Bachmann's hubby might be taking Medicare for "gay therapy"Follow

Why? So they just did it for no reason at all? That's your argument? Seems kinda... weak to me.

Especially when you need to keep lying about it. No one else is fooled when you pretend that no one has offered anything else so why you'd make the decision to look this desperate is beyond me.

I can only guess that looking desperate and pathetic is still a more agreeable option to you than admitting your abject failure at ever producing a scrap of evidence beyond "It's just obvious!"

Edited, Jul 11th 2011 5:50pm by Jophiel

No. It explains why it was lobbied for. Which is still only saying why the people who wanted the benefits wanted them. That does not tell us why it was given to them. There's no end to people wanting things because they would help them out in some way. We kinda have to start with a base assumption that we don't give everything to everyone, right? Thus, there must be some criteria used to decide which groups get which things and which don't.

You honestly have never thought about this? It never occurred to you to see if there's some common theme at work here? Head in sand a lot?



Links to what sources, saying what, about what? You're being very vague. No one else has provided any links at all to any source discussing why the government would choose to provide those benefits, have they? So I've provided "links to sources", while no one else has. Yet, I get attacked because my sources aren't "primary sources"? All the while ignoring that the counter position hasn't provided any alternative explanation much less any sources to support said explanation.

You're applying radically different standards to the two sides of the discussion, aren't you?



Huh? Did you not understand the point of my question? If we gave people benefits just because they asked for them, or wanted them, or could show that they benefited them in some way, then there would be no reason to justify those benefits to the voting public on some grounds of economic parity or even benefit. The fact that these things nearly always include such an argument provides incredibly strong evidence that a similar rationale was involved in the decisions to provide various marriage benefits as well. They're just far enough in the past that the public debate aspect of those things aren't readily available on the interwebs.

It's just kind of absurd to argue that for some magical reason, in this one case, the government just said "Oh. You want these benefits? Sure!", when we don't do that for anything else. Even the arguments for Social Security and later Medicare were based on fiscal cost considerations. The argument was that it would be cheaper to collect the money for these things via payroll taxes ahead of time when people worked and then provide the benefits out of that fund than to deal with a bunch of elderly people needing money for housing and medical care after the fact.

Nearly every social spending program in the US is based on that sort of argument. Welfare? Same deal. Education spending? Same deal. Alternative Action spending? Same deal. We justify them all by arguing that the costs for not doing them outweigh the costs of the program themselves. Admittedly, many times this turns out not to be true, but the point here is that this is the argument which works when trying to get public support for these things.

I don't think it's unreasonable at all to assume that the same sort of reasoning exists behind the choice to fund various benefits for married couples. Yet somehow you all want to assume the exact opposite even in the absolute absence of any evidence.



Lol! IIRC, that exact question was addressed in one of the two cases we often discuss here: Perez v Sharp. The argument (on both sides mind you!) did involve the issue of mixed race children. On the one hand, the argument was that since mixed race children would be assumed to be at a disadvantage in life, the state should not encourage such things by allowing mixed race couples to marry. On the other side, the argument was that mixed race children would result from those relationships anyway, and it was unfair to deny their parents the opportunity to produce them in a recognized and legally binding marriage.

In both arguments, they absolutely did approach it from the perception that official recognition of the marriage, with the attendant benefits, acted as an incentive to relationship behavior. They only differed on whether or not it was a good idea to do so. The final decision basically came down to the same argument I make about heterosexual couples in general: They're going to get together whether they marry or not, and thus will produce children whether married or not, so we should let them marry because it's better for them and for the rest of us if they're born to a legally married couple.

That was probably the dumbest question you could have asked.



No. I'm looking at it from the perspective of consequences if we don't act. Just as the judge in that case did. If children are going to result from the relationship, they should be treated the same as any other relationship which may produce children. To do otherwise represents blanket and non-purposeful discrimination (in this case based purely on race).

There is no correlation at all to gay couples. You just need to look at the issue beyond just "minority group not getting something it wants", and look at *why* we provide the benefits and ask if they make sense in the situation at hand.



Except that many liberals (especially on this issue) don't use common sense or logic to support their argument. And I *am* using common sense and logic to support mine. Seriously, your whole argument basically rests on the idea that you should just support the "cause" of a minority group because they're a minority and thus need your help or something. There's nothing else there. The attempts to compare interracial marriage with gay marriage are simply absurd. They fall down at the very first application of logic. The *only* thing those two things have in common is that both groups are viewed as minorities to you. That's it.


Relevant excerpts from Perez v. Sharp:




and...




and...



and in the other direction...



and...




and...





It's hard to read that decision and not see the overwhelming abundance of mentions and references to procreation. Many of the legal references used refer specifically to the right to choose to have children. The court clearly saw a connection between marrying the person of your choice and having children with the person of your choice. And why not? It's only been in the past couple decades with the rise of the gay marriage argument that this idea has been essentially scrubbed from our social awareness. But that's yet another example of cart-before-horse logic. Those who want to argue for extending marriage benefits to gay couples have systematically worked to argue that marriage has nothing to do with procreation. And now today we sit here arguing over whether or not marriage and procreation were historically related by those considering both the laws applicable to marriage and the benefits marriage provides.


It's a pretty extreme example of dishonesty to argue that gay marriages are the same as interracial marriages. Yet many do anyway. They do it because they've been taught that it's about the group being denied something which must be redressed, and not about looking at why the thing exists in the first place and asking "does it make sense to provide it to this group?".

Because people demanded them...?



No, that's you.



Yes, I understood the point of your incredibly loaded question. I didn't give you teh answer you wanted, and instead gave you the truth. Sorry if I fucked up your twisting of the facts.



Ok. That still doesn't mean what you think it means.



No, gbaji. You're using what you call "logic" to twist something around to make it fit the conservative viewpoint.



What's sad is that you don't understand how that helps the case for same-sex marriage, as well....



Ah, gbaji. You're so transparent.

That's it? Because they demanded them? I've already addressed that argument and shown that it's not a good enough reason. We don't do things just because people demand them. If we did, we wouldn't need to make arguments about broader socio-economic benefits if we give them what they want.

There's no end to what people want. And we don't give everyone everything they want. Therefore, there must be some additional criteria beyond just "a group demanded this". How the hell can we have a rational discussion about this if you refuse to even acknowledge this basic fact?



Yes, you are. You dismiss any and all links I provide to others making the same argument as I, as biased opinion, yet have no problems using sources of people who agree with you even though they're just as much opinion (yet alone biased) as mine. Why accept without question one set of sources, while rejecting out of hand the others?

It's a double standard. A pretty blatant one actually.



Ah... So you didn't understand the point of the question and choose to ignore it instead! Head in the sand, right?



Er? I didn't make that stuff up. WTF? So now court decisions aren't sufficiently legitimate sources for you? The arguments about mixed race children in relation to mixed-race marriage come from court decisions on the issue. I know you want to ignore anything and everything that doesn't match your own little micro-view of this issue, but that aspect of it is absolutely true.

Your cart is so far ahead of your horse you can't even see it anymore.



No. My logic is straightforward. It proceeds from a single starting point: That there exists a societal advantage to encouraging procreation within the context of legally recognized marriage and a significant disadvantage to societies which do not do so in some manner. I then make note of the number of state funded or mandated benefits provided to married couples. I then arrive the rather obvious conclusion that the state created a set of benefits to married couples in order to fulfill that social need. I mean, we could speculate some other reasons exist, but those are most likely to be the correct ones.

It's no less obvious than concluding that someone who chooses to exercise and eat healthy foods is doing so because they want to live a long and healthy life. We don't need to ask each of them why. We just need to know that exercise and good diet are associated with longer/healthier life, and the observe that the person in question is doing those things. Again, we could speculate that they just randomly happened to do this, or they're doing it under orders from their alien masters or something, but that would be silly.




No. What's sad is that you don't see that it doesn't. Read the whole case. Read the arguments. The judge doesn't just blanket state that restricting marriage is wrong. He says it's wrong when there's no social rational for doing so. Since mixed race couples can and do produce children, there is no effective difference between them and other couples *except* racial discrimination.

Here, let me quote another section which sheds more light on this:



If a determination of high disease potential between two married people is judged to be sufficient to deny them marriage (on an individual basis, and not a race-wide one), then what about two people who can't possibly produce children? The individual basis aspect disappears here, right? No gay couple can produce a child together. Ever. In this case, we don't need to test each individual as the precedent would require in the case of potential disease. It's an acceptable restriction.


You just don't want to see it. So you pretend it's not there.



What? That I do things like make logical arguments, and then provide facts and data to support them? As opposed to those who argue against me who just fall back on rhetoric and personal attacks?

There you go lying again. Who do you think you're fooling? Yourself? You think you're tricking me into thinking I haven't? Tricking everyone who has read these threads for years into thinking this is so? There's no one here to fool, Gbaji so it's time to be honest for once.


It's not an argument, it's an attempt to determine why you have this pathological need to lie about every past thread to try and save some dignity in front of the very people who know you're lying.


Well, I'm not desperately lying to avoid the admission that I have no real evidence so I am feeling more rational than the guy who's frantic to avoid the truth. I have that much going for me.

Have any evidence yet? Real evidence? Or were you going to lie some more to cover for it?

I fail to see how legislation put forth specifically to further a racist agenda and keep non-white peoples (in this case, specifically black ones) from producing children in ANY way influences your claims that marriage benefits were put forth specifically as a way to entice people to enter into straight marriages and produce children.

Especially since, you know, this is legislation encouraging the exact opposite.

And none of that had ANYTHING to do with benefits or marriage incentives. It was all about them trying to prevent the birth of half-blood children that would force them to readdress their laws that obviously oppress one group in favor of the other.

I think it's obvious that gbaji's big whinefest in this thread is to distract from the real matter at hand, and that is that Bachmann's race is over.

Ah... What the hell?



But when that significant social rationale is presented to you, you pretend that it doesn't exist. No one's arguing that the state can restrict marriage for no reason at all. I presented a reason. I explained at length what social benefits there are to a set of marriage benefits limited to couples consisting of one man and one woman. You ignore it. Then you argue that this isn't really the reason for the restriction. And when I show that others share the same argument, I'm attacked for linking "biased sources".

You argue in circles Joph.




You left off the first section of that paragraph. You do that a lot Joph. Ignore the context of a statement. The word "thus" should have been a big clue that the preceding section is the support for the statement being made. So let's examine that support by looking at Meyer v. Nebraska.

The case isn't about marriage! It's about whether a teacher violated the law by teaching a student in German instead of English. In the midst of writing his opinion, the judge for some reason choose to expound upon the fourteenth amendment by generating a somewhat random list of things that could not be prohibited. So the entire precedent for the "fundamental right of marriage" rests on the fact that a judge writing an opinion on a completely unrelated issue happened to include the phrase "to marry" in a list of protected fourteenth amendment rights. That's weak, to say the least.

I've checked every reference listed at the end of the paragraph with "to marry" listed as a right. Not one of them mentions marriage. The judge in that case didn't refer to or repeat some previous ruling establishing marriage as a fundamental right. He just decided to include it in a list. And from his inclusion, Perez expands it to a fundamental right. And from Perez, other cases then argue that it is a fundamental right. Um... This is why precedent in the absence of common sense is a stupid way to judge cases.

I'll also point out that Meyer specifies that these are "privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness". The judge surely was not arguing that there was a right to receive state issued benefits for marriage. He was speaking within the common law context of marriage. So two people can shack up together without the government arresting them.



We shouldn't be paying money for any benefits which don't have a broader socio-economic benefit Joph. My position isn't limited to marriage. It's just that in this case, marriage between a man and a woman produces a tangible benefit to me which justifies the cost of the benefits, while marriage between two people of the same sex doesn't.



I don't believe that the "fundamental right" to marry includes the right to receive funding from the government. Now if you can show me that the judge in the Meyer case was speaking about things like social security benefits and military survivor benefits and pre-tax health insurance back in 1923 when he wrote that, then you might have a point. I somehow doubt you can do that though.

Edited, Jul 13th 2011 5:04pm by gbaji

It wasn't in 1923. And it wasn't a component of the "common law" aspect which the judge in that case referred to.



But there's a difference between the right to do something and any benefits given to you because you do that thing. If tomorrow the government decides to pay people a dollar every time they post a message on an internet board because they want to encourage people to engage in their right to free speech, and then the day after that we eliminate that payment, we aren't actually infringing the "right" to free speech. We're just not giving you a reward for doing it.

In the same way, the fact that over time the government has decided to give benefits to couples who marry does not mean that taking those benefits away (or restricting them in some way) takes away the "right to marry". The benefits are not part of the right. They can't be because rights are things you choose to do. They aren't things other people do for you.



Not at all. I'm saying that the "fundamental right" part of marriage doesn't apply to the benefits one receives for being married. In Perez, those issues were the same because there was no reason to restrict the granting of a marriage license (and thus the benefits associated with marriage) except for purely racial reasons.



You're trying to argue that because marriage is a "fundamental right", that it cannot be infringed or restricted at all. But Perez (and others on the same subject) repeatedly speak about tests for whether a restriction is constitutional. In the case of interracial marriage, the decision was that it was not. And a large part of that ruling rested on the reality that aside from the skin colors involved, the fundamentals of a mixed race marriage were identical to a non-mixed marriage.


That's not the case with same-sex marriage though, is it? Whether you agree with my argument or not, you should at least be willing to acknowledge that the fact that a same sex couple cannot produce children together is significant in some way. It changes both the relationship *and* that relationships impact on the surrounding society. My interest in having a same sex couple marry is no greater than having any two random non sexually active people share an apartment or other living expenses. In other words: not much. But my interest in a heterosexual couple marrying is significant. If they're going to be sexually active, they (and all other similar couples) will statistically produce children, whether they intend to or not. I, and the rest of society have a vested interest in getting them to marry even on the off chance that they produce a child.


I know that many of you don't agree with this, but to me that's the heart and soul of this issue. It's the only reason in my opinion to provide benefits to married couples at all. By extending those benefits to gay couples, we're essentially chucking that rationale out the window. If that happens, we may as well eliminate the benefits entirely. And then what will all of this have been for? The only result will be yet one more social change which will increase the rate at which children will be born to single mothers and the likelihood of those children becoming dependent on the state in some way.



Linked to doesn't mean that they constitute any part of the "right" to marry though. In the same way that funding for public education has nothing to do with the "right" to an education, or that funding for health care has nothing to do with the right to health care. It's kinda important to understand that difference. A right can never be expressed as something someone else must do for you. That's a fallacy invented by social liberalists in order to get people who've adopted liberalism to accept government authoritarianism by labeling it as a "right".


I don't opposed this because I hate gay people. I oppose it for the same reason I oppose higher taxes, or socialized medicine, or welfare, or most of the social spending we do. The fact that in some cases, I'm willing to compromise those principles for a clear greater good (like education funding for example) does not mean that I abandon the principles themselves. You really have the burden backwards IMO. I should not have to prove why it's ok to exclude a group from qualifying for some benefit. You have to show now inclusion of that group provides sufficient broader socio-economic "good" to justify doing it. In the case of K-12 education, I can accept the cost versus benefit (although I think we still do this horribly). In the case of marriage between men and women, I can accept the cost versus the benefit. In the case of gay marriage? Absolutely not. There's no benefit to the rest of us sufficient to justify the cost of the benefits.


And that's before even getting into the point that most gay couples don't really care about those benefits anyway. Surely there should be a solution which gives them the social and legal recognition they really want without having to provide that other stuff as well? There is. It's something like the Domestic Partnership status here in California. But that got brushed aside, didn't it?

No, I'm saying you have no factual evidence to support your claim. Now, if you want to say that it's just your opinion that marriage should be for the kids, that's fine although it's not a very compelling legal argument to take away someone's rights.


Perez v. Sharp is about marriage and however "weak" you want to cry about it being, his ruling has been upheld in numerous later cases which cited his ruling as precedent and not a single court has even attempted to overturn the concept that marriage is a fundamental right.


Which is irrelevant because the legal concept of marriage includes the entire civil contract of marriage with its associated legal benefits. Which is why every place trying to not give you those benefits does so on the basis that you're not married, not that you're married but still don't qualify. Which is also why no legal argument even attempts your sad little "You can just say you're married!" line as a defense. You can have whatever personal opinions about what marriage means that you want -- the courts have a set idea of what that concept entails which is also clarified in Perez v. Sharp when the judge says that marriage is more than a civil contract. Not "in addition" to that contract, but marriage in the eyes of the court is the right to have that contract.

In other words, you're free to stomp your feet and howl all you want about you hate the legal precedent, but it's still the legal precedent and you're just crying bitter rage-tears to make noise.

No, it didn't.

The right to free speech does not mean that someone else has to pay for the microphone. Similarly, the "right to marry" does not mean that someone else has to pay you benefits. One is not the same as the other.



Irrelevant. Federal recognition of marriage *is* about determining whether the federal government will provide you benefits. That's all it is. You get that, right? That's what the "recognition" part of that is. In the same way that the federal government recognizing that you are disabled qualifies you for medicare. You didn't become disabled because the government recognized it. You were disabled before and then the government recognized that your disability qualifies you for a set of government benefits.


It's just shocking that you guys can't see the difference between those things.




How does not getting something qualify as oppression? Bit of hyperbole, isn't it?