Gay Marriage

No. Where have I said that it does? You don't even know what you're talking about. I wasn't even using that as an argument for why gays shouldn't be allowed to get married.You are the poster boy for why liberals are asshats for pushing people into positions they haven't taken just so they can spout their hate speach against them for not sharing their opinions. Taking away? Nobody has taken anything away, what are you talking about? Gay people didn't have a right to marry to begin with.

Context.... uh, hello? It was an answer to a direct question. Maybe if you read the thread instead of taking one line out of one post (out of context) and using it as if it was the premise an argument then I wouldn't need to label why I type. You're conflating natural rights and legal rights.Black people did not have legal rights before they were granted to them by the Constitution.You're going to have to make a philosophical argument to claim natural rights, which I don't really have an interest in discussing.

Really? Then how do people get legal rights?

Yeah. The 1000+ laws were written with the understanding that marriage was between one man and one woman. California has interpreted their constitution and the word marriage to be between any consenting adults. I guess they are free to do that. So now, Utah can legalize polygamy and Mississippi can legalize incestual marriages (sorry Mississippians , oh wait...they don't have computers down there anyways j/k).So we have a bunch of laws that use a word that had a specific meaning, and the definition of that word has changed significantly. ZOMG! Chaos! Who knows what kind of shenanigans the exploiters of the law are going to be able to come up with now. CEO's having poly-marriages and unifying multiple companies, dirk bike buddy's spreading the healthcare system out too thin, etc.Anything like that, that can affect the entire country, has an effect on me personally. I'm glad that DOMA protects me from that (on the federal level).Now, if individual states want to change things for themselves, well I'm under the impression that they have the right to do so, as long as they don't go against the Constitution. I don't really care if gay people have marriage, per say. But that's not what the word marriage has meant. So its going to take some changes to allow gay marriage. If the people want to make the changes, then more power to them.But I don't think that gays have some natural right to marriage, nor that our Constitution grants them a legal right to marriage. If someone is going to make a legal argument for the rigts of gays that I find fallacious, then I'm going to point it out and argue for what I think is correct. This gets me labeled as a fucking bigot (not by you), but whatever, I think I'm arguing with hateful morons, so it can be expected.

From Message 407To get the pyramids built...But moral arguments for natural rights are off topic in a thread on the legal arguments for gay rights. Besides that I'm not at all interested in having moral or philosophical arguments.

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From Message 408By what evidence do you know that natural rights even exist? In 10,000 BC, was the saber-tooth tiger aware of your "natural rights"? At what point did we get natural rights? Where did they come from? I'm not convinced that natural rights even exist. Well, unless you believe in God and want to envoke him as the grand arbiter of what is and what is not a natural right. You really think the Constitution has that power, huh? What about the Japanese American interment in 1942? American citizens, with all the rights that the Constitution guarantees them, where placed into camps with no if, ands, or buts. If your "rights" can be taken away that easily, then they aren't really Rights, they're priviledges, now aren't they? [thanks George Carlin]You are welcome to that opinion, sir.But again, this needs to be tied back to the topic of gay marriage for us to continue much further with this discussion. Why did you bring it up in this thread? How does it relate to the topic?

How about all of them I had a friend a few years back who was from England but living in the U.S. His visa was running out and he was going to have to go back. One of the ways he could have avoided going back was to get married. So he was proposing to all the girls around town, telling them they didn't even have to have a ceremony or have sex with him... just go down to the courthouse and sign the paper so he can stay in the States. lol, he even asked one guy's mom. It didn't work out because none of the girls were willing.If gay marriage was allowed, it would have been a lot easier for him to find a "spouse". We even joked about it. Most of the guys said that they wouldn't have had a problem getting married to him to keep him in the states.Now, this isn't meant to be an example of a reason for disallowing gay marriage. It just exposes some of the types of concerns I have with simply flipping a swtch and allowing gay marriage with no consideration for the consequences.

From your own source:

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The concept of inalienable rights was criticized by Jeremy Bentham and Edmund Burke as groundless. Bentham and Burke, writing in the eighteenth century, claimed that rights arise from the actions of government, or evolve from tradition, and that neither of these can provide anything inalienable. (See Bentham's "Critique of the Doctrine of Inalienable, Natural Rights", and Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France"). Keeping with shift in thinking in the 19th century, Bentham famously dismissed the idea of natural rights as "nonsense on stilts".

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The signers of the Declaration of Independence deemed it a "self evident truth" that all men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". Critics, however, could argue that use of the word "Creator" signifies that these rights are based on theological principles, and might question which theological principles those are, or why those theological principles should be accepted by people who do not adhere to the religion from which they are derived.

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Derivation of inalienable rights from Natural Law can also be criticized on solely philosophical grounds. The is-ought problem of David Hume is the fallacy of deriving normative propositions (how the world ought to be) from naturalistic ones (how the world is) without providing the necessary justification for such a logical jump. Jonathan Wallace claims in his paper "Natural Rights Don't Exist,"[17] that the phrase "We hold these truths to be self-evident" is simply a "more elegant version of 'Because we said so.'"

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In "The Social Contract," Jean-Jacques Rousseau claims that the existence of inalienable rights is unnecessary for the existence of a constitution or a set of laws and rights. This idea of a social contract - that rights and responsibilities are derived from a consensual contract between the government and the people - is the most widely recognized alternative.

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Samuel P. Huntington, an American political scientist, wrote that the "inalienable rights" argument from the Declaration of Independence was necessary because "The British were white, Anglo, and Protestant, just as we were. They had to have some other basis on which to justify independence".

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You cannot prove that natural rights even exist. I don't think that they do. Perhaps you could start a new thread on whether or not we have natural rights. Pussy. These Internets are one huge locker room filled with sophmoric frat boys. You shouldn't take anything seriously in here.

In this case, it would have been easier simply because he had double the amount of people to ask. I don't believe that. I mean, there we were with all the girls saying no and all the guys saying yeah... Sure, it was a hypothetical situation, which is easier to say yes to.But this particular case doesn't really matter that much. It was just an example of one possibility. There's over 1000 laws that menetion marriage, so...

Ahhh, the old "everything is going to be okay... don't worry about it" defense.I can't believe that changing the definition of a word in over 1000 laws isn't going to have substantial consequences. It simply follows.IANAL so I'm not easily capable of the enumeration you request. It would take a lot of time and effort.

Fine. Don't take them seriously.Anything I came up with would probably just be argued against with either "that's not bad" or "that's not substantial". Its too subjective.I think that healthcare costs would go up from the influx of new covered spouses if gay marriage were legalized across the counry one day. But its not like I can prove that or anything.

How so?Because they don't have health insurance? They can buy that like any other unmarried person, without employer provided healthcare, has to do.But the rise in cost would also be contributed by straight people who marry others of the same sex for the insurance benefits.

The California Supreme Court found that their consitution and definition of marriage means that everyone has the right to enter marriage with a consenting adult of their choice. That means that people have the right to have polygamous marriages and marriages of incest as well as gay marriages, according to their constitution.So, California must legalize both polygamy and incest marrages or they are violating the rights of the people who want to enter those mariages. If you don't support the legalization of polygamy and incest marriages in California then you are a fucking phobic bigot for denying these people their rights.Edited by Catholic Scientist, : 3rd typo today >.<

It doesn't explicitly say TWO...

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As these and many other California decisions make clear, the right to marry represents the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with the person of one’s choice, and, as such, is of fundamental significance both to society and to the individual.

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with the person... hmmm. Does that have to mean only one?

I guess if you want to make a semantic argument....But "the person" doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be only one person.And coupled with these from the decision:

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Although our state Constitution does not contain any explicit reference to a “right to marry,” past California cases establish beyond question that the right to marry is a fundamental right whose protection is guaranteed to all persons by the California Constitution. (See, e.g., Conservatorship of Valerie N. (1985) 40 Cal.3d 143, 161 (Valerie N.) . . . These rights are aspects of the right of privacy which . . . is express in section 1 of article I of the California Constitution which includes among the inalienable rights possessed by all persons in this state, that of ”privacy’ ”; Williams v. Garcetti (1993) 5 Cal.4th 561, 577 he concept of personal liberties and fundamental human rights entitled to protection against overbroad intrusion or regulation by government . . . extends to . . . such basic civil liberties and rights not explicitly listed in the Constitution [as] the right “to marry, establish a home and bring up children” ’ ”

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the state constitutional right to marry, while presumably still embodied as a component of the liberty protected by the state due process clause,30 now also clearly falls within the reach of the constitutional protection afforded to an individual’s interest in personal autonomy by California’s explicit state constitutional privacy clause. (See, e.g., Hill v. National Collegiate Athletic Assn., supra, 7 Cal.4th at p. 34 [the interest in personal autonomy protected by the state constitutional privacy clause includes “the freedom to pursue consensual familial relationships”]; Valerie N., supra, 40 Cal.3d 143, 161.)

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quotes from the California decision on same-sex marriage.So it seems that California's constitution does grant people the right to polygamy.So is everyone going to start fighting for the polygamists now?

If they had said "a person" instead of "the person", then you'd definately be wrong because you could marry a person, and then go marry another person. When it says the person, it seems to imply only one, but that isn't the case by neccesity. Also, this quote is not determining the law. They could have simply mis-spoke. The context of the decision was in regards to single partner marriages so polygamy could have simply been overlooked. It could easily be fixed by changing it to "the person(s)". That's not the applicable part...Let me clean it up a bit...:

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Although our state Constitution does not contain any explicit reference to a “right to marry,” past California cases establish beyond question that the right to marry is a fundamental right whose protection is guaranteed to all persons by the California Constitution. These rights are aspects of the right of privacy which includes among the inalienable rights possessed by all persons in this state, that of ”privacy’. The concept of personal liberties and fundamental human rights entitled to protection against overbroad intrusion or regulation by government extends to such basic civil liberties and rights not explicitly listed in the Constitution as the right “to marry, establish a home and bring up children".

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and

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the state constitutional right to marry now also clearly falls within the reach of the constitutional protection afforded to an individual’s interest in personal autonomy by California’s explicit state constitutional privacy clause. The interest in personal autonomy protected by the state constitutional privacy clause includes “the freedom to pursue consensual familial relationships”.

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So even if the semantic argument of the definition of marriage doesn't grant polygamists the right to marry, their right to privacy and personal autonomy does. I think its both, but whatever.