Vermont Legislature Legalizes Gay MarriageFollow

But it is easy to know which ones do have children. And to think any number of people of a significant amount gets married because of financial benefits, is ridiculous. People get married because it's what society expects of them when they're "in love" with someone.

Because we want them to marry *before* they have children. It's not just about providing benefits to people who have children, but trying to increase the likelihood that children will be produced in an existing socio-economic environment which will be most beneficial to them and least likely to result in the children being drains on society.



Again. The incentive is not to get people to have children. We don't (or shouldn't) simply reward people for popping out babies. We do this to some extent and it's a mistake and increases the rate of children born to single mothers (a bad thing).

If you give the benefits only for marrying and not just for having children, then the children will be more likely to be born to a married couple. Hand them out to anyone who has children, without including the marriage bits, and you increase the rate at which they will be born outside a marriage.



No. I'm really not. In fact, I'm all for gay couples marrying. I'm just not in favor of subsidizing those marriage with a whole set of financial benefits which I pay for and for which there is no benefit to society in return.


I even proposed a situation in which we'd change our laws to allow gay couples to qualify for the legal status of "married", but then change all the other laws which grant just a set of specific financial benefits to couples who marry such that only married couples consisting of one man and one woman could qualify and was told that would *still* be wrong. I'm doing everything I can to come up with a solution which meets all the social needs and wants, while preventing unnecessary financial expenses and am hitting a wall of "but it's not fair!!!" responses.


Ask yourself why that's not fair? Not every single person should receive government funded benefits. We shouldn't grant those benefits just because we feel sorry for a group or want them to get the same thing some other group gets. We should grant benefits only because the gain to society from granting those benefits outweighs the cost of the benefits themselves. We can debate this as it applies to straight couples, but it's an absolute no-brainer when it comes to gay couples. There is no societal benefit sufficient to justify the cost of the benefits for them. Thus, there no rational reason to grant those benefits to them.

It's not me being mean. It's me looking at the issue honestly and unemotionally.

So you're saying that the "We do it for the kids!" is pure opinion and not fact? Because you keep presenting it as fact so I'd like to get this settled before moving onwards.

It's why I am Ok with paying higher taxes/whatnot so that married couples pay less or receive more benefits.


Insisting on the "facts" of this is an unfair argument. Ask 20 people just what marriage *is* and you'll get at least 10 different responses. There is no one single document held on high, and sealed in a glass case in which we can read exactly the one single reason why marriage benefits are granted.

It's not exactly hard to noodle out why most of them exist though, just by looking at what they are and how they work. If you're unhappy with that, then I suppose you'll live a very unhappy life as you insist that no public debate can exist on any subject unless we can find the single reason everyone holds for whatever it is we're talking about. We have a system in which collective positions are derived at and often codified into law. To insist that every single person voting "yes" on a piece of legislature have the exact same reason for voting "yes" is absurd beyond belief...

Edited, Apr 13th 2009 5:24pm by gbaji

So, exactly what's the difference in taxes collected from a married couple rather then a two people who are single but live together? If I recall right in most cases don't you end up paying more in the end? I'm just wondering exactly how much money you're arguing over.

And gay couples can achieve most of the other rights of being married already without the marriage, it just might take a lot more time and work. Also quite a few health insurance companies do have options to include significant others, even when you're not married.

Yes. Congratulations. We have a legal status, and a whole mess of different benefits attached to that status, and no one single document explaining *why* the status exists, or why any one benefit (much less all of them) exist. Great!

So. We're debating whether or not gay couples should be allowed to qualify for that legal status, and qualify in turn for all those benefits. I have looked a the benefits, and given my opinion as to why those benefits are ok from my perspective to provide to the existing set of couples. I have then asked the question as to whether that same set of reasons apply to same sex couples, and arrived at the conclusion that they do not.

That's me. I'm asking you to do the same. Why do you believe those benefits exist? What purpose to they serve? And do you believe that the purpose they serve makes sense if those benefits are extended to same sex couples?


I'm asking you to go through the same logic I have. I'm not insisting that you arrive at the same conclusion, but I really would like to hear why you think the cost for providing those benefits to gay couples is justified? And again. I don't want to hear about who gets them now. Assess whether they should get them on their own merits. If you want to argue that the existing qualifications are too broad, then that's a whole different issue. But that would mean that gay couples would be less qualified to receive them, not more...


Give me the Joph reason. That's all I'm asking for here.




I'm not insisting that my reasons are "the reason". But in the absence of anyone else coming up with any other, then that's kinda all we have, right?

Again. Give me your reason for them existing? Why do we provide those benefits. Tell me what you think. Then assess whether those reasons make sense if we apply those benefits to gay couples.



Nothing is universally decided Joph. You're holding this one set of legislature up to a higher standard than any other.

Find me where there is a single document defining the reason why we fund public education Joph. You can't. Everyone knows of course. But if you were to challenge me to find where "Because an educated population is worth the cost" is written anywhere, I'd also be unable to find that. Amazingly, we still manage to make decisions regarding education funding.


If you don't think my reasons are legitimate, then by all means come up with some counter rationale. I can't think of one, but maybe you can...

BS. It only doesn't fly when there's a group of people who are perceived to be a victim class involved. It flies just fine all the rest of the time though.

There are thousands of legally defined statuses. Each of them have sets of requirements and have various benefits or penalties associated with them. And none of them are "equal". They're all "different". They are different because they address different situations.

You need to stop looking at things are purely a benefit that one group gets so it's somehow unfair if another doesn't. IMO that's a moronic way to approach any spending issue. I'll ask a question I asked earlier: Why limit those benefits to married couples? If it's really just about making sure all people get the same benefits, why only married couples?

Why don't I get to assign X number of people to be covered by my medical insurance? That's the same thing married people with children get, so why not me? Why can't I just designate one person who gets to receive my social security or pension benefits when I die? Why do only spouses get those? Gee. That's unfair! As a single person I'm being treated differently... Whaaaaah!


Before you can argue that gay couples should receive these benefits, you really should first at least *try* to explain why straight couples should receive them and then show how gay couples meet the same criteria. I'm approaching this in that manner. No one else is. You may disagree with my conclusions, but my argument is inherently consistent. The rest of you are just parroting a position, without a single reason for it other than "That's the way it should be".



See. Unfair. It's not like I pay proportionately less for my medical coverage than the married guy in the next office. Yet his insurance covers himself and any arbitrary number of dependents. I'm paying for his wife and children to get medical care. How is that fair? It's not.

If it's just about fairness, then there'd be no benefits at all.

I'm still wondering exactly what these benefits that you're so worried about actually cost. Hell, maybe even the money spent on the wedding ceremony to caterers, photographers and the like would be enough to outweigh any theoretical cost to society.

Lol. You're asking good questions, but it's still interesting to me how often the very way we view an issue is skewed sometimes. It's not about them re-couping the cost of their wedding. It's not about the benefits someone gets. It's about the cost someone else has to pay for them to receive those.

It just seems that somewhere long the line most people have been taught/indoctrinated into viewing issues of liberty, equality, fairness, etc in terms of what people get instead of what is taken from people. And IMO that is exactly 180 degrees backwards. If you get 100 dollars of stuff and I get 100 dollars of stuff, this does not make either of us more equal, or free, nor does it make the world in any way more "fair". You and I each got some stuff. That's it. But the guy who had to pay the 200 bucks for us to get it is the one who has been infringed upon.

Even if that's equalized, there's still a problem. Imagine if both you and I are taxed $100, and provided $100 in some form of benefits. We're even, right? Are we? Or did the government just take $100 from us, which we could have spent on anything we wanted, and spent that money on a specific thing they wanted us to have, and then gave us that thing? Yup. That's exactly what they just did...


It's *always* about what's taken away, not what is gained. You don't achieve equality, freedom, or a society of equals by working really hard to make sure everyone receives the same benefits from the government. You best achieve those things by minimizing the total amount taken from anyone in your society as a whole. Period.

Thus, the criteria for deciding to spend money on some benefits should never be about whether that group is getting their fair share, but rather whether the benefit to society as a whole if that group gains that specific benefit is sufficient to justify the costs to the citizens in the form of taxes and whatnot. That's the *only* reason to spend government money and this question should be asked each and every time.


This is why the "gay couples should receive these benefits because it's unfair for straight couples to get them and not gay couples" is a completely fallacious argument. It does not tell me why gay couples should receive them. It tells me only that the person making the argument somehow thinks our spending objectives should be to make sure everyone gets the same relative amount of goodies from the government and furthermore believes that to not do so is some kind of violation of one group's "rights". It's not. But far too many people approach this sort of issue from that viewpoint and it's incredibly hard to get them to see that this is backwards.


It's not about what people get. It's about whether any given thing we might spend money on is worth the cost to those who have to foot the bill for it. It doesn't matter if the results seem "unfair" to one group or another. It's not about fair. If it was just about "fair", we'd never take money from one person and give it to another, right? It's not fair to single people to foot the bill for so many programs which benefit married couples. The only reason to do it is if the result is a net positive for everyone...

I think we discussed this either in a previous gay marriage thread, or maybe the one about healthcare (the one were McCain was taxing benefits IIRC). The cost for a married person is typically about half again that charged to a single employee.

So they get them for a little more, but not that much more. And less than the assumed double average cost for the coverage. And that's before considering children.

The point is that a married co-worker with a spouse and three kids does *not* pay 5 times as much for health insurance as I do. Not even remotely close. Yet, on average, we can assume his payouts from the program are going to be roughly five times mine. Guess who's paying more for less? That would be the single guy...



Er? Even if it were double, that would just make us even (without taking into account children). Double for two people is the same per-person. I'm talking about the share of money I put into our insurance program in comparison to the share I pull out. A single person gets shafted on this. It's arguable that if we were to suddenly bend the labor laws such that I could work at a company which employed nothing but single people with no dependents, the cost for my insurance would probably be half or even a third as much as I pay working for a corporation in which say 50% of the employees are married.

Nope. Go back and read.Nope. We talked about it. You didn't miss it.Nope. You humor me and go back and read. It's no "hardship" but I just don't care to and your clumsy attempts to railroad me into it ain't gonna work.If someone asked for support for your reason, I'd certainly argue that "It just is and everyone knows it" would be ****-poor support. I know I could build a much better argument for it.

I haven't argued it before in the past because I already know, and could back up, where those notions come from. You, on the other hand, are incapable of doing the same when it comes to marriage.

Oh, and the whole "one document" thing is pretty much a strawman (albeit one I entertained for a post or two). I never said it had to be in one singular document; I asked for supporting evidence for your claims. You're allowed to find two documents which each support different facets of your argument or three documents or even four!

Joph and I both provided some reasons in a previous thread. Just because you discount or disagree with them doesn't mean they are not reasons.

As for your position ... if the reason we provide some benefits to married couples without children is to encourage reproduction, we're insane. I don't believe that's even a reason, let alone the reason. It's nothing more than your rationalization to prevent mental distress at paying for your share of the costs.