re: Judge strikes down Wisconsin gay marriage ban[W:287]
Sorry, you can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't talk about the importance of history and tradition, only to then cherry pick the history and tradition that you think supports your argument. History is history, and we're living it.
Oh come on, that is nonsense. Thousands of years of history and you are saying it is "cherry-picking" to not include the last ten or so years as part of that history? I am including it, of course, but as an ongoing process of changing the traditional and historic meaning of marriage that has existed for the previous thousands of years.
Your attempt to take polygamous marriage and try to use verbal acrobatics to somehow frame it as still being monogamous did not work.
Not what I was doing, but just pointing out that even the polygamous marriages were taken as being between a man and a woman. The women were not married to each other. Each was married individually to the man.
It's an arbitrary line in the sand. There were people who believed mixed race marriages would be the ruin of the institution.
Such laws had nothing to do with the institution of marriage and everything to do with general hostility towards race-mixing. It was opposition to the mixing of black and white blood. Nothing arbitrary about saying marriage is traditionally between a man and a woman. That is a clear bright line.
Never said it was akin to allowing slavery or human sacrifice, just that when you use the tradition argument you have to take into consideration every tradition we've had throughout history.
Yet, those traditions had more than their fair share of prominent opposition and faced bans throughout history. Abolition of slavery goes back thousands of years. Many contemporary countries had banned slavery decades prior to the U.S. or even earlier.
Do you have a problem with the way our government is set up? Those judges exist to review the constitutionality of laws. If those laws are unconstitutional, then the judges are going to rule against them. Else why have a constitution if you're not going to have a system in place for upholding it?
The problem is not the government, but the people in charge of it. Enforcing the constitution, like all law, is great so long as people are committed to an honest and faithful interpretation. When people abuse their position of authority over the law to push their political views on society, that is when I have a problem.
The original form of the constitution can blow me, seeing as women weren't allowed to vote then and black people could be traded as property. Or do you now have a problem with all the amendments?
I don't have a problem with the amendments. What the **** are you talking about? You are now being completely dishonest in attacking my position. My point is actually that the amendment did not somehow require recognition of gay marriage.
Who cares? The social mores of the United States is changing in that it's growing accepting of same sex marriage, and if it becomes legal in all fifty states, guess what: homophobes in Utah will still be allowed to be homophobes. No one can force anybody to accept gay marriage.
Except, legal recognition means they do have to accept it on some level. I mean, are their businesses not now going to be required take part in any gay marriage ceremony at request? They can only avoid it by coming up with some non-religious excuse. Any argument that "it is against my beliefs" will be promptly met with a lawsuit saying this photographer has to take photos at my gay wedding no matter how they feel about it or this person has to bake my wedding cake even if it goes against everything in their religion. You can say that is not being "forced to accept" gay marriage, but it is in effect putting people in a position where they either take some part in the celebration of the union or lose their livelihood. People are, in effect, being forced to accept it as lawsuits and financial penalties are a form of coercive force.
Do you really support that?
Link to me a story of two heterosexual people of the same gender being forced to marry each other and we'll talk, otherwise your statement is nonsense.
Again with the illogical retorts. People are going to have to accept it when it is legalized and that would be fine if this was the choice of the people. When it is the choice of certain activist judges then they are being forced by a small group of individuals to accept that marriage no longer means what it has meant for thousands of years. No one needs to be forced to marry anyone for the change to be forced on society.
No, that's not Orwellian. You are invoking oppression where there is none.
Orwellian does not inherently mean "oppressive", but merely something that is akin to the world in Orwell's writings. By arguing that the 14th Amendment requires legal recognition of gay marriages, they are effectively reinventing history, because even those who wrote it most assuredly did not think it applied in such a manner and only in the past few years has anyone taken it that way. The law should be firm, not subject to the whims of judges. Interpretation of the law should be limited in scope and not become a way to perpetually move the law closer to a position favoring a political end not even remotely envisioned by its authors. When the law is seen to have deficiencies that prevent a certain political goal it should be revised in accordance with the appropriate procedures, not perverted through arbitrary decisions by partisan judges.
Cardinal is correct, same sex marriage or unions has been happening for eons.
History of same-sex unions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikipedia fail. Even if the stories are true, you should play closer attention as it explicitly says such unions were not recognized under the law. Anyone can have a ceremony, but we are talking about legal recognition.
Enough. Focus on the topic, not on the poster.