Let me borrow from Thomas Sowell on the subject of homosexual "marriage", since I could not possibly improve on his words.
"The "equal protection of the laws" provided by the Constitution of the United States applies to people, not actions. Laws exist precisely in order to discriminate between different kinds of actions.
When the law permits automobiles to drive on highways but forbids bicycles from doing the same, that is not discrimination against people. A cyclist who gets off his bicycle and gets into a car can drive on the highway just like anyone else.
Actions and not people. Um, both interracial marriage and homosexual marriage are obviously actions, i.e. the act of making a contract. Yet SCOTUS struck down anti-miscegenation laws, a tradition that went back 300 years, and cited the 14th amendment in doing so. So apparently SCOTUS disagrees with your source, which you didn't cite, on the nature of the 14th amendment.
Gotta love the bicycle analogy. Now that's a bogus analogy. The reason bicycles are not on the freeway is because that would create an unsafe situation. Does gay marriage create an unsafe situation for others?
Analogies with bans against interracial marriage are bogus. Race is not part of the definition of marriage. A ban on interracial marriage is a ban on the same actions otherwise permitted because of the race of the particular people involved. It is a discrimination against people, not actions.
Why does anybody care about preserving traditional definitions?
He must have been basing his actions versus people idea on the contention that while race is not chosen, sexuality is. First off, whether sexual preference is a choice or not is not a debate that is settled. Most likely there's a combination of factors. It seems it's more of a choice for some than others. I can neither choose to be attracted to men nor be attracted to most other ethnicities.
Secondly, this is not a valid distinction between gay and interracial marriage.
What is outlawed in both cases is not whether a certain kind of person can get married at all, but rather who they can choose from. Anti-miscegenation laws were upheld for a century after the civil war on the premise that, "Well, they can marry their own race too so it's not violating equal protection." But if sexuality is a choice, then they could just choose to like somebody of their own race, right? Similarly, today people say, "Gays can choose somebody of the opposite sex just like straights." Even if I conceded that everything about sexuality is a choice (I don't), the question remains: Why should they have to be restricted like that? Who is harmed?
That impractical attitude is the reason why we have such a high divorce rate. However, I'm not talking in this case about what your marriage is about for you personally. I'm talking about what marriage is about for the purposes of the law. And the law doesn't give a rat's ass if you are happy or in love. That's none of its business.
A high divorce rate is better than people sticking to a marriage they're miserable in.
It always fascinates me that people who are vociferously advocating a complete change in society on the basis of "Some people don't like the way it is" consider "Most people don't want to change it" to be an illegitimate reason.
It's based upon harm to non-consenting parties. People should be allowed to do what they want if and only if nobody is harmed against their consent. Do you have a better standard?
Wrong. If you have a better reason for why society should behave in a certain way than the fact that the majority of the people who make up society want it to be that way, I'd like to hear it. I can promise you that "A small minority of people disagree" is not going to get it done.
Democratic proceses are checked by minority rights because the mob does not always care if they're oppressing a minority. The actions of any group of people, minority or majority, should be outlawed only when people are getting harmed against their consent.
Which is still an utterly irrelevant and incorrect analogy.
LOL. It's not perfect, for reasons explained in the bottom of the source in my last post. But it's A LOT better than the bicycle one.
Yeah, it's a great luxury to have an overwhelming chance of living below the poverty line because you've been convinced that you don't need men and marriage.
I say it's a luxury because it's true that not all women have that choice. Female doctors, lawyers, and pharmacists, for example, do have that choice. They can marry a starving artist or another doctor and will be fine, financially, either way.
What we're talking about is which relationships society recognizes and sanctions, and that's a whole 'nother issue entirely. Any attempt to pretend that the two are the same thing is disingenuous.
What society sanctions should be based upon giving people maximal freedom so long as they do not harm others.
I like how you dismiss things as "irrelevant" based on nothing other than your own personal disagreement with them. You think they're wrong, ergo they're irrelevant and don't require you to address them. Sorry, but no. Also, I will thank you in the future, when purporting to quote the arguments of the opposition, to quote ACTUAL arguments of the opposition, rather than your own snarky paraphrase of what you think their arguments are (ie. "Sex makes Baby Jesus cry"). If you want to argue against that particular argument, then you'd better be prepared to show me an exact citation of when a prominent opponent to homosexual "marriage" said it.
They say what boils down to my "snarky" comments. And obviously I have to address the children argument even though I consider it irrelevant because that's what many people base their opposition to gay marriage upon. Somehow they don't realize that even though their marriage may be mostly about providing an environment for their children, not all marriages need to be about children at all.
The majority is not treating a group differently. It is treating a behavior differently, and it needs no more than the fact that the majority does not wish to endorse that behavior as a reason for them not to do it. Certainly, YOU have no right to set yourself up as the arbiter which they must convince of the acceptability of their reasons. You are nothing but one voter who has been outnumbered at the ballot box, so why should they care if they meet your approval?
My objection is that they're opposing a behavior that harms nobody. The majority is perfectly capable of being irrational and that's why ad populum is a fallacy. As far as I can tell, I am basing my opinion on reason and they are not. If I had argued against anti-miscegenation laws back in the 1950s, or slavery in the 1700s, it would have been the same scenario. My only option is to try to persuade a few people to my side so that people won't continue to be oppressed arbitrarily.
Disingenuous and obfuscatory. No one is talking about anyone being told whom they can marry. The topic here is which relationships society does and does not sanction. If you need society to give your relationship its official stamp of approval before you consider it to exist, then you are a sad, sad puppy.
Obviously that's not the issue for most. The issue is to be treated equally and have equal access to the legal ramifications of a marriage as a contract.
If you're so damned independent and autonomous and consider it your own private business, why the hell are you here arguing that it should be made public business via legalization and governmental endorsement? Inconsistent much?
A marriage is not a government endorsement or public business any more than any other contract. I also have no idea why you find it necessary to take such an abrasive approach to people who disagree with you. Why do you feel so threatened by homosexual marriage?
Arguing that pedophiles, the incestuous, and the polyamorous will use homosexual "marriage" as a path-breaker to legalizing their own behaviors has a lot more ground to stand on than comparing homosexual "marriage" to interracial marriage. You can look at advocates of pedophilia, incest, and polyamory right now and see them pointing to homosexual "marriage" advocates and legal decisions as their forebears.
Silly slippery slope. That's like saying that unveiling women in the middle east would be a pathbreaker to adultery and so they should keep women veiled. I see no problem with polyamorous marriage so long as they don't end up with any special tax breaks (if that's possible) and all involved are consenting adults. The problem with incest is that it would cause deformed babies to be born and thus cause suffering. Pedophilia does not involve consenting adults. The step from interracial to homosexual marriage is a lot smaller because both harm nobody and grant no special rights (as polygamy potentially would).
On the other hand, race and homosexuality are not even remotely comparable.
As explained above, wanting interracial marriage is not based upon who you are racially, but who you're attracted to. It wasn't that Whites had a right Blacks didn't. Whites couldn't marry somebody of another race either. Rather, it was people with a sexual preference for another race that were not granted equal rights. Sound familiar? Some people claim to only be attracted to those of another "race," though I'm not familiar with the label for it. Are people born with a preference for another ethnicity? The parallels are quite close.
