Blog on Same-Sex "Marriage," Atheism, and More

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Again, it's no surprise at all that you'd disagree with the antecedent of the conditional -- your support of ssm depends on your doing so.

Actually, I reject it because it's false.

But, again, as I have mentioned many times previously, denying the antecedent of the conditional is utterly fraught with problems.

What problems?

Well that's just a mere triviality. That's tantamount to saying "men are not women; women are not men."

No, it's not a mere triviality. It calls attention to the fact that the system you propose is discriminatory even when you claim that you're imposing the same condition on everyone.

 

[Sovereign Dream]

If that's the case, then why don't you care about the children being raised in same-sex parented families? They do exist, and any change in the legality of same-sex marriage won't change that fact.

What do you mean by my "not caring" for such children? Of course they matter and they ought be looked after for, etc., but we what we ought not do is to change public policy in such a way that we intentionally and institutionally deprive children of a mother or father as such children were just as we should not "promote" single-parenting, etc.

The state does recognize these relationships in certain ways. For instance, you can be your sister's sponsor for immigration purposes, and in some cases, you can get job-protected leave to care for a critically ill sibling.

Sure, but that's of no concern to marriage.

Both of these are rights that same-sex couples are fighting for with regard to their partners.

(A.) They probably can already obtain such benefits (e.g. hospital visitation, etc.). (B) These benefits are handed out for a reason (if they weren't handed out for a reason, they would be handed out in the first place, after all). And that reason is because the state has a compelling interest in attaching children to their mothers and fathers, not to allow Bob to see Steve in the hospital the next time his anal warts flare up again.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

And that reason is because the state has a compelling interest in attaching children to their mothers and fathers, not to allow Bob to see Steve in the hospital the next him his anal warts flare up again.

I love it when your crude bigotry seeps through. Please, let it out. Let us know how you really feel.

 

[Sovereign Dream]

Since I was one of those who raised 'straw-manning' I'll give some detail, although it's worth remembering that this is only MY view. Others might have made the same accusation for different reasons, I suppose.

Focusing on the 'Greetings' post, I'd mention the following;



Ignoring the fact that you consistently make your 'atheist voice' sound like a stoner by adding 'man' on the end of a lot of sentences, this is pretty clearly an attempt to build a straw man you can then successfully knock over. Unless you happen to believe this is factually accurate? That the vast majority of the internet is populated by 'intellectually-challenged-village-atheist-reprobates'?

That's been my experience yes. You probably know who I am referring to. I'm referring to the sort of village atheist that thinks that the cosmological arguments of Aquinas, Leibniz, Craig, Maimonides, Plotinus, Aristotle, et al. can be defeated by posing a simple question: "WELL THEN WHO CAUSED GOD, YOU THEIST TARD?!??!?! LOL PWNED! PRAISE DAWKINS!" These are the sorts of atheists that I consistently come across in my online interactions. Now, to be sure, there's plenty of respectable atheists out there, e.g. Quentin Smith, Graham Oppy, et al. and, though I obviously disagree with them on a number of matters, I nevertheless have great respect for their intellectual rigor and work. But village atheists of the sort who think "THEN WHO CAUSED GOD?!!?!" is a good objection to the cosmological argument (e.g. Dawkins, Krauss, Harris, et al.) I have no respect for.

So, my friends would wonder why I was using lol in a sentence. Or perhaps you meant online? I have a pretty good handle on science, without being a scientist. And I do tend to get thought of as a very reasonable guy. My atheism would be the LEAST reason any of my friends have for thinking I'm reasonable. Again, talking real-life rather than online. I 'know' far more atheists online than off.

The way you link the decay of society to this issue is a clear strawman. In any case, I am one of those 'intellectually-challenged-village-atheist-reprobates' I suppose, and nothing that you'd said here applies to me in the least sense.

Well, then perhaps you're not the sort of atheist I am referring to. Again, I don't doubt there are some serious, good-willing atheists out there (again, like Oppy, Graham, etc.). But there are far too many of these "intellectually-challenged-village-atheist-reprobates"

Hope that helps clarify.

Thanks

 

[Alceste]

On a more personal note, this gives me the opportunity to say that what is most unfortunate about the ssm movement is the fact that its supporters are convinced that they are doing something so good and great and "progressive" by seeking to implementing ssm. But that is just tragically misguided as any attempt to detach children from their mothers and fathers would be.

Social progressives feel good about it because social progress is good. Women voting, holding public office, and attaining economic independence? Awesome! Ending slavery? Woohoo! When Ghandi pushed Britain out of India without firing a single shot? Hell, yes! Ending apartheid in S.A.? Bring it! Ooh - how about a social safety net and universal health care? Best idea EVER!

Face it, bro. We turn out to be right about everything in the end, and our views eventually become universal common sense views. It just takes your kind a little longer to see the light.

 

[Sovereign Dream]

I love it when your crude bigotry seeps through. Please, let it out. Let us know how you really feel.

It's called humor. :cigar:

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

It's called humor. :cigar:

It's not funny. Would you think it was funny if your girlfriend or wife is dying in the hospital but you're not allowed to see them because the visitation policy of the hospital doesn't cover you? Would you think it was funny if they died without you by their side? Furthermore, would you think it was funny if some heartless bigot on the Internet who wants to prevent you from having those rights thought it would be a good idea make a "joke" out of it?

Because those very same scenarios have happened many, many times to gay and lesbian couples and it's not funny at all. Shame on you.

 

[Alceste]

That's cute but, if you have been paying attention, I haven't mentioned the Bible or "GOD!" once in my opposition to ssm. Once again, even if I had an anti-epiphany and became an atheist, my opposition to ssm wouldn't falter whatsoever because my opposition to ssm does not depend on my belief in God, or in my commitment to Catholicism, etc., etc., etc.

Yeah it does. You start the entire argument by saying "IF marriage represents [your opinion on what marriage represents], THEN yada yada yada". If it's only your personal opinion, the argument - however many words you use to express it - is utterly destroyed by me popping in and saying "It doesn't".

Nothing after that "if" of yours can be defended without completely relying on a theistic model of objective morality. If you were an atheist, you simply wouldn't believe it any more. You'd have no way of knowing whether marriage means what you think it does or not, and it wouldn't be worth your effort to worry about it.

 

[Sovereign Dream]

Social progressives feel good about it because social progress is good. Women voting, holding public office, and attaining economic independence? Awesome! Ending slavery? Woohoo! When Ghandi pushed Britain out of India without firing a single shot? Hell, yes! Ending apartheid in S.A.? Bring it! Ooh - how about a social safety net and universal health care? Best idea EVER!

Face it, bro. We turn out to be right about everything in the end, and our views eventually become universal common sense views. It just takes your kind a little longer to see the light.

To assume that ssm is another example of a great "progressive move towards the moral good" or some other amorphous catchphrase is exactly what is in contention. I'm convinced that implementing of ssm will bring nothing but trouble for future generations, busy as we seem to be attempting to detach them from their mother and father, abandoning our responsibilities to them, and aborting them incessantly. Whereas you might think that ssm is just another move down progress to "like, yay and roses and really good stuff" I think that ssm is progress, alright, but progress in the train that we boarded ever since the sexual revolution that takes us to an even more absurd destination every half-generation or so. After all, you already have divorce rates through the roof, the "right" to kill you children, the ability to end a marriage at your whim and have the government side with you 100% of the time; you buy into the notion that sex is an intrinsically sterile activity that is not "whatsoever" linked with procreation and that you can shirk away your parental obligations by killing your child or leaving it, and, on top of all that, you have a bankrupt view of marriage, namely, that it just "like, exists to, like, recognize when person(s) feel, like, fuzzy feelings for one another." It's no surprise that you see the idea of two men or two women, or indeed 10 men and women "marrying" as "no big deal."

 

[Alceste]

I love it when your crude bigotry seeps through. Please, let it out. Let us know how you really feel.

OMG! I totally missed that one.

This guy spends entirely too much time contemplating the condition of other men's anuses if a doozy like that slips out in casual conversation...

Edit: I think one of the reasons repressed gay conservatives despise the idea of gay marriage is that they personally prefer to imagine gay sex that is dirty and shameful. Thinking of an old married gay couple who have been together for so long they forget to have sex for months at a stretch just doesn't turn them on as much. Comments like that one affirm my suspicions.

 

[Gjallarhorn]

It's not funny. Would you think it was funny if your girlfriend or wife is dying in the hospital but you're not allowed to see them because the visitation policy of the hospital doesn't cover you? Would you think it was funny if they died without you by their side? Furthermore, would you think it was funny if some heartless bigot on the Internet who wants to prevent you from having those rights thought it would be a good idea make a "joke" out of it?

Because those very same scenarios have happened many, many times to gay and lesbian couples and it's not funny at all. Shame on you.

Thank you.

 

[Father Heathen]

Yes, let's use the arbitrary, irrational, unsubstantiated superstitions and social norms of ancient primitives as a basis for denying people rights, freedoms, and equality. Religious fundamentalists are welcomed to believe and practice as they wish. The problem is when they try to impose them upon others. We should be using reason and compassion as a moral compass in the modern world, rather than blindly adhering to something that instructs how to sell your own daughter into sexual slavery, and to stone people to death for wearing mixed fabrics, talking to menstruating women, for rotating crops, and for eating pork or shrimp. The bigotry toward homosexuals is unjust and asinine.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

OMG! I totally missed that one.

This guy spends entirely too much time contemplating the condition of other men's anuses if a doozy like that slips out in casual conversation...

Edit: I think one of the reasons repressed gay conservatives despise the idea of gay marriage is that they personally prefer to imagine gay sex that is dirty and shameful. Thinking of an old married gay couple who have been together for so long they forget to have sex for months at a stretch just doesn't turn them on as much. Comments like that one affirm my suspicions.

Well, of course being gay is all about anal sex. That's all gay people care about. Lesbians don't exist.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

What do you mean by my "not caring" for such children? Of course they matter and they ought be looked after for, etc., but we what we ought not do is to change public policy in such a way that we intentionally and institutionally deprive children of a mother or father as such children were just as we should not "promote" single-parenting, etc.

I mean that you don't care about them enough to allow them access to one of the best tools we have to protect them.

So... I ask again: why do you not care enough about the children of same-sex-parented families to protect them with the rights and benefits of marriage? I get that you don't like what the parents are doing, but why hurt their kids? It just seems spiteful.

Sure, but that's of no concern to marriage.

It's relevant to the argument you just made.

(A.) They probably can already obtain such benefits (e.g. hospital visitation, etc.).

Please describe how a same-sex couple could obtain either of the rights I described without same-sex marriage or similar legal status for their relationship (i.e. civil union).

(B) These benefits are handed out for a reason (if they weren't handed out for a reason, they would be handed out in the first place, after all).

In the case of immigration sponsorship, the benefit is based on the idea that the relationship between the sponsor and sponsee is close enough that the sponsor can be relied upon to support the sponsee if needed so that he doesn't become a burden on the government of his new country.

And that reason is because the state has a compelling interest in attaching children to their mothers and fathers, not to allow Bob to see Steve in the hospital the next him his anal warts flare up again.

Your lack of compassion astounds me. Your life experience must be very sheltered and limited if that's what you think the rights of marriage are for. Have you ever had a relative die of disease?

 

[Father Heathen]

It's called humor. :cigar:

You know what I find humorous? The fact that a religious institution which has systematically raped thousands of children for decades and attempted to cover up its crimes still has the audacity to present itself as a moral authority.

 

[Sovereign Dream]

Actually, I reject it because it's false.
What problems?

Lets' say you reject the supposition that marriage is the metaphysically comprehensive union between . . . and that its purpose is to attach . . . etc. What do supporters of ssm think that marriage is? Here is one popular answer: Marriage is the lifelong union of two persons who love each other. Marriage functions as a way of publicly acknowledging one’s love and commitment for their spouse. Because same-sex couples are capable of loving in the same way as everyone else, the law ought to make provisions for recognizing their unions as legal marriages.

Love alone cannot be sufficient for legal recognition. For one, not every loving relationship is afforded legal recognition. There are many different kinds of valuable social relationships that are simply not relevant to the public good in the way that marriage is. Companionships, for example, involve love, but nobody is calling for the government to legally recognize friendships. Love certainly motivates a couple to enter into marriage, but it is mistaken to think that marriage is essentially about love.

Key to a particular type of relationship being subject to legal recognition is its serving a public purpose. Social institutions are afforded legal recognition in virtue of their serving some good to society-at-large, not because those involved may happen to love each other. There must be something intrinsic to a certain kind of relationship that bears on the common good for there to be a legitimate state interest in regulating it. Now what public purpose would legally recognizing a loving relationship serve? Love is an essentially private matter that involves only those people in a relationship. The state has no business poking around in this domain of life, since the state exists to regulate public goods and institutions. Some bring up the various benefits and incentives already associated with marriage as a reason to legalize same-sex relationships. According to this argument, same-sex unions should be afforded legal recognition in order to take advantage of the benefits that opposite-sex couples currently enjoy. But this is clearly question-begging. Why should anyone deserve these benefits to begin with? It cannot be because they love each other, since that’s the very issue at stake.

Some libertarians have used this rationale to argue that the state should not be involved in marriage at all. If the position described in the preceding paragraphs captures what marriage amounts to, they have a point. But in fact many of us have the intuition that marriage is something special, something that the state should involve itself in. The question then becomes: Why? What’s so special about marriage that could justify this? And the only reasonable answer to that question is because marriage has to do with the union of man and a woman and their children.

By denying this and accepting the supposition that marriage is just "recognizing loving commitments," then not only does this serve no public purpose, but it also commits you to recognizing any concievable configartions of individuals who are "lovingly committed to one another" are "married."

No, it's not a mere triviality. It calls attention to the fact that the system you propose is discriminatory even when you claim that you're imposing the same condition on everyone.

No it's not. On my view, everyone can marry someone of the opposite sex. There's nothing discriminatory about that. For on my view (indeed, the correct view), the public purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children to one another. And so, on this view, having two men or two women "marry" one another just makes no sense. It would be no more discriminatory to disallow two men or two women (or indeed 5 men and 10 women) to "marry" on this view than it would be "discriminatory" to disallow a man to become a member of a women's debate club, or to disallow a blind man from getting a drivers' license, etc. How many times do I have to explain this? Is this is just too hard to comprehend?

 

[Sovereign Dream]

Yeah it does. You start the entire argument by saying "IF marriage represents [your opinion on what marriage represents], THEN yada yada yada". If it's only your personal opinion, the argument - however many words you use to express it - is utterly destroyed by me popping in and saying "It doesn't".

Yes, and unlike many of you, I actually give reasons to think that the antecedent of that conditional is true, whereas you prefer to just say that "it's, like, your opinion, man!"

Nothing after that "if" of yours can be defended without completely relying on a theistic model of objective morality.

What? When did I ever mention anything about "objective morality"? All I'm doing here is considering pragmatic facts about public policy, folks. Is that just too big a cookie for you?

If you were an atheist, you simply wouldn't believe it any more. You'd have no way of knowing whether marriage means what you think it does or not, and it wouldn't be worth your effort to worry about it.

Talk about irrelevant comments.

 

[Alceste]

To assume that ssm is another example of a great "progressive move towards the moral good" or some other amorphous catchphrase is exactly what is in contention. I'm convinced that implementing of ssm will bring nothing but trouble for future generations, busy as we seem to be attempting to detach them from their mother and father, abandoning our responsibilities to them, and aborting them incessantly. Whereas you might think that ssm is just another move down progress to "like, yay and roses and really good stuff" I think that ssm is progress, alright, but progress in the train that we boarded ever since the sexual revolution that takes us to an even more absurd destination every half-generation or so. After all, you already have divorce rates through the roof, the "right" to kill you children, the ability to end a marriage at your whim and have the government side with you 100% of the time; you buy into the notion that sex is an intrinsically sterile activity that is not "whatsoever" linked with procreation and that you can shirk away your parental obligations by killing your child or leaving it, and, on top of all that, you have a bankrupt view of marriage, namely, that it just "like, exists to, like, recognize when person(s) feel, like, fuzzy feelings for one another." It's no surprise that you see the idea of two men or two women, or indeed 10 men and women "marrying" as "no big deal."

It is a big deal. That's the whole point. The more love in this world, the better. The less suffering in the world, the better. The more gay families there are, the better, especially for the unwanted progeny of careless heterosexual couplings. It's a big deal because it makes the world a more loving, fairer, less painful place. It brings one of the most abused, despised and isolated demographics in the history of European culture into the fold of general society, and says "We were wrong - we're sorry - we want to do better". What's not to celebrate?

I mean, if you're into hateful, paranoid, vicious nonsense, you can go ahead and imagine it's all a big mean plot against babies, but nobody else sees it that way. That's why they're singing in the video. They're singing because despite the vicious, hateful, paranoid nonsense folks like you have been promoting, love and compassion for our fellow man has prevailed.

If Christ Himself were in that room, he'd be singing along.

 

[Sovereign Dream]

OMG! I totally missed that one.

This guy spends entirely too much time contemplating the condition of other men's anuses if a doozy like that slips out in casual conversation...

Edit: I think one of the reasons repressed gay conservatives despise the idea of gay marriage is that they personally prefer to imagine gay sex that is dirty and shameful. Thinking of an old married gay couple who have been together for so long they forget to have sex for months at a stretch just doesn't turn them on as much. Comments like that one affirm my suspicions.

Yes, the "oh you're opposed to ssm so you just must be a closeted gay!" Will the quality of comments ever improve? Or should I make my responses less that 20 characters for you to adequately ponder them?

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

It's called humor. :cigar:

You call that humour? You don't even reach this low bar for funny:

The Great Desecration – Pharyngula