Sad day in USA for both Parties (Page 9)

Don, I am sure that in your mind you see a non catholic view of the gay marriage issue, but I have yet to feel that it has been explained to me with out being tainted by a religeous belief.  You talk about natural law, but in everything I have read about the definition of natural law, it does not substantiate the ban on gay marriage...Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal.  I have always thought that meant we should have equal rights.  Which at this point we do not.  

I want you to reverse the situation.  Hypothetically speaking, what if you were denied the right to marry the woman you love.  Everyone around you is able to marry, they get certain rights that come with marriage, but you are told you cannot.  Infact, you are often degraded for being in love with your wife.  You are forced to feel like you must hide the fact that you love your wife.  You can't talk about her around the water fountain at work.  You have no pictures of her in the office.  And in public you must act like there is no connection between you.  Your faith tells you that its wrong to love this woman, but you can't stop loving her, and she you.  You believe that your God has created you this way, given you this mate.  But the priest tells you that its a sin.  Where do you go?  What do you do?  You may not be able to answer any of these questions...you are not in this situation. 

But I am. 

The constant media/liberal criticism of this war I believe has cost soldiers lives by making the enemy bolder and bolder. I fear today for those soldiers and what we have done to give our enemy hope that terrorists have accomplished their goal which is to make us back down.
- triingforsept07

Ditto

and for the record, Possum, I'm with ya

Well, ya know, if you weren't so damn mentally ill you probably could have paid better attention.

Don, do you see marriages performed by civil servants as being different from those performed by religious officials?

I saw this really cool reproductive documentary--I think it was Nova show--where they had an amazing video of the opening of the cervix during female orgasm. At least in this video, it actually showed the end of the cervix  contracting out and dipping into the pool of semen at the back of the vagina. So the thought is female orgasm helps draw semen into the cervix.

Totally off subject, but did they talk about how human face to face communication contributed to the evolution of the female body.  Do you see any other mammals that copulate face to face?  It's due to our advanced level of speech, this theory claims. 

Ok, sorry, hijack off.  er, I mean, never mind.

It was a long time ago, so I don't remember. I think I have seen chimps (or maybe bonobos) doing it face-to-face.

Rob, with all respect, it seems like you want to have it both ways.

On the one hand, it seems that you are going to reject any argument that is religiously based. (I'm not conceeding that my argument is religiously based, just pointing out that it seems that if you feel it is you will reject it as inappropriate)

At the same time, you want me to sanction a radical change in well established public policy based on your personal feelings.

If you reject someone's argument based on their religious feelings, why should they accept yours based on your emotional feelings?

If you require a non-religious argument, which I think is valid on your part, then you have the responsibility to lay out an equally non-ideological/psychological/emotional one as well. You need to lay out some sort of post-modern theory of homosexuality that supercedes post-modernism itself. It needs to be comprehensible to non-post-modernists.

Otherwise, you are simply appealing to the "religion" of post-modernism, and are falling into the same error that you accuse Christians of falling into, namely forcing their belief system on someone else.

I'd suggest the way to do this is with reason, which ought to be the cross cultural lingua franca.

Jefferson believed in freedom, but not in license. Up to this point, from what I can tell, the only pro-gay marriage arguments I see are ones based in a belief in license.

No, not at the expense of rejecting some underlying "unalieanable" truth.

Are you saying that Jefferson's philosophy, not his personal life but his philosophy, says that it is licit valid for a majority to oppress a minority, even to the point of death, based on the rule of law? In other words, if the majority thinks it's ok to kill all blue eyed people, then it's licit valid?

Of course, not. There is an overarching principle that ought to prevent that, namely the unalienable right to life.

The real battle here, if you will, is whether or not our system of moral discernment is based on these underlying unmovable principles, these natural-laws, or are they based on nothing more than the beliefs of a certain people in a certain point in time.

Is it based on unmovable truth or moral relativism.

Jefferson was licentious in both public and private life. He was about freeing people from the reins of government. He was gleeful about the Reign of Terror in France. He supported the violent overthrow of an overreaching, constricting government.

You frame the issue as you see it. Here's how I see it framed: We are denying basic civil rights to one part of the population; the only justification I see used for this denial is bigotry.

Here's a frame that says what I believe in a much more eloquent fashion:

Denying committed same-sex couples the financial and social benefits and privileges given to their married heterosexual counterparts bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose. The Court holds that under the equal protection guarantee of Article I, Paragraph 1 of the New Jersey Constitution, committed samesex couples must be afforded on equal terms the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the civil marriage statutes. The name to be given to the statutory scheme that provides full rights and benefits to samesex couples, whether marriage or some other term, is a matter left to the democratic process. 

Don, I fully support the Roman Catholic Church's - and any other religious community-  right to deny marriage sacraments to same-gendered couples. I fully support the RCC's right to decide who is properly subscribing to the RCC's policies.

I fully reject, however, the RCC's right to interfere with the civil matter of allowing same-gendered couples to apply for and receive marriage licenses. 

Then I guess I need to do a better job of making my case, because it certainly does not flow from bigotry.

Again, the real battle here is between natural-law theory and moral relativism theory.

If you subscribe to the latter, which I don't believe you do, then I guess the jig is up. In my opinion, if that's the way we go then the great American and Western experiment will soon be over and we will slide into traditional forms of tyranny.

If you subscribe to the former, and I believe you do from everything you've written, then let's argue it out on that basis.

To begin with, serious opposition to gay marriage, that is based in natural-law, does not flow from bigotry.

(sadly for me, I may not be able to continue this conversation due to work and deadlines, but I'll jump in if and when I can)

I just want to say it one more time...

I am not making an argument on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church, even though some people think I'm on the payroll of the Vatican.  

For better or worse, I am attempting to make a non-religious reason based argument.

So please, I beg of you, stop hauling out that red hearing cause it's starting to stink.

dontracy - 2006-11-10 9:50 AM ...even though some people think I'm on the payroll of the Vatican.  

I think we should retitle this thread:

Opus Dei vs. Opus Gay

Don, that's YOUR construct for this argument. My construct is quite clear and concise. It's a simple matter of civil law applied equally - that's what this country is allegedly all about. See above in bold and enlarged letters.

Dude, you own me a new coffee free keyboard...

That truly is funny...  

Well, I guess then that there really was no fundamental difference between the United States and the former Soviet Union.  The USSR also strived to apply their civil law equally.

Guess it's just a matter of taste. 

Mmmm yeah, I don't subscribe to the slippery slope argument. We're not a nation of wild jackals or downtrodden, uneducated peasants to be easily led or subdued. As a historical note, the US did not trade one totalitarian system for another. We went from being the protected province of a parliamentary government to a republic.

We're mostly educated, believe in equal rights for all (it's our national ethos, is it not?) and instinctively sympathetic to a sense of fair play. Most people in this country don't need elaborate constructs about philosophy and law to know what is innately fair.

Here is a compelling ( to me ) Natural Law argument from Weithman in support of state recognition of gay marriage:

Weithman  

I was making the distinction - fair, I thought - between wedding sacraments which are the domain of religious institutions and marriage licenses which are the domain of government institutions.

I support the Methodists' right to decide who will receive wedding sacraments. I don't support the Methodists or Evangelicals or Jewish or Muslim or Lutheran or Mormon's right to decide who will receive a marriage license.

And I think that's the very crux of the argument. Churches should be free to marry whomever they choose, and for whatever reason. BUt civil marriages should not be doled out in a discriminatory manner.

Natural law interpretation of nature is biased in favor of religious belief, since it is ultimately grounded in the presupposition that nature has an ethical purpose or intention that is identical with the purposes and intentions of the Christian God. Hence, natural law tends to depend on circular reasoning; it discovers in nature what its adherents already believe is the intention of the Christian God.

Despite natural law's pretense to objectivity, it is impossible to downplay the divine element in the scholastic natural law tradition, with its prior notion that biological facts are as they are because that is how God commanded them to be.

The sexual regulation and definitions you use in your arguments stem from a refinement to Aristotlian natural law put forth by medieval Christian scholars.  To claim that there is no religious influence found in natural law as you use it, is disingenious.