You know why? Because the governor of Maine just signed a bill into law that legalizes same-sex marriage.
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whoo!
I hope this is really the beginning of an unstoppable avalanche. I'll believe it when all those laws stick for a few years and there won't be any dramatic reversals/democratic losses over "values".
but it's a more and more encouraging picture, that's for sure. I'm certain my current state will be as always one of the last to follow suit... after all, they just recently bothered to get rid of the law criminalizing cohabitation :-p
Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, and now Maine. Plus New Hampshire already has civil unions, and has a marriage equality bill pending. New England rocks!
[Looks expectantly at Rhode Island...]
I never thought I'd live to see the day when not just one but several states recognized marriage equality, and I'm thankful that I HAVE lived to see it. I think the momentum is now unstoppable. I knew time was not on the side of the bigots, but I would never have dared hope that once the wall of bigotry was breached it would begin to crumble at such a high speed.
It's still subject to a general vote if opponents can get enough signatures, so maybe we shouldn't celebrate yet.
Marriage equality is sweeping the nation! Give it up for Maine!
Well if an asteroid falls from the heavens and causes massive destruction and casualties to Maine, the people of Maine should not look to our great merciful god. They have rejected him and embraced the evil that is called tolerance and equality.
I notice that the only people opposing this do so for religious reasons. How transparently feeble can an argument be? There is no valid reason, none, why same-sex couples should be denied the same married rights I and my wife enjoy. All the opponents of this can do is the equivalent of holding a flashlight below their faces and tell spooky stories about the angry deity in the sky. I hope this is the start of an unstoppable movement for two reasons: its the right thing to do and it'll piss off fundies. Who could ask for anything more?
Would it be too simplistic for me to just grin and be happy for a few minutes? Perhaps, but...
YAY!!!!! :D
When I saw the news I cheered (quite loudly and got weird looks from my dogs). I'm so proud to live in Maine right now. Makes the cold nasty winters worth it.
Still might go up as a referendum vote and honestly I think it will but I also think it's likely the referendum will go in favor of gay marriage.
*Kicks a rock* Stupid Bible Belt. Why can't the fundies move out of the Dark Ages so that Texas can be one of the cool states? I wanna live in a cool state!
As a Rhode Islander who is absolutely in favor of marriage equality in the state (and who harasses his state legislators about it on a regular basis), I have to warn you not to look too expectantly in our direction. Unfortunately the Catholic church has a stranglehold on RI politics. Why do you think we still have Sunday sales laws?
But three cheers for Maine! Maybe now with the rest of New England breathing down their necks, those numbnuts on Smith Hill will get the message.
I should also note that in Maine the bill was supported by a number of religious leaders. That support should make things interesting if it goes to referendum to see religion on both sides of the issue not just opposed. Should also help diffuse some of the religious objections (as well as specific language saying churches don't have to perform same sex marriage unless they choose to).
What started with judicial tactics is now moving to the will of the people through their elected representatives. It's clear that once the obvious equal rights issues with marriage were brought before the people, the attitudes toward same sex marriage would change. Good for you, Maine. The opponents of equal rights always lose the battle in the end.
Anyone wanna make bets on where Yahweh is gonna "smite" in retribution for this?
I've got five-to-one on Toledo.
Damned activist legislators and governors!
Go Maine! A victory for common decency and fairness.
As a Toledoan, I really REALLY hope you're wrong Benjamin.
Instead, might I suggest all of Arkansas? It's a bigger target.
Jeremy:
Eh, you're right. Yahweh never smites the places where the sin actually occurs, and you've got the likes of Jamie Farr there...
Jeremy:
So, what's it really like on Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio?
Don't cheer the wave yet. Most states have constitutional amendments banning anything like same-sex marriage. Those can't be so easily legislated away. Nor do most state supreme courts have the wherewithal to nullify them.
I suspect that we'll be fighting this fight for decades to come.
woot woot!!
Wonder if this will change Stephen King novels... probably not.
@11
I love RI, but you're absolutely right. I find it sad that we're behind the curve of marriage equality, since we were founded by a guy trying to ditch these types of kooks. Perhaps I'm over glorifying it? I was taught in school to believe that the Puritans were seeking freedom of religion, so it might be that I'm confusing what Roger Williams actually did with the fabrications I've been fed.
But kudos to Maine and every other state to come to their senses!
Like I said when Iowa legalised same sex marriage, this is probably a same sex marriage domino effect.
So the progressive states ("progressive" is American for "not totally backward") are falling like dominos.
Any bets on how long it'll take to get Texas/Oklahoma/etc. to cave? I'm guessing over a decade, three max.
Good for New England. I may move back there yet if they continue to lead the nation like this.
Jadehawk @1,
I hope this is really the beginning of an unstoppable avalanche
From your lips to G... emm, I mean, I hope you are right.
But OTOH perhaps it will be like the abolition of slavery. The more civilised of the American states got rid of that peculiar institution early (before they were even states, IIRC). That eventually did start an avalanche, but of a different sort. The states whose powerful people liked holding fellow humans as chattels turned traitor to protect their "property rights", and the civilised states were forced to use extraparliamentary means to show them the error of their ways.
I think it's not terribly likely to come to that. At least, not on anything like the same scale; I'd hardly be surprised to see Christian warriors in the mould of Timothy McVeigh mount terror campaigns (though when they do, it will take the state a lot less time to eradicate them than it took to crush the confederate insurrection). But nor do I expect the spiritual heirs of the confederate traitors (by no means are all of them southerners, and by no means do all southerners number among them) to enact marriage equality any time soon.
That is, we might well see a whole raft of states do the right thing over the next, say, 5 years or so, but then a wall will be hit. (And the contours of that wall will probably look a lot like the border between "The United States of Canada" and "Jesusland" on that joke map that made the rounds a few years ago.) From that point on, eliminating marriage discrimination entirely in the USA is likely to morph into a much longer-term project. Either the mouth-breathing-bigot component of the holdout states' electorates will need to decline substantially, or else the social change will need to have been long- and firmly-enough established that the US Supreme Court will follow its lead. And that, I think, will be the work of at least a full generation. Remember, Rome wasn't destroyed in a day.
James Dobson does not agree: http://atheistbiblegroup.blogspot.com/2009/05/shit-dobson-is-back.html
If Dobson is upset then we're doing something right.
I just can't believe we're letting these fool New England states beat us! But I'm starting to fear that Washington won't even be among the first half of states to recognize gay marriage. It's such an embarrassment.
But Maine... Now you won't get Joe the Plumber visiting...
Two thumbs up for the state of Maine. May other states see the foolishness of their ways and move to treat all their citizens equally.
*Raises a toast to the people who worked hard to achieve this*
To a job well done! SALUTE!
Orson Scott Card opines:
"I will act to destroy that government and bring it down"
The progress feels awfully slow sometimes, but when I think back to what it was like only a little over a decade ago when even Sen. Wellstone voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, I realize that bigots really are facing a quickly rising tide.
Samnell:
Most? By my quick count of this listing, it's only 17 states — almost exactly one-third — that have constitutional amendments or "constitutional laws" (whatever that means) against same-sex marriage (and one of those is CA's Prop 8, which I don't expect to survive the current court challenge). Many more have statutory provisions (DOMAs), but those are easier to change.
Maybe they can't be legislated away, but most of those amendments are recent (i.e., they're not buttressed by decades of tradition and case law), and in many cases they exist in the first place because it's relatively easy to amend those states' constitutions (e.g., through initiative or referendum). Whatever can be done can be undone, and the political winds are shifting on this issue. Marriage equality (and LGBTQetc... rights generally) is, I think, a distinctly generational issue; every year, another wave of former 17 year olds become new voters, and it doesn't seem to me that those young people are particularly eager to participate in oppressing their fellow humans.
AFAIK, state constitutions are still subject to the federal constitution. I don't think many (any?) of these amendments have been challenged in federal courts, but I wouldn't be surprised if they faced rough sledding there... esp. after we've had a couple terms of Democratic appointments to the federal judiciary. As more and more states do extend marriage rights to all, it will be increasingly difficult to argue that denying said rights is consistent with equal protection1.
There's also a purely pecuniary consideration: Once same-sex marriage becomes broadly accepted by the public, states that ban it will start to lose residents and business (and thus tax revenue) to states that embrace it... and then we'll see how committed those states are to "traditional morals." I don't mean to sound cynical, but....
1 I'm no lawyer or constitutional scholar, so I might be talking out of my sphincter here; it just seems that a commonsense notion of "equal protection" would make this point.
That picture of Judith Chamberlin is so sweet. This is awesome news. :)
Bill Dauphin, here's one for you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDqr4FmozjQ
Have to say I'm proud to be a "Mainiac" (albeit in Exile).
My favorite (read: the saddest, most pathetic) story in the Maine equality saga is (or perhaps, was) the stance of representative Sherly Briggs. Her daughter is gay, but Briggs, a Democrat, felt she had no choice but to vote against the bill, and "to finally confess to her exactly how I feel and now I have no choice."
She loves her daughter, of course: "I would never hurt her. I would go to the end of the earth for her. But because I feel so strongly opposed to this bill, blame it on my upbringing or the good book. I can't change how I feel...."
http://www.queerty.com/shock-rep-sherly-briggs-has-gay-daughter-will-no…
Go, Maine!
Go home, Rep. Briggs! Ask your daughter's forgiveness, and hope she is a better person than you are!
Timothy @ #29: Are you aware that Gov. Gregoire just signed a bill that gives same-sex couples all the same rights under Washington state law as married couples? The only remaining difference is the word "marriage", and pundits predict that will come in a year or two.
I live in Maine. Buildings are crumbling outside.
It's all over, folks. The gays have destroyed society.
Congratulations Maine! I am convinced that it is going to be a long, tough, fight before belief in basic human rights and justice wins the war. However, we can certainly still celebrate the victories achieved in several significant and important battles. And, of course, some yet to be won. Down with H8 in CA!
@ Bill -
Saturday night in Toledo isn't as bad as the song says. :) I actually used to hang out in the restaurant that the song was written in. It was a dive near the train station, on the ground floor of one of those hotels where the homeless could stay for cheap, and therefore we were subject to some very colorful people. Oh, and 25 cent pinball all night - Funhouse and Terminator for the win, baby.
@ Benjamin - Jamie Farr... and... Katie Holmes. People actually ask me if I know either of them when I'm out of town.
Today, I am a honorary Mainiac.
Mrs Tilton:
Fantastic. The best euphemism of the year is definitely "extraparliamentary means".
Noadi(#12) says: "...Should also help diffuse some of the religious objections (as well as specific language saying churches don't have to perform same sex marriage unless they choose to)"
I know I'm picking a fight just for the heck of it, but I hope churches do refuse to perform same sex marriages. If they do, it might help spotlight one of the most glaring violations of church/state separation still around today. While so many have been arguing about whether gays should be allowed to be "married" or be contented with "civil unions", I've been arguing that the State should stop recognizing [i]all[/i] religious marriages, and only recognize civil unions for everyone, regardless of the gender of the people involved. By what right does anything that happens in a church/mosque/synagogue/whatever have any relevance at all on my legal status in the eyes of the law? A couple's tax filing or property rights shouldn't change because some guy in a dress mumbled some words in Latin over them (can you tell that it's the Catholic god I don't believe in?). That's like saying that I gain rights of citizenship by getting baptized. The whole contention over gay marriage was caused by this conflation of religion and civil law. If religious institutions want to continue to be licensed by the state to affect the legal standing of its citizens, then the church will have to perform these functions according to civil principles rather than religious ones. If the churches find this distasteful, then maybe they'll realize how important it is to "render onto Caesar that which belongs to him". When my cousins in Canada get married, they stop by the Justice of the Peace first to get married in the eyes of the law, then proceed to the Church for the pageantry, rituals, and customs that are purely personal in nature and have no legal bearing whatsoever. Shouldn't we be doing the same thing in the US?
Why is it so imperative that every single state in the nation become pro-same-sex marriage? It seems to me that those of us in regions of the country that don't share the same moral perspective as the pro-gay crowd shouldn't be forced to conform... why should the distant minority (in a given state) be able to impose their views on the majority?
Benjamin @14: Have you driven through Toledo lately? Cause it already comes pre-smitten.
I think the most pursuasive legal argument is that same-sex marriage is discrimination based on gender. It has nothing to do with sexual orientation. When courts are involved, they should be ruling on this principle: discrimination on the basis of sex is illegal in most instances.
So, that said, it's clear that legal arguments should be taking the cake in this whole issue. When we come to the issue of religions being allowed to deny performing ceremonies for same-sex couples, it's complete logical bullshit, but it should be legal. The First Amendement protects freedom of religion. I believe this falls under that.
No, religion doesn't deserve such respect. Logically, if we're going to allow religious figures to legally marry two people, they should have to follow the law like everyone else. Unfortunately, they are protected by the First Amendment.
Legally that language was totally unnecessary because the law as it stands is that churches can refuse to perform marriages for any reason at all. It was only put in there to quell the sort of propaganda you saw with Prop 8 that implied churches would be forced to marry gays. Now I'm with you that civil marriage and religious marriage are totally separate things and the law should see it that way. Actually a few years back an episcopal priest in Maine proposed exactly that but the bill went nowhere (I took note because I was surprised it was a priest advocating it).
Hooray for Maine. Sanity and tolerance is found in another state.
why should the distant minority (in a given state) be able to impose their views on the majority?
Yes, because as you know, that whole 'equality' thing totally got pushed down the throats of Americans that were totally against it by a bunch of whining activist New England liberals in the 1700's ...
oh, wait.
/sarcasm
Go crawl back in your hole, bigot.
That is the problem, are you afraid that someone will force you into a GLBT marriage if it is legal in your state?
Why deny people a right? Please explain.
Bill Dauphin,
Here's another map:
http://thetaskforce.org/downloads/reports/issue_maps/GayMarriage_05_09…
Twenty-nine states have constitutional amendments banning the recognitions of marriages between members of the same-sex. A number of these also bar the creation of relationships like Civil Unions.
Really? @ 46
"Why is it so imperative that every single state in the nation become pro-same-sex racially mixed marriage? It seems to me that those of us in regions of the country that don't share the same moral perspective as the pro-gay pro-civil-rights-for-blacks crowd shouldn't be forced to conform uphold our constitutional obligation to treat people equally, even if we think that's icky... why should the distant minority (in a given state) be able to impose their views on the majority?"
There. Fixed it for ya.
Don't forget the District of Columbia. The city council (DC's legislature) has passed a measure by a 12-1 vote (Delusional Marion "I'm a moral compass" Barry was the sole holdout) to recognize all (gay and straight) marriages performed in other states and Mayor Fenty (DC's current non-whoring, non-crack smoking executive) has said he will sign it. The only obstacle remaining is Congress: by DC's home rule charter, all legislation undergoes a mandatory 30-day review during which it can be overridden by congress.
Please write your Congressional representatives and encourage them to fight the effort to overturn this! Sidenote: of course, the effort to overturn is being led by non-other than Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz from (whereelse?) Utah who just happens to be (wait for it...)a MORmON!
It seems to me that those of us in regions of the country that don't share the same moral perspective as the pro-gay crowd shouldn't be forced to conform.
That's right, we're all coming to your house to force YOU, personally, to marry a same sex partner.
*rolleyes*
you morons just don't get it. Nobody is forcing YOU to do anything, instead it's been your idiotic sense of "morality" that has been forcing those who love each other but are of the same sex to not have the same rights as you.
It's more of the moral majority claiming persecution crap again.
just stop it already, and get a fucking clue.
Delusional Marion "I'm a moral compass" Barry was the sole holdout
wait...
Marion Barry, the crack addict?
He must have bought his "moral compass" from Ted Haggard!
I admit, I did gain a modicum of understanding of these "it cheapens my marriage!" buffoons when a friend of mine for whom I, ahem, don't have much academic respect, got her master's degree in Education after doing a master's project, i.e. no thesis. I felt it cheapened my master's degree, for which I actually had to come up with an original thesis and defend it.
So I suppose I can understand how someone who sees gay marriage as fundamentally inferior to straight marriage might conceivably feel like it cheapens their marriage... I guess... but of course, I guess all I'm really saying is, "If you are a bigot, I understand how you could come to a bigoted conclusion." heh...
But Maine... Now you won't get Joe the Plumber visiting...
Quick! Everybody legalize same-sex marriage! We'll have him repelled below the Mason-Dixon! Wonder if his alleged gay friends will visit him?
This blog was down for awhile today, at least it was broken from Houston.
It just so happens that it is NATIONAL walk around and mumble to yourself like a crazy person DAY.
Coincidence???
James, I understands what you're saying, but wouldn't it make a lot more sense for them to rally against Las Vegas weddings, weddings for money/green cards/health insurance etc more? because out here in the real world, those are the things that might conceivably be seen as "cheapening" marriage. Most my acquaintances, and myself, have been married at least once for exactly those reasons, and it kinda does render the whole concept ridiculous, doesn't it?
I felt it cheapened my master's degree, for which I actually had to come up with an original thesis and defend it.
why?
you have a thesis to point to, published for all to see.
it speaks for itself.
Is this a Christian admitting moral relativism?
New Hampshire leg just passed. It's onto the Governor in the Granite State. It could soon be six.
If you're in NH, contact the Governor!!!!!!!!!!!
@#52:
"Why deny people a right? Please explain."
I obviously don't suggest denying people their rights. The problem comes in defining what is a right and what isn't. Just declaring that something "is my right" doesn't make it so. EG: the right to take things that I really really want. The right to prostitute my body if I so desire. The right to yell fire in a theatre.
the right to take things that I really really want. The right to prostitute my body if I so desire. The right to yell fire in a theatre.
"The right to treat our homos the way we want...."
@Jadehawk #61: Oh yeah, of course. I mean, I only understand the reasoning if one takes as a given that gay marriage is less valuable than shotgun weddings, Vegas marriages, mail-order brides, etc. At its core, this is still about bigotry. I'm just saying, I can follow their argument from point A to point B now, which I didn't use to before. I still think point A is ludicrous.
@Ichthyic #62: Good point, I never really thought of it that way. I dunno, actually, I got over it after about five minutes, but my initial reaction was "They gave the same degree to her for that as they did to me for all my hard work?!?" In retrospect it was probably a rather self-centered and immature reaction to begin with... but again, as I said above, it did at least allow me to see how the anti-gay marriage folks are getting from point A ("I think gay marriage is teh suck") to point B ("If the government sanctions gay marriage, then they are saying my marriage is teh suck").
Heh, so, I guess what I am saying is that if you hold a strong negative opinion about homosexuality and you base your political opinions on self-centered, immature, knee-jerk responses, then I can see how one could come to oppose gay marriage. Hrm. Nevermind. ;D
@Really #65: The right to be treated equally under the law, based on the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. If the government didn't sanction straight marriage, then of course there would be no reason for them to sanction gay marriage to begin with. But, if they are recognizing a specific type of relationship between two people of a specific gender, they must allow the same relationship among people with different genders, or else it runs afoul of the modern(*) interpretation of the 14th amendment.
(*) When I say "modern", I only mean that women are included. The 14th amendment predated women's suffrage, so... I suppose if you think the equal protection clause doesn't apply to gender, then I guess a ban on gay marriage could be constitutional... heh...
@54, et al
Homosexuality is clearly a different case than historical issues of gender/race/color. The latter is a physically based attribute, which is permanent (is based on the person's genetics), whereas homosexuality is very clearly not. Nor does race/gender have the blatant moral overtones of homosexuality. A unique, thorough discussion of its own is warranted... not a dismissive reference to previous cases.
@46 so how about:
Why is it so imperative that every single state in the nation become anti-slavery? It seems to me that those of us in regions of the country that don't share the same moral perspective as the anti-slavery crowd shouldn't be forced to conform... why should the distant minority (in a given state) be able to impose their views on the majority?
Or pick any subject where you think the tyranny of the majority should prevail.
Look at it this way - it's no big impact on your little life if teh gay want to marry. Nobody is trying to force you to marry someone of the same sex.
In reality it should be the opposite, start with freedom and then add restrictions on whatever basis. Are there good reasons for denying gay couples the same rights as straight couples in a secular society?
what exactly is so difficult about this? everything that's done voluntarily (i.e. all the participants are adults capable of consent, giving consent) and for which there's a legal template, should be legal. thus:
screaming fire in a theater causes panics and leads to injuries; not a right
prostituting yourself voluntarily (as opposed to being blackmailed into it, for example) doesn't hurt you, or your customer, or anyone else; you should have that right
marrying anyone doesn't hurt anyone, and is already an existing legal contract; that's a right
telling people who they can or cannot marry affects and hurts those who want to marry against your decree; thus, bigoted discriminatory marriage laws are not a right.
In reviewing the Governor's comments, gay marriage is finally being framed as a civil rights issue. For a long time, the discussion was always about "gay rights." Reframing it as a "civil rights" issue is a winning move. The momentum is undeniable.
@#69: We don't even need to decide whether LGBT people should be protected under the 14th amendment (I think it's obvious that they should, but that is a matter of constitutional interpretation and has some wiggle room, especially if you are a strict constructionist). I am a man, and I have the right to marry a woman (which I did! :). Under the modern interpretation of the equal protection clause, if I am a man and I can legally do X, the government must also allow a woman to legally do X. Hence, the government must allow a woman to marry a woman. Same argument in reverse for two men.
"There's a storm gathering."
"That's why there are these clouds behind me. They represent a storm that's gathering."
"And it's gathering fast."
"And I....am afraid. 'Cause I have a fear of storms."
"I am also afraid."
"And I am afraid. Wait, did someone say that? Oh, he did? My bad."
oh, kel said it better: we have all the freedoms/rights we want, and the restrictions should only come in when some form of harm is done, and can be eliminated by the lesser harm of a restricion on freedom.
#75 oops... I meant,
"There's a storm gathering."
etc.
I will never eat lobster again.
http://teabaggingforjesus.blogspot.com/
@69 "whereas homosexuality is very clearly not. " All that evidence dried up, cleared up, and disappeared. See: Exodus International.
Also, the "moral overtones" you see are what you have created in your head, and do not exist in reality.
Gay couples should descend on New England for Marriage Vacations. Get married in Vermont, head over to New Hampshire for a civil union ceremony, hit Maine and Massachusetts as well.
The more registrations, the more compelling the data on the impact on tourism dollars.
EG: the right to take things that I really really want
How could I, one who enjoys the non-addictive pleasures of the occasional spliff and fan of vaginal sex in a non-businesslike manner, begrudge someone their right to fill their body with meth and have anal sex with a prostitute*caugh*Haggard*caugh*?
Actually, I could begrudge them the anal sex or the prostitutes (although I hate the concept of a pimp) even though I wouldn't enjoy them. Prostitution may be a health risk, and may relate to other crime. Meth is a huge detriment to your health, and meth labs are dangerous, usually run by really not-nice folk, and they can poison the ground-water. That was a real problem in my town (especially on my corner) a few years ago.
Ergo: male-male / female-female marriage in my area => no effect on me, except maybe more smiling faces; Meth labs and prostitutes => possible effect from the hookers, definite effect from drugs.
Don't compare them ass-hat.
Besides, if adjacent states have gay marriage and you don't, you'll look like a bunch of theocratic pricks, and then you'll resent us(MN you better get your ass moving) for making you look bad.
@65
In Loving the SCOTUS majority noted that marriage is a basic human right. The case was not about same sex marriage, but the point stands. Marriage is a basic human right. You can now whine that the SCOTUS was just making up rights blah blah blah. However, I think I'll put my eggs in that basket anyway. It is based on a freedom of association and the freedom to enter into contracts with whomever one wishes. You want to deny people that right based on what? Again, explain yourself. In the light of the fact that marriage is a basic human right, what objection do you have to two men or two women getting married. Out with it. Don't be shy.
From a sidebar to the article:
"Dr. Judith Chamberlin holds up a text message proposing to her partner Karen Marlin after the Maine Senate passed the same-sex marriage bill today. Marlin's answer was "You bet.""
I am a staunch supporter of gay rights, and I still surprised myself by the upwelling of warm-fuzzy-happy feelings I got when I read that and saw the picture. She just looks so happy. How could anyone think that is evil?
“This new law does not force any religion to recognize a marriage that falls outside of its beliefs," the governor said. "It does not require the church to perform any ceremony with which it disagrees. Instead, it reaffirms the separation of church and state."
That's my gov'nah!
RE: 56, 70, 71, 72, 76...
70: "Look at it this way - it's no big impact on your little life if teh gay want to marry."
If it were true that homosexuality had zero impact on me, I'd be totally fine with gay marriage. But I'd disagree that that's true. Check the "controversy" section of the wikipedia article on same-sex marriage, for starters.
76: "we have all the freedoms/rights we want, and the restrictions should only come in when some form of harm is done"
So then what about prostitution? Illicit drug abuse? For "victimless crimes", the real "victim" (the moral problem) is the degradation of a community or society. Many truly believe that homosexuality falls in this category.
Sorry, forgot to sign in, #85 is me.
Again, for more perspectives on the harm to society via same-sex marriages, see the wikipedia articles for same-sex marriage and the traditional marriage movement.
James Sweet (@58):
I can tell you're on the right side of this issue, but...
There's a difference between something like a degree, which recognizes merit and achievement, and basic rights, which are the inherent possession of all without regard to merit. Unearned honors can indeed cheapen earned ones, but the question doesn't arise when we're talking about rights.
MAJeff (@53):
Thanks for the pointer. I'm puzzled as to why the two lists are so different, but I trust your source. So I guess "most" was appropriate after all; nevertheless, I remain optimistic that the tide has turned, and that it will sweep away these obstacles (albeit not as quickly as we'd like).
science fail. homosexuality is as permanent and "physical" as race.
@ 85
Many truly believe that homosexuality falls into the category of moral degradation. Based on what, precisely? The bible? Tough noogies. The bible isn't the basis of our Constitution, which is specifically designed to be a secular document.
Teh gay sexorz != drug abuse.
Marriage is a right. Same sex marriage is a right. Get over it.
Anyone know if it is likely under the new administration that a national amendment could be worked up?
Hey, Really? I'm a lesbian.
If you don't want a gay marriage, then don't have one.
Kiss my ass, but only if you're a woman.
Congratulations, Maine! Well done!
No kings,
Robert
For the nth fucking time, read a fucking introductory anthropology text, you illiterate fucking bigots. Since you fuckwits never will, I'll save you some time.
Historically, anthropologically, humanly, traditional marriage isn't necessarily between one man and one woman.
You know what'll help stop the erosion of society? Getting a fucking library card!
Dumbasses.
Anonymous (@85):
Legalize it, and regulate it like any other business.
Treat it as the public health issue that it is, rather than as a criminal matter.
You can believe anything you want, but to limit the consensual behavior of others, you need something more than your god-soaked sense of moral "degradation." If you can't point to anything other than a fictional god's disapproval, ya' got nothin' on which to base denying gays the same rights as anyone else.... including marriage.
(Nor, for that matter, denying prostitutes the same rights as others who sell other sorts of personal services for a living... but I digress.)
If you've read my exchanges with Walton and our other resident L-word-arians, you know I'm not shy about advocating government restrictions... but they have to be based on something real, and they have to treat all people evenhandedly, absent some objectively compelling reason to discriminate.
Or, to put it more bluntly, bite me!
Okay Anonymous,
While you're casting stones let's see what's in your closet.
Ever had extramarital sex, before or after taking vows? Ever been divorced? Used birth control? Taken illicit drugs? Performed oral sex? Masturbated? Viewed sexual acts by someone other than your spouse live or on screen? Had youthful indiscretions? Incited lustful feelings? Entered a place of worship with your head uncovered? Abused (physically / verbally) or neglected a child? Talked back to your parents?
If you've answered yes to any one of these things, there is some religious group somewhere who say you are unfit to marry, and probably, to even live. Did you actively choose to be straight? Were you overwhelmed by dark homoerotic impulses and fought to be heterosexual? Who taught you that homosexual love was shameful?
BTW, Your final bandwagon fallacy is bush league . Just admit that you're a bigot and call it a day.
@ Really #85, 86
Regarding the Wiki entry on same-sex marriage. I see a lot of arguments on both sides and lack of any data supporting a number of the "harm" arguments. So what's your particular hang-up? How would gay marriage personally harm you?
Great idea, but you left of the minor detail of actually using it for non-fiction in order to learn something outside of their present world view.
foxfire @ 96
because he would have to spend hard earned janitor wages to repaint his closet every fucking week.
I can understand why people feel threatened by SSM. It has no direct effect on them, it just taps into their insecurities.
Let's respect people's insecurities.
Okay, so that means: no churches; no mosques; no temples, hell, no parties; no Schools; no TV; no billboards; no talking about anything.
Guess what! Almost everyone is insecure about something. Some people, however, are mature, and they fucking deal with their irrational insecurities and don't bother others with them.
Fuck you, "Really?"! You got me in icky mode now. I need to stop reading teh intartubes.
why should the distant minority (in a given state) be able to impose their views on the majority?
They're making it legal. Not mandatory.
I just don't buy your Burqa logic. No one is taking away your rights. You don't have a right to restrict other peoples' rights. Legalizing gay marriage doesn't force you to do anything. It just prevents you from forcing other people to live a certain way. You are not being oppressed by not being permitted to oppress others.
@#85:"So then what about prostitution? Illicit drug abuse? For "victimless crimes", the real "victim" (the moral problem) is the degradation of a community or society. Many truly believe that homosexuality falls in this category."
I actually disagree with your whole premise. I don't believe that prostitution should be a crime at all. Nor should drug use - which can only be "illicit" since it's criminalized. Just because the current laws on the books label these activites "crimes" doesn't mean that they actually cause any more of a moral problem than alchoholism or marrying for money.
Does divorce cause a degradation of society (it certainly causes a degradation of marriage)? If so, should this be enough to outlaw divorce, thereby condemning some people to miserable lives? It seems that our society has already chosen to accept the price to be paid for allowing people to dissolve their stable, two-parent households in favor of personal happiness, well being, emotional health, etc. Why, then shouldn't we make the same decision in regards to gay marriage or homosexuality (which are two different issues, btw), which I doubt contributes anything at all to "the degradation of a community or society"?
And let us not forget that the source, cause, or permanence of same-sex attraction is irrelevant to the discussion. One's religion is a personal choice, and our Constitution respects an individual's right to that choice. Our laws should also respect the choices of individuals to enter into marriage, whether those choices are based on immutable biology or are simply choices.
Go Maine!
@88: "science fail. homosexuality is as permanent and "physical" as race"
Bzzt. Science fail overruled. Science has concluded no such thing. There has been minimal findings for a biological basis for sexual orientation. By far the most you can say is that the jury is still out. Anything more is wishful thinking.
As for its permanence, ask Giuseppe Povìa or thousands of other ex-gays what they think.
@93:
"For the nth fucking time, read a fucking introductory anthropology text, you illiterate fucking bigots. Since you fuckwits never will....You know what'll help stop the erosion of society? Getting a fucking library card!
Dumbasses."
Well said. I've got a bachelor's degree in biochemistry, halfway through my graduate studies to get a PhD in the same. How educated are you?
@EV #95:
"While you're casting stones let's see what's in your closet. Ever had extramarital sex, before or after taking vows? Ever been divorced? Used birth control? Taken illicit drugs? Performed oral sex? Masturbated? Viewed sexual acts by someone other than your spouse live or on screen? Had youthful indiscretions? Incited lustful feelings? Entered a place of worship with your head uncovered? Abused (physically / verbally) or neglected a child? Talked back to your parents? Did you actively choose to be straight? Were you overwhelmed by dark homoerotic impulses and fought to be heterosexual? ..... Just admit that you're a bigot and call it a day."
Let's see... no, no, no, no, no, yes, yes, no, I highly doubt it, yes, no, yes, yup (we all do), no. Sorry, not a bigot... just a logical, reasoning thinker.
It's absolutely hysterical how badly the religionists want influence on society. The enlightenment, and more directly, the Constitution crippled their ability to carry out their controlling ambitions. Now we just need to be a bit more diligent about upholding the Constitution. Way to go Maine.
Maybe the morons will finally start to face the fact that they're not wanted in science, in our private lives, or in our government ruling by fiat. Those things work much better without their meddling.
So... tell us, what's impact it's had on you?
Another state defied American ideals, Biblical morality and the laws of God. Maine is the fifth state to recognize fake marriage over real marriage. Sure glad my state will be the last (if ever) to do such a political stunt. I always knew those drugged up hippies would be the end of America. Oh well, when God hands us over to our enemies, we'll all be crying for forgiveness becuase of the arrogance of the militant left. They will be the downfall of America - it's only a matter of time. When that time comes, I'll be back to say "I TOLD YOU SO".
Fake marriage will not endure forever. When Christ returns, he will destroy gay "marriage" along with all other evil in this world.
Maine - the fifth state to listen to SATAN. What a pity. Maine was such a beautiful state. Now it is tarnished with evil.
Mississippi sure looks good about right now.
Many much impact:
1. it's icky
2. it makes me feel awkward
3. my belief system finds it abhorrent
4. how do we explain it to the children?
5. did I say it's icky?
/bigoted, logical, reasoning
@103: You are a self-hating gay. :)
So... tell us, what's impact it's had on you?
It makes him feel tingly and his pants get tight in front. And that confuses the poor lad.
(I realize I am making a sexist assumption, but I like a good confused-young-man joke)
by the by:
I feel my relationship with my atheist girlfriend is threatened by religious marriages. Who the hell are these people to redefine mating bonds? They are going against a tradition that has been handed down by our ape ancestors.
So... tell us, what's impact it's had on you?
It makes him feel tingly and his pants get tight in front. And that confuses the poor lad.
(I realize I am making a sexist assumption, but I like a good confused-young-man joke)
by the by:
I feel my relationship with my atheist girlfriend is threatened by religious marriages. Who the hell are these people to redefine mating bonds? They are going against a tradition that has been handed down by our ape ancestors.
@ Really?
You actively choose to be straight? How so? Do you have to consciously make the decision to be straight on a daily basis? Are you saying that you were gay and then chose to be straight, or that you had no sexual inclinations towards any particular gender and decided to go straight one day? Please, do tell.
So... tell us, what's impact it's had on you?
It makes him feel tingly and his pants get tight in front. And that confuses the poor lad.
(I realize I am making a sexist assumption, but I like a good confused-young-man joke)
by the by:
I feel my relationship with my atheist girlfriend is threatened by religious marriages. Who the hell are these people to redefine mating bonds? They are going against a tradition that has been handed down by our ape ancestors.
Umm, your definition of logical and reasoning has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. PhD or no, you're a pinhead.
I'd like to point out that the question of whether or not homosexuality is "permanent" etc. etc. etc. is completely irrelevant to the issue.
I'd like remind proponents of gay rights that building a case for rights on unproven scientific claims is a recipe for disaster. The right to marry shouldn't be based on a genetic or organic explanation (mutable or otherwise) for sexual orientation. It should be based primarily on the concept of the equal right to the pursuit of happiness, regardless of race, creed, etc. including sexual orientation. The underlying "causes" of sexual orientation is irrelevant in this context, and should remain so. It is not a science issue, it's a rights issue.
I'd like to remind opponents (one again) that if the actions of two consenting adults (who are not you and not your spouse, and who do not live with you) pose a significant threat to your marriage, then your marriage is probably fucked anyway, and you should take personal responsibility for that instead of trying to blame it on the mere existence of an oppressed minority. I'd also like to point out that they think that what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom is "shoving their lifestyle down your throat," then they should probably put down the telephoto lens and stop peeping.
Sorry. I'm tired, computer must be tired. Bed time
Wow, what a badly written paragraph that last one was. Serious person-confusion. Ah well. Haste makes waste. It seems comprehensible, at least.
Watchman:
This paragraph...
...validates the Molly nom I gave you this month, and ensure I'll repeat it for May (if necessary). Keep up the good work!
Why can't the progressive states be down here in the south where the weather is awesome? My choices are baptists or snow. Lame.
I was going to mention that as well Watchman:
What does sexual orientation, or whether or not it's moveable, have to do with adult human pair bonding? If two consenting adults wish to participate in a pair bond, it's their choice. If there are justifiable reasons as to why the government should encourage and support pair bonds, then it should support them all equally.
Mrs Tilton @ 26:
Rome's still on the map. What part of "Eternal City" don't you understand?
Because, as Mrs Tilton amply demonstrated @ 26, they're hate-filled bigots who are not interested in tolerance but in compulsory approval.
Wait and see.
I think that's exactly the same wording they used against the pro-free-the-slaves crowd.
Pilty, shown your physical evidence for your imaginary deity yet so you can keep posting?
My, my, feeling frisky again Piltdown Man?
Will Maine still be one of the "cool, smart states" when its people vote in favor of an amendment to their state constitution banning gay "marriage"? Or is "cool" and "smart" based entirely upon agreeing with PZ Myers, instead of freely expressing their own beliefs?
Absolutely, and I think this point can't be made often enough. Frankly, the whole "biological basis" argument to me is a non-starter, as it suggests that it's OK that gays are icky because they can't help it. That makes being gay essentially a genetic disease, and thus could be seen as something tragic to be treated. The real issue, it seems to me, is that it is nobody's damn business what people do in their bedrooms or who they love, and the State has no right to impose its views on who people can marry.
Standard lies from someone who hates gay people.
Legally it doesn't matter whether there's a genetic basis to gayness, because there's no reason to impose upon freedom of marriage, no matter whether the marriage is inspired by instinctual attraction or arbitrary choice.
But everyone scientifically literate, and everyone who does not hate gay people, acknowledges that there is a genetic component to sexual orientation. http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_caus.htm
Also the standard lies of a homophobe. Race-mixing marriages were legislated against precisely because of moral issues. The lower court in Loving v. Virginia declared:
"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."
http://wings.buffalo.edu/law/bclc/web/loving.htm
An important but much less interesting discussion is why jerks like you hate gay people. Your specific lies indicate that in your case it's because you're an extremist religious theocrat who hates America and hates freedom.
From #120:
Way to take Mrs. Tilton's comment literally. What part of using a variant of the old saw "Rome wasn't built in a day" as a trope don't you understand?
Now, I'm really lousy at logic, so I'm asking for a Pharyngula-check to correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the above quoted is a strawman. Compulsory approval isn't happening with this circumstance. Civil rights are being extended to a group that has been traditionally disenfranchised. You are welcome to remain disapproving for the rest of your life, tut-tutting, scowling, and thinking to yourself, "I certainly don't approve of a man marrying a man, or a woman marrying a woman."
Regardless of that disapproval, the law in Maine, and other places, holds that those men who wish to marry men, and those women who wish to marry women, may do so, enjoying the rights extended to consenting adults in this country.
No one is making you be happy about it. Apropos, I encourage you to remain wallowing in misery, lest your risk delight in the happiness of others, and especially lest you risk delight in the happiness of others who wish to demonstrate their love by getting married.
No kings,
Robert
If you think hating gay people is "cool" and "smart" then we can't help you. You're too full of hatred to ever learn decency or empathy.
Might as well pour a tall sangria, here we go...
Way to go, Maine!
Oh look, Piltdown Man thinks that the Supreme Court was being hateful and bigoted when they ruled that laws banning interracial marriage were in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
No surprise that someone so hateful and bigoted himself would turn the very meanings of the words upside down. Every year is 1984 in Christian America.
Sorry, that last paragraph should have included "lest you risk delight," not "lest your risk delight."
We now return you to your regularly scheduled syntax, brought to you by Lucky Strike brand cigarettes. "Lucky Strike means fine tobacco!"
No kings,
Robert
It seems to me that those of us in regions of the country that don't share the same moral perspective as the pro-gay crowd shouldn't be forced to conform.
Psssst... gay people live right near you. You just don't know which ones they are.
Definitely calls for a celebration [pours Guinness into a chilled glass]. Here's to Maine and everyone fighting the good fight.
As to the bigots, your tripe is as stale as ever. Enjoy your misery.
Psssst... gay people live right near you. You just don't know which ones they are.
And all they ask is to be able to treat their homos in whatever manner they wish.
I'm SO stealing that.
Piltdown wrote:
Er, you do realise that the term 'Rome' applied to more than just the city itself, don't you? Does the word 'empire' ring any bells?
More idiocy:
Where did someone write that you don't have the right to disapprove of gay marriage? You do realise prevention and disapproval don't actually mean the same thing, don't you?
You have the right to disapprove; what Maine (and the other sensible states) are saying is that you don't have the right to discriminate against people simply because the superstitious nonsense you use as security blanket considers them inferior and icky.
For example, I disapprove of Céline Dion, but I don't have any right to demand that listening to her dreadful caterwauling be illegal, as much as it makes me want to stab at my eardrums with a sharpened 2B pencil.
Face it - the days of legislative support for your homophobia are drawing to and end. Whine and squeal all you like; you won't stop it.
Apologies in advance for the quick off-topic: is anyone else having trouble posting, or getting Pharyngula to load? Seems like it's wonky today . . . maybe just on my end of the Intartubes?
No kings,
Robert
P.S. I am serious, and don't call me "Shirley."
Well put. The Constitution does not only defend freedom based on genetic factors, as freedom of religion is clearly a choice.
To be picky, not only does sexual orientation have a genetic component, race is has a social construction. http://academic.udayton.edu/Race/01race/race.htm
Funny thing, but I have yet to hear one of those brave souls who favors passing anti-gay-marriage amendments by popular referendum explain which of their own civil liberties they'd be willing to surrender if they, too, became unpopular.
Yaaaay for Maine!
The MadPanda, FCD
Now Wowbagger you know ol' Pilty loves to whine and squeal, just like the pope. *smiles innocently*
Shirley, it's not working worth a damn out here in Oregon either. :)
Desert Son @ 127:
I was aware s/he/it wasn't speaking literally. I did think it was an interesting figure of speech, suggesting as it did a hankering for the destruction of eternal verities, venerable customs etc.
By 'compulsory approval' I mean the disallowing of openly expressed disapproval. That is happening apace in the West. That is the agenda.
Vive le Roi
The bigots just cant stand not being in total control. One day they will discover that the rest of society has passed them by....or they will just continue to deny that too. I feel like the bigots are still fighting the Kinsey report. Sad sad lonely bigots. And getting lonlier all the time.
Pilty, as stupid and non-evidential as ever. What delusional godbot. One of the prime candidates for the next Survivor Pharyngula, as he hasn't made a cogent post for months.
If by which you mean did Mrs Tilton exhibit a hankering for the destruction of that bloated, stinking, pus-filled canker of hypocrisy, corruption, misery and antihuman propaganda called the Roman Catholic church then I, for one, hope that was exactly what she meant - as should every intellectually honest and decent person.
Robert @ 138
The server was all the way down earlier today. As I speculated earlier, it is probably because in the US, tomorrow is NATIONAL walk around mumbling to yourself like an idiot DAY" so the angels are practicing their intertube skilz.
No way. God will send tornados to smite the south central USA. Lots of tornados. He will also slam the coastal areas down there with hurricanes. I'm not exactly claiming divine revelation but it is all but guaranteed.
That leaves Pilty out.
Scooter - Thanks for confirming it was totally down, I thought it was just here.
So Piltdown Man are you opposed to the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act?
Posted by Piltdown Man at #142:
Gonna have to agree to disagree with you on that one. Mrs. Tilton would have to clarify, but I read it not as an attempt to destroy "eternal verities" (whatever those are) and "venerable customs" (like vomitoriums, for example? "Joey, do you like films about gladiators?"), but rather as a trope to emphasize a socio-political change and how such changes often take time. Your take was evidently different.
Piltdown Man, the Ku Klux Klan still holds marches in Illinois (perhaps elsewhere, too, I don't know) on occasion. They're racist assholes, but they're allowed to voice their racist asshole disapproval. No one is disallowing open expressions of disapproval. You may continue to openly express your disapproval at a man wanting to marry a man, and a woman wanting to marry a woman. You may also continue to hear yourself characterized as a bigot. That doesn't mean you're not allowed to disapprove.
It just means you're a bigot.
Do you get FM on whatever receiver in your head gets the sorts of update you mentioned?
Patricia, OM:
"Roger, Roger." :)
Ok, now I've really got to get some dinner and get back to studying.
No kings,
Robert
By 'compulsory approval' I mean the disallowing of openly expressed disapproval. That is happening apace in the West. That is the agenda.
Where? Relate a specific instance, please.
Also, if the California Supreme Court overturns Proposition 8, God will send fires to California to punish them. If they do not overturn Prop 8, God will send fires to California because He works in mysterious ways.
druidbros @ 143:
Piltdown Man on an ancient thread:
"So... tell us, what's impact it's had on you? "
maybe it's something like this:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33540
As for its permanence, ask Giuseppe Povìa or thousands of other ex-gays what they think.
shall we ask Ted Haggard, too?
I knew it, Piltdown Man hates America. :)
History fail: I totally fell for the "vomitorium as place to vomit" thing. Just looked it up, and it's a perfectly serviceable way to allow traffic to move in and out of a terraced seating area.
Serves me right for posting before looking. My mistake, I own that one.
scooter, thanks for the update on the server. Sadly, but with good humor, many days in a given month are "walk around mumbling to myself like an idiot day" for me. ;)
Ok, really going to get dinner now.
No kings,
Robert
@103
Huh, funny, I'm also a biologist in the middle of my pursuit for my Master's and then PhD and I've literally got about 50 articles on my computer alone showing the natural origins of a number of sexualities, all by simply looking at the animal kingdom. Gay and bisexual animals flood the animal kingdom in most of the sexual mammals and we also have some interesting evidence regarding natural transsexual animals and naturally asexual sexual animals.
But I think what always makes me smile the most about you bigots is how small you think. The Ex-gay movement you point to is a great example of this. The belief that if you can find a gay person and get them to most often pretend to be attracted to an opposite-sexed partner that even if it was a real sexual attraction, it would prove something about homosexuality is hilarious. Even if one of these conversions actually worked, all you've done is found the existence of a bisexual (oh yeah, there's more than just gay and straight, there's a whole Kinsey spectrum of whoop-ass). Similarly, even if it was a choice, religion is fundamentally, obviously a choice and these RELIGIOUS idiots are trying to say choices shouldn't have basic rights...because they're CHOSEN religion says so. Very dim.
But yeah, I'd get angry at you, but the truth is to quote a fine Iowan's daughter: "You don't understand. You've already lost. My generation doesn't care."
Even the kids in fundie households can't manage the visceral hatred of gays. My best friend's sister is a frickin' counselor for one of those Bible Camp things (and also a closeted lesbian, but that's another issue) and still has gay friends. You may be telling the truth and actually be what you say you are rather than yet another old pathetic dying fundie, but in that case, even in your circle of haters, there are no real allies to protect you in the middle of the night when Hugh Jackman stands alluringly naked above you.
And we don't need the law to protect your closet.
What's your point pilty?
@154
And here I assumed that most of them just hadn't heard about Dr. Kinsey because to them "everyone knows" that reading works on sexuality or even summaries of those works instantly dooms you to ever-lasting hellfire.
I should have assumed that it was just the old fighting against reality thing and pathetic attempts to argue by authority. Yes, Kinsey was a polyamorous bisexual man. He was also dead-to-rights on the variation of sexuality in the human species. In short, suck on that science, wingnuts.
From #69, Too-embarassed-about-my-opinion-to-use-an-identifier, aka Anonymous:
"Homosexuality is clearly a different case than historical issues of gender/race/color. The latter is a physically based attribute, which is permanent (is based on the person's genetics), whereas homosexuality is very clearly not."
I am always bemused when told that homosexuality is a "life-style choice." I would like to ask you, as I always do in this situation, when did you decide to be straight? I never get an answer to this, and I am truly curious, because my gender preference involved no conscious decision-making process on my part. The gay people I know never made a decision to be attracted to the same gender; their only decision-making involved whether to reveal their inborn preference to others, risking persecution and possible physical harm. I know of several people who, in dire fear of familial ostracism, kept their sexuality secret and allowed themselves to be pressured into opposite-sex marriages. The eventual consequences were devastating to them, their spouses, and their children, not to mention their extended families.
So, Anon, please tell me -- did you sit down at 16 and make a list of pros and cons for heterosexuality/homosexuality, and rationally weigh them, and decide? Or did you try both types of sexual relationship and then decide which you preferred? Or was it a coin toss? And did you end up as comment 69 by complete accident, or did you wait for just the right moment to press "Post?"
Pilty never has a point, other than he hates anything beyond the thirteenth century. Just another godbesoaked idiotic bigot with a computer.
Yes, it might load in my IE browser but it is very slow and sometimes crashes. I've given up. IE works fine for everything else but scienceblogs.
I found a browser from an ancient Egyptian tomb that works really well. Rather embarassing that something from the bronze age works and IE doesn't.
@160
Apparently, if it's the standard fundie fare (one sec)...
Ahem, thar's an army of dem dere demons in the guise of tha filthy homa-seck-shuals out to steal our children to Satan before the glorious return of THA LAWD, Jaisus Christ. That's why our kids no longer speak to us anymore, not because we raise them in intensely abusive environments wherein it's proven that everything we told them is a lie the second they get their hands on any "non-approved" book, movie, or video game.
/wingnut
More interesting or rather frightening is that these people believe, at least out loud, that there is no such thing as gay people. Rather gay people are merely demons or demon-possessed or at best evil people actively working on the side of demons.
@162
I'm always even more amused because I'm an asexual. Aka, a perfect blank slate test subject on whether one can truly "choose" an orientation and in fact, I even went through a phase before I realized there was a name for it, wherein I tried essentially to do that (find what turned me on) through a perusal of every legal expression of the erotic I could find in every medium.
It's really impossible and studying sexuals since, it's really obvious the power of a sexuality that it is ludicrous to believe one could have any real effect on it unless one was homophobic and refused to believe in the existence of bisexuals or else one solely based things on who you happen to love or be dating at any given time in a desperate attempt to try and escape the existence of lust.
I also find it delicious as an asexual, because by their pathetic standards of purity that they use to falsely view themselves as "better" than homosexuals and less "sin-touched" they inadvertently make themselves lose every time to asexuals on the same scale. Considering, I'm also trans, this facet literally has me giggling often in pure malevolent whimsy.
@ Really #103
Oh really, Really. In that case, what is the logic behind denying same-sex couples the right to marry? The wiki article you referred to earlier contains a lot of opinion and no real data for denying same-sex couples the same legal status as heterosexual couples.
In your #85 above, you wrote
I asked you (#96) how gay marriage would have a negative personal impact on you and you have yet to respond. Please feel free to do so in support of your logically reasoned position in opposition to gay marriage.
Way to go, Maine. Yet one more step in the US toward reason, sanity, and equality.
EV @95: Oooh, is this a quiz for everyone? A bit like Truth Or Dare?
No, but I really, really, really want to. Ideally before my 20th birthday.
No.
No. See answer to q1.
Depends on what you mean by "illicit". I drank alcohol when I was underage, if that counts.
No.
Yes. Today, in fact.
Yes.
What's a "youthful indiscretion?"
Ha. I doubt it.
Yes.
Not that I remember.
Yes. Regularly.
That was fun. Now everyone else has to take the quiz!
"Anonymous" above is me. (Don't mind me... just a 19 year old atheist from New Zealand. And a troublemaker.)
Cerebus @ #159:
That's the most gorgeous and heartening thing I've read all week. Thanks for that quote!
That is easy. Wherever gay marriage is legal, black helicopters drop out of the sky at night in people's backyards and soldiers seize all their guns. Heavy set guys in black leather make people marry their dogs.
A lot of states have had civil unions which is marriage without the M word. For years. All the states on the Pacific coast in fact. The sum total impact on anybody or anything has been exactly one damn zero, ZERO. Do the math homophobic idiots. You can still hate and fear gays even if they are married.
It doesn't surprise me that you are well versed in Crowley, kinky old Pilty.
An it harm none, do as thou will.
Or any variation there of. :)
Raven @ 164
Mozilla Firefox, it's free and takes about 12 minutes to download and install, even transfers your bookmarks from IE. Way less troublesome and also blocks pop-ups and is immune to alot of the malware which plagues IE.
It's not as cool as having a MAC to browse but it's a lot cheaper.
Well they say you have to understand the opposition before you can fight it... /rolleyes
I'm sure Kinsey would've had no problems spending his time with Catholic priests, if only they liked their men a little bit older.
EV - I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.
I have eaten shellfish, pork, gone into a church with an uncovered head, taught a man bible verses, spoken rudely to my parents and disobeyed my husband.
Oh! The holy spirit can fuck off. Damn near forgot that.
There ya go.
@ raven
Yeah, we now have civil unions in Oregon and we still have this big ugly wart on our state Constitution, enacted in a previous election year (supported by big-money out-of-state special interest groups) stating marriage is between one man and one woman.
Exactly. It's time for wart removal in Oregon. "Separate-but-equal" is bullshit, unsupported by any logic or reason. Although Oregon now guarantees equal treatment to same-sex couples under Oregon law, the Federal government does not recognize Oregon civil unions as it does Oregon marriages. Hence separate-but-unequal.
So Piltdown Man are you opposed to the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act?"
------
What exactly is a "hate crime" anyway. Have you ever seen a love crime?
Besides, the Matthew Shepard case was blown out of proportion by the left wing media in an attempt to make the gay man the victim of a gender orientated crime, when in fact he was robbed for money, not for being gay. Get your facts straight people.
Shepard murder not a “hate crime”
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=515678
Piltdown Man:
Uh.... The part that unequivocally implies that Rome has existed and will exist forever?
Well, since "eternal" is apparently a euphemism for "ephemeral", then I think we can allow that "cool" is a synonym for "not completely terrified of change", and that "smart" is a synonym for "taking a step in the direction of doing the right thing by all its citizens".
I would like to address your concerns, if I may. This is still the United States of America, and people have a Constitutional right to express their views, so long as the expression of those views does not amount to an attempt to induce theatre-goers into fleeing an imaginary fire. More to the point, that right ensures that people such as yourself will never lose the right to publicly bemoan the fact that niggers can marry kikes.
Yeah, I've seen some love crimes.
How about Diane Downs throwing her children off the Crooked River Bridge?
Have you ever looked over the Crooked River Bridge? The great depth of the yawning chasm almost makes one vomit.
These opponents of equal rights really need to be asked just this one question: What's it to you? I find it appropriately confrontational, and it just feels right to ask.
Since the subject of pork (and shellfish!) has already been raised, I thought I'd add that, on doctor's orders, I have to eat at least one non-kosher meal daily. A damn shame, that...
So rights should only be based on physical attributes?
HUZZAH! THE REPEALING OF SPECIAL RIGHTS FOR RELIGION SHALL BEGIN IMMEDIATELY.
There's no genetic component to religion either, you acephalic nincompoop. Yet rights supporting a LIFESTYLE CHOICE are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. and all the others.
Funny how you have no problems with that.
You must be on hallucinogens. People are born with their sexual orientation. It appears to be caused by a genetic predisposition coupled with the timing of hormones during fetal development. If you have evidence otherwise, cite the peer reviewed primary scientific literature. If you don't, STFU.
Well, that explains what I've been seeing in Toronto! Damn Canada and its non-homophobic marriage laws! (Then again, the black helicopters have been around ever since we ditched the abortion laws...)
Whether true or not, it is a red herring. The point is that freedom is the ability to choose. Rights are enshrined in the Constitution to protect the ability to choose. I would even go so far to say that it is dangerous to make the protection of gay rights dependent on it being a physical characteristic like race or sex as it diminishes the importance of the role of choice in liberty. That is, just because we protect the rights of people with different physical characteristics does not mean that physical characteristics are the only rights to protect. Freedom of religion, speech and assembly are all rights of choice not physical characteristics.
raven #172 writes,
As Lewis Black explains, it's more insidious than that.
Enough to know what I'm talking about when I use the term 'traditional marriage'.
Anytime you wanna take me on, throw down.
I don't know why some folks here find it so difficult to believe that gays can decide to become heterosexual, since heterosexuals can decide to become gay. Elton John, for example.
Reading this thread and hearing the mindless arguments against marriage equality voiced by the trolls has finally proven, for once, to be inspirational. I have an idea for a new approach to counter-protests at GLBT events. We should bring blank posterboard and markers and copy their boards word for solecistic word. We will then put on tinfoil hats, adjust them for reception, and start shouting what the fundies are saying back at them, with just as much energy and vehemence.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...
foxfire @ 167 wrote:
Oh, let me answer this!
Here's a video that illustrates some of the horrific consequences of gay marriage.
Patricia,
I was curious about your reference and found you were referring to the Freeman and Jackson case. Absolutely horrid. Freeman ended up back in prison in 2002 after threatening someone with a knife. Do you know what happened to Gertrude Jackson after she was released on parole after 7 years? I can find no mention of her. I am assuming that since you are in Oregon, you must know everything about everybody there.
Hey Nerd, can you give a cite? I have read a fair amount of the documentation on the APA sites in the past (not recently though), and they were very open yet vague beyond simply stating that the evidence doesn't point to homo/bi sexuality being either a disorder or a "choice".
Anecdotally I can attest that some of the people I know that are homosexual would not have "chosen" it, but science is better than anecdote. Oh, and just to let everyone know they wouldn't have made that "choice" due to societal/family pressures, not because they didn't love their partners or think that they were attractive, smart, funny, and such.
scooter (@174):
Cooler yet is using Firefox on a Mac.
Patricia:
Now that that's out of the way, what do you see on the map?
@192
Even better than mere psychology, I always point to what I think is the best evidence for natural origins of alternative sexualities. That is the high incidence of animal bi and homosexuality, where the human social arguments are obviously non-existent.
This museum exhibit had a good roundup of a number of incidences, but other evidence can be seen both in the vast studies on animal sexuality as well as "fun" articles like the ones on the gay penguins in China that are adopting their own egg.
If the social or choice arguments had weight, we'd only expect to see homosexuality in humans and only in some cultures rather than in all cultures throughout all history and through many if not all of the mammals and pretty close to all sexual species for that matter.
@ foxfire (#167) et al...
"I asked you (#96) how gay marriage would have a negative personal impact on you and you have yet to respond"
Sorry, been away from da interwebz for a while.
First, in response to various posts above, I neither "hate" nor "fear" gays, and I even have some very nice gay friends myself. (*gasp!*) I'm nothing but friendly to them - definitely never confronted/criticized their lifestyle - and they probably don't even know whether or not I'm anti-gay, except that they probably assume I am since they know i'm religious.
So, to answer the question ("finally," i can hear foxfire saying...), I have never been directly negatively impacted by homosexuality. Nor do I ever expect to. Just like I never expect to be personally harmed by prostitution, or improper drug use.
*Indirectly*, however, I feel there is great harm to be done to our society by same-sex marriages, as I feel for prostitution, or illicit drug use, or alcohol abuse (something that HAS personally affected me in multiple ways, including the death of friends at the hands of a drunk driver). There are certain things - open prostitution, blatant drug use, alcohol abuse - that we agree are bad for our society, and so we agree (since we are a self-governing country) to not do those things.
In the case of same-sex marriage, at stake is the "devaluing" of the marriage commitment and the family, the core of our society. And yes, as someone pointed out above, I *do* think things like the increase in acceptability divorces, Vegas weddings, single-parent families, etc have already weakened the seriousness of the marriage commitment, and *have* done harm to our society by breaking down the family.
At stake is the welfare of our children. Study after study show that the best environment for children's "cognitive and verbal skills, academic performance, involvement in or avoidance of high-risk behaviors and crime, and emotional and psychological health" is one of a stable, two-parent traditional household. (ONE example are those by Child Trends, a child-welfare organization, showing there is "[v]alue for children in promoting strong, stable marriages between biological parents.") [See the "traditional marriage movement" wiki page, references 19-24, for more info.]
Another example is the decoupling of parenthood from marriage, further weakening marriage. Or, if we want to talk about rights... what about the rights of children to be raised by their biological parents?
Anyway, those are some random thoughts, and now I'm off to bed. Let the shredding of my opinions (and mental abilities, and personality, and moral perspective, etc etc) commence. :)
PS - Thanks, #190, but that's not quite what I had in mind. :)
Really? wrote:
You don't need a marriage to have a family and you don't need to want a family to get married. Marriage and family are not inextricably linked and, as such, this argument is worthless against gay marriage.
If your argument is that marriage is inseparable from marriage, then surely you would advocate that infertile people or those who wish to remain childless should not be allowed to be married either. Is that the case?
And I still don't understand how allowing same-sex couples to formally and legally demonstrate their love and committment to each other has any effect whatsoever on male/female relationships other than to bring joy via the knowledge that everyone is able to have what they have.
What I love most is the number of straight couples who have stated they refuse to get married until same-sex marriages are allowed. I've got no intention of getting married, but if I did I'd be doing exactly that same as a protest. Not letting gays marry is doing far more harm than letting them ever will.
So, you think two abusive, alcoholic, negligent parents would be better than two loving, caring, committed and responsible same-sex parents simply because in the former there's one penis and one vagina*? Are you really that ignorant?
*Not including hermaphrodites, of course. But, if you're wondering, I'll happily state that I have no problem whatsoever with hermaphrodites being parents.
#196: "You don't need a marriage to have a family and you don't need to want a family to get married. Marriage and family are not inextricably linked."
This is exactly what I'm talking about. 50 years ago - maybe even 30 - this sort of thinking was totally fringe. Marriage without a family, perhaps... but family without marriage? No way! And I think our society today is seeing the (negative) results of this kind of thinking.
"So, you think two abusive, alcoholic, negligent parents would be better than two loving, caring, committed and responsible same-sex parents simply because in the former there's one penis and one vagina?"
Um, nope, I definitely don't think that. (And I never said that at all.) In the scenario you described, the children of the heterosexual couple would certainly be much worse off.
By the way, I'm actually interested in a serious discussion here. I'll probably ignore mindless, sarcastic attacks after this. But if anyone has some reasonable questions/responses to my post #195, I'd love to discuss them.
Even if it were a lifestyle choice, so what? It's a lifestyle choice for me to wear black, listen to metal and get drunk. It's a lifestyle choice that I blog on science / atheism. It being a lifestyle choice has NOTHING do to with whether it should be permissible in society. If sexual attraction between an adult and child were genetic, it wouldn't make the case that it should be allowed. Don't commit the naturalistic fallacy.
Remember...
"As Maine goes, so goes the nation."
Kudos to the Gov and Maine State Legislature.
right... "bastard" children are purely an invention of the 20th century.
and what precisely is wrong with not getting married but still having a family? Marriage is not some magic spell that makes people stay together longer, or make them better parents. marriage is simply a legal contract to make live easier for those who want certain legal protections/advantages for their family. nothing more, nothing less. the romantic aspect of "marriage" is something else altogether, and gays have been performing those kinds of commitment ceremonies without your permission for generations.
strange gods before me @ 157:
I love America. But the 'USA' was obviously a Masonic conspiracy (Green Dragon Tavern, Ben Franklin, Liberty Enlightening the World etc).
Patricia @ 173:
I don't think "harming none" was high on Crowley's list of priorities. As for the Wiccan rede, wasn't Wicca invented by some randy old Mason in the 1920s?
Butter @ 152:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article782242.ece
strange gods before me @ 150:
Murder is murder.
Remember Jesse Dirkhising.
Rev. BigDumbChimp @ 160:
That Kinsey was a moral degenerate with a subversive agenda.
Cerberus @ 161:
Here are some facts about Kinsey. The source is the Catholic Medical Association of England & Wales, but I know people here aren't bigoted bigots who would flaunt their bigotry by bigotedly dismissing it on those grounds alone. If the following has been refuted, I'd be interested to know about it.
The Kinsey team's 1948 and 1953 books shocked society with a picture of what citizens were supposedly doing sexually. "Statistically common behaviour" was deduced from a sample of just over 5,000 men and almost 6,000 women
Here's a profile of Kinsey and team's male sample used to picture normal sexual behaviour in American men: 25% were prisoners or ex-cons; a further abnormal percentage were sex offenders (Kinsey had the histories of over 1400); many were recruited from sex lectures, where they had gone to get the answer to sex problems, some were obtained through paid contact men, including underworld figures and leaders of homosexual groups; the group was wholly unrepresentative in terms of marital status, church attendance and educational level. In addition, Kinsey had a minimum of 200 male prostitutes among his histories.
Kinsey's homosexuality statistics were clearly inflated Thus, epidemiologist David Forman, after a careful survey of a much more representative population, was forced to say in his 1989, British Medical Journal article that "frequently cited figures such as [Kinsey's] 10% of men being more or less exclusively homosexual cannot be regarded as applicable to the general population."
For example, the Kinsey tearn claimed that 37% of the male population had some homosexual experience "between adolescence, and old age."1(p650) What they omitted to point out was that 32% had occurred by age 16 and the full 37% by age 19 (see Table 139, p.624 of the Male Report). And the statistic they misleadingly represent as adult homosexuality was, in fact, principally homosexual play among heterosexual preadolescents and adolescents.
Kinsey and team provided a body of experimental evidence demonstrating that children are "orgasmic" and capable of sexual pleasure - not just affection - from infancy. ... Several hundred children, 2 months and older, were manually and orally masturbated by "partners" in "orgasm" experiments, in some cases over periods of 24 hours. The performance of at least 188 children was timed with a stopwatch (see tables). Particulars of physiological reactions, such as the presence of anal contractions, were carefully recorded. Kinsey has assured us that "technically trained" individuals were involved in this experimentation and that some of the children were followed over a period of years to make sure that true orgasms were occurring.1(p177) These data are unique in the scientific literature, but no satisfactory explanation has ever been given of how they were obtained.
"We have always insisted on maintaining confidentiality, even at the cost of thereby becoming amoral at best and criminal at worst. Examples of amorality are our refusal to inform a wife that her husband has just confessed to us he has an active venereal disease, and our refusal to tell parents that their child is involved in seriously deviant behaviour ... An example of criminality is our refusal to cooperate with authorities in apprehending a paedophile we had interviewed who was being sought for a sex murder ... "
A fascinating review by former Kinsey Institute staffer Dr William Simon has just appeared in the February 1992 issue of Archives of Sexual Behaviour.19 For the first time ever (as far as we can determine) a Kinsey disciple agonizes about the ethical dilemma of using data from the illegal experiments described above. However, Simon will only admit that the experiments were "possibly abusive." He assumes, moreover, that data from children can illustrate normal sexual development, and expresses concern that we "must ... be alert to tendencies to overidentify with the subjects of our research."
Cerberus @ 166:
Interesting.
Liberals say: The weakening of taboos surrounding sex has been a positive development, long may it continue.
There seem to be two main arguments to support this view:
1. Sex is utterly harmless and innocuous. To fence it round with puritanical taboos is cruel and unnecessary, breaking a butterfly on the wheel.
2. Sex is a primordial powerhouse of raw dionysiac energy. To attempt to dam this volcano is both futile and dangerous.
These kind of contradict each other but the same liberal will often come out with both. I recall having a conversation many years ago with a feminist colleague concerning a news story about a girl who'd been sexually assaulted while out alone wearing what some would consider 'provocative' dress. The feminist waxed indignant about males - all potential rapists, uncivilized, utterly unable to control their savage instincts, little better than brutes basically. Should, then, the victim have dressed less provocatively so as not to inflame this uncontrollable savagery? Certainly not, exclaimed the outraged feminist - men should be expected to exercise self-control!
pcarini @ 171:
Any successful cultural revolution depends on fostering generation gaps as a means of destroying the transmission of traditional values through the medium of the family. They're after your children.
oy, I didn't even notice that one previously... something tells me this was an "all else being equal" kind of study at best, biased at worst. every psychologist out there will tell you that children suffer greatly when parents "stay together for the kids", and there's no longitudinal study that I'm aware of that compared large samples of children raised by same-sex parents with children of opposite-sex parents that concluded that the latter are better off than the former.
how many rapes occur at nudist camps?
and how many rapes occur in cultures where women are covered from head to toe?
hmmm......
Any successful cultural revolution depends on fostering generation gaps as a means of destroying the transmission of traditional values through the medium of the family. They're after your children.
crazy people are funny.
Really?#195,
"There are certain things - open prostitution, blatant drug use, alcohol abuse - that we agree are bad for our society, and so we agree (since we are a self-governing country) to not do those things."
Our agreement is not evidence that making these behaviors illegal actually improves things, in a complex nonlinear society, the cure may be far worse than the "problem" and education, and REAL cultural agreement on values may be more effective and less coercive. Divorce and serial monogamy cheapened marriage and impacted children far more than gay marriage will.
Really? Did you actually throw out the "But I have some gay friends" line? Excuse me while I convulse in laughter for a few minutes.
Ok, back now.
In the case of same-sex marriage, at stake is the "devaluing" of the marriage commitment and the family, the core of our society.
I keep hearing this, but it keeps not making sense. How does people fighting tooth and nail to be allowed to make that commitment devalue it? Letting 14 year olds make such a momentous decision devalues it. Letting people make that decision with no waiting period devalues it. Counseling women to stick with abusive husbands "for the sake of the marriage" devalues it. Letting mature adults who desire formal commitment more than anything else have it...um, strengthens it.
Carlie,
"Letting 14 year olds make such a momentous decision devalues it. Letting people make that decision with no waiting period devalues it."
"Letting" the government define it and license it, devalues it. Its value and meaning should be between the between the people making the commitment. Separate banking accounts and property devalue it. Infidelity devalues it. Pre-nuptual agreements devalue it. The marriage penalty in tax law devalues it. No fault divorce devalues it. Abortion or contraception without informing the spouse(s), devalues it. Breaking of mutually agreed vows devalues it. etc.
Carlie,
"Did you actually throw out the "But I have some gay friends" line? Excuse me while I convulse in laughter for a few minutes."
It does seem to be a useful bit of information. It demonstrates a certain level of tolerance and perhaps means that the disclosure that follows is not based upon hate or overwelming disgust. Your mocking is a bit self-reighteous.
@208: I think you're wrong to assume that the "I have some gay friends" line is at all sincere; lots of bigots use that line and then spout hatred. The classic in this field is "Some of my best friends are black". It's one of those lines, like "No offence meant, but..." or "I'm not prejudiced, but..." which has the precise reverse of its apparent meaning.
there is "[v]alue for children in promoting strong, stable marriages between biological parents.")
Nice going, asshole. You just slammed every adoptive parent that ever existed.
EPIC FAIL
A consequence of meth being illegal to make. They aren't inspected by OSHA or EPA.
@201
Now that is some impressive crazy. I'm tempted to do a slow golf clap. Interestingly, follow up stories have actually said he did overestimate certain groups of people including as you say full homosexuals and my group, full asexuals. They also say he vastly underestimated the number of bisexuals and it's even potentially possible that bisexuals of the various Kinsey hues may make up a straight up majority.
Also, yes, feminists believe men are not naturally rapists. Rape is also not a crime of lust, but power. There's this particular aspect that defines the baffling liberal acceptance of sex, it starts with a c, ends with an onsent. I think it's code word for demonology. Also, I'm personally asexual, so that means, my transsexual ass is by your code infinity times more moral than you could ever hope to be. Let that drive you further over the edge big boy.
@208
Snerk. Yes, we're totally falling for your fantasy world and people who use the "I have X friends, BUT" isn't the oldest "I'm not really a bigot, I just play one on TV" dodges of all times. I wonder though, is there a linguist in the house who knows the origin of that particular "I know we're losing the long fight, but I'm still fighting the war" bigotry tool? Was it during the 1960s civil rights battle or does it predate that?
@197
...
So how were those reruns of Leave it to Beaver that apparently defined your understanding of history?
Also, I believe this proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that your attempt to pose as a young college student was a complete crock of shit. The olden days that never were nostalgia just isn't a youthful phenomenon. But...I'll bite.
Yeah, like how moonshiners have always been unsavory in comparison to someone who runs a brewery, like--No, not the Coors guy (wacko). Um--these guys They have all the perks of being part of a legal business. Which includes things like not having cops bugging them all the time, the right to advertise within certain limits, the right to openly sell their products within reasonable limits, and all that. Even though their product is just as dangerous as meth when used unwisely.
It demonstrates a certain level of tolerance and perhaps means that the disclosure that follows is not based upon hate or overwelming disgust.
No, it demonstrates that said person is too much of a sniveling coward to stand up for their beliefs when confronted with actual people. It means that they will willingly smile to someone's face while kicking them in the gut from behind. It means that they are willing to engage in social niceties so that they won't be branded by society as a bigot, even though they think such people are subhuman and don't deserve the same rights they have. It means that they enjoy having the "friend" to point at as a cover for not being one of "those" hateful bigoted people, even though they support exactly the same policies as the openly bigoted. It only means they've managed to cloak their hatred and disgust with a veneer of respectability.
@195
First, yes, they know and no they're not your friends. If they exist to begin with.
Second, the indirect argument comparison is interesting. I know in authoritarian circles (the aspect of viewing the world, not necessarily one's support of movements involving same uniforms and walking in straight lines) there is either or. That is, if something is bad, it must be banned, good, it must be supported, but in the reality, sometimes something seen as a social negative is actually better off supported and regulated. Alcohol is a great example of this. While it's "ill effects" have indeed cost lives, it's negative social impact is far less now, than when it was banned, because prohibition lead to far more than drunk behavior but the propping up of organized crime, criminalizing poverty itself, and often breaking up families for non-violent crimes. The drug war in particular is rife with evidence along these lines and in fact, may be solely responsible for the high incidence of single parent families in the black and latino families. Prostitution is a bit more complicated, as it turns out more johns are looking for a simulated rape experience than just paying for a type of sex, one way to root out those effects that has been semi-successful in reducing ill effects is the Swedish model wherein prostitution was legalized but being a john was criminalized. It's still not the best possible system, but again, the system reduced many of the worst effects of prostitution.
Social ills are also an interesting phenomenon, because pretty much across the board, the biggest effector of those negative effects is poverty. Reducing wage disparity across the board does more than any other combat method in reducing the incidence of ill effects from the "indirect" ills. In short, if one wanted to reduce indirect ills, the better strategy is almost always partial or full legalization and regulation followed up with poverty relief or full funding for treatment centers and the like. The results are evident in the low crime rates in the scandinavian countries.
Now onto marriage in general. I find it telling you bring up an example of the tests showing two-parent families are generally better than not, but find it intriguing that you try and turn that and say that only applies to "traditional" marriage whereas those studies have also concluded that it isn't the tradition or the opposite sexes, but that the mere act of two parents provides as you would expect stability, a greater deal of financial security, multiple sources of support and love, and a means by which a parent can "hand off" to their partner when they feel stressed or unhappy. It's also an average and single parents are by no means incompetent and the same studies often show that "staying together for the kids" does more harm than not.
There were a large set of APA studies and considerations that were bundled together recently to fight the Florida, no same sex adoption, rule that demonstrated it. One such study is here. There was no discernible difference in children raised by homosexuals to their heterosexual compatriots and allowing homosexuals (or rather same-gender couples) to marry strengthened the homes and when allowed did not negatively impact their kids in comparison to heterosexuals.
This is to be expected. Most of the ill effects in children stem from three major sources, these are:
1) Poverty. Increasing financial security raises the likelihood of well-raised children for pretty obvious reasons. When a parent is stressed out about financial situations or working multiple jobs, they have less time to focus on their kids and less energy to devote to them as well as being less happy themselves. Also, it impacts the amount of health care and nutrition and can be tied to the "ghetto" effect wherein the child growing up disbelieves in their ability to escape by societal means of playing the social game and thus turns to delinquency. However, there's also some interesting studies that suggest that the delinquency rates are skewed by how crimes by minors are treated in "high crime" areas rather than "low crime" areas, which can also involve racial profiling. I know for instance that my district turned out to have the actual highest incidence of drug trafficking in the area, but it was low policed because the culprits were rich white kids from "good" heterosexual Christian households. Entirely supplementary and off-topic, but interesting nonetheless.
2) Lack of happiness in the parents. Make the parents happier and more egalitarian and their kids will turn out better (aka smarter and well-adjusted). This has been backed up by more than 25 studies in multiple countries. Thus something that increases the happiness of an already existing familial unit (yes, gays are already in these, no they don't care that you think that very existence is a destruction on the family) increases happiness of the kids. Interestingly, this was one of the main arguments for the social goods in legalizing divorce which is why there's been actual decreases in things like parents murdering their children. Also interesting is that the same studies show the act of childbirth itself often decreases happiness of parents and put them at risk. Children are wonderful, but their net effect is actually negative not positive to the American family and the happiness that makes raising children more healthy and the like. A prime example of a socially negative thing that is in fact desirable to many couples.
3) Security and child abuse. The latter merely requires enforcement of laws, but as regards your worries, there is no increase in child abuse among same gender couples who adopt or raise children. In fact, if anything, there's usually a decrease, owing to the fact that many if not all abuses of children stem from hyper-masculine traditional views on the ownership role of fatherhood (this is also the source of most abuses of spouses as well). The former however is negatively impacted by denying same gender couples the right to mary as reduced security in one's future, the knowledge of being protected if the worst should happen to you, the ability to change to better jobs without worrying about health insurance and the like. Without these, one is again more stressed and thus less able to raise children, but also one fears more for the bonds that can be easily taken away which can raise anxiety in the home which affects kids. These anxious and insecure aspects are actually what are the real sources of most childhood trauma over divorces as evidenced by how much better kids handle divorce when they are informed of the situation and the split is amicable so that insecurity is reduced. Again, fun and supplementary facts.
In short, blocking homosexual marriages (and some straight marriages) reduces as a demonstrable social effect the welfare of those children raised in same gender homes for no other reason than one believes those parents by the mere fact of their existence are worse for the children than nothing. In even shorter and more brusque if I may, you are perfectly happy harming children and would gladly make them do without any parents because you believe that gay people are worse than nothing (aka, inhuman). I find these viewpoints monstrous, but then, I also am sane enough to recognize that one can't ban things they don't like simply because one doesn't like them and one can't stop things as they are, situations as they are simply because one wants to impose by will a 1950s ideal that never existed.
Same gender couples and all other "ills of this modern world" as you would categorize them are here as they are and we must deal with them as they exist, not as we would have them exist in fantasy. One cannot ban them into not existing and this was as true in the magical 1950s as it was today. The same issues existed, often in higher numbers in that "mythical time", but society tried to ignore them away by fleeing to the suburbs. It didn't work and acknowledging that didn't make the 70s and 90s a den of sin. In actual truth, lives improved for the better in nearly every regard thanks to that recognition.
But in full, though I have taken your bait and presented a full takedown, you really don't matter. You and everyone like you, the bitter holdovers from the civil rights battle of old, don't matter. You're old and you're dying out and the kids don't believe the old lies so easily. They have actual gay friends, family members, even parents and they recognize that the mere fact of dating someone of the same gender doesn't make one a demon, nor shatter the multiverse. It's not novel or unique, it's been around for millennia. And the kids, quite frankly, do not care about the old people's bullshit. Call it recruitment like crazy Pilt or mumble about choice and ex-gays, but this simple fact remains.
And once gay marriage is legalized, it will get harder and harder for those lies to get passed down. Because the real "evil" you people are fighting is the knowledge that once gay people are accepted as actual loving couples, no different, no worse by virtue of their birth to straight people, that people will realize that there is no great social collapse, no ill effect to the fabric of the nation. I know this for a fact, because I'm currently living in your worst nightmare, Denmark, the first nation to give gay unions the full equal protection of straight ones. Now, people don't care, same gender couples walk their kids down the street in the same way as opposite genders. Crime is low, people are egalitarian and in the greatest fear of people like you, the real danger is that no one cares. No one privileges straight people for the mere fact of their heterosexuality, no one believes that one is more moral simply by their appeals to a non-existent God, no one cares about the old hates.
In short, you and your type are fearful that you will become irrelevant before you die, that you yourself will become the "freaks" same as the out and out racists have become.
To that, I state, yes you will. Because you have already lost, my generation does not care.
-Transexual Asexual in a same gender relationship
Sorry everyone, that turned out way longer than I was expecting. (Bow head in eternal shame)
@214
I also take it as the prime symbol that we're at or near the crest in the fight for a visible win for equality. When even your most hateful of opponents are terrified as being seen as bigots, that means that the simple fact that gays are human beings has affected a majority of Americans. Just compare the attacks. Back in the 80s and 90s, people like Really and Sarah Palin would have no problem calling gay people demons and the like and while there are still a number who call gays pedophiles and animal-rapists, even the ones who use these attacks are still turning to the "we don't hate gays, personally" dodges.
The "I have X friends" dodge is particularly telling, because unlike the "hate the sin, love the sinner" dodge of old, this dodge recognizes that not knowing any gay people is seen on a social level as odd and open to prejudice whereas before it was seen by a majority as being a sign of moral fortitude. When someone without gay contacts in their lives is seen as odder than one with them, there is simply a crest about to occur. That's because what changes minds isn't really the calls to equality and people's inherent morality, but the personal connection. When it's not just a caricature, but one's niece, one's brother, one's mom, one's best friend, the lies fall apart and the haters have to rely on evidence and solid arguments. And that's impossible when your cause is the removal of another group's rights.
I think this is why there's been an increase in the anti-gay leadership in trying to ratchet up the "we're the real victims" and "the oppressed are a vast horde who'll start treating us like we've treated them" lines of attack. Once they had to claim nonexistent gay friends to be considered halfway credible, they'd already lost and so now it's throwing everything against the kitchen sink in the hopes of slowing the avalanche down.
Honestly, this feels DAMN good. I never knew living history like this would feel so literally amazing. I knew it'd feel good and that it was right, but the avalanche, where your opponents aren't merely unhinged but actually seen that way by the public and the victories come hard and fast. This moment.
It feels damn good. Weep little fundies, weep and take your sweet old time in hating the next group because I strongly suspect I'm also in that one.
azqaz, I don't have a specific citation, just tidbits of information I have picked up over the years. For people being born gay, start with psychological journals, where this was first reported. The most recent reports from the internet news I have seen reported that certain brain structures are the same in gay men and heterosexual women, which are different from heterosexual men and gay women. Google can be your friend.
Cerberus for a Molly, I think, for sheer epic level of takedown.
Extramarital sex? yes, premarital; been divorced? never married; Used birth control? yes; Taken illicit drugs? does weed count?; Performed oral sex? yes, I think everyone should; Masturbated? hahahaha, regularly, how else would you keep from snapping?; Viewed sexual acts by someone other than your spouse live or on screen? ja; Had youthful indiscretions? yes, but not enough; Incited lustful feelings? I sure as shit hope so, although if not, it would explain past relationship fails; Abused ... child? not since I was one; Talked back to your parents? someone's gotta keep the old man in check.
This is fun. Hell, I think I've done at least 5 of those things in one day.
And making threats is making threats.
Making threats of violence against a community is also a separate crime. Why is it that right-wingers are always so quick to bellow about topics they do not understand and have not researched? And why is it they never correct themselves after being proven wrong?
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/its_a_goddamned_cracker.php#…
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/its_a_goddamned_cracker.php#…
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/its_a_goddamned_cracker.php#…
Anonymous: "Homosexuality is clearly a different case than historical issues of gender/race/color. The latter is a physically based attribute, which is permanent (is based on the person's genetics), whereas homosexuality is very clearly not."
Religion is a protected class, and that's even less physically-based than homosexuality (not sure where you get your info that being gay is "clearly" not physical anyway...I can no more control who I'm attracted to than I can control whether I sneeze or if my leg kicks when the doctor hits my knee reflex). Religion is something one practices, not something one IS, yet the right to practice any religion one wants is a fundamental right in this country. You could call yourself Catholic one day and Buddhist the next, and you're protected from discrimination at both the federal and state level in both cases.
Even if someone did "choose" to be gay, it doesn't mean they don't deserve to be considered less than a full citizen for making that choice, especially when that choice has no negative effect at all on people around them.
You're a liar. The defendants' own testimony explains that they targeted him for being gay and killed him for being gay.
http://mediamattersaction.org/items/200904290005
Why do you hate gay people so much that you would lie about this?
Score one more for the US Constitution and for good sense and fairness.
The only way same-sex marriage could be considered a threat to straight marriage is if, all of a sudden, there were limited numbers of marriage licenses available and straight people were somehow 'missing out' because of it. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that that isn't ever going to happen.
The only thing gay marriage is a threat to is the tiny minds in the as-yet-unexploded heads of that particular segment of idiotic, Jesus-loving homophobes who really only moan about it because if they didn't no-one would bother to pay any attention to them anymore.
Suck it up, losers. The days of your joyous denial of equal rights to people your moronic security blanket of a religion doesn't approve of are coming to an end.
There are lots of journal citations in the essays linked as subpages from this one. Scroll down to "Studies into -- and indicators of -- the cause(s) of sexual orientation:"
http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_caus.htm
Me not like "Anonymous" posters.Take away the odd "oops my typekey ID didnt carry through" one,too many people hiding behind that nick,cant tell them apart,cant respond to them properly.
PZ,cant the software only allow one "Anonymous" for one IP addy at a time or somthing?
Not dissing you Rorschach, but it's funny when I hear someone by that moniker chastise anons after reading Watchmen.
Hehe "Gimme back my face!"
"I hate you.... You keep calling me Walter."
I concur. It's hard to tell the players without a scorecard. (This being said when I have had a couple of oops, which I immediately corrected.)
People get so upset about the "hate crime" designation, but I don't hear anything at all about "malicious damage." It's basically the same thing, but to objects. If you just wreck someone else's stuff for fun, it's called vandalism. If you do it with the intent of malice toward the owner of the thing you wreck, it's called malicious damage and carries a higher penalty than simple vandalism.
Gauging the intent which was behind a crime is not uncommon or unwarranted.
oh, and also...crimes that are classified as hate crimes often carry the characteristic of "overkill" - like in Matthew Shepard or James Byrd's case (the latter was a black man who murdered by being dragged to death behind a car by a group of white men) - you could just kill someone, but the murder has an extreme level of anger to it, where the assailant continued to kill the victim well after they were actually dead.
So fine, don't call it a "hate crime," call it an "overkill" crime. They didn't need to kill Matthew Shepard...they got his money, if it was truly "just" a robbery, they could've stopped there.
You do hate gay people. It's obvious. You believe they are beneath you, so they do not deserve the right to marry people they love, a right that you enjoy. Denying people their rights, treating them as subhuman, is hatred.
You've lied to yourself just the same way that racists who "have a black friend" have lied to themselves that they aren't otherwise racists.
If you want to treat your gay acquaintances as friends, then stop trying to hurt them.
Gay people who commit to marriage and raise families are no threat to your marriage or your family.
You would have to hate gay people to imagine otherwise.
Also a lie. Children benefit from relationships with adults that care about them, regardless of gender, and families with gay parents can have all these benefits too. A large extended family of close and involved grandparents, aunts or uncles, and adult cousins, is far better than an isolated family of one mother and one father. But there are no statistical differences between families with one mother and one father, families with two mothers, and families with two fathers.
http://www.apa.org/pi/parent.html
http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbc/publications/lgpchildren.html
I notice you want to outlaw gay families but you wouldn't outlaw divorce. Another point of evidence that you hate gay people.
*returns to thread whistling a jaunty tune*
*reads post #201, tune slowly dying on his lips*
*backs slowly out of thread*
No kings,
Robert
Oh look, Piltdown Man hates women too, and blames the victims of rape for being raped. We didn't see that one coming a mile away.
He/she used to be an atheist too until they found jesus!!!
Just a kook creating straw men and then knocking them down. What is really bad for children is fundie Death Cult xianity.
1. Their heartland of south central USA has far higher incidences of the usual social problems of teen age pregnancy, poverty, child poverty, divorce and so on. These are well known statistical facts.
2. The fundie cults can only survive on lies, and hate. They use hate for in group out group identity politics and lies to preserve their mythology. Ignorance is strength, Freedom is Slavery, the world is 6,000 years old, the Big Bang never happened, and neurobiologists found the soul next to the genticulate nucleus but they are covering it up. The result is a hostile kid with a mind set in cult concrete who avoids thinking at all time.
While the fundie Death Cults are a serious social problem, openly hate the USA, and almost destroyed it during their disastrous Bushco regime, IMO, there is no reason to worry too much about them. They are destroying their own religion while simultaneously repulsing and horrifying the rest of America, mostly normal people and normal xians. Between 1 and 2 million people a year drop the xian religion. Blame the fundies. Hate, lies, ignorance, and violence just isn't all that popular a lifestyle choice for many people.
Piltdown @120,
Rome's still on the map. What part of "Eternal City" don't you understand?
What a clever boy you are. Similarly, one can still buy jars full of ether, so light still propagates through that elusive substance, just as men still wear togas and gladiators duke it out at the Colosseum, per omnia saecula saeculorum.
There have been many "Romes" down the ages, most of them well worthy of destruction though it take many lifetimes. There is the Rome that amassed all power in the hands of the patricii, denying the plebes political participation; the later Rome that overran and parasitised the known world, nailed slaves and foreigners to crosses in their thousands to die in agonised asphyxiation; the Rome of the mediaeval popes who ruled (on the basis of a forgery) as tyrannical temporal princes; the Rome of popes right down to the day the Italian people destroyed the tiara-waering tyrant's state, in which Jewish children could be, and were, forcibly taken from their parents to be raised as catholics and groomed for the RC priesthood. However distressing the fact must be for you, those Romes are gone, destroyed by free men and women, and good riddance.
...hate-filled bigots who are not interested in tolerance but in compulsory approval
Projection much? You really aren't very good at seeing points. Normal people don't give a rat's ass for your approval. Compulsory approval? That's more something your cult insists on. You remeber, the cult that claimed error has no rights, that insisted (whenever it has had power to do so) that all accept its teachings and bow down to its authority, under penalty (whenever it has had the power to impose it) of death.
Me, though? I truly do not care what you approve or disapprove of, no more than I care what contemptible fairy-tales you choose to beleive, nor what comical ritals you choose to perform in front of statues. Indeed, though the notion will be utterly alien to you, I and many like me would use every tool available under the law to stop people who wanted to force you to abandon your fairy-tales and refrain from your rituals.
All of which has precisely nothing to do with the point being discussed here. Nobody is going to make you approve of equal rights for all citizens. We are merely removing, slowly and with great effort, your ability and that of people like you to deny equal rights to others, claiming your superstitions give you the authority to do so.
And @201,
They're after your children
You really don't get it, do you? Beyond the baseline position that it is evil to oppress others, my primary reason for wanting to see religious cultural reaction denied further influence on setting public policy is that I want to protect my children from people like you.
#197:
The dumbfucks are always say they're interested in a 'serious discussion', but they never bring anything to the table except for bogus claims (e.g. "I think our society today is seeing the (negative) results of [family without marriage]", bogus claims cut and pasted from fundie websites, and logical fallacies. This fucking clown can cite no studies, has no background in the issue, and yet wants to have a 'serious discussion'?
That's not a discussion. That's us tutoring a recalcitrant and argumentative student for free.
So take your fucking near-doctorate in biochemistry and fuck off, Really, and let those of us with an actual grounding in the relevant fields discuss the issues, unless you want to do some real homework and make some real arguments based on empirical evidence and not vague feelings of "things are different from when I was young, and I blame...teh gays!"
Otherwise, leave your card and we'll call you when we need something pipetted.
#221,
"Even if someone did "choose" to be gay, it doesn't mean they don't deserve to be considered less than a full citizen for making that choice, especially when that choice has no negative effect at all on people around them."
Choosing is more threatening to parents than biological determinism, since persuasion, awareness of the option, social acceptance and sexually charged school environments might influence their children in a way which increasess their risk of expressing the homosexual phenotype, decreasing their evolutionry fitness. Mere sensation seeking, exploratory behavior, or succumbing to peer pressure might cause the children to express a homosexual behavior phenotype, that might have been much less likely in other environments. People who want biological children and grandchildren might see the choice to be gay as having a direct negative effect, if chosen by their descendents and to have a potentially negative influence if present in the environment.
Still, gays don't deserve to be less than full citizens, whether biologically determined (in today's environment) or a choice.
I've said it before but I'm saying it again:
There's no way that some other couple getting married can concievably "injure" or "invalidate" or "threaten" my own (white, middle class, X-Y) marriage. It certainly can't compared to the travesty "regular" marriages that are performed every day. Get real people.
And why is the gummint involved in what is bascially a personal relationship anyway? The reason is that that marriage license has legal force with regard to: Taxes, employer benefits, inheritance, child custody, visitation rights in hospitals, etc., etc.
What the anti-gay-marriage crowd want, specifically, is to deny this legal rights and privileges to gay people: Because they don't like them. And they don't like them because their book of fairy tales tells tham the invisible boogey man doesn't like gay people. In fact the boogey man enjoins these people to kill gay people. I guess denying gays rights is the most they can get away with (they think) in the US (most of the time anyway.)
It's none of my effing business what other consenting adults do in their bedrooms. It's none of my effing business how they create and maintain their relationships.
I don't have any homosexual fibers in me. But I'm not afraid of gays or dislike them or wish them anything but well in their lives. Grow up everybody!
Wowbagger (@196):
You're right, of course, but you surely didn't expect Really? (or anyone else on the other side of this argument) to accept your assertion? In their minds, marriage and family are inextricably linked by the act of procreation. Because sexual intercourse gives physical pleasure, it — like all other "worldly" pleasures of the flesh — is immoral, unless it's sanctified by some godly purpose. So to the extent that sex is reserved strictly to heterosexual marriage, and marriage in turn is inextricably linked with the getting and raising of children (in response to god's command to "be fruitful and multiply"), then sexual pleasure can be justified as morally acceptable; otherwise, not so much.
And since "traditional" (i.e., heterosexual, child-focused) marriage is seen as the only morally acceptable context for sexual pleasure (which most of them actually want), these folks feel compelled to "defend" it tenaciously. To them, same-sex marriage (like any marriage or other sexual relationship not focused on getting and raising children) must seem the moral equivalent of masturbation: Pure self-gratification without the redemptive character of serving god's will. It's not that recognizing same-sex marriage threatens their heterosexual marriages in any way that makes sense to rational third-party observers; rather it (along with all non-marriage sexual relationships, not to mention birth control, abortion, and masturbation) threatens the whole edifice of moral self-justification through which they permit themselves to enjoy sex.
I've been called/accused of being a hedonist here, and if I understood more about what that term really means (as opposed to the way it's casually used in common discourse), I might agree... but in any case, what I've observed (and increasingly noticed in recent years) is that the religious mindset (at least in terms of the Abrahamic monotheisms, and Christianity and Islam in particular) is all about stripping the moral acceptability of all "worldly" pleasure, except where such pleasure is legitimated by serving some divine plan. These divine plans, of course, are communicated and mediated by the church (in the broadest sense of the term), which thereby gains absolute control and direction of the human energies associated with our inherent physical appetites. Assert dominion over our gullets and our genitals, and you've asserted dominion over us in a very fundamental way.
I, OTOH, think pleasure is inherently good (albeit, of course, any good thing can be abused). I have often joked (only half-jokingly) that Sheryl Crow is a great philosopher when she sings If it makes you happy/It can't be that bad. When my wife pushes back on this formulation, pointing out all the stupid, venal things that make some people happy, my response is to invert the equation, and say the proper definition of happy is the one that makes Crow's assertion true.
My own (possibly worthless) opinion is that the proper aim of humankind is to maximize the happiness of humankind... including those forms of happiness that attend upon physical pleasure. This view, whatever you think of it, is quite obviously at cross purposes with an authoritarian church serving an totalitarian (albeit imaginary) god.
But I'd be happier to live in a world organized around my formulation than I am living in the world organized around theirs.
Cerberus (@215):
I grok that you and I are on the same page WRT the larger issue, but I'm curious about a couple things:
Really? I don't claim to be an expert on sex work (and if I had any firsthand knowledge, I might be reluctant blurt it out in a public forum, eh?), but based on what little anecdotal awareness I have (e.g., the "escort" ads in the back of the local alternative weekly paper), I would've guessed that most sex-for-hire is pretty "normal" sex, and that rape-fantasy role play (along with other more-or-less extreme kinks) would be a fairly minor niche market. And I would've thought that street prostitutes (i.e., who probably don't advertise in places I might see) would be even less likely to be "specialty" providers. Is there really any evidence that rape simulation predominates in the sex-for-hire industry?
Or are you suggesting that all prostitution is de facto rape simulation because of the (usually mild) power imbalance implicit in all customer-supplier relationships (i.e., within limits, the customer has the right to tell the supplier what to do)? But if buying sex is inherently similar to rape, wouldn't bying any sort of personal service by (by analogy) similar to slavery? And buying goods (by similar analogy) similar to theft?
If that's what you mean, I don't think I agree; if, instead, you mean that the majority of sex-for-hire transactions consist of explicit rape simulation scenarios... well, that sounds like an extraordinary claim, and I'd love to hear about the evidence for it. (Maybe this varies from market to market and country to country?)
Stipulating for the sake of the argument that some large number of sex-for-hire transactions are either explicit or implicit rape simulation, how sure are you that the effects are ill? Is there a correlation (or a causal relationship) between rape fantasy and actual rape? (As an aside, I've had female friends who have told me about their rape-victim fantasies, which they've acted out in detail with their partners, and it's never meant they actually wanted to be raped in real life... but I admit it might be different on the other side of the fantasy.) Is it possible that an arguably harmless outlet for rape fantasies might actually reduce real rape? (Please note, these are actual questions, not arguments clothed in the rhetoric of the question: I'm genuinely interested in what the research [if any] is in this area.)
I'm not sure I understand how this makes sense, or how it works to reduce "many of the worst effects of prostitution": Regardless of whether it's the customer, the supplier, or both that you put in jail, if you outlaw one half of the transaction you've effectively outlawed the transaction. Any method of outlawing the transaction may be more or less effective in reducing the number of transactions... but it seems to me that the impact on secondary effects of the trade would be attributable to how much you reduce the number of transactions, and not on how you reduce them. What am I missing?
This rule is not analogous to laws that forbid the sale of a commodity (e.g., pot) but not its possession, because in those cases you can usually produce small quantities of the commodity at home without resorting to commerce. Sadly, there doesn't appear to be any way to grow your own hookers (no sick jokes about daughters, please!).
All (@various):
I know we've got some sociologists and sex researchers who post here. Can anyone give me a factual, no-ideological-axe-to-grind summary of the current estimation of Kinsey and his work within the scholarly/scientific community? I'm ashamed to admit how little I know about Kinsey (though I did see the Liam Neeson movie). Some of what's been said about him in this thread has the stench of ideological denialism about it, and I'm trying to figure out whether I should trust my nose on this point. Thanks in advance for any enlightenment any of you might be able to provide.
Man, just knowing that somewhere out there some bigoted theists are eating their lunch right now totally destroys the nutrient content of the tom yam I'm going to have in a couple of hours.
I think I'm gonna barf.
Waitaminnit! I just realised that some Christians also sometimes wear pants! Thanks, fuckers. You've eroded the very fabric of my jeans! If I get fired for being symbolically naked at work, it's on all of your heads!
@237
I'm interested at this line of argument, because it's always so weird. I mean parents don't own their adult children. If you as a grandparent want "natural" grandchildren, but your child doesn't want children, you'll have to do without. Plus, on the gay front, turkey basters. Plenty of lesbian couples have had natural childbirth and even more often carry in children from previous marriages or relationships. Being gay is hardly a big obstacle to natural child birth and will only get easier as science advances. Also, it's not like we need MORE children on this planet. We already have too many unwanted children and we're already vastly overpopulated for the resources of the planet. There are even a subset of evolutionary biologists who hypothesize that homosexuality may actually be lightly selected for in a population because it can provide fitness in helping in the raising of children whose parents are killed or otherwise removed, but it's not sure this is actually true (gayness can just as easily be one more neutral mutation).
Finally, it's bizarre because bisexuals.
I mean, they exist. It's not like gay marriage will occur and all the members of the planet will suddenly turn fully gay and no one will ever be able to reproduce. There will be gay people and straight people and bisexual people. Even if more people express the "gay phenotype" whatever you think that means, there would be little to no impact other than as you often hint at, the fundies terrified idea of sex. Perhaps I'm just an ignorant asexual, but I think sex isn't an inherent evil and people being honest and happy is far better for our children and our society than desperately fucking people you hate to further overpopulate the planet. We have condoms and birth control, that ship has sailed, the sex control pathway is no longer the easy sell to authoritarian power it used to be.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article782242.ece
- Pilty's reference when challenged to support his ludicrous claims about the evil forces of "compulsory approval". Do check it out people - it really is astonishing that he couldn't find anything better than that to make his case.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article782242.ece
- Pilty's reference when challenged to support his ludicrous claims about the evil forces of "compulsory approval". Do check it out people - it really is astonishing that he couldn't find anything better than that to make his case.
Anonymous (@240):
Oh, snap! But how can I nominate "anonymous" for a Molly?
And at the risk of opening the I responded to Pilty can of worms... (@201):
These propositions are only contradictory because you've manipulated the rhetoric to make them so: There's no inherent contradiction between something being innocuous on the one hand and having great power and import, in human terms, on the other hand. Frankly, it's telling (about you and your ilk, I mean) that you should consider something humanly powerful to be the opposite of "innocuous"; it's right in line with my assertions (@239) about churches' desire to assert control over humans by controlling their most primal appetites.
Those appetites can be channeled fruitfully, of course, but hamhanded attempts to shut them down can be disastrous.
There's nothing inherently immoral about a river, for example, but it is more powerful than it looks on the surface. We can use the energy of a river in wonderful ways, but just thoughtlessly tossing up a dam will almost always lead to unpredictable, unintended, usually bad consequences.
And so it is, IMHO, with human sexuality: It is inherently wonderful, and can be thoughtfully channeled in wonderful ways, but invidious attempts to thwart its power will inevitably produce perverse outcomes.
Which, in case you don't get it, is an argument for a permissive, live-and-let-live approach to sexuality; not an argument for a prescriptive, moralistic approach (i.e., "[t]o fence it round with puritanical taboos ").
Grr, Anonymous at #240 is me.
Has same sex marriage already destroyed TypePad's ability to keep one signed in?
What do you 'think' Really??
@239
Ok, it's a bit complicated and based on some counterintuitive findings. Basically, they were looking at the Netherlands model (which I previously supported 100%) and found that it wasn't actually reducing the illegal sex trade (including the mob-tied Russian underaged prostitute problem that's been plaguing a lot of Europe) nor the demand for it. In other words, it wasn't actually helping all the women by getting them out of the abusive system. Examining the system, it was apparent that for some large group of johns, the rape interaction was the best part in their minds of the illicit sex trade in that they could get off on the fact that they were wielding this power over someone who was lesser for owning a vagina and being a position of being fucked.
This has been corroborated by interviews in Las Vegas and other high prostitution zones and found high levels of exploitation where the AVERAGE age of "starting one's career" was around 14, which is many layers of fucked up.
Now, these were the findings that lead to the Sweden model, which I find intensely problematic as well, though it was highly successful at problem A, which was shutting down the more rapey, child-exploiting prostitution. The problems are of course as you mention, it shuts down those aspects, but there may be a real genuine interest in "professional" sex not as a rape interaction and not for rape reasons, so how does one separate the two. I think there's some sexologists in the Netherlands and Sweden currently trying to bang heads on forming some form of compromise system where say purchasing on the street is illegal (though selling is legal) and purchasing in a licensed brothel or sex shop would be legal (and as well, selling legal), though there is of course a big debate.
On that debate there are those who say that the aspect will always be problematic, especially in how women are viewed in general, not resolving issues of sex and whether even legal brothels are fully free from the treatment of sex as something done to someone, rather than something both partners indulge in. There are also counters to that from feminist sex workers who believe that getting people over their sexual inhibitions frees them and who believe that the BDSM community in particular would be negatively effected from attempts to fully eliminate "professional" sex workers in that a professional dom would actually have skills not easily reproduced even in a strictly egalitarian society, where sex was allowed as a common point of discourse and interaction.
On that last point especially, I find myself more in agreement with the latter, though I am as a female sympathetic and in fact militant to the need to reduce rape and rape culture narratives. But I think even in a say, Craigs List based society where one could find willing partners for any sexual kink, there are trust issues that might require the use of a professional even though there wouldn't be any "real" chemistry. It is also true, that the sex worker field also circles in porn stars, strippers, and burlesque show performers all of whom there is little need to really crack down on other than to ensure full consent and maybe to purge the rape narratives a little so that not most every movie about human sexuality was "take it bitch volume 38".
But and this is a big but, it's all sort of a moot or tangental conversation which is important in that it affects real lives and real openness about sexuality, but that the aspects that make it most problematic are like with most things based in separate issues. The prime motivator for exploitative prostitution is poverty, which also is a prime recruiter for drug addictions creating the stereotype prostitute our culture uses to dehumanize them (that of a crack whore). And the prime aspect that makes rape-based interactions the prime use of prostitutes in our society is really oppositional sexism and in particular, the madonna-whore complex in some-to-many men. This complex is of course the complex wherein a man in conflict with the fact that he's a sexual being in a sexist world divides all women into two categories, sexless virtuous women who act as house slaves at home and "bad girls" who'll "say yes to anyone" whom you're allowed to do anything you want to. It gets further complicated by the predator-prey idea of male sexuality that we rather unfortunately teach our young men.
So yeah, a bit of an awkward solution in that there will be a lot of nuance and on-the-fly corrections in approaches to the situation and there are various good-natured camps with different ideas that may or may not work so it's not as easy as pay the poor a living wage and voila, problem mostly solved. It's further complicated by the child trafficking aspects and those paying for them.
But yeah, moving along from that fraught issue. I believe the current consensus on Kinsey is right in theory, but probably off on the numbers. People comparing incidence of Kinsey 6 homosexuality in nature show that the 10% number is probably closer to 5%, though bisexuals are probably way underreported. There was an attempt to rate "social" gayness on another scale that some like, but I hate it because it relies heavily on the idea that by playing up certain social aspects that you can affect your orientation.
The Kinsey scale has also had some detractors asking about those who define themselves outside the male-female paradigm and whether or not the 7-point scale can at all predict those attractions.
For its primary purpose of gauging where one's actual sexuality most likely lies, it's the gold standard, but the limitations above as well as it's lack of question into potentialities like naturally being attracted to bondage say more than either sex mean it is also being tweaked with behind the scenes. In other words, it's kind of like evolution. The fundamentals are pretty universal, no everyone is dithering on the exact numerical aspects and methods.
In fact, the 7-point scale idea has been used by other sexologists. There was one, I don't know who did it, looking at gender in the transgender spectrum. It provides a good base map for any spread spectrum in that it's not as limiting as a 3-point and it also includes an X category for those who the question doesn't apply to (agendered and asexual people for instance in the two scales I've mentioned).
It also gets people considering the shades of bisexuality which has a great social science use in getting people to stop discounting things like "occasional attractions to the same sex" as immaterial to one's sexuality. It also narrows sexuality to sexual attraction which was and actual still is novel in a culture where we try and turn alternative sexualities into an alien culture you can avoid being a part of merely by playing up one's "social straightness". In other words, it breaks down the closet and the lies and gets to the heart of what it means to have a libido and have sexual attractions to people or sexes.
And I think I've posted another novel...Sorry everyone.
At work I need to sign in twice a week, on Monday and Thursday. So it looks like a sign in is good for between 56 and 72 hours.
Brownian (@245):
Kinda' moots my comment @244, eh? Oh well... more Tentacle Clusters for you, my friend!
I really have nothing to comment other than "Woo Maine! You go girl!"
Ehem..
Another small victory for equal rights in America.
Yay Maine...
As a divorced heterosexual male, I always wondered why teh gays were protected from the hell that marriage can turn into. 'Bout time they had the chance to ruin their lives like the straight folk.
One caution though... make sure to complete the rule changes. For a while here in Canada, gay marriage was legal, but gay divorce wasn't. Now that IS truly cruel!
Excuse me? AG has just pulled another fallacy out of his ass. Unless, of course, he would like to provide some supporting evidence.
To the best of my knowledge, and I admit to being anecdotal here, marriages are happier when each partner has money of his/her own that he/she doesn't have to account to the partner for. This is not to say that there should not be common funds for running the household - there should. But nothing says marriage should be symbiotic where money is concerned. I know marriages where the wife handles all the money, and where the husband handles all the money. It is only when the decision to handle the money is made unilaterally, that unhappiness is sure to result. In my own case, I handle it all, only because husbeast has never been real specific about inconsequential details like balancing a checkbook, a chore he permanently yielded to me after some disastrous attempts to manage. It works for us, and there are seldom disagreements about finances.
Hmpf, I just remembered that this WAS AG talking and I'm wondering why I bothered.
Daaww. How about animals? ^_^
Really @ 197 wrote,
There are already gay partners living together in committed, long term relationships.
There are already gay partners raising children.
So what kind of terrible things are going to occur to society as a result of allowing such committed partners, with or without children, to marry?
What kinds of terrible things have happened in states and countries that allow gay marriages?
And since you are concerned about the fate of children who are raised by the unmarried:
1. Allowing unmarried gays who have, or plan to have, children to marry would eliminate that concern, would it not?
2. Seems to me that in the majority of cases, when children are being raised by parents who aren't married, the parents are straight. So, how is allowing gays to marry going to change that?
It's remarkable how strongly people cling to beliefs that have been refuted by research.
I'm not the first person to post a reference to these studies, and I won't be the last, so here we go again:
Study: Same-Sex Parents Raise Well-Adjusted Kids
Okay, Cerberus, you can stop apologizing for your long, interesting, articulate, well-informed, Molly-worthy posts now.
@255
...But, the scrolling... (blush)
Thanks.
It's mostly because I'm pretty involved in it, Kinsey because of my asexuality, sexuality in general because of my partner's Kinsey 5ness, and the movement and struggle because of our same gender relationship (thank you transition for stripping me of fake-straight privilege).
Cerberus:
Thanks for the reply (@246), and please don't apologize for the length: People who don't want to read that much can scroll past it at very little cost!
You've obviously made more of a study of this than I have, and I defer to your greater knowledge... but I confess some of what you've said challenges my intuitive sense of the matter. In particular...
...I find it hard to imagine that most "johns" are thinking about it that hard at all. Rather, I would have thought most of the customers of "straight" sex providers (i.e., those not specifically selling some fetish-related service) would be much more focused on getting what they want in purely physical terms, rather than intellectualizing the relationship in the terms you suggest (indeed, I would guess many men go to sex workers specifically because they don't want to think about relationships).
Now, I can understand that "getting what they want in purely physical terms" might sound somewhat rape-like at first blush... but because there's compensation involved, it's at least theoretically a free and fair exchange (and to the extent that the compensation does not fully represent fair value, that's [IMHO] an effect of prohibition, rather than an inherent feature of the sex trade). For example, when you go to your butcher, you get exactly the cut of meat you demand... but because you pay for that service, and because the butcher is deliberately in the business of selling that service, your "demand" is not robbery, nor even a simulated robbery.
I wouldn't count this so much as evidence that the sex trade is rape-like, but rather as evidence of the shameful lack of options impoverished youth have to cope with life on the street: That is, to our great shame, a homeless teenage dropout on the streets may have precious few better options to turn to besides prostitution. The fact that many of the women (not to mention male hustlers as well) may have started when they were underaged is, of course, a problem in its own right, but I'm not sure it really demonstrates that most of their customers have some sort of rape narrative running in their heads.
In general, I think we need to be on our collective guard not to too quickly associate sex culture with rape culture. When we blur different problems together, it makes appropriate solutions more difficult to discern.
@257
Sorry, yes, let me explain. It's highly counterintuitive.
Basically the Netherlands model (full legalization, regulation, safe housing for prostitutes, and free STD testing (all very good things)) was looked into regarding the dangerous and unregulated street prostitution and there wasn't a dramatic downturn and no elimination of things like child prostitution from the Russian mafia, which was expected to be essentially "cut out" of the market by helping women and making it more attractive for men looking for sex.
Basically, the failure of this to occur was a point of failure in assuming that the male johns were looking primarily for sex, whereas, it seemed for some non-negligible portion of the john customer base, the interaction wasn't about sex, but rather power and the rape simulation or interaction.
This was a surprising result and in fact surprised me. The Sweden model solved that problem, but was problematic because it doesn't account as well for those who are genuinely looking for sex for pay (a genuine consent, but simulated attraction).
This is the basic backdrop and there's a bunch of battles on issues like whether "lie back and think of England" is genuinely neutral even if accepted as a prior consent, but those are more inter-group feminism battles (though of course important in their own ways).
So yeah, I'm not saying that it's confusing sex culture with rape culture, but rather that the Netherlands model failure had to do with solving the sex culture problem and finding that there was this stream of johns who were all about the rape culture. It's rather counterintuitive, but that was the result.
So yeah. Hope that helps. Of course, in general, I would warn you off over-relying on comparison of women to meat as an analogy, though I know you don't mean anything by it. It's just a bad habit to get into.
Addendum:
The important bit of that was that the johns even had to go out of their way to get these rape culture interactions and put themselves at greater risk to infections and the like, considering the centrality, regulation, and ease of access to the brothels (see Amsterdam, though possibly not anymore, there's been a bit of a Right-wing resurgence).
Basically, going out of your way to get worse, more dangerous, less regulated and experienced sex, doesn't make sense in a strictly sex-culture context.
Cerberus and Bill Dauphin:
There was an article in the December 2008 issue of Scientific American Mind that echoes a few of the things Cerberus found regarding the buying and selling of sex that you might be interested in reading: Why Do Men Buy Sex?
And Cerberus, I'll be adding my vote to your Molly nomination for this month as well. Those is some great and informative comments.
Really? should take notes, when he gets a free moment after barricading the nurseries against teh married gay hordes, of course.
Africangenesis apparently thinks a marriage is only worth having when one person has legal control over all the money and the other one cannot afford to leave. This explains his rejection of prenuptial agreements as well.
Separate accounts empower both partners. Not coincidentally this means in heterosexual couples the woman is empowered to make decisions about her future. Not coincidentally this pisses off Africangenesis.
Ahhhh, poor AG having a snit fit due to lack of uberkontrol? I think I can live with it.
One of the first things we did after we were married was make sure the Redhead had her own monies. While it has never been much (I have no idea of the balance even today), it has saved a lot of arguments over the years. Any sane couple make sure there are some funds, even if it is only a few dollars a week, of money they can spend how they see fit without having to justify the expense to their partner.
Cerberus:
Yah, I hit Post on that on my way out of my office, and before I'd even reached my car in the parking lot, I'd begun to worry it might be too easily misunderstood. Hopefully people who read my stuff here know me well enough to know I would never compare a woman1 to a piece of meat... but you're right, I should've been more careful.
In fact, I meant that analogy to compare the butcher, not the meat, to a prostitute2: That is, I was looking for an example of a service provider to whom a customer might give very specific and detailed instructions, with the expectation that they would be carried out to the letter. In other words, a customer-provider relationship that might appear at first glance to represent a power imbalance, but which is in fact fully consensual and mutually remunerative.
BTW, I think we've got a couple cross-cultural confusions interfering with our communication: First (and forgive me if I've misunderstood), you seem to be distinguishing between "johns" and other customers (perhaps by "johns" you mean specifically the customers of illicit street prostitutes), whereas in the U.S. that term (when used at all) refers to any customer of prostitution. Second, the distinction between licit and illicit prostitution is effectively moot for the U.S., because here, with the exception of a handful of legal brothels in part of Nevada, it's all illicit (officially, anyway, though in many places "massage parlors" and "escort" services advertise fairly openly without ever getting shut down).
It doesn't surprise me that bringing house prostitution "in out of the cold" in the Netherlands failed to shut down the street trade, but I'm not convinced that the continuing existence of a customer base for what can only be gotten illicitly indicts all (or even most) sex-worker customers as latent rapists. I'm also not sure it's valid to lump underage prostitution together with rape simulation: Both obviously relate to unbalanced power relationships3, but the latter is primarily about violence, while the former may well not be. Both reprehensible4, of course, but I'm not sure they're equivalent phenomena.
But fascinating as this discussion is, we're getting into the weeds a bit. I've been talking based only on my casual, anecdotal observations, and on my intuitive sense of things; I appreciate you listening despite the fact that I may well be talking out of my sphincter. To sum up:
1. I still find it hard to imagine that most, or even many, of the American men who seek out the services of adult (or at least ostensibly adult) female prostitutes do so with the conscious intent of acting out a rape scenario.
2. I understand and agree that there are numerous social problems associated with the real-world practice of illegal prostitution.
3. Nevertheless, I continue to reject Really?'s assertion that prostitution (among other things on his/her list) is per se any more "morally degrading" to society than any other commercial provision of personal services. (And this last point is really the only reason I started posting about prostitution in this thread at all.)
Thanks for the very (you should pardon the expression) stimulating conversation!
1 Especially sex workers, for whom I have nothing but high regard: Deep respect for those in the trade of their own choosing, and deep sympathy for those who are in it due to addiction, economic deprivation, or other exigencies.
2 No, that's no insult to butchers (see 1 above).
3 Actually, a fascination with young girls (or boys, for that matter) might be based on aesthetics rather than power... but anyone would have to be (at best) totally insensitive to the inherent power unbalance to act on that fascination.
4 To be honest, I'm not convinced rape fantasy is all that reprehensible, as long as everybody's clear on what the game is and there's no correlation to real-world rape... but I grok that by "rape simulation," you mean something uglier than erotic role-play.
sgbm @261,
This explains [AG's] rejection of prenuptial agreements as well
My goodness, a libertarian opposing freedom to contract; who could have imagined such a thing? The fact that the contract in question runs counter to the typical libertarian nerd's perenially-adolescent "I am Tarl Cabot of Gor!" sexual fantasy of how the world should work is mere coincidence, I'm sure.
Shorter bigot: I know I'm a bigot, but I'm too chicken shit to own up to my bigotry.
You still haven't given a real reason why gay marriage hurts society. Nothing except the usual, "It hurts traditional marriage's feelings." Which is asinine. I've been married nearly 15 years. It wouldn't matter if the entire world turned homosexual tomorrow. I'd still be straight. And I'd still be happily married to my husband. Two guys with a marriage license has zip, zilch, zero, nada, no impact on my marriage.
And yes, as someone pointed out above, I *do* think things like the increase in acceptability divorces, Vegas weddings, single-parent families, etc have already weakened the seriousness of the marriage commitment, and *have* done harm to our society by breaking down the family
Vegas weddings? Fuck you. My husband and I got married in Vegas. What the hell difference does it make where someone gets married? We were poor college students and a Las Vegas wedding fit into our budget. Again, fuck you.
My husband doesn't want kids. I don't want kids. So what? There are plenty of people out there who do. I didn't get married to have kids. I got married because I wanted to spend the rest of my life with my best friend.
And since when do children have a right to be raised by their biological parents? Children have a right to be raised by loving, humane parents. Ever heard of adoption?
50 years ago it was okay to make African Americans sit in the back of the bus. That's the problem with you conservative wack-jobs. You are opposed to progress. You're not conservative, you're regressive.
263-
Sorry. I tend to do that often, I'm glad I was able to be edifying anyways and no I wasn't trying to implicate that you compare women to meat or that you believe women are meat.
Moving back a bit, I am talking about a different interaction than rape simulation (rather the consensual rape fantasy) which I've always seen as part of the BDSM fantasy play spectrum and which I could easily see become a paid for industry considering how amateur domming that dark can have really dangerous results and may be too dark for many of the respectful types of partners that would do it safely and in full mind of the consent line. In other words, good doms can do dark scenes better and may be worth some good money for that purpose and may even be a viable sex worker career in a theoretical perfect society wherein egalitarian interactions are the norm and sexuality is fully out there and subject to no social shames.
And yeah, I'm actually using johns as term for any and all customers, though I suppose I've used it more in terms of those who purchase sex on the street, but yeah, I was intending it to be a term for all customers. I suppose for comparison, there are "good" johns who fit the expected model of wanting to pay for some form of sex they believe themselves unable to get through normal channels for whatever reason good or bad and "bad" johns who seem to be seeking out a power interaction instead, which will cause a rape interaction or a rape-like interaction, because the desire isn't the fulfillment of a sexual need, but rather a power need.
As such I suspect they probably more often than not are looking specifically to rape someone, only that they are seeking to get power and masculinity issues met on a sexual level, which more often than not occur in the form of these rape-like interactions.
Similarly, the power imbalance and the lack of adequate sexual exploration to create a basis for truly INFORMED consent makes all underaged prostitution inherently a rape of an underaged women, more obviously so when it's revealed how many are often essentially sex slaves to mafia figures, especially in Europe.
But stepping back even further as this whole thing is really just an interesting aside, you're absolutely right that there is nothing wrong with fully CONSENSUAL prostitution or sex work.
As an additional aside, the "social" cost of prostitution, even in our completely horrid system back in America, is really minimal on its face. That's not to say there isn't real harm being done to the women in sex work in America, but that it's "indirect" costs are mostly poverty based, that is they are symptomatic of poverty and they serve as visual "signs" of poverty. Their direct effect on say Really's family is minimal unless he's a john. The social despair is more how women are treated in sex work and how sex workers are deliberately targeted as essentially non-people, which is mainly a problem for sex workers themselves.
So yeah, hopefully I've helped you learn something you wanted to learn about and leave us both back to celebrating Maine and the impending question on New Hampshire. Let's keep the avalanche coming.
Brownian:
Thanks for the link; that was an interesting article. But wow, I now see what the recent SciAm-bashing thread (which I didn't follow closely) was on about: A relatively uncritical collection of top-level summaries of disparate and often contradictory research spanning conclusions ranging from benign (men go to prostitutes because they like sex) to bizarrely dark (patronizing prostitutes is equivalent to necrophilia), without any discussion of the researchers' methodology or much of any basis for making critical distinctions between the competing conclusions. (Mind you, I haven't provided any data to support my comments, either, but then I don't call myself Scientific American.)
One highlight: The article (in its editorial voice) claims that...
...and provides as "evidence" for that statement a wholly unquantified assertion from the website of an organization previously identified as an anti-prostitution advocacy group:
Now, I'm emphatically not claiming that everything is hunky-dory in the world of sex work, but anyone who has (for instance) listened to Susie Bright's podcast knows that there are at least some women (and men, too) who have gone into sex work because they like the work.
And if many do not like the work, what exactly are we to make of that? I'm sure most people don't actively like flipping burgers or picking up trash or snaking drains... but people do those jobs anyway, for a variety of good and sufficient reasons, and it doesn't mean their customers are oppressing them.
I don't mean to glibly compare sex to flipping burgers, of course, but many (most?) of us spend our days working at tasks we probably wouldn't choose, but which we've decided are the most congenial available way to meet our material and financial needs... and who ever promised us it would be otherwise?
As I said to Cerberus, I'm well aware that there are big social problems associated with the practice of prostitution... but the notion that sex is somehow too special (dare I say holy?) to be a job, or to be an object of commerce, is, IMHO, just another creeping intrusion of religious moralism.
@265
It's more a fantasy version of 1950s. I've seen the studies, the 50s were horrid for the family. Soaring divorces, dangerous abortions, intense unhappiness, tranquilizers a common part of family living, soaring child abuse, murders of children by distraught mothers, racial intolerance, regular murders and running outs of gay, interracial, and minority families (including Jews and Italians).
There's a reason that Rebel Without a Cause and American Graffiti were the way they were and just reading through the first few chapters of The Feminine Mystique will have one weeping on the floor at the sheer abuses that were tolerated in the home.
Hell, marital rape was still actually legal in a few states and treated as a myth in a huge number of others if it was regarded at all.
But apparently to a set of particular opponents, the 1950s were Leave it to Beaver and as such, they decry what is if anything a decrease in the "damage" to the family (which it must be pointed out, was radically changed in that same decade to a focus on the "nuclear family" which was hideously uncommon family arrangement before then, making traditional families as they view it as best 60 years old).
But yeah, compared to having no idea of my sexuality, accepting marital rape as a given, being at a risk for death with no investigation for being "queer", smashed on tranquilizers while abusive relationships were so common that they were even placed on TV as sympathetic portrayals, I'll take the risk that comes with George Takei getting hitched.
Luckily for all of us, the weird fake-50s obsession started by Raygun Ronnie seems to finally be dissipating.
And it feels so very good.
@267
I know we keep blabbing on about it, but you're absolutely right that there will always even in egalitarian theoretical paradise a place for sex work (even if it is just in erotic film or burlesque performances).
It's also germane that as much as we debate the now, the real problems that both bring the horrendous aspects of sex work as well as mess up what should be a lot more egalitarian like say porn are really driven by the social ills of sexism and poverty. A woman desperate for money or young and homeless is more easily taken advantage of, especially in a conclusively bad system like America and oppositional sexism drives a lot of the crap that leads to the "bad" john phenomenon and the rape interactions and the other horror stories (including the huge number of sex workers who are beaten, raped, and murdered).
The solution is both to make life better incrementally for the people in it now while shaping society to have less poverty and sexism and yes, the puritanical stupidity on sex is part of the sexism part.
Posted by: Really? | May 7, 2009
First, in response to various posts above, I neither "hate" nor "fear" gays, and I even have some very nice gay friends myself. (*gasp!*) I'm nothing but friendly to them - definitely never confronted/criticized their lifestyle - and they probably don't even know whether or not I'm anti-gay, except that they probably assume I am since they know i'm religious.
First, I know this is a cheap shot but I will fire anyways; I cannot help but think about the St Bartholomew's Day's Massacre. Not saying a word against those people that you think are detrimental to society.
So, to answer the question ("finally," i can hear foxfire saying...), I have never been directly negatively impacted by homosexuality. Nor do I ever expect to. Just like I never expect to be personally harmed by prostitution, or improper drug use.
*Indirectly*, however, I feel there is great harm to be done to our society by same-sex marriages, as I feel for prostitution, or illicit drug use, or alcohol abuse (something that HAS personally affected me in multiple ways, including the death of friends at the hands of a drunk driver). There are certain things - open prostitution, blatant drug use, alcohol abuse - that we agree are bad for our society, and so we agree (since we are a self-governing country) to not do those things.
I lived with an alcoholic father. It is nothing like my homosexuality. But thank you very much for comparing my sexuality to criminal activity. It is oh so comforting to know that I can never be a decent person in your eyes.
In the case of same-sex marriage, at stake is the "devaluing" of the marriage commitment and the family, the core of our society. And yes, as someone pointed out above, I *do* think things like the increase in acceptability divorces, Vegas weddings, single-parent families, etc have already weakened the seriousness of the marriage commitment, and *have* done harm to our society by breaking down the family.
As opposed to different times in christian European history when off springs were property to be used by the father. And, hey, what about those good old days when abused wives could not leave a bad marriage?
At stake is the welfare of our children. Study after study show that the best environment for children's "cognitive and verbal skills, academic performance, involvement in or avoidance of high-risk behaviors and crime, and emotional and psychological health" is one of a stable, two-parent traditional household. (ONE example are those by Child Trends, a child-welfare organization, showing there is "[v]alue for children in promoting strong, stable marriages between biological parents.") [See the "traditional marriage movement" wiki page, references 19-24, for more info.]
Really?, you lack historical perspective. Through out history, many children were raised by people who were not their biological parents. It has only been in the last century that death by child birth has gone down for women. And frankly, the mortality rate for men were not much better.
Also, the traditional two parent family is an invention of modern industrialization. Much more common through out most societies are children being raised by many people in their extended families.
Single parenthood sucks, it places too much pressure on the one parent. And children should have many different influences.
Another example is the decoupling of parenthood from marriage, further weakening marriage. Or, if we want to talk about rights... what about the rights of children to be raised by their biological parents?
Even though I just said that single parenthood sucks, it was better for me to be raised by my single mother than to be raised in a dysfunctional family with a drunken father. Children are bested raised by parents who are invested in their children, and just because a person is a biological parent does not neam they are a good parent.
Anyway, those are some random thoughts, and now I'm off to bed. Let the shredding of my opinions (and mental abilities, and personality, and moral perspective, etc etc) commence. :)
Here is my opinion of your personality. Really?, you are a spineless coward who is too scared to tell real people that you think they are defective. And you are willing to grasp onto any idea that has no relation to how people actually live in order to justify your silent bigotry.
Janine and Cerberus, you two are on a roll. Not the same roll, though. That would get pretty crowded.
Let us not forget two other grand artifacts of the 1950s:
1. "In God We Trust" added to US paper currency.
2. "Under God" inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance.
Anyone see a pattern?
(The movie Pleasantville comes to mind at times like these.)
hah, that was a fun movie. though I consider a toilet-free universe to be a nightmare :-p
Cerberus:
Huzzah!! A point of total accord on which to conclude our little colloquy! (I was afraid if I posted just once more in defense of sex work, folks 'round here would start calling me the Whoremonger of Pharyngula™!)
Thanks again for a thought-provoking discussion.
This gives me a really great idea...
Damn! Thou'st beat me to it!
Whoa! I was thinking the same thing!
Although I was still fairly young in the 50s and early 60s, I remember them as depressing, repressive times.
When I watch the series Mad Men, I get a kick of seeing the sets and props depicting the years of my early childhood, or at least those that were in the homes of those much better off than my family was.
But it's truly awful to be reminded how how badly women, children, and all minorities were treated during that era.
Just so long as you don't set it to disco and put the cast on roller skates, Lloyd Webber!
Strange Gods and Mrs Tilton,
"Africangenesis apparently thinks a marriage is only worth having when one person has legal control over all the money and the other one cannot afford to leave. This explains his rejection of prenuptial agreements as well."
Since I've never lived in a state that wasn't a community property state, all partners to the marriage had legal control over all the money, which is quite different than one person. Also, mentioning things which can be argued to devalue marriage, is different than advocating anything that would restrict the freedom of those who would choose such a marriage. In fact I favor "allowing" group marriages (communism?) of various forms. I do think that government will continue to make a muck of things if it stays involved in the licensing of marriages. My core statement about marriage was this:
"Its value and meaning should be between the between the people making the commitment."
I do wonder about any married anarchists that have separate bank accounts. "Property is theft" after all. If they can't make anarchy work at the family level how can they expect success at larger scales. Of course, they may have married outside their "faith".
Nostalgia is a powerful phenomenon, even more so when it draws people to look back fondly on a time that preceded their own birth. These idealized pasts never really existed, of course, and while "simpler times" surely have a charm (and perhaps a very real upside) of their own, the hazy gauze that covers them obscures all manner of drawback and injustice. We should be very wary of nostalgia as a political motivator, because the goal is usually to take something away from people who worked long and hard to get it.
Calm your fears, dear sir. I'm saving that for the musical version of Boogie Nights
Knockgoats @ 242:
Behold the great champion of human rights.
You think it's perfectly acceptable for the police to harass an elderly couple in their home because they requested Christian literature be displayed alongside pro-homosexual leaflets.
Suppose they had asked if socialist pamphlets could be displayed and got a visit from plod? How would you feel about that?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/3999004/Care-home-for-elderly-Christians-in-gay-row.html
Does anyone know why the hell africangenesis keeps talking about "anarchists" as if they were a significant political or social force at the moment? Was he bitten by an anarchist as a child?
I have a theory on that.....LOL
I got the impression that african genesis was an anarchist, well an anarcho-capitalist anyway.
You think it's perfectly acceptable for the police to harass an elderly couple in their home because they requested Christian literature be displayed alongside pro-homosexual leaflets. - Piltdown Man
Stop putting words in my mouth, Scumbag. If the account in the Times was accurate - we have, after all, only the "victims" word for it - then the actions of the council and police were officious and unjustifiable. The incident was, however, trivial compared to the actions police took against the G20 demonstrators for example. As evidence of some global conspiracy to persecute homophobes, it is worthless. Your second "example" is even more stupid and trivial. Grow up you self-pitying little shit.
Stephen Wells@283, kel@285,
AG isn't an anarcho-capitalist. He has a weird paranoid obsession that he's being persecuted by "left anarchists" and "Chomskyites".
By the way, AG, you've misunderstood the slogan "Property is theft". This is from Proudhon, who in fact supported individual property rights over both personal possessions and small-scale means of production. Here's part of what wikipedia has to say about the slogan:
"By "property," Proudhon referred to the Roman law concept of the sovereign right of property – the right of the proprietor to do with his property as he pleases, "to use and abuse," so long as in the end he submits to state-sanctioned title, and he contrasted the supposed right of property with the rights (which he considered valid) of liberty, equality, and security.
In the Confessions d'un revolutionnaire Proudhon further explained his use of this phrase:
In my first memorandum, in a frontal assault upon the established order, I said things like, Property is theft! The intention was to lodge a protest, to highlight, so to speak, the inanity of our institutions. At the time, that was my sole concern. Also, in the memorandum in which I demonstrated that startling proposition using simple arithmetic, I took care to speak out against any communist conclusion. In the System of Economic Contradictions, having recalled and confirmed my initial formula, I added another quite contrary one rooted in considerations of quite another order – a formula that could neither destroy the first proposition nor be demolished by it: Property is freedom. [...] In respect of property, as of all economic factors, harm and abuse cannot be dissevered from the good, any more than debit can from asset in double-entry book-keeping. The one necessarily spawns the other. To seek to do away with the abuses of property, is to destroy the thing itself; just as the striking of a debit from an account is tantamount to striking it from the credit record."
Although he was the first to call himself an anarchist, Proudhon's views were quite distant from those of most anarchists today. He held very patriarchal views, considering the father to be the head of the family, with whose powers over wife and children no outsider should interfere (now who does this remind me of?). He was also extremely antisemitic, and highly inconsistent.
Thanx Knockgoats,
Since "property is theft" is a popular phrase among anarchists, what current users of it mean is probably more important than what Proudhon originally meant. If Proudhon's meaning is still the current intent, that would imply that single family home owners and farmers would still be secure in their real and personal property and not at the mercy of participatory democracy, which is more specificity than one can get from most anarchists.
I guess we all knew this was coming. Those of us in neighboring New England states need to be ready to offer up some time and treasure if this "people's veto" referendum actually makes it onto a ballot!
"Since "property is theft" is a popular phrase among anarchists"
[citation needed]
Actually I've only come across it in the form of a joke:
"Why do anarchists only drink herbal tea?"
"Because proper tea is theft."
"more specificity than one can get from most anarchists."
I, at your request, did sketch how a (non-anarchist) direct democratic socialism might work. There's actually plenty available online about anarchist ideas of how a future anarchist society might look (SC has made it clear she's not very interested in this, preferring to apply anarchist principles to contemporary issues), if you could be bothered to look for it rather than simply indulging your paranoia. You could start from:
anarchist economics and references therefrom.
Knockgoats @ 286:
Thanks for another priceless insight into the leftard mindset.
I never said there was a "global conspiracy". Stop putting words in my mouth. I think it's a cultural trend which is gathering momentum.
Of course you regard low-level harassment of Christians as "trivial". There's no great progressive cause involved ... it doesn't have the cheap drama of crowds of unwashed hippies getting their heads broken by Robocop ... nothing to make an aging radical feel he has a full head of long hair again.
Beardy twunt.
(How about this: thttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_east/5319896.stm? Again, what if it had been a socialist activist handing out tracts at a Tory conference?)
Yawn, the deluded is paranoid. Welcome to belief in god, where the mind and rationality go out the window.
Bill Dauphin @ 239:
Well there's one allegation you can easily check. Get a copy of the Kinsey report and see if it does indeed refer to the sexual stimulation of children by Kinsey researchers.
If this proves to be so, I have every confidence the liberal community will react with the same justified disgust and outrage they displayed at the clerical sex abuse scandals.
Why? Did Kinsey claim he was acting under the one and only true morality? Did the head of all universities, everywhere, insist that this was covered up?
If this is what he did, then that is indeed unethical, immoral, and despicable. What the Catholic Church did, again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again (and then lie about it) and again and again and again is downright EVIL.
Don't worry if you can't seem to get that through your head, Pilty. None of us here expect you to. You see, we've read your comments for quite awhile now, and everything about you from your lie-as-moniker to nearly every word in your comments shows you to be just as evil. You're a reprehensible person, and you defend reprehensible persons.
Amen brother.
Bill Dauphin @ 244:
I don't consider human sexuality to be innocuous in the same way I don't consider any tremendously powerful force of nature to be innocuous. They can be deadly. It's not a question of a megalomaniac desire for "control" over other human beings; it's a question of protecting individuals & society from potentially destructive impulses.
You seem to assume I regard sexual impulses as "inherently immoral". What am I, a Cathar?
You also seem to assume I think the sexual drive should be "shut down", "thwarted" and "thoughtlessly dammed". What am I, a Puritan?
Like you, I believe sexual appetites should be "channeled fruitfully". Unlike you, I don't believe the "permissive" society is doing this. Consider:
- Western society has in the past few decades become saturated with images of a highly sexualized nature. These can be seen on television, on cinema screens, in magazines, advertising billboards, etc.
- These images often don't even relate specifically to sex as such - they could be advertising motor cars or chocolate. In other words, a 'pan-sexualism' has crept into the culture, whereby an erotic component is gratuitously grafted on to something that has nothing to do with sex.
- At no point is this pervasive eroticism linked to the conception and raising of children. Quite the reverse - the possibility of conceiving a child is an annoying inconvenience that gets in the way of a free and easy hedonism. Hence the urgency with which contraceptive devices and procedures are devised and promoted.
- As the years have passed, these images have become more and more explicit. This is in conformity with the inner logic of a consciously taboo-breaking mindset - once one sacred cow has been killed the hunt is on to find an even bigger and more sacred one to slaughter in order to achieve the same frisson. This 'drift' toward the ever more extreme can easily be confirmed by watching a 10-year-old movie whose sexual content was considered shocking in its day. Chances are it will now seem quaint, innocent even.
- Younger age-groups are being exposed to these processes. Witness, for example, the emergence of sexualised children's toys such as the Bratz range of dolls. Observe how the so-called 'lads' mags' that took off in the 90s are regularly displayed in newsagents' where they can easily be seen by children, despite featuring soft-porn cover imagery which is often almost as explicit as the 'top-shelf' material. Or what about the introduction of an explicitly bisexual character in the new Doctor Who series?
These developments are indisputable. What you think the consequences will be depends on your view of sexuality. Personally I believe sex is a tremendously powerful force with vast physical, psychological and spiritual ramifications. Whatever the final cultural effect of this process might be, I can't see it being trivial.
Pilty the paranoid. Seek professional help. You are losing it.
i actually thought NY would be next..... our gov really wants it
good
Brownian @ 294:
I don't know what he claimed but you can be sure he believed it. Kinsey's one true morality may have been Sex; it may have been Pleasure; it may have been Freedom; it may have been that there are no true moralities ("nothing is true, everything is permitted"); it may even, in light of his pilgrimage to Sicily, have been the Law of Thelema.
Apparently they didn't feel the need. That's what's really scary.
You mean ... if he didn't believe he was acting under the one and only true morality, and if his actions were not covered up -- then those actions would NOT have been unethical, immoral and despicable?? Incredible.
Nope. What the network of sodomites who infiltrated the Catholic Church did was downright evil.
The sickest irony is that the hellbound bishops who protected this scum were only acting in accordance with best liberal practice, weren't they? Don't condemn, don't be judgmental ... For Heaven's sake, we don't use such bigoted expressions as sin in this day and age ... These people aren't evil, they're just ill. They don't need demonizing, they need counselling.
http://www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=744
+++
Nerd of Redhead @ 297:
Tell me, why are the humans behind this organization still alive?
Because being disgusting evil assholes is not necessarily a terminal illness?
Interesting.
Pilty, why are your guilty priests still in their frocks? It's called immorality of the hierarchy. And you know it. Your feeble attempts to deflect the issue speaks volumes to your contribution to the immorality. If you were a moral person, you would demand your hierarchy turn over all pedophiles to the secular authorities or you will leave the church and encourage all you know to do likewise. Why haven't you done so?
Your brain is in backwards.
Learn to read.
No, fuckface. They were acting in accordance with the not-yet-Pope's directives. I do wish you'd learn to read.
Hmm, sounds like you've committed murder in your heart. Enjoy hell, you piece of filth.
Tell us, why are the humans behind this organization still alive?
You remain evil scum, Piltdown, a truly despicable human.
From the NAMBLA website:
The 1960s saw the blooming of a new and democratic concept of children, youth and the family. Childrens' natural spontaneity and joyful exhuberance, their pursuit of discovery and experiment, all were seen as vitally important social activities. Children are not simply our beneficiaries; they are our benefactors as well.
Ever since this transformative period, forces of reaction have been working to sow seeds of anxiety about the freedoms widely considered necessary to a healthy functioning society.
(Check out the Wiki article on this amiable association - it's quite an eye-opener. There's no doubt it emerged from the gay subculture and was supported by the gay subculture until it became too hot to handle.)
NAMBLA should take the more honorable actions that the RRC took; cover up, deny and blame the victims.
Trust an asshole like the Hoax to take the issue of GLBT marriage and take it into pedophilia.
Pilty,
Would you like us to start naming all the organizations associated with the church that did horrible things?
Pilty uses child molestation as an argument against the gays at the same time as defending an organisation that has protected and redistributed child molesters throughout the globe?
Yes. I don't think it's a violation of Godwin's Law to say that the Nuremberg Principles were designed to protect against people like the Hoax, for whom the Church can do no wrong, even when it does no right.
Piltdown,
What the network of sodomites who infiltrated the Catholic Church did was does is downright evil.
Fixed it for you. No, that's okay - I'll add it to your tab.
It's not even that there were paedophile priests, it's that the organisation systematically protected those paedophiles, paid hush money to the victims and relocated those priests to a new area unbeknown to the new town that their new priest was a kiddy fiddler. And this is meant to be not only a moral source but the moral source?!?
Pilty (@296):
So what?
You disclaim being a puritan, yet implicit in all your discourse on this matter is the suggestion that "pervasive eroticism" — indeed, all focus on sexuality and sexual pleasure — is manifestly wrong except as "linked to the conception and raising of children."
I utterly reject that premise, and I assert that you cannot support that notion except by recourse to religious moralism, imputed to a nonexistent god, but in fact the tools religious institutions employ to control the masses.
IMHO, most if not all of the social ills (as distinct, that is, from potential individual consequences of personal choices) attributed to sexuality (or, if you prefer, "pervasive eroticism") are in fact more correctly understood as caused by the fear of sexuality, and by draconian efforts to control and suppress a wholly natural human desire for pleasure.
The fact that sexual function evolved for the purpose of procreation does not imply that all other uses of sexuality are evil. After all, vision and hearing evolved to promote physical survival, but that does not render the pleasure of looking at art and listening to music immoral.
I find it bizarre (absurd, really) that so many people take so much pleasure from opposing pleasure.
And there's also the inaction from their alleged god. They claim there's an all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing superbeing that watches over and cares for humanity; why is it this entity sits by and does nothing while priests commit atrocities in his name, and other priests protect them?
What Pilty doesn't get is that forcing people to repress their sexuality does more harm than good.
Got that, Pilty? More. Harm. Than. Good.
I want you to write that on the blackboard 100 times before you leave school today.
The goal here is not only to ensure that people's rights aren't violated, it's to help alleviate our social/cultural neurosis about sex, sexuality, and sexual orientation. Religion is definitely part of the problem here. If you can't see that, you're blind. The fact that you link homosexuality with pedophilia - rather than with an array of discriminatory practices perpetuated against a minority - demonstrates that you're as neurotic about sex as the average perpetually-shocked bluehead or child-molesting priest.
By the way, what does NAMBLA have to do with the legalization of same-sex marriage?
Let me answer that one for you, because I'm quite sure you can't answer it for yourself:
NOTHING.
I tend to take God out of the equation. I figure, if God is not going to step in when the RCC tortured and killed heretics, burned young women at the stake for the crime of witchcraft, when the Spanish committed genocide in the Americas, when those in the Children's Crusade were taken into slavery, when the Nazi's committed genocide against the Jews, etc... the list is endless. If God is not going to step in on any of those things, why should God step in to protect those altar boys? It's the RCC that needs to answer for the crimes especially when it was so systematic.
Kel, God has been too busy lowering gas prices and fixing sporting events to stop trivial events like child molestation.
FYI to all...
After a brief (because that's all it's worth) attempt to Google up some info on Pilty's assertions about Kinsey, I still don't claim to know much about how legitimate scientists and historians regard his legacy. I can, however, say that I found support for Pilty's claims only on obviously wingnuttish websites, with most lines of sourcing tracing back to a single author, Judith Reisman1, who has apparently made something of a career out of blaming Kinsey as the father of our allegedly ruinously permissive approach to sexuality.
In my search, I did find this detailed takedown of some of the anti-Kinsey propaganda. Admittedly this is not an unbiased source, either — it's a "watchdog" website reporting on the excesses of conservative media — but the article is detailed and coherent... which is more than I can say for anything I could find supporting Reisman's claims.
It's clear (and clearly controversial) that Kinsey surveyed men who had had sex with children and did not report them to law enforcement — that much, along with Kinsey's own bisexuality, sexual swapping among his researchers, and the fact that they filmed adult sexual acts, was in the recent popular movie (which the anti-Kinsey forces nevertheless appear to consider a deliberate whitewash) — but the suggestion that Kinsey or his researchers carried out sexual experiments on children (or that they solicited pedophiles to do so on their behalf) appears to be based on the presumption that that's the only way the Kinsey Report data on children's sexual responses could have been obtained, rather than on any direct evidence. The Kinsey Institute responds to this assertion thusly (as quoted in the article linked above):
Of course, the anti-Kinsey forces no doubt write this off as self-serving falsehood... but as I suspected, their stuff all has the taste and texture of classic denialism, similar in rhetorical and intellectual style to Holocaust denialism, 9/11 truthism, Moon landing hoaxism, etc.
Indeed, Pilty's claim that...
...resembles nothing so much as theists' disingenuous assertion that atheism is "just another religion." Just as atheists' rejection of god belief gets mischaracterized as an alternative god belief, so Pilty mischaracterizes Kinsey's rejection of bogus moralism about sex as an alternative bogus moralism.
To which I can only respond with but a single word: Batcrap!
1 Some of Reisman's reported ideas about sexuality, including her notion of "erototoxin," sound suspiciously like they may be the source of some of Pilty's notions.
Yeah true. It's important to make statues bleed or put his likeness into inanimate objects to be held accountable for what others are doing in his name.
Pilty uses child molestation as an argument against the gays at the same time as defending an organisation that has protected and redistributed child molesters throughout the globe?
hadn't we established long ago that religiobots like Pilty exhibit massive denial and projection?
consider this another great example of projection.
Of course, it was a rhetorical question designed for Pilty to see his own hypocrisy. Like Randy understanding natural selection, the chances of getting through are slim. But it's worth a shot.
At no point is this pervasive eroticism linked to the conception and raising of children.
Why do you think pervasive eroticism should be linked to the raising of children? Pervert!
Knockgoats,
"I, at your request, did sketch how a (non-anarchist) direct democratic socialism might work. There's actually plenty available online"
Yes, I hope I thanked you at the time. I believe that I shared with you the concern that worker's organizations select the union boss types as leaders. Just as in other political organizations the worst seem to rise to the top. When I was reading saint Kropotkin, I noticed that the forwards and associated literature were similarly entralled with the rise of unions and worker organizations. Presumably, in your nation oriented socialism there would be some checks on union and worker power, but in anarchism, I don't seen any means for such checks to come into existence, and even on the internet, not only are mechanisms not discussed, it appears the problem is not even acknowledged. Instead there is this mystical assumption that "participatory democracy" will be truly egalitarian, with no one have more persuasive abuility or spheres of influence, no one will have prejudices, there will be no problems reaching consenssus, informal organizations won't fill the vacuum of power, etc. I see no reason it won't devolve into no-holds-barred union bosses imposing their idea of your obligations upon you. Humans tend to spontaneously organize, and it isn't always the most egalitarian organizations that win, even with the best of intentions. Anarchists are not participating in good faith by not participating in filling in details, they expect us to take on faith, that anarchism will be more democratic, egalitiarian, productive, evironmentally and socially conscious.
Contrast that bad faith with the openness and transparency displayed by others. Even internal disputes and differences in economic schools are freely discussed, criticised and defended. How existing institutions would be changed and "improved" is openly discussed. The similarity to present and past social institutions allow insight from their strengths and weaknesses to be considered, and more plausible consideration of proposed reforms.
in your nation oriented socialism - africangenesis
The fact that you can describe my views in this way shows that you have not understand them. IIRC, I specifically noted (a) the need to include a global level for matters that need to be decided at that level, and (b) my preference for keeping decisions at the most local level feasible for each class of decision. Unlike you, I am a consistent anti-nationalist.
FWIW, I agree with you that relying on consensus rather than voting, and more generally doing away with formal rules (laws, constitutions etc.) would indeed risk the rise of major power differences in favour of (for example) those prepared to sit in meetings the longest. However, the claim of "bad faith" is unjustified because, contrary to your claims, there is a considerable amount of anarchist discussion readily available of how anarchist societies would or could work - see for example:
Forms of Decisionmaking and Organization.
It would perhaps be inconsistent for anarchists to produce over-detailed blueprints for future anarchist societies - since the members of those societies will determine how they work.
"Libertarians" are far more guilty of bad faith, in failing to acknowledge the institutional embedding of all markets, the extent of the failures of markets to deal with externalities, their tendency to concentrate wealth (and hence power), and the extent of non-state forms of oppression and exploitation. Moreover, they show consistent bad faith in claiming the strongest aspect of capitalism - its ability to encourage innovation - for themselves, while claiming that all its bad features are the result of deviations from "libertarian" principles, ignoring the fact that it is actually existing capitalism, in which strong states have played an essential part, that has produced both, and nothing close to a "libertarian" society has ever existed. (If you can point me to "libertarian" discussions that acknowledge and deal with these points and hence bring evidence against my claim of bad faith as I have of yours, please do.)
Incidentally, you use the term "participatory democracy" a lot. What exactly are you meaning by it? I find it an unsatisfactorily vague term, which can mean anything from direct democracy (which I advocate) to the government organising "consultation" exercises with predetermined outcomes.
OT: I hope this weekend to have time to respond to your last AGW-related post on the "How did we get to this point" thread. I would not normally post on such an old thread, but I was obliged by a clutch of deadlines to take a break from Pharyngula.
Oh - and another common form of "libertarian" bad faith: accusations of racism against anyone who points out that the vast majority of "libertarians" are well-off white males, or that those of European descent benefit from historically-rooted privilege, while failing to recognise real racism e.g. by Israeli Jews against Arabs.
i actually thought NY would be next..... our gov really wants it
But he's entirely inept.
Those people with a bizarre nostalgia for the "way things used to be" need to read Stephanie Coontz' book "The way we never were".
Windy #320
For the win.
Knockgoats,
"my preference for keeping decisions at the most local level feasible for each class of decision. Unlike you, I am a consistent anti-nationalist."
I seem to recall that I had less respect for Saddam's sovereignty than you. And I don't acknowledge my own countries sovereignty over me, or sovereignty of other countries over their citizens.
If you preference for local control is enforced, it might reduce some of the monopolistic and trust behavior associated with unions. In the US, unfortunately unions have anti-trust exemptions that have allowed unions to join with corporations in exploiting other workers with multi-tiered wage systems.
""Libertarians" are far more guilty of bad faith, in failing to acknowledge the institutional embedding of all markets, the extent of the failures of markets to deal with externalities, their tendency to concentrate wealth (and hence power), and the extent of non-state forms of oppression and exploitation. "
You must be thinking of anarchism. Both the chicago and austrian schools of economics acknowledge and address the problems of externalities and information costs. Most libertarians accept a legitimate government role in addressing these, and oppose non-state forms of oppression. I have worked on dark sky initiatives, and favored a revenue neutral shift to taxing oil consumption even before the global warming scare, to encourage efficiency, and reduce imports and to reflect the externality of protecting the sea lanes for the oil trade. Looking for the most efficient and least coercive way to address social problems is hardly something that needs to be apologized for.
It is government intervention in markets that increased income inequality, by directing the returns on the increased productivity of labor towards capital rather than labor. The federal reserve does this by considering wage increases inflationary. The market would have resulted in less income inequality.
Globalization has decreased income inequality by raising huge middle classes in China, India and other Asian tigers. Globalization's local effects in the developed nations has arguably increased income inequality, but overall the world is better off. I am a consistent anti-nationalist.
agrciangenesis,
"You must be thinking of anarchism."
Don't be more ridiculous than you can help.
"Most libertarians... oppose non-state forms of oppression."
Bilge. You yourself support the "right" of parents to sexually mutilate their daughters. Walton supports the "right" of food hoarders in famines to let people starve to death.
"It is government intervention in markets that increased income inequality, by directing the returns on the increased productivity of labor towards capital rather than labor. The federal reserve does this by considering wage increases inflationary. The market would have resulted in less income inequality."
Government interventions can of course act either to reduce income inequalities (minimum wages, welfare, progressive taxation), or to increase them. It remains the fact that the countries with least income inequality are extremely remote from "libertarian" economic systems; while when we were closest to such systems, in the 19th and early 20th century, income inequalities were extreme. Such inequalities systematically increase when the right is in power. Markets will tend to increase inequalities for the simple reason that the rich have more choice about when and with whom they bargain, and more resources to gather information - and that is assuming, contrary to fact, that (for example) employers will not hire thugs to murder trades unionists when states allow them to do so.
"Globalization has decreased income inequality by raising huge middle classes in China, India and other Asian tigers. Globalization's local effects in the developed nations has arguably increased income inequality, but overall the world is better off."
Measuring global income inequality is extremely difficult - any simple claim that it has either increased or decreased over the past few decades is highly dubious.
Of course China, India and the other "Asian tigers" are all very remote from "libertarian" economics and China, which accounts for most of the people who have risen out of poverty, is still a largely state-controlled economy. It is in any case arguable that Asian states' relative economic rise is simply a recovery from the disastrous periods of civil war and Maoism (China), and of colonialism (India and south-east Asia). World growth rates have been slower during the era of globalisation than the post-WWII period of high tax rates and trade barriers (roughly 1945-75). Oh, and of course globalisation has brought us the current economic crisis.
"I am a consistent anti-nationalist."
Your persistent parroting of neocon lies about Iraq shows this to be false.
"Oh, and of course globalisation has brought us the current economic crisis." -- knockgoats
It is actually the government run monetary system, which favors the banks with the benefits of printing money through leverage. It created the crisis through artificially low interest rates fueling speculatiion. It then allowed trillions of dollars to disappear through deleveraging, without printing replacements. I can't believe it is so stupid. If you know a good place to blog on this where it might have some influence, please let me know.
"I am a consistent anti-nationalist." -- me
"Your persistent parroting of neocon lies about Iraq shows this to be false." -- knockgoats
I'd have to see the structure of your argument, to know whether it was valid or not. Surely there are non-nationalist reasons for opposing a dictator and an immoral insurgency. Your argument should be able to distinquish my opposition to the 1st Gulf War fought for the "New World Order" from my enthusiasm for pointing out how benign the second one was from a historical perspective.
On the issue of Anthropogenic Global Warming, perhaps you will join me on the Texas State Climatologist's blog at the Houston Chronicle. It might be a more appropropriate forum and he doesn't censor opposing views like realclimate.org does:
http://www.chron.com/commons/readerblogs/atmosphere.html
I have many past postings there and the current ones are on:
The Attack of the Factoids
The Skeptic's Handbook
If you really want to hash it out here, I suggest we get prior permission from PZ.
Bill Dauphin @ 311:
I do not claim "other uses of sexuality are evil". I do maintain they are strictly secondary, just as looking at art and listening to music are secondary to physical survival.
If you want a "secular" justification of traditional sexual morality's emphasis on procreation, I guess one could argue along these lines:-
- Human life is essentially social; man requires a social context in which to flourish.
- To a certain extent social life requires individuals sacrifice immediate personal gratification for the greater good. Sometimes these sacrifices are particularly onerous - for example in wartime.
- For this reason, society has a legitimate interest in curbing hedonistic excesses: a widespread obsession with personal gratification imperils the culture of communal self-sacrifice necessary to keep society afloat.
- Sex brings this tension between gratification and sacrifice into particularly sharp relief: sex is intensely pleasurable yet its consequences - children - demand considerable sacrifices on the part of individuals.
- Modern man thinks he has resolved this dilemma through contraceptive technology; contraception removes the burdonsome consequences of sex, allowing its pleasurable aspects to be freely indulged.
- Those who hold the traditional position point out that this "uncoupling" removes a desirable check on socially corrosive hedonism.
- Moreover, society has a legitimate interest in privileging the procreative aspect of sex; it supplies the next generation of the community.
Regarding the latter point, it is generally acknowledged that Europe is currently facing a major demographic crisis: not enough babies are being born. And while Europeans are busy aborting and contracepting themselves out of existence, Muslims are steadily procreating.
It would be ironic if decadent Westerners' rejection of traditional Christian teaching regarding continence resulted in their subjugation to Islam. For believers, it might suggest God has a sense of humour.
+++
BTW, the relationship between sex and the conception/raising of children was just one of five points I raised in that post. The others were: the prevalence of erotic imagery in modern society; the annexation of the non-sexual to the sexual; the increasingly explicit nature of this imagery; and the increasing exposure of children to its manifestations.
You do not address these points - is that because you agree they are a fair description of contemporary phenomena? If so, do you regard these developments as innocuous?
Bill Dauphin @ 316:
In other words, he was an accessory to the sexual abuse of children.
Well, yes. This probably has something to do with the fact that Kinsey's tables relating to pre-adolescent orgasms give stopwatch timings.
What a pile of stupid sophistry Pilty. But we expect that from you. One of these days, if you ever open up your mind to reality, you won't make such inane remarks, and our opinion of you might go up. As it is we consider everything you say a self serving lie, and you never disappoint.
Pilty:
I didn't say you made such a claim; I asserted that this position implicitly underlies the things you do say.
The better question than whether this is a fair representation is why you think these things matter. I dealt with the one point about disconnection between eroticism and procreation because the progression of your argument suggested that you consider that point the lynchpin: You seem to suggest that what's wrong with the "pervasive eroticism" your other points purport to describe is that it's disconnected from procreation. Implicitly, then, you're suggesting (without explicitly making the claim) that sexuality is inherently problematic except in the context of procreation. Because if (as I assert) there's nothing wrong with nonprocreative sex (and erotic expressions related thereto), then the only response required to any of your points is... so what?
No, in other words, he was a social scientist whose data happened to include information about illegal acts. In fact, much of what Kinsey's subjects told him (i.e., lots of stuff having nothing to do with children) was illegal at the time of his research, even though most of it is now not only legal but considered normal (by mainstream researchers and rational laypeople, that is). Do you also assert he was an accessory to the crime of sodomy because people talked to him about oral and anal sex, which were then illegal? Was he an accessory to the crime of adultery because his subjects talked to him about extramarital affairs?
More broadly, do you assert that social scientists can never offer their research subjects confidentiality, but must report every instance of illegal behavior that shows up in their data? If so, you've just effectively banned a whole research discipline (and lost us any chance of a data-based understanding of human behavior).
As to the reports of sex with children, under current Indiana law (and, AFAIK, the law of most jurisdictions), Kinsey would be required to report such revelations... but that was not the law at the time. Had it been, it's doubtful it would have led to the arrest or conviction of any of the 9 subjects (out of may thousands) who told Kinsey about sex with children: The survey was entirely voluntary, and those people surely would not have agreed to speak to Kinsey in the first place if he could not have guaranteed their confidentiality.
But you know, my interest in this was never to validate Kinsey's ethical goodness: I don't own any Kinsey stock. Instead, I was trying to evaluate the intellectual quality and honesty of your position... and it appears that my initial estimate was correct: The arguments you're advancing (but which are apparently not original to you) are nothing but nutbag denialist armwaving, of an intellectual piece with the other sorts of denialism I mentioned in my last comment. There may well be legitimate questions to ask about the ethics of Kinsey's methods; these are not them.
One the more bizarre hallmarks of denialist arguments is the notion that clear, unhidden, indisputable evidence is right in front of the public's face... and yet only the denialists themselves seem able to see it for what it is. You say...
...and frankly, even the great and powerful SIWOTI can't compel me to bother hunting down a copy of the infamous Table 34 to evaluate it firsthand. But I don't need to: In order to take your assertion at face value and believe it means what you seem to think it means, I would have to believe that Kinsey was both an evil pedophile mastermind and stupid enough to publish, in plain unvarnished language, in his own book, evidence that would have been (if it were what you claim it to have been) sufficient to put him in prison for life. And, BTW, I must also believe that this evidence has been available for 60 years now, and in all that time only you, Judith Reisman, and a tiny handful of other wingnuts have been able to see it for what it is.
Sorry, but my Occam's razor leaves that pile of... er, argument... as bloody and dead as "long pig" in Sweeney Todd's barber chair.
But thanks for playing.
Bill Dauphin @ 332:
Very well, I concede the point. The disconnection between eroticism and procreation is the lynchpin.
So, whether or not it's fair to say that children are being increasingly exposed to erotic imagery, it would be a matter of absolutely no concern if they were ...?
+++
None dare call it cover-up.
Possibly, although they're hardly of the same order of magnitude.
That alone would make it worthwhile.
A rather naive view of things. In the first place, ordinary decent members of "the public" would have neither the time nor the inclination to read Kinsey's opus; only moral degenerates like himself, who shared his agenda, would be likely to do so.
And of course Kinsey himself had friends in high places & with deep pockets, notably the Rockefeller Foundation.
Mrs Tilton @ 235:
Spare me your insulting imbecilities.
So these civilizations contained violence, oppression and corruption. Welcome to the human race.
All civilizations contain violence, oppression and corruption, including our own. Me, I put it down to the Fall of Man. I guess you'd blame insufficient sex education.
But if you seriously believe ancient Rome was no more than a "parasite" and medieval Christendom no more than a "tyranny", you're probably beyond reason. (What would you put in their place - the EU, a byword for corruption that is cordially and universally loathed by ordinary folk?)
By "the people" you mean, of course, "revolutionary secret societies claiming to be acting on behalf of the people".
I assume you're referring to the Mortara case (singular)? Whatever one's views on the affair, the circumstances were rather more nuanced than your words suggest. And (to employ Dr Knockgoats' idiom) it pales into insignificance beside such examples of secular intervention in a family's affairs as Ruby Ridge.
We're not talking about "normal people". We're talking about sodomites, who are by definition abnormal. The silencing of normal people's disapproval is an attempt to culturally normalize their abnormal actions and so silence their own guilty consciences.
Thank you. We can all sleep that bit more soundly in our beds knowing you're looking out for us. Under you're zealous eye we can be sure justice will be done.
Or maybe not. The evident relish with which you spoke (@ 26) of the "extraparliamentary means" used to keep the CSA in the Novus Ordo Seclorum* leads me to suspect you're full of it.
(* "... to show them the error of their ways" as you put it. And as we all know, error has no rights.)
After all, really, how long can these Christers be allowed to indoctrinate their children with their homophobic beliefs? Why, it's tantamount to child abuse. Surely the beneficient state should intervene to protect these unfortunate children's human rights - and the good of society as a whole - by removing them from their merely biological parents and placing them in the care of trained social workers? As for the parents, a few sessions of compulsory diversity awareness consciousness-raising will re-educate them into a more socially acceptable point of view - show them the error of their ways, as it were.
And I want to protect my children from people like you. It's a culture war.
Time for a ciggie.
We keep asking the same from you, but you keep posting like an imbecile who can't learn anything. Here's the point Pilty, we don't give a shit about your opinion. You don't give a shit about ours either. So do everyone a favor and just go away.
Piltdown:
LOL! And you expect to be taken seriously...? What superstitious nonsense you spout!
(He never disappoints, does he?)
"Abnormal" by whose unbiased definition? You have no such definition in your arsenal, sir. Piltdown Man, have you noticed how many "normal" people disagree with you? Can you explain why the APA struck homosexuality from the DSM nearly forty years ago? Where do you stand on the abomination of Virginia vs. Loving?
Yes, and you have apparently sided with the people who have spent decades, if not generations, persecuting homosexuals while protecting and enabling pedophiles. Whose conscience needs soothing? Not mine, I assure you.
Hi, Really - I too abandoned teh innertubes for the reality of outdoors - it quit raining and there were many I can has things to resolve - teh weeds that grooooowd.
With respect to # 195:
FINALLY, Really has no personal experience and therefore no logical or rational reason based on personal experience to oppose gay marriage.
Do data in the studies include stable homosexual families? Do studies include the benefit of a homosexual couple vs a single parent? What is the scientific definition of a "traditional household?
Sorry, Really - I think your negative opinion of gay marriage is amygala biased.
I guess you'd blame insufficient sex education.
hmm.
didn't Napoleon die of Syphilis?
We're talking about sodomites, who are by definition abnormal.
are people with freckles* abnormal?
*(yes, I know gingers have no souls, but save the "ginger" links from the peanut gallery till later, everyone)
As for the parents, a few sessions of compulsory diversity awareness consciousness-raising will re-educate them into a more socially acceptable point of view - show them the error of their ways, as it were.
we've already seen how little actual education impacts ignorant morons.
Aren't you here to testify to that, in fact?
Yes, that's right, wave your little moron flag for us again.
that's a good little wanker.
"If so, you've just effectively banned a whole research discipline (and lost us any chance of a data-based understanding of human behavior)."
and our resident toad croaks:
That alone would make it worthwhile.
yes, ignorance can only exist if no light is shining on it, right Pilty?
someday, you'll be trodden under reality like all the rest of the bigots in love with their own fictions.
and it won't matter how loud you scream, because nobody pays attention to the screams of bugs that scurry in the dark.
the only sound they might hear is a soft crunch underfoot.
And I want to protect my children from people like you. It's a culture war.
Time for a ciggie.
One has to love an asshole who adds humor to his bigotry. It almost distracts me from the fact he thinks I am a treat to humanity and thinks I should be silenced.
No. It shows that the Hoax has the humor of a bully.
Sorry Ichthyic, I can't withhold my link to the story of my favorite Ginger Geezer ever.
Also, I'm disgusted that Pilty would use PZ's bandwidth to wank about religiously rationalized homophobia, one-handed to the extent that he wants a cigarette afterward.
You know, homophobia is rapidly going every bit as extinct as concerns over the threat to civilization represented by miscegenation. What makes me sad is that Pilty is allowed anywhere near children. One of my boy's closest friends has two mommies, one of whom officiated in civil ceremonies for same sex couples at San Francisco's City Hall. My children, characteristically for their generation, will be just as confused about, and dismissive of Pilty's homophobia as they will be about the bizarre cult to which he belongs.
My irony meter is twitching. One cannot help but wonder how much of Pilty's second-hand smoke is inhaled by his own children.
*blink blink*
Wow. I'm going to regret this, I suspect, but just exactly what percentage of a population needs to exhibit a certain trait before it falls within your parameters of "normal?"
I expect Pilty to come back with something suitably low, but it will be a lie. Uniformity and conformity are what he's after, despite his protestations to the contrary and his ostensible distaste for "compulsory approval." He wants to enforce his way of life on others, while disingenuously whining that his targets - who want more than anything to simply be left alone to live their lives - are doing precisely that. This is what we've come to expect from people who put aside love to revel in hatred, and who embrace superstition at the expense of fact.
Pilty:
I see others have chimed in while I was away from my keyboard this weekend. Just a couple replies, and then I'll leave this thread for more recent conversations.
Well, the glib answer would be that since I don't think erotic imagery is inherently toxic, then no, I'm not especially concerned about anyone's exposure to it.
Of course, in the real world, nothing is quite that simple, since many things that are not inherently toxic can still do harm in very large doses, and many things that are not toxic to adults may be harmful for children. But I will make a couple points here:
1. On the list of threats to the health and wellbeing of the world's children, erotic imagery in media and culture is waaaaaayyyyyy down my prioritized list of concerns: Come back to me after we've meaningfully addressed child hunger and child poverty and the lack of adequate access to healthcare for children (even, sadly, in so-called "advanced" countries) and actual sexual abuses against children (e.g., child sexual trafficking, production of child pornography, etc.) and all the dozens of other more serious challenges the world's children face; maybe then we can talk about whether the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and some sexy TV ads are bad for kids. It's a matter of sad fascination to me that some people prioritize this sort of puritanical handwringing ahead of unambiguously real, material threats to children.
2. To the extent that "pervasive" eroticism in society does create harm, I would argue that the harm comes more (maybe entirely) from the fear, guilt, and self-recrimination attached to expressions of sexuality by you and your ilk than from the eroticism itself. Given the history of moralistic social prohibitions in the U.S., I suspect there would be far less of the "pervasive eroticism" you so fear in a society governed by the sort of open, nonjudgmental approach to sexuality that people like me advocate, and that the public expressions of eroticism that remained would be nontoxic in fact, as opposed to merely in principle.
I see that Ichthyic has already commented on this, but allow me to add my bit: I find it interestingly self-revealing on your part that you would celebrate the idea of walling ourselves off from any actual data about human behavior. The principle you're implicitly enunciating — that any researcher who gathers data that include information regarding individual violations of law must, in all cases, turn that data over to law enforcement or be considered complicit in said crimes — would effectively abolish not only research into human sexuality, but all behavioral research (since in what area of human behavior could a researcher be confident that no violations of law would turn up?) and, in all likelihood, all investigative journalism, as well. You wouldn't actually catch more criminals — absent promises of confidentiality, nobody would talk to the vanishingly few researchers who might still take the legal risk of asking the questions — and our resulting ignorance of the true parameters of human behavior would arguably shield criminals and noncriminal "bad actors" from any sort of legal or social remediation.
So your approach would potentially increase both ignorance and bad behavior. A good day's work, that. </snark>
Finally, re Kinsey's supposed sins, and the alleged evidence therefor...
Actually, the Kinsey reports attracted quite a lot of attention among the (you should pardon the expression) lay public, both becoming bestsellers in their own right and being discussed/excerpted in the popular press; the notion that only a small cabal of "moral degenerates" were aware of the reports' contents is specious.
Of course, Kinsey's key findings boil down to the observation that, by the puritanical standards of you and your ilk, most of us are "moral degenerates."
Hmmm... Kinsey's supposedly deep-pocketed friends in high places were mostly addressing his team's chronic shortage of funding, and defending his work against equally deep-pocketed and high-profile critics. So if his work had, as the current-day wingnut critics suggest, contained undisguised, indisputable smoking-gun evidence that he and his team were child molesters, the notion that it would have escaped the world's attention for 60 days, let alone 60 years, is literally incredible.
But that's what denialists always believe: that the evidence is right there in front of everyone, but that only the denialist illuminati can discern its significance. You might as well be talking about Apollo 11 photo artifacts or the "coverup" of the Face on Mars, for all the cogence of your arguments.
Pilty must have changed his mind about homosexuality.
Janine @ 342:
Oh please. How am I bullying anyone? My language may be occasionally intemperate but it's nothing to what is regularly dished out here and you know it. Any unwary theist or conservative who ventures into Pharyngula's comboxes is going to get dogpiled. No matter who polite or diffident they are, they can expect a storm of abuse and braying mockery. So who is the bully here?
I expressed the opinion that homosexual acts are disordered and sinful. It's an unfashionable opinion and one that most people here deeply disagree with. So does that make me mistaken, misguided or even obnoxious? Nope, it makes me a "piece of filth", "evil scum" , a verminous subhuman insect that deserves to be crushed underfoot. It's water off a duck's back to me, but it reflects poorly on the much-vaunted sweet reasonableness of secular liberals.
The fact that the robust expression of an opinion meets with such a hysterical response suggests that liberals define goodness and rationality as liberalism. Anyone who isn't a liberal is therefore by definition wicked or stupid or suffering from some kind of psychological disorder.
Believe that traditional sexual morality might actually increase the sum of human happiness? You're a repressed puritanical prude. Believe traditional standards of sartorial modesty enhance the dignity and safety of women? You're a vile misogynist who clearly gets a sadistic kick out of oppressing women. Think the cultural normalization of homosexual acts has an adverse impact on society? You're nothing but a hate-filled homophobic bigot.
If you look at my post @ 329, you'll notice I outline an argument in favour of trad sex morals (one that makes no reference to religious belief). You might think that argument is rubbish -- that the premises are incorrect or that they are correct but the conclusions don't logically follow. Whatever. The point is that it is undeniably an argument, not the ranting expression of an irrational prejudice.
+++
Ichthyic @ 341:
Nice bit of dehumanization there, Ichthyic. I wonder, though, if you will ever be satisfied with accidentally squashing a few of these insects in the dark. Is that really sufficient to deal with these pesky critters? After all, you know how they breed ... For serious pest control you need to call in the exterminator.
(And that noted homosexual counter-culture icon William S. Burroughs did recommend killing Christians and others who disapproved of homosexuality ...)
No, just ignorant.
Or where is the adverse impact all over the First World?
You then refer us to comment 229. It contains another argument from ignorance that I'll get to below, but first of all it starts with a logical fallacy – a slippery-slope argument based on the unstated assumption that everyone will automatically get addicted to sex unless something (rational thinking about consequences, of all things! Rational thinking! An addiction! Hello?) restrains us.
Here's the ignorance:
1) France has a birth rate of 2.1 children per woman. How come? Rampant socialism! Cribs, kindergartens etc. everywhere, all financed by taxes.
Did it never occur to you that most people like children and want to have some of their own?
2) Now you'll probably think the birth rate is actually all accomplished by the immigrant Muslim hordes. Said hordes are way too small to account for 2.1 children per woman, however.
3) All over Europe, the birth rates of all immigrants drop to the local average after a generation or two. The religious attitudes soften likewise – did you really believe that only Christianity was susceptible to a secular environment?
4) If you want to see high abortion rates, go to the USA in general and the southern states in particular. Even from a totally cynical point of view, completely apart from moral considerations, contraception is at least two orders of magnitude cheaper than abortion! Add to this the fact that we don't get abstinence-only non-education here.
It's always the same: ignorance produces fear, and fear produces conservativism.
Working upwards in the thread:
:-D
Still refusing to accept that one's sexual orientation is something one is born with, are you?
When exactly did you decide to be straight…?
And even then, I'd be concerned about depictions of violence before allusions to the existence of sex (an allusion that only the initiate, i. e. those at or after puberty, even grasp). What's the estimate of how many murders an average 6-year-old kid has seen on TV?
That's right. After puberty, it's a different story.
I think the violence is worse, though, and starts getting into kids' heads at a very young age. Here's an odd source, but interesting. Lots of links. The Evidence Against Media Violence.
well, it would help for starters if those opinions weren't pulled out of your (or your church's) ass, but rather based on something like evidence. I've already told you that as it is, the more "modest" the clothing withing a society, the more common, accepted and prevalent the violence against women is; both of those are strictly correlated to the patriarchal society you're proposing, and your blindness to those facts in favor of ideology makes you a vile ass.
If you look at my post @ 329, you'll notice I outline an argument in favour of trad sex morals (one that makes no reference to religious belief). You might think that argument is rubbish -- that the premises are incorrect or that they are correct but the conclusions don't logically follow. Whatever. The point is that it is undeniably an argument, not the ranting expression of an irrational prejudice.
False dichotomy. Calling it an "argument" doesn't change the fact that it's a sophistic rant, a pile of steaming unsupported assertions and erroneous inferences, steeped in irrational prejudices and absurd "premises" such as that ordinary sexual pleasure is "hedonistic excess", which somehow "imperils the culture of communal self-sacrifice necessary to keep society afloat". A far bigger threat than the sex that upsets your prudish immature brain is excessive blog posting.
The fact that the robust expression of an opinion meets with such a hysterical response suggests that liberals define goodness and rationality as liberalism.
It only suggests that to people who are not very rational. If someone asks me to point to something red and I point to an apple, I'm not defining apples to be red. If someone stomps on my toe and I scream, I'm not defining having my toe stomped on as being painful. It's not about definition, it's about perception. I perceive your bigotry and sexism and racism and your whole twisted moral framework to be bad, I don't define it to be bad.
@Pilty's first comment here
Rome's still on the map. What part of "Eternal City" don't you understand?
Mrs. Tilton of course wasn't referring to the city. And then you dishonestly follow up with
I was aware s/he/it wasn't speaking literally. I did think it was an interesting figure of speech, suggesting as it did a hankering for the destruction of eternal verities, venerable customs etc.
Then why the "what part don't you understand" if you realized that Mrs. Tilton was referring to the empire, not the city?
The reason that you get the sort of response you do from "liberals" here is because you're a fucked up lying piece of foul putrescent shit, a stupid bigot and sexist and racist, a superstitious addlebrained godbot, a blot on this blog and on humanity. Despite how incredibly bad you are, most people here treat you far more civilly than you deserve.
Nerd, sometimes I think you're an anti-Poe, a godbotter posing as their imagining of a mindlessly reflexive atheist scientist to make us all look bad. He was referring to religion as a lifestyle choice, you old fool.
I don't tend to berate Pilty as much is do the more malodorous trolls, mostly because I enjoy his unintentionally hilarious logical cock-ups - if little else. He's simply another reminder of the depths of intellectual dishonesty to which theists will sink; I feel better for calling him on it.
NS,
so Im a "coward"(on another thread),Nerd's an "old fool"( and I am not a fan of his repetitive posts by any means),is this how you deal with frustration or bad days or something,go on the net and call people names?
You're such a sharp thinker,I really wish you wouldnt do that.
Yes, you're a coward and Nerd's an old fool. Sometimes "names" are facts -- something sharp thinkers like me can comprehend.
P.S. I didn't say anything about Nerd being repetitive, my point was that he's such a reflexive troll basher that he's often wrong. He attacks trolls even for their good points, and sometimes when they aren't even trolls -- as here. He's a bit like Ichthyic but without the latter's redeeming qualities.
Clinteas is a coward? What brought that on?
Kel,
it was about our brief chat on the "elephants" thread,never mind,I just wish NS would use his thinking skills to make good arguments,not call people he disagrees with names.
You know,Nerd's comments have been repetitive and ad hom at times,so lets talk about it,but why the "old fool" ?
As I said on the elephants thread,I dont care,its the net,people can throw insults all they like,but I just think its unneccessary.
The hurling of insults is a sacred tradition and one not to discard for the sake of civility. Besides, some people really deserve it. If Stimpy is being obtuse, or facilis is being facile, why not throw a few insults their way? If reason doesn't get to them, maybe mockery will.
I don't care all that much what a dull thinker like you thinks, or what you wish I would or wouldn't do. The "old fool" is specifically for his "I've been a scientist for 30+ years" BS that he uses -- yes, repetitively -- in the place of actual argument.
"I just wish NS would use his thinking skills to make good arguments,not call people he disagrees with names."
I do make good arguments, frequently. As for the latter, it's a common ploy of cowards, to say that criticisms are merely a matter of calling people you disagree with names; Pilty has made the same charge repeatedly here.
In any case, I find nothing so boring as these sorts of whiny wankfests about my posting style, so I'll bid you a good night.
I think that's one of the best arguments against socialism I've ever heard.
In the unlikely event that I ever get in a relationship, I have every intention of having a vasectomy. If other people are foolish enough to have children, that's their lookout - but I certainly don't wish to spend my whole life paying for their self-indulgence through my taxes. I'd far rather my tax money was spent on contraception than kindergartens.
Why not just get a vasectomy now and cut out the bother of first being in a relationship?
True,and not disputed,done it myself plenty times,as you know..:-) But there's a reason we throw insults at stimpy or facilis,and not Nerd or Owl or you,and thats because Nerd or Owl or yourself (or me) are capable of having a rational unbiased argument.
I dont mind if he calls me whatever,its the net and nothing I can do about it.
But there's a reason we throw insults at stimpy or facilis,and not Nerd or Owl or you,and thats because Nerd or Owl or yourself (or me) are capable of having a rational unbiased argument.
This is the worst thing about this place, the notion that "regulars" are inherently more rational than "trolls". Me, I don't hold anyone to be sacred, and many of the "regulars" are capable of, and have displayed, at least as much irrationality as some of the "trolls", and some "trolls" (like Walton) have displayed far more rationality than many of the "regulars" ever have -- and I include you and Nerd among the latter.
I really wish NoR wouldn't talk about his qualifications so much. It's almost as bad as CW posting his Mensa card. Besides, if qualifications start to become an issue then my bachelor's degree in computer science looks pretty meagre.
Why not just get a vasectomy now and cut out the bother of first being in a relationship?
Vasectomies have risks, so he's rational to put that off.
I didnt say that,did I.
I was referring to the fact that after 2 years or so I can form an opinion on who is able to argue without bias and with an open mind on here.
There are people here who can argue without bias?
hahaha,I give up......
I didnt say that,did I.
I was referring to the fact that after 2 years or so I can form an opinion on who is able to argue without bias and with an open mind on here.
Jeez you're dimwitted.
Ok.
And just because you have been such an asshole tonight:
At 05.03am
At 06.25am
*Sigh*
Walton (@366):
Really? The fact that someone associated x with human reproduction rates almost precisely what's required to maintain a stable population strikes you as an argument against x? Are you secretly an adherent of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement? Who'da' thunk it?
It's well and good to not want children yourself (though I doubt many people have really made that decision permanently by your age, no matter what they think at the time), but this...
...is a slap in the faces of all those people (many of them childless themselves) who have maintained the social infrastructure that has made your privileged life possible... that is, those who've spent their whole lives paying for your parents' self-indulgence through their taxes.
I honestly believe that L-word-arians truly can't see how selfish their ideology is... but I have hope: This form of blindness is treatable, and at least occasionally curable.
Can I talk about my qualific......
Um... never mind. I don't have any.
Rorschach
I think you highlighted the "I'm leaving [but I'm not]" maneuver, but not emphasized the more glaring irony of his characterizing the comments about him as "whiny wankfests about my posting style" while what prompted those wankfests was his own whining, via namecalling, about other people's commenting style. Geez, NS you're as tiresome as those you complain about ... and have been since your start as TM. At least those other took some time to become repetitious.
Bill, once again I have to say I enjoy your posts. I don't know if that slapdown will make it through to Walton, but it was the model of clarity.
Walton, I advise you to avoid making decisions about potentially irreversible surgical procedures at your age.
A close friend of mine had a vasectomy when he was about 20, for reasons that seemed to him, at the time, to be ironclad. However, by the time he was 30, he was in love with a wonderful woman who wanted children, and he would have given up quite a lot to be able to father some with her.
nothing's sacred @ 365:
Cowardice? No, it's rather the quaint belief that grown men can conduct a debate without resorting to infantile insults. (Admittedly I did call Knockgoats a beardy twunt, but that was just gay banter.)
@ 355:
Since your powers of perception are so penetrating, you should have no trouble indicating which statements of mine are racist.
@ 356:
Mrs Tilton wasn't referring to the real Roman Empire any more than she was referring to the real city of Rome. Her comment about Rome not being destroyed in a day was a figure of speech. My use of "Eternal City" was also a figure of speech, a metonym for eternal verities, venerable customs etc.
Got it?
How rude. I blame the parents.
I challenge you or anyone else to produce a single comment of mine from this or any other thread that could reasonably be construed as racist. I'm confident you won't be able to find any, just as I'm confident you will then retract your calumny in accordance with the conventions of civilized discourse.
@ 357 (re: Nerd of Redhead):
Is ageism acceptable now? It's so hard to keep up with the ever-changing zeitgeist ...
And just because
Yeah, dimwit, I didn't know that I posted after saying goodnight. Thanks so much for bringing it to my attention.
Rorshach, at least you can comfort yourself with the fact that you have twice the intellect of "Don't Panic".
"a stupid bigot and sexist and racist"
I challenge you or anyone else to produce a single comment of mine from this or any other thread that could reasonably be construed as racist.
Two out of three is more than enough.
Don't worry Pilty, the only fool here is you. Every time you post. We enjoy laughing at you. You are funny. And your paranoia stands as a shining beacon to all of Pharyngula not to get involved with imaginary deities, lest is rot your brain.
makes a lot of sense from where I'm standing: lack of empathy + depression = misanthropy = desire for childlessness and lack of understanding why others would want those loud, leaking, obnoxious creatures.
I experience this a lot, too. I actually have this recurrent and elaborate daydream about one day waking up and finding that by some freak occurrence, I've "stepped out of time", and then I spend a year or so all by myself in a world frozen in that one split second, where the world is magically devoid of humans, and yet the grocery stores are still full of fresh produce :-p
anyway, I've mostly overcome the depression and lack of empathy, which has gotten me to accept that even though I feel like I wouldn't care if 90% of humanity suddenly vanished, it might make life a bit more inconvenient, plus the remaining 10% might have something against all those disappearances :-p
Are we to take it that you tacitly admit to lying, being a stupid, bigot, sexist, and a superstitious addlebrained godbot?
And you blame your faults on the Fall of Man, of course; an eternally convenient excuse.
"How you have fallen from heaven, O star of the morning, son of the dawn!
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/01/the_man_pope_ratzi_reinstate… (whole comment)
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/01/the_man_pope_ratzi_reinstate… "I would certainly have no problem about attending Mass at a Society [of Saint Pius X] chapel if there were one in my vicinity."
Jadehawk:
I grok that there are many emotional reasons why an individual might not want kids... and that any one of them might lead to a profound lack of understanding as to why anyone else would want them, either... but it's a whole 'nother thing to think that other people having just enough kids to keep the population stable is bad public policy. Even people who don't want/like kids surely like living in a world that isn't collapsing, no?
Then again, I posted my comment before I read Walton's revealing comments in the other thread, which shed a whole new wavelength of electromagnetic radiation on the matter. I took his remark in this thread as an ideological position, not (as might have been more accurate, in hindsight) as a cry for help.
Anonymous @ 389:
The comment in question was:
That remark was not an expression of antisemitism, it was a facetious jibe at the ADL and SPLC, who tried to smear traditionalist Catholics as antisemites.
Bill:
I wasn't being entirely serious with my earlier comments; and you're right, on balance.
It is up to an individual to choose whether or not they wish to have children. I don't, and I doubt that will ever change (but it's largely an academic question in my case, anyway). But you're right, in that I went too far in what I said earlier.
You mean, they accurately tell the truth about "traditionalist" Catholics, who are indeed antisemites.
[...]
-- Rev. Frs. Michael Crowdy & Kenneth Novak, Originally printed in the April 1997 issue of The Angelus magaine
( From the web archive of SSPX.org ; the page has currently been purged. All hail the new pravda from the Ministry of Truth! )
nothing sacred's egomaniacal interventions distracted attention from a far more interesting subject -- sex.
Jadehawk @ 353:
What you actually wrote was this:
I don't know what the stats are, but it seems questionable to equate a nudist colony with a complex developed society.
It's also questionable to equate Mohammedan societies (which I presume is what you mean by " cultures where women are covered from head to toe") with anything I am advocating.
A more pertinent statistical comparison would be between the incidence of rape in Western countries pre- and post-sexual revolution; or between the incidence of rape in the USA and, say, Malta.
Regarding nudism, I would argue that nudity per se is not the same thing as the "pervasive eroticism" I was talking about, which is characterized less by the amount of naked flesh on display than by an atmosphere of licentious sensuality.
Owlmirror @ 393:
Some traditionalist Catholics are antisemites. So are some Mohammedans, neo-pagans and atheists. Traditional Catholic doctrine is not antisemitic.
If that quotation is antisemitic, we may as well write off the Old Testament as antisemitic.
We've been over this ground before. If opposition to Judaism is antisemitic, does that mean opposition to Mohammedanism is also antisemitic?
If opposition to Judaism is antisemitic, does that make eco-atheists - who blame Genesis for environmental catastrophe - antisemites?
If anti-Judaism is assumed to imply a hatred for Jewish people, can we assume the anti-Catholicism displayed on this blog implies a hatred for individual Roman Catholics?
Quite disgraceful, I agree. They'll be censoring the Gospels next.
Except for when it is.
Do you overdo the sacramental wine before posting? That makes even less sense than your usual doublespeak gibberish.
Because you persist in being wrong and hypocritical.
For example, you persist in using fallacious arguments like the above.
Again, you persist in using fallacious arguments. No, because to the best of my knowledge, the only ones who have used Genesis as a justification for total ecological dominion have been Christians. The only way you can get to it being against "Judaism" is if you admit that Christianity is indeed in point of fact a Jewish heresy.
Let me know if you ever see an atheist on this blog even hint of an accusation that all Roman Catholics everywhere are collectively guilty of killing God.
Which is, of course, one of the traditions of traditional Catholicism.
Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.