[Turambar]

Social conservatives hate freedom

Umm, lawl.

Seriously though...how can you say that because I favor a more responsible view on sex and relationships that I hate freedom?

It's because you don't view the ability to make such choices, say for a gay dude to marry another gay dude, as a good thing.  You see the repression of their freedom as preserving the fabric of society.

Pervasive social liberalism (keeping your opinions to yourself and not legally limiting the choices of others) will work these problems out in the end.  All the single mothers who would give birth to fatherless criminals can instead terminate their pregnancies (or their education in birth control methods will make that unnecessary) .  The gay folks won't need to parade anymore, since there won't be any reason to.  The kids in school who are different won't be bullied to the point of suicide.  Non-violent pot offenders won't be wasting our resources by being in prison.

Also, as a bonus, we get to keep calling the USA the Land of the Free

[Nuclear1]

[Liberator]

Social conservatives hate freedom

Umm, lawl.

Seriously though...how can you say that because I favor a more responsible view on sex and relationships that I hate freedom?

It's because you don't view the ability to make such choices, say for a gay dude to marry another gay dude, as a good thing.  You see the repression of their freedom as preserving the fabric of society.

Pervasive social liberalism (keeping your opinions to yourself and not legally limiting the choices of others) will work these problems out in the end.  All the single mothers who would give birth to fatherless criminals can instead terminate their pregnancies (or their education in birth control methods will make that unnecessary) .  The gay folks won't need to parade anymore, since there won't be any reason to.  The kids in school who are different won't be bullied to the point of suicide.  Non-violent pot offenders won't be wasting our resources by being in prison.

Also, as a bonus, we get to keep calling the USA the Land of the Free

You are out of your ever loving mind if you think that.

Non-violent offenders should get the hint that what they're doing is illegal after they're first arrest and have the sense to not do it again.

I don't care what gay people do in the privacy of they're own bedrooms/houses/whatever, I'm not gonna restrict what you can do for a living or how much you can make or who you can live with based on that.  But the covenant of marriage was a holy religious covenant between a man, woman and God long before the current homosexual Left decided to use it as a political issue.

[redsniper]

Stop using 'they're' when you mean 'their'! I can understand doing it once or twice accidentally, but you are doing it consistently! You are using the language wrong! I can't begin to take you seriously if you can't even follow basic rules of grammar and spelling especially when they change the meaning of your words!

[Turambar]

  But the covenant of marriage was a holy religious covenant between a man, woman and God long before the current homosexual Left decided to use it as a political issue.

this is reality, quit bringing your fairy tales into it.

Non-violent offenders should get the hint that what they're doing is illegal after they're first arrest and have the sense to not do it again.

it shouldn't be illegal, and the only people that are harmed by anyone's consumption of marijuana are harmed only because of the government's position on it.

[The E]

I don't care what gay people do in the privacy of they're own bedrooms/houses/whatever, I'm not gonna restrict what you can do for a living or how much you can make or who you can live with based on that.  But the covenant of marriage was a holy religious covenant between a man, woman and God long before the current homosexual Left decided to use it as a political issue.

But the Earth was the center of the universe for a long time before astronomers decided to change it.
Answer me this: What is wrong about the following statement:"Without love, there can be no true marriage. With Love, there can be nothing else."?

[NGTM-1R]

Seriously though...how can you say that because I favor a more responsible view on sex and relationships that I hate freedom?

As you are against contraceptives and abortion, I cannot in good conscience consider you to favor a more responsible view.

[Janos]

You are out of your ever loving mind if you think that.

Non-violent offenders should get the hint that what they're doing is illegal after they're first arrest and have the sense to not do it again.

You are muddying the waters
The point is that not all things that are currently illegal should actually be so. The issue is not whether breaking the law is illegal (...) but whether should the same

I don't care what gay people do in the privacy of they're own bedrooms/houses/whatever, I'm not gonna restrict what you can do for a living or how much you can make or who you can live with based on that.  But the covenant of marriage was a holy religious covenant between a man, woman and God long before the current homosexual Left decided to use it as a political issue.

THE HOMOSEXUAL LEFT why do we even bother to argue with someone like... this

You should probably go around India, Arabian peninsula and Japan parading your well-thought position of marriage. And tell atheists that they cannot marry either.

[Blue Lion]

Non-violent offenders should get the hint that what they're doing is illegal after they're first arrest and have the sense to not do it again.

Amazingly enough, they don't often times.

I don't care what gay people do in the privacy of they're own bedrooms/houses/whatever, I'm not gonna restrict what you can do for a living or how much you can make or who you can live with based on that.  But the covenant of marriage was a holy religious covenant between a man, woman and God long before the current homosexual Left decided to use it as a political issue.

Shouldn't that be in the bounds of the churches then? Shouldn't they be the ones to decide who gets to "marry" and who doesn't?

If a church says "Hey, let's let gays marry" who are you to say they can't?

[Nuclear1]

You are out of your ever loving mind if you think that.

Hey, watch the personal attacks--you do know there are a lot of people who are dying to say the same thing to you, but don't.

Non-violent offenders should get the hint that what they're doing is illegal after they're first arrest and have the sense to not do it again.

Yes, but they don't.  And government resources continued to be piled into a losing war when we could be spending it on something else.

But the covenant of marriage was a holy religious covenant between a man, woman and God long before the current homosexual Left decided to use it as a political issue.

Oh damn them for demanding the same legal rights as heterosexual couples.

They're not human beings like us, they don't need them!  God said so!

[Janos]

Hey Liberator you still haven't proved your assertions about male figures and crime rate

or about how the personal responsibility vanished

or about how the promiscuity is bad

and the single mothers being the source of all evil

And the degenerated culture! That was a direct question I asked you at page 3 and I've still yet to see a good answer!

Just answer these questions already - your continuous shifting of goalposts and evading the argument is irritating as ****. I will ask these questions for all eternity until I get an answer in this thread because now people are for some reason letting this crap go through. Your argument lies squarely on unfounded assertions and what's even funnier, when asked to specify them you don't do that.  It's almost as if you completely ignore any and all arguments to contrary. If you are right then proving it shouldn't be difficult.

So answer the questions and explain your arguments, thanks!

[General Battuta]

Yeah, you keep giving ground every time we crush one of your points. Why not admit you're wrong?

[Blue Lion]

Didn't Pat Robertson or someone say they lost the culture war in the US and that were "awash in sin"?

[Polpolion]

Hey Liberator you still haven't proved your assertions about male figures and crime rate

or about how the personal responsibility vanished

or about how the promiscuity is bad

and the single mothers being the source of all evil

And the degenerated culture! That was a direct question I asked you at page 3 and I've still yet to see a good answer!

Just answer these questions already - your continuous shifting of goalposts and evading the argument is irritating as ****. I will ask these questions for all eternity until I get an answer in this thread because now people are for some reason letting this crap go through. Your argument lies squarely on unfounded assertions and what's even funnier, when asked to specify them you don't do that.  It's almost as if you completely ignore any and all arguments to contrary. If you are right then proving it shouldn't be difficult.

So answer the questions and explain your arguments, thanks!

Yeah, you keep giving ground every time we crush one of your points. Why not admit you're wrong?

Intimidation: It wins debates.

[MP-Ryan]

And I think one could safely make a conclusion about the biological hardwiring of the sexes based on an examination of human history.  "Cross-wiring" of genders is the exception, not the rule.  And there hasn't been a single successful "Amazon woman" society anywhere in the world, ever.

You'd think wrong.  While sexual organ development is typically a dichotomy, sexual identity and preference (along with gender identity, which is the social construct) are determined primarily by two factors:  hormonal dosage during embryonic development, and gender roles during upbringing.

People get this sex versus gender thing mixed up all the time, so here's the fast and dirty breakdown:
-Sex is biological identity, determined in humans by dosage concentrations of X and Y chromosomes (actually, two particular genes on the Y chromosome).  Usually sex is considered dichotomous, both in reality it's more of a gradient.  As we're genetically wired to function best with either XX or XY it's the most common, but dosage mix-ups are reasonably common, and so the biological difference between the sexes is better looked at as a gradient than two biological absolutes.
-Sexual identity does NOT correlate to sexual organ development.  Sexual identity is determined in the brain, and the most popular and best support theory at the moment has reasonably conclusive evidence that it is the result of testosterone concentrations in the brain during early development.  This is how transsexual phenotypes come about.  Again, there is no dichotomy - it's a threshold based gradient.  1-10% of the population have transsexual characteristics, including variance in brain structure (there is a little known study published in Nature or Science [can't remember offhand] in the early 2000s that compared anatomical features of the brain in deceased persons and found that brain physiology differs for males and females, but that it doesn't always correlate to genetic sexual identity - in short, they could tell if a person was transsexual simply by examining part of their brain).
-Gender identity is a result of learned social stereotypes about gender, which again doesn't always correlate with the biological factors.  Thus, it is possible to get a genetically male individual with a biologically female brain whose behaviour correlates most closely with learned male gender patterns.

So there are at least three different major contributors to the determination of which sexual characteristics (biological and behaviour) that we exhibit.  Therefore, saying humans with male primary sexual characteristics should fit a certain pattern and humans with female primary sexual characteristics should fit a different pattern is ludicrous.  It's all down to individual behavioural types.

That said, there are common behavioural genettic patterns which are wired into hormone balances that make it more likely for particular sexes to exhibit particular behaviours, but it certainly isn't absolute.

[MP-Ryan]

But the covenant of marriage was a holy religious covenant between a man, woman and God long before the current homosexual Left decided to use it as a political issue.

FACT:  Marriage existed long before Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, to name but a few of the major religions claiming to control marriage.

Evidence of marriage ceremonies dates back well into the era of the Mesopotamian city-states (and prior to that - just in case you don't know the history, that's nearly 4000 BCE).  And guess what - it hasn't always been between just one man and one woman.  And it usually had more to do with politics and trade than any religious conventions.

If I can put another large hole in your argument, child-rearing wasn't traditionally done by a nuclear family.  Up until recently (maybe the last 300 years) children were usually raised by a large extended family and community.  The nuclear family, as often harped upon by Christian conservatives, is a relatively recent social construct used more as a political tool than it ever actually existed.

[Polpolion]

FACT:  Marriage existed long before Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, to name but a few of the major religions claiming to control marriage.

Evidence of marriage ceremonies dates back well into the era of the Mesopotamian city-states (and prior to that - just in case you don't know the history, that's nearly 4000 BCE).  And guess what - it hasn't always been between just one man and one woman.  And it usually had more to do with politics and trade than any religious conventions.

If I can put another large hole in your argument, child-rearing wasn't traditionally done by a nuclear family.  Up until recently (maybe the last 300 years) children were usually raised by a large extended family and community.  The nuclear family, as often harped upon by Christian conservatives, is a relatively recent social construct used more as a political tool than it ever actually existed.

Is there a web source that you got this info from? I'd like to show it to some people that I know.

[MP-Ryan]

FACT:  Marriage existed long before Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, to name but a few of the major religions claiming to control marriage.

Evidence of marriage ceremonies dates back well into the era of the Mesopotamian city-states (and prior to that - just in case you don't know the history, that's nearly 4000 BCE).  And guess what - it hasn't always been between just one man and one woman.  And it usually had more to do with politics and trade than any religious conventions.

If I can put another large hole in your argument, child-rearing wasn't traditionally done by a nuclear family.  Up until recently (maybe the last 300 years) children were usually raised by a large extended family and community.  The nuclear family, as often harped upon by Christian conservatives, is a relatively recent social construct used more as a political tool than it ever actually existed.

Is there a web source that you got this info from? I'd like to show it to some people that I know.

There probably is, but that's constructed from a combination of my history and psychology background.  Marriage rituals from Mesopotamia should be a fairly easy find - try looking up information on the Sumerians.  A variety of neolithic peoples before them practiced marriage (there is evidence in cave sites found all over Europe, and a couple settlements were uncovered in the Shetlands, in Britain).  Really, your best source is probably Art History textbooks or sources as they cover ceremonial artifacts from the daily life of these peoples (thank you, Art History 101).  I'm trying to remember the name of the city-state in Iraq and it presently escapes me, but they practiced marriage ceremonies overseen by priest-clerics who ran the city and were the common person's only link to the local gods.

As for child-rearing, your best example is the Inuit peoples of northern North America or the customs of First Nations peoples across the continent.  While evidence of communal child-rearing from Europe does abound, you'll have to hunt through a lot more material to find what you're looking for.

The construct of the nuclear family actually began with the nobility sometime after 1600 CE, as noble children were socially constructed as nothing more than "small adults" rather than a distinct phase of human development.  Evidence is best found in the writings of individuals like Hobbes and Swift, or in family portraits (where children are depicted bearing adult visual characteristics rather than child-like features).

[General Battuta]

Thank you, MP-Ryan. That was a quality contribution (and I hope I'd have said as much even if it didn't agree with my viewpoint.)

[Knight Templar]

Social conservatives hate freedom

Umm, lawl.

Seriously though...how can you say that because I favor a more responsible view on sex and relationships that I hate freedom?

It's because you don't view the ability to make such choices, say for a gay dude to marry another gay dude, as a good thing.  You see the repression of their freedom as preserving the fabric of society.

Pervasive social liberalism (keeping your opinions to yourself and not legally limiting the choices of others) will work these problems out in the end.  All the single mothers who would give birth to fatherless criminals can instead terminate their pregnancies (or their education in birth control methods will make that unnecessary) .  The gay folks won't need to parade anymore, since there won't be any reason to.  The kids in school who are different won't be bullied to the point of suicide.  Non-violent pot offenders won't be wasting our resources by being in prison.

Also, as a bonus, we get to keep calling the USA the Land of the Free

You are out of your ever loving mind if you think that.

Non-violent offenders should get the hint that what they're doing is illegal after they're first arrest and have the sense to not do it again.

I don't care what gay people do in the privacy of they're own bedrooms/houses/whatever, I'm not gonna restrict what you can do for a living or how much you can make or who you can live with based on that.  But the covenant of marriage was a holy religious covenant between a man, woman and God long before the current homosexual Left decided to use it as a political issue.

SOMEONE ALERT THE INTERNET, GAY PEOPLES' HAPPINESS IS GOING TO DESTROY SOCIETY.

Not to jump on you like everyone else is man, but this is simply wrong. Honestly, I think Christians have much bigger fish to fry in this world than people who find true love in someone of the same gender.

Denying basic rights to a specific group of people is discrimination. Just like racism was practiced (In America) against Catholics, Italians, Irish, Chinese, Hispanics and Blacks, its now also being practiced against Gays. Why its happening now probably has to do with the interesting social crossroads created with the LGBT movement meeting the Christian Right at the same time and place in history.

What really gets me is why the Christian institution gets involved in it at all. The Old Testament might have a footnote regarding marriage being between guys and gals somewhere, but the Christian church doesn't own marriage. Saying Gays can't be wed because the Old Testament doesn't want them to is like saying non-Christians can't get married because they aren't Christian. I say Old Testament, because Jesus supposedly led a sinless life, sacrificed himself for all of Humanity's sins, and then was resurrected as a testament to God's will. His ministry and sacrifice wiped the slate clean for Humanity. Does this mean we can go nuts and do whatever we want? Of course not. But it does mean we can progress past the old ways. Just like we aren't required to sacrifice our livestock or first born children to God anymore to make penance for when we **** up, we aren't required to pretend we're something we're not. Through Christ, our sins are forgiven.

Gays and gay relationships might be strange and uncomfortable to straights, but so is meatloaf. Pretending they don't exist, or worse, antagonizing and persecuting them, isn't going to make them stop existing. It's simply persecuting a group of people because they are different.

So to come back to my original argument, the denial of basic rights and respects to Gays (or any group of people) under Christian pretenses is wrong. Not only is it wrong, but its directly contrary to God's will, and the lessons we learned from Christ. And if you or anyone else is going to tell me that its God's will that everyone in the world is entitled to the same equality, basic rights, and eternal salvation through faith, except for Gays, then we clearly don't share faith in the same God.

And please don't even get me started on why denying them the right to marry is wrong legally.