interesting on-campus findings by former homosexuals

Then why's the left so stuck on the gay marriage agenda if you're admitting that the legal benefits don't even amount to very much?

Gays can already legally have a wedding, which is what most people think of when they think of marriage - the only reason to legally marry is for the benefits - and you just admitted they're basically un-applicable - so... again why's the left feel this agenda is so important?

 

Seems to me like you're putting words in his mouth, unless you don't think that benefits that come into effect upon death are of significance to families. Perhaps he doesn't think of it daily, but those who don't have such benefits for their families might think of it more often, and will certainly be thinking of it if that day ever happens to them, and probably go through a fair more effort and expense making preparations just in case a death does happen.

I can tell you some of the ways it has effected me personally (or the lack of it has). I've been with my partner for 8 years. He lost his job about 6 months ago, and with it he lost his insurance. During the same time frame, he underwent emergency retinal detachment surgery. Both of which taught us a little something about these benefits.

For one, the surgery. I'm grateful I'm on good terms with his parents, because it's basically up to them what information I was allowed to have and support I was allowed to provide, at least until he was able to speak for himself. He was bed-ridden for days after the surgery, so I tried to help take care of the insurance and other forms for medical equipment, some of which I was allowed to do, some of which I wasn't. My situation was fortunate, as his surgery was short and I have no problem with his parents, but not necessarily so for any other given couple. And I'm fortunate that I didn't have to rely on something like FMLA, which would not have been available to me anyway.

As for insurance, consider what happens when a married spouse loses their job. For married couples, loss of employment is a "qualifying event" that allows them to immediately add a spouse to their insurance without having to wait for open enrollment. This wasn't an option for us. For married couples, if their spouse is added to their employer's insurance, the cost is not considered taxable income, providing them a tax break that would have cost us about 100 a month more. But none of that is a problem for us anyway, because my employer didn't offer insurance for same-sex couples, so none of it mattered.... but not because they wouldn't. They said they would add it the next time their insurance contract was negotiated, it's just an option they hadn't considered before because it was an afterthought.

So there's some ways how it has effected me personally thus far. As for some other legal and social differences:

-Insurance for spouses children
-join adoption
-joint parental rights
-preferential treatment for hiring of spouses for certain employers, among other benefits for the spouse of employees (consider the military)
-And let's not forget death benefits, which are probably just as important, not just after death, but in many of the financial and legal decisions we make in life to prepare just in case it happens.

So I agree, legally marring is for them benefits, and for the social norms it fits into... people generally take the benefits for granted without ever seriously considering how it effects them, because they marry for love, which marriage is part of in our culture. But only if you're of the opposite sex, some would say.

 

That's why people have weddings - if you need the state to hand you a slip of paper with the words "married" on it in order to be in love, then that's pretty stupid. So how then did people "marry" ever before govt marriage licenses were officially invented?

Cultural marriage = weddings - which are already legal for gays. Legal marriage is solely a legal contract done for benefits, and has nothing to do with love.

How did Native Americans "marry" before the colonists ever arrived - they didn't have "legal marriage"?

 

Did I say otherwise? Regardless, the benefits are certainly designed to support the fact that we humans do tend to need and appreciate love and companionship, it as important enough to associate legally with a formal institution. You tried to down-play the significance of the benefits to these loving relationships, and then didn't even address that part of my post. This strikes me as being a little insincere.

... I'm not sure where to even begin with that one... are you saying laws and social norms didn't exist until colonists arrived? Certainly they had their own cultures with their own variety of rules and requirements regarding love and marriage, but this is part of ours, and marriage has become deeply engrained in the dramatically more complex legal and social frameworks we have set up today, nothing like existed 400+ years ago. You can hardly compare the tribal customs of that time to the sprawling network of global legal structures we deal with today.

 

Then I guess you can't love someone without some judge handing you a piece of paper telling you that you're legally a couple

 

Sure you can, it just makes certain logistics harder. I don't believe anyone has said otherwise. You just seem to be downplaying the significance of those logistics, while in the mean time society has created these marriage benefits for a reason... to deal with those logistics. Sounds like hypocrisy to me, to create the benefits, and then to say that they're actually not that important for the people that they deny them for. Society apparently goes through a whole lot of trouble for nothing, apparently, and continues to go through a whole lot more trouble for nothing as they continue to try and prevent same-sex couples from getting the same benefits.

 

I don't care if states want to give them benefits on an individual basis - I'm just pointing out that the priority the left puts on 'legalizing gay marriage' is disproportionate and the gay agenda is motivated more by political correctness than anything else.

 

So all of the benefits that society has attached to marriage are disproportionate and unnecessary? I'm just checking. Because otherwise, I don't see how you've established that it's motivated by anything less. Society sure has gone through a lot of trouble establishing what you seem to be calling disproportionate and unnecessary.

 

So when you go to a doctor you ask for information about fixing your car right, because its an 'information center'?

 

Actually, your commentary is motivated by PC, far more than the right of gay Americans to seek equality.

Please, stop with the closed-mindedness.

- - - Updated - - -

Ha-ha!! Great response!!

 

If and when you ever get married, I hope to god you don't marry in order to get get benefits. I know I certainly didn't.

But if and when you get married, I hope you do get the same legal benefits of marriage as my wife and I enjoy- regardless of the gender of your spouse.

That would not be a legal wedding. That would be a non-binding non-legal ceremony. By that standard you could marry your two dogs together, but it wouldn't be legal.

What is left on this agenda is that I think that i think a gay couple should be treated legally exactly the same way as my wife and I. So why does the right have objections to treating people legally equally?

 

I am just pointing out that this is merely your opinion- the opinion of someone who has never been married and frankly has little experience in what marriage is.

As a man who has been happily married for over 20 years, I understand why two people who love each other would want the same legal benefits and protections as my wife and I do- even if that is not the reason that they want to get married. My wife and I didn't get married so she could legally be my guardian if I go into a coma, but that is a side benefit that we are glad we have.

 

I asked you to explain to me the consistancy in a position that includes:
a) forcing LGBTQ Resource Centers to post material they disagree with,
b) Whining about businesses being "forced" to serve gays,
c) Saying no rules should be made in relation to how people have sex.

Your response is a justification for LGBTQ Resource Centers being forced to promote agendas they oppose, that does not explain why you think businesses should be able to discriminate against gays despite LGBTQ Resource Centers needing to be open to alternative viewpoints.

 

???? You are the one reducing marriage to sex. Insisting that marriage be extended to gay couples, as opposed to extending marriage to any two consenting adults, because homosexuals also have sex with each other like the heterosexuals. Heterosexual couples haven't been required or encouraged to marry for thousands of years because they have sex with each other. They have been so required or encouraged to marry because when heterosexual couples engage in sexual relationships, children are frequently the result.

 

Acknowledging that marriage usually involves sex, and reducing it to sex are two different things. Weighing the risks for for third-party bystanders is a legitimate concern for those tasked with weighing them. And I've already gone over the vast inconsistencies in the application of your logic with regard to prisoners, elderly, and fertile polygamists. Not really worth my time to go over it again, especially since the people, the courts and the legislatures are already moving well past that.

 

Because you are not treating people equally. You are by design treating the married UNEQUAL to the unmarried. Cant continue to restrict who can and cannot marry, but then carve out an exception for "gay couples", and claim to be treating "people legally equally".

 

I know people who live together as a married couple and idenitfy as 'husband/wife', and don't even want to legally marry or have the legal benefits - so no they don't need "the state" to approve their relationship

 

In addition, within limits, a statute generally does not fail rational basis review on the grounds of over- or under-inclusiveness; “[a] classification does not fail rational-basis review because ‘it is not made with mathematical nicety or because in practice it results in some inequity.’”...

Under this standard, DOMA is constitutional because the legislature was entitled to believe that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation, essential to survival of the human race, and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by the children’s biological parents. Allowing same-sex couples to marry does not, in the legislature’s view, further these purposes.....

Nearly all United States Supreme Court decisions declaring marriage to be a fundamental right expressly link marriage to fundamental rights of procreation, childbirth, abortion, and child-rearing....

But as Skinner, Loving, and Zablocki indicate, marriage is traditionally linked to procreation and survival of the human race. Heterosexual couples are the only couples who can produce biological offspring of the couple....

And the link between opposite-sex marriage and procreation is not defeated by the fact that the law allows opposite-sex marriage regardless of a couple’s willingness or ability to procreate. The facts that all opposite-sex couples do not have children and that single-sex couples raise children and have children with third party assistance or through adoption do not mean that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples lacks a rational basis. Such over- or under-inclusiveness does not defeat finding a rational basis....
http://www.courts.wa.gov/newsinfo/co.../759341opn.pdf




Petitioners note that the state does not impose upon heterosexual married couples a condition that they have a proved capacity or declared willingness to procreate, posing a rhetorical demand that this court must read such condition into the statute if same-sex marriages are to be prohibited. Even assuming that such a condition would be neither unrealistic nor offensive under the Griswold rationale, the classification is no more than theoretically imperfect. We are reminded, however, that "abstract symmetry" is not demanded by the Fourteenth Amendment
http://www.cas.umt.edu/phil/faculty/Walton/bakrvnel.htm

 

That's correct. The legal justifications for discriminating against homosexuals are dwindling, as well they should.

 

You're long past worth my time, have a good day Dixon.

 

Why don't you go over it again, applying your logic to marriage limited to heterosexual and homosexual couples? Or like all your arguments, does the logic only apply to include "gay couples"

 

It would apply to anyone who doesn't pose an overriding risk to third-party bystanders, which may well include incestious and polygamist unions if it were determined that there is no (substantial) risk. The same reasoning is used in certain gun laws, where I could argue that a mentally ill or criminal person might wish to own a gun for the same reason as anyone else (i.e. to go hunting, or whatever), but overriding risks may justify a limitation that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the intended use of the gun. I do not care to argue whether or not polygamist and incestious couples do or do not pose such a risk that would justify limitations, and I am content to say that they couple may very well be included in marriage for the same reasons I argue homosexuals are included if there are no overriding risks worth consideration. Of course, none of this should be new to you, as it is what I've said and been saying for quite some time. Hopefully that satisfies you. If you disagree, I respect your opinion. Have a good night Dixon.

 

Afraid I dont know what you are going on about here. Apply your logic regarding prisoners, to marriage limited to heterosexual and homosexual couples.

 

Well good for you. I am glad you know people.

And if the 'wife' got hit by a car tomorrow, and was in a coma, her parents would be making all decisions regarding her health care, not her husband.

One day, if you ever get married, you might understand why that would be a concern.

 

That's nice. But at least they have the option.