Same sex marriage and the slippery slope.

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You have just proven that you never bothered to read any of my posts, much less the references I linked to.


You put forward a bunch of articles which we were conveniently unable to read. I assume that those articles actually do exist; I do not assume that they mean what you think they mean, especially after you cited a bunch of single-sentence quotes on embryology for your claim that 'life starts at conception.'

No. You have demonstrated the benefits of intact families.


If we are to accept the criticism of reproductive medicine, based on its affects on children, as valid, then we must accept it as valid for everyone including heterosexuals because the affects on children do not vary by the orientation of the parents.

@LKL

In relation to your last statement, I agree this also applies to heterosexual couples.

The judges DO in fact know the law, and specifically the state constitution of California, better than the California voters. That's what they're there for. Read the decision - you said you have access to it. I dare you. Loving v. Virgina also went against the will of the voters... would you also consider that "judicial activism," a term that seems to be a right-wing dog whistle for 'a decision not pandering to the extreme right'?


No, he's not, because you switch back and forth between the two seemingly at random.


No. It cannot. It has a heartbeat, but that is meaningless wrt. personhood. It does not have recognizably mammalian brain waves, nor is it physiologically capable of sensing pain or responding in any way other than reflex arcs. I have posted multiple sources for this already, from the Mayo clinic, the NIH, and a very good, unbiased but nonetheless fact-based textbook on development which has been praised by other, fact-based, pro-lifers whom I have argued with.


You are incorrect. Someone with no more brain activity than that of a 22-week-old fetus would be, at best, a donor.


three months is not 'a few weeks,' especially to a developing human fetus.


Firstly, I think that most of those who claim to have 'survived abortion' are hoaxers. Secondly, what they want now doesn't matter; if they had been aborted, they would never have had a conscious existence to regret the lack of anyways. It's the same as saying, 'I would not choose to have had my mother marry a different man, because then I would have never existed...'

[/quote]
Yes, in fact, they are.
Hyper-individualism is basically libertarianism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
Totalitarianism is the elimination of individual liberty in favor of control by the state:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism

Oh, so you don't mean, 'get rid of California,' you mean, 'get rid of the people of California.'

It really would be more convenient, wouldn't it, if we could just get rid of all of the humans that disagree with us?

I know about the judgment, I read through it, and the 14th Amendment was really the underlying grounding of that judgment. The judges cited that society's views had changed on the nature of marriage, and thus this was under the jurisdiction of the 14th Amendment.

Saying "the people" doesn't really say anything, because merely voting to remove gay marriage is not a sign of one's beliefs about marriage, it could be a sign of anything. It could simply be a sign of disliking homosexuals, or theocratic tendencies. Neither of which would really be a dispute with the judge's ruling.


On the rights of the child? That's because you've asserted some random ethicist on some point that I don't even begin to consider sensible, much less valid. I don't see the need to dispute outright foolishness, especially when another poster has already engaged the matter.

As for my engagement, I have pointed out issues with what you have said, and I have pointed out past engagement by other posters noting its validity. You are doing no better than simply rebutting, so at *BEST* this is pot meet kettle, but I deny that I am so dark on this matter.

I have read the decision. You do not appear to be getting my point or at least you seen quite intent on not listening to it. The judges, as one of the reasons for their decision, cited that society’s views on the matter had CHANGED. I consider this judicial activism because they were using this to overturn legislation that the majority of people had voted, only recently, for. Also, I do not consider being against same-sex marriage to be a position of the extreme right. It is quite a majority opinion in most countries.



No it has always been my position that the subjective criteria are too broad and that therefore conception is the best place to standard. Its only an attempt at silly chicanery on the part of some posters that the discussion was separated; they were clearly attempting to attack the conception point rather than deal with the subjective nature of the present criteria.



I put these two together because it illustrates a problem I am having with you in this discussion. In relation to the first you are making a valid point, I in turn pointed out that if you possessed these traits, you could not be taken off life-support without consent. You then picked ONE of those aspects when clearly you would need to address ALL of the traits. If you had brain activity, a heartbeat and the ability to respond in a way that is indicative of pain (sorry, not all sources are forum friendly, but I did post five of them), then you could not be removed from life-support.



You are right, all of that potential, utterly extinguish with no regard.



It can and often does mean a total emphasis on one’s own rights. You are right that it is a form of libertarianism but it is an oppressive form, where only one’s own rights are considered.



Its interesting that even 'the people's democratic republic of California' voted against Gay Marriage.

AG, there is one small problem - the court that rejected the law in California was a state court, and not qualified to rule on US Constitutional grounds. Instead, they found that the law violated the California state constitution's "equal protection" clause, which voters later changed by passing a constitutional amendment permitting this particular bit of discrimination. (Thus far, no one has yet brought suit against such laws on 14th Amendment grounds, nor has anyone brought suit against the Defense of Marriage Act as a violation of Article IV, Section 1 [since it calls for states to be permitted to ignore marriages performed in other states, if the participants share a gender - thus setting up a class of "public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings" which are NOT honored by all states]).

That is to say, your argument is correct in aim and application, but erroneous in detail - and that's what some of these people will jump on, ignoring the fact that the detail is not important to the thesis. (They will also proceed to ignore details they can't twist, which is why so many of my posts have faded into the aether in here...)

No, I thought the relevant court decision was a district court?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_v._Schwarzenegger

Maybe I am getting my court cases confused?

Majority opinion among first world nations? You have to remember that the politics of third world nations and other non-first world nations usually aren't even considered in Western discourse(and I would argue for very good reasons).


Then criticisms of conception are valid, and I've already shown that other standards, such as implantation, can exist, that are not objective, while still presenting relevant differences to our political practice. It is also not "chicanery" to attack an opponents actual position. As for the "subjective nature", I think it is generally agreed that third trimester is when we can actually BEGIN to start calling this a child. It is not as if LKL and I talked before this all began on the situation, but rather, our agreement on facts is not coincidence, suggesting that there is more involved here than "subjectivity".


You can be removed from life support if you have brain activity, a heart beat, and even some response to stimulus. This happens in the case of persistent vegetative states.


Ok? But you are ceding LKL his point, and your current statement is just an emotive expression without any real persuasive content.


Hyper-individualism has to refer to the rights of multiples individuals, otherwise what justifies calling it "hyper-individualism" if all it is is just mundane egoism? Egoism isn't a category of "individualism" thus talking about egoism as if it were hyper-individualism is a bit strained.

Its also the majority opinion in your own country, just as it is everywhere, your just being needlessly argumentative now. I really am not going to continue with this sort of silly back and forth banter.



Yes, you are defending the status-quo, Citing it does not make it objective in any way but the present legal situation. Most people think that abortion after the first trimester is wrong. Nearly 60% of Americans believe in restrictions on abortion.



Not without consent and never when it is near certain that you will be just fine in less than a year.



Actually I believe that LKL is not a him… and no I was not ceding the point, I was merely agreeing that a few months is everything to a child that may not survive inaction with their own species before being born.



This has nothing to do with my main point, why are you even bothering to respond and disagree; it appears you do because you think you can. The term hyper-individualism to describe all others than one’s self, is in common usage within the ethics on the subject.

You are bringing up nothing new or substantive to this discussion unless you do, I will probably not respond.

The fact that society's values have changed allowed us to create the legal entity of a domestic partnership; the fact that a domestic partnership is clearly intended to be a 'separate and inequal' alternative to marriage is the reason that the judges overthrew prop.22 on equal protection grounds. This was not a radical, activist court, and it was the 'separate and unequal' aspect of domestic partnerships, not the change of society, that was the proximate factor in their ruling.


Then you must also consider the SCOTUS's ruling in Loving v. Virginia to be judicial activism. There were plenty of people, including the police who arrested the Lovings, who felt at that time that interracial marriages were 'unnatural' and 'against God's law.'

You are demonstrating my criticism in your very response. The criteria for what? Which factor are you referring to in that paragraph? Life, or personhood? You have taken me to task before for assuming that you meant full humanity and personhood started at conception, so when exactly do you think it begins if not then?

You are incorrect. Someone with the pain perception, brain activity, and heartbeat of a 22 week old fetus can and routinely is removed from life support. That's where heart transplants come from, silly. Frankly, I have made it abundantly clear to my family that they are to pull the plug and donate everything that they can if my body is ever unfortunate enough to end up in that state.
I could post a dozen more sources backing my position from the wall of biology textbooks behind me, but I don't because they're meaningless on an internet forum. Your sources are nothing but claims unless we can review them ourselves.


And as such, it is the opposite of totalitarianism.


Our school system was destroyed decades ago by ballot measures that crippled the state's ability to raise taxes, and as such the population was not well-enough versed to see the lies in the Mormon-funded prop 8 campaign. We have become more like the rest of the United States, and have declined as a people as we have done so.
http://mydd.com/2008/10/23/prop-8-tell- ... y-marriage

Yes, there was proposition 22, which was voted on by the state supreme court, and then prop 8, which amended the state constitution (Shame, shame that Californians amended our constitution to withdraw a right from people!) and is currently working its way through the federal court system, waiting for the California Supreme Court (IIrc) to decide if the backers of prop 8 have the standing to defend it in federal court, since neither the governor nor the attourney general will touch it with a 10 foot pole.

I thought I would respond to these two points, since it seems that you and I will never agree, these two however are quite attacking.

Not really, the majority of people in the United States supported the court’s decision. There are no rights implications outside of the couple involved in an interracial marriage. Children within same sex unions are deprived of a number of rights (which I detailed earlier). You just don’t seem to be getting that there is more at work here than the same-sex couple. I have campaigned for legal recognition of same-sex relationships (mentioned in one of my original posts) in relation to inheritance and next of kin matters. I however do not support an entitlement for such couples to marry.



I have argued that establishing personhood is just too subjective and difficult and that the present legal definition of abortion on demand with no regard is just plain wrong. I believe that the best place to place the beginning of life is conception. Its interesting that Christopher Hitchens (while being pro-abortion) even agrees with pro-lifers on this matter.

You are incorrect.
http://www.blackpast.org/?q=perspective ... erspective
quote:
Judges justified these laws by insisting that interracial marriage was somehow "unnatural," a claim that became so pervasive that by 1958, 94 percent of Americans told pollsters they opposed interracial marriage.

...Richard knew they had no hope of getting a license in Virginia, so the pair traveled to Washington, D.C. to get married, returning with a marriage certificate that they framed and placed on a wall of the home they shared with Mildred's parents. Most of their Central Point neighbors paid little attention to the marriage, but someone told the Caroline County sheriff, who vowed to put a stop to it. The newlyweds had lived together for a little more than a month when they were awakened in the middle of the night by the sheriff and his deputies, who walked through the unlocked door of the house and right into the Lovings' bedroom to arrest them.

... In 1963 {Mildred Loving} took a cousin's advice and wrote to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, asking if the civil rights bill being debated in Congress might lift Judge Bazile's restriction on living in Virginia with her husband. Kennedy sent her letter to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which asked attorney Bernard Cohen to look into the matter. Cohen and Phil Hirschkop, another ACLU lawyer, persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court, which had been avoiding the issue of interracial marriage, to hear the Lovings' case. On June 12, 1967, the Court unanimously declared Virginia's miscegenation law-and those of all the rest of the states, too-unconstitutional.
http://gbge.aclu.org/blog/relationships ... ears-later
quote:
More than 40 years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared laws barring interracial marriage unconstitutional, it was upsetting to learn that a Louisiana justice of the peace has denied a marriage license to an interracial couple.
...Justice of the peace Keith Bardwell’s justification for refusing to issue the license is especially troubling. Bardwell told the Daily Star of Hammond, LA, that he was not a racist but merely concerned about the welfare of any children the couple may have.

There's also Brown v. Board of Education.

There is a reason that the founders did not make justices of the courts elected positions. Their job is to determine if laws comply with the law of the land, not to kowtow to the 'will of the people.' Doing so is their job, not 'judicial activism.'


How is a child who has been adopted out of foster care by a gay couple being 'denied their rights' by that gay couple? Do I need to post citations for you about the conditions of foster care, or the backlog of children stuck in foster care? Why should that child and that family be treated as lesser than a family with heterosexual parents?


No, I get what you're trying to claim perfectly well; I just think that you're ignoring the inconsistencies of your own argument.


First, I repeat my question: what do you regard as the beginning of personhood? Give me a range of times if you're not comfortable pinning down a specific week of gestation.
Second, current laws do not generally allow for 'abortion on demand' except in the first trimester. Most states have extreme limitations on 3rd trimester abortions, and the vast majority of very late term abortions are performed on abnormal fetuses whose problems were only discovered late in the pregnancy, extremely young women who have attempted to hide a pregnancy or were unaware of their pregnancy, or with pregnancies which have become life- or health- threatening to the mother. Yes, mental health can be a factor - for example, with a woman who has stopped her psych meds in an attempt to protect her zef but is increasingly becoming a danger to herself and/or others without them. Late term abortions are statistically extremely rare, and even Dr. George Tiller, bless his memory, turned away women whose reasons he did not think were sufficient to justify an abortion at that stage.


That's fine, but 'life' is biologically a continuum and, even if we accept that conception is the beginning, 'life' alone confers neither rights nor enough moral weight to impact an abortion decision.

On this I am.



I do not think that one can create an objective standard. Therefore I simply refrain and refer to all human life as being valuable without justification or qualification.



I believe that all human life has intrinsic moral value. A human being is not defined by their personhood or any other factor.

91, I sympathize with your goal but even 'human life' has to be further refined. It might seem like semantics, but it really is important in this case. It can't just be 'human life,' because we routinely chop living bits of humans out of them (even healthy tissue). It can't just be, 'genetically unique human life,' because that applies to cancer as well. 'Healthy, genetically unique human life' might be approaching a start, except for the phenomenon of chimerism and parasitic twins in which the parasitic twin is generally removed for the sake of the more developed one, even though it is healthy and genetically unique (chimerism is not the same as 'siamese twinning,' in which two genetically identical twins fail to fully separate, and are usually equally developed).
So, where do we draw the line at what human life gets rights, and what human life doesn't? Usually it hinges on personhood. A biopsy is not a person. A cancer is not a person. A parasitic twin is not generally considered a person, but should we differentiate based on how much of the twin is there? No head, and it's ok to remove the thing? If it has a head, but no mental function, should we leave it attached to its host sibling? When would it be regarded as an attached twin (a la siamese twins), and not as a parasite to its sibling?