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Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules

nytimes.com

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Re: Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules

#941

Post by pacala »

ScottBurson wrote: post #691
pacala wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, you think marriage shouldn't be available for straight people who are both infertile? The rest of your argument around mutual care is reasonable. There are more nuanced views than a blunt "if state support for marriage depends on procreation, let's ban marriage for infertile people as well.", which sounds like spite: if I can't get it, then those guys over there should not get it either because they are similar…

As any parent will tell you, pregnancy and childbirth are only the beginning of all that is involved in raising a child. And those can be contracted out: adoption has always been possible, and modern technology gives us the option of surrogacy. Plenty of gay couples are raising kids, and have been doing so for years. You're just trying to rationalize your prejudice by pretending it's about fertility.

You're overreacting. "> So, you think marriage shouldn't be available for straight people who are both infertile?" is, sadly, quite close to spite. Pointing out that gay couples raise children in significant numbers is a constructive argument, though this implicitly recognizes that marriage benefits are, at least partly, about procreation and child rearing.

PS. I'm a parent, thank you very much.

Re: Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules

#942

Post by tjradcliffe »

baddox wrote: post #595
drcube wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marriage has always been a government institution. Religion co-opted it for themselves at a later time. This "leave marriage to the churches where they belong" cry is disingenuous. Marriage is about a contract between individuals. It provides government granted privileges in regards to taxes, healthcare, inheritance, court testimony and child custody. It has nothing to do with religion. If you want to have a religiou…

> Marriage has always been a government institution. Religion co-opted it for themselves at a later time. I don't think that's the full story. I suspect that religious marriage existed long before nation states and most of the current legal distinctions associated with marriage.

Marriage as a practical matter exists in all societies everywhere, in the absense of any institutions of organized religion or the political state. Read any ethnography of any stone-age people from the past several hundred years and you'll find social pair-bonding without any religious or state sanction. There is frequently family sanction, but that is clearly not what you are talking about.

For example: http://www.amazon.com/Anxious-Pleasures-Sexual-Amazonian-Peo...

And historically in the West, marriage as a sacrement didn't get off the ground until the late Middle Ages: the Council of Verona in 1184 if memory serves. And even long after that it was still mostly a practical matter for most people.

Re: Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules

#943

Post by DanBC »

ElComradio wrote: post #866
DanBC wrote: post #818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any straight guy will A small change makes your sentence more truthy: "Many straight guys will". This isn't just a quibble. Public safety gave up using "gay men" because so many men do not identify as gay but do have sex with men. Thus, MSM is now used instead.

There are always exceptions so I don't fee the need to explicitly call that out. But I do submit that it's more like most than many. Can you clarify how your second paragraph is connected to the first?

You start with the mental model of sexuality of three seperate and distinct groups - straight, bi, and gay. You then use that mental model to make a statement "any straight guy will avoid". But because your mental model is wrong that statement is also wrong.

You have absolutely nothing to support your statement apart from your own gut feeling.

Re: Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules

#944

Post by monochromatic »

seszett wrote: post #356
BurningFrog wrote: post #227

I'm glad we'll have full gay marriage now. But the idea that "the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage" is pretty laughable. Does anyone really believe this right was in the Constitution for 250 years, only to be discovered recently? In reality public opinion and culture changed, and 5 justices decided to change the law.

> Does anyone really believe this right was in the Constitution for 250 years, only to be discovered recently? That seems to be the case to me. I'm not completely familiar with US history, but don't you think the right of black people to be free and equal to the other people was already written in the constitution 250 years ago, for example? Or women's suffrage. It just took a while to actually recognize it. Homosexu…

> don't you think the right of black people to be free and equal to the other people was already written in the constitution 250 years ago, for example?

No, of course it wasn't. Slavery was common and accepted when the Constitution was written, and the Constitution didn't say there was anything wrong with it until it was amended in 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment.

Re: Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules

#945

Post by mirimir »

honestcoyote wrote: post #717
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably don't need to be polyamorous to do this. But it's an expensive option given all the paperwork (and taxes) you'd have to file at least once a year. In the UK, you'd probably be better off incorporating as a trust - perhaps even a charitable trust, if you can find a good enough cover story. And you may think you're joking, but a lot of families set up financial trusts for their assets for exactly these rea…

I honestly wasn't joking at all. It's something I've thought of off-and-on over the years. I could see how a trust would be better, though, in the US at least, I think a corp / LLC might be more flexible. And here, especially if the corp is formed in a few rules state like Nevada or Delaware, the paperwork isn't too terrible for small organizations.

How about a mix of marriage and adoption?

Just assemble a cross-linked family. Write powers of attorney, medical directives, wills, and so on.

Re: Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules

#946

Post by pc2g4d »

lisper wrote: post #741
pc2g4d wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people who Just Don't Get It Ah, but you clearly _do_ "Get It" and should have the right to impose your understanding of the universe on the rest of the country? Who gets to decide who "gets it"? Who decides in which situations those not-getting-it-majority-states should be denied their right to self-government and forced to adopt ways they oppose?

> Who decides in which situations those not-getting-it-majority-states should be denied their right to self-government and forced to adopt ways they oppose? Ultimately, the Supreme Court, by virtue of the fact that the Union army won the civil war. If you don't like it, you can always try to get the Fourteenth Amendment repealed. Maybe the Thirteenth too while you're at it. Good luck with that.

So your preference is for fundamental changes to the institution of marriage to be propagated by the force of state power rather than through reason, persuasion, and organic change.

I'm afraid the Union Army wasn't fighting for gay rights, so I don't quite see how that applies. Nor do I see the relevance of your curious implication that because I question the appropriateness of the Supreme Court proclaiming gay marriage by fiat, I must also be interested in bringing back slavery. ("Maybe the Thirteenth too while you're at it.")

Re: Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules

#947

Post by vidarh »

talmand wrote: post #419
vidarh wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though sometimes it can be entertaining. In the UK the debate included one lord embarrassing himself by "warning" that gay marriage might lead to a lesbian queen giving birth to a future monarch through artificial insemination, as well as musing about how it could allow said lord to marry his son to escape inheritance tax [1] I'm already looking forward to reading some of the tripe that will be written about this SCO…

I'm failing to understand how a lesbian queen and a queen giving birth through artificial insemination is even related. That's just weird. Was the guy suggesting if a queen married to a man, say with sperm issues, who chose to use artificial insemination would somehow produce a child that wouldn't be considered royalty? Even despite being born of the queen? What an idiotic comparison. Although, I like the father/son…

He was just trying to come up with the most offensive sounding (to his conservative constituency) examples to shock.

The father/son marriage thing of course could not happen for the same reason we don't have father/daughter marriages today: the laws have restrictions on close relatives marrying.

Re: Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules

#950

Post by giaour »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #724
giaour wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, New Jersey allows this, and consenting, incestuous couple have moved there in droves. I would try to look up the reference but I don't want to do a search for "legal incest New Jersey" on my work computer.

Allows this? Or recognizes it as marriage? (I'm assuming that it's closer than first cousins.)

Allows this, though it seems that they did so through some kind of legislative error 15 years ago. (http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2015/01/incest_is_totally_o...)
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