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Mike….There is no need to make this personal. If gay marriage is a done deal… if I am wrong in my analysis of family structures, what does it matter?
Jennifer, most of your arguments are centered around your personal experiences. And now you admonish others of using this in response?
Mike, I have only talked about ideas, not my experiences. But let me ask you something. What was your family like as a child? Were you raised with your mom and dad?
#YesAllNonNuclearChildren?
I was generalizing, as one has to do with 200 words. Practically any rational you use in the choice to have children could be used by a gay couple. If they feel the same duty, it doesn’t become selfish just because they can’t produce biological children alone.
I have no idea what you are saying here. You want to criticize my bias, but you won’t give me enough information to analyze yours.
Are you implying that I’m criticizing the innate dignity of kids in those arrangements? If so, then I have not properly made the argument, and that’s not good. This is valuable feedback and I will work to make it clear that I am not criticizing the innate dignity of the child. I’m not criticizing anybody’s dignity, only the choices of adults in those particular arrangements.
Good one, Mike.
Are you familiar with #YesAllWomen? Their goto argument when a man engages them is that they can’t possibly know what it’s like to be a women and thus anything the man argues is invalid, and actually harmful. When you use others intact family upbringing it is basically the same argument. I’ll say to you what I say to them: I can’t contest your experiences, but I can contest your interpretation.
I think it would be kinder to wait for Jennifer to commit logical errors before condemning her for them.
Perhaps personal experience is sometimes just personal experience, and not universal?
I saw some reference to that hashtag on my facebook stream, but made no effort to see what it was about. I am automatically suspect of any hashtag that smacks of feminism, and I tend to eschew pop culture.
OK, so you had an intact upbringing. What is the reason you didn’t say so when I asked?
You have tried to discredit my by no longer addressing my argument but insisting I’m biased. I think you tried to take a short cut. Either my arguments stand on their own, or they do not.
It’s not that you’re biased, just predictable. I’m not interested in chasing you around the same tree again. James is right in that I’m preempting your logical errors from older threads instead of waiting for you to commit them again because I’ve already wasted more time on this dead horse than I care to. I’m mad at myself for even starting, but sometimes I am bored and things are just teed up so nicely. Then 10 comments later I’m caught in the weeds again.
Questions:
1. Do you think I find you predictable?
2. If gay marriage is a done deal… if I’m wrong in my family structure analysis… and if I’m committing logical errors (though by your admission not on this thread), why does it matter? Why do you feel the need to counter me?
3. Which logical errors have I committed on past threads? Which threads?
4. What is the reason you didn’t tell me your family structure when I asked?
You better work on your swing ;)
I would say one of the most common rationals has been “whoops, we’re pregnant”. [how many families do you know who have a couple children, and then one more several years later – ask my brother who is 7 years younger than me, or my wife who is 9 years younger than her next oldest sister] Another extremely common one – One morning radio host I listen to says that his proposal to his wife was “well, I guess we better get married then”.
Those rationals will *never* be used by a same-sex couple.
Jennifer, shouldn’t your focus really be on gay adoptions? Unlike many of the other SSM opponents on Ricochet, I don’t remember you taking any umbrage at gays and marriage if children weren’t involved. The handful of gay couples I’ve known in the past few years were in their forties and fifties and had no interest in starting a family. If that were the case–and I’m being theoretical, now–would you drop your objection to SSM if it had nothing to do with children or family formation?
Because I do see two tangled strands here–objections to gay marriage, no matter what, and objections to it based on outcomes for the children.
Hi Gary! My objections to gay marriage are two fold.
1. The first is that gay marriage redefines the entire civil institution, and this is a three part objection.
The first is that the institution must become gender neutral. Since marriage is directly related to how we define parenthood, we are redefining parenthood to be gender neutral and are already seeing injustices from this.
The second is that the state has removed a limiting principle from marriage based on biology (m/f), to creating a new limiting principle, one based on urges. These new ideas will need to be enforced (gender neutrality, urges), and the logical consequences that flow from them will follow. If biology can be so easily discarded as a limiting principle, I have no confidence that other, less stark, limiting principles will withstand the Left’s historic onslaught against marriage.
The third is that people mistakenly believe that “it’s only 3% of the population,” not realizing that the entire institution is redefined. I bet the people conducting those polls, or participating in them, don’t know this.
continued.
2. The second objection has to do with what is owed to the child. Gay marriage is an implicit endorsement of gay parenting, which separates a child from his origins by design, thus harming his ontology by design. I can never endorse this arrangement, regardless of who does it. Furthermore, I don’t see a way to argue against childless gay marriages. To do so, I believe I would have to argue against all marriages being childless, which I obviously cannot do. If there is some way around that, I am happy to hear it.
What any particular set of adults do in the privacy of their bedroom with full consent does not concern me from a policy standpoint, and never has.
Correction:
2. The second objection has to do with what is owed to the child. Gay marriage is an implicit endorsement of gay parenting, which separates a child from his origins by design, thus harming his ontology by design. I can never endorse this arrangement, regardless of who does it. Furthermore, I don’t see a way to argue FOR gay marriages that must be childless without arguing that all marriages must be childless. I obviously cannot argue that all marriages must be childless. If there is some way around that, I am happy to hear it.
“The problem is that studies done so far don’t prove the hypothesis ….”
Pardon me for weighing in again with a point that I have stated two or three times before:
The studies done so far do not amount to much; neither side can claim to have much at all in the way of scientific evidence for any position whatsoever. All the studies suffer from small sample sizes and selection bias. Some have fewer methodological errors than others, but the sociology and psychology of same-sex “marriage” and same-sex parenting are very immature fields of study.
As a conservative, I think it is very unwise to re-define the basic unit of society with such a flimsy body of scientific work to consider.
Jennifer, it seems your objections are to divorce and adoption wrt how they impact on children. Opposing gay marriage doesn’t address these directly, nor does it directly impact on the majority of marriages in any concrete way. If your concerns are divorce and adoption why not address these directly?
Let’s compare individual rights and marriage. Gay people have all the same individual rights as straight people. Freedom of association is a right. But marriage is not a right. The ability to obtain legal sanction of any relationship between two people and from a societal body requires the consent of that body. The rules that govern who and what ages of people may be recognized are written as laws. Laws discriminate because that is what laws do – otherwise anarchy. Representatives and judiciary change the law over time, but it requires the consent of the governed to do it.
What kind of question is this? Are you talking three way polygamous marriage (two of one sex and one of the other), or a marriage in which two people pair but one of the parties still has bisexual feelings for a person of a different sex than the one they’re married to? In that case, it’s just a marriage if married to a person of the opposite sex, or not a marriage if you would otherwise consider it a marriage with a person of the same sex. Cheating doesn’t count. I don’t see the point of this question.
It occurs to me from reading science fiction involving the implications of human cloning (I refer you to the Ender Shadow series by Orson Scott Card), human clones would fall into a similar predicament, being outside the norm.