Americans flee Democrat ruleFollow

You don't really understand how companies work, do you?

Companies are run by people...for the time being.

Fembots will rule the world soon enough.

Not universally.

Yup. That's a perfect example. The existing marriage laws were not created for the purpose of discriminating against gay people, or benefiting heterosexual people. Without delving into yet another argument about the precise objectives of those laws, surely we can agree that it wasn't because the people passing them hated gays and wanted to hurt them while helping the straight folks.

The fact that marriage laws happen to benefit heterosexual couples is a side effect. But that's exactly what I was talking about earlier. Modern liberals take a "pro-gay" position and thus argue for the benefits of marriage to be granted to gay couples solely and entirely because it will benefit gay couples. Conservatives disagree with making law based on which group will benefit from it, and thus oppose the change. And since liberals take their position because they are "pro-gay", they assume that conservatives take the opposite position because they are "anti-gay".

And, as I also pointed out above, just to muddle things up, there are certainly enough people running around who are anti-gay for the liberals to point at. And just as I said earlier, some of those will label themselves "conservatives" even though their methodology is *not* conservative at all. And the result is that some people (many people) come to associate being conservative with being "anti-gay", when that has nothing at all to do with it.


We tend to far far over focus on being "for" or "against" a group. There's a completely different axis to look at though. The one that is about whether or not you make decisions based on being "for" or "against" a group in the first place. But despite the reality that said difference is at the absolute heart of the largest philosophical/ideological conflict in this country (classical liberalism vs social liberalism), that axis is almost completely ignored in our political discourse. What is left is the assumption that everyone is a liberal, and that we all are picking sides and supporting actions based on our side.

Some of us reject that entirely. We believe that by doing that, we're missing the much more important part of what's going on around us. And we also happen to believe (since we're supporters of classical liberalism) that this perception is actively fostered by modern social liberalists since it helps them in the long run. Get enough "conservatives" to adopt social liberal methodologies, even if they don't realize it, and you win. Kinda sneaky and simple. They don't have to debate their ideology at all. Just getting people to fight over which groups they like and don't like forces everyone to adopt said ideology even if they've never heard of it before.


Change the game board and you don't have to defeat the other player.

Edited, Nov 18th 2010 6:48pm by gbaji

lol

I'm actually surprised that nobody's pulled out the filing status known as "head of household" in one of those arguments.

They also didn't provide state funded benefits to those who married either. Those came along later as well. One could even argue (and I have!) that gay couples had the "right" to marry all along, but never had any reason to do so until it was financially advantageous to do so.


But aside from that, the larger point here is that those laws were not created exclusively to harm homosexual couples. It was largely a side effect, and quite possibly a healthy dollop of most people just assuming that the marriage laws (including later benefits) would only be applied to the same group of people who had been the only group seeking legally recognized marriage prior to those laws being enacted. The point here is that the conservative position on this is that the laws should exist and have a purpose aside from helping one group or hurting another. That's why I often focus on what reason (aside from targeting benefits at a chosen group) might be behind our marriage laws. Because to a conservative, that's the most important thing to figure out. If there is no reason, then there's no reason for the law at all. To a conservative the argument that if heterosexual couples get something that gay couples should get it to, is just plain wrong. It's a complete non-starter for us.

I went ahead and bolded the key word.

Democrats?

My mom says I'm the handsomest boy in my class!

What snide comment? Are you unaware that the Democrats currently have a majority in the House?

Is calling me a "goose stepping liberal" (oh noes!) your way of covering for your gaping ignorance about our government? No wonder you had to run away from your teaching "job".

Congratulations on learning to use Google!