Sayonara

My point was that saying "Sodomy Laws made gay marriage impossible" makes as much sense as saying "Sodomy Laws made straight marriage impossible", because both comments are equally applicable in terms of the logic they employ and the basis for it. IOW, the post I was quoting was rubbish.

This is a religion topic. As most of the people in this thread well know, we don't do those round these parts.

I'm not sure I see the connection between sodomy and marriage.

It gives a 404 Not Found, I'm afraid.

If anyone is here to lecture, for the record, your thoughts are probably more appropriately inscribed in blog format.

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This thread was temporarily locked due to "that" argument which occurred earlier. The offending posts have been moved for inspection.

The change in temperature in different planetary seasons has nothing to do with that planet's proximity to the sun. It is due to the tilt of the planet's axis relative to its plane of revolution. I am not sure what significance you think a "Global Temperature" has or why anyone should be that interested in orbital eccentricities, because you have not really explained your reasoning. What I can say though is that your premises are faulty and therefore so is your conclusion.

The "everything needs something which created it, except for the creator who just doesn't" argument always makes me smile.

Actually the better hypothesis here is that you have not read all the case law.

I think you have misunderstood me ParanoiA; I did not mean to say that intelligence has no bearing on the issue. What I meant was that whereas waitforufo is claiming that a person of common intelligence would give an answer to the question "who has a husband/wife?" which is contingent on their intelligence, I am making that counter-claim that their answer will be (mostly) contingent on the breadth of their cultural background. The ability of a person to observe, identify, acknowledge, and recall the existence of same-sex partnerships is not dependent on intelligence to the same degree as it is dependent on their cultural experiences. I should probably not have begun the paragraph with the words "that has nothing to do with intelligence". Mea culpa. I should also point out that -- as you say -- laws have to be written so that they can be understood by a common man of common intelligence. This DOES NOT MEAN, as waitforufo implies, that whatever meaning a common man of common intelligence derives from their reading of the law should be regarded as the proper interpretation, nor that it can have any legal merit.

So why not say that straight partners are in a "domestic partnership"? I think it would be better if we kept the gay marriage discussion in the latest of the many gay marriage threads.

However, you were taking that "common person's understanding of the law" and saying that it has legal merit. It does not. Firstly, that has nothing to do with intelligence. Their first answer will be mostly determined by the breadth of their cultural background. Secondly, it will still have no legal merit. No. It defines bigamy, and only bigamy. None whatsoever. You're completely wrong.

Well yeah, it's best to cover all possibilities. As for the PS, I think it is usually down to poor drafting. It tends to happen less these days than it used to. The UK's Sexual Offences Act 2003, as an example, is a fantastic piece of legislation purely because it was intended to overwrite the shortcomings of the poorly-conceived previous version.

Reynolds vs United States was brought up BY YOU in this thread about 16 posts ago and instantly shown to be irrelevant. Why have you just repeated it? Would it be a stretch to conclude that you didn't understand the word person has no gender? The law refers to two different unions: 1) A union between A PERSON and their husband, 2) A union between A PERSON and their wife. The gender of the PERSON in either union is not defined. In any case, even if it were, the law would read as follows: "Any man having a wife living or woman having a husband living [who marries another etc] shall commit bigamy". Which is not in the slightest bit what you claim it to be.

Lance, look at what you are saying here. "The physical measurements correlate with intelligence". How was that level of intelligence established? Could it have been with... IQ tests?

I think it may also be in this particular case that although the word as used in law was never meant to include same sex couples, it was not necessarily meant to exclude them either. If it were, that would surely be unambiguously encoded in the legislation.

A search for any posts containing the word "biofeedback" yields 13 threads, none of which are in the biology forum/s. Search search search. Bear in mind some people may hyphenate it.

I don't think I like the idea of tearing through the atmosphere in a lightspeed nosedive at a giant pyramid. It's not what I have come to expect from public transport.

If you aren't really sure I am not entirely certain why you would argue at such length. Throughout this thread several people, myself included, have questioned whether or not religious rights are infringed upon simply by virtue of the fact that people outside their group do not share their definition of "marriage". Since this is something they subscribe to within their group, and since different usages apply anyway, the consensus seems to be that it makes no odds. Nobody has shown otherwise as yet, but of course they still could. I would positively welcome a reasoned demonstration of such infringement. Nobody is differentiating in law between religious and non-religious people. The proposition is "in legal parlance, marriage may be defined as such...", which makes no commentary at all on the various peoples using the word or their reasons for doing so. The overbearing theme there seemed to be a confused point about a traditional usage of a word within one particular in-group, which simply cannot be made into a compelling argument against a legal definition being adopted for use in legislation. If it may be trampling on their rights then it may need a better reason, not would. The focus should be on showing whether or not rights are so affected, instead of steaming ahead with a possibly superfluous argument regardless. That's exactly what is happening. If you sacrifice your principles for the sake of a small degree of additional support you are likely to lose more support elsewhere. There is also the issue that legal equality should not be contingent on popularity contests - the magnitude of support for a position does not alter its rational standing. That is an issue that's come up before in various gay marriage threads. In this thread though we pretty much have our hands tied in that we can only really discuss the legal definitions as they are specified by Prop 8. Not at all. I was trying to make the point that simply turning the tables, i.e. reversing a scenario, does not really work. But you keep doing it as if it does. If you genuinely believe that it does represent a real point, then obviously I'd see that as being mistaken rather than serpentine. But it's Prop 8 which has disrupted the status quo in California, and the argument we are having is symptomatic of the status quo pushing back. The arguments against Prop 8 are going to be reviewed. By your own logic, the onus is on the proponents of Prop 8 to defend it, which is exactly what will happen in the California Supreme Court. That amounts to the same thing, unless they are simply voting with their feet in which case it makes no odds whether they are religious are not. The proponents of Proposition 8. Unequivocally. They aren't arguments for a definition, they are arguments against making a distinction in legal terms for straight and gay marriages. I think plenty of people have shown that they are wrong. Just not in a scenario that would have led to Prop 8 originally being blocked. Now that this review is pending, of course, that may well change, although the question of Prop 8's constitutionality is likely to be a bigger factor in the final outcome. My thoughts exactly. No, it's all about winning the cake game.

If it's bollocks then he doesn't really need to. Unless ofc you are asking for help with it.

Lance: given the choice, would you rather have the small chance of probable death, or a cloaca? Just curious (The cloaca has to be a -50 Awful on the good biology scale).

Err... couldn't the person in "every person" be a man or a woman, regardless of whether the second party is a husband or a wife? It's like they specifically wrote that to keep you wondering.

"At least partly" in the first excerpt and "correlated" in the second would seem to undermine the proposal "largely inherited". I would err on the side of "partly" and leave the magnitude of the effect for future studies to determine, personally. I am sure that inherited traits are involved though.

Works for me. Could you point out where this happened so that I can follow it through the thread? Which argument? I don't think that's a very good comparison. It's not just about gay rights, it is about having all citizens on an equal legal footing. And even if it were about gay rights, that is not license to derisively wave it away as if you can just dismiss an argument which you have no interest or investment in. Clearly it's important to someone, and they probably aren't looking for your validation. If you make the tiniest legal differentiation between one group and another without any rational basis you are discriminating, and you need a substantially more weighty reason to do this than the indignation of some followers of one particular religion. Perhaps I could have phrased that better. The bible as we know it came to be (and was repeatedly revised) during the Dark Ages. The OT was translated from Hebrew scriptures through a torturous route which involved several languages and which included the addition and revision of books as the translations progressed. It took about 600 years from 800AD onwards for Jewish scholars to compose a unified text from all the different versions which stemmed from the standardised Hebrew book based on the Septuagint. As far as the West was concerned, that had already been thrown out anyway. The Vulgate, which precedes most modern Bibles (albeit without some texts contained in the deuterocanonical books or apocrypha) was commissioned by Papal decree. That happened in 382AD (as in the commissioning, not completion of the weighty task), which is pretty much bang on target for the lower bound of the Dark Ages, during which who knows how many changes were made and parallel versions appeared. So please, don't patronise me with claims that "definitions" from a document that has repeatedly changed over many centuries are any basis on which laws should be disputed. And seriously don't even get me started on the King James version or the influence of the Peshitta. For what it's worth, I don't actually see how those scriptures predating the Dark Ages helps at all. It simply serves to show how divorced (if you'll pardon the pun) those values are from anything which is useful to contemporary Western societies. It's an ancient traditional definition which is the invariant word of god and which has changed a lot in meaning and intent but is the same and ancient and it is modern. Okaaay. I do recall reading somewhere someone saying that you displayed double standards, but I don't think it was me. I have really only been concentrating on the onus for reasoning and fallacious explanations. [edit] On a read-through, turns out it was actually YOU accusing someone else of accusing you of having double standards. Way to invoke confidence in your debate tactics. In case you are in any doubt, I am not accusing you of "wanting to have unfair standards", or indeed wanting anything. All I take issue with is your reasoning. I couldn't give two hoots about your intentions. [/edit] I have not chosen a "side" from the options of gay camp or Christian camp. I am arguing on the same side I usually try to argue on: the one that stands against poor reasoning. What, you mean apart from the specified definition conflict in which the legally defined word "marriage" conflicts with the Christian use of the word "marriage" in some kind of definition conflict? I tend to agree. But I think you would be hard-pressed to find anyone outside the Westboro Baptist Church who thinks that "call a marriage a marriage" is anywhere near as extreme and unreasonable a statement. Ignoring, of course, that you simply wish to ignore that religion has no business interfering in the passing of laws. You only think this because you keep batting away the burden of proof (on behalf of Christians), and pretending that people who have a problem with a more all-encompassing and inclusive definition of a given word are somehow in a position to decree by fiat that nobody is allowed to use it. If that were the scenario then the same would apply there. But it's not. I think you are possibly on the wrong tracks here, as GBLT pressure groups have repeatedly and very publicly lost a raft of attempts to mark words or ideas as their own, having spat their dummies out in much the same fashion as the religious objectors we were discussing. Parsimony. Not implying a legal difference where none exists. Religion has no business acting in an editorial capacity in the formulation of legislation. Belief in the privileged status of the specified in-group definition of a commonly-used word does not extend to anyone outside that in-group. Legislation should not pander to the subscriptions of arbitrary social groups. I could go on. I actually thought of some and then forgot them while typing the list. It's late It's a marriage. Call it a ****ing marriage. Don't imply that there is a difference between the legal statuses, the value of the participants as people, or the sanctity of the unions by saying "no, you can't be in our club because you are dirty and you will sully our word which isn't ours but it is really". Don't thank me. I really have not helped you to a millionth of the degree to which you think I have. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged I think what actually counts here are the times when you remember having several more cakes. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged At some point I would like to see someone from a less major but still well-represented religion throw this argument off a bit with a definition of "marriage" which conflicts with the Christian usage.