[QUOTE=wblipp;145186]In Connecticut, civil unions have the same rights and privileges as marriages. So there are already no distinctions in the matter of law. As mentioned above, such de-facto families without legal standing have been my friends and neighbors all through the raising of our children - most of these children are recent college graduates now. In my experience, they are just families. I stand by my "no distinction" analysis based on limited but long term personal experience.[/QUOTE]

William,

Please don't misunderstand me. I respect you greatly, and I also respect that you have your opinion, and it is that you see no distinctions. What I don't understand is whether or not you see that the pro-SSM people *do* see a distinction, and whether you value the distinction they see or disregard their argument. (In other words, did you find the lawsuit which eventually ended in the supreme court decision as a frivilous one on the part of the SSM advocates?)

Best,
Zeta-Flux

P.S. While I might agree with you that there are no legal distinctions to the change, as per Connecticut law, there would be impacts in other states where they don't recognize civil unions but do recognize marriages from out of state.

-----------

Edited to add:

After reading your posts a couple of times, I think I finally understand what you meant. Namely, their *families* are no different from traditional ones. I thought you were talking about the legal institutions, etc...

[QUOTE=Zeta-Flux;145194]I think I finally understand what you meant. Namely, their *families* are no different from traditional ones.[/QUOTE]

Yes.

[QUOTE=Zeta-Flux;145194]In other words, did you find the lawsuit which eventually ended in the supreme court decision as a frivolous one on the part of the SSM advocates?[/QUOTE]

The original lawsuit predated Connecticut's Civil Union law, so none of my reservations would have been applicable at that time.


Googling around, I found a pair of adjacent sentences with opposite implications in a Boston Herald article:

[QUOTE=Boston Herald Oct 11, 2009]“Once again, you have four unelected judges by a slim margin doing what the people don’t want,” said Kris Mineau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute.

Legislatures in Vermont, Rhode Island, New York and Maryland are expected to take up bills legalizing gay marriage in the next year.[/QUOTE]

The first sentence is the "judges ramming this down our throats" argument that I believe has great traction, and was entirely irrelevant in Connecticut prior to this ruling. The second sentence suggests we may be on the road to the open legislative debate and determination of the real will of the people that I think we need.

[QUOTE=wblipp;145205]The first sentence is the "judges ramming this down our throats" argument that I believe has great traction, and was entirely irrelevant in Connecticut prior to this ruling. The second sentence suggests we may be on the road to the open legislative debate and determination of the real will of the people that I think we need.[/QUOTE]

Thanks for the clarification. I'm actually disappointed with the news reporting, as they don't seem to get the difference between legalizing civil unions, and opening up the definition of marriage to comprehend SSMs. So, for example, in the quote you gave, are they talking about legalizing civil unions, or the more dramatic step of redefining marriage?

By the way, as far as I understand it, both major political parties (and both their nominees for POTUS) are opposed to opening up the definition of marriage in this way, but both candidates support state's rights to civil unions.

[QUOTE=Zeta-Flux;145208]So, for example, in the quote you gave, are they talking about legalizing civil unions, or the more dramatic step of redefining marriage?[/QUOTE]

My fault for not providing context. In the original Boston Herald article is was clear they were commenting on the recent decision by the Connecticut Supreme Court.

If many people in Connecticut, and anywhere else where marriage has been opened to same sex couples, have the feeling that judges and legislators have made a decision which goes against common sense and is not what the general public wants, then that is indeed unfortunate. (Of course a sizable section of the general public [B]does[/B] want it: the population may well be split approximately half in half on the issue.)

Generally speaking, I take the view that in some cases - and same sex marriage is one of them - the authorities often actually know better than the dissenting general public. Let's face it, many people who oppose same sex marriage have not really thought about it properly and will in many cases be basing their judgments on ignorant ideas such as "same sex attraction is a choice" or "two men or two women cannot love each other in the same way as a man and woman can", or maybe they are just echoing what their priest tells them. [I do not of course include Zeta-Flux or anyone else who has lucidly argued against SSM here in that statement: I am speaking very, very generally there! :smile:]

If there is a high level of general ignorance over an issue, the "majority decision" amongst the general public is not then necessarily the right thing to do to. We elect politicians, and appoint judges with very stringent selection procedures, in order to make the sort of legal decisions which the general public is, frankly, often not qualified to make.

A few other examples of issues which I am very glad are/were not left to "majority rule" are the legalizing of mixed race marriages, the abolition of the death penalty where that has occurred, and very recently the government bail-outs of the big banks with huge amounts of tax-payers money. All those decisions are/were unpopular with the general public at the time they were made but nonetheless absolutely correct and essential.

I agree, wblipp, that the negative public reaction to SSM in Connecticut is very unfortunate. I maintain, however, that this public attitude would be most unlikely to change in time by itself, and the availability of civil unions would not make any difference to attitudes about marriage.

[QUOTE=Brian-E;145252]If there is a high level of general ignorance over an issue, the "majority decision" amongst the general public is not then necessarily the right thing to do to. We elect politicians, and appoint judges with very stringent selection procedures, in order to make the sort of legal decisions which the general public is, frankly, often not qualified to make.

A few other examples of issues which I am very glad are/were not left to "majority rule" are the legalizing of mixed race marriages, the abolition of the death penalty where that has occurred, and very recently the government bail-outs of the big banks with huge amounts of tax-payers money. All those decisions are/were unpopular with the general public at the time they were made but nonetheless absolutely correct and essential.[/QUOTE]I can not agree : first there is a tendency in all people of power to decide because they know better. They do not want to explain and let the public decide in order to keep their power. I for one do not approve of the selection of judges and politicians (who said "those who love the law or sausages should not look how they are made" ?) By qualifying every decision to be too complicated to be made by the public, by explaining everything in a most simplistic way those in power remain in power.

I do not agree with your qualifying the decision to bail out the big banks as correct or essential. It is correct and essential for a minority and paid by the majority. Concerning the death penalty I agree that it is a correct and essential decision (I know a lot of people in the USA will not agree with me about that,) but I do not agree when you say it was decided against a majority of the people. Do you have a specific example in mind ?

Jacob

[quote=S485122;145289]I can not agree : first there is a tendency in all people of power to decide because they know better. They do not want to explain and let the public decide in order to keep their power. I for one do not approve of the selection of judges and politicians (who said "those who love the law or sausages should not look how they are made" ?) By qualifying every decision to be too complicated to be made by the public, by explaining everything in a most simplistic way those in power remain in power.[/quote]
Please note that I only advocate imposing a decision against majority public opinion in certain specific cases, opening gay marriage being one of them. I was careful to state that in my posting. I most certainly don't advocate government by intimidation and am a fervent supporter of democracy as the only way to ensure stable and prosperous societies.

[quote]I do not agree with your qualifying the decision to bail out the big banks as correct or essential. It is correct and essential for a minority and paid by the majority. Concerning the death penalty I agree that it is a correct and essential decision (I know a lot of people in the USA will not agree with me about that,) but I do not agree when you say it was decided against a majority of the people. Do you have a specific example in mind ?[/quote]
See [URL]http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/international-polls-and-studies[/URL]. The support or otherwise of the death penalty varies throughout the world and in a lot of places it is declining, fortunately. But even in the most civilised countries which abolished it many decades ago, a slight majority in favour of reinstating it is quite common.

Sorry Brian et al, I can't resist:

My mother made me a homosexual.
If you ask her nicely, she'll make you one too:smile:

A new article in [I]Scientific American[/I] at [URL]http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=homosexuality-cure-masters-johnson[/URL]

"Can Psychiatrists Really 'Cure' Homosexuality?"

[quote=Thomas Maier]Masters and Johnson claimed to convert gays to heterosexuality in a 1979 book. But did they?

...

It may not be surprising that Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson and televangelist pastor Jerry Falwell, among many others, have supported programs designed to convert homosexuals away from "sin" and into the arms of God-fearing heterosexuality. But what may surprise you is one of the research sources cited by the Catholic Medical Association in 2006 when it declared that science "counters the myth that same-sex attraction is genetically predetermined and unchangeable, and offers hope for prevention and treatment."

That source? William Masters and Virginia Johnson, a husband–wife team who are perhaps the world's most famous sex researchers.

...

But were Masters and Johnson's claims of "conversion" in those 12 cases -- nine men and three women -- even true?

Prior to the book's publication, doubts arose about the validity of their case studies. Most staffers never met any of the conversion cases during the study period of 1968 through 1977, according to research I've done for my new book [I][URL="http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Sex-Thomas-Maier/dp/0465003079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235199143&sr=1-1"]Masters of Sex[/URL][/I]. Clinic staffer Lynn Strenkofsky, who organized patient schedules during this period, says she never dealt with any conversion cases. Marshall and Peggy Shearer, perhaps the clinic's most experienced therapy team in the early 1970s, says they never treated homosexuals and heard virtually nothing about conversion therapy.

When the clinic's top associate, Robert Kolodny, asked to see the files and to hear the tape-recordings of these "storybook" cases, Masters refused to show them to him. Kolodny—who had never seen any conversion cases himself—began to suspect some, if not all, of the conversion cases were not entirely true. When he pressed Masters, it became ever clearer to him that these were at best composite case studies made into single ideal narratives, and at worst they were fabricated.

Eventually Kolodny approached Virginia Johnson privately to express his alarm. She, too, held similar suspicions about Masters' conversion theory, though publicly she supported him. The prospect of public embarrassment, of being exposed as a fraud, greatly upset Johnson, a self-educated therapist who didn't have a college degree and depended largely on her husband's medical expertise.

With Johnson's approval, Kolodny spoke to their publisher about a delay, but it came too late in the process. "That was a bad book," Johnson recalled decades later. Johnson said she favored a rewriting and revision of the whole book "to fit within the existing [medical] literature," and feared that Bill simply didn't know what he was talking about. At worst, she said, "Bill was being creative in those days" in the compiling of the "gay conversion" case studies.

...

But despite his claims, the success of Masters's "gay conversion" therapy have never been proved.[/quote]

This thread is total nonsense.

[B]Conservatives[/B] should be arguing [B]pro gay male[/B] marriage, to protect the children just in case the myopic angel comes back and accidentally impregnates a gay male instead of a virgin. (Gay female virgins can't exist, so if one of those sluts gets preggers, it's not a miracle.)

[B]Liberals[/B] should be arguing [B]contra gay [/B]marriage, as a few gay people are multi-millionaire artists (e.g. Elton John & Tom Cruise), gay marriage is obviously corporate welfare.

For the record:

I think that everybody who insists on protecting functionally superfluous traditions is a nincompoop. I also think that people who insist on changing functionally superfluous traditions, so that more people can functionally-superfluous-tradition (new verb!) together, are exceptionally nincompoopy nincompoops.

Although I firmly believe in gay marriage, I think that this thread really has not gone anywhere. All it does is either reaffirm the beliefs of people who are pro-gay marriage, and piss off the people who are anti-gay marriage. I seriously do not see any of you guys on this thread (including myself) actually helping the dilemmas gays have to face. Don't just preach, do what you preach! If you believe in gay rights, go to a rally or something or fundraise! But seriously, get off of your asses and do something about it!*

*-Although saying this is admittedly much easier than doing it. :smile: