Criminy wrote:
gbaji wrote:
So by your logic, first cousins aren't full humans? Think it through. You're making an assumption that isn't valid.
You should know the reason why first cousins are on the no-marriage list.
Of course I do. My point is that we exclude them for reasons other than not viewing them as "full human". Ari's argument was basically that by not granting legal marriage to gay couples, we are treating them as less than fully human. But if that were true, then it would be true for all sets of people we don't allow to qualify for marriage. Which would mean first cousins, siblings, groups of more than 2, etc.
Since we *don't* view those sets of people as not being fully human, then Ari's assumption isn't valid. While this does not preclude the possibility of some people not viewing gay people as fully human, it does preclude the assumption that by not granting them the same access to the legal status of "married" we are treating them as less than fully human.
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Homosexual couples don't have to worry about that problem, what with the inability to reproduce.
Yup. So we only grant marriage licenses to those couples who may reproduce and who we want to reproduce. It's almost like the marriage status exists as an incentive to get those couples to marry so as to maximize the procreative outcome of our society. But that's just a crazy interpretation. Never mind that it is the single consistent facet to our traditional rules for who gets to marry.
The ancient Greeks didn't view homosexuality as an abomination. They practiced it as a matter of course. Yet, they didn't recognize gay marriages either. In that society, men married women in order to create families. They had sex with other men for pleasure. Amazing how frequently this whole procreative aspect of the issue of marriage keeps cropping up. Makes one wonder why some people insist on denying it.
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Keep squirming though trying to hunt for excuses, it is rather fun to watch the worm squirm in the dirt before the bird eats it.
I'm not squirming at all. You basically just provided yet more support for my position.
I think the first problem many people have when they look at government benefits, is that they interpret them in the context of why a specific group is denied them. What you should be doing is looking at why the state grants them to the group it includes. Ask why the state would target a given benefit at a specific set of people. Then ask if that same reason applies to a larger set. If marriage benefits were just about the lives of the two people involved, we would have no reason to exclude people because of close blood relations (or for being the same sex). There's only one quite obvious explanation for why we bother to exclude that group. And once you understand that, you should understand why gay couples should also be excluded.
But that would require objectively looking at the issue rather than reacting based on emotion. And that's hard for most people to do.