| appolose said: Oh, I'm not arguing against an objective morality (I believe in it), I'm saying that the criticisms made against relgious moral enforcement can be made for the nonreligious moral enforcement. Perhaps even better. Now, your assement of general mankind hearkens back to what I had been saying earlier; the majority is the "moral" decider (moral being, in this case, an arbitrary preference). I would agree that most of mankind, at the moment, seems to want to preserve itself via rights and liberty, but, then again, that's just most of mankind. On the other parts of humanity, this standard is forced, and that is where I see the hypocricy arise: the Christian is criticized for barring gay marriage, while the critic goes along and forbids whatever he prefers. Hence my point that the standards of the nonreligous are those that have the most enforcers. The reason why I brought up paedophilia was to show that this method thus allows it (I'm not (I think) using the slippery slope argument). If you're going to hold paedophilia as wrong and always wrong, you're going to have to drop this methodology. Incidentally, he's riding a raptor :)
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No one is forcing anything on you if we allow gay people to get married. We aren't trying to make you marry a gay person. We aren't forcing your church to marry gay people, we aren't forcing you to invite gay couples to your house. What are we forcing you to do? Sacrifice your religious beliefs? That's absurd, you are still entitled to not allow gay people to get married in your church and to believe that it is morally wrong for gay people to marry. Allowing someone else to do something that has no tangible impact on your life is not depriving you of a right. And even if that is a right, its not a right society has an interest in protecting.
By your same logic, we are infringing on people's rights who are offended by interracial marriages and who are racists when we make them eat in the same restaurant as those people. What you are talking about is a right to determine how other people run their lives even though their choice has no tangible impact on your life other than a perceived impact. Its different than us allowing people to murder others in society. That can tangibly impact your life. Gay marriage will only impact your life if you allow it to. Its like a person being offended by interracial couples eating in a restaurant.
The right you are discussing is a right that society has no interest in protecting, since it conflicts with another person's right to live life in a way they choose when that choice does not impact society in a negative way. You can argue that allowing gay people to marry would impact people in a negative way, but that argument has about as much support for it as saying that allowing interracial marriage will have a negative impact on society.
Show me scientific studies or documented evidence that gay marriage has a negative impact on society, and then we can talk. You aren't basing your reasons for being against gay marriage on anything tangible or anything empirical. Without hard evidence that it will impact society in a negative way (pretty easy to do with something like allowing murder), then your argument is weak at best.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
