Since atheists tend to take cues from nature, isn't the idea of marriage totally a religious institution?

I mean, do monkeys stay monogamous? Hmm, perhaps monogamy doesn't matter after further thought. (multiple wives in bible)

So...I guess it just comes down to contracts? Like getting insurance companies to cover your partner?

(sorry, I thought there was a lull. don't want to tard this up too much)

The point for many many years has been precisely about, as you called it, contracts. There are legal rights and privilidges that people receive by being married. Things like hospital visitation rights, inheritance rights, rights to children, insurance issues, etc.

Also-
from wikipedia: just interesting....

I didn't realize there was some period where I was denying the emotional element, or some time when you were trying to argue it was that. Someone else asked it unrelated to our discussion and I immediately replied. So drop the "finally admit" nonsense. And of course, this is but a small component of what I have discussed whether it is the tactical superiority of my solution or anything else.

Further, just because there is an emotional reaction to something doesn't mean it should be a pejorative in any sense. Emotionalism and rationalism is a false dichotomy. As you have seen, I can argue against the status quo quite fine on the grounds of a utilitarian assessment of the harm caused devoid of any shred of emotional attachment. But most people form their moral beliefs about the world based not on logical deductions from moral precepts - and I question the ability to actually even do this successfully and consistently - but based on emotional views of something. Casting gay marriage in terms that people have a positive emotional reaction to is, I think, going to be among the most important tactics in the fight to end the discrimination and harm that you are enabling. Of course, this isn't working on you, but by and large I suspect it will be successful.

As for history, I couldn't care less if my person view of marriage as I think of it with my wife is or is not supported by history. I am surely aware that discrimination is widespread in history I am not trying to deny that reality. I maintain that elements of love and commitment ARE widely considered to be parts of marriage by both religious people and else wise. But outside of that, it doesn't have any implications on anything else. Heck, religious people could make zero reference ever to love and commitment and I would still think it was entirely appropriate to end the discrimination and harm.

Would gay couples be opposed to having to pay more for their medical insurance if there were stats indicating a higher rate of disease? (similar to car insurance with men and woman)

Uhm...inheritance rights - largely dependent on the parents of gay persons will? (since we're not going by mandated torah law) Like the parents can acknowledge that relationship if they want to or not (even sonship and str8 edge can be cut out, and the unrelated put in), unlike bible where inheritance is automatic and non negotiable.

kids - non applicable (sure, hairy issue of adoption)

hospital visitation - hmm, just a few more hours?


See guys, nothing to gain here.

Ah, what they really want is social acceptance, and this will fully legitimize it in their view.

Well....to be fair,

You've gained the automatic inheritance if the the parents are lazy and a few hours in the hospital.

Oh, but then your going to take your gay spouses parents to court for "bigotry", if they cut you out of the will. Hmm, clever.

This seems absurd to me, but how would gay people defend against this accusation:

A man who refuses to marry women, and only wants to marry men; is bigoted.

I should clarify this point a bit because your objection is correct as I've stated things.

Under my proposal, "marriage" refers to a purely social contract. Atheists can certainly be "married" by any organization (religious or secular) that is willing to marry them. But what the separation of naming accomplishes is that it allows for religious institutions to take the meaning of the agreement to be whatever they want it to be without creating confusion with the legal terminology or without feeling imposed upon by the government. Specifically, it makes the concept of "marriage" as something disjoint from anything that may be legally binding, which is where the interplay of religious freedoms and government may come into play.

Imagine a clean slate of the word marriage in both government and society. Government creates a two-person legal document that endows both parties with certain rights. That's the civil union. Now within society, different groups can hold whatever ceremonies they want with the full knowledge that their ceremony has no particular legal bearing, basically as Bar Mitzvahs, baptisms, and Temple marriages are practiced today.

What's going on now is kind of like if middle school graduations were called Bar Mitzvahs. Yes, Jewish synagogues could have *their* Bar Mitazvahs, and the government could have its Bar Mitzvahs, but it's really just asking for confusion and trouble.

Wow, so many mischaracterizations here...

- Insurance: In most cases, partners would be trying to gain access to group health policies issued through the spouses' employer. Most of these policies do not restrict access to the policies or charge differential rates on the basis of individual risk, they generally charge everyone the same rate because the large pool of insured individuals aggregates the risk enough that the insurer doesn't need to assess each person individually. So, if they aren't going to charge differential rates based on age or weight, or a bunch of other factors, they shouldn't do it based on orientation.

- Inheritance. We're not talking about the ability to inherit money from parents, we're referring to the ability of one spouse to pass assets to the other. For example, is a man dies and leaves 10 million to his wife, she pays nothing. But, under current federal law, if he leaves it to a "husband," the surviving partner has to pay millions of dollars in estate taxes. This can be especially messy if much of the wealth is trapped in non liquid assets like a business or real estate, because some of those assets might have to be sold in order to raise the money to pay the taxes.

- Kids are tremendously relevant, both in adoptions, and in situations where one mother gave birth to the child... In the absence of legal recognition, there are documented cases where the other partner was not granted custody over the child when the biological parent died, where the non biological parent has had trouble taking the child on an airplane because they could not document that they had a legal relationship with the child, etc.

- You brush off hospital visitation, but just imagine that someone you loved, that you had pledged your life to the same way that a married straight couple had, was laying in a hospital bed, or undergoing surgery, and the doctors and nurses wouldn't tell you anything because you aren't "family."

And sure, I also think that seeing gay folks getting married and realizing that the world didn't end will make people more accepting of homosexuality, but that is far from the primary reason why I support same sex marriage...

I took no comment as tacit *rejection:

*edited because it was the opposite word of what I meant.

This was my position back in post #50-something. And you never really addressed it, and you kept on going on in the same manner for dozens of posts. It seemed you wanted to pretend like you were making an argument when you were making an emotional plea.

That's too bad. But I suppose that's why your position sounds gratingly shallow. When you say:

You're willfully taking an anti-intellectual position. You lose a lot of standing from an intellectual point of view if you're going to say "screw history, I'm just going to start making stuff up because it enhances my position."

No, I have not seen, and this is still an emotional argument. Your utilitarian assessment of "harm" is deeply emotional.

Obviously someone writing a will can include or exclude anyone they want for any reason, so no suits against parents imo...

As far as the bigotry charge, not wanting to marry a particular person does not mean that I view them as a less deserving of the same civil rights as I am, or as an inferior being. If that were the case, you could say that everyone who is married is "bigoted" against every person that they did not marry, and if you want to go that far, then you've stretched the word bigot so far that it has now lost any meaning.

Oh but they will...(sue and win), and it has no meaning to me already fwiw.

I appreciate your posts, but I see you're going to make me have to work, so I'm out. I mean, I really can't argue, the info you posted seems close to a reasonable play out under current law in general, but I think the whole political system is fraudulent and house of cards waiting to collapse.

I mean...I have no options (nor do I want them), Torah is legit, all else is a fraud (Deut. 4:2)

There's a distinction betwen what happens when a Mormon church does something and when the government does something, yes?

Okay, so I've noted that this thing you call "intellectual freedom" isn't really written into the same documents as the "religious freedom." And now you've repeated it.

I have no clue what you're really saying. This seems to me that you're once again making up arbitrary challenges and standards to be met.

So what you're actually saying is that you want to abolish civil marriages and have instead civil unions, both gay and straight, in order to not be perceived as infringing on religious freedoms? You are putting a higher priority on being perceived as good by the very-religious community than you are on allowing equality for gays (since you would vote no to gay marriage in order to move closer to getting the government out of marriage altogether).

Am I misinterpreting here, or do you really not think this is bad?

I want to have it that way so that there's an absolutely clear distinction between the two types of agreements. I think the shared word "marriage" creates all sorts of unnecessary difficulties in the language (and in the process of advancing rights).

It is best in the long term to have government not using the word marriage. This makes equal rights a clear legal issue, rather than a religious one.

The perception by the religious community is a huge stumbling block and is a potential source of additional legal problems for advancing the end goal. Therefore, in order to work around the primary stumbling block, let's just not make it about marriage at all*. I think it will accomplish both ends in a way that doesn't simply try to barrel through a significant portion of the population.

One of the most visceral reactions that you can get from someone is when that person believes something of value is being taken from them. Pushing "gay marriage" through by basically trying to overpower people doesn't seem to me to be the most efficient solution. Sidestep the problem, and then things will go much more smoothly. (Also, actual homophobia -- which I admit is out there -- will be more readily exposed because it can't hide behind a curtain of religious freedoms.)

The idea here is similar to the idea that wars tend to be highly inefficient ways of accomplishing diplomacy. Not that this stops us from engaging in wars, but in many instances we realize partway through that war wasn't the best option, but we get kind of stuck in it.

* Edit: The "right to marry" is something that gets thrown around, and I think that's a large tactical error because the whole problem is bound up in the word "marriage." So simply repeating that you have this "right" doesn't do anything. Yes, gays have a right to enter into a legal contract with a member of the opposite sex, so their "right" hasn't actually been taken from them. Oh, you have the right marry *ANYONE* you want? Well, why not any*THING*? And on and on... Get the word marriage out of the equation, and these types of objections go away.

People have a right to see people they care about in the hospital, and the right to have their earnings distributed as they wish upon their death. Those rights are much easier to talk about and convince people of than the right to marriage.

Oh sorry, I ignored many things like that which seemed like empty trolls over this discussion. But if you think it is meaningful sure I can address it.

I say "harmful discrimination based on sexual orientation is bad" is a "first principle" in the following sense. Any time someone says something is bad, it is possible to go into an endless spiral of intellectual masterbation over whether this claim is justified from some deeper moral precept in a deontological world and whether these deeper moral precepts are consistent with every other moral view the person has. I don't care. I don't want to go into that, whether it is something totally egregious like slavery or genocide or something less egregious like preventing people who love each other to marry.

Now if someone genuinely comes up as says "i don't think slavery is bad" or the like, then sure I suppose we have to get into it further. But you AGREED that the status quo is bad right from the get go and AGREED that it needed to be changed and proposed a completely egalitarian solution. So what value was there going down this rabbit hole? I accept it as a first principle for the conversation.

Thank goodness I have not said anything remotely similar to that. Well the screw history part yes, I couldn't care less whether history thinks marriages are between people of the same race, i still think that is wrong. But the make stuff up part, not at all. I have identified a component of marriage that IS widely considered and talked about from people on a wide portion of the spectrum. Not every historical example, of course, but today most religious people ALSO think marriage is about love and commitment. Now they may additionally think it is between a man and a woman and that is fine, they can think whatever religious voodoo they want, but I make the common identification because it helps bridge the gap. If we think of marriage in these terms - one common way to think of it - then it helps people see why it makes sense to include it. Nobody is forced to, of course.
I didn't give it (since we agreed it was harmful) but no, I think it is pretty standard concepts of harm and I don't think emotion plays into it at all. For instance, one can talk about the harm from the loss of inheritance and custody rights which is quite measurable harm. Some things like loss of hospital visitation rights and the like yes I suppose it is emotional in the sense that I can't give an objective measure of the harm caused by denying this, but it is quite real and I doubt you disagree.

It's kind of like that if "Bar Mitzvah" was already a commonly used secular word for middle school gradating, that had been in use for so long that the Jews could not clearly claim to have used it first.

You're painting a picture of religious folk as borderline ******ed, unable to tell the difference between a secular civil marriage and a religious ceremony. To be fair, that does seem to be what the problem is, but your solution is "religion gets the word marriage" instead of perhaps some very basic education demonstrating the difference between what the state is being asked to update and what religious groups are NOT being asked to change.

I don't see any problems except for those who don't want gay people marrying. And I don't care what they think. Does anyone think the US will not legalize gay marriage in my lifetime anyway?

And now I'm struggling even more than before to see the infringement on religious rights that you initially brought up. It seems the only problem is that you think it would be confusing to religious people? This doesn't seem like a real argument.

What? First, are you making the argument that it's a slippery slope from saying we have a right to gay marriage to saying we have a right to marry non-consenting human adults?

Second, are you saying that simply by changing the name you are really changing the argument? If there was no marriage, then we would be talking about gays right to have a civil union. It's no different just by changing the name.

I think Aaron's concerned that this might be the event that wakes the sleeping lion. His wordplay trick seems pretty smart imo.

Like right now, christians (or white people) have no idea what legal system is valid. But they do know they don't like gays....

Whatever Aaron personally thinks, the word marriage is not what the rest of the "pro-traditional marriage" Americans thinks is the problem: check out all the states in dark red where Constitution bans same-sex marriage and some or all forms of same-sex unions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sa...age_in_USA.svg

(I don't know if it's Ok to hotlink to wikipedia images)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-se...tates_by_state

I think your characterization is slightly askew. I did some spot checking, and I'm not sure that the words mean what you think they mean.

Idaho:

Texas:

These laws are basically reactionary to the potential of having to recognize out-of-state civil unions. After Massachusetts legalized gay marriage, there was an intentional effort of some to get married in Massachusetts and then to test the legal waters in their home states. It's more of a state's rights issue.

Trying to characterize these laws as solely a "state's rights" issue is pretty disingenuous, IMO.

As you state, these laws were specifically passed as a reaction to same sex marriages occurring in other states. These states had not seen fit to pass these laws to, for example not recognize first cousin marriages carried out in a state that recognized them, or a state that had a younger age of consent, or a state that imposed a shorter waiting period for getting married than they did. This wasn't about Texas asserting its right to define all marriages within Texas and therefore refusing to recognize all marriages from other states that did not conform to Texas' definition. It was only about same sex marriages.

Second, remember that these state laws are only possible because Congress passed DOMA, a law that, in a pretty unprecidented way, specifically allowed one state to disregard the public acts of another state. So, to the extent that this specific "state right" exists, it only exists because the Federal government decided to give the states a loophole that allowed them to avoid having to recognize same sex marriages (something, that, in the absence of DOMA, they almost certainly would have had to do because of the "full faith and credit" clause of the Constitution.

The point I was making was that civil unions are in fact NOT an acceptable alternative to civil marriage in many/most states. If the only problem was the word "marriage", do you think civil unions would be abolished as they have been? An option that already existed was constitutionally removed, even to the detriment of existing heterosexual civil unions (but that's just collateral damage I suppose).

The fact that some recent changes to these states family laws were declared in a reactionary fashion is hardly something to tout proudly. I am not remotely qualified to be able to comment on this in any detail (I presume DOMA related?), but the Texas LGBT rights Wiki page mentioned "The Constitutionality of refusing to recognize a lawful marriage performed in another State remains in dispute." I can only offer a personal opinion, which is along the lines of "it's BS"

This is true. It *IS* about same sex marriages. It is *NOT* primarily about civil unions. Those got swept into the mix because individual states did not want decisions in other states pushing them around. (Basically, this is an example of why just pushing things through is the more difficult route to take, and a demonstration that you will get a big blowback.)

Right. And once you give a right, it's even harder to take it away. Even more reason to take the route of less confrontation.

I wouldn't say it was the "only" problem, but I think it was a big piece of the problem. Here's what is contained in the link you provided;

Translation: You've got 60% at "civil unions or more." If the issue is *TRULY* about legal rights, you're basically there. The only issue is if it's about the title "marriage" because then you've got less than a quarter of the population.

But because of Massachusetts*, there was a huge push back in fear of being forced to do something that they didn't want to do.

* And DOMA for opening the door, but the timeline points to Massachusetts:

DOMA = 1996
Massachusetts = 2003
Texas = 2005

Yes, I am saying this. You take away all religious language and boil it straight down to rights. There will be some for whom it's not going to matter, but you'll get a lot better "conversion" if you frame this in strict legal language instead of a shared legal/religious language.

So it *IS* different because the types of arguments you will face are different (and fewer, and forces a much more clearly defined stand on the other side with regards to homosexuality).