Beards and Gay Marriage

[frobert]

This is circular, frobert.

Polygamy is nowhere legal in the US, therefore, in the US it isn’t legal.

:whacky:

You need to answer the question: why do you deny polygamists the right to a legal marriage while protecting the homosexual’s right to a legal marriage?

Sorry for the sloppy sentence construction. I promise to be more careful in the future. Thanks.

It was not my intent to give you the impression that I was denying some a right and giving rights to others. I apologize for anything in my post that implies in any way that I claim that kind of authority or power. Allow me to correct my mistake, my intent was to convey a lay opinion.

Peace.

 

[frobert]

How is a man having sex with an animal harming the animal?

Using that logic,can I say that a man having sex with another man is harming that man?

I am not a vet so I do not know for sure if the the animal is being harmed or not but do know it is illegal. Please share whatever knowledge of such matters.

Peace

 

[PRmerger]

Sorry for the sloppy sentence construction. I promise to be more careful in the future. Thanks.

It was not my intent to give you the impression that I was denying some a right and giving rights to others. I apologize for anything in my post that implies in any way that I claim that kind of authority or power. Allow me to correct my mistake, my intent was to convey a lay opinion.

Peace.

There is no need to apologize.

But please explain your position.

Right now all you’re saying is: Polygamy is illegal in the US, therefore it is illegal in the US.

Please state your case as for why polygamy should be illegal. Who is harmed by it?

And, also, why bestiality should be illegal. Who is harmed by it?

 

[PRmerger]

I am not a vet so I do not know for sure if the the animal is being harmed or not but do know it is illegal. Please share whatever knowledge of such matters.

Peace

Please explain why you think it should be illegal.

And why you don’t believe eating meat should be illegal (of course, presuming that you are a carnivore).

 

[Prodigal_Son]

I think you are confusing civil law with Christian morality. You adhere to a morality wherein certain types of marriage are repugnant to you.

Not so. I don’t find gay marriage repugnant at all. I’d love to be married to another man. I just think it’s wrong, and that it wouldn’t be good for me. You seem to be confusing morality with personal preference.

Is your objection to incest, or pedophilia, based merely on their being repugnant to you? Do you think this is a solid basis for moral objections?

Whereas the states’ obligation is to make and interpret laws that interfere as little as possible with private lives while protecting the states interests.

That’s John Rawls’ theory, and it is not obviously true. Personally, I think a central goal of the law is to make people good people, and to make children as psychologically healthy as possible.

I am not a lawyer, what follow is a lay opinion. The state has a vested interest in families so will likely not consider familiar incest relationships a right that needs protection and will maintain its legal prohibitions against such relationships. In the case of bestiality, the state has laws protecting animals that they will uphold.

Your argument assumes that bestiality always harms animals. What possible non-religious justification could you have for such a view?

In the case of polygamy there is nowhere in the US that it is legal. My guess is that the state does not and will not recognize it as a right because there are no rights being denied to would be polygamists that others are enjoying. In other words there it is fairness or discrimination issue and the mere desire to have more than one spouse does not make it a right. In the case of SS marriage the states consistently found that whole classes of people are/were being denied a right enjoyed by others. The winning issues are based on fairness.

I agree that the courts have found this. Whether their rulings are morally correct is an open question. I do think that, given the current state of heterosexual marriage, the courts may be ruling in a way at least consistent with previous rulings. Hence Scalia’s claims that gay marriage was the logical conclusion of the Lawrence ruling.

“How can you say what apple is bad?” The answer lies in your own powers of reason and morality. Civil laws will of course put limitations on what we perceive to be our rights in that when an individual or group think they have a right that is illegal they are will be legally refrained from acting on it.

This is question begging. You haven’t said what makes it not a right.

For example, suppose you give a reason (and there are many!) that it’s wrong for an adult to have sex with a child. This reason is NOT a reason that adult/child marriage is wrong, nor a reason that this is a “bad marriage”. After all, if you don’t define “marriage” as including sex, there is no reason to believe an adult married to a child is having sex with the child. If you have NO particular understanding of what marriage is, then you can have no rational norms about marriage.

So then, what is your definition of marriage?

 

[frobert]

There is no need to apologize.

But please explain your position.

Right now all you’re saying is: Polygamy is illegal in the US, therefore it is illegal in the US.

Please state your case as for why polygamy should be illegal. Who is harmed by it?

And, also, why bestiality should be illegal. Who is harmed by it?

You are asking the wrong person. All I can give you are my personal opinions.

If you ask nicely I will share with you but somehow I get the idea that you are simply looking for areas to criticize me personally, so please excuse me when I refuse to play your game and not respond further. Think of me and my opinions in whatever way makes you feel better.

Peace.

 

[PRmerger]

You are asking the wrong person. All I can give you are my personal opinions.

That’s what this forum is for.

Now, we’d like you to offer some apologia, or defense, for your personal opinions.

For example, if you say, “It is my personal opinion that children should not get immunized” we would say, "Why do you believe this?

And then you could say, “Well, because science shows that immunizations cause your hair to fall out!”

And then we would say, “Can you please provide the studies that show this?”

Then you could say, “Well, it’s just what I’ve heard. I haven’t actually seen the studies.”

And then we would say, “Then, perhaps you should re-evaluate your opinion. It seems to be based on a lie.”

Similarly, when you offer your opinions here about gay marriage, we are going to ask you to support your opinions.

If you ask nicely I will share with you but somehow I get the idea that you are simply looking for areas to criticize me personally, so please excuse me when I refuse to play your game and not respond further. Think of me and my opinions in whatever way makes you feel better.

Peace.

No one is criticizing you.

We are asking for you to offer reasons for your beliefs.

That’s what you are commanded to do in the Bible, frobert.

 

[frobert]

Not so. I don’t find gay marriage repugnant at all. I’d love to be married to another man. I just think it’s wrong, and that it wouldn’t be good for me. You seem to be confusing morality with personal preference.

Is your objection to incest, or pedophilia, based merely on their being repugnant to you? Do you think this is a solid basis for moral objections?

That is a valid distinction that I hadn’t thought about. I apologize for jumping to such an erroneous conclusion.

My objection to incest is it is more apt than not to do damage at least to one of the parties. This I know from studies and personal experience as a psychotherapist treating both victims and perpetrators of incest.

Pedophilia is personally repugnant but my objection again is based on knowledge and experience as a psychotherapist of the damage it does.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

That is a valid distinction that I hadn’t thought about. I apologize for jumping to such an erroneous conclusion.

My objection to incest is it is more apt than not to do damage at least to one of the parties. This I know from studies and personal experience as a psychotherapist treating both victims and perpetrators of incest.

Pedophilia is personally repugnant but my objection again is based on knowledge and experience as a psychotherapist of the damage it does.

See, then I hope you see where I’m coming from. I don’t think homosexual activity is good for people. I have nothing against gay people – heck, I probably enjoy being around gay people more than straight people. But I don’t think sodomy is good for gay people or straight people, and I think calling gay unions “marriages” would do more harm than good.

 

[frobert]

See, then I hope you see where I’m coming from. I don’t think homosexuality activity is good for people. I have nothing against gay people – heck, I probably enjoy being around gay people more than straight people. But I don’t think sodomy is good for gay people or straight people, and I think calling gay unions “marriages” would do more harm than good.

Thank you for sharing. I truly respect where you are coming from along with your reasoning and beliefs which I admire. There is much to celebrate in the areas where we do agree.

Peace

 

[DrTaffy]

I call it protecting the common good.

Calling it something does not make it so. If you can demonstrate how denying an entire subsection of society the right to marry anyone they might find attractive is ‘protecting the common good’, despite no evidence that such marriage harms anyone, and evidence that such marriages reduce mortality in the couples involved and if anything raise healthier children than heterosexual marriages, now would be a good time to do so.

Why should I give support to homosexual marriages?

Why should they support you? Why should muslims support the tax breaks given to Catholic schools and churches?

That is what society does. Homosexuals pay their taxes, so they have as much right as you to public services such as the emergency forces, public libraries, public schools for their children, public roads, and so on. Why should they not have the same legal rights and responsibilities offered to heterosexual couples when they settle down together and form a new family unit?

Why should I be that interested?

If you are not even interested, you can hardly be surprised that you never heard of them. Nor does your deliberate ignorance justify discrimination towards homosexuals.

I guess that is one of the reason why God sent his Son when he did.

Non sequitur. Given that most of those references date well after Jesus’ reported death, what does this have to do with them? Especially as when he came he is not reported as having said one word about homosexuality.

Not

One

Word!

 

[PRmerger]

Especially as when he came he is not reported as having said one word about homosexuality.

Not

One

Word!

It seems that you have, again (!), forgotten that you are on a Catholic forum, in dialogue with knowledgeable Catholics.

Perhaps if you were on an Evangelical Christian forum your point would be met with a .

But let me remind you that the Catholic Church does not believe that everything Jesus said was recorded in the pages of a book, no matter how holy.

It is the Church, the Body of Christ, which speaks about homosexuality, based on natural law, reason, and revelation.

When you are in dialogue on a Catholic forum, it is better to be familiar with our teachings, so as to not appear to be making uninformed arguments.

 

[DrTaffy]

When I say “marriage exists in nature” – or rather “there is a certain thing that has regularly been called ‘marriage’ that exists in nature” – I am not making a historical or biological claim. I am not talking about “nature” in the sense of “natural history”.

So you don’t mean ‘in nature’ in the way that any english speaker would understand it.

Perhaps it would help if you stated what you do mean as opposed to what you do not?

OK, so think about the concept of “blueness”. If I were to say that “blueness exists in nature”, I would be saying that there is a certain way things can be which is “blue”, and that all blue things have this property of blueness in common. It is plausible, at least, that blueness would continue to exist as a “way things could be” even if all blue things suddenly stopped existing.

There are several different things that you could mean by ‘blueness’ - e.g. the wavelength, the frequency or the energy of photons reflected or emitted by something. Or the physicochemical properties of something that make this so. Or indeed the internal representation inside your head of how you perceive ‘blueness’. ‘Qualia’, in other words.

For example, if the villainous DrTaffy kidnaps you and rewires your optic nerve or visual cortex so that you perceive your (previously blue) dressing gown as ‘red’ and your (previously red) spiderman underwear as ‘blue’, which now has ‘blueness’?

More to the point, what has this to do with the topic of this thread?

The most obvious link is the internal represantation. To that extent, sure there is a thing that we all recognise as the thing currently referred to as ‘marriage’, and would probably recognise as such even in a remote amazonian tribe without bridesmaids or penguin suits or wedding cakes.

But the problem here is that this is exactly where ‘civil unions’ fell down - everyone immediately recognised these as gay ‘marriages’. QED?

I think marriage is something like that. There is a certain real relation in nature, whether or not any beings ever participate in that relation: this is the relation we might call “marriage”.

Great - what is it, and why do you argue that it excludes gay couples? Again, please say clearly what you do mean rather than quibbling about what you do not.

So when you say that certain cultures have had gay marriages, that is completely irrelevant to the claim I am making.

How can that possible be irrelevant? Especially to my question about how Catholics justify trying to narrow the definition of ‘marriage’?

Would you agree to the premise that morality exists objectively, independent of human opinions?

Not without a long discussion about what you mean by that, especially as you have claimed that no argument or premise can be objective. Nor do I see how this is relevant to the topic of this thread.

 

[DrTaffy]

If your wife were to tell you that she wants to marry anyone else, you will have to tell her, “My dear, I must deny you that right, since you are already married to me.”

In doing so, are you forcing her to live a life of celibacy?

I am insulted at the claim that marriage to me implies celibacy. Are you calling me a eunuch?

 

[PRmerger]

I am insulted at the claim that marriage to me implies celibacy. Are you calling me a eunuch?

You need not be insulted, DrTaffy, because you are not following the argument.

When you deny your wife the right to marry someone she is attracted to, you are NOT resigning her to a life of celibacy.

That’s our position. Denying someone the right to marry anyone she is attracted to does NOT resign her to a life of celibacy.

To wit: you deny your wife the right to marry Hugh Jackman.
But she is not, therefore, doomed to be celibate all her life.

We deny homosexuals the right to marry Hugh Jackman.
But they are not, therefore, doomed to be celibate all their life.

See how the argument evolved?

 

[Stephen168]

And one has to wonder why there is so much reluctance to answering the question: what is marriage?
by the homosexual marriage apologists.

I would start my answer with an analogy. During the time of Jim Crow we had laws where only whites could sit at the deli counter, which gave whites some social dignity. To solve this inequity, if one minority group was able to gather support and pass a law declaring black to be white therefore blacks can now sit at the deli counter. We could all smugly declare “deli equality.” This approach makes sense if your goal is social dignity as well as equality.

Of course this approach has it problems. First is that white and black have lost their legal meaning and perhaps their meaning altogether. Second is that we have done nothing for the other non-whites who would also like to be treated equal at the deli, because the legal fiction did nothing for all, just some. We must now create legal fictions for each group.

So to answer your question, if you want to make white and black the same you can’t define white; and it is impossible to have a definition which would include black and white.

They want what they want and they want it now. They don’t seem to care about other’s dignity or equality, who my share their circumstances, but this would require a thoughtful examination of the law. Something to tedious for someone throwing a tantrum.

 

[PRmerger]

I would start my answer with an analogy. During the time of Jim Crow we had laws where only whites could sit at the deli counter, which gave whites some social dignity. To solve this inequity, if one minority group was able to gather support and pass a law declaring black to be white therefore blacks can now sit at the deli counter. We could all smugly declare “deli equality.” This approach makes sense if your goal is social dignity as well as equality.

Of course this approach has it problems. First is that white and black have lost their legal meaning and perhaps their meaning altogether. Second is that we have done nothing for the other non-whites who would also like to be treated equal at the deli, because the legal fiction did nothing for all, just some. We must now create legal fictions for each group.

So to answer your question, if you want to make white and black the same you can’t define white; and it is impossible to have a definition which would include black and white.

They want what they want and they want it now. They don’t seem to care about other’s dignity or equality, who my share their circumstances, but this would require a thoughtful examination of the law. Something to tedious for someone throwing a tantrum.

:clapping::bowdown2::bowdown:

 

[PRmerger]

I would start my answer with an analogy. During the time of Jim Crow we had laws where only whites could sit at the deli counter, which gave whites some social dignity. To solve this inequity, if one minority group was able to gather support and pass a law declaring black to be white therefore blacks can now sit at the deli counter. We could all smugly declare “deli equality.” This approach makes sense if your goal is social dignity as well as equality.

Of course this approach has it problems.

And the main problem is that it is not grounded in truth. If we say, “Black is now white!” it is, unfortunately, as false as if we say, “A circle is now a square!”

Now, please note we are talking in hypotheticals here. No one is presenting an opinion about whether race is a genetic absolute or merely a social construct. The point is the bigger picture: if we just re-define something, without any basis in truth (i.e. let’s just say that black people are white!), then our foundation is based on a lie. And our foundation will crumb.e

 

[ThinkingSapien]

So many questions, so little time. Let’s see how much I can address in the limited time I have at the moment.

If you don’t have a single definition for marriage,

I don’t have an omnicultural omnitemporal definition that would be any more specific than what I’ve already said. It would be nice if there were an anthropologist in this discussion. But in turning to anthropology here is some of what I find.
"Linda S. Stone:

…]But what anthropologists have learned is that from a global, cross-cultural perspective, “marriage” is in the first place extremely difficult, some would say impossible, to define. One anthropologist, Edmund Leach tried to define marriage in his 1955 article “Polyandry, Inheritance and the Definition of Marriage” published in MAN. Leach quickly gave up this task, concluding that no definition could cover all the varied institutions that anthropologists regularly consider as marriage. Rejecting Leach’s conclusion, Kathleen Gough attempted to define marriage cross-culturally in 1959 as an institution conferring full “birth status rights” to children (The Nayars and the Definition of Marriage. Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 89:23-34). Gough’s definition of marriage was convoluted—notable, in her own words, for its “inevitably clumsy phraseology”—since it covered monogamy, polygyny, polyandry and same-sex marriage. But most important, its core feature—conferring of birth status rights on children—does not hold up cross-culturally…]

I found more but I’m keeping this short, so I’ve only shared a section of one article.

then how can you claim that child-adult marriages are wrong?

Here I think you might be confusing me with another forum member. Thus far I’ve not discussed the morality of child-adult marriages. Please skim back at past messages to ensure your comment is directed at the person that may have made the statement.

If you don’t make any claim to know what an apple is, how can you reasonably say that some particular apple is a “bad apple”?

Without getting into the technical reasons on why I think this analogy isn’t fitting, my position isn’t that I don’t know what marriage is, but that the criteria/description/definition is not the same across cultures, states, and time.

Are you “married?”

Not yet! So I must modify your question some so that I can continue to respond.

If so, is your understanding of what -]your/-] marriage IS dependent on “what constitutes a civil marriage in various states in the USA?”

What one personally refers to as their marriage may or may not be dependent on the civil definition of marriage. I’ve personally encountered people and know of groups in the USA that don’t bother with civil marriages as defined in their state in favor of engaging in what they call marriage on their own terms. There are also people that won’t considered themselves married unless there is a public record and public acknowledgement of it that is backed by the state.

If so, I instinctively feel some sympathy for your [potential] spouse.

I think you may be mistaking a generic description as an expression of how I would see my own marriage. If I had been asked what constitutes a motored vehicle that I could legally operate on local road I would give a generic description in an attempt to capture the variations in vehicles could be legally operated. But that description isn’t sufficiently indicative of what I look for when shopping for a car. I was asked (without any parameters at all ) what is marriage. Thus far I’ve kept my reply generic because there have been no constraints imposed on the question except for those that PRmerger has provided. II plan to respond to the constrains that she listed in what I hope to be a short period of time but by tonight at latest.

 

[frobert]

I would start my answer with an analogy. During the time of Jim Crow we had laws where only whites could sit at the deli counter, which gave whites some social dignity. To solve this inequity, if one minority group was able to gather support and pass a law declaring black to be white therefore blacks can now sit at the deli counter. We could all smugly declare “deli equality.” This approach makes sense if your goal is social dignity as well as equality.

Of course this approach has it problems. First is that white and black have lost their legal meaning and perhaps their meaning altogether. Second is that we have done nothing for the other non-whites who would also like to be treated equal at the deli, because the legal fiction did nothing for all, just some. We must now create legal fictions for each group.

So to answer your question, if you want to make white and black the same you can’t define white; and it is impossible to have a definition which would include black and white.

They want what they want and they want it now. They don’t seem to care about other’s dignity or equality, who my share their circumstances, but this would require a thoughtful examination of the law. Something to tedious for someone throwing a tantrum.

I must be missing something in how your analogy pertains to a state marriage law.

Use NYS as an example, two years ago the state of NY defined marriage in 36 words composing of 213 characters as follows:

The legal union of a couple as spouses. The basic elements of a marriage are: (1) the parties’ legal ability to marry each other, (2) mutual consent of the parties, and (3) a marriage contract as required by law.

I.e, what minorities do you believe were left out? Whose equality is being passed over? Does it diminish your choice and right to be married by a Catholic priest in a Catholic Church if you so choose? How does such a law personally effect you?