Not really. That's just what I was afraid I was going to find when I saw this on their frontpage:
"Help repeal the Wright Amendment and Set Love Free! Visit setlovefree.com for more details. "
Not that I know of any marriage amendment called the Wright Amendment, but I thought maybe I'd just not been paying attention.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
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12 comments:
Can you explain why conservatives have such a problem with gay marriage? How is this any threat to you? This is a genuine question. I really don't understand it myself.
Do you have a problem with polygamy? Or incest? Well, I see those as the next logical step beyond gay marriage. Western civilization has been built upon the family as its fundamental building block. A redefinition of the nuclear family is what's at stake here; once it's redefined to include man-man and woman-woman relationships, what's to keep man-man-woman or woman-woman-man or brother-sister or [place currently unacceptable relationship here]? Nothing.
The same was said of interracial relationships. Did that destroy the fabric of our society?
You make a choice to have a family. That choice is unaffected by the choices others make. What you are actually trying to do is impose your moral beliefs on others. I don't like evangelical Christians, for example. I feel that they are the greatest threat to this country today. If people like me were someday in the majority, do you think it would be okay for us to make laws banning evangelical Christianity?
Actually, there is a long historical record of interracial marriage. Conservatives rely on tradition and history to make judgments on radical changes, and even your so-called "greatest threat" evangelicals would have to agree that the Bible condones interracial marriages (for example, the Moabite Ruth, who became a part of the lineage of the King David and Jesus Christ. There is no such support for the legal sanctioning of families consisting of two homosexual partners. If there is, please provide me with the references. So far, the only one I can think of is the man-boy relationships known to have existed during the ancient Greek civilization, and I highly doubt you condone pedophilia.
Instead of spouting your bigoted opinions, engage in a little debate, with facts to back you up. What is possibly the matter with imposing moral beliefs? The government's sole existence is to impose moral beliefs. Reading through your scatterbrained blog I see nothing but moral axioms on the inherent evilness of capitalism. So the question is not whether it is ok to impose morality - but what is the proper morality to impose. You believe in yours, and I'll believe in mine. In a constitutionally mandated representative democracy, the one whose morality is judged moral by a majority wins - as long as that morality does not violate the constitution. If you don't like it, tough noogies.
Yeah Engicon, Dallas calls its 'other' airport Love Field, so at first glance www.setlovefree.com and referencing a law seems kinda weird if you didn't know that. Although if you fly SWA at all, you usually end up getting routed thru Love at some point if you are heading anywhere in TX. By the way, Love Field is also the airport famous for being the one that JFK landed at before he was fatally shot.
Laws banning evangelical Christianity would not be ok as they would directly violate the First Amendment.
Gay marriage could try to invoke the "right to happiness." The counter argument is that person A doesn't have the right to happiness which harms person B. This is the root of the, amoral, argument for explicitly defining marriage as man-woman. America (and the rest of civilization) has proof positive that man-woman unions produce a stable civilization. It's how we got where we are. No other union would have the same synergistic combination of the strengths that a woman possesses and the strengths that a man possesses. Failing to encourage man-woman unions then would result in a destabilitzed civilization.
The current system does not prohibit men from living together (nor women). We just don't recognize same sex unions as one of the fundamental building blocks of our society. Hence they don't get the encouragement and support of tax breaks and such. We actively encourage man-woman households and the proven stability that they bring. The others are left to do what they will. Conservatives don't want to mess with this system. Conservatives defend this system because we believe it to be optimal.
Heh, Timdido managed to post two replies while I was working on that one.
I've even flown into Dallas Love. It's just that I saw "Amendment" and "free love" together and jumped to what turned out to be a funny conclusion.
Yeah dude, I'm quick like that. Actually, it's 'cause I have nothing better to do while I'm sitting at this computer running experiments.
I like your wording better anyway. In reality, I'm not opposed to gay marriage - I think the federalist approach is the best (which is why I don't particularly like the way the Marriage Amendment is worded). Honestly, I or anyone else doesn't know if gay marriage is a good thing for society. Having little 'experiments for democracy' in each state is the perfect way to find out (and I think, judging from my beliefs and understanding of history, that it would prove detrimental to society, but hey, that's just me). Sadly, liberals are not exactly originalists when it comes to the constitution so I highly doubt they would support other logically consistent positions with this one. They tend to prefer the outright imposition of law by federal judicial fiat.
My response to timdido, without petty insults and name-calling:
According to Section 1 of the 14th Amendment [link]:
"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
This applies to homosexuality if you believe that it is a biological trait, which is admittably a contentious issue, but supported by the following evidence:
1. Homosexuality in sheep was linked to an area of the hypothalmous involved in mating behavior [link].
2. Similar results were confirmed in humans [link]
3. The brains of homosexual men have been shown to respond more like that of hetersexual females in response to male hormones [link]
Marriage is legislated, and to deny individuals equal protection under this law would violate the the 14th Amendment, if you believe the biological nature of homosexuality.
The nature of government is not to legislate morality, it is, essentially, to provide protection and equality to all it's members. That is the reason that marital infedility is not illegal. It is certainly immoral, but has no place in government.
If you are fine with homosexuals, and with committed homosexual relationships, then it seems that you are only opposed to the official sanctioning of these relationships by the government. This seems to be contradictory to me. If you approve of homosexual relationships morally, and you believe in legislating morality, then how can you pass laws to make it illegal?
Hold on now....but thanks for your civil response. Apologies if my previous comments were insulting.
Now to address your argument - first of all, why does homosexuality have to be a biological trait to be afforded equal protection? Are you trying to equate gender and race? Well, we deny felons the right to vote. What if criminal behavior is shown to have a hereditary factor? Are we denying criminals equal protection then, should this link be proven (and I believe some research has been done into it, but I don't want to find it). Also, I could easily turn that equal protection argument around on you. See this link (I ain't got the HTML skillz to make a hyperlink so adjust).
http://www.intellectualconservative
.com/article2920.html
I made this argument up in the second comment. Sen. Santorum got ripped for making this link, but it's a valid one.
Aside: don't naively believe the science hype when it's tainted by politics. Scientific researchers have an axe to grind too, and sometimes it leads to disastrous conclusions and actions. Remember eugenics? I find the best way to combat this is to look at and question data, not some researcher's conclusion.
Your statement "The nature of government is...to provide protection and equality to all it's members" was made to counteract my assertion that government legislates morality. Is that statement not a statement of morality? Riddle me this: why does the government have to provide "protection and equality"? Your answer, I believe, will contain some moral principle, and whether your God is the God of the Christian Bible, or Allah, or Reason, or Quetzalcoatl, this principle comes from somewhere. "You gotta serve somebody"
Finally, you misinterpret me - well, I guess I misled you. I'm not opposed to homosexual relationships (I have a good gay friend who's been in a relationship for many years), but I am opposed to gay marriage. My problem with the current conservative movement for the FMA is that it would force a blanket ban on gay marriage, and I think the proper approach is the federalist approach. This is what would happen in my ideal scenario: 1) the FMA is reworded to state that the federal government leaves the institution of marriage to be legislated SOLELY by the states, and that states are NOT required to recognize each other's laws regarding non-heterosexual marriage. 2) individual states, in accordance with their respective constitutions, determine the legality of gay marriage, and soon it is legal in a few states (MA, HI, whatever). 3) based on the results in the states where it is legal, the states where it is illegal will follow suit if the results are good. For example, if corporations put factories in gay-marriage states (because it turns out to be good for society) then other states will follow suit. And if they don't, they suffer the consequences for their "bigotry". Now isn't that easy? It's called federalism, but thanks to liberals, it's been pretty much down the tubes since FDR. I view the need to de-legislate the courts as far greater then the need to experiment with gay marriage, thus explaining my tepid opposition to the FMA as it's currently being presented. If gays lose the ability to ever get married to one another, tough - if that means that we return to a judiciary that interprets the constitution literally, as originalists (see next post regarding Clarence Thomas).
Imoral Majority, your position is that government should not legislate morality but instead provide protection and equality for all. Timdido's answer was that providing protection and equality _is_ a moral service. I'll go one further and suggest that pretty much everything a government does or could do is based on some form of morals. First, we'll dispell the counter argument that just because there is a rational reason for something doesn't mean it's not also a moral decision. Imoral Majority pretty much did the dispellation for me. I provided a rational reason for only recognizing man-woman marriages, then Imoral Majority came back with the argument that any such legislature would (for other reasons) a moral action. Therefore I'll procede with the understanding that a law can still be called labled moral legislation even if it has a rational justification also.
Let's start with the easy example. Murder. Murder is illegal because it is wrong, a moral judgement. Yes, legalizing murder would destabalize society, so there is a rational justification. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that if you polled a number of random people (even if they were all random lawmakers), the majority would tell you that the primary reason for murder being illegal is because it is wrong. Hence criminalizing murder is legislating morality. Theft, assualt, public lewdness, etc., all fall to the same argument.
Expanding farther, what about environmentalism? Isn't it a moral judgment to say that we (humanity) shouldn't scour the earth clean of resources? What about anit-corporationism? Isn't that a moral judgment that corporations are evil because they do morally bad things to their employees and the rest of the world? Laws are just a bunch of elected officials getting together and deciding that XYZ is the right thing to make people do. If the good of the country necessitates that the government steal 30% of your paycheck then that's what they'll do. Any law is, by nature, a limitation on freedom (freedom in the sense of being able to carry out any behavior you want). It is inherently a moral judgment to tell person A that she needs freedom X less than person B needs freedom Y. The reason it is a moral judgment is that no lawmaker can know how much freedom X means to person A. The lawmakers are imposing their judgment, of the worth of freedom X, upon person A. Someone's idea of the worth of freedom X is inseperably tied up with their idea of the goodness/badness of the behavior associated with freedom X. Lawmakers don't legislate morality because they are mean, they do it because they have no choice.
The idea the gay marriage should be legally protected if homosexuallity is a primarily biological condition is easily dispelled. I am biologically predisposed to try and impregnate every woman I see. That doesn't mean that congress should make a law ensuring that I get to act on that biological disposition.
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