[extropy-chat] Gay marriage in Spain, a world of change

[Evan Hamlin]

Samantha Atkins wrote:
>Laws do not make something normal they just strive to make things  more 
>just and balanced.
>
>No.  It says that these relationships are just as deep, just as real  and 
>that people of same sex orientation have the same rights as  everyone else 
>including the right to have their relationships as  recognized and 
>respected.

In response to Samantha:

I must respectfully disagree. Laws do not state anything about how deep 
relationships are, or whether they are as meaningful or anything like that. 
They may be interpreted as such, but that would only be your interpretation 
fit into the mold of your personal beliefs. What laws do is outline the 
goals of a society. Saying that homosexuality occurs in X% of the world or 
has been around for X thousand years is totally irrelevant. Murder has 
occured for millions of years and continues to be carried out by a large 
portion of the population, but is still made illegal. Why? Because we want 
to discourage people from killing one another. We as a society think this is 
undesirable behavior.

Mike Lorrey was correct in his defense of my meaning. They all have equal 
rights to marry whomever they wish of the same sex. Additionally, they have 
the right to be with whomever they want, male or female. What they don't 
have is the blessing of society and the government, for whatever that is 
worth (apparently quite a bit, mainly due to the social security benefits, 
although I am mainly approaching this law as a societal symbol) to carry out 
a relationship which may just as well be as deep as any of mine or yours, 
but nonetheless goes against the grain of evolution. One simple reason is 
that a society of purely homosexuals cannot exist without the natural 
reproduction of heterosexuals (barring test tube babies, but is that the 
kind of parentage we want future generations of children to have?).


Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
If you think God exists and moreover this superintelligent creator of the
universe doesn't like gay marriage, you're religious.

This is a mailing list for people who want to grow tails, sprout wings, 
switch
sexes, grow new sex organs, create new sexes, and upload themselves into
Jupiter Brains.  If you can't handle the concept of gay marriage, then what
the hell are you doing here?

PS:  Let the record show that this is the person who chided me for not being
open-minded when I expressed dissatisfaction with David Stiger's posting
quality.  (Ad hominem tu qoque.)

In response to Eliezer:

I said that I am non-religious, which obviously implies a disbelief in a 
higher being which approves or disproves anything. I simply mentioned it for 
the sake of mentioning it for anyone who cared. Religion was, used to, and 
*sometimes* still is an indicator of societal norms, at least in the time 
when their texts were written.

Moreover, I am totally up for growing tails, sprouting wings, creating new 
sexes, and uploading my brain into who-knows-what. The following is kind of 
hard to explain but I'll try. What I am saying is that so long as our 
society has a set of laws which represent a moral code of our society, for 
example making drugs illegal is a moral law more than anything else, we 
should treat it as such. Personally, I would much prefer to see a set of 
'laissez faire' laws replace the current ones, at which point laws will no 
longer represent what is right and wrong, but simply what is legal and 
illegal. When that happens, I would completely expect and accept "legalized" 
homosexuality. Until that happens however, there should be some consistency 
in our laws. I am with Mike in believing that ultimately, marriage should be 
not be something which is licensed anyway. In such a case, opposition to gay 
union would simply be an opinion with no legal ramifications, which is fine 
with me.

In addition, opposing gay marriage is nothing like opposing inter-racial 
marriage. The basis for my objection is evolutionary, not based on bigotry. 
Interracial marriages make perfect sense in the Darwinian sense, and are in 
fact often better (genes and memes and everything we already know). This is 
an unfair analogy designed to make me look as closed minded as those who 
opposed interracial marriages. I wont have it :P

In regards to David Lubkin's post:

This has already occurred. Today, dwarfism has become something which is 
testable during gestation. However, the dwarf community (sounds like 
something out of tolkein) strongly opposes legalization of these tests. They 
claim that dwarves live healthy fulfilling lives and that to legalize the 
test is.... discrimination? Profiling? Its hard to say in this context.

And for those who have asked me to define normal, perhaps I should rephrase 
myself, since normal is an almost meaningless word (a washing machine 
setting? I liked that).

Homosexuality is not something which society should promote in the same way 
that heterosexual marriages are promoted via incentives (all the 
aforementioned benefits).

Keep in mind folks, that those benefits are in place to promote the creation 
of monogamous heterosexual families. Gay marriage/union should occur IN 
SPITE of the law, not be promoted by it, especially if we are finding that 
it could be the side effect of a virus, or the result of some kind of stress 
(Due to the averseness to the word, I'll avoid putting 'abnormal' here).

But perhaps I'm really just shouting all this through the closet door. :)

-Evan
"Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why 
several of us died of tuberculosis."

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