The most incredibly stupid ignorant hateful thing I've read Follow

Now, not so much. In 1919? Yeah, maybe.

The fact that women's rights are still an ongoing battle shows that it was a compromise.

You can have a job, but not equal pay..

20 years later.. Hey how about equal pay guys?

Right, but was the lack of equal pay a foreseeable issue at the time?

don't get angry at me Bel i'm on your side.

Just for you

True, don't know why that didn't pass through my head.

Still though, I'd think that the women would have expected their right to vote to guarantee them a place in legislature that would give them equal pay, and it was probably a bit of a shock when they didn't get it. In addition, I've been under the impression that women weren't really as prolific in the workforce as a whole until the advent of Rosie the Riveter and all that.

I honestly don't know as much about the women's right movement, however, so you'll have to forgive me if I'm living in my own, ideal little world.

"you look like Barbra Streissand's left nostril!

No, most of us find out we're pregnant, then lay in the fetal position for 2 days, crying.

Gonna reply to this first, since it encapsulates some of the main points. Got busy at work today and didn't get to respond to much yet. I will respond to Jophs earlier post.



Correct. Let me also go a step further. Even those benefits which do not seem to have anything directly to do with producing children still act as an incentive. Yes. Even those social security and pension benefits that they're unlikely to get until they are much older still generate an incentive for those who are younger to get married.

I think people need to step away from the idea that you simply equate "having a child" with "receiving a benefit". IMO, this simply encourages people to have children, but does not encourage them to do so in the best possible manner. Also, I'll point out that while there are many benefits which do apply directly to those with dependents, regardless of marital status, many people feel that those are harmful in the long run (and I'm one of them) exactly because it encourages the creation of children without marriage.

Heck. We often talk about the marriage "penalty". Oddly, it's most obvious among lower income people. The combination of already being near the bottom of the income tax scale and the effects of the Earned Income tax Credit, as well as the relatively larger dependent exemption actually makes it more financially desirable for a couple to have a child while remaining single than to get married. This is wrong IMO and shouldn't be the way things are set up. To argue that since we already do this we should further remove incentives for getting married as it relates to children is just going another step in that same wrong direction.



I didn't say that. I said that the benefit for encouraging those who will produce children whether marriage exists or not to enter into said stable home environment is greater that if we don't. Yes. There's a benefit to society if people form loving stable relationships. But they can do that whether they are married or not, or whether their marriage gains them benefits from the government or not.


The benefits of two people deciding to share their lives and expenses and whatnot are inherent in the choice itself. This is the same reason why people choose to get roommates. It's easier to manage if you can share expenses. Doing so with people you like makes this even more of a positive. Doing this with someone you love and want to spend your live with is obviously even better.

But we don't need any special benefits to encourage people to do that. They'll choose to or not as they wish. The point to providing additional benefits is not just to encourage people to casually share their expenses, but to get them to enter into far more binding civil contracts obligating themselves to eachother. There's really only one reason for this if you stop and think about it. And that's to ensure that if children should result from the relationship, that there will be binding requirements placed on the parents to ensure the best possible environment for them.


The broad social benefits Joph talks about apply whether the people involved get "married" or not. Certainly, those benefits occur outside of any requirement for a civil contract of any sort. People have been co-habitating for a long time. There are many benefits to it. But those are not by themselves sufficient insurance of a protective environment for children. The marriage contract binds the two in a way that normal co-habitation does not. And the marriage benefits from the legal status acts as an incentive to get couples to sign those papers.



No. Because just because something is beneficial is not sufficient reason to subsidize it. There are many choices individuals can and do make all the time that have positive social impact. We don't subsidize them all with tax dollars.


Let me put out another analogy. Let's pretend we live in some alternate universe in which new people appear fully grown out of a factory. There are no children. No parents. Everyone starts as an adult and lives their lives working, playing, loving, hating, etc... It's otherwise exactly the same. Would we ever bother to create something called marriage? Maybe. We might recognize two people choosing to share their lives. But would we create tax breaks and pension sharing benefits for them? Would we create any sort of incentive for them to marry?


I don't think so. We certainly would encourage it (maybe). But the "need" for them to enter into such relationships just doesn't exist. There difference to society either way is pretty darn minimal. Think "Brave New World" here. How many marriages did you hear about in that book? Why was that? Could it be because the children were all raised in creches? With no parents, there's no real need for marriage. Certainly, people may form relationships and choose to love and support eachother, but the actual institution of marriage as we think of it today would simply serve no purpose.



To me, that's why gay couples should not receive special benefits for marrying. If they choose to enter into that sort of relationship, that's great. Good for them. But I don't think that we should subsidize those relationships. There's just no point to it.

Edited, Nov 7th 2008 5:52pm by gbaji

Sharing rent and half the water bill is a pale imitiation of the pooled resources and efforts of a married couple.Ridiculous. Once again, you cling to this notion that children are the only possible reason for providing the coping tools which benefit the stable household unit. Of course, you also skip over the notion of children in same sex households and why they shouldn't receive the same level of household stability and care that is provided via marriage in a heterosexual household.Not remotely. No one would seriously consider a couple people spliting the rent on a 2-bedroom to be analogous to households formed by a committed couple sharing the burdens of property, healthcare, childrearing, etc.

Which is why it's a nice thing for people to do if there's no child production aspect to it, but becomes worth providing incentives for when the issue of child production is present.



You say that as though there's a reason we wouldn't like it.



Except that they'll never have a child together. And let me be clear. "have a child" means one of them impregnating the other. Adoption and artificial insemination are choices. Getting pregnant will just statistically happen to heterosexual couples over time.



Yup. Happens to single people as well. But there is nothing inherent in a homosexual relationship that makes the support structure rely on one income, while there is with heterosexual relationships.



Yes. It does and would. The question is: Is there a need for this?

I would say not. There is no more need for a homosexual couple to receive those benefits than two people who happen to be roommates. None at all. Both can work. Both can have their own health care. Both can earn their own pensions and social security. Only in a heterosexual relationship is there an event that may happen (statistically *must* happen) which will vastly increase the likelihood that one of them will rely on the other for those things.

Just because it would be nice to provide these to same sex couples is not sufficient reason for us to do it. It would be nice for everyone to have a free pony, but I'm going to oppose that bit of legislative change as well.



I simply disagree. It's nice, but not worth the cost. But then, if you happen to also support things like universal health care and government provided "cradle to grave" protections, I suppose your position makes sense. Of course, if we provided those things, this whole conversation would be moot, right? No need for pensions if everyone's covered. Not need for health care benefits if everyone's covered. No need for social security if everyone's covered.

That's another topic of course, but I bring it up to illustrate that much of your position starts with an assumption that because something is beneficial to the people that we should do it. I disagree. We should only provide said benefits in situations where not providing them would cost us more. I believe that is true in the case of marriage benefits applied to opposite-sex couples. I don't see how it comes even close in the case of same-sex couples. They don't produce children, thus there's no "cost" associated with them, and thus no reason to try to get them to form any particular type of relationship.

It's not all about benefit. It's also about reducing cost. Children being raised by single mothers represents a cost to society as a whole. A pretty big one, not just in terms of money, but also social "good" over time.




Private contracts provide for the majority of the powers that they need. The rest is "benefits" provided for or mandated by the government. IMO, those things aren't needed.

Again. I think the core disagreement is based on our respective perception of the base criteria for something before we fund it (or mandate it) from the government. We're not really arguing about the value of relationships or marriage, but how high the bar need be set before we decide that the government should step in and provide for something. As a conservative, I tend to set that bar much higher than you do. And same-sex couples don't reach that bar. There just isn't enough "need" from the perspective of the state to justify the cost.

I point this out to make it clear that this isn't about treating people differently based on their sexual orientation or preference. That's not really the determinant. It's treating them different based on choices that are made. A couple is made up of two people. It's makeup will determine whether a child might be produced. A couple made up of two people of the same sex will never produce a child. A couple made up of two people of the opposite sex *might*. While we can argue that perhaps we can tighten the marriage benefits within that second group to continue to weed out those who we're sure wont produce children (and interestingly enough, that's exactly what the Domestic Partnership law did here in California), it's absurd to insist on going the other direction.




All a result of choice though. Choices they are free to make, and free to pay for. I don't see the need to subsidize those choices either.



They do. They will automatically be the child of their parents and receive benefits appropriately. The difference is that we still don't subsidize the relationship between same-sex partners since they can't produce additional children together.

If a woman has a child by one man, and the marries another. That first child's legal father is still the first man. If she dies a few years later, the first man becomes the guardian of the child. Not the man she was married to. The only (and interesting) possible exception is if the woman then has more children with the second man. If the conditions regarding the first man are bad enough, the second man may be able to retain the first child. In this case, because it's the sibling of his children. It's rare, but can happen.

There is no biological relationship between two people of the same sex, nor between any children they may have. While their relationship is wonderful, that does not and should not change that fact. We can talk about adoption as a separate issue of course. My point is that the biological connection of children tends to run this issue pretty strongly. We don't automatically grant benefits to someone just because we feel like it. It goes back to my earlier point about how just because something would be nice doesn't mean we should do it.



No they don't. Because it's not "their child". The child belongs to one of them. In exactly the same way that if a single woman has a roommate, we don't assume that her child belongs to the roommate. No amount of closeness between the two confers any special legal relationship between the other person and the child. Again. We can discuss adoption if you wish. That's a whole nother can of worms though...



No. It really doesn't. In an ideal world where everyone makes perfect choices, sure. But in the real world, what overwhelmingly happens is that as a result of our attempts to separate marriage from child production, we've created incentives for single women to have children on their own. We've created an incentive for single women to get pregnant from some random guy she intends to have no part of her child's life and then insist that the government wave a magic wand, remove his biological responsibility and grant it to her lesbian girlfriend.

While it's certainly better that she's attempting to at least have a second person involved in the care of that child, it's only because she thinks this will work that she attempts it in the first place. Had we left well enough alone, virtually all children would today be born to married couples who are both the biological parents of the child. Today, that statistic is rapidly going the way of the dodo.

It's the same sort of problem we're seeing with welfare moms. In the process of attempting to help poor children of single mothers, we've dramatically increased the rate of poor children born to single mothers. Along the way, we've damaged the traditional benefits and incentive for couples to marry, which in turn leads to many of the arguments in this thread for gay marriage.

But in each case, what we're doing is increasing the rate at which less then ideal conditions for raising children occur. And you're demanding that we encourage this even more? Are you kidding?!



And if both parents are the parent of that child, they get that. I'm not sure what your point is here. That if one is the parent, and the other is someone else she met along the way and will never produce a child with, we should grant that person special benefits? What happened to the other parent? See. There were two people involved at some point with creating that child. Two people. Same chances and opportunities for one of them to have some sort of health insurance for the child exists in either case. The addition of a third person who does not meet the criteria for potentially producing yet more children with one of the parents is irrelevant.

Again. From the state's perspective this is no different than having a roommate. Useful. A good idea. But it does not assume any sort of special benefits are necessary.



No. It's not. Without putting children into the mix, there is zero reason to provide special benefits for them. None at all. And with children in the mix, there's no reason either. They can't produce children together. The most they can do is help support eachother in exactly the same way any two (or more) people can. There's no need for special benefits for this.

What other benefits? We were talking about those generated *by* the couple themselves (for themselves and society around them). Not those paid for and provided to them. You were saying there's an inherent advantage to society just for people forming those relationships regardless of what we call it or to what degree we recognize it. I believe your argument had to do with suggesting that we should subsidize marriage for anyone who can enter into that sort of relationship regardless of the sexual makeup of that couple just because of the societal "good" that results.



Stop misrepresenting what I said.

I said that production of children is the only reason why the government should subsidize those relationships. Totally different thing. But my argument is relevant to the topic at hand while your's is out from left field.




They do. If their biological father has health insurance, they can be covered. If their biological mother has health insurance, they can be covered. They can receive inheritance and financial support from both of them.

The same sex partner of one of the parents is irrelevant in this context. That person is a nice addition and can certainly help out, but the addition of that person is not required, and certainly there's no reason to subsidize him/her.

We subsidize a second marriage for heterosexual couples because that coupling may also produce additional children and we want to make sure the same legal conditions are present in that case as well. That way if she separates again, the second biological father to her second child (in the case of a woman) will also become a source of insurance benefits and inheritance, etc...





We were talking about social benefits. Stuff like "do married people commit crime more or less than single people". Are they happier? Do they participate in the community more often? Those are the "social benefits" of the sort of relationships we're talking about. And you'd be hard pressed to argue that the distinction between a couple with a civil union contract is significantly different in this respect than one with the same contract but who qualified (as a result of being heterosexual) for the benefits derived from the legal status of "marriage".

Or were you confusing social benefits with "personal benefits". The couple themselves are better off with those benefits of course. But that does not mean that society as a whole is any better of as a result of them receiving them. I suspect you kinda mixed those together...

Edited, Nov 7th 2008 6:47pm by gbaji

Plenty of people don't.Choices which result in a child. I'm not sure why the children who enter a family from adoption, artifical insemination, eBay, blended families or whatever are less worthy of a stable married family environment than "natural" children.Single income heterosexual households are a dying breed. When you come back from the 1950's, bring me some of Auntie May's pie, okay?Sure. It keeps the households more stable. Stable households result in a more stable society.Legally blending those things produces a household in which the total is greater than the sum of its parts. It is intrinsiticly stronger than two separate people using their own individual statuses.It's lovely that you equate someone wanting to be able to take the time off to tend to a dying partner with them wanting a pony.Again, it's lovely that your opinion of children in a family from some means other than being born there is "Tought shit for you that your parents didn't create you naturally."However, the child has considerable protections under the step-parent which don't exist without a married relationship between the biological parent and the step-parent. Furthermore, this scenario disregards any chance that the biological parent(s) may not be around due to death, adoption situations, etc. That about says it all.

The rest really isn't worth answering. It's you stomping your feet and declaring over and over that only "natural" children matter and that society doesn't really benefit from committed households working to remain self-sustaining and being able to cope with major downturns. Well, unless they're making natural children.