There are two factors in gay marriage, gays and marriage. I have no problem with homosexuality, my problem is with marriage, I think it's broken. It's been added to, changed, manipulated, co-opted by the state, claimed by religion and when we have as much diversity as we do today it's woefully inadequate.Silvanus said:Hang on, so you're actually arguing that we should extend marriage to polygamous relationships and consensual incestuous ones as well?MagunBFP said:I'm sure it was, it seems you're missing the point I was making. The fact is that we've changed and added to marriage repeatedly through it's history, it's barely even symbolically what it used to be. Rather then just keep adding to the patchwork of additions and addemdums that define marriage we should fix the whole damn thing. The problem is when there are people who don't care about anything not being included except for their own personal agendas and they insist that "insert flavour here" gets taken care of immediately and then eventually they'll support someone elses "harder" or "less important" flavour, such as is often the arguement when polygamy is brought into the marriage equality debate.
In principle, I'm not against that. Those have issues unique to them, of course-- as far as I know, many polygamous relationships are unbalanced, and many incestuous ones are abusive or exploitative. There would have to be in-depth studies into whether allowing marriage for the above could amount to further mechanisms of abuse.
...So, hang on, you're not actually against gay people marrying; you just believe the change should go further?
A secular marriage isn't about love or commitment, we don't need the government to approve who we have a relationship with. Secular marriages are contracts detailing rights, responsibilites and the terms and conditions of contract, it should also include standard terms for the disolution of the contract instead of the "your lawyer is better then their lawyer so you win more"
Fix marriage or scrap it and replace it with something better that is all inclusive, until then all anyone doing is adding "flavour of the month" patches to an already flawed status.
I never suggested that all of them would be hiding pro-gay-marriage sympathies, but it's likely that not all of them are as hateful as you might think.Silvanus said:What? No, I didn't say that. I said the majority is against gay marriage, and vocal about it. I never said "everyone is always honest about their opinions".MagunBFP said:So everyone in your town and county is always honest about their opinions? Then I envy you, we could all do with a little less bullshit and a lot more honesty. To be honest I don't know you from Bob, so telling me you're not being fashionable is relatively meaningless. Just like you could be thinking I'm a bigot because you don't agree with me... doesn't really make any difference.
But, I severely doubt they're all just hiding pro-gay-marriage sympathies. That's pretty absurd.