WSJ: Democracy loses if Prop. 8 is overturned.

[Grey Acumen]

TheRealMafoo said:

One of the principles of this country is separation of church and state. If you want tax breaks for mirage, fine. But to do that, you need to strip all religious meaning of the word away first. If you don't, then you must believe in god before the government will provide you with additional benefit, or it's against our constitution.

We did that, and the christians got what they wanted. Now when people you don't agree with want the same benefit, you can't now say it's a religious thing. You can't have it both ways.

I want to get married so my wife can visit me when I get sick, so if I die, she is better protected. So she can be on my health benefits, and use my car insurance.

I don't believe in your god, but I do believe in equality. So, allow whomever wants to marry whomever the right to do so.

If you don't want that, fine, remove every government privilege first.

What you're missing is that tax breaks have nothing to do with the religious side of things. The whole point is to protect society as a whole, of which a key aspect is supporting the upbringing of children, which will be the future society. Marriage, and specifically religious marriage is for a man and a woman to commit to a relationship that will result in bearing and raising children together. The tax breaks are to support and strengthen the relationship BEFORE the child is born so that it is already a solid foundation with which to raise the child.

Of course then you get into the whole issue of comparative abilities of child raising, and you hear people putting out cases about how they were raised by single parents just fine, or cases where a man and a woman turned out to be horrible parents, etc etc, blah blah, but a man and a woman in a committed relationship are still going to be the best option for child raising, and religion has nothing to do with that.

1) A marriage between a man and a woman can typically be expected to result in offspring, maybe not immediately, maybe not always, but typically. If you were to force this issue, then that would put unreasonable strain on the relationship between the man and woman that is needed as the stable base for child raising, which is why you base the tax breaks on the marriage, not the presence of children.
A marriage between two men or two women cannot truly be expected to result in offspring. At this rate, any guy could just find another guy and say "hey, lets get married so we don't have to pay as much taxes, if we want to marry a chick, we'll just get a divorce(it's not like there's any legal backlash to getting a mutual divorce)"

Now, there are of course a few arguments against this, such as adoption, artifical insimenation, and sterile couples, which I will address next.

2) Even for those couple that cannot bear children naturally, there is still adoption and artificial insimination. For these cases, gay couples technically have just as much of a shot as straight couples. Except I turn back to original statement that a man and a woman is still the best way to go for child raising. You can bitch at me all you want, my reasons aren't religious, so harping on that isn't going to get you anywhere, but you still don't have a chance at changing my views on that.
Men and Women are physically, socially, physiologically different from each other. When it comes to a relationship, this doesn't make that much of a difference to me, it's purely a personal thing, but when it comes to raising children, the differences are crucial. No matter how in touch with his feminine side a guy is, or how butch a woman is, there's a limit to how well they can understand, empathize, and get the opposite gender to recognize that empathy. Lacking a true mother or father figure that is commited to the other is a SEVERE handicap to child raising, whether that child is a boy or a girl, not only for their ability to grow as an individual, but also for their ability to interact with the opposite gender, form a stable relationship of their own, and raise their own children.

Of course, this is where the main arguments come up involving the single parents, whether by death or by seperation, and I get the indignant questions of "so since my dad raised me alone, I'm less of a person?" Quite frankly it's ridiculous. I never said it's IMPOSSIBLE, I said it's BETTER, and don't give me this shit about "Oh, so I would have been better off if my mom stuck with her abusive husband" and again, no, quit being a retard. The issue is that with the same individual emotional stability of two people involved in childraising, a team of a man and woman will always have the best range of skills and perspectives to handle whatever comes up. That's why a marriage between a man and a woman should be supported.

What this all boils down to is that the purpose of States laws recognizing and supporting marriage is that you cannot make a law that forces people to reproduce and raise children, but that action is still essential to society, so all it can do is encourage those actions.