neo-x wrote:Jac3510 wrote:neo-x wrote:I think gay people should be allowed to marry, why not. But that is just me, its against my faith, but then not everyone lives under or according to my faith.
If that were the argument against gay marriage, I would completely agree with you. And it is, in fact, the argument many, if not most, Christians use.
It is, however, the wrong argument. It is not the argument that has historically been used. The simple fact is that the definition of marriage is not a matter of faith. It is a matter of reason. And society has a vested interest in defining it a particular way. You you define it incorrectly, there are social consequences that seriously detract from the common good, and to steal and reverse a metaphor commonly used to describe economics, when the tide falls,
all the ships fall with it.
And I agree but I also think this only addresses part of the problem. Reason doesn't, inherently, in all cases carry with it objectivity. While 2+2=4 is four always, x+y=z will always vary on the values of x and y. I think when you introduce the element of personal rights the values change and so does the outcome and that is why despite while the argument from reason as you cited is great and I tend to agree with it, it still fails to produce any result and part of the problem is that such argument does not solve the problem at all nor does it address the rights of the individual on their own self...which now seem to override this argument from reason, and I can see why.
It is like a law "you can't do this because of reason x, y, z" because it makes sense...to you. But the person on whom this law applies or you wish to imply has his own argument of reason and his values of x, y, z differ. Now comes the rights part, do his rights protect the value of his x,y,z or they don't?
As I said above and before, in principle I agree with the argument from reason and I have used it in the past but I find it useless now. The only question is, can reason(subjective in this case) alleviate the rights of a person to himself if the said person doesn't agree.
Now I presume you would advocate that this argument from reason is objective but I'll let you phase out more clearly your response on this.
Now which social consequences specifically, other than the reasonable institution of marriage, detract from the common good if Gay marriage is allowed?
All things considered my own conclusion is, it doesn't change anything more or less. Consider the following scenarios:
1. Gay people are not allowed to marry, protests continue and sooner or later, because of the rights of a citizen and tax payer - gays in this instance, win. Rights so far preserve the values a person places on themselves.
2. Gay people are allowed to marry, society has now two standards of marriage, gay marriages will always be in a minority. They can never really increase.
I'll give you an example.
When I was in highschool, I was made to read and recite the koran, everyday, it was a mandatory thing, I really had no choice. It was the law of the land. If I had a fair law at my disposal which protected my rights to my self and my values I could override such and such actions by whatever powers that may be. But it was because there weren't any I had to go through it.
I understand your argument but my experience tells me that a fair law which allows something broken to pass occasionally is much better than a broken law which is unfair every time it applies to someone. And out of this reasoning comes my support of the idea of gay marriage, the way I see it rights to yourself should be able to override laws which affect your values or reasons to be such and such.
Respectfully, I reject your premise. People do not have rights over their own selves. That is a western invention that is, frankly, absurd. It is rooted in a basic misunderstanding of the nature of free will. That is, the assumption is essentially libertarian: I can do whatever I want with myself so long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.
But that's just not true. And why should it be? Why should the "so long as it doesn't hurt anyone else" be the qualifier? This goes back to questions about OM that trolls like Kenny just can't get their minds around. And in some ways I don't blame them. They've been taught to accept as dogma something about "rights" that is just fundamentally false, and rather than being willing to entertain that notion seriously, they defend it with a ferocity that should be reserved only for religious truth. And perhaps there's an important reason for that . . .
But back to the point. We don't have the right to do with ourselves whatever we want. That's because
we don't have the right to sin. If you want it in less biblical language, we do not have the right to act against our nature. We certainly are capable of doing so, but when we do so, we are against against nature and nature's God. Free will is not, contrary to popular Protestant opinion, the right to choose for ourselves between good and evil and suffer the consequences as we may. It is the right to choose between this good and that good. We NEVER have the right to choose evil, and I further submit that NO ONE chooses evil freely. They necessarily an always choose it under compulsion, which is why we wait for God's restoration of all things. That's why the redeemed in heaven will finally have a truly free will and will live truly free of sin. They will lack all compulsion to act against their nature, and so they will ALWAYS choose the good--exactly the reason Christ did so.
As such, I think you misunderstood the fundamental nature of my argument. I'm not saying something so trivial as heterosexual marriage is reasonable and make sense, but that homosexual marriage is unreasonable and doesn't make sense. I am saying that we can know, from reason alone, that marriage is by nature heterosexual; that the notion of homosexual marriage is an oxymoron because it is a violation of the very nature of marriage. And this is because the nature of marriage is born out of the nature of humanity. Homosexuality is
intrinsically disordered. It is not wrong because it is unreasonable. It is unreasonable because it is wrong. And it is wrong because it is a violation of what we are as human beings. To act in homosexual ways is to act against our nature,
which no one has the right to do.
Now, when you act against your nature, you can expect there to be harmful consequences. It is the nature of food to provide nutrition to the body. Literally, that which provides no nutrition is not food. Put a piece of bread on the table. It's food because it is nutritious. Leave it there for a month. What will happen? It will lose all nutritious value. It is literally, by nature, no longer food anymore. Now, it is the nature of the human body to consume food, and it does so via the mouth. You can therefore put bread in your mouth, which is natural, and when you do so, a natural good follows (you become nourished). But put the month old "bread" in your mouth and swallow it. What happens? Something bad. You get sick. You are not nourished. Why? Because you have acted against your basic nature. Your body, by nature, does not take in that sort of substance and get nourished from it. Instead, that substance when taken in the way food is
supposed to be taken (do you see the teleology there? don't miss it!) has a negative impact on the body. And that negativity manifests itself in illness.
But let's press the analogy further. We know the nature of food is to nourish and the nature of the mouth and stomach is to take in and digest that nourishment. Suppose, then, you take in a good piece of bread. That is in accordance with your nature and it is good. But suppose you take another piece. And another piece. And another, and so on, until you are so full you are about to pop. I am speaking here of gluttony. Notice that gluttony is unnatural--just as unnatural as eating moldly "bread" is unnatural. For the nature of food and of eating is to nourish. But there comes a point in time that the body, because it is finite, cannot receive any further nourishment. Therefore, further food is no longer nourishing. Now you are taking in food against the body's nature. Why do you keep eating if you aren't getting nourishment? Probably because it tastes good. And here you have confused the primary or essential and to secondary or accidental aspects of food. It is essential that food nourish. It is accidental that food tastes good. So what happens is that gluttons keep eating not to nourish themselves but for the taste--
and when they are no longer being nourished they continue to taste. But that is against their nature. And what is the effect? Sickness and, if the practice is continued, obesity and all the related medical problems.
Does this mean that gluttony is wrong because it produces obesity and related medical problems? No. It produces those problems because it is wrong, and it is wrong because it is a violation of our human nature.
And so it is with homosexuality. Just as the glutton does not have the right to overeat--they are doing so AGAINST their own natures--so homosexuals do not have the right to engage in sub-sexual acts with members of the same sex--the are doing so AGAINST their own natures. And we are not surprised when we see the society that embraces homosexual "marriage" to therefore suffer a range of consequences. If you want to see what they are, look at the overall Western birth rate. Look at the average age of our populations. Look at the rate of out of wedlock births. Look at the divorce rate. Look at the percentage of children in poverty.
You may say that such things are not related to gay marriage. You are wrong. For the same mentality that necessarily produces gay marriage is the same mentality that necessarily produces those social ills. All of those ills are related to a fundamental redefinition of marriage. In American history, that started in the 50s. We've simply been working out the implications of that redefinition over the past sixty years. The first implication was the creation of no-fault divorce on January 1, 1970 under Ronald Reagan in California. Things have progressed from there to the point we have reached today. The point is that all of those social ills are directly related to the redefinition of marriage that happened way back then.
The solution, then, isn't to embrace gay marriage as someone's right to be unreasonable. It is to begin to do the long and hard work of reestablishing the nature of marriage in a society that rejected that nature some sixty or seventy years ago.
