My internet is out for the month and I am trying to find a new place to live, so I'm having a hard time responding atm :chuckle: (at work right now searching for apartments)
:rain:
In an attempt to summarize my position:
1. My position is wholly dependent on the benefits and positive subsidies that the government offers married couples
2. I believe that those benefits exist for healthy families and society, namely:
2a. Procreation
2b. Optimal family setting--one mother and one father
Now this is a perfectly coherent argument, whether you and TH in your enormous bias prefer to acknowledge it or not.
There's nothing here that's at all new. Even if your argument were entirely coherent, that doesn't imply that it is correct. More on this below.
As for our own conversation, it seems that you have recently been challenging 1, even in spite of the support it has had throughout the thread.
I think wherever I've seen you assert something like #1, I've challenged it all along.
If you think that marriage does not imply those benefits, then I'd say you're as crazy as TH when he says the government is merely looking to strengthen relationships to increase happiness and productivity in society via monetary support.
If that's true, I'd say I'm in good company. But you've been given an answer to this line of reasoning repeatedly, and failed to address it adequately each time. The law is entirely able to address benefits for raising children specifically to people who are actually raising children. That being the case, where legislation names as beneficiary the married couple themselves, or a spouse, it is quite reasonable to assume that the intention is to subsidize the marriage for its own sake, not dependent on children, especially where, as with the SSA, there are parallel benefits for both surviving spouses and surviving children.
As for points 2a-b, marriage has been described by the Supreme Court as a basic right. To deny it to make it easier to withhold certain government benefits from homosexual couples is not only directly in conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment, but it is also contrary to the Court's view of what marriage is. Now previously you've been shown the error due to irrelevance of 2a, and you haven't even begun to try to make the case for 2b, so I'd say you're pretty well without an argument.
The everyday man working in the middle class just knows how wrong those assertions are, I don't intend to argue them and if you disagree then we've nowhere to go.
It's like your earlier appeal to common sense. You claim to speak for a silent majority that removes the burden of winning the argument from you. You're right on the cusp of the anti-intellectual crowd's derision of "elitism".
I think you should take some careful time to consider what has been said to you, and try to post something that actually addresses the argument against you.