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

[David Lubkin]

Amara wrote:

>So I will keep this short: The idea of 'parentage' is to give care,
>support, guidance, and love to a baby, child, young person, and/or
>teenager. Do you really care how that life came to be in this world
>and does it matter what person, persons, or combination of persons
>give the [support,guidance, and love],
>
>    *as long as the child gets [support,guidance, and love]* ??

Enter the very messy question of when a third-party can legitimately 
interfere with someone's parenting, now and into a transhuman libertopia, 
when individuals could create sentient slave species or robotic children.

In the outer community, it is often taken as axiomatic that a member of set 
P [ single parent | gay couple | nuclear family | retarded parents | 
atheists | etc. ] either [is] or [is not] equally capable of providing 
[support, guidance, love] as any other member of set P.

This leads to a conviction that legal or social [benefits | restrictions] 
[should | must | should not | must not] be in place for P member p.

These presumed axioms are testable, however. One can measure outcomes in 
both individual children and in the set of children parented by p [i], and 
compare with p [j] or with a normal distribution across P. Life expectancy, 
socio-economic status, incidence of criminal behavior, IQ, malnutrition, 
evidence of physical abuse.

At some outcome-values, extant societies deem that an individual child may 
be removed from their parents, or have their parenting micromanaged. At 
other outcome-values, societies have legislated against member p becoming 
parents by [banning marriage | banning adoption | forced contraception or 
sterilization | imprisonment].

As libertarians, perhaps there should be a rebuttable presumption in favor 
of any p in P. But are there outcome-values that justify pre-emptive steps? 
John murders his son, so the other kids are taken away. Versus statistical 
aggregates -- 1% of children raised by redheads become alcoholics or 93% of 
children raised by sf readers are hypocephalic.


-- David Lubkin.