Gay Marriage: Is It Perhaps Moral to Oppose It Independent of Religion?

[Kopikatsu]

Eeeeeh, there are scientists trying to prove that homosexuality (As in, homosexual couples being around/raising children) damages our kids. Or something. I don't keep up on that whole whatever.

there are scientists trying to prove the earth is flat and 9-11 was an inside job.

So?

I didn't say it was true, just that there are people trying to find a non-religious reason for opposing gay marriage.

 

[direkiller]

Marriage is the legal act of connecting two people as a unit, and typically leading to them living their lives together. A common byproduct is children, which is the real goal here. For the human race to go on, for the country to grow and become more powerful, people need to procreate. This is where gay marriage comes into play.

The government sees a gay marriage as two persons who will not have children but will take benefits which are meant for those who the government believes WILL have children. This is not good financially for the government, and as such is a problem.

So, where should we stand? To support legal gay marriage is to support the following:

1) Happiness for the couple (or rather, more happiness than not legal gay marriage presumably)

2) Less expected income for the state per year

3) Less population (ergo power) for the nation

Now, how do we weigh the happiness of a couple versus the losses which our state will suffer per marriage? Before I do that, I want to say that while those who are gay have already supposedly aided toward 3, and perhaps 2, it is encouraging of the gay culture to support gay marriage legally. So in the long run, legalized gay marriage should lead to more gay persons.

Anyway, consider the happiness of two gay people who are informally married but not legally married. Are they sad that they are not married legally to where their happiness is less than neutral overall? I think not, but that is a point which is tough to argue. How much more happiness could 'official' marriage possibly bring?

The loss in income, population, and power is best measured like this:
A google search tells me that there are 307 million persons in the United States currently.
For every 1 million gay couples, there are 2 million gays, and 2 million people which will not procreate.
I recall hearing that about 5% of the nation was openly gay. So, 15.35 million gays are estimated in America (rough rough estimate). Can you see why the government may have problems, why we as people perhaps should have problems, with this many people (remember, legalized marriage would seem to imply the rate at which gays are open will increase) not procreating? This may be a serious (buzzword I know; if you need a more technical proposition, I'd say large) blow to the United States' power and economy.

Other factors are things such as expected good a baby will do and how much help they would be in the world in terms of national power etc, but that is difficult to figure when making a decision on the matter. It is also not a variable which would seem to carry much weight in the decision as well, as to assume that there would be enough babies which would cause more problems if those who were gay were straight such that our nation faces even greater and steeper problems, is to assume potential collapse of the United States. To assume that would be pointless, as it is not a conclusion worth considering.

tl'dr human ethics and morals seem to imply that we should allow gay marriage, however on closer inspection, this may not be the case

You put up so many strawmen to shoot down its kinda funny
(the points made are not referring to your 1,2,3)
1. Being gay is not a choice it seems to be a genetic mutation that affects 5%-10% of the population(roughly the same percentage can be seen in outer higher mammals) anyway letting gay couples marry will not change the population that is homosexual(you cant catch the gay)
2. Homosexual couples can raise kids and they grow up to be normal with the exception of they tend to be bullied more at schools
3. Tax revenue would not decrees by any significant amount
currently in the US there are 6.8per 1000
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/divorce.htm
people or .68% of the population gets married every year. As being a homosexual is normal they will get married at a normal rate or the marriage rate per year would increasing to about 7.5 per 1000 people(amusing 10% of the population is homosexual).
6.8/1000=.0068
.0068*100=.68
as homosexual couples were included in the population before you can just add the amount to 6.8)
so roughly 7.5
Also
http://money.msn.com/family-money/the-myth-of-the-marriage-penalty-weston.aspx
marriage dose not matter in terms of taxes collected it basically evens out

 

[Handbag1992]

I fail to see why gay people shouldn't be able to marry. And I don't see why religious people care either (I'm Christian by the way). Really, whether or not a gay couple get married to each other has no effect on you, so why should you care?

One of the main problems is that your holy book claims that I'm an abomination and should be put to death.

Leviticus 18:22
Leviticus 20:13

Spoiler

Me on a bad day

 

[Dastardly]

The government sees a gay marriage as two persons who will not have children but will take benefits which are meant for those who the government believes WILL have children. This is not good financially for the government, and as such is a problem.

The problem is that, if this is our reasoning, we also have to penalize married straight folks that don't have children. To me, the simpler and better solution is to reserve any kind of benefits until a couple actually has children... which, for the most part, they already do.

Marriage "benefits" are mostly just the ability to share health benefits, name each other as beneficiaries, and other two-person benefits. These things were given to encourage marriage itself, not just family. Monogamy is good for a nation, too (less illegimate children / custody battles / sexually-transmitted disease / etc.)

 

[seraphy]

Edit: In response to all the people going "It helps with overpopulation!": You're all insane. The world is in absolutely no danger of overpopulation. With our current methods of resource usage, we could reliably sustain twice the world's current population. More if we refine those methods. We do not have a massive deficit of resources, and there is a lot of untapped land in the Americas, Africa and some parts of Asia with resources we simply don't use. We are in no danger of running out.

Even if you are correct, which I doubt you are. According to some estimations world population will be 11 billion at year 2050. So not very far of your estimation of twice the world current population.

So yes overpopulation will be real problem quite soon. Already over 1 billion people are undernourished. http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/20568/icode/

If the world don't make enough food for current human population, what makes you think twice that won't be a problem.

 

[Lexodus]

This can be expressed nicely in a pie chart.

I honestly can't tell if the OP's trolling or not. I call Poe. ;-;

 

[Kpt._Rob]

When you consider that probably the most pressing issue of the coming decades is going to be overpopulation, it becomes abundantly clear why this couldn't be a worse reason to ban gay marriage. We need to be encouraging people not to reproduce, not the other way around.

 

[Leodiensian]

More gay people = less births.

Nnnno. Gay marriage =/= Gays breeding. We just kind of 'happen'. Letting us get married isn't going to lead to some kind of fabulous baby boom.

Some (admittedly the minority) of gay couples do have biological children via surrogates or IVF treatments. But those children aren't going to themselves be gay necessarily. After all, straight parents give birth to gay kids.

More common among gay couples is ADOPTING or FOSTERING parentless children. If you encourage gay couples to create stable household units via legal and legitimate marriages, you subsequently create more nurturing homes that will be more open to adoption than a heterosexual household.

 

[Samus Aran but a man]

I'm not a troll, and if you don't believe me view my earlier posts from my profile, I have never 'trolled' anyone. Once again I will respond later. This thread is to determine whether the argument presented in the first post is valid at all.

Well, I think by this point we have determined that the argument is not valid at all. I hope the thread has changed your views on the topic.

 

[Zombie_Fish]

Snip

Where to start:

The government sees a gay marriage as two persons who will not have children but will take benefits which are meant for those who the government believes WILL have children. This is not good financially for the government, and as such is a problem.

So, where should we stand? To support legal gay marriage is to support the following:

1) Happiness for the couple (or rather, more happiness than not legal gay marriage presumably)

2) Less expected income for the state per year

3) Less population (ergo power) for the nation

1. Homosexual couples can and often do have kids through surrogate mothers and sperm donors.

2. Not all hetrosexual married couples have kids. This is particularly true for infertile couples, unless you deny them the right to be married as well.

I want to say that while those who are gay have already supposedly aided toward 3, and perhaps 2, it is encouraging of the gay culture to support gay marriage legally. So in the long run, legalized gay marriage should lead to more gay persons.

Legalising gay marriage is supporting gay culture. There is a big difference between supporting gay culture and encouraging it.

Anyway, consider the happiness of two gay people who are informally married but not legally married. Are they sad that they are not married legally to where their happiness is less than neutral overall? I think not, but that is a point which is tough to argue. How much more happiness could 'official' marriage possibly bring?

Surely you could say the exact same thing about heterosexual couples getting officially married?

The loss in income, population, and power is best measured like this:
A google search tells me that there are 307 million persons in the United States currently.
For every 1 million gay couples, there are 2 million gays, and 2 million people which will not procreate.
I recall hearing that about 5% of the nation was openly gay. So, 15.35 million gays are estimated in America (rough rough estimate). Can you see why the government may have problems, why we as people perhaps should have problems, with this many people (remember, legalized marriage would seem to imply the rate at which gays are open will increase) not procreating? This may be a serious (buzzword I know; if you need a more technical proposition, I'd say large) blow to the United States' power and economy.

You make the key assumption that every gay person in the United States will get married as a result of legalisation. Because every straight person in the US marries as well, right?

And you are failing to take into account the OP's point, specifically that giving the legal right of marriage to people who do not procreate is giving them a collection of privileges and tax breaks specifically meant to encourage people to procreate.

I don't really agree with the OP, insofar as I don't see why a double standard can be argued to be moral, regardless of what that double standard is, but he does have a valid argument.

The vast majority of marriage rights are meant to go to "family units" and are designed to make the having and raising of children much easier. Things like tax deductions (or even exemptions), increased social security benefits, medicaid, etc are very much an encouragement to have children, and homosexual couples can't do that. They are effectively taking these benefits from the system and not contributing back to it.

Again, I don't personally agree, but it is a point of view that is very rarely brought up and worth considering properly.

Surely it would make more sense to just give the benefits, deductions etc. to the couples that raise kids, regardless of marriage or sexuality of the couple? Otherwise you have a system which relies on all married couples having kids and all non-married couples having no kids.

 

[Handbag1992]

I'm not a troll, and if you don't believe me view my earlier posts from my profile, I have never 'trolled' anyone. Once again I will respond later. This thread is to determine whether the argument presented in the first post is valid at all.

Well, I think by this point we have determined that the argument is not valid at all. I hope the thread has changed your views on the topic.

Your faith that well-reasoned arguments backed up by fact will change the mind of a bigot warms my heart. It reminds me of a young and innocent me, before I learned how to use the internet, now I can experience the concentrated idiocy of the planet whenever I want to.

 

[maxmanrules]

Marriage is an outdated concept. It was formed to make a partnered pair of people "legitimate" so they could have children. Anyone with children and not married was shunned and/or looked down on. It also provides some other benefits, but it was mainly made for children to be raised in a stable environment and so they could survive. Nowadays a mother or father could singlehandedly raise a child by themselves.

Anyway, gay people can't have children, so they adopt. This takes a child out of a social welfare institution and puts them with a stable family unit. They can then get numerous benefits that they otherwise wouldn't, mainly those of being looked after by loving parents.

 

[Aizsaule]

If someone was to

tl'dr human ethics and morals seem to imply that we should allow gay marriage, however on closer inspection, this may not be the case

A intelligent person would not come to this conclusion.

 

[Biosophilogical]

The rights to equality before the law > Welfare of the State.

And this is a brilliant point. Who cares about how powerful the nation is if it is a nation of repression and inequality? Sure as hell not the people being repressed/oppressed. Also, as others have pointed out, gay marriage does not mean a weaker nation anyway, so you are getting the pointy end of both sticks by not making it legal.

 

[Alex_P]

Faulty premises lead to faulty conclusions.

I mean, come on!
1. In the modern world, population is not the major limited resource that determines a nation's "power".
2. Just because two people can't get together and reproduce biologically doesn't mean they're incapable of forming a household that can raise children. Which is essential to having a workforce that's actually, you know, productive.

-- Alex

 

[Samus Aran but a man]

I'm not a troll, and if you don't believe me view my earlier posts from my profile, I have never 'trolled' anyone. Once again I will respond later. This thread is to determine whether the argument presented in the first post is valid at all.

Well, I think by this point we have determined that the argument is not valid at all. I hope the thread has changed your views on the topic.

Your faith that well-reasoned arguments backed up by fact will change the mind of a bigot warms my heart. It reminds me of a young and innocent me, before I learned how to use the internet, now I can experience the concentrated idiocy of the planet whenever I want to.

Yeah I know...

The sad reality is that humans aren't programmed to seek the truth; we are programmed to win. Even if that means sticking to an argument that is obviously wrong and defending it until you die.

 

[Escapefromwhatever]

1. Population =/= power. There's such a thing as overpopulation, which many Americans are already worried about.
2. Heterosexual couples are allowed to get married and not have children. Why should homosexual couples be denied this?
3. Adoption. Allowing gay marriage will allow for more adoption of kids who need it.

I mean, the real problem you seem to have with gay marriage is that it won't produce children (although, this is not always the case. Lesbian couples often use sperm banks to have kids, for example.). Therefore, following your logic, wouldn't it be more effective to ban childless marriages, regardless of sexuality? Why make this issue about sexuality?

 

[userwhoquitthesite]

snip for disrespect

This post ANGERS me. Marriage doesn't cost the government anything, and in fact many couples pay MORE in taxes than they did single. Plus, you still pay a marriage license fee.

The "benefits" you speak of are all things that, currently, the government has no real part in, like insurance, and bank loans.

Your claim that gay marriage will cause more gay people is plain stupid. Unless you mean that more people will be OPENLY gay, but even then, most "closeted" gays arent going out and acting totally heterosexual. Most are being extremely private about their social lives, or in some cases just refusing to have one at all.

Almost everything is your post is wrong, ignorant, or stupid.
I don't care if I get flagged for this post, because there is NO discussion value in your posting, except to tell you how incredibly wrong you are.

Then again, based on your username (logicLul, mods) you may just be trolling to PROVOKE such an angry response, and if so, then I have taken the bait and bit through the damned LINE

Marriage, as it exists today, is an economical partnership between two (in some cases, more) people based supposedly on a deep emotional connection. It is giving a legal classification to "i want to sleep with THIS person, and should anything happen to me, I want my holdings to benefit them". Gay people have every right to, like any heterosexual union, option to register themselves AS said union for legal census.

You are wrong

 

[Terminal Blue]

As others have pointed out, there's some incredibly retarded reasoning going on here.

1) There isn't actually a shortage of children, not even in the developed world. There is a shortage of young babies being put up for adoption, but that's due to changing social patterns (such as the increasing acceptability of single parenting).

2) Even if there were a shortage of children. Declining fertility rates in the developed world can be (and usually are) easily balanced by immigration. We are in no risk of a population crisis. Heterosexuals of this generation are having fewer children than their predecessors a hundred years ago, and society has yet to collapse.

3) Let's assume it's correct that married people pay less tax, and I'm really not sure it is outside of a few fringe circumstances. This would seem to be an opportune time to ask why that is the case, and perhaps to institute more targeted legislation? This is government we're talking about, it's kind of their job to come up with and manage the taxation system so that it is within the public interest. If it's losing too much money by giving tax breaks to married couples who don't need it, well.. just change the legislature so those tax breaks only apply to those who do need it. Government should be reviewing its own legislature for appropriateness anyway.

4) This is the big one, right.. 'Homosexuality' has been formally recognized since about 1850, from that point on there have always been people who weren't 'procreating'. There is more that you can add to the world and to your society than your fucking gametes, not that gay people even have a particularly great problem with that any more.

I'm amazed this kind of argument still comes up. It's incredibly dumb. In fact, it's worse than dumb, it's got this whole 'cult of the family' vibe which seems eerily familiar..

 

[ThrobbingEgo]

The sad reality is that humans aren't programmed to seek the truth; we are programmed to win. Even if that means sticking to an argument that is obviously wrong and defending it until you die.

Win? We're not even programmed that far. More or less, we're blindly equipped with crude implements that are good enough to help most of us not die or pass on our genes in a savanna.

Untrained, we're very vulnerable to logical fallacies. Trained, we're slightly less vulnerable.