CFA part Deux (Page 10)

No it doesn't.

For example, the issue of interracial marriage has nothing to do with the definition of what a marriage is.

And your definition of marriage is based on religion. 

It doesn't in this case either in a court of law.

BTW, I've got to go.  I'll hop back in tomorrow, work permitting.

Thanks for the reasonable and civil discussions folks.  I may not agree with everyone but love that this talk has been as civil as it has been. 

Ok, gonna answer this and THEN I'm gone.

No, because the animal is not a human, therefore does not have rights and cannot consent.  And don't go down the incest and pedophilia route because that has all be hashed and rehashed ad nauseum before.  Polygamy, on the other hand, is a different sticky wicket.

And with that. I'm gone till tomorrow. 

Three years?
That's probably the last time I trained.

I'm copying and pasting from my post on this thread.
I'm out the door now. Be back later.

OK, here again is the philosophical definition of marriage as formulated by Robert George, Professor of Law at Princeton.
It is the most compelling argument I've ever encountered regarding what marriage is in the civil sense. 

It's very technical and dry and takes a while to unpack, but it needs to be in order to meet the standard that everyone is asking for, namely a non-religious definition of marriage.

Marriage is a two-in-one-flesh communion of persons that is consummated and actualized by acts that are reproductive in type, whether or not they are reproductive in effect (or are motivated, even in part, by a desire to reproduce).

The bodily union of spouses in marital acts is the biological matrix of their marriage as a multi-level relationship: that is, a relationship that unites persons at the bodily, emotional, dispositional, and spiritual levels of their being.

Marriage, precisely as such a relationship , is naturally ordered to the good of procreation (and to the nurturing and education of children) as well as to the good of spousal unity, and these goods are tightly bound together.

The distinctive unity of spouses is possible because human (like other mammalian) males and females, by mating, unite organically - they become a single reproductive principle.

Although reproduction is a single act, in humans (and other mammals) the reproductive act is performed not by individual members of the species, but by a mated pair as an organic unit. 

A point to consider and maybe why we need a constitutional amendment to bring clarity to the issue.

It was never necessary before now to codify that marriage was between a man and a woman.
It was just understood to be so.

By "definition" I mean to say that the pro gay agenda is to redefine what up until now
was simply understood by common sense; that being that marriage is between a man and a woman.

The definition is the battleground. 

less than 100 years ago, the "common sense" definition was a white man and white woman.

I don't know that I accept his interpretation or agree with this dude in the least.  I know more people who do not intend to procreate, never intended to procreate and have taken permanent steps to prevent procreation prior to marriage than I know who have kids.

I should take that back.  I have more close friends who will not procreate than I do those that have kids.  Procreation and marriage are two separate subjects.  One does not necessitate the other.  It'd be nice if it did, but it does not.

His interpretation sounds tainted by christian value because it takes what is supposed to be natural law and then doesn't account for nature.  It basically says that marriage is for procreation or any act that is like it if it's eventual intent or normal intent is for procreation at some point in time.  So hetero acts are fall under the classification because even when for enjoyment they can be done for procreation or result in procreation, BUT homo acts do not fall under because while they imitate, they can not ever result in procreation.  In essence, it says that if you are hetero then it falls under the classification, if not, then you don't.  BUT since this is natural law you have to take into account the high occurrence of homo acts in nature for which this theory does not.  Until he takes into account the natural occurrence of homosexuality in the natural world, I can't see how this argument stands.

ETA: sorry I wasn't clear here.  It basically says that heteros can marry because they are hetero and homos can't because they are homos.  There's no logic there.  it doesn't make sense.  It's a "because I said so" defense.

I'm out gotta go.  check back later.

What is Chik-Fil-A's stance on Caster Semenya?

Does she marry based on chromosomes or genitalia?

Does she prefer waffle fries or a premium side?

Is Lady Gaga more acceptable because Caster really was born that way?

I also find it interesting that he chooses procreation as the unifying quality amongst all marriages.  It would seem to me, since it exists in every marriage or, in the natural world, courting/mating/long term coupling, is a mutually beneficial partnership as the unifying quality.  procreation needs no marriage, neither does it necessarily lead to one, it only happens to be a biproduct in most (however shrinking) number of case.  My presumption is that he uses mazlow's heirarchy as some sort of justification for that, but that still looks past the advantages to communal grouping when it comes to food, water, and homeostasis (in the most basic physiological needs category).  While sex is part of this, I find it convenient that he latches on to this as it is glaringly obvious there are better options.

I was talking about most churches it is kind of arrogant to think you have the
one and only church no? But as far as the Catholic Church it did in fact have
slaves over the history of the church. It wasn't till 1965 that the church said
slavery is a sin. I guess all the other centuries of slavery were just unfortunate.

So like I said in my early post the church did have slaves and they did change
their view. So I would say it would be accurate to say that the church has
changed its social views over the long history of the church.

This is not really making a case for marriage as such. Here are some of the problems with this approach:

"Acts that are reproductive in type" - he appears to be saying marriage is defined by the act of sex. But sex and marriage are not unified. People have sex without marriage all the time. People who are married may not have sex (not in the "no, you may not have sex tonight" sense, but in the "yes we are married but we have not had sex for the past 5 years/ever").

Marriage as being ordered to the procreative and spousal unity goals - these may in fact be mutually exclusive. Being married poses a bigger barrier to separation, as it represents the dissolution of a contract (which is, in the non-religious and purely civil sense, what marriage actually IS). But people who are married and focused on the raising of the children are (by dint of that focus) less focused on the relationship between the partners. Hence the need for parents to schedule "date nights" or have other specific times of getting away from the children in order to still have a relationship when the children leave the household. In addition, if we make children the primary concern of marriage (which is arguably a societal and civil good), then people who are childless by choice or necessity (infertility, age, medical risk) would by definition have less "real" marriages; not to mention same sex couples who live in a committed relationship and choose to raise children have a more "real" marriage, even if it is not called so by name.

Indeed, I have read arguments for polygamy that make the case that have multiple "sister-wives" means there is the better opportunity for the children to have parenting done by the parent best suited for that child's needs at that particular time. 

In short, while your definition does, as advertised, refrain from making a supernatural or religious appeal, it makes an error just as grievous - equating marriage with reproductive sexual activity, and then claiming this to be the marital state due to "natural laws" - when in fact, reproductive sex can and does occur regularly outside marriage, and marriages without reproductive sex can be as happy and long-lived (or unhappy and short-lived) as those with it.

If we separate sexual functioning and reproduction from marriage, what we have is what marriage has indeed represented historically through much of human history - a contract between individuals. The numbers and genders of those involved is frankly immaterial. And being a contract, it requires the individuals to have to ability to enter into contracts freely - which eliminates children, animals, and inanimate objects.The terms of the contract can certainly vary - marriage could be a term-limited thing, or dependent on the production of progeny, or the expectations of sexual fidelity, or frequency. The benefits to the parties can be assented to in a formal contractual fashion (e.g. a detailed pre-nup) or through the exchange ("in sickness and in health").

I would be fine with making same sex unions "civil unions", as long as we also defined marriage as being the religious institution, and couples who chose to bond outside a religious setting (e.g. getting married by the local JP) were ALL in a civil union. In fact, the legal benefits that now accrue to marriage would have to only be granted to those who had such a civil union. Those, couple who got "married" in church/synagogue/mosque/what have you, would still need to complete the paperwork of a civil union (which might be a simply as signing an affidavit in the local city hall) to be allowed to file as "married" for taxes, claim inheritance rights, be protected against having to testify against their spouses, etc. It makes the legal standing of the relationship independent of gender, and wholly dependent on the legal right to sign contracts, which affords truly equal protection under the law.

That's not true.

Just look at the history of Latin America for evidence.

He's arguing among other things that persons within a marriage of one man and one woman can rightly be considered to be a separate class and distinct from any other union of persons.  That argument rests in the biological fact that a man and a woman can form a single reproductive organism.

That's a 14th amendment argument.

It's true that the other things you mentioned are part of marriage.  However, same sex couples can't become a single reproductive organism.

That's important because any type of sexual acts outside of intercourse fall into the category of what is known as a "instrumental" goods. That is, they are serving some other purpose. So oral sex for example is serving the purpose of pleasure, perhaps some sort of emotional bonding, ect. It has no purpose outside of these instrumental goods.

It's only intercourse that is not instrumental as an act in itself.  It perhaps does have instrumental aspects such as pleasure and bonding, but the act itself defines what the state of the two persons is.  Intercourse within marriage "marries" the two persons and literally biologically causes them to become one reproductive organism; one body in a sense.

Unions of same sex couples, or unions of multiple persons of whatever gender, can never become "one body".  It's impossible. Science tells us so.

That's true, if we separate the two.

However, the question here is can you rightfully separate the two.

Yes, sex happens outside of marriage.  The argument here is that if you take sex outside of the marriage equation,
then what you have might be some sort of union, but it won't be marriage.

On the other had if you take marriage out of the sex equation then you also have something, but not what can be considered a marital embrace.

It's only within marriage of one man and one woman that you can have the full matrix, the complete dynamic, of what can rightly be understood to be marriage.  It is a very particular type of state of being that encompasses the fullness of the human person that simply does not exist in any other state of being.

By claiming that a union of two persons of the same sex is equal in all measure to the union of one man and one woman in marriage is to limit the meaning and understanding of the human person.

If the issue is that sex within marriage is somehow something more special, then the genders are irrelevant. If the issue is the reproductive nature of that sex, then you must eliminate as marriage all child-less couples, regardless of gender. As well as couples who have children not through biological reproduction between the partners (e.g. adoptions, in-vitro, surrogacy, etc).

Are you saying that couples  who do not bear their own children are somehow having a less meaningful personhood?

The bonding of egg and sperm does not unite the primary organisms into a single entity. Those are germ-cells. By the definitions you are using, the use of donor sperm is tantamount to infidelity, as it is creating a single "reproductive organism" (whatever that is supposed to mean) out of two individual who are not married to one another. As would be the use of donor eggs fertilized in vitro. And I have no idea how to interpret the use of a surrogate to carry the eggs and sperm of the married couple if the woman is unable to tolerate the biologic demands of child bearing, lacks a functional uterus, or just plain wants to avoid being pregnant.

If you are going to use science to define marriage, things get messy in a hurry. Especially when you start to use terms that have no true meaning in biology.

The issue of childless couples gets addressed in the first paragraph of that argument.
Marriage is actualized by acts reproductive in type if not in effect.  So marriage is consummated by a reproductive act regardless of whether a child is conceived or not from that act.

We honor, appreciate, and benefit often from aspects of personhood that we ourselves may not personally experience.  For example, take art.  Not all of us are artists and can experience the depth of the direct artistic experience, yet we can experience some appreciation of that depth as we encounter their work.

So no, this isn't about less meaningful personhood for some.

To just shift back to a commons sense view for a moment, the bodies of a man and a women put together are designed to make babies.  Together. That's pretty clear.

It's not the bonding of just the egg and sperm that causes the unity, it is the whole package.
During intercourse the man and woman become a single reproducing organism in type. 

BTW, I think that the use of technical forms of conception such as IVF are part of the problem as well.  
(and just to fully stir the pot at warp speed, contraception in all forms is also part of the problem) 

Just curious (and not that it matters for anything), but does his theory base any ideas off of the work of Aquinas or Augustine?

I understand that his argument lies in the biological fact that man and woman can form one single reproductive form.  It would be nice if I had read any of his work, but I have not, so I have to shoot from what you give me.  If I understand correctly you(R. George) say that because the "single reproductive organism" is specific to a man and woman it defines a marriage.  I guess this why I asked about Aquinas and Augustine because they are inclined to say that that "single reproductive organism" is the reason why procreation shouldn't happen outside of marriage.  And I guess this where I get hung up, is in the connection between marriage and procreation.  There is no connection between the two.  They are independent of each other and examples of that are born every day.  By the very nature of procreation that it happens quite frequently out of wedlock, that it contradicts any correlation to marriage.  Additionally for year the intent of marriage had absolutely nothing to do with procreation and every thing to with position in society and inheritances.  Even as far back as the romans they had eugenic breeding of temporary marriages at festivals specifically to procreate and the children were taken away and cared for by the state.  That would fall under R George's definition of marriage would it not, but I think we can both agree that is by no means a marriage.  My point is there is more to it, and to me specifically procreation isn't part of it, something else is.

I am only trying to define what a marriage is right now, not what type of marriage I am willing to accept.

BTW, I saw what you did with that link.  I read every page that day and didn't see what you wrote a page ago, and I went back to it today before posting and still missed it.  I trust you that you posted it before, but apparently my scanning skills are lacking.

For sake fo entertainment I found this: 

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

-George Bernard Shaw