[extropy-chat] Re: White House To Seek Ban On Gay Sex On The Moon

Mike Lorrey mlorrey at yahoo.com
Sat Feb 28 15:38:49 UTC 2004


--- Christian Weisgerber <naddy at mips.inka.de> wrote:
> David Lubkin <extropy at unreasonable.com> wrote:
> 
> > [Orson Scott Card] recently presented his case against gay marriage
> in
> > 
> > http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2004-02-15-1.html
> 
> If I had to grade this, it wouldn't fare well.
> 
> The first half or so looks like an attempt by somebody with a deep
> emotional investment against gay marriage to somehow justify this
> position.
> 
> He manages to push a wrong button early on when he complains about
> the semantic change in the word "marriage".  Well, calling this
> computer peripheral under my hand a "mouse" is a much greater
> semantic extension, but I don't see anybody advocating against it.
> Words gain extensions in meaning, new metaphorical senses, lose old
> semantics, and shift to new ones all the time.  Card knows and
> personally employs this, he is a professional writer after all.  So
> why does he spew this linguistic nonsense?

Specifically because law is not literature. You are entirely wrong when
it comes to law in this regard. Incrementalists that strip our
individual liberties do like to use this strategy, of inventing new
definitions for legal terms of art in order to create statutory
authority without even legislative action.

This is exactly what is going on with the term "marriage". The original
legal term for marriage is a legal estate partnership type used to
provide the male with property rights to the woman's womb in order to
produce "an heir and a spare" to inherity his estate. On this basis,
the NH Supreme Court recently ruled that homosexual sex by a spouse
with a third party outside marriage is not adultery, since it could not
result in conception of an illegitimate child.

While this is very obviously out of date (though considering that the
the Equal Rights Amendment never passed here in the US, that itself is
debatable, at least in a strict legal sense, irrespective of cultural
changes), the issue is one which needs to be addressed by the
legislatures of each state. 

The federal government has no constitutional authority in this, even to
the point of saying that our republican form of government would be
seriously corrupted by an amendment to the constitution which actually
limits individual liberties (this would be the first such limitation on
individual liberties in this document).

The only solution that would satisfy both sides would be to get
government out of marriage entirely. No more marriage licenses, it is
merely a private contract of partnership witnessed by your minister or
your lawyer(s). This is the libertarian solution.

=====
Mike Lorrey
Chairman, Free Town Land Development
"Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
                                       - Gen. John Stark
Sado-Mikeyism: http://mikeysoft.zblogger.com

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