The Conservative Case for Gay MarriageFollow

How about the fact that allowing them to marry will increase the likelihood of committed gay relationships, therefore reducing STD's amongst them? You keep making that argument over and over again and it's still meaningless every single time.


Maybe that would be preferable. But it'l be nigh impossible to remove the benefits for heterosexual 90% of the population in comparison to just giving the gay 10% population those same rights.

NO U?


From the article that gbaji referenced ON THIS PAGE:

I know that by coming back to this point, you will completely ignore my previous posts but I just have to ask. Do you REALLY get it? Do you REALLY know what it feels like to be treated like a second class citizen. Do you REALLY know what it feels like to be on a date (probably not), but always have a little irrational fear that some homophobe is going to make a scene? Do you REALLY know what it feels like to hide who you are from friends/family, even for just a day?

No on all counts?

thought so.

Um... Reporters will tend to label such things "rights", but that does not make them so. You'll note that the attorney quoted at the end does not label them so. He calls them "benefits and protections". The reporter writing the article inserted the word "rights" all by himself...

But extending full benefits to homosexual married couples wouldn't be. So that was easy.

I realize you may argue it would be but your reasons for arguing so haven't been especially persuasive.

I disagree.



Can we start with an agreement that the cost to provide those benefits to gay couples are more or less identical to the cost to provide them to heterosexual couples?

So. If we've decided that it's worth that cost to provide those benefits to heterosexual couples, that is presumably based on an assumption that the gains outweigh the costs in some way. The question then becomes: Is the same condition met when we apply this to gay couples?


IMO, the answer is overwhelmingly: No. We spend X and get Y when we provide those benefits to heterosexual couples. We spend X and get .0001Y when we provide those benefits to gay couples. I know you don't want to hear this, but the big difference is the biological reality that heterosexual couples as a group will statistically produce children. We can't say ahead of time which ones will and which ones wont, but we can state with a fair degree of accuracy how many children will be produced as a natural consequence of them simply being couples.


That simply does not exist with regard to gay couples. The only way a gay couple gains a child is if they adopt or one of them is artificially inseminated. In both cases, the choice is directly and entirely to have a child which they must support. Ultimately, this choice is no less likely or unlikely than a similar one made by a single person, a pair of siblings, or any other random assortment of people.

Straight couples will produce children by making the choice to have sex. They may not intend to produce a child, but that may happen anyway. And when we look statistically at the group of "straight couples", it will happen as a rate whether they are married or not, or whether they intend to or not. Thus, there is additional value to encouraging sexually active straight couples to marry. There is no additional value to encouraging sexually active gay couples to marry.


Gay couples are no more likely to end up with a child than any other non-sexually active couple, or single people. There's no "accidental pregnancies" occurring among gay couples.

The costs to provide them to any two people is roughly equal to the costs to provide them to any two other people.


No, you're already wrong. The benefits of marriage were not decided on some cost benefit analysis. They were decided over the course of many years based on a bunch of other factors, many of which largely revolved around property and gender rights.

Again, the rest of your post is built upon the false premise that we provide these benefits due to some desire to get folks to tie the knot prior to producing tricycle engines. You've never been able to back this up with any evidence but instead keep trying to insists that it's true by using some little logical maze. If it's true, back it up with real evidence. Otherwise, stop wasting my time by building arguments based on bullshit and asking me to refute them.

1) Just because Y > .0001Y doesn't mean that .0001Y < X

2) Your entire argument hinges on children. Why not argue that all marriage benefits should be dormant until a child is produced? Don't say it is because that "isn't feasible". After all, dependents are claimed yearly on taxes.



Why not make it less economically straining on a gay couple to adopt a child? Unless you support having kids in orphanages.



Stop treating marriage as an "oops you got pregnant" bandaid. If that was the case, half the incentives offered to married couples wouldn't exist you dolt.

But if we currently justify the cost of X based on the benefit of Y, then if that is true, we are currently grossly under providing benefits for existing same sex marriages. You know. If we're going to get all mathy and everything...



Nope. Not going to say that. I will say that it defeats the incentive portion of marriage benefits though. You kinda want the heterosexuals to marry before they produce children, not wait until after they do and grant them extra benefits. It's not an incentive to marry then is it? It simply become an incentive to have children.

It's not about encouraging couples to have children, much less rewarding them for doing so. It's about rewarding them for entering into a socio-economic condition in which, if they should happen to produce children, those children will be most likely to be productive future members of society and least likely to be costly burdens on the rest of us.




Why not make it less economically straining on single people to adopt a child? Or any group of people? What if two spinster sisters decide to adopt some children together. Must the be married to do so? Must they be gay? What if it's just two good friends? Why not make it more financially viable for them to do so?

I could make the exact same case for those situations that you can make for a gay couple. We don't provide marriage benefits to heterosexual couples so that if they should happen to choose to adopt a child, they'll get some extra benefits. It's to deal with the children they may produce together. Period.




Which ones? I'm serious. Why do you assume this is the case?

Let me put it another way. If the state did not create the set of benefits currently provided to married couple for the reasons I have stated, then why did it create it? What reason does the state have to create an incentive for anyone to marry?

Did they do it just to be nice? I doubt it. Did they do it to provide assistance for people raising children? Not really. As has been pointed out repeatedly (and not just by me), the tax breaks and assistance available to help raise children is largely disconnected from marriage. In fact, good arguments can be made that those things actually harm marriage rates by encouraging women to be single when raising a child (especially the EITC when the potential parents are low income).

If you can make a coherent case for why the government created these benefits other than for the reasons I've posted, I'd really love to hear them. Because I constantly get arguments insisting that this isn't why those benefits exist, but no one can ever seem to provide a sensible alternative reason. It's kinda funny really...

But they do. Married people are far more likely to buy homes, and permanent addresses make it far easier for the government to track and tax citizens. Married couples also automatically create appointees to help manage the estate should one of the individuals be unable to do so. There are a plethora of reasons why the state would like to see individuals marry with absolutely no potential for producing children.

But why would the state care if two people shared common property if there are no children to inherit it?

My thought experiment attempts to imagine a condition in which there are no parents and no children. In that condition, would the state care if two people shared common property or not? I would argue overwhelmingly that it would not. Certainly not to the point of creating benefits for people who did...



No more so than to encourage people to form into any of a large number of types of relationships. We've been down this road already. Take away the need to deal with procreation and the institutions of marriage ceases to have nearly the importance it has. It's just another relationship type, right? It might have more importance for the individuals entering into it, but it doesn't really for the rest of us. We aren't affected at all if two people get married or simply live together if there's no chance that they'll produce a child together...