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Yes, you do. Better and smarter people than you have said so

That was easy.

How about arguing without relying on "Some other guy says so!"?

Sure. How about you arguing with an understanding of Law that exceeds that of the average "Cops" viewer? I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist you go first.

Because, frankly, my opinion on it matters as little as your does. It may be my opinion that, because I didn't like the wait I had when calling Citimortgage that I shouldn't have to pay my bill this month. I might even make up a really smart sounding argument for it. But, come the first of the month, I still have a legal obligation to cut Citimortgage a check.

Hey, small world, I'm arbitraging a tiny piece of your house as we speak.

Want the part where the ants keep trying to come in? I'll cut you a deal on it.

Really, I'd benefit most if you burned it down in some sort of obvious arson that wouldn't be covered by insurance, but I'm not a greedy man, just burn splinter of flooring or something.

Yes, they did. Because the court was only interested in legally recognized marriage and legally recognized marriages get you state benefits. Now, if the state stops allowing benefits for legally recognized marriages and someone sues demanding that they have a right to those benefits, you may have a point. Let me know when that happens.Yeah, you're wrong and you'll contort yourself however possible to avoid admitting it.No, Prop 8 denied the right to marry to homosexual couples based on defining legally recognized marriage in CA as between a man and a woman. It did not say that marriage itself isn't a right.

Which is what I've said a few times now and you keep pretending isn't really what you meant. If you think that gays should be denied the right to marriage then just say that. Stop trying in every single way possible to avoid admitting that this is exactly what you're doing. We deny this same right to people closely related by blood, by people we feel are too young, to people trying to marry sixteen partners, etc. But we don't make lame arguments defending those choices by insisting that marriage isn't a right.There ya go... the ruling upheld the notion of banning marriage in various cases but does not say that prohibiting marriage in those cases negates the basic right of marriage, just that the "important social objective" overrode the "fundamental right".

Edited, Feb 27th 2009 10:29pm by Jophiel

The marriage license makes the marriage. Without the license, you are in a life partnership. A domestic partnership. You are De Factos [in Australia, after two years of cohabitation if you are a hetrosexual couple] You are shacked up. You're boyfriend and girlfriend. You are each other's honeybun, if you're in the Southern US. You're Significant Others. You're a couple. But you're not married.

Lets take two people who go to University and through a Medical course. They do the same classes, read the same texts, attend the same rounds and cut up the same cadavers. They get equal scores in the exams. One of them gets his signed Degree of Doctorate of Medicine from his accredited University and one doesn't for some paperwork/legalistic/bureaucratic reason. The first person is a Medical Doctor. The second isn't. Even though the two people have exactly the same skills and knowledge. The first one is allowed to diagnose illnesses in people, and write precriptions and referrals. The second one is not.

The second one could hold his owm privately organised "graduation ceremony" with friends and family and call himself a doctor, but he just isn't one.

Edited, Feb 28th 2009 12:20am by Aripyanfar

I think same-sex married couples or parents would need and deserve state benefits* no less and no more than heterosexual couples or parents.

I don't agree with your analogy. I think it's more like paraplegic people used to qualify for handicaped parking, and now people who have massive difficulty and pain in walking because they have Multiple Sclerosis want to qualify for handicapped parking also.
It isnt' absurd. Especially when there's no logical reason according to contemporary morals to discriminate between gays and straights. What's little to one person isn't little to every person. Different people have different attachments to personal-social-legal symbol/realities.

For me, Marriage means nothing. I live with my partners and plan never to get married. But a Doctoral degree means the world to me. I got my Bachelors, and my grad ceremony was so the best day of my life up until that time that I aquired an entirely new smile, the widest smile that I'd ever had on my face. I had no idea until I got to it how important that day would be to me.

I had my Honours paper topic all planned out so that it would form the first chapter of my Masters paper that would be bumped up into a Doctorate paper. I had it all planned in my head, and my research resources planned. I knew I could do it. I had the intellectual respect of my usual professors and my visiting guest professors. Raymond Gaita and I agreed to disagree, but for a while we were each other's high spot of the week when he came up every Thursday for a Trimester. I got to tell him he had made a fundamental category mistake on an issue that was the basis of the entirety of the latest book he'd recently had published. He got to defend it against me to the rest of the class. I pulled apart his book lecture by lecture and he wound up satisfactorily structuring his lectures by stitching the argument of his book all back together again to his own satisfaction and holding the argument up to us all, in the face of my arguments, criticisms and questions.

Half the class looked green with sick terror the first time I put my hand up and challenged the logic of the man who is one of the most well known, highly regarded and published philosophers in Australia. When I wasn't smote by lightening after the first lecture they eventually joined in. By the end of the lecture series he beamed around at us all and declared he'd rarely met such a bright, interesting bunch of students and he wished he had more like us come though his university.

Then I got sick. So seriously sick it's a perpetual strain on my concentration. I'm deteriorating badly, with no hope of a cure.

And it kills me, I cannot describe enough how much is kills me that I won't ever get my Doctorate. Even though I logically know in my head that I already know enough to qualify for one. That I know how to structure a good one. That if I wasn't sick I have the skills to do proper research and citations. Because other people can't see into my head to see everything I know, or see my intellectual competence when I'm able to think straight. That "symbolic" piece of paper that would make a "small handful of differences" in my life would make all the personal, social difference in the world to me.

It makes me sick to my soul that my family and friends won't have that little bit of extra respect for and be a little extra impressed because I got a Doctorate. It makes me mad that I'm automatically more liked by strangers/acquaintances/friends because I'm small and pretty and fluffy looking, but it also means they automatically discount my intellectual or political arguments more than they usually would. I've been talked over by guys who are trying to make an argument on information that they lack and I posses, and I hate it. Whenever I was feeling a little nervous, or feeling unreasonably intellectually overlooked, I could introduce myself as Dr _______, if I only had the paper.

*state benefits should always be "means-tested" imo.

During my lifetime the verb "heating" has changed to "hotting" in Australia. Also, the American practise of dropping the -ly ending off adverbs is spreading everywhere. Thirdly, the American practise of dropping the "The" off the front of proper nouns of inanimate objects is spreading everywhere. All these things grate on my nerves and sh*t me up the wall. But after reading articles on evolving English, I've had to give in and resign myself to evolution in action.

I'm sorry Gbaji. It's not just languages and biological entities that evolve. It's societies and cultures too.

200 years ago conservatives were fighting tooth and nail to hang onto their peasants. Peasants weren't allowed to travel off their lord's land without permission. Peasants weren't allowed to get married without their lord's permission. Peasants weren't allowed to own land. Non land owners weren't allowed to vote. That stopped in England 1836. I'm sorry Gbaji, it's just one damned thing after another.

In America it was indentured servants, it was American Indians, it was slaves, it was women voting, it was female and racial equality. Now it's Gays. You are very right. Homosexual emancipation is the social issue Du Jour. It's ok sweety. It'll actually turn out better than you expect. If you know your history well enough, you know that life now is far more better for the majority of people than it used to be.



So that people have a legal leg to stand on when the relationship blows up to hell and things get messy? Secondly, for the same reason that I need a Doctorate. Which isn't very much of a reason to anyone except me.


Edited, Feb 28th 2009 4:02am by Aripyanfar

It's really extra more better than it used to be!

Even when all legal differences *except* a small handful of benefits have been removed, it's still being fought for.

That's absurd too. Isn't it?

No, it's just a different issue. If people who gave birth to women filled out "***** certificates", them fighting to have this changed to "birth certificates" wouldn't be absurd, even if all benefits conveyed were the same.

There's the issue of equal protection under the law, and then there's the issue of equal standing in society. Neither is necessarily more important, though the first is usually easier to achieve.