SF Judge: "no rational purpose" for denying marriage to gay couples - Page 7  

True. But that can open up a whole new can of worms with idiots who "just know" that homosexual relationships also lead to "psychological trauma".

But what they don't see is that it's the bigotry and hatred that most gays and lesbians have to live with that is traumatic for them. Take away the bigotry and there's no trauma. That's what I meant when I said that discrimination against same sex couples causes harm to people.

When I was about 12 my mom had a gay friend who was so distraught by the way people treated him that he slashed his wrists. That was my first exposure to homosexuality and the cruelty involved with homophobia and anti-homosexual bigotry.

It was a general statement. I've replied to more than you. I specifically mentioned Tonton called me a name. You simply declared I lied.


Actually, wrong again. On the very first page of this thread it was first mentioned by Tonton. It was cited in the decision by the California judge that started this thread in the first place. You will clearly see Tonton making the equal protection claim from Loving as a claim to support homosexual marriage. All I did was show that this reasoning is false. Loving doesn't address homosexual marriage and I have said that claims that it supports it are wrong.

Loving only addresses attempts to equally punish parties who wish to marry for purposes of procreation, but who the state would desire not procreate. I've stated that this concern is not valid with homosexual marriage.

The reasoning by the judge in the first post, as cited by Tonton, was that since since the 14th amendment provides equal protection, and since Loving vs. Virginia shows that racial mixing is not a valid rationale for preventing two parties from marrying, then it is not valid to prevent the same gender from marrying.

That is a pretty large logical leap for me and it should be for you too. Miscegenation clearly related to mixing races with offspring. Anyone who has studied the history of the South and especially the reasoning of "one drop" and ancestrial bloodlines clearly understands the intent of those laws was to segregate races and insure segregated offspring as well.

The reason it was cited is because it is an instance where individual rights overrode the state interest in defining licensing terms for marriage. The court agreed that marriage is more than an individual right and that the state police power in this matter is not unlimited. However jumping from race to gender is a logical leap in this instance. The state was actively using it's police power to prevent people of different races from marrying and legally procreating. The state has not created any such laws nor are the prosecuting homosexuals for such actions.



This would be called you ignoring my point. The state has the right to legislate on matters of procreation or else incest would be legal. You can duck it but it does have the right. When the state can prove a rational basis, they can override the individual rights outlined in the 14th amendment.


The racial regulation as ruled out as a state interest. Society reserveds the right to promote relationship types that insure positive procreation. If this were not the case, incest laws would be unconstitutional. The states pressing miscegenation laws did so because they thought biracial children were bad. The courts declared this rationale invalid because biracial children aren't bad.

However in the matter of states pressing incest laws, the rationale would be that sexual relations would be highly likely to produce deformed or malformed children. This case would be seen as rational and would override the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.

So the government does have a right to legislate where procreation is concerned, regardless of what you want to believe. They have a right to act in societal interest and in the interest and rights of the children who will make up that future society. These rights can even override the 14th amendment equal protection rights and other Constitutional rights which is why I brought up the draft. Certainly nothing can deprive a man of more rights than being drafted to work for the government during a war. Yet the societal interest here overrides personal rights and even gender rights since it applies exclusively to men.

Societal interest, which some here dismiss as mob rule, is viewed by the court as a valid interest in matters of marriage licensing restrictions. Society deems it important for children to have adult guardians. That doesn't stop 12 year olds from having babies, but it does say we aren't going to endorse it and call it the standard by awarding it the title marriage.

Society has a right to define the standards it endorses and the words that represent those standards. This is true for marriage as well.

Nick

This seems to be the crux of your argument. Be against gay marriage becauase it's the right of society.

Society may think that it has the right to do whatever it wants. However, If it chooses to discriminate against people because of the way they are born... it tends to lead to violence.

If I were gay and came across someone actively trying to push me out of society and deny me rights... I'd probably have a violent reaction. Do you realize that what you are saying is so purposefully hateful that otherwise peaceful people might be enraged enough to attack you?

Seriously, you are advocating social constructs, enforced at the point of a gun, which are extremely discriminetory. You are making serious enemies! Is that your intention?

That last post came out a bit harsh so I'll try to clarify a bit.

I'm not advocating violence. Instead, I'm trying to illustate how serious of an issue this is for gay americans.

It isn't a maybe, a perhaps, or a theoretical situation. Not being afforded the legal rights accompanying marriage is something that they currently must endure.

Wouldn't you be mad if your wife was sick and you weren't allowed to make timely decisions about medical care?

Wouldn't you be mad if your wife died and you got evicted from your home and had to spend the next decade in court?

We're not talking about 'something bad' that might happen to society. Millions of gays in this country already live with 'something bad'. They are denied the same legal status and thus quality of life available to heterosexuals.

They're pissed! Really pissed.

That's signature worthy.

I'm I the only person left who feels as though homosexuality itself is wrong? Everyone here is arguing about gay marriage and I'm still stuck at gay. I feel that society is starting to believe that being gay is acceptable and to me it's not. I find it disgusting that one male would have sexual feelings for another. My other hang up with gays is with the so called "bisexuals" who run around doing guys and then turn around and have sex with girls and in doing this spreading that damned HIV virus. Then when a normal straight guy comes along and does the same girl he gets the virus. If the gays would just STAY GAY then I believe that AIDS would not be as prevalent as it is today.
But back to the gay marriage debate. I cannot understand that if the majority of society feels as though that gay marriage is wrong and should not be allowed then why we should change the laws to please the minority who feel it is right and should be allowed? Afterall majority rules.

Why should I have to be quiet about it?


I didnt mean that the blame only lies with the gay person but only that since the HIV virus seems to have originated in the homosexual community if the gays would just stay gay then it would have confined itself to the homosexual community. As far as your comment about how awesome I am, I agree with you. I kick ass! 8)


I have in fact taken a civics class, AP US Gov't to be exact. And I learned that majority rules. I also learned that our gov't is here to protect to rights of the minority from being stomped by the rights of the majority. But since the said "minority",gays, chooses to be the minority (I dont care what anyone says, you choose to be gay), that doesnt apply to them. They could easily be with the majority
and be heterosexual but they choose not to.

I know! Atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, and so on could *easily* choose Christianity. But they don't! They could join the majority but they choose not to. So we shouldn't give them any religious freedom.

Honestly now. Do you even now any gay people? Do you think anyone would *choose* a life of torment, mentally and physically? I used to be on the fence as to whether homosexuality was a choice or not, but then I met more gay people. With every one that I met, the story was always the same and it was just a nail in the coffin. I really think that my friend eric *chose* to get chastised and beaten on throughout the majority of his middle school and high school years, yea he definitely chose being referred to as less than shit, and being shunned. He definitely chose all this, sitting in his room wishing more than anything that he didn't have to be gay. Thanks to bigots like yourself, his life, and millions others is made hell, and when you say they can just choose to not be gay... it's adding insult to insult AND injury.

Sure, there might be those who CHOOSE homosexuality, I wouldn't necessarily call them homosexuals, just sexual deviants, they know that they aren't gay, but they choose to engage in gay sex. There are a lot of strange fetishes out there, doing far more perverted things. But The vast majority of gays definitely do not fall into that category.

So, Did you choose to be heterosexual? do you think you could choose to be homosexual? if you tried really hard, do you ever think that you could make yourself gay? honestly, because you are claiming it's so easy to change such things, why don't you give it a try?

Huh. So is that like, a local legend? The promiscuous bisexual who is spreading the aids amongst good heterosexual people?

Cause, you know, it's nonsense. Really dude. You may be young but thats no reason to believe really really stupid things.

The original spread of the HIV virus among non-homosexual populations arose from IV drug use, prostitutes and blood transfusions. Of course, once the virus gets a toe hold, plain old mom and dad sex spreads it. Or maybe dad and little on the side. See how that works? Disease doesn't have a moral agenda.




"Not caring what anyone says" when "anyone" includes people who are in a position to know is a good way to stay ignorant your whole life.

Protection as far as what?


Why would I want to know any gays? You said that some engage in gay sex but know they are not gay. That doesn't make sense to me because I've always thought of someone who is gay as someone who engages in gay sex and is attracted to the same sex. To me if you engage in gay sex, then you must be attracted to the same sex, which makes you gay. And I still don't buy, regardless of your story, all of the "they don't choose to be gay" bullshit. Until someone comes up with some cold, hard genetic evidence supporting this arguement it will continue to fall flat on its face. Noone wakes up one morning and all of a sudden likes other men or women for no reason. It has to be a choice.


I knew that already. What I was pointing out is that the HIV virus originally hit the homosexual community very hard, which is why is used to be known as the gay man's disease. What I was getting at as far as the bisexual commnet is that since it hit the gay community so hard, bisexual men would take the virus from gay men to heterosexual women. Heterosexual men would then take the virus from those infected women and then spread to other women. This is especially the case in the black community, which is why so many black women have AIDS.

Just as I thought, you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.

Protostar --

Your arguments are so full of holes, stereotypes, and misconceptions, that, well, there is little point in responding to the actual "content." In fact, with your "explanation" of how a bisexual can transmit the disease to straight people, it seems almost that you are talking down to everyone. This, is of course, horribly ironic for reasons obvious to most of us.

I remember when I first started grad school and was sitting in a course about third world issues that focused on analyzing a variety of published work from many different perspectives and the first day the teacher mentioned a couple issues fairly common in the field, such as imperialism, the role of IMF and WorldBank, etc. and the first thing everyone started doing was blabbering their opinions. At this point the professor said that we really had no business launching into arguments about stuff we knew relatively little as it is academically inappropriate and also makes us look bigotted and reveals all personal biases.

I don't always agree with the profs, but she had this right, and I suggest you heed the advice.

I support a good flamewar in an internet forum and part of the greatness of the medium is the quick feedback and the ability to state opinions, build on the knowledge of others and ultimately come away with something, even if you aren't an expert going in, and no one expects that. But there is no reason to be bigotted and present absurd arguments pulled out of nowhere for no apparent reason other than to be harmful.

Um..........I found these......I didn't know how many you would be needing.....

Wow. You don't have a clue about the epidemiology of HIV.

That is all.

No, he's an ignorant kid.

Why don't you save those for your friends who would like to bash in the heads of queers?

Because this thread has degenerated into a Blind Man's Zoo.

Nope it's degenerated into denial.

You really don't have a logical real reason do you?

I think dmz was agreeing with us there with the rock thing. Every time you see his name you're assuming he's on "their" side, but I think he was calling Protostar a hating bigot just like the rest of us were.

Protostar:

I respect your honesty. I also pray you get more life experience very soon. Try moving out of the South for a while.

I guess it's for DMZ to say but when a Christian starts talking about stoning it has a very specific vibe.

No real Christian advocates stoning of anyone.

Remember, in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, there are dozens of examples of punishment of people by stoning them to death.

But they somehow single out Lev. 20:13 as God's word (minus the death penalty), while silently ignoring all of the other sick and twisted parts of the Old Testament.

Cool.

I'd still like to hear from DMZ how he squares the many people who would profess to "listen to god" but hear something different than what he's hearing.

That is, rather than allow him to just sit back and be the "call me when you're willing to subsume your own desires to a higher power, pathetic materialists" guy, I want to know what a secular society that derives it's underlying morality from God, as he has characterized our society as being, does about people who profess faith and obedience to a God that tells them things that DMZ, for instance, doesn't accept as being moral.

I'm not being cute, I know such people. Are they deluded? Is it the devil tricking them?

I think DMZ has opened himself to this contradiction via what I tried to describe before: using historical citations to make a case for a particular morality while managing to convey that the real reason he knows he's right is because the God that made himself known in antiquity is the same God talking to DMZ right now.

Right. I took DMZ's rocks to say "here, why not stone poor proto-star, vengeance minded heathens".

Enough about stoning please.

Yeah-- I believe we were last discussing how homosexuals could "choose" to join the majority and have regular grandma-grandpa sex. That was last semblance of an argument for denying marriage to gay couples. Before that we learned that God says we should deny marriage to gay couples, so we should. And somewhere, among thousands and thousands of words, we learned that society can do it, so they should. Stellar stuff, guys.

Not quite....

The point is that the Bible (Old Testament) says that stoning to death is an acceptable punishment for adultery, disobedience, and many other things.

So obviously, the Bible can be wrong.

dmz, do you honestly believe that stoning people to death for adultery is okay?

Then you, too, agree that the Bible can be wrong.

Guys!!

It wasn't about stoning, it was about a rock fight.

A blind man's zoo is where you attempt to discuss issues with people whose ultimate response is "Don't pin me me down on context or my presuppostions because I don't need any".


oooooooookaaaaay.....but at this rate we couldn't agree on how to make Kool-Aid.


It's pointless.

Oh, I think Nick's proven his proficiency at that.

So...rational arguments....*chirp....chirp*.....