Anti gay-marriage atheist??

[Tartarus Sauce]

Ain't no thang girl.

[Losty]

#4 is a blatant lie. If it were true, it would be the only one that mattered at all to the gay marriage case, but it's a lie.

[Brian37]

No, reproduction is one aspect as to why any species has sex, socializing is another aspect, an asserting dominance as an act of power and control is another.

Heterosexuals also can have sex just for fun, they can also have oral and anal sex. Heterosexuals can aslo have incestuous sex, and even rape.

Sex and sexuality are two different things. And sex when it comes to molesting kids or rape of adults is about power and control, not sexuality.

Heterosexuals do all this thing. Same sex acts not ending up in a pregnancy, does not preclude LGBT from having consensual sex. It also does not preclude gays from having sex with the opposite sex to make a offspring. Climaxing is a function of the body, and can be reactionary by itself. Gays can and do have kids.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

I'm still having a bit of trouble with the difference in the unicode at this site, so please bear with me if I get this wrong, but I feel I have GOT to address this one.

I am an atheist, and have no religious reasons for denying gays the right to be married; but, I have very secular reasons. 

No. No no no. No way are you secular, author of this original article. No effing way. You just recognize that if you start out with "because the Bible says", people will rightfully call you a religious bigot.

1. The primary evolutionary purpose of a man and a woman is to propagate the species and raising children. 

The "primary purpose" of any genetically-reproducing creature is to propagate the species. There are asexual species that manage to do this just fine, without the help of "a man and a woman", and I don't suppose you'd consider them "purposeless", eh? But since you clearly mean "since humans reproduce sexually", I'd be curious to know what possible link this datum could have with the sexual choices, practices, proclivities, or rights of individuals in a Constitutional democratic republic?

2. Homosexual men are more than twice as likely to spread HIV and other STDs than straight men, which applies to lesbian woman too. 

That doesn't even make sense, since lesbians are the least likely to transmit any form of STI. As for the HIV issue, you'd better tell Africa, because they apparently didn't get the memo. And while it is true that "In the United States from 2001–2005, the highest transmission risk behaviors were sex between men (40–49% of new cases) and high risk heterosexual sex (32–35% of new cases)" (source), because it impacted and established itself in our homosexual communities first, it had largely to do with the "perfect storm" of promiscuity in America's large cities where the virus first arrived, where repressed communities of men met in secret locales to have anonymous sex. Encouraging monogamous pairing and/or marriage among the gay male community would largely serve to sever that small disparity between the gay and straight community HIV rates in the USA.

3. Homosexual men and lesbians are much more likely to have serious substance abuse problems. 

I'm not sure why you think this is an objection to their right to be married. This just strikes me as open bigotry. According to the CDC, quote: "Alcohol and drug use among some men who have sex with men (MSM) can be a reaction to homophobia, discrimination, or violence they experienced due to their sexual orientation and can contribute to other mental health problems."

As with the previous issue, it would seem that the solution to this situation would be to normalize and destigmatize our treatment of homosexuals and encourage them to enter into the same sort of stable relationships the rest of us commonly (hypothetically, anyway) enjoy. I would be surprised if we did not find this result in the most oppressed and marginalized communities.

Most drug counselors will tell you that abuse is typically tied to a feeling of disconnection from community in the addict, and recent research from Vancouver's destigmatization project for heroin addicts (a common means by which HIV is transmitted in both gay and straight communities) has shown that reconnecting that person to society and a safe/nonjudgmental social environment is most effective in causing them to discontinue or significantly moderate their abuse of chemicals. (I found links to articles on this, but they were all paid ones, and I can't find the original that I read about this on a free site, so I apologize for lack of citation.)

4. Gays are not the proper role models to raise children. Children need a real female mom and a real male dad, one of each. All recent studies prove that children are best raised by a man and a woman. New Research on Children of Same-Sex Parents Suggests Differences Matter. 

See, this is how I know that you're really a Christian pretending to be an atheist, Mr. Author. That claim is straight out of the Focus on the Family™ playbook. And unfortunately for you, it happens to be completely false.

Quote: "A new study from Australia's Melbourne University found kids of gay parents are growing up healthy and well-adjusted, despite continued discrimination against their families."

That study was from 2013, but it's not the first to report this. You should be ashamed of yourself for trying to forward a debunked, Christian idea in the name of atheism. In the words of Joseph Welch, "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

The biggest danger homosexual civil marriage presents is the enshrining into law the notion that sexual love, regardless of its fecundity, is the sole criterion for marriage.

Since when did either of those things become a requirement, let alone a "criterion" for marriage? And since when did the question of whether or not to extend legal protections and benefits ever have anything to do with whether or not a person was useful to society? (This is the essence of your previous paragraphs' assertions, which I deleted for brevity's sake.)

If the state must recognize a marriage of two men simply because they love one another, upon what basis can it deny marital recognition to a group of two men and three women, for example, or a sterile brother and sister who claim to love each other? Homosexual activists protest that they only want all couples treated equally. But why is sexual love between two people more worthy of state sanction than love between three, or five? When the purpose of marriage is procreation, the answer is obvious. If sexual love becomes the primary purpose, the restriction of marriage to couples loses its logical basis, leading to marital chaos.

In a word, complexity. The legal rights we extend to married (and divorcing) couples are already complex enough without adding third, fifth, and potentially tenth parties into the marriage and financial arrangements. Other than that, I don't see any reason why it would be prohibited, if our politicians could devise a fair way of doing it. And I would point out that we already "sanction" procreative couplings between "three, or five", in the form of serial marriage-and-divorce laws. I hardly imagine you'd argue that we should revoke these rights!

As for the brother-sister thing--"ewww factor" aside--the only way that would be feasible without obvious dangers to society in the form of genetic diseases is if the government could make provisions to legally reassure itself that the couple is, indeed, completely sterile. I cannot even think of an acceptable mechanism by which we would give them such intrusive rights that would not violate their inherent right to bodily autonomy under the First Amendment's guarantee of personal privacy. It is simply not legally plausible under the American system of Constitutional law.

In conclusion: you, Mr. Author, are clearly someone who is operating from premises which are indistinguishable from those put forth by members of hyper-fundamentalist Christian organizations like the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family. If you are one of them, and felt it would be okay to lie and claim to be an atheist as a way of trying to "slip below the radar" of the gullible, then you have discovered a new low in the field of douchebaggery. As such, my hat is off to you for this accomplishment. In short, "Go have non-procreative sex with yourself, you anal sphincter."

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Re-reading my response, above, it dawns on me that I need to clarify my First Amendment-related answer about incest.

The right to bodily autonomy, under the general category of Constitutionally-guaranteed privacy rights, in the face of government intrusion absent a "compelling state interest", is what governs much of our relationship between the person and the government in general.

You may not have realized it, Mr. Author, but the same set of rights which allow two (heterosexual) people who have genetic disease recessive traits (and thus would likely produce children with those heritable diseases) to marry freely under law, since the government is prohibited from finding out about your genetic suitability prior to granting your license, are the same ones that prevent us from being able to regulate incestuous marriages in the manner it would take to overcome the presumption that such diseases would occur in a familial pairing.

Likewise, it's not the government's business to determine what categories of people (racial characteristics, gender, etc.) are "eligible" to be included in the umbrella of marriage as currently defined in each state, short of ensuring that they are of legal standing (of age) to enter into what amounts to a civil legal contract together. Contrary to the claims of conservatives, the recent SCotUS ruling did not "redefine" marriage; instead, it examined the ability of the government to determine whether the gender of those entering the contract met the level of scrutiny required under the Equal Protection Clause, and found that government did not have the right or the power to restrict the categories on that basis, just as it made the same finding in 1967 for race in the Loving v. Virginia case.

It would be considered a major victory for conservatism, if they truly believed in limiting the power of government to restrict our private lives; only bigotry keeps them from celebrating it as a victory in this manner, since they appear to still want government intrusion in private lives, when it comes to enforcing Biblical concepts onto our behavior in the bedroom. Luckily for those of us who love freedom and individual dignity under law, the conservatives have been steadily losing every battle they fight to maintain this particular form of power, over the last century.