While Dotard I'd like to whack you over the head with studies on homosexual behaviors observed in the natural world, that is neither here nor there.
Marriage, the legal institution, should serve all persons, where person is defined as a sapient, thinking being on par with the average human. It seems arbitrary because it is - were there an AI or animal that had the same capabilities for social growth, mental agility and language, it would pretty much be a person.
To explain further on this, I indulge in the walks-like-a-duck, quacks-like-a-duck line of thought (called duck-typing in Python btw). If you accept that a human being is completely isolated from another human being with only inputs of the five senses and a "mind" to interpret them, then we essentially see the "human being" as a black box.
Now that we have this black box, or what we consider makes a thinking being a thinking being, divorced from the biology (but not the initial conditions set in this thought experiment), we must now consider what makes it akin to another, unrelated black box. However, this second black box can be derived from anything and compared to the first, which is derived from us humans. If both boxes share a significant set of similarities past an arbitrary limit (I would suggest the statistical differences between all human-derived black boxes), then they are considered of equal footing (as in rights, capability, personhood). Less (or perhaps more - supersmart AI's that outstrip us by chance?) would, of course, be subject to argument.
Either way, in the above, I laid out (at least what I see) a consistent system to compare, assuming we had all the information (this is an ideal system), multiple entities, a baseline for "personhood" derived from ourselves, etc,.
Why did I do this?
So I can shoot down your statement about marrying your dog, which probably doesn't have close to a significant fraction of "personhood" as a disabled, retard will have. Since we don't let them marry (very rarely it occurs - there is a court case over such a thing TBH), why should we let you marry your dog?
However, since we let persons marry each other (they must rate within whatever humans consider the norm - how us humans differentiate between normal and abnormal is still unknown, but when they see it, they object to it), then what does it matter, the genitalia at hand?
A person of appropriate personhood is given rights in our society (using actual terms from the ethics class on embryonic stem cells - fucking shit load of ethics papers I had to read :S). Finding the limits on what is a person is the question.
What is not in the question is whether or not same-sex lovers are people.
If they're people, they have rights.
Let the fuckers marry under the law and be done with it.
Marriage, the legal institution, should serve all persons, where person is defined as a sapient, thinking being on par with the average human. It seems arbitrary because it is - were there an AI or animal that had the same capabilities for social growth, mental agility and language, it would pretty much be a person.
To explain further on this, I indulge in the walks-like-a-duck, quacks-like-a-duck line of thought (called duck-typing in Python btw). If you accept that a human being is completely isolated from another human being with only inputs of the five senses and a "mind" to interpret them, then we essentially see the "human being" as a black box.
Now that we have this black box, or what we consider makes a thinking being a thinking being, divorced from the biology (but not the initial conditions set in this thought experiment), we must now consider what makes it akin to another, unrelated black box. However, this second black box can be derived from anything and compared to the first, which is derived from us humans. If both boxes share a significant set of similarities past an arbitrary limit (I would suggest the statistical differences between all human-derived black boxes), then they are considered of equal footing (as in rights, capability, personhood). Less (or perhaps more - supersmart AI's that outstrip us by chance?) would, of course, be subject to argument.
Either way, in the above, I laid out (at least what I see) a consistent system to compare, assuming we had all the information (this is an ideal system), multiple entities, a baseline for "personhood" derived from ourselves, etc,.
Why did I do this?
So I can shoot down your statement about marrying your dog, which probably doesn't have close to a significant fraction of "personhood" as a disabled, retard will have. Since we don't let them marry (very rarely it occurs - there is a court case over such a thing TBH), why should we let you marry your dog?
However, since we let persons marry each other (they must rate within whatever humans consider the norm - how us humans differentiate between normal and abnormal is still unknown, but when they see it, they object to it), then what does it matter, the genitalia at hand?
A person of appropriate personhood is given rights in our society (using actual terms from the ethics class on embryonic stem cells - fucking shit load of ethics papers I had to read :S). Finding the limits on what is a person is the question.
What is not in the question is whether or not same-sex lovers are people.
If they're people, they have rights.
Let the fuckers marry under the law and be done with it.
