Sad day in USA for both Parties (Page 7)

Many states don't recognize common law marriage.

Illinois stopped recognizing them as of 1905.  Illinois also disallows same-sex marriage.  You can however marry your first cousin provided that one of two criteria are met:

You are both > 50 years of age.

One of you is irreversibly sterile. 

Illinois law also states that it won't recognize a marriage from another state as valid, if it is contrary to the laws of Illinois. 

Is it me or have I yet to hear backup for the statement that same sex marriages threaten heterosexual marriages.

Is it the procreation issue?  If so, you gotta be kidding me, didn't we just celebrate the 300 MILLIONTH US citizen born??  6.5 TRILLION people on the earth?  I don't think humans are in rik of decline due to same sex marriages.  Maybe other things, but not homosexuality.,  http://www.census.gov/

And to be consistent on that argument, shouldn't my wife and I be banned from marrying?  We do not have kids and do not intend to have kids.  Don't we threaten the human race under that theory?

Nah. I recognize it for the shell game it is.

I expect their next move to be along the lines of "Hey, look, Elvis!!"

On the procreation point, see the requirements above for first cousins to marry in the state of Illinois.  You basically have to prove that you cannot now and will not ever be able to procreate in order to be married.  Though with medical advances, 50 years is not quite the guarantee of being beyond child bearing that it once was.

It's really pathetic that the agenda is not just to restrict the use of the word MARRIAGE to heterosexual couples (even faux-hetero couples like the Haggards) but that these people also want to deny CIVIL UNIONS to homosexual couples. These amendments/ laws/ movements are evil. Nasty and wicked. Despicable.

But I take heart in knowing that it's just a matter of time before people start listening to the better angels of their nature and repeal these amendments. I'm optimistic.

I stumbled across this and wanted to share. Appealing to better angels and all...

Equal-marriage activists are right when they say there is something special about the word “marriage.”

It may seem like semantics. I myself thought that semantics was all it was, until I went up to Massachusetts a few weekends ago to play football and spend some time with Janna and Carrie, and Michelle and Heather (I need to see Amy and Beth on my next trip—sorry, guys).

I know many, many long-term lesbian couples in Chicago and New York. They own houses and condos, they have children and pets and car payments and gardens and holidays with the in-laws. They are as committed as my married friends.

I myself was in a partnership for seven years that both of us considered a marriage (this was before legal marriage was even a pipe dream). We had a ceremony; we received gifts. We presented ourselves to new acquaintances as till-death-did-we-part. Certainly, that was our intention, if not the eventual reality.

So I know that mere words—“marriage” or “civil unions” or “domestic partnership”—do not have the power to put a relationship together or take it apart.

But there’s something special about the lesbian couples who are legally married, a striking difference between them and my partnered friends. There’s an ease about them. A security. A relaxed sense of entitlement when dealing with officials, contractors, lawyers, employers. Marriage gives them personal and social standing that being partnered simply doesn’t.

The words matter.

Not just to them. The words matter to their friends and neighbors and family members. Straight people understand about marriage. They understand what kind of commitment it is. They intuitively get the words wife, husband. They don’t have to wonder after a year if the married couple is still together—they can assume they are, or else expect to commiserate over the news of divorce. They don’t have to stumble over words, don’t have to wonder if they say “girlfriend” or “significant other” or “partner” or what.

When faced with the words “married couple,” straight people know how the couple should be treated, and they treat them accordingly. When they don’t treat them accordingly, it is clear to everyone that they are discriminating.

Marriage is special. It just is. It is one of the marks of adulthood in our society, the term we use to describe the crucible that creates new families.

New Jersey isn’t ready for marriage yet. Nor, obviously, is most of the country. If civil unions are what we can get right now, then civil unions are what we should continue to fight for, what we should agree to when compromise is necessary—as it inevitably is.

So it is civil unions for now. But let’s not forget that we’re aiming for what Janna and Carrie, Michelle and Heather, and Amy and Beth have already.

We want marriage.

You will be dealt with contacted shortly.  Thank you for your surrender support.

No, you didn't miss it. I've been working this afternoon.

This may take me a couple of go's in order to make myself clear. (I should just learn to photograph the damn thing )

I look at this issue at both a micro and macro level.

On the micro level, it would seem that two men or two women who come together and form a union that they want to be recognized to be the same as the marital union between a man and a woman, ought not to interfere with my ability to enjoy my marriage. Nor would it seem that it would interfere with my desire to have my family, in joining with other families, be a building block of society.

I believed that for a long time.

It's when I zoomed out to the macro level that I started to see cracks in the reasoning.

Two points come to mind.

The first is the notion of what we base our common pluralistic moral life on. Is it some objective standard? The founders suggested that the standard was natural-law. (this is a point that critics of "religious values" ought to understand. Natural-law is consistent with Christian teaching, but it is not dependent on Christian teaching. It is knowable outside of Christian religious belief. It is knowable by the a-religious and the a-theist)

So is it based on this objective standard?

Or is it based on a subjective positivist standard. One that is changable according to the taste of the time. Is moral truth something that can be subjected to a democratic vote?

If you believe the second, then you are going to have a tough time defending your unalienable right to claim that you may subject the moral truth to a democratic vote (or judical fiat, or what have you). Because if you claim the right to subject moral truth to the decision of a certain class in power (say, the enfranchised in a democracy) then your claim to be able to do this itself can be changed by some other class that later comes to power.

An inverse way of saying this is that the claim that no one has the right to make moral claims, is itself a moral claim.

So, at best you're dealing with a situation in which your argument is literally absurd, and at worst you're dealing with a situation in which you have no moral or philosophical ability to stop a slide into totalitarianism.

So, for example, the philosophy that lays claim to the right to gay marriage, as I understand the argument, cannot later argue against a claim that all homosexuals ought to be killed. At least they can't point to any unmovable truth in order to do so.

So

Therefore, the undermining of natural-law puts my marriage and my family at risk because it opens the door to totalitarianism.

(And, of course, regarding the unborn, this is already happening.)

The second point is this: It interferes with the natural rights of a legitimate class of people ( the one man, one woman married couple, who in turn form bonds with other one man, one woman married couples) from teaching their children.

Here's a petty example. In my neighborhood, very blue and sexually diverse, you begin to hear the murmurs that perhaps the time for Mother's Day and Father's Day is drawing to a close. Why? Because, for example with Father's Day, it causes the children who are told that they do not have fathers, but rather donors, to feel bad. So in the interest of these children not feeling bad, other parents ought not have the right to celebrate Father's Day in the public square.

Now, you may think that is a petty example. But consider another example.

Spain recently passed a law that requires that birth certificates strike the words Mother and Father, and instead refer to Progenitor A, and Progenitor B. That was done to avoid descriminating against same sex couples.

The law is a teacher, and apparently in Spain it now teaches that you need to honor you Progenitor A and your Progenitor B.

So, to sum it up, gay marriage threatens marriage in two ways:

1. Since it is not based in natural-law, it contributes to an erosion of moral truth that is based in natural law, for example the moral truth that homosexuals ought not be killed. This in turn threatens a family with the possibility of totalitarianism.

2. It erodes the right of a protected class, the one man, one woman married couple, from teaching their children and thus perpetuate the class (which can be shown through natural-law to not only be a protected class, but also be the basic building block of society). This erosion comes from the state forcing restrictions on the association of like families in the name another social group, the gay marrieds, who cannot, in my pedestrian understanding, show a similar right to protection according to naural law. This itself shows the traces of totalitarianism.

OK, those are the bones of an argument about why gay marriage threatens marriage.

I will have more questions about this later...but my main one is to just ask you to define natural law...here is what I have found it to mean:

Natural law (Latin jus naturale) is law that exists independently of the positive law of a given political order, society or nation-state. It is simultaneously a legal philosophy or perspective, and a genre of law - depending on the jurisdiction in which the term is used. The theory of natural law was introduced by Aristotle before being further developed within a Christian context by St Thomas Aquinas.

As a genre, natural law is the law of nature—that is, the principle that some things are as they are, because that is how they are. This use is especially valid in Scotland, where "natural law" operates as a genre of law parallel to both civil and criminal law, and its discussion is not limited to human beings.

As a philosophical perspective, especially in the English and American legal traditions, the principles of natural law are expressed, obliquely or openly, in such documents as Magna Carta and the United States Declaration of Independence, when rights are discussed, explicitly or implicitly, as being inherent. For example, the expression "...that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." expresses such a right that is discussed as being inherent. The words that immediately precede that expression: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, ..." express a natural law philosophy.

I was born gay, am I unnatural.  My relationship to my partner is no less valid or heart felt than your relationship to your wife.  And in my world, it is what is natural.  I have been with women...tried to marry one once...and there wasn't anything more forced and unnatural than that relationship.  Men are born equal and by natural law should be given equal rights. 

Need to go...will comment more tomorrow.

So don, you gonna answer the question or just try to confuse us? 

I will admit that I don't understand point #1 at all. 

Point #2 is endemic throughout our society, and is a byproduct of a certain cultural leaning towards inclusiveness.  see, e.g., Hallowen, Christmas [GASP!!!], etc.  You can thank groups like the ACLU for this reduction in reasoning.  However, I don't buy the argument and it talsk about the "effects", not on marriage, but on other things, i.e., what others may teach your children (you wouldn't abdicate your role in that).  Let's assume you are correct, and let's say Massachusetts now has Donor 1 and Donor 2 on the birth certificate.  How does that affect you and Cornelia exactly?  Have your vows changed?  Do you treat eachother differently?  Do you teach your children differently? 

It may offend your religious notions of the sanctity of marriage, but that's not sufficient, IMHO.  That places Christianity above all, which is not a good thing.  Again, only IMHO.

And I still don't buy the married couple as a protected class argument, you're going to have to work on that more, but you have an uphill battle.  It's simply not true.

[edit - reading runningwoof's post - is point #1 that being gay is not "natural"?  With al due respect Don, how the hell do you know that?  Like runingwoof, I have a dear gay friend that was married for several years and trie to be "natural," only to find it.... "unnatural," and not to his true self.   I know your church teaches that, and OK fine, you believe that, but that is a dangerous road on which to tread - really, you're getting into Shirley Phelps Roper territory there, how far is the leap form your statement (if I've interpreted it correctly) to a website like hers?]

Sorry for the confusion, I told you it may take me several go's.

1. If I can make the case in 4., then 1. can be shown to be a further slide into moral relativism. If that's the case, then Jefferson was wrong, we have no unalianble rights. If that's the case, then you can't make a moral claim against totalitarianism. In that case, power wins out, not reason.

2. Let's assume there is a school in a small community in rural MA. Assume there is a class in civics and they're talking about citizenship. Say that they use the process of documentation in one of their lessons, including birth cirtificates. And say the school board refuses to teach the children that the birth cirtificate says Progenitor A and Progenitor B, but rather tell the children that it's a bad law and that it ought to say Mother and Father. Could the school board be put in jail for something like hate speech? Does it put limits on the school boards right to set the curriculum regarding lessons about family?

3. I'm not making a religious argument.

4. I gotta work on #4. I promised Liz.

I'll skip 1, 3 and 4...

but 2.  I'm sorry, I am misreading or misunderstanding or not getting the point.  There might be social issues raised by same sex marriages (might!?), and what you wrote is interesting, but I still fail to see how anything you've written threatens the sanctity of marriage.  Call me Progenitor A and Wendy Progenitor B, we are still as married as we ever were......

And you have made a big assumption to apply a law from a socialist gov't to anything that might happen here, but I understand the argument

But it wouldn't be the first time I've missed a point, nor will it be the last

here's the beginning of #4 and the answer to Liz... I just copied it from the old gay marriage ban thread...

my layman's understanding is that it is this kind of argument that might be used to counter 14th ammendment claims:

I'll take a stab at this.

And rather than put this into my own words, as I am still in the stage of trying to understand both sides of the argument, I'll quote Robert P. George, professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton.

"Here is the core of the traditional understanding: 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."

That paragraph is a lot to work through in one sitting. Here are the key points in my mind:

Marriage is the union of two persons in a multi-level way. These levels include the emotional, the spiritual. And it includes the bodily, whereby the two persons become one biological organism.

This union is ordered toward the good of procreation, even if the union does not effect procreation.

Sorry -- boring Thursday evening waiting to leave work to go swim :  

Married couples are a protected class because they have the ability to procreate?  Are you using protected class in the 14th amendment legal sense?  Or in the natural law sense?  The former I can buy as a basis for the argument, the latter I can't becasue i don't know where it gets us other than one side believing it's unnatural and one believing it is natural.

So we're back to procreation.  Given my prior post, maybe the earth needs some unions ordered away from procreation