: You are a homophobe, period.

If the book was about two opposite-sex penguins, I’ll bet you a million box, no one would even raise an eyebrow. If the story encourages tolerance, then the district has every incentive to have it as a part of the curriculum especially in the state where gay and lesbian communities are prominent.

If the feigned outrage wasn’t enough, these people are planning to take their kids out of the school because a supposedly “gay” book aims to teach tolerance and have them indoctrinated with hatred of a group of citizens who they deem nefarious to society. Bravo! If the level of bigotry and discrimination weren’t conspicuous in the mainstream wingnut American, perhaps there wouldn’t be any need for such text to be read to our kids.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/28417/Most-Americans-Approve-Interracial-Marriages.aspx
Most Americans Approve of Interracial Marriages
Blacks more likely than whites to approve of black-white unions
by Joseph Carroll

GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ — Gallup’s recent Minority Rights and Relations survey updated a long-term trend that asks Americans if they “approve or disapprove of marriages between blacks and whites.”

More than three in four Americans say they approve of marriages between blacks and whites — similar to the results measured in 2003 and 2004. As recently as 1994, less than half of Americans approved. The vast majority of whites and an even larger majority of blacks approve of interracial marriages. Older Americans — regardless of race or ethnicity — are less inclined to support interracial marriages than are younger Americans, but still, older Americans show majority support.

The poll was conducted June 4-24, 2007, interviewing 2,388 adults nationwide, including 1,302 whites, 802 non-Hispanic blacks, and 502 Hispanics. The total sample is weighted to reflect the proper proportions of each group in the U.S. population. About one-quarter of the interviews with Hispanics were conducted in Spanish, with the remainder in English.

Overall Results

According to the poll, 77% of Americans say they approve of marriages between blacks and whites, while 17% say they disapprove. Public support for black-white marriages is now at the high end of the range of approval seen on this question since Gallup first asked it almost 50 years ago. The latest result essentially ties with the 76% approval rating found in 2004.

Gallup’s long-term trend on this question documents a sea change in public attitudes about interracial marriage. In 1958, only 4% of Americans said they approved of marriages between whites and blacks. (The precise wording of the Gallup question has changed across the decades as the commonly accepted descriptive terms for blacks have changed; when Gallup first asked the question in 1958, the poll wording was, “whites and non-whites.”) Approval gradually increased over the next few decades, but at least half of Americans disapproved of black-white unions through 1983. Then, in the next measure eight years later, disapproval had fallen to 42%, with 48% approving. In 1997, the next time Gallup asked the question, approval had jumped well into the majority, with nearly two in three Americans saying they approved of marriages between blacks and whites. Disapproval fell to 27% in that same year. Support remained at about the two-thirds level until 2002, but increased to 73% in 2003. Since then, there have only been modest variations in attitudes about interracial marriages.

Black-White Marriage Support by Racial and Ethnic Groups

Seventy-five percent of whites approve of marriages between blacks and whites, and 19% disapprove. The trends in whites’ approval of interracial marriages closely mirror that of the general population. Few whites approved of interracial marriage in 1958, but support gradually increased, reaching majority level in 1997 and then edging up to the current 75% approval rating, the highest point to date, though by a statistically insignificant two points compared with Gallup’s 2004 survey.

Blacks are even more likely than whites to approve of interracial marriages — 85% of blacks currently say they approve, leaving 10% of blacks who disapprove and 5% who do not express an opinion.

The attitudes of blacks about interracial marriage are not available from Gallup’s initial 1958 polling on the subject. However, starting with the 1968 poll, a majority of blacks have consistently approved of marriages between blacks and whites. In the 1968 poll, 56% of blacks said they approved of black-white unions. This percentage gradually increased by the late 1970s to the mid-60% range and then to the low 70% range in the 1980s and early 1990s. By 1997, three in four blacks approved of interracial marriages, and since 2003, at least 80% have approved.

Hispanics’ opinions about black-white marriages are similar to blacks, with 87% of Hispanics in the June 2007 update approving and 10% disapproving. These results have not shown much significant change since Gallup first asked this question of Hispanics in 2002.

Younger vs. Older Americans’ Attitudes Toward Interracial Marriage

Americans aged 50 and older — including whites, blacks, and Hispanics in this age group — are less likely to approve of these unions than those 18 to 49 years of age. However, a majority of older Americans in each racial group still say they approve of black-white marriages.

Overall, 85% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 49 approve of marriages between blacks and whites, while among those aged 50 and older, 67% approve. These results are similar among whites — 86% of whites ages 18 to 49 approve, compared with 64% of whites who are older.

At each age level, blacks’ show greater approval of interracial marriage compared with whites. Still, older blacks show less support for black-white unions than younger blacks do. Among blacks ages 18 to 49, 89% approve of interracial marriage, while among blacks aged 50 and older, 77% approve. Approval of interracial marriage among Hispanics by age is similar to that of blacks.

Survey Methods

Results are based on telephone interviews with 2,388 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted June 4-24, 2007, including oversamples of Blacks and Hispanics that are weighted to reflect their proportions in the general population. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±5 percentage points.

For results based on sample of 1,302 whites (including 434 white Hispanics), the maximum margin of sampling error is ±7 percentage points.

For results based on sample of 802 blacks, the maximum margin of sampling error is ±6 percentage points.

For results based on sample of 502 Hispanics, the maximum margin of sampling error is ±6 percentage points. (138 out of the 502 interviews with Hispanics were conducted in Spanish).

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

Do you approve or disapprove of marriage between blacks and whites?

Approve

Disapprove

No
opinion

Total

%

%

%

2007 Jun 4-24

77

17

6

2004 Jun 9-30

76

19

5

2003 Nov 11-Dec 14

73

23

4

2002 Jun 3-9

65

29

6

1997 Jan 4-Feb 28

64

27

9

1994 Sep 18-20

48

37

15

1991 Jun 13-16

48

42

10

1983 Apr 29-May 2

43

50

7

1978 Jul 21-24^

36

54

10

1972 Oct 13-16^

29

60

11

1968 Jun 26-Jul 1 ^

20

73

8

1958 Sep 24-29†

4

94

3

Non-Hispanic Whites

2007 Jun 4-24

75

20

6

2004 Jun 9-30

72

23

5

Long-term trend: Whites (including Hispanics)

2007 Jun 4-24

75

19

5

2004 Jun 9-30

73

21

6

2003 Nov 11-Dec 14

70

27

3

2002 Jun 3-6

60

33

7

1997 Jan 4-Feb 28

61

30

9

1994 Sep 18-20

45

41

14

1991 Jun 13-16

44

45

11

1983 Apr 29-May 2

38

56

6

1978 Jul 21-24^

33

58

9

1972 Oct 13-16^

25

65

10

1968 Jun 26-Jul 1 ^

17

75

7

1958 Sep 24-29†

4

94

3

Blacks

2007 Jun 4-24

85

10

4

2004 Jun 9-30

87

9

4

2003 Nov 11-Dec 14

80

16

4

2002 Jun 3-9

78

20

2

1997 Jan 4-Feb 28

77

16

7

1994 Sep 18-20

68

19

13

1991 Jun 13-16

70

19

11

1983 Apr 29-May 2

71

21

9

1978 Jul 21-24^

66

19

15

1972 Oct 13-16^

61

21

19

1968 Jun 26-Jul 1 ^

56

33

11

Hispanics

2007 Jun 4-24

87

10

3

2004 Jun 9-30

88

7

5

2003 Nov 11-Dec 14

77

15

8

2002 Jun 3-9

84

10

6

^ WORDING: Between whites and non-whites?
† WORDING: Between white and colored people?

This is a government non-interference issue, or the equivalent, because it is a discrimination issue.

If civil marriage is a “positive right”, then how can you justify denying it on the basis of discrimination?

Discrimination is government interference. When the government says “all taxpayers pay for this water fountain, but a certain ethnic group is banned from using it”, the water fountain may be a “positive right” but the subsequent discrimination is government interference.

The political Religious Right seems to be bent on the repathologizing of homosexuality. In 1973, the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association voted to delete homosexuality as a mental disorder from the seventh printing of the second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-II.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romer_v_Evans

Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996), was a United States Supreme Court case dealing with civil rights and state laws. The Court gave its ruling on May 20, 1996 against an amendment to the Colorado state constitution that would have prevented any city, town or county in the state from taking any legislative, executive, or judicial action to protect homosexual citizens from discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 History
* 2 The U.S. Supreme Court ruling
* 3 Dissent
* 4 Notes
* 5 See also
* 6 Further reading
* 7 References
* 8 External links

[edit] History

On November 3, 1992, Colorado voters, with a vote of 53.4 percent, enacted “Amendment 2”, which read:

Neither the state of Colorado, through any of its branches or departments, nor any of its agencies, political subdivisions, municipalities or school districts, shall enact, adopt or enforce any statute, regulation, ordinance or policy whereby homosexual, lesbian or bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships shall constitute or otherwise be the basis of, or entitle any person or class of persons to have or claim any minority status, quota preferences, protected status or claim of discrimination. This Section of the Constitution shall be in all respects self-executing.

The amendment was drafted and promoted by the organization Colorado for Family Values, and it would have effectively prevented any laws banning discrimination against gays, and thereby nullified gay rights laws that already existed in Aspen, Denver, and Boulder.

An immediate legal challenge was launched by gay rights groups. On January 15, 1993 the groups were granted a temporary injunction from 2nd District Court Judge Jeffrey Bayless preventing Amendment 2 becoming part of the state constitution, on the grounds of its possible unconstitutionality and possible irreparable harm that would be caused by its implementation. The court scheduled a trial to decide the case.

Before the trial could begin, the state appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court. On July 19, 1993, that court upheld the original injunction, on the grounds that Amendment 2 violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, insofar as Amendment 2 denied gays equal rights to normal political processes. Chief Justice Luis Rovera wrote:

Were Amendment 2 in force […] the sole political avenue by which this class could seek such protection [against discrimination] would be through the constitutional amendment process.

The state Supreme Court demanded that the legislation face “strict scrutiny” and prove that it advanced a “compelling state interest”, and returned the case to the District Court for trial. Judge Bayless found that the amendment failed the test, and ruled it unconstitutional on December 14, 1993.

Colorado appealed to the State Supreme Court, which affirmed the District Court’s decision on October 11, 1994, and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

[edit] The U.S. Supreme Court ruling

The case was argued on October 10, 1995. On May 20, 1996, the court ruled 6-3 that Colorado’s Amendment 2 was unconstitutional, though on different reasoning than the Colorado courts. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, and was joined by John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer.

Rejecting the state’s argument that Amendment 2 merely blocked gay people from receiving “special rights”, Kennedy wrote:

To the contrary, the amendment imposes a special disability upon those persons alone. Homosexuals are forbidden the safeguards that others enjoy or may seek without constraint.

Kennedy argued that protection offered by antidiscrimination laws was not a “special right” because they protected fundamental rights already enjoyed by all other citizens. Though antidiscrimination laws “enumerated” certain groups which they protected, this merely served to put others on notice (i.e., the enumeration was merely declaratory).

Instead of applying “strict scrutiny” to Amendment 2 (as Colorado Supreme Court had required) Kennedy wrote that it did not even meet the much lower requirement of having a rational relationship to a legitimate government purpose:

Its sheer breadth is so discontinuous with the reasons offered for it that the amendment seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class that it affects; it lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests.

And:

[Amendment 2] is at once too narrow and too broad. It identifies persons by a single trait and then denies them protection across the board. The resulting disqualification of a class of persons from the right to seek specific protection from the law is unprecedented in our jurisprudence.

Kennedy did not go into depth in rejecting the claims put forward in support of the law (protecting the rights of landlords to evict gay tenants if they found homosexuality morally offensive, etc.) because he held that the law was so unique as to “confound this normal process of judicial review” and “defies…conventional inquiry.” This conclusion was supported by his assertion that “It is not within our constitutional tradition to enact laws of this sort.” Finding that “laws of the kind now before us raise the inevitable inference that the disadvantage imposed is born of animosity toward the class of persons affected,” the Court implied that the passage of Amendment 2 was born of a “bare…desire to harm” homosexuals.

[edit] Dissent

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a dissent which was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas. Scalia wrote:

[Amendment 2 is] a modest attempt by seemingly tolerant Coloradans to preserve traditional sexual mores against the efforts of a politically powerful minority to revise those mores through use of the laws. That objective, and the means chosen to achieve it, are […] unimpeachable under any constitutional doctrine hitherto pronounced.

Scalia argued that Amendment 2 did not deny homosexuals access to the political process but merely made it more difficult to enact laws that they favored. He noted that the majority’s result stood in flat contradiction to the court’s earlier decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), in which it had ruled that laws outlawing sodomy are not unconstitutional. That was based on the fact that Bowers had rejected a rational-basis challenge to sodomy laws on the grounds that traditional moral disapproval furnished such a rational basis. Scalia noted:

If it is rational to criminalize the conduct, surely it is rational to deny special favor and protection to those with a self-avowed tendency or desire to engage in the conduct.

Justice Scalia also asked how the holding of the majority could be reconciled with Davis v. Beason, 133 U.S. 333 (1890):

“remains to be explained how §501 of the Idaho Revised Statutes was not an “impermissible targeting” of polygamists, but (the much more mild) Amendment 2 is an “impermissible targeting” of homosexuals. Has the Court concluded that the perceived social harm of polygamy is a “legitimate concern of government,” and the perceived social harm of homosexuality is not?”

Against what he saw as judicial activism, he wrote:

Since the Constitution of the United States says nothing about this subject [homosexuality], it is left to be resolved by normal democratic means, including the democratic adoption of provisions in state constitutions.

Justice Scalia stated that the Court should take no part in what is termed the “culture war”. After quoting a passage from Murphy v. Ramsey, 114 U.S. 15 (1885) which had praised governmental favouring of heterosexual monogamy, Justice Scalia wrote the following:

“I would not myself indulge in such official praise for heterosexual monogamy, because I think it no business of the courts (as opposed to the political branches) to take sides in this culture war. But the Court today has done so, not only by inventing a novel and extravagant constitutional doctrine to take the victory away from traditional forces, but even by verbally disparaging as bigotry adherence to traditional attitudes.”

The dissent ends as follows:

“Today’s opinion has no foundation in American constitutional law, and barely pretends to. The people of Colorado have adopted an entirely reasonable provision which does not even disfavor homosexuals in any substantive sense, but merely denies them preferential treatment. Amendment 2 is designed to prevent piecemeal deterioration of the sexual morality favored by a majority of Coloradans, and is not only an appropriate means to that legitimate end, but a means that Americans have employed before. Striking it down is an act, not of judicial judgment, but of political will. I dissent.”

[edit] Notes

In 1993, Cincinnati, Ohio passed Ballot Issue 3, an amendment to the city charter which forbade the city from adopting or enforcing civil rights ordinances based on sexual orientation, the only municipality in the United States to pass such a restriction. The wording of Cincinnati’s amendment was almost identical to that of Colorado’s. The amendment was upheld by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1996 but remanded by the Supreme Court for further consideration in 1997 in the wake of the Romer decision. The Sixth Circuit upheld the amendment a second time, differentiating it from the state-level amendment on the grounds that it was a local government action of the type that Amendment 2 was designed to pre-empt. On October 13, 1998, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal, allowing the Sixth Circuit decision and the city amendment to stand.[1] In 2005, Cincinnati voters overturned the amendment.[2]

Since Romer stood in obvious tension with the Court’s earlier decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), it laid the groundwork for 2003’s Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), which overturned Bowers. Romer, however, has not been widely cited beyond Lawrence, no doubt because Kennedy emphasized the “special” nature of Amendment 2 and refused to apply traditional rational-basis analysis to the Colorado law.

In this case, the court lined up in almost the same way as in Lawrence, though in Lawrence Justice O’Connor concurred in the judgment on different grounds.

Ironically, although Roy Romer was on record as opposing Amendment 2, his name was on the suit as defendant and the appellant solely due to his position as governor of Colorado.

In 2007, fifteen years after the referendum on Amendment 2, a law was passed that banned discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity for all employers in Colorado.

“Polygamy is clearly a lifestyle choice, not some inborn trait which the individual has no control over.”

Marriage is a lifestyle choice too. You may not have control over being gay, but you have control over whether you’re married or not.

“The state has an interest in not allowing polygamy. There would be legal issues involving property rights, inheritance rights, and child custodial issues, to name a few, if polygamy were allowed.”

Why? There could be simple rules in place, such as “the first wife gets everything”, “each wife gets in proportion to duration of marriage”, “each wife gets equal share”, etc. That of course is assuming there is no will involved. Kids go with whoever bore them.

We have to ask ourselves what the purpose of special privileges for married couples is to begin with. Generally we treat marriages differently from other relationships because it is a more intimate and long-lasting relationship than others. So if one man has an intimate and long-lasting relationship with multiple women, why doesn’t that fit our criterion?

As for marriage with a horse–well, horses don’t have legal rights to begin with, so it’s a non-issue. Horses don’t have to file tax returns.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23868.html

In fact, Obama’s promise to offer ancillary employee benefits — such as long-term-care insurance and the right to use sick leave to care for domestic partners — while still denying more valuable benefits, such as health insurance and retirement funds, may have further agitated gay and lesbian activists who were already fuming over other perceived snubs.

Obama said he also favors extending health and retirement benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees but that such a move is currently prohibited by the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, which passed in 1996.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23868.html#ixzz0IqDWYpkx&C

Ok, now that I have your undivided attention–I would like to come up with a series of logical statements against people who for religious or personal reasons condemn with homosexuality. I am not a nationally ranked debater, frankly I probably get beat arguing with a 10-year-old over why candies are no good for him. That being said, I would like to explain a few pointers–or one just not to give you a headache. Back in good old Aristotle time, when people didn’t have much useful things to do, such as shopping in the mall or regurgitating over their last fast food, they spent their entire time trying to come up with ways of successfully make their points across. They had a thing called enthymeme. Enthymeme is an incomplete logical structure. Its persuasiveness depends on an unstated assumption or belief that the audience, in this case gay bashers, must accept. So with every remark, I will try to state the enthymeme, following by a claim, then the stated reason, and finally revealing the unstated assumption… Or something in that order.

With that in mind, I would like to step by step argue that homosexuality is not, after all, going to be the Pale Horse to our world as we know it. Before continuing, I would like to say that I am NOT gay and I am a perfectly straight guy. I am secure with my own sexuality but I do appreciate male form (Ok, mostly male model type figure). There is no sexual implication in my admiration and I prefer female body over its counter part anytime, anywhere. Moreover, I am not affiliated with any religious group or sect and I do NOT worship false prophets or any god. What I do believe in, or should I rephrase myself, what I do not believe in is the metaphysical club mentality that has infected every corner of our planet. A plague called organized religion or institution that is suppressing flow of exchange of ideas. Before you people of “book” throw my words in the air and viciously slice them at your will, I just wanted to add this: We allow freedom of expression because as a human, we need every resources to acquire the ideas that would ameliorate our existence. We are what we are, as a result of what has happened to us in the past, and I am not attempting to throw around a witty statement. Look how our entire ideology has evolved since WWII with regards to war itself although that hasn’t stopped war mongering mentality entirely but we are in progress.

1) Sex exists for procreation and homosexuality is “unnatural”
Yes, I do think that our biological physiology has been evolved in such way that encourages us with its pleasurable component merely to ensure a procreation and preservation of our species. But wait, that statement would have hold true 40,000 years ago up until now. Nowadays, we have technological and medical advances that would allow us to procreate without engaging in sexual act. But you may say it is not natural. I agree, natural in a sense that this is what has been done since the beginning. But wasn’t the whole point of having sex, as it was stated, to procreate? So we just reached a common goal but from two various paths and you can save your precious humanity from going distinct. Personally, I believe that we have over-populated our kind on this planet and I would like to see for us to take a two or three generation break in manufacturing offsprings like spring rain drops. But I do not view homosexuality as an adaptive mean to overpopulation. Back to the original point.

On the surface there is flaw to this argument; what if someone comes along and say, “What about beastiality? What if someone has sex with animals or a child but still manages to procreate through sleeping with an opposite sex.” Well the scenario in that argument is not innately tantamount to same sex attraction. In both cases, animal and child, at least one party is not psychologically matured or compatible enough to make sane decisions. But in case of two homosexual adults, the decision is made by both parties who are willingly participating in the act.

You may also argue that physical act of same sex is unnatural. That is, anus is filthy but vagina is self-lubricating and self-cleansing. First of all, for every problem there is a solution. Not self-lubricant, use artificial lubrication. Not clean, use condom. Every half brain individual knows that engaging in a sexual act these days has its own set of risks (STD’s…). Yes, all those reasons are true and anal penetration is unnatural. But then you can argue that a lot of sexual activities fall under this category such as fellatio. After all, the whole act itself is “unnatural” and serves no purpose when it comes to procreation itself. If an inability to reproduce is the main reason people agree to ban on the same sex marriage, then it can be argued that ALL the couple, union of man and woman in this sense, that cannot bare a child must also be thrown out because, hey, after all, they cannot produce an offspring so their existence is futile.

But wait, so far we are solely been observing homosexuality from the male-male perspective. What about female-female relationship? We just said that vagina is all this and that… So is homosexuality ok for two women but not for two men? Here is an eye opener: You find two men engaging in a sexual activity appalling and disgusting. You view the whole thing as nauseating, hideous, pukishly repugnant, or unwholesome [fill out the rest yourself]. But I bet if you watch two supposedly beautiful women make out, your sexual tentacles be standing straight on every pores on your body. If you don’t… Well that is “unnatural”. Either you are a member of Jehovah’s Witness or sexually suppressed. You may claim, “I am a woman and I find a lesbian scene appalling. What now?” Well, I tell you, they throw two hot guys at each other and you’ll be bouncing on your orgasmic senses. You see, it is not about finding the situation appalling, but rather understanding that the sexual orientation of two people has nothing to do with. You may not stand watching two overweight couple having sex but it might as well be enjoyable for others.

What’s interesting is that Billy boy seems to be way out of the left field when it comes to distinguishing between “sexuality” and “sexual orientation.” He conjectures that any action performed by a homosexual individual implies that he/she is flaunting his/her “sexual” nature. Sexuality is a “conduct” which normally is associated with the physical act, involving one or more participants’ genital or any other way of expressing one’s sexual nature. sexuality is defined by sexual thoughts, desires and longings, erotic fantasies, turn-ons and experiences. It can also be triggered by many stimulus: “humor, personality, likability, compatibility, or intelligence.” “Sexual orientation,” on the other hand, is identity based on certain attractions among certain domain of people. So the sexual orientation by itself does not relate to the behavior or “act” of sex as Bill desperately tries to juxtapose these two contextually distinct definitions.

If a man is flirtatious or a woman is visibly lascivious in her manner, we would conclude that their _action_ has “sexual connotation.” In a way, I understand where Bill’O come from; his presumption stems from the fact, since homosexuality is proportionally rare in the society, and since this oddity would prevail over our short-span attention, therefore, the first cognitive thought that comes to one’s mind [when he/she views even a homosexual couple walking down the street] is their “sexual nature.” That is due to the preconception registered in our psyche to pick out various social circumstances and lump them into pre-defined categories. But in reality, they (the homosexual couple) are NOT advertising their sexuality by just being there. So if Bill watches a lesbian couple in a gathering, the first impression that He pickes up, in reality, is their “sexual orientation” amplified in his head to the point that their very being is amalgamated with their “sexuality,” which by the way is not the same sentiment our brain acquires when we observe a heterosexual couple. This “identification,” which is really a sexual orientation, spills over to the actual “sexual conduct” (or sexuality), which by itself makes it appear, a homosexual couple is brandishing their “sexuality.” This is due to social stigma attached to homosexuality and has nothing to do with them being guilty of false-flag demonstration of sexuality.

Of course, this is FruxNews, and knowing well what set of people browse its programs religiously, one cannot hope to have a profound and psychological discussion, which requires a high cognitive complexity and discerning subtleties, on such topics.

Architectural Interest – Monasteries

Taktsang Monastery, Bhutan, 17th century

The Taktsang or “Tiger’s Lair” monastery clings onto a sheer cliff at a dizzying altitude of 10,200 ft in Bhutan’s Paro Valley, nestled in the Himalayas.

Xuankong Monastery, China, 5th century

Xuankong Si – “The Hanging Monastery” – has stood the test of 1,400 years, and earthquakes no less. The halls and pavilions of this structure follow the contours of the rock face, its buildings connected by bridges and walkways, the highest of which wavers over 200 ft above the riverbed atop stilt-like pillars.

Phugtal Gompa, India, 12th century

High in the Himalayas, an awe-inspiring sight greets the eyes of travelers trekking through the remote region of south-eastern Zanskar: Phugtal Gompa. Hanging onto the edge of a rocky gorge at the mouth of a giant cave, this sacred construction is built directly into the cliff side, like a giant honeycomb.

Popa Taungkalat Monastery, Myanmar

Sitting serenely among the clouds some 2,417 ft on top of a massive lava plug (now extinct), Popa Taungkalat towers above the plains of central Myanmar, a stunning sight visible for miles around.

St. George’s Monastery, West Bank, 6th century

St. George’s Orthodox Monastery is located in the eastern West Bank of the Palestinian territories. Clinging precariously to the sheer north face of a gorge, this 6th century sanctuary is accessible via a pedestrian bridge across the Wadi Qelt.

Sümela Monastery, Turkey, 4th century

Hovering dramatically on the ledge of a steep cliff overlooking the lush forests and streams of Turkey’s Altindere Valley, Sümela lies at an altitude of around 3,940 ft.

Phuktal Monastery. Zanskar. India

About Me

WARNING: Long and continuous exposure to this profile may cause hallucinations, love, hatred, melancholy, STD’s, fanaticism, retention of urine, extreme gore, and uncontrollable jubilation. Proceed at your own discretion. I do not expect you to read the entire profile but I do not wish you to pick your nose and scratch your ass simultaneously while doing it. On this page, anger meets hatred, love espouses compassion, and at the end, you’ll find a smile on your face.

Write? Something that I’m dreadful to do. You know when you’ve spent a period of time in a place with high intensity lighting and suddenly walk into a semi dark room and your pupils struggle for a few minutes to adjust themselves to the new surroundings… You stare at the corner of the room and are not able to distinguish objects but as soon as you roll your eyes an image of a shadowy figure is formed in your head… The object is there but you just can’t “see” it. That’s how my brain operates. The feelings are there but I cannot get to them to form a cohesive idea. Everything is fragmented… Welcome to my world.

I find strength in my solitude. Some times I have horrible nightmares. I am very resourceful. I have a ratiocinative (sic) consciousness with a spurring heart beats. I like to think of my head as a washing machine that they threw in a box of galvanized nail.

My parents have done an irreversible psychological damage to me. An overbearing father and irrational mother. Blaming your birth givers for your problems is a convenient way of getting through life.

I tend to stay away from people who work as a stripper or at a church — I prefer moderation. Sometimes I just blurt out the most demented random shit then I credit myself with being blessed with insatiable sense of creativity.

Tragedies and griefs, not necessarily mine, have tremendously shaped my perspectives on life. Understanding comes from feeling — without it, nothing would be perceived. One can understand someone’s lamentation due to the lost of love one but wouldn’t be able to feel the mourning unless it has happened to him. A great man is the one who is able to create such emotions without actually experiencing them.

I used to think logic would always prevail. I was wrong. There is no right nor wrong — there is stronger and there is weaker. So I am right and you are wrong because this profile says so.

I like the way babies drool. Those noises babies make… the kind of gurgle noise. Delicate angelic fingers/hand. Platonic girl friends. The sound of graceful waves, stroking the sandy bay. The whistling wind on a calm summer night.

A wise man once said that the optimal relationship is realized with a psychologist in her 30’s. I don’t know how much of his statement is true but I’m willing to give it a try.

Sometimes I fly… but I’ve never been to the Lala land. I am my own natural opium. I have so much to say yet words wouldn’t come out which forces me to appear taciturn.

I have weak knees for people who are reserved, compassionate, kind-hearted, and respectfully-dressed.

Sweat is a potion of love. I don’t yearn outdoors; I am weary of indoors; can’t stand the between-doors… I have myself in my own kryptonic world. Oh how ruefully Emolicious. I don’t live in the past; I don’t live in the future; I don’t even live in the present — I live at my own time.

You know, I reek “I am who I am” factual manner that leaves you no choice to come whisper in my ears, “I know, and that’s why I HATE you.” I need my down time… 24/7 and I always want to “quit”. This profile is not real.

I like to have fingers run through my hair and massaged… It’s as if bubbles of orgasm ascend and burst on the surface of my head. When I was 5, I used to assumed Japanese women were the perfect fit for my self-indulging desires.

I am an epiphany of lacuna. If you represent every person in this world as a dot on a single line, I would be a speck in the 3rd dimension, ogling at this spectrum of human mendacity. I am a sum of all anomalies in this universe.

If you are a type of person who substitutes a clear crystal carbon as a symbol of love, do me a favor, close this profile, exit all your programs, turn off your machine, unplug the computer, take it to the edge of a window and throw your repugnant, self-serving, invidious personality onto the incoming traffic. Symbolism is dead to me.

I am a global citizen, not another grudged diaspora. I am awry of traditions but reverence of cultures. I suffer from dysgraphia; I have a hard time coordinating my streaming run away emotions and thoughts into cohesive set of ideas.

My situation is haplessly hopeless. I prefer sensuality over sexuality. between an incognizant optimist and a realistic pessimist, I choose the latter.

I believe that there are more than one solution to every problem. Not two people resolve or tackle an issue the same way but there might be more than one correct answers. I am a unique motherfucker in every possibly wrong way.

I am inclined to honesty. Maybe that’s why I cherish moments after climax… A struggle between unsustainable focus on making love and falling into an abyss of perpetual ecstasy. A fight with irrevocable outcome that sucks you down like a quick sand of vanity and then… the anomaly in a grotesque fashion reveals itself: human is fundamentally flawed. At the zenith of giving yourself to each other, you succumb to your self medicated biological complacency — nothing matters but you.

We haven’t truly won the genetic lottery yet. Sure there was a time when a gene mutation magically flipped through some unknown causation to expand the size of our skull. Or when a heredity chromosome shoveled so we were blessed with developing auditory bones. But we still got. not a few hundred years, not a few thousands of years, rather perhaps millions of years to achieve the ultimate paragon — to become a perfect entity. I yearn that day in my dreams not even fully comprehending what “perfect” entails to…

It’s a fact that I am a goofball and a dork with passion to remedy social injustice and inequality. I wonder about mindless consumerism and exploitative advertisement. I see kids in malls with signs written on their foreheads flashing, “I shop, therefore I am.” When Dalia Lama buys fabric for his attire made at some sweatshop in Bangladesh, then all hopes are lost.

I am growing… And I still have so much to figure out.

Being freakishly and exceptionally eccentric. I’ve a very strong sense of smell. Most of the times I don’t even taste a food but rather smell it to see whether I’d like it or not. The day that I lose my sense of smell is the day that I die. Half the times I unexpectedly associate people with a “made-up” smell. In the contrary, I literally create an image of unseen sights or places when I encounter a strange or newly discovered odor for the very first time. It could be a under water environment in the Arctics or an apartment room in an overly populated Korean city high rise.

I’m probably smelling your profile right this moment.

And… Being asexual… Like Hitler. Come to think of it, the profile says “less sex-driven” that is because I had a penis transplant but my hands rejected it. Actually, I resent such stereotyping by the machine profiler. The last time I checked, my southern engines were fully functional so I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I still possess the kind of marksmanship that would render the existence of all other sperm producers futile. Ok, so I am hellosexual, whatever a fuck that means.

Not being racist… I’ve never had a black friend but I do download black porn. I tend to stay away from BBW and lesbian sections though.

sanitizing my behind; all the good boys and girls should know that.

A wholesome, intelligent, exceptionally good looking, handsome, kind hearted, well-balanced… Young man (#!@%$%^). Seriously, what the fuck do I know what people’s first impression of me is. Give it a rest.

My startling deliciously feminine face!!! Mothers and fathers, please prevent your children from licking their screen.

Folding the laundry clothing articles is my passion. I take comfort in organizing and structuring a messy environment. Surprisingly, I have proclivity towards people who are completely opposite IF they let me organize their place.

Human psyche. I think about all the women (or perhaps men) who take enjoyment in kissing a guy with a thick juicy mustache.

I think about mother nature… Mother nature that is on the run… From us. Some times I think it is trying somehow to get rid of us with hurricanes, floods, and diseases. I think about sky defilers and earth rapers.

I think about a husband who is told he needs to pay more money upfront to stitch up his dying wife who just been cut open for C-section delivery and can’t scramble enough money on time as the newly-mothered bleeds to death watching her baby across the room from the operation table.

I think about saving everybody’s “scandalous” photos and show them to their children when they grow up. “MOM! Is that you?” does you parent know that you are taking half naked pictures of yourself? And for crying out loud, clean up your room then snap that phone — throwing yourself in your crummy apartment/room really defeats the whole purpose of being covetable.

I think about why testicles are egg shape and do not have a cubic form. After all, they need not to be inserted anywhere. Pyramid anyone? Some times I wonder why women are so stingy that they hide their balls in their belly.

You know what’s good about being a circumcised amigo? It’s that I have an option dating someone with earrings out of her mouth. Oh… the possibilities.

I think about how people change when they procreate an offspring. I think about all the single parents and wonder why.

I think about a kid who is intentionally mutilated in order to be a more profitable beggar for his owners.

I think about how much of a bitch women are and how much of a dick men are, and I am stuck in between. I think about why men are so stupid to chase after women and why women are more dumber wanting to be chased by men.

I still don’t see the point of phone sex and bachelor[ette] parties, prom and dating in general, malls and churches, clubs and cubicles, Myspace and Facebook and now the god damned Tweeter…

I think about the people who traveled all around the world yet they don’t have a slightest clue of what life entails to. I think people should donate more blood and sperm… mixed together.

I think about adjectives and little feet. I like small feet. I pity those women with burning bunions who subject themselves to those high heels.

I think about why women are so into dancing and guys into sport. I think it all comes down to your physiological structure of your hip.

Some times I think if I am the ONLY one with these thoughts… Am I? Really! You want to tell me there is no one that shares my values? How did that happen?

That I am married to my mother and am a father to all children in the world.

I’m a woman at heart and a man on the outside. Transvestites please refrain from messaging me. Once I write something, I have a hard time re-reading it.

Mother: “Get a girlfriend, you need one. You know, guys have ‘urges’.” Me: “I will, when you die.” (true story)

I enjoy long walks on the beach, candle lite dinners, and bed time stories… And having consensual relationships with sea turtles.

I get emotionally disconsolate when I don’t find physical attraction in someone.

I unwantedly ponder about the weirdest job positions: A jeez-moper at a local strip club spending most of his time on lonely roads hoping to hump a dear. I am not expected to live beyond 30 — I’ve a weak heart. I can beat up pretty much anyone… Sexually that is.

I’ve what you call an alcohol intolerance — half a bottle of beer and I’m physically out for the night. I only drink if I’m extremely thirsty and beer (not hard liquor) is the only thing available at the moment. If your idea of having a good time always involves alcohol, then lick my smelly arm pit. Sorry, I just don’t feel losing control so fast.

I fart once every other day. There is something horribly wrong with my digestive system. Fear farts are natural. I’ve never known anyone in my life.

I’m planning to extract testicular cancer by the age of 33; there is something about 30’s that scare the baby Moses out of me. That and people who are born after 1980’s.

I wear “My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys” T-shirt to rodeos. I like plucking my pubes; is that really shameful to admit?

I have the hots for hard core engineers and I am not talking about the posers who leave the field to pursue other brain dead careers.

Rape-kisses are no fun. And let me get something straight here: Vagina discharges are not appalling despite popular belief.

I am TERRIFIED of pointy shoes. I cry after evening naps for no particular reason. A little bit of hair on forearms is extremely sexy.

I rather literally bury my face between pages of a book than two voluptuous double-WMD size double lattes. I just want to take this time and aver my heterosexuality to the masses.

I’ve been in boys’ locker room — It’s musty. I’ve come to the sad realization that soccer is the most mephitic sport after Japanese sumo wrestling.

I adore the female physique — I do not care what shape or size it is, if it’s womanly, it’s good for me. As a matter of fact, the most precious living object in the world to me is Choo-chooleh (if you know what that means).

I have a tremendous weakness when it comes to spaghetti. I am a freak magnet and so is my sister; we are both cursed with such diabolical virtue.

I respect cacophonous spinsters — they seem to “get it.” I am mostly hated in the IT community.

I’m mildly autistic, case in point: “Sir, Can I have the title of your car,” “Umm… Miss! Mr.! Mrs.! Take your pick.” I view the world through a screwed up prism purchased at a bazaar in Calcutta. My short term memory is really out of whack.

I was named after a mythical archer who sacrifices his life to save a nation by my uncle who was viciously murdered — standing up for something that was truly right.

When I see a couple with a battalion of kids, I think to myself, hey dog-shit-for-brain, it’s called condom, try to utilize it.

I am not fond of flip-flops. Every time I see someone walking around with a pair, I am reminded of Star Jones’ pudgy, perspiring feet drenched in melting butter abusing the inner walls of my mouth with her soused creamy fat churned toes… YIKES!

You have exhausted your luck after numerous masturbatory sessions. Don’t message me if you are afraid to explore the world individually. And you must be the bestest [sic] and we both can see dead people.

You are not a pretentious cocksucker who yearns attention even at the expense of taking your little daughter to a violent pedophile cell block for a strip tease. In other word, you are not an attention seeker and you are not looking for a constant social validation through collective reassurance.

You are a purple-lipped ninny with a heart of gold who can turn me on with your bullshit and entertain me with your unique ghetto porn-wear. If I make you horny, then I have no doubts that you possess some serious unresolved issues.

You are not accompanied with a pile of streaming estrogen when you head out to clubs. You do not paint your face with chemical substances (you know why you do that — I resent it).

And please no more Emo-shots (you know who you are). And especially you god damned people who take pictures of yourself in the car. IN THE FRIGGING CAR! That makes you wonder why there are so many road accidents. If your intentions are to impress others with the interior of your glamorized vehicle, you lose.

Your liquor shots do say much about your crumbling personality that you relish in losing control as fast as a crack whore prostitute clamantly hankers her next fix.

You know thy self. Seriously, “how much do you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight ™?” The amount of aggression you can project on me would not scar me for life.

No more boob-shots; I do have them too, to some extent, so don’t try to be cute. Be more creative, chop them off, put them into a grinder, hit the on button, snort it up through your nose. That should restore your dignity to some extent. And NO, I am NOT going to take a dump on your chest — that really upsets me.

If you know how to color my fart that would be a big plus. You are not here to recruit me for your flagitious mind-fuck cult. No one is asking you to ski on my piss, you proselytizing vampires.

You have a dream… YOUR dream, not someone else’s. Teenyboppers! Please refrain from messaging this individual or prepare for some nocuous scathing. And promise you would not give me a blue ball.

You do not go psychosomatic on me after 30 seconds of conversation… Or EVER. I have seen too many good men’s life savagely destroyed by some psycho bitch. And no more PHONE call requests; I rather meet you face-to-face than go through the whole Alexander Graham Bell wire[less] dandling.

You do not possess an `inability’ to pay attention to more important details at hand in life but rather gabbing away about your precious meetings, partying, over-consumption, stock quotes, materialistic longings, political and religious agenda which makes your existence entirely devolutionary. I know, double negatives… Just to fuck with you head.

You sincerely wish for me to introduce millions of my potential children to a piece of white tissue rather than into a damp and moist canal of life-long-misery.

You do not possess one of those roses-and-leafs tattoos on your lower back. What the fuck you want me to make love to a plant? Not a pleasant doggy-style lovemaking bidding catalyst.

I am not a type that condemns the existence of female hair below the eyebrows. Mustache is permitted but let’s not over-grown it longer than my armpits, Ok? And under the arm hair… Hey, go ahead, be more like Ani DiFranco but again, moderation is the virtue you must possess. You don’t want me going around saying it looks like you got Don King in a headlock, do you?

Your IQ is actually higher than a piece of rock. Due to collective indecency of number of teenagers, I am left with no choice to politely ask people under 19 years of age to abstain from messaging me. I made this statement in a very general tone so you should take it as in a case by case scenario. If you are in that age range but have a head on your shoulder… Then please come in. Otherwise, do not let my inner monkey to lash out. But seriously, I am not a monkey.

You don’t take this profile too seriously.

You are a purple-lipped ninny with a heart of gold who can turn me on with your bullshit and entertain me with your unique ghetto pornwear

An excerpt from some book matches a part of who I am:

how should they do otherwise than take my simplicity for cynicism, my innocent candor for impudence? They found my knowledge tiresome; my feminine languor, weakness.

my own pride would have kept me aloof from them if contempt and indifference had not shut their doors on me in the first place. I was related to people who were very influential, and who lavished their patronage on strangers; but I found neither relations nor patrons in them. Continually circumscribed
in my affections, they recoiled upon me. Unreserved and simple by nature, I must have appeared frigid and sophisticated. My father’s discipline had destroyed all confidence in myself. I was shy and awkward; I could not believe that my opinion carried any weight whatever; I took no pleasure in myself; I thought myself ugly, and was ashamed to meet my own eyes. In spite of the inward voice that must be the stay of a man with anything in him, in all his struggles, the voice that cries, ‘Courage! Go forward!’ in spite of sudden revelations of my own strength in my solitude; in spite of the hopes
that thrilled me as I compared new works, that the public admired so much, with the schemes that hovered in my brain,–in spite of all this, I had a childish mistrust of myself.

“All through the year in which, by my father’s wish, I threw myself into the whirlpool of fashionable society, I came away with an inexperienced heart, and fresh in mind. Like every grown child, I sighed in secret for a love affair. I met, among young men of my own age, a set of swaggerers who held their heads high, and talked about trifles as they seated themselves without a tremor beside women who inspired awe in me. They chattered nonsense, sucked the heads of their canes, gave themselves affected airs, appropriated the fairest women, and laid, or pretended that they had laid their heads on every pillow.
Pleasure, seemingly, was at their beck and call; they looked on the most virtuous and prudish as an easy prey, ready to surrender at a word, at the slightest impudent gesture or insolent look. I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.

“So I found the tumult of my heart, my feelings, and my creeds all at variance with the axioms of society. I had plenty of audacity in my character, but none in my manner. Later, I found out that women did not like to be implored. I have from afar adored many a one to whom I devoted a soul proof against all tests, a heart to break, energy that shrank from no sacrifice and from no torture; _they_ accepted fools whom I would not have engaged as hall porters. How often, mute and motionless, have I not admired the lady of my dreams, swaying in the dance; given up my life in thought to one eternal caress, expressed
all my hopes in a look, and laid before her, in my rapture, a young man’s love, which should outstrip all fables. At some moments I was ready to barter my whole life for one single night. Well, as I could never find a listener for my impassioned proposals, eyes to rest my own upon, a heart made for my heart, I lived on in all the sufferings of impotent force that consumes itself; lacking either opportunity or courage or experience. I despaired, maybe, of making myself understood, or I feared to be understood but too well; and yet the storm within me was ready to burst at every chance courteous look. In
spite of my readiness to take the semblance of interest in look or word for a tenderer solicitude, I dared neither to speak nor to be silent seasonably. My words grew insignificant, and my silence stupid, by sheer stress of emotion. I was too ingenuous, no doubt, for that artificial life, led by candle-light, where every thought is expressed in conventional phrases, or by words that fashion dictates; and not only so, I had not learned how to employ speech that says nothing, and silence that says a great deal. In short, I concealed the fires that consumed me, and with such a soul as women wish to find, with all the elevation of soul that they long for, and a mettle that fools plume themselves upon, all women have been cruelly treacherous to me.

“I can see now that my natural sincerity must have been displeasing to them; women, perhaps, even require a little hypocrisy. And I, who in the same hour’s space am alternately a man and a child, frivolous and thoughtful, free from bias and brimful of superstition, and often times myself as much a woman as any of them; how should they do otherwise than take my simplicity for cynicism, my innocent candor for impudence? They found my knowledge tiresome; my feminine languor, weakness. I was held to be listless and incapable of love or of steady purpose; a too active imagination, that curse of poets, was no doubt
the cause. My silence was idiotic; and as I daresay I alarmed them by my efforts to please, women one and all have condemned me. With tears and mortification, I bowed before the decision of the world; but my distress was not barren. I determined to revenge myself on society; I would dominate the feminine intellect, and so have the feminine soul at my mercy;

they look to find in their lovers the wherewithal to gratify their own vanity. It is themselves that they love in us

Reason for This Blog

As my life is coming to an end, I found it upon myself to disclose documents I’ve been gathering, on various topics, and dump them here. The main reason is to provide further reading for others who might be interested in these materials.