<p>Yeah, sorry about taking that out on you. It's just that I really think Prop 8 could have failed if the opponents had looked as civil and mature as the supporters.</p>
<p>^LogicWarrior, don't forget that there are crazies on both sides of the fence. Must I bring up Fred Phelps?</p>
<p>
[quote]
"Government" is not a faceless, remote entity allowing or disallowing anything. Government is the will of the majority of the governed (at least in the US). Voters (people) determine what is allowed or disallowed and it need not be fair or even rational.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>way to show a clear lack of understanding of our form of government and how it is meant to work :rolleyes:</p>
<p>^Actually, it might be better to restrict the arguments in favour of Gay Marriage; the winning side in a war is often retrospectively said to have held itself to higher standards. Usually only OnTheFencers will be swayed by (nearly) perfectly rational debate; the hardened will ignore it, and point at the horrors of the more faulty Gay Marriage Crusaders like Burgess' Assailants. The sooner we establish an aggressive-passive front, the sooner our olive branches make subtle biases in the supposed neutral field.</p>
<p>(ie, we cannot bother about the outright loonies; we have to stomp out our own allies' flaws because the Glass House Fallacy has the force of Public Opinion.)</p>
<p>My first convertee in spreading the Gospel of Gay Marriage (btw, in the backward Third World) was won by love and tact as opposed to logic or debate - and it took pains to distance the liberal loonies from myself.</p>
<p>This just popped up on my Google News: Warren</a>, Cizik, Obama, left, right, pro, anti, etc. - Progressive Revival</p>
<p>Marriage is a religious sacrament. If you cannot conform to the religion, then you obviously cannot partake in a sacrament of that religion.</p>
<p>Civil unions on the other hand are an entirely different matter...</p>
<p>According to most constitutions, including all US ones, the opening line in post 65 is misleading or false. Marriage is also defined by the state for its purposes. The marriage of the State is not just a religious sacrament.</p>
<p>Even where marriage is only religious (which is nowhere, but let us just assume there was somewhere), justice is not enough. Social change includes religious change, but that is a battle for public opinion.</p>
<p>LogicWarrior,</p>
<p>Nobody is disputing that historically, gender roles have existed. What some of us are arguing for is that just because gender roles have existed for a long time doesn't mean that they're necessary or correct. I brought up the example of other historically prevalent roles such as master/slave and conqueror/war-bride, which you bizarrely claimed was endemically Western. From the wife-nappers of Mongolia to the slave-sacrificers of Meso-America, such things have existed in pretty much every society ever created.</p>
<p>So now, the REAL argument that you need to make is why we should still have gender roles. We've gotten rid of slavery and war-pimping, at least for the most part in our part of the world. Why should we still have gender roles?</p>
<p>And LogicWarrior, you are not included in this dubious bunch, but some of you "debaters" in this thread are in the wrong forum. MiddleSchoolConfidential is just a few URLs away from here.</p>
<p>"We've gotten rid of slavery and war-pimping, at least for the most part in our part of the world. Why should we still have gender roles?"</p>
<p>I think gender roles are being phased out, but I think it's biological, not sociological. Now that the physically stronger sex no longer needs to be physically stronger, men don't need to have a stronger personality than women, and the evolutionary shift has already begun.</p>
<p>And gender roles are a biological part of one's personality. Are you claiming that slavery and war-pimping are as well?</p>
<p>That's a really good point, LogicWarrior. One of the great things about the U.S. is it has the political philosophy, the economic might, and the natural resource base (see Australia for a country that could have been a world power if it wasn't so barren) to allow that evolutionary process to play itself out as we transition from physical might to intellectual might. </p>
<p>Those who fight intellecutalism and the disintegration of gender roles are being left behind. The last 8 years was their last stand for a while, much like the 1950s before the 1960s.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Marriage is a religious sacrament. If you cannot conform to the religion, then you obviously cannot partake in a sacrament of that religion.</p>
<p>Civil unions on the other hand are an entirely different matter...
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This statement isn't true at all. It derives from a miopic worldview derived from a single religion and culture. Marriage is an institution that has manifest in nearly every culture in the world - from aboriginal to Mormom. It has been defined vastly differently based on the culture - whether people marry for land, wealth, political power, love, multiple partners, or even to be with animals and hills (which has happened recently). </p>
<p>To try to force one religious subsect's interpretation of "marriage" on a global culture that has never uniformly defined it fails to understand marriage. That is why so many fight against conservative Christianity's claims. They are not the final word.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Marriage is a religious sacrament. If you cannot conform to the religion, then you obviously cannot partake in a sacrament of that religion.</p>
<p>Civil unions on the other hand are an entirely different matter...
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Marriage has both religious and civil components. In many European countries, there are two marriage ceremonies: one in the courthouse and one in the church. </p>
<p>But in any case, insofar as marriage is regulated by the government, it is strictly a civil institution, and the government cannot discriminate on religious grounds as to who can get one and who can't. </p>
<p>And as applejack mentioned, choosing a religion's conception of marriage to enforce would be arbitrary; marriage has evolved throughout the Christian tradition as it has throughout the wider world (yes, despite the constant talk about the thousands-year-old definition of "traditional marriage". They need to read their own Bibles and study a little history.) When marriage changed from the transfer of human property (a man's daughter given to another man as a wife) to the union of two legal and social equals, it opened the door to same-sex marriages, the next logical step in the evolution of the concept of marriage.</p>
<p>galestorm's first post way back on the second page = LMFAO</p>