Ladies and gentlemen, you have convinced me. I thank you for your debate, I apologize for any insult you might have felt as a homosexual or on behalf of homosexuals. Some of you commented on my odd anxiety. I will admit some of what I was expressing did come from a place of fear. Fears need to be explored as much as hopes, though. I had to go there.

Myca, different underlying axioms would certainly make my questions appear quite senseless. I disagree with you on a thing or two, but generally I like where you stand on the issues. Thanks for ignoring me only 80% of the time.

PG, thank you for your plain approach and clear arguments, and for taking seriously my crazy talk.

Daisy, I hope your marriage makes you insanely happy. Your civility when something of such personal importance was at stake was especially appreciated.

Jake, thanks for your candor. The reason I comment less than I read is that I tend to agree with you a lot. You were right this time.

Eh, mostly ;)

Chingona, ditto.

Yusi, you got imaginary people are more important to me than real ones? What imaginary people? I was trying to articulate how no kind of person they are right now or might be later, or what kind of life I can imagine them living, alter how I feel about them as a family, including whether they were straight or homosexual.

Perhaps I’ll run my drafts by PG for polishing and review from now on, she has a clean and efficient approach to writing. I bet you wouldn’t have got that if she’d proofread my work.

You write:

I assumed what was generally meant by marriage and family was what I mean by it.

and

SSM and other alternative lifestyles do not change existing laws, they are derived from them. They are based on what you think our legal responsibilities are, and I think they are rubbish. I am not a creature of law, Jake. The beating heart matters to me more than the black and white.

There are gay people who share your values and straight people who don’t. The gay people who share your values are barred from marrying and creating families that you would admire and respect in every way, and the straight people who don’t are free to create marriages that violate everything you consider valuable to that institution.

I assure you that every single one of us has values that we wish everyone would follow but that cannot be legislated. You cannot legislate a good family or kindness or responsibility. Indeed, even parental responsibility cannot be legislated. Every day parents abuse and torture and even kill their children, and every day thousands of other children are removed from their biological families because the adults who should have been responsible for them were not. This is a terrible state of affairs, but it has ALWAYS existed. You say our legal responsibilities are “rubbish” and that gay marriage would reflect that tainted origin. Do you wish to ban straight marriage because it, too, is based on these “rubbish” responsibilities?

If my son is gay, you offer him a marriage that doesn’t envision his right to inclusion in a family as an adult or his place among one when he is old.

Like Jake, I reject this as strongly as I possibly can. If your son is gay, and you have taught him your values and he has accepted them, he will create relationships that reflect and include those values. If your son is straight and he has rejected your values, he will not.

You speak of responsibility to each other. Imagine your hypothetical gay son and his partner adopting a child, a child they both love and cherish, a child who sees both of them as his parents, the only parents he can ever remember. But because they cannot marry, only one of them can be his legal parent. If your son’s partner were the legal parent and he were to die, your grandchild could be removed from your son because he is not the legal parent, because the child legally would be an orphan and your son - the child’s father - would be nothing to him under the law. Your son could be prevented from fulfilling the obligations you hold so dear. But if your son and his partner could marry, your grandson could remain with his family, growing up with that interconnectedness between the generations you claim to value.

Of even if they do not have a child together, and your son’s partner were to fall ill and be hospitalized, your son could be prevented from visiting him, caring for him, making medical decisions for him - in short, fulfilling all the obligations that spouses have toward each other. Prevented not by his own irresponsibility, but by outside forces.

You seem to have a tremendous amount of anxiety, fear and sorrow about what you perceive as a change in the level of responsibility we have toward each other, in the level of interconnectedness we have. My own view is that there have always been good and bad families, responsible and irresponsible people, but there are a lot of things people used to hide and paper over and not talk about, and now it’s out in the open. There is, also, more social space for individuals be their true selves. Sometimes, this causes family members to reject someone who loves the wrong person, follows the wrong religion or none at all, or whatever. To my mind the fault in not living up to familial obligations is with the person who does the rejecting, not with the person who is rejected.

But regardless of what you or I see as the cause, this state of affairs already exists. It exists without gay marriage. Gay marriage does not cause of any of this. But the lack of gay marriage means that gay people who share your values are prevented from following through on their obligations.

I feel sorry for you. But that pity is tempered by the knowledge that people who think like you are responsible for laws and policies that hurt families.

While I fully support your choice to live according to a philosophy you find fulfilling, that support ends when you try to force that philosophy on others.

Also, this

If my son is gay, you offer him a marriage that doesn’t envision his right to inclusion in a family as an adult or his place among one when he is old.

is wrong, wrong, wrong. How does offering your fictional gay son the ability to marry his lover NOT “envision his right to inclusion in a family as an adult or his place among one when he is old?” It does not do that. In fact, it explicitly does the opposite. It envisions for your fictional gay son his right to inclusion in a family as an adult, along with all the rights and responsibilities that go with inclusion in a family as an adult, and his place among a family when he is old. In other words, it offers him exactly what it offers those among us who are heterosexual. As it stands now in most of this country, your fictional gay son is prohibited from “envision[ing] his right to inclusion in a family as an adult or his place among one when he is old.” Your position continues to deny what you feel is necessary.

I have struggled to find a way to incorporate same-sex unions into the kind of pattern I value, one which I respect and appreciate and want desperately for the people I love the most in life, but at some point there comes a time when I have to say “this is something you must do for this person” and I have to be able to trust that you will do it.

Pretending that SSM actually has relevance to this quote, which it doesn’t:
So you have decided, because you can’t incorporate SSM into your valued pattern, that nobody, not even people you’ll never meet, can live in a way that doesn’t match your valued pattern.

The problem here is that you can see no validity in families that don’t match your utopian view of what a family should be like. The problem is that SSM doesn’t fit the way that you would like to live. You can’t even see validity in a family that differs from your ideal only in the matter of genders involved. Your imagination is so limited that you actually find alternative versions of family threatening. You are afraid that some family members of yours would use it as an excuse to abandon their obligations? It doesn’t seem like you trust your family. I would pity you if it weren’t for the fact that you’re actively working to hurt others.

Feh. Gah.

I get that you don’t think we can choose our obligations or our families — and I agree with you! But you don’t believe in arranged marriage, right? You got married because you fell in love? If you believe we can choose our spouses, there is no reason we can’t choose a spouse of a gender we’re actually attracted to* and continue to fulfill our obligations to the rest of our families, and raise children in a way that’s completely congruent with your value system (i.e. adoption — look, I know it’s really unfortunate that there are kids out their who need to be adopted in the first place, but that’s the reality).

* A marriage that becomes sexless is one thing; it’s entirely different to suggest people marry someone with whom they were never in love in the first place.

Jake: I think that we can all agree that one is not required to acknowledge one’s parents. There is no law that makes us responsible for our parents well-being. I think we can also all agree that the existence of divorce makes it possible, under law, to not acknowledge one’s spouse.

So, it seems to me, that your problem is with responsibility for children. We do have laws that cover that. Those laws succeed, on the whole, in assigning responsibility (parent or guardian) regardless of whether marriage exists or does not exist, whether marriage allows for OSM or SSM or miscegenation or poly or any other version of marriage you might think of.

Your first paragraph may be technically correct regarding our laws, but it is my personal Tao that I believe in balance in all things, that to endure, what is given must be given back (and if not given back, passed forward) and to understand a thing requires that we see the whole thing, not part of it.

Our children are not just children. They are adults and they are elderly. They are wise and foolish. They are sick and healthy. My baby cousin Heather, my sister-in-law Grace and my great-aunt Esther, youngest and oldest and middling among my living relatives, are identical in nature and in importance to me. A system of family values that you claim covers Heather but not Grace or my mother or Esther, is of very little value to me.

If my son is gay, you offer him a marriage that doesn’t envision his right to inclusion in a family as an adult or his place among one when he is old.

From the day she was born, Esther has been surrounded by family. Heather has just begun her life and my brother’s new child is almost here, but I feel I can trust implicitly that they will end their days the same way. This is of value to me. This is what I want for my son, if he were gay or straight.

I began exploring armchair politics like blogging strongly in favor of gay marriage, believe it or not. I am considered a very unbiased man in daily life. But I assumed what was generally meant by marriage and family was what I mean by it.

I still have no idea how you come to the conclusion that SSM changes any of our familial obligations, legally or otherwise. Perhaps you can clarify how you think SSM changes the law with regards to obligations to family?

SSM and other alternative lifestyles do not change existing laws, they are derived from them. They are based on what you think our legal responsibilities are, and I think they are rubbish. I am not a creature of law, Jake. The beating heart matters to me more than the black and white.

I have struggled to find a way to incorporate same-sex unions into the kind of pattern I value, one which I respect and appreciate and want desperately for the people I love the most in life, but at some point there comes a time when I have to say “this is something you must do for this person” and I have to be able to trust that you will do it. After years of having people simultaneously tell me “Oh, I’d never do that, why don’t you trust me” and simultaneously “I’ll do it if I like, it’s my legal right”, I retreated into a traditionalist stance and have been considering my options ever since.

I have no time for more thoughts, but to all of you who asked, I have given your arguments every consideration and intend to answer.

Daisy, I do want you to be able to adopt, but your desire to adopt does not strengthen your right to marry a woman, since I assume you would agree that, if you didn’t want to adopt, your right to marry a woman would not be weakened. So I feel there is a scent of red herring there.

Warning: Shameless ranting about an out of context quote ahead…

If we treated every sperm-egg combination in the same way we treat 30 year olds with respect to our desire to keep them alive then abortion is the least of our problems.

If a thirty year old dies, it is, in general, considered a tragedy whether s/he died of “natural causes” or not. A thirty year old being murdered is a tragedy. So is a thirty year old dying of leukemia or hypertrophic cardiomyopathy or pregnancy complications. Because we consider the death of a young person to be a tragedy, whether human malice was involved in that death or not, we take steps to reduce the chances of death at age 30. We encourage people to use seatbelts when they drive and helmets when they bike (or ski). We spend huge amounts of money trying to keep sick 30 year olds from dying. We spend huge amounts of money trying to convert currently incurable illnesses to curable illnesses.

So, if every conceptus is to be treated as a 30 year old, first consider medical research. As many as 80% of concepti fail to implant. Think about that: 80% of people are dying in the first hours or days of their lives! That’s a bigger problem than HIV, isn’t it? Or heart disease, cancer, SIDS, etc. Or even later miscarriage. And we have no idea–none whatsoever–of how to prevent it from happening. Thus, the majority of our medical research funds should go to prevention of implantation failure. If the death of a conceptus is the same as the death of a 30 year old.

Then there’s the problem of medical care. Ok, we don’t really know what causes failure to implant and early miscarriage, so there’s not a lot to be done now, but some things are known. For example, if you conceive during the lower fertility period (i.e. use rhythm method and “miss”) then you’re more likely to miscarry very early on (before or just after implantation.) So clearly sex should be prohibited during the lower fertility periods. Certainly intentionally having sex only in the low fertility periods is out. Absolutely maliciously placing people in harm’s way. Whether conception is intended or not. Arguably whether birth control is used or not.

Then we need to consider the question of what it means for someone to die. The current standard definition is brain death. Clearly, this is unsuitable because how can you determine brain death in an undifferentiated ball of cells? You can’t. So what’s the new definition? Maybe last cell in the body dying. Ok, so much for cadaveric organ donation–can’t steal organs from a living person no matter how dead their brains are. And if all concepti must be kept alive if at all possible regardless of their health then all people must be as well. No hospice, no compassionate care only, no do not recessitate orders. No taking someone off a ventilator when they’re brain dead. Keep going til the last cell dies. Or be charged with murder.

And speaking of murders, what about chimeras? It’s presumably not their fault that they absorbed their twin, but they did. Should they be sent to reform school at birth? Be taken from the mother who provided the dangerous environment? How are we even going to know it happened? Screen all pregnant women for number of embryos early on? Screen all women of child bearing age for pregnancy regardless of their history of birth control use or even sexual activity? You never know…

In short, treating the death of a newly conceived embryo as equal to that of a 30 year old has profound implications for health care, medical research, law, civil rights, and even the definition of what a “living person” is. Abortion is the least of it.

Honestly, my mother would slap my face to the far side of my head (figuratively) if I expressed the thought that the absense of sexual desire altered my fidelity to my children and their mother, and I have to say I’ve always agreed with that sentiment.

This has zero relevance for same-sex marriage. No one’s sex drive has any bearing on their obligations to their kids, whether it’s a straight couple in a sexless marriage, a gay or lesbian couple in a sexless marriage, or any other possible permutation, no one’s sexual desires have any bearing on their parental responsibilities. Furthermore, divorce and break-ups have no bearing on parental responsibilities. No one has claimed otherwise.

But once again, this has nothing whatsoever to do with same-sex marriage. You’re already married to your wife, and therefore bound to her, and your kids are already born, so you have parental responsibilities. This goes for any married parent regardless of gender or sexual orientation. We’re not talking about letting married parents out of their obligations, we’re talking about letting single folks take on the responsibilities of marriage!

Why shouldn’t I have the same opportunity to marry someone I love as you? (I can only assume that, whatever your feelings about your wife now or later, you married in the first place out of love. Once married, people are obligated to each other, but I hope we can agree that people should be able to choose their spouses.)

Why shouldn’t my future wife and I be able to adopt kids who need homes? Why don’t you want orphans to get new homes? I apologize for the melodrama, but seriously.

By the way, I’m totally baffled that you and I disagree (we dialogued in another thread awhile back), as I do feel strongly that we’re morally obligated to our parents and other relatives (except in cases of abuse), I’m extremely disturbed and disgusted by irresponsibility when it comes to providing for children and the elderly, and I derive great personal meaning from my family and family history. (Though I don’t have a huge family like you, because my ancestral community was destroyed in the Holocaust. This is one reason I’m grateful to be able to form a family of friends in addition to my family by birth, because there simply aren’t very many of us.)

This is correct. You don’t have to acknowledge your parents or your spouse (divorce) or your children (adoption, should your co-parent agree).

Maco:

Before, I tried to elaborate on the security and sense of individual value my family derived from its interconnectedness across many generations, a feat that does not appear compatible with that particular sentence, as contrasted with some of my peer’s security and sense of personal value, whose lack of a family seems to exemplify it.

You’re still making no sense to me. The “value your family derived from its interconnectedness across many generations” is not legally mandated. How is this incompatible with what you quoted from me? It’s great that your family has derived value from its interconnectedness. I’m happy that this choice worked for all of you. But it’s still a choice and not legally mandated.

I replied to your statement of position by showing how permitting SSM, or a variety of other forms of marriage, in no way legally impacts the current status of your concerns. You respond with, what seems to me, a non sequitur or diversion or tangent. What’s the connection between my refutation of your opinion on the legal effects of SSM and your response to my refutation? I don’t see it.

Aren’t you putting our obligations to our sons and daughters and mothers and fathers on the same level as our obligations to strangers?

I’m certainly putting our obligations to our parents on the same level as our obligations to strangers or, more properly, people not related to us. That is to say, the level of my obligations to my parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins, etc. is my choice. There is no law laying out my responsibilities to relatives who are not my spouse or children. SSM does not change this.

Our obligations to our children, OTOH, are codified into our legal system. SSM does not change this either.

I still have no idea how you come to the conclusion that SSM changes any of our familial obligations, legally or otherwise. Perhaps you can clarify how you think SSM changes the law with regards to obligations to family?

OK, what constitutes “a very good reason”? Do you condemn Melissa (the young woman from whom Dan Savage and his boyfriend Terry adopted their son) for having her son adopted because she lives on the street and didn’t want that life for him?

Honestly, my mother would slap my face to the far side of my head (figuratively) if I expressed the thought that the absense of sexual desire altered my fidelity to my children and their mother, and I have to say I’ve always agreed with that sentiment.

Who’s ever said that absence of sexual desire alters one’s obligations to one’s children? Yuck.

You said the legal default is to attach obligation to the gestational mother and the person she denotes as the other, if she denotes another, but only until she, he or they find someone else to take over or relinquishes responsibility to the state. Are they not selecting their own definitions?

I think we’re experiencing confusion over what you mean by “definitions.” To me, the definition of a parent is a person who assumes legal responsibility for a minor — ensuring that the minor is safe, healthy, educated and cared about — until the minor is an adult. The parent can be a person with a genetic or gestational relationship to the child, but that’s neither necessary nor sufficient. Someone isn’t a lesser parent for lacking that biological relationship, and the biological relationship is not sufficient to make someone a parent if she fails to assume the responsibility of parenthood.

Aren’t you putting our obligations to our sons and daughters and mothers and fathers on the same level as our obligations to strangers? Before, I tried to elaborate on the security and sense of individual value my family derived from its interconnectedness across many generations, a feat that does not appear compatible with that particular sentence, as contrasted with some of my peer’s security and sense of personal value, whose lack of a family seems to exemplify it.

PG: Your preference for allowing only blood-relative family relationships means that neglected/abused kids either would have to stay in bad homes or remain family-less wards of the state.

No, that is not true. I want to be clear. Relationships other than blood-family relationships can exist absolutely, but I feel a blood relationship can never be denied without valid cause. I can adopt. You can adopt. I cannot give my child up to you to adopt. Not without a very good reason.

Honestly, my mother would slap my face to the far side of my head (figuratively) if I expressed the thought that the absense of sexual desire altered my fidelity to my children and their mother, and I have to say I’ve always agreed with that sentiment.

PG/Myca: This is a red herring. I’m not calling for everyone’s “selecting their own definitions.” / It’s a straw man, and you’re the only one making this claim.

Okay, two of you feel I’m off base on this, but I’m experiencing dissonance again. The way I was raised, I do not select my definitions wrt my kids. You know without asking who bears responsibility for their feeding and clothing and schooling.

You said the legal default is to attach obligation to the gestational mother and the person she denotes as the other, if she denotes another, but only until she, he or they find someone else to take over or relinquishes responsibility to the state. Are they not selecting their own definitions?

I am reflecting on these and other poster’s responses. See you tomorrow.

Take a contract. I do a fair bit of contract drafting. As I tell my clients, there is always a balance between risk and functionality. I can draft a “bulletproof” contract, but it will be 100 pages long and cost them $150,000. In many respects, they are better off relying on a cheaper contract and absorbing some risk of dispute.*

Clients have cost to consider.

But for government, the balance changes because of the vast population affected by the laws. So what if it takes 10,000 hours to decide on the perfect abortion definition? If it lasts 10 years it will cover 10 million abortions.

*And BTW, I don’t necessarily agree with you about “prevailing standards” language existing only to save time. That isn’t necessarily a copout. In many industries, there ARE prevailing standards: codes, regulations, boards, licenses, and the like. Moreover, those standards are constantly being updated and are otherwise evolving. The “prevailing standards” language allows you to access the most current standards in your language without the need to become familiar with every standard. Of course, it also saves time: I don’t want to read the Plumbers and Gas Fitters Codebook, and I’m happy to be able to incorporate it by reference, thank you very much.

To be sure, many people in the Federalist Society argue that the 14th Amendment was drafted to deal with the problems of former slaves AND ONLY THOSE PROBLEMS, and if Congress had meant to extend the equal protection of the laws more broadly it should have enumerated the circumstances to be remedied; generalizing from the principles of the 14th Amendment would be wrong, wrong, wrong. And returning to the them of this thread, some people have even gone so far as to suggest that the entire right to privacy underlying Roe v. Wade represents a wrongful extension of general principles, and that only a much more particularized articulation should justify a court’s decision.

These are well-worn arguments. I’m a little surprised to see how much traction they’re getting here.

Except the FedSoc is arguing that the default in interpretation should be to limit the rights granted as much as possible, which I don’t think is the philosophy of interpretation either Sailorman or I have advocated here. So that’s a bit of a strawman.

Instead, if the language is clear and definitional instead of being based on principles, you don’t end up in these arguments about the framer’s intent. You can stick to the language itself. “Congress shall make no law” works nicely; you still have to define what “speech” is (flag burning? monetary contributions?), but at least courts aren’t in the position of protecting unpopular minorities from the wrath of the majority with a pansy-assed principle like “Freedom of conscience is important.”

As a litigator who’s aware of the impact litigation has on our society (cost to business, government and individuals), I’d say that expecting tribunals to clean up someone’s principles-based drafting is
a) dumping the drafter’s job onto someone else; and
b) imposing the cost of clarity on citizens who have to pay taxes to support the cost of civil litigation (judges, juries, courtrooms, etc.).

My final chapter in contracts text involved fashioning tests for enforcement and remedies. To be sure, there are a lot of lazy-assed lawyers out there. Rather than specifying every detail of a building contract for a sky-scraper, right down to the quality of the grout in the marble tile, those lazy-assed punks say goofy things like “according to prevailing industry standards,” and designate some arbitrator to provide the details about what those standards are in the event of a dispute. Hard to believe that rank amateur drafting like that make it into to contracts text books. But hey, that’s the sort of stuff we learned in law school.

Ok, admittedly, construction contracts are matters of private law, not public law. Nevertheless, how exactly would we expect private parties to behave if they had to actually specify in detail every component of a construction contract? The Uniform Commercial Code (and similar laws) came into existence to specify the typically unspecified terms of commercial relationships. Just one more example of private parties foisting onto government the burden of filling in the blanks. And yet, the system seems to work.

Legal drafting expert Bryan Garner notes the perils of “rigorous drafting.” If you really want to specify things in a rigorous manner, you look in drafting form books for language that has already withstood interpretation by a court. But what kind of language gets tested in court? Really clear drafting is unlikely to end up being litigated, because one side or the other will see that they don’t have a chance of winning. No, the language that is most likely to get litigated all the way to resolution is language that is so vague that both sides believed they had a credible chance of winning. THAT is the language you find in form books! And you wonder why legal language reads the way it does….

Let me sum up my worry simply: The more we rely on discretion, the more we put power in the hands of people who may misuse it….

Agreed.

and the more problems we cause on the ground.

Disagreed. Problems arise both from over-specification and from under-specification. Undeniably problems arise from government officials exercising unbounded discretion. But I can’t tell, in the abstract, whether those problems are greater than the problems that arise from government officials having insufficient discretion.

To be sure, many people in the Federalist Society argue that the 14th Amendment was drafted to deal with the problems of former slaves AND ONLY THOSE PROBLEMS, and if Congress had meant to extend the equal protection of the laws more broadly it should have enumerated the circumstances to be remedied; generalizing from the principles of the 14th Amendment would be wrong, wrong, wrong. And returning to the them of this thread, some people have even gone so far as to suggest that the entire right to privacy underlying Roe v. Wade represents a wrongful extension of general principles, and that only a much more particularized articulation should justify a court’s decision.

These are well-worn arguments. I’m a little surprised to see how much traction they’re getting here.

To use a simple hypothetical: Cops are there to protect us, and they know we like our Constitutional rights. Should we let cops use their discretion about what are currently constitutional issues, or should we continue to have limits set by the legislature?

Should cops exercise discretion over constitutional issues? How could they not?

The very act of making someone a cop is an act of bestowing upon a mere mortal the power to threaten and wield force in untold numbers of circumstances, foreseen and unforeseen, on behalf of the state. Try as you like, you will never, ever, ever draft rules addressing all the circumstances that cop will encounter. And even if you could, the cop would never be able to memorize them, let alone apply them in a timely fashion. Whatever your ideal, we inevitably end up with cops making moment-by-moment decisions on the basis of a few broad principles. And then we have enforcement actions in which the cop’s conduct is subject to review. Like it or lump it, I can’t envision any better system.

Now, sure, the legislature can attempt to influence a cop’s behavior in real time by establishing the standards by which we review the cop’s behavior in retrospect. “Don’t stop people just for failure to wear a seatbelt.” “Don’t use lethal force to stop a fleeing suspect.” “Don’t engage in a high-speed chase in urban areas.” But none of that determines what the cop actually does in real time. The cop acts. And then we review.

So if enforcement actions are an unavoidable part of the process regardless of how much we micro-manage cops, how much do we gain through micro-management?

To be sure, we gain something. In acknowledgment of the very dynamics I’ve been discussing, courts generally grant a degree of immunity to government actions taken in fulfillment of official duties. So if the legislature wants to establish certain bright line no-nos, it may make sense for the legislature to do so. (“Doing X is outside the scope of your employment and not protected by official immunity”)

But consider the example of Sentencing Guidelines. Here is an explicit effort to limit a judge’s discretion to deviate from the formula set down by the legislature, to anticipate all contingencies and provide for them. But far from eliminating official discretion, it has merely concentrated the power of that discretion in the hands of the prosecutor. The result has been wildly unequal, arbitrary sentences. More unequal than before? Dunno. But clearly still unequal and arbitrary.

If we can all select our own definitions,

Also, yeah, I’m with PG on this. It’s a straw man, and you’re the only one making this claim.

—Myca

If we can all select our own definitions, then as you said, when a child is born one doesn’t know who bears the ultimate responsibility for ensuring that the child is fed, sheltered and schooled. I would also add “accepts them as human beings”.

Hey Maco.

I’m taking your question seriously, in part because you are expressing such frustration about it. In the past I have not taken it seriously, mostly because it simply made zero sense to me (and still doesn’t). This is part of why on the other thread I decided to ignore you. But, taking it seriously, here’s my take. Assuming that your main concern is the welfare of children and avoiding child abandonment:

Families headed by gay and lesbian couples already exist. That’s not a political opinion or a utopian ideal, it’s a fact. Some of these families already have children. Also a fact.

Bearing these facts in mind, we can either grant legal status to the relationships between the gay and lesbian couples, or we can deny them legal status. Right now, through most of the USA, we’re denying them legal status.

If they’re granted legal status, then that comes with certain rights and responsibilities. Much of the conversation about SSM has been around the rights, but the same responsibilities would apply to same sex couples vis-a-vis their children that would apply to any opposite sex-couple. This would include things like child support, inheritance, etc.

As it stands now, many of these things either do not apply or apply only on a case-by-case as determined by the courts basis.

Thus, if what you are really, truly concerned with is child welfare and avoiding child abandonment, embrace same sex marriage. It will strengthen protection for children in these families.

—Myca

The legal default is that the gestational mother and the person she denotes as the father of a child are responsible for it until either the state deems them to be incapable or they voluntarily choose to pass responsibility to someone else. This works fine in about 85% of cases, whether it’s a single mother who nonetheless can make a claim for financial child support on the man who impregnated her, your favored two opposite-sex parents who conceived the child through sex, John and Elizabeth Edwards using an egg donor, etc. Where the parents are unwilling or unfit to care for the child, the state finds alternative parents who are not blood relatives. Your preference for allowing only blood-relative family relationships means that neglected/abused kids either would have to stay in bad homes or remain family-less wards of the state.

But there are more possibilities that the law can accommodate just fine. For example, when a homeless young woman became pregnant by her homeless boyfriend and both felt unable from the beginning to raise the child, she could find a loving same-sex couple to adopt the baby instead of her having aborted it (if you want the whole story, read Dan Savage’s book The Kid). If that same-sex couple had the legal recognition of marriage, they would have an easier time of it in marginal situations (e.g. if one of them became hospitalized in Florida, which doesn’t require that visitation be permitted for non-spouses).

I want the definition of family and marriage, but not civil unions, to be the same for everyone for largely this very reason.

I want it to be “the same for everyone,” in the sense that it should be put into law and the law is applicable to everyone. I don’t have your obsession with sex/gender as the locus of what family and marriage are (and the law is not supposed to discriminate on the basis of sex/gender, and indeed family and marriage law has been reformed so that it no longer does except with regard to who can marry whom). Family and marriage should be based on the assumption of legally-binding responsibilities toward one another, and those who are failed in these responsibilities — for example, the child or spouse who is abused — should be able to get out. The ability to assume legally-binding responsibilities shouldn’t be conditioned on race, sex, religion, etc.

If we can all select our own definitions,

This is a red herring. I’m not calling for everyone’s “selecting their own definitions.” I’m calling for the law to erase the last vestige of sex/gender discrimination by allowing people to marry regardless of whether they or their spouse is male or female.

What does discretion say about bioethics?

What do bioethicists think of sticks?

Are sticks discreet? Are they discrete?

Quiet, you.

:-P

—Myca

What does discretion say about bioethics?

What do bioethicists think of sticks?

Are sticks discreet? Are they discrete?