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

Robbie Lindauer robgobblin at aol.com
Thu Jul 21 12:14:12 UTC 2005


On Jul 21, 2005, at 12:24 AM, Evan Hamlin wrote:

> Samantha Atkins wrote:
>> Laws do not make something normal they just strive to make things  
>> more just and balanced.

With respect for Samantha, she's mistaken here.  Politically created 
laws strive to ensure that the power of the power-class of a given 
society remains in the hands of that class.

>> 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.

A society is technically a third order metapoesis - a way of speaking 
about a group of groups of people.  When one says "outline the goals of 
a society" one actually means which behaviors one wishes to exclude 
from the society by force.  You quote below "this is a mailing list for 
people who want to ...", some of which are interesting goals, but one 
could hardly call them "the goals of our society" remembering that the 
people who actually make laws around these parts have something very, 
very different in mind for us chattle.  One must remember that the 
"goals of a society" are really the goals of some sub-group of a group 
of actual people - that is, the goals of some particular people.  
Keeping this in mind, you can see plainly that if some subgroup of some 
group of people is able to control the behavior of the rest of the 
group by force, then they are the law-makers - you do what they say or 
you dictate what they do depending on which side you're on.  But make 
no mistake, there are sides and you're either on the dictating side or 
on the obeying side depending on, in the US, how much money and 
property you have.  In other countries, straight military might 
continues to rule (as in China or North Korea).

It may be considered by some a major advance that power isn't solely 
invested in the military, e.g. that there is a land-owning non-military 
class (the so-called middle-class).  But such a thing is, in general, 
an illusion.  The middle class's ownership of its land in the United 
States is a sham.  According to the US Census of 2001, 68% of homes in 
the us are owner occupied, 68% of owner-occupied American homes are 
mortgaged more than 40%, and only 3% of owner-occupied homes are owned 
outright.  In 2001 the median monthly home payment was around $700, 
approximately 1/3 of the median monthly income (remembering that there 
are plenty of people who make less than 3000/month and only very few 
people who make more than 6000/month).   So while "ownership" as 
defined in THE LAW really isn't ownership OUTRIGHT, but really just a 
complicated rental system designed to give this so-called middle-class 
the feeling that we are not actually poor despite the fact that we 
don't actually own anything outright (well, I for one own some 
properties outright being willing to buy swampland and such...)

That is, in the case of home ownership, we've simply redefined the term 
"ownership" so as to make it more amenable to the pragmatic goals of 
the ACTUAL wealth-holding classes.  In the US, these are the bankers, 
their subsidiary corporations (remembering that the SNP 500 remains 80% 
in the hands of a small group of institutional owners run by bankers) 
and the political and military system that supports their cause.  This 
remains rather like feudal europe in which baronial estates run by 
those who inherited their wealth utilized military assistance to ensure 
their legacy without themselves dirtying their hands except for sport.  
Our military system exists to ensure that those banks and their 
subsidiary corporations can run rampant worldwide in the name of "free 
trade".

It is a significant fact that while Bush is an anti-globalizer when it 
comes to the International Criminal Court, he's a pro-globalizer when 
it comes to helping the world's largest banks gain access to every 
country in the world with the help of the WTO.

Back to the subject....

I suspect that the only reason Gay Marriage is a political issue at all 
is that it is an excuse for the media not to pay attention to any 
issues that might actually be significant and important economically.  
Remembering the famous study by Noam Chomsky of the ability of the 
national television media to report on weather so consistently but 
unable to cover economic issues at all except in specialized segments 
usually on non-mainstream media (e.g. public television).


> 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.

Remembering that our laws don't actually discourage people from killing 
each other, it just discourages certain kinds of killing of each other. 
  Other kinds of other-killing are considered good and respectable.  
Which kinds of killing are condoned by the law are related more to the 
protection of the property of the ruling class than anything like a 
"natural morality".  For instance, it's fine to kill people in an 
official war when doing what your superior officer says.  It's not fine 
to kill someone in the process of breaking into someone else's house.  
But it would be sheer hypocrisy to

>
> 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?).

It's important to distinguish here between "natural rights" and 
"political rights".  Political rights are those granted by law under a 
given governmental system.   For instance, the political-right to marry 
someone of the same sex doesn't exist in the US right now except in a 
few states.  The "natural right" remains debatable depending on whether 
one thinks one has God-ordained natural inalienable rights (as in the 
US constitution) or whether one believes that natural rights are 
primarily negative in character (Nobody has the right to kill me, so I 
have a right to live, by default), or one thinks that there is a 
number-like third-world of objective moral facts.  In each of these 
cases, any particular claimed right has a well-explored and ancient 
history of debate in each of the traditions both to the positive and 
negative.

On this basis, I think it's true that any legal right held under 
political law SHOULD by natural law be held by any other person under 
the law (I think this a basic constraint on justice).  However, I think 
it's unlikely that natural law could be invoked to support legislation 
on this matter anyway there being a clear religious tradition, no 
apparent reason to expect a platonic solution, and no likely reason to 
believe any negative-ethical theory on the matter.  Certainly your 
evolutionary-principle is ridiculous.


> 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.

Usually quite the opposite.  Religious leaders are typically persecuted 
for speaking out against societal norms.  Without sermonizing, in the 
modern era we have Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., the outstanding 
religious leaders of our century, both of who were fighting a desperate 
battle against the oppressive norms of their society.   Note this is 
also the theme of Moses (freeing slaves), Elijah, Daniel, Habakuk, 
Zechariah and of course Jesus Christ.

> 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,

This is the two-fold mistake.  There is no such thing as "our society" 
and our laws don't even approximate anything like a "moral code" but 
rather simply the desires of the strong imposed by force upon the weak.

>  for example making drugs illegal is a moral law more than anything 
> else, we should treat it as such.

No, the war on drugs is a profit-center for our police-state.  Inasmuch 
as we need to have something for the police to do to terrorize the 
populace while having an excuse to expend large amounts of money, we 
need a war on drugs to further the goals of "our society".  It's 
important for our police-state to have an effective terrorizing effect 
on the lower-classes to prevent widespread redistribution of property, 
and so it's important for us to have a well-funded police-state.  The 
war on drugs is an  excuse to have one.  It is therefore, precisely in 
line with the "goals of our society".


> 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.

It's a red herring.  It's only important if you're counting on the 
government and/or "society" to provide legitimation and/or funding of 
your personal actions.  Once you've abandoned that as a goal, who 
cares?

> 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

Wow, wait a minute, so you're against gay marriage because it's 
anti-evolutionary?

If evolution is right, then eventually a gay marriage should produce 
viable offspring which may have significant advantages over offspring 
produced by straight marriages.  In that case, we should take a wait 
and see attitude.

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

Maybe "society" should stop promoting behavior at all.   I wish 
"society" would just leave us the heck alone!

> 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).

So now you think homosexuality is a disease of some kind, like 
hypertension or the flu?

Did you have some reputable studies you'd like to cite to support this 
view or did you just make it up?

Robbie Lindauer




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