40. rocketeer:
@23 DavidN – “I still haven’t had a serious answer as to what negative effect would come from legalizing gay marriage”
Let’s turn the question around and ask what positive effects there would be to legalize it. I still haven’t had a serious answer as to what positive effect would come from legalizing gay marriage.
Since when did we outlaw things because no one can see any benefit from them being legal? The only reason to outlaw something is public safety, or the well-being of the citizenry. Outlawing something because you don’t like it is rather silly, and very arbitrary.
As for the argument that the gay community makes themselves less palatable by their rhetoric and extremes, I agree that they do. Frankly I’ve been accused of being a homophobe on gay sites, because I don’t believe marriage to be the right of anyone, gay or straight. You don’t get a license from the government to exercise your rights. Anyway, both sides need to tone down the rhetoric, and the accusations of what supposedly will ensue if gay marriage becomes legal, or doesn’t. It’s not the end of religion, your church, or anything else. As I pointed out above, Catholics have operated with a marriage standard very different from that of the government. It used to be you couldn’t get an annulment if your last name wasn’t Kennedy. For many years, there were people who were married to one person as far as the Catholic church was concerned, and to another person (or no one at all) in legal terms. Why does gay marriage have to be any different.
As to all of the supposed bad consequences of polygamy: I’ll agree that the fundamentalist Mormons, and their ilk, are very annoying. I’ll also agree that child marriage is a bad thing. However, many states in the Union allow it, or have in the recent past. This is beside polygamy, a man in his fifties can marry a 15-year-old. Does anyone think that healthy? But somehow, that’s healthier than a menage-a-trois being legalized, even if that involves people in their thirties. *That* makes sense.
I would suggest that the solution is to require marriage to be between consenting adults, with no exceptions. Minors shouldn’t be allowed to get married, or failing that the age of consent of 16 or 17 ought to be inviolable, and men caught fooling around with younger women ought to get in some trouble. The problem, of course, is that everyone can justify their violation of rules like this (“She told me she was 18″) and the system is typically reluctant to enforce rules on people harshly, under these circumstances.
But beyond all of this, I return to what I said originally. No one has shown me anything (anything credible, anyway) bad that would result from gay marriage being legalized. Everyone has all sorts of predictions of “what comes next” but that’s in one way irrelevant. Do we make the consumption of alcohol illegal, because we know some of the people who get drunk are going to drive their cars, afterward? No, and there the one thing stems directly from the other. In the case of gay marriage, you’re assuming that *other people* will come out of the woodwork, insisting these other practices become legal, too. Does that, in and of itself, justify keeping gay marriage illegal? Laws aren’t for prohibiting things of which you disapprove; they’re for protecting the many from the few, and the few from the many. I repeat: no one has shown me any credible proof anything bad would happen as a result of gay marriage being legalized.
