Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective

Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective
qntm.org

It is more about the connection of database engineering and "the real world" than about gay marriage.

-- This:

It's asinine to do it this way. However, there is a good reason why I haven't just skipped schemas (schemae?) One to Six. There are a lot of people in the world who actually think like this. This is their for-real, no-joking conception of "marriage". They do not grasp that men and women are interchangeable, as a result of which homosexual marriages create repulsive integrity problems in their heads. "But if they're both guys, which one is the wife?" How sad.

-- And this:

Finally we are reaching something which is non-stupid and non-sexist enough that it might actually exist somewhere in reality. This schema is reasonably sensible assuming you live in a fairly God-fearing administrative district.

-- And this...

As an aside, I have actually considered that laws against (or implicitly disallowing) gay marriage are, actually, sexist. For example, suppose I lived somewhere with antihomonuptial legislation. As I am a man, any woman in that district has the right to marry me. (As well they should.) But any man in that district who wanted to marry me does not have that right. The women have a right which the men do not have. Likewise, if there was a nubile woman nearby, I (and any other man) would have the right to marry that woman. But any nearby woman would not have that right. The men have a right which women do not have. Sexist!

Anti-gay-marriage laws throw a very real legislative dividing line between two sets of people on the world, and say, "all marriages must cross this line". But any law which divides men from women is clearly sexist, and, as I've stated above, closed-minded towards unconventional gender assignments who don't clearly fall on either side.

And there's plenty more I won't quote for the sake of brevity. The article has a full freaking ASIDE with personal opinion weighing into the issue of gay marriage, it's pretty damn obvious this is just political opinion. Political opinion with an Engineering slant, NOT something Hacker News worthy.

Either way, the fact that you have such a strong opinion about it seems to disprove your own argument, don't you think?

I'm finding this article very entertaining. And it's clearly stimulating some rousing commentary on this board already.

The great thing about HN is that you can just ignore anything you think shouldn't be here. Don't vote it up, don't comment on it, and if others agree with you and do the same, it'll fall off. Lots of articles never make the front page.

If you were intrigued enough to read it, and then moved enough to comment on it, then that proves it should be here.