This is a fascinating article. While I have seen, and believe there still exists, a great many abuses by men in the name of heed to some notion as to what is or isn't said or dictated by the Bible, I do hope that one would not take one womans choice to follow her faith as an inherent abandonment of those feminist ideals that really must continue. Simply because a woman does not see the exact kind of feminism another does as being called for in her life doesn't mean that she's simply reverted stock and barrel to old machismo tradition. It is, in my view, entirely possible for a woman to be fully commited to faith, to Christianity, and still hold out the torch of true feminist spirit and accomplishment.

I think it a grave error to simply slop all women who seem to have "gone back" as inherently having abandoned the whole movement or to be jepordizing the current position and rights women have obtained through many brave generations.

I would suspect that in many if not most cases, these women chose to do this.  Isn't it possible they thought they'd be happier?  Isn't it possible they had a spiritual epiphany at some point that made them want to do it?

Yes. What smart women realize is that it is incredibly difficult to work 2 demanding jobs..earning a check and full time homemaker and child nurrturing is a huge job which is time consuming and difficult to do well,when there are competing demands on the females times.

Frankly,this is a backlash to the feminist movement. Many,many, many women found that their mantra of a 'woman can have it all' to be nothing but a cruel hoax.  Complete with emotional turmoil, unfulfilling careers and guilt ridden parenting. So yes, yes, yes...many women are finding they are a lot happier doing one or the other, not both.

The spirtitual epiphany turns out to be, you do not have to 'do it all' to feel complete as a woman. Once you learn the difference between surrender and defeat, domestic life can be far more fulfilling than any juggling of a corporate job with being a spouse and parent.

Hmmm... I think my Aunt Mary's "spiritual epiphany" came the day she was staying home with her 5 kids under 8 and her husband ran his car into a bridge.

Having 5 kids under 8, sounds more like stupidity than an epiphany.

"...domestic life can be far more fulfilling than any juggling of a corporate job with being a spouse and parent."

I totally agree. I quit a job I loved to stay home with my 4 year-old and my infant twin boys. I thoroughly enjoyed that life.

Fast forward....15 years:

1. Divorce (not my choice or desire)
2. Breast cancer (not my fault)
3. Terrible rating for private health insurance because of #2, so in effect (with a $5,000 annual deductible and $4,500 annually in premiums, I basically had VERY expensive catastrophic coverage only)
4. Started applying for jobs --> shot down over & over because of "employment gap."
5. Finally found a job ( a good one that I like, by the way), but my earning potential is miniscule compared to those who stayed in my field these years.

Bottom line: If we had a system that had the common good as its core, health care would not be the issue it is. Employers could hire more people, and could compete with employers in countries like Canada where it is not an issue. Woman who stay at home with their families but who do not remain in the "safe haven" of marriage for whatever reason lose A LOT when they MUST resume their careers.

Lastly, WRB, you really sound so judgemental when you talk about women who have children and also enjoy their jobs. There is nothing wrong with that. I know plenty of stay-at-home moms who are narcissistic shoppers and ignore their children all the time.

Great mothers and fathers are that way because they want to be and work at it all the time. They can have other things in their lives that matter enormously to them, and I think they raise children who learn much from their examples.

Jan Knaus

I don't know what you are talking about when you say that women who stay home are put down by others. As I explained I stayed home for 15 years. I left a professional job; my former husband was a professional; I never got any holier-than-thou, how could you? from professional women I knew through his job or my own.

My friends were concerned when I stopped working that I would lose my ability to keep up professionally, and they were right; I did. But I always read, took a variety of classes, and kept up with current events, and so I never felt left out of conversations with working people, and in fact, I felt more knowledgeable in many cases because I really did mangage to keep abreast of things.

My basic message is this: There is not ONE right choice for everyone, and the kind of parent, and moreover the kind of person you are boils down to how you want to be; what matters to you, and where your priorities are. You can be a good parent if you choose to be. You can be an airhead if you don't make an effort not to be.

Work--not work--stay at home--or not; these things are not what make good parents, good citizens, or fulfilled people. It is all a struggle, friends, so let's just stick together and respect each other's decisions, eh?

Jan Knaus

There are interesting misreadings here (confusing the daughter's choices for the mother's) and peculiar sidetracks regarding choices that many (but not all) women have the option to make between home, work, and career. The peculiar thing is that the discussion seems to miss the point regarding the issue of whether women and men are inherently equal--socially, legally, economically--or whether women are rightly and properly always to be considered subservient to men in all things.

Fundamentalist Christians seek to restore the status quo for women and their position in society. Is this a backlash against feminism? Or is it a backlash against the fundamental American value that we are all equal?

You are confusing equal treatment under the law with equal positions. We are different beings, males and females. In that sense we can never both be equal for those are points of inherent discrepancy. One is not better than the other, but they are both different, they both, via evolution, or whatever determined such, have been granted a tendancy to different roles. Now you can have hissy fits all you want about natural selections selection of reproduction and genetic continuation, but that's all whistling in the dark when it comes to the realities. All this incistance that women should some how receive all compensations they feel they need to access things they feel men have easier access to simply because of physiological tendancies is feminism on steroids. It distorts the virtue that feminism has and seeks to actualy unify the genders by a de factoo destroying of gender. I'm all for equal treatment under the law. I agree many men have, and too many still do, abuse and subvert the rights of women. But I do not see this as being corrected through the current fundie femenist fanatical stance that unless they can do, and are doing, ALL that ALL men are doing that they are somehow being persicuted or being demeaned by society or the law.

HR, I was extremely careful not to mention physical differences or similarities just so that we could avoid discussing this kind of crap.  Men have are generally taller than women, they are generally stronger, they generally have more testosterone.  You win.  You Tarzan, me Jane.  This is NOT what the discussion is about.

This is NOT what the discussion is about.

The extensions of such are what it's about. So many are under the delusion that you can seperate all discrepancies from the physiological differences and their subsequent effects. Such is not the case. We can have equal treatment under the law WITHOUT there being equal access for both sexes to every caveat the other enjoys or must endure. This idea that you can talk about equality without considering the fact that we are not, at our core, identical beings, is inane and a fool's task.

I have no doubt that the Fundamentalists would like a return to some mythical past where women (at least wives) never worked outside the home. But they might as well be playing King Canute ordering the tide to go out. Economic forces require that even many Fundamentalists wives must work outsider the home and I don’t see anything changing that reality any time in the future.

Sine your own freedom to contract a heterosexual marriage is entirely unaffected how doest his impose on your marriage (or lack of one if that’s your choice)? This is like saying that allowing people to own cats imposes felinity on dog owners.

I've not said that it diminishes an immediately held adherence to a centuries old institution. You are implying that that is my argument. It is not. My issue is the inherent effects on the tradition into the future. My hypothetical storage of volatile toxic waste in the ground in my back yard doesn't immediately, or even in the near future, effect the enviromental quality you experience in your back yard. In fact it will not likely effect anything outside my yard untill after you and I are dead. But that does not mean that you do not lack the capacity, through the law of the land, to enforce laws made to stop myself from producing a legacy that will doubtlessly be a burden and destructive force against generations yet to come. Homosexual activity with governmental endorsement will lead to a society that will be substantialy less fit to both maintain over all cohesiveness and to provide the situations most likely to produce favorable atmospheres for the proper inculcation of future generations that are fit to continue civilization's progress. Immediate heed by some given to the UN does not immediately compromize the US constitution, but it takes an utter moron to not see that the UN charter and goals are to create a system in which the US sovreignty is significantly reduced. Things like the world court do not immediately infringe on US sovreignty and constitutional integrity BUT the only way for the world court to reach it's goals the soundness of the US constitution must be forfiet and/or compromized. This is the same with governmental endorsement of homosexual unions as being estimated to be of the same value as traditional marriage.

Economic forces require that even many Fundamentalists wives must work outsider the home and I don’t see anything changing that reality any time in the future.

A classic result of ignoring the implications of game theory.

People want bigger nicer house. Some start to have two income families. They get bigger houses. Soon lots are using two incomes in the hopes of a bigger house. Having fewer kids frees expenses for nicer house and toys. More people seek two income households. Demand for nicer houses and toys skyrocket. Subsequent prices for said nicer houses and toys skyrocket. Those with two incomes are reduced to only a fraction of economic influence they once had. Now two income families are doing only slightly better economicaly, and sometimes worse, than one income families were doing in their respective era.

Expenses expand to fill the budget allocated. Materialism is killing off our future generation's potency AND our current capacity to enjoy life.

Various economic factors cause various financial security institutions (governemental and private) to colapse. Society falls apart. Those with enough kids to support them are the only ones with REAL social security. Kids, a counter-intuitive investment on a micro-economic scale at the moment, become the most valuable asset in a society under financial upheaval.

Re: . Those with enough kids to support them are the only ones with REAL social security.

Perhaps you live in some alternate reality? Where I live children generally do not support (materially) their parents and so having lots of children therefore does not guarantee any sort of material support in old age. To be sure many adult children do try to help their elderly parents in many, many practical ways: I did while my father was dying certainly. But the economics was still the other way around: my father had more wealth and more income than I did in those days. Which is as it should be.
No, having lost of children is a way of ensuring that you will not have very much in the way of savings in old age, and this iso ne reason few people have large families these days.

Perhaps you live in some alternate reality?

If you want to call Utah that. But I've lived in California amongst many of the hispanics and I must say that amongst those who's legality was questionable or economic situation less than ideal their familys WERE their social security. No they didn't get to travel around the country in a big RV or relax in a big house, but they were taken care of.

Where I live children generally do not support (materially) their parents

Out of curiosity where is that? How many children do they normaly have?

and so having lots of children therefore does not guarantee any sort of material support in old age.

Simply having kids certainly doesn't guarentee it. I'll conceed that. I'll give you my nuanced view later in this response.

To be sure many adult children do try to help their elderly parents in many, many practical ways: I did while my father was dying certainly. But the economics was still the other way around: my father had more wealth and more income than I did in those days. Which is as it should be.

I wish it could be and remain that way. But kids were key to your Father being able to both have and use his wealth. An explanation--

A Hypothetical--Pretend suddenly everyone in the world only had replacement level of children. Everyone had aprox 2.1 children. Sound great? Now imagine the economic details of it. Look at the retirement and financial security that your father likely had. No doubt it was in someway dependent on things like compound intrest and a growing economy. Am I correct thus far? So your father's assets, if they are like most retirement assets, were both collected and invested and distributed on the assumption of a growing economy. This way one had a base in which investment was statisticaly insured, over the long term, to grow sufficiently.

But with a zero population birth rate economic growth would be limited merely to technological advances. Gone would be the productivity increases inherent in having a larger global work force. More limited than ever in recent history would be the capacity to produce anything requiring specificaly human skill, intuition or capacity. So that takes a substantive growth aspect out of the financial situation. But you may say, technology could keep up, advances could compensate. To a degree, for a time, you might be correct. But that would have to be limited for even current accelerations in advance have existed in the background of demographicaly based economic growth. Now you would have fewer available resources so those that would remain would have to do more, in terms of advances, with less goods and resources. I mean with fewer people to do the meaneal tasks of society, the low skill jobs, you would inherently loose a portion of potential talent, or resources for existing talent, to fullfill their potential for society.

So you have lessening economic growth and hampered technological growth. Let's say despite all this, to be optimistic, that people were able to fiscally be even more prepared than your currently well prepared retirees are. Say they were flush with enough cash that if they were to be retiring today (rather than the hypothetical future) that they'd have something on the order of fifty to a hundred percent more in financial resources than they have now so as to hopefully avoid the predicted downturns economicaly and technologicaly. But there would still be a serious problem because despite them being flush with cash the labor market would be a mere remnant of what it is today. So you have people with alot of money, yet the labor market can now command far more than todays market precisely because of the whole 'supply/demand' scarcity issues. So now you have a populace retiring, yet they lack even a sufficient economic base with which to exchange their hard earned currency for currently available goods and services. Not enough workers in an economy and it doesn't matter how much money you have. Inflation takes over and before you know it, even if you never had the impending social security melt down before us or the looming debts before us (both implicit and explicit) it would not be a pretty picture with zero population growth. Yet that's where most of the western world is headed. In the US we're hovering at that right now. If it werent' for immigrants, legal and illegal, our economic future would be far closer to Europe's than it is now--namely not good.

And how do you maintain economic viability when your society stops melting together because the immigration levels are so high and past the capacity for absorption as is the case in places like Germany. Just look at the riots in France or the tenuous situation with some immigrants here in the US to see the potential schisms created by a society trying to immigrate themselves out of a zero, or negative, population condundrum.

No, having lost of children is a way of ensuring that you will not have very much in the way of savings in old age, and this iso ne reason few people have large families these days.

You see but it only insures you a good living later on if you can find a large enough work force to keep your retirement dollars as valuable as you currently plan on them being.

A woman on a business call with my Father went of on a self-righteous tirade against my Father when he mentioned his need to feed his nine children. She tried to tell him what a bad person and irresponsible person he was for having so many children, the woman promptly shut up when my father proclaimed "MA'M MY CHILDREN WILL BE PAYING FOR YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY!"

Again this is all horrible revenge that comes from the neglect of game theory and a comprehensive world view. Yes it's a terrible financial strain to raise children. And there's no 100% certainty that kids will support you in your old age. But it is certain that if society at large does not produce alot of children to continue the systems of support that have enabled older people the capacity to enjoy their older years then it must soon abandon it's delusion that it can have it's cake and eat it too. That it can enjoy financial strength through limited or no children early on and still expect the outcomes in old age that have been afforded those retirees of today and the recent past. Retirement as we know it would then become indefinently a thing of the past. Or our society may just be replaced by one that still has the will to invest in people, namely children.

Wealth, and where it truly lies, is not the mere bottom line of the net worth of individuals or couples. It's rooted in the very society in which the individuals and couples reside.

Re: But kids were key to your Father being able to both have and use his wealth

My father had two children-- or three if you count the infant daughter who died shortly after birth. Neither myself nor my older half brother (who had serious drug problems and eventually committed suicide) contributed to my father’s to in any way—we were in fact drains on it. I did as I mentioned, provide a great deal of non-material support to my father during his final years as his health declined.
Your larger assertion that a growing economy requires a growing population is erroneous too, an old 18th mercantilist notion, and it is easily disproved by reference to the real world. To be sure there may be a grain of superficial truth if you consider only growth in an absolute sense, but what counts is not the overall growth by the growth per capita: a society whose population increased by 10% but whose economy increased by just 5% would have a “growing economy” but it would not be a happy place to live. And check out those nations whose populations have grown the fastest—ouch, anyone think Bangladesh or Haiti or Ceauscescu’s Romania were economic dynamos? Meanwhile, Japan with its shrinking population seems to be doing just fine. And then there’s the example of 15th century Europe. There the population had declined precipitously by at third due to the Black Death, and the birth rate remained flat for generations. But the standard of living was at a historic high it would not reach again until the late 1700s and indeed the smaller population with a growing capital base allowed the Europeans to begin their rise to world dominance: that was the century of the Renaissance and of the voyages of discovery. Where you are going astray is failing to realize the fact that economies grow because of productivity growth, not because of population growth, and productivity growth is unconnected to population growth. Indeed a (slowly) shrinking population with steadily increasing productivity would in fact be the ideal situation: more and more wealth shared by fewer people.

Simply incisting that government condone a definition for marriage that it has not had through the existence of the western tradition seems to be forcing something.

First: I'd recommend you read William Eskridge's History of Same-Sex Marriage (Virginia Law Review, Vol 79 Num 7). Same-sex marriage isn't something new.

Second: All that advocates of SSM are calling for is for the government to respect the principles of the Constitution, specifically the Equal Protection Clause (for the record, the Supreme Court declared in Loving v. Virginia that marriage was a fundamental right of mankind).

You didn't hear about the girl that was taken for an abortion by the parent or grandparent of the man who took advantage of her and was kept against her and her mother's will from having contact with her mother untill after they'd performed the abortion? I know it's just a single case. And I know that fanatics will at times trump up charges or exagerate claims. But there are documented cases like that one in which parents are side stepped. The complaint is made that 'not every family is a model family' As true as it is, in almost all cases I'd wager the parents would make better decisions than the governement would, and if the parents can be shown to abuse or neglect their children then by all means revoke their parenting rights, but there ARE cases (one is too many) in which parents are second guessed without due process and a large part of that is accessable because of policies enacted and promoted by many so called 'progresives.'

This is a good argument against parental notification for abortions, but has nothing at all to do with the legalization of the procedure in general.

So I get a little tired of people being paranoid about the evil influence of pepsi-cola but totaly open to the birth-contorl-industrial complex getting it's doctrines into our children's minds as early as they can.

... I don't even know what to say ...

You want to talk about intrusion. Go back to the internment camps for those of Japanese decent.

I feel like this is close enough to invoke Godwin's Law, in addition to being a serious logical fallacy.

So what happens when your population growth exceeds your ability to sustain that population? I fail to see how a model based on a continually increasing population is going to work indefinitely given that there are many resources which do not scale with population.

THEY HAVE EQUAL OPPORTUNITY.

This obsurd notion that one must be able to marry anyone or anything to be equal is inane. All men can marry women and all women can marry men. What if I have a consenting adult who wants to become a devoted life long endentured servant to me but desires to have government endorsement without the title of being an equal companion? Wouldn't that be an act of removing social constraint? To have your view of "equality" extended would not I and said hypothetical consenting subserviant need to have the right to government endorsement of our union? Is it moraly questionable to say the above proposal of removing a social constraint is wrong?

So what happens when your population growth exceeds your ability to sustain that population?

You are going under the assumption that zero-population advocates have gone under for ages. Namely that current energy and resource constraints will not change substantialy. If we took JUST coal reserves in Alaska we could power the whole planet at current energy consumption levels for 500 years. That's JUST coal and that's JUST in Alaska. Start looking at uranium resources and the potential to both conserve energy in ways not currently seen or implimented and the possibility of discovering other energy sources in the future. I tend to side with human innovation. I believe the more people there are the more innovation will be possible and the longer and better our resources will be able to be used. Energy problems are only short term problems that are centered around the fact that we've not yet adapted the system to a new level of versatility. There is no real energy problem anywhere in the near or distant future with regard to available stashes on this planet. And by the time we'd ever get to a point of even coming close to exausting currently tapable sources we can either move of the planet in search OR we may figure out how to tap fusion or something else.

Yes the earth is finite, but people forget that the total mass of ANTS out masses the total mass of humans. Now if ants can, and have been able to not only out number us on this planet BUT OUTWEIGH US then I have a really hard time buying the fact that the earth's finite nature is of any significance to beings as endowed with the capacity to inovate as us.

Re: Can you tell me with certainty that Japan, with current demographic trends, has any forseeable chance of regaining the prominence in the world market it once had?

Sure, why not? You apparently think we are still in the Paleolithic era when all work was done by humans. But that hasn't been true for millennia: we added animal power to the mix in the Neolithic, simple machines (windmills etc.) by Roman times and nowadays the vast majority of our work is done by complex machines and human labor accounts for only a tiny fraction of the total output of society. And even if the population fell to half its current level, well, that's what it was within living memory (the 60s): would you care to suggest that the US and the other countries you fret about did not have enough people in 1960 to sustain a modern economy? Or consider this: you cite problems in Germany and France, but their problems are not the ones you would expect from a shrinking population. Instead of a tight labor market, their problem is the opposite: unemployment, which says that they do not have too few workers at all. And far from having to import workers the Europeans would be better off they could send those immigrants home since they don't have enough jobs for them.

Re: Look at the downfall of the roman empire and you will see that directly corresponding to it was the ruling classes unwillingness to procreate at any level near that needed to maintain it's cultural and genetic significance.

Um, let's see: Latin based languages are spoken over a major fraction of the Earth's surface, and many other languages including are own are full of Latin words. And the official religion of the late Empire is also spread across the whole Earth, with over a billion adherents. Too, Roman law is the basis for many legal codes today, and Roman architectural design is widely employed everywhere, notably for public buildings. Then too, did Rome really fall,and if so when? Remember Byzantium? How about the Holy Roman Empire and Moscow, the third Rome? Nothing lasts forever, but the Romans did quite well for themselves. And Rome's demographic problems had nothing to do with too few babies: five or six kids per couple was the norm back then, though sadly about half of them died in childhood. Rather, it was epidemics in the 3rd and 6th centuries that depopulated the Empire.

Re: For centuries almost all of my ancestors managed to live well enough despite having large families

Yes, and during those centuries there was a far greater need for human labor, as there were only animals and simple machines to assist in producing output. That's not true today. We don't need a lot of strong, bodies, we need relatively few strong minds. So we are quite reasonably switching our demogrphic streategy as a species to one of producing few offspring, but focusing lots and lots of resources on them to insure their survival and competence.That is a very valid reproductive stratetgy, found in a number of plant and animal species.

Re: Also another thing to consider when referencing the black death and the correlating economic boosts is the fact that when the quarter of the population is systematicaly wiped out without the exhaustive expenses such desimation would demand in war far

Yes, of course: the Plague killed some livestock, but otherwise left the wealth base of society alone. The same is true for our gradual shrinkage of the population: nothing is being damaged or destroyed and the fact that this will play out over many generations also means there will be no sudden and disruptive shock.

Re: For almost two centuries those in my faith and immediate culture have generaly vastly out paced the industrialized world and those in this nation in terms of offspring.

But you are living in the larger culture and you are part of it and enjoy its benefits and its support. (Not that you don't contribute to it; I am not accusing you of parasitism). Plop yourself down on a desert island with nothing but the clothes on your back and see how well you do.

I never said the idea was something new. I said that broad government endorsement is only an anomally in the history of the civilized world. The fact that nation's like the Spartan's didn't last rather demonstrates the long term effects of such non-traditional notions being supported by the state.

SSM was practiced in both ancient Greece and Rome (though Rome grew more hostile towards the practice as the Empire began to collapse); far larger than just Sparta. I'd also love to see the argument that SSM has any "long term effects" leading to the collapse of a state.

That was marriage as then acknowledged, it was in no way intended to include every fringe groups concept of what marriage could entail. So it is their fundamental right any man (regardless his tendancies) can marry a woman and vica versa for women (also regardless their tendancies. There is no persecution for all have the same access to government endorsement of what is considered marriage in the context of the institution as it's been seen by the vast majority through most of world history.

I'm not sure if you're being intentionally humorous here, because that's almost word for word the argument that Virginia used in Loving. After all, whites could marry whites, and non-whites could marry non-whites, so no one was barred from marriage, right?

To explain further, consider this situation: there are three people, Bob, Joe, and Mary. Mary can marry Bob, but Joe cannot marry Bob. The only relevant difference between Mary and Joe is that Mary is female and Joe is male. That is clearcut discrimination on the basis of sex: one person is barred from doing something because of their sex that someone else of the opposite sex is able to do.

If you seriously think that SSM will lead to beastiality, plural marriage, or any other Santorum-esque doomsday situation, you may want to look into the "slippery slope fallacy" and exactly why it's a fundamentally invalid argument.

If you want to stop debating me then stop. Heck you can pretend you won on what you feel to be some special technicality and assertion, neither of which you've demonstrated. But if you've any discernment of intellectual honesty you know that you've not answered my questions sufficiently NOR have you given substantive and tenable claims.

It's not so much about "winning" the debate... it's more of pointing out that your line of argument is patently ridiculous and completely invalid. If a smaller government intrusion is justified by the existence of a larger intrusion in history, than there can be no way to ever protect against all but the most extreme abuses. By your logic, it would be valid for the government to argue for the permanent incarceration of political dissidents by claiming that Hitler or Stalin did worse. That's not a workable system; far better to actually respect the Constitution and hold the government accountable for all such breaches, large or small.

Honestly, I wasn't talking about energy (although that is a concern) so much as I was talking about a resource that can't really be expanded much by technical innovation - actual room for people to live.

There are several ongoing forums where sexuality and marriage, including Gay marriage, are being discussed. I just went back and looked for a spot to insert this. This particular spot has no particular significance.
Growing up in Texas and Oklahoma, most of my friends came from fundamentalist families, mostly Southern Baptist. A common compliment I heard given by one Baptist to another was,” You’ve grown so much as a Christian“. As a kid it was common for us [Christians all] to call someone a “queer’ as a putdown which had nothing to do with what we thought their sexual orientation actually was. The commonly expressed attitude was that to actually be a homosexual [expressed also as being a queer] was perverted and disgusting. This fit my [apparently natural] inclinations so I believed it and felt the same way. Now I have grown up. I believe I have “grown” as a human. I know better. Some people’s inborn inclination is to be sexually attracted to the same sex whether they wish that were true or not. It doesn’t hurt me and I see no reason why it should threaten anyone else. When I combine this idea with my belief that it is both natural and pragmatic to have a partner in and for life, I find it easy to support civil unions which have the same rights and obligations as a traditional marriage. It angers me that Gays made such an issue of Gay marriage and that it became such a wedge issue that helped install our current President. Why wasn’t civil union enough? It had to be enough for me. I was raised Catholic and the Catholic Church never recognized my marriage as anything more than a civil union since it was performed by a J.P. I would not think of trying to get the Catholic Church to change it’s position on what constitutes a marriage in the eyes of God and I am satisfied that they don’t they have the right to say I cannot have the rights, privileges, and obligations granted by civil law because a priest did not perform my marriage. The Reformation resulted in many denominations and the Catholic Church lost the power to control what would be considered marriage and what wouldn’t be but all churches retained the right to recognize what they chose to recognize as a legitimate marriage in the eyes of God. Now the word “marriage” has become a political issue defining a distinction which has no difference as long as the participants are a man and a woman. Let’s give the word “marriage” to the churches and allow civil unions among Gays. Partners in civil unions can call their partnership any thing they want. Churches don’t have to. Call it a separation of Church and State issue. America can continue to “grow” as a country. We can debate things that make a real difference. Gays can continue to scream for “marriage” sanctioned by the State but I will be pissed off about it and know, or at least believe, that they are hurting their particular cause and also hurting America’s best interests.

SSM was practiced in both ancient Greece and Rome (though Rome grew more hostile towards the practice as the Empire began to collapse); far larger than just Sparta. I'd also love to see the argument that SSM has any "long term effects" leading to the collapse of a state.

It's been practiced throughout history. You still are mistaking that with governmental and societal endorsement.

I'm not sure if you're being intentionally humorous here, because that's almost word for word the argument that Virginia used in Loving. After all, whites could marry whites, and non-whites could marry non-whites, so no one was barred from marriage, right?

To explain further, consider this situation: there are three people, Bob, Joe, and Mary. Mary can marry Bob, but Joe cannot marry Bob. The only relevant difference between Mary and Joe is that Mary is female and Joe is male. That is clearcut discrimination on the basis of sex: one person is barred from doing something because of their sex that someone else of the opposite sex is able to do.

The differences between the sexes are patently different from differences between the races. Regardless your race you can generaly perform the acts necesary for procreation regardless your race and that of your partner. For one trying to catch every logical fallacy you think I make you sure do have a hard time seeing those that exist in your own arguments.

On to the alleged logical fallacy of mine--

If you seriously think that SSM will lead to beastiality, plural marriage, or any other Santorum-esque doomsday situation, you may want to look into the "slippery slope fallacy" and exactly why it's a fundamentally invalid argument.

It's not the slippery slope fallacy. Your assertion was that releasing social constraints in seeking what you term 'equal treatment' was a valid means to such. I simply am demonstrating that there are many cases in which similar easements of social constraint, within the confines of private consenting relationships, in which your overriding claim is questionable. Thusly I've demonstrated that either you must admit that your underlying values and claims are not true OR if they still remain true that all other potential proceedings from them must be true. If you will do neither than you need to demonstrate what specific items set your releasing of social constraints in seeking equality apart from the others mentioned, in other words why do your values only apply to the scenarios you want them to apply to and not the others I've mentioned, others which share the same underlying points of justifification that you've thus far mentioned. So if you're unwilling to grant other scenarios than give us your further points of governance so that we too can see the lines of discernment so clearly in your mind but, as of yet, remain unshared with us.

It's not so much about "winning" the debate... it's more of pointing out that your line of argument is patently ridiculous and completely invalid. If a smaller government intrusion is justified by the existence of a larger intrusion in history, than there can be no way to ever protect against all but the most extreme abuses. By your logic, it would be valid for the government to argue for the permanent incarceration of political dissidents by claiming that Hitler or Stalin did worse. That's not a workable system; far better to actually respect the Constitution and hold the government accountable for all such breaches, large or small.

You are misstating what I was using the point for. The claim was made that what is 'being done' to those of 'alternative lifestyles' was the most egregious infringment by our governement in it's recent history. My reference was to a very egregious, in my view, infringment on rights. I was not using it to justify anything (granted I don't see what's happening in limiting the definition of marriage to be any kind of infringment on any person's real and intended claim on rights) I was simply using it as a demonstration that if the person's claim was accepted at face value then it would demand the eclipsing of the severity of what occured in internment camps.

The funny thing is that by claiming that I was doing what you describe above, justifying lesser infringments over the existance of more severe ones, you demonstrate that you are either do not understanding my claims OR you are intentionaly restating them with the intent of warping my original points and creating the appearance of logicall fallacies that do not actualy exist in my arguments.

So we either have assertions made in ignorance or willfull attempts to misportray.

One side asks for permission to do something personal, the other side refuses. Which is forcing a lifestyle?

They are not asking for permission. They are asking for societal endorsement. So the claim that it is forcing just a lifestyle is erroneous. It's forcing public policy to ENDORSE (it's already permited in the confines of personal rights in private consenting adult relationships) NOT to force any lifestyle. We are not prohibiting or stoping anyone from those lifestyles. But they ARE trying to force a public endorsement SANS due process. They want to force a change in the definition of a key social and governmentaly endorsed public institution WITHOUT going through the proper channels to create NEW policy.

This does not compare with arguments over public religious activity, since those are unversally about using government-sponsored or -run facilities for the benefit of some, and to the detriment of others.

What is the difference between a governmental exemption to taxes and a governmental subsidy if the net change is no different? Traditional marriage is inherently the best situation for the propegation ot the species in an ordered and well adapted manner. Thusly it deserves to be endorsed. Other arrangements, as descirbed, do not offer the benefits marriage does to society and so should not be endorsed by society by either exemptions NOR subsidees.

You act as though we are limiting personal choices made in private by consenting adults. We are doing no such thing. We are simply refusing to give preferential endorsement to those arrangements, as we do to traditional marriage, because they are inherently incapable of providing the balanced and optimal environs for the raising of children to be productive, well adapted, and capable citizens.

Sure, why not? You apparently think we are still in the Paleolithic era when all work was done by humans. But that hasn't been true for millennia: we added animal power to the mix in the Neolithic, simple machines (windmills etc.) by Roman times and nowadays the vast majority of our work is done by complex machines and human labor accounts for only a tiny fraction of the total output of society.

There must be those to maintain the infrastructure and machines. You seem to be oblivious to how quickly a country can loose capacities it had just a few decades ago.

And even if the population fell to half its current level, well, that's what it was within living memory (the 60s): would you care to suggest that the US and the other countries you fret about did not have enough people in 1960 to sustain a modern economy?

If they want a 'modern' economy from the 60's then fine. You seem to think that scaling back an economy is like scaling back on an automobiles accellerator. There are massive changes and retrofitting that occured between then and now, and to imagine that their lifestyles were as convencienced then as now is also absured. Jobs and entire technological avenues move out of countries. The Japan of the future will not have the convenience of being able to scale back the rest of the world with it to a 60's scale, neither will they have the demographic edge of having a younger population of that size. Instead of the decreased population being steeped in capable young people it will be filled with tiring older people. This illusion that technology and some economic backing off in a world utterly different from the pacific rim of the 60's is inane. China hasn't forgotten what the Japanese empire did to their nation. And with a supluss of so many millions of males in China they'll certainly be capable to exact a delayed revenge on a Japan who's population is back to 50's levels, but so aged as to be rather limited in retaliation capacity.

Or consider this: you cite problems in Germany and France, but their problems are not the ones you would expect from a shrinking population. Instead of a tight labor market, their problem is the opposite: unemployment, which says that they do not have too few workers at all. And far from having to import workers the Europeans would be better off they could send those immigrants home since they don't have enough jobs for them.

This is even worse. Not only do they lack a capacity to replace their losses demographicaly but their economy is tanking in productivity from such a long and significant tenure of socialist policy. So they're not only living off the surplusses created by a diversion of investment from the creation of a future generation but they are living off loans that are suppose to be paid back by the future generation that will be doubly burdened because it will be half the stature of the previous generation but asked to carry twice, or more, the financial load. And this all because their parents wished to have a momentary illusion of secular socialist utopia. So you promise the piper that your kids will pay your debt, but you only have one or two kids so that those kids not only have to keep themselves alive, and try and raise a generation to follow them, but they are suppose to pay back the debts occured over the life or their parents. What a 'happy' scenario!

Um, let's see: Latin based languages are spoken over a major fraction of the Earth's surface, and many other languages including are own are full of Latin words. And the official religion of the late Empire is also spread across the whole Earth, with over a billion adherents. Too, Roman law is the basis for many legal codes today, and Roman architectural design is widely employed everywhere, notably for public buildings. Then too, did Rome really fall,and if so when? Remember Byzantium? How about the Holy Roman Empire and Moscow, the third Rome?

Consolation prizes? We still live very similarly to the Babylonians. Is that a consolation to the dead if we are not their children?

Nothing lasts forever, but the Romans did quite well for themselves. And Rome's demographic problems had nothing to do with too few babies: five or six kids per couple was the norm back then, though sadly about half of them died in childhood. Rather, it was epidemics in the 3rd and 6th centuries that depopulated the Empire.

If half of five or six die in childbirth then that gives you roughly the demographic numbers of the industrialized world today. Do you think we're immune from the potency of epidemics or pandemics? Compare the five or six kids to the numbers had by the 'barbarians' that skirted the empire.

Also currious. With a phrase like "Nothing lasts forever" do you then give heed to the philosophy of "why try" or "eat drink and be merry, for tomarrow we die!"??? That philosophy eliminates you from the gene pool and is quite the self fullfilling prophesy. Not to mention that it's not terribly appreciated by the few of your posterity that might survive as they are far more likely to be removed from relative positions of capacity and relevancy as the children of others crowd them out.

That's not true today. We don't need a lot of strong, bodies, we need relatively few strong minds. So we are quite reasonably switching our demogrphic streategy as a species to one of producing few offspring, but focusing lots and lots of resources on them to insure their survival and competence.That is a very valid reproductive stratetgy, found in a number of plant and animal specie

And if a community discovers how to have many children with a majority of them being among those "few strong minds" then they will dominate and dominate the world. That's an even more valid reproductive strategy. One I've seen in families that have had fifteen children. All children attending college, producing the gamut of engineers, social scientists, doctors etc..

Yes, of course: the Plague killed some livestock, but otherwise left the wealth base of society alone. The same is true for our gradual shrinkage of the population: nothing is being damaged or destroyed and the fact that this will play out over many generations also means there will be no sudden and disruptive shock.

It's not so. Look at the many reports of fertility health projections and possible catastrophes in Europe. There have been extended casualties, just not the kind you're use to seeing in war or the like. Look at this BBC article to see what I'm talking about

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4112450.stm

Then there are tales of developing nations like Brazil in which estimates put the numbers at half of all women of child bearing age being unable to conceive. Then the fact that the Korean government, in light of some villages having not seen a birth in 18 years, now only pays for reversals on tubal ligations and the such. The whole world thought they could turn it on and off with the ease they do the water in their wash basins. Now they're finding that there was more in the equations than they original bargained for.

We are so far away from even coming close to there not being enough room that it's nothing of an issue, and will not be for a very very very long time, even if we were growing significantly faster than we are now. With just current land under cultivation we could feed over 10 billion people. I've seen too many empty buildings to think we're anywhere close to reaching any spacial limit. And if we get there at some point I'm certain our reach will enable us to cross fronteirs we've currently only glimpsed.

If a union is less "complete" than a marriage it does not satisfy the desire for combined economic credibility, inheritance and visitation privileges,etc.

All the above can be acheived by a granting of a power of attorney and other legal arrangements. On financial matters such unions never merit the tax benefits granted traditional marriage because they, as institutions, lack the equal benefits to society that traditional marriage has the capacity to bring.

"Yet your side is trying to limit their advocacy of the benefits of such an arrangement."

How so?

The inverse is true in federal family planning actions overseas, where recipients of aid are precluded from discussing some options. The same is asked for here by some conservatives.

Which benefits?

If it is children, many marriages don't produce any.

It's the situation most capable to produce the best benefits. One may have some program to encourage or subsidize increases in energy efficiency of residential domicials. Yet just because a domicile receives the mandated benefits doesn't mean that some other factors, chosen or not, by those owning or living in the domicile will not cancel our or override those efforts. Does that mean you stop the program because there are cases in which the sought benefits are not reached in the target group? I'm well aware that many marriages don't produce any. But it's scientific fact that no homosexual relationship can, without artificial interference, produce offspring AND it's rather intuitive that the ideal situation for a child would be to have a father and a mother. That's the way mother nature intended it. That's why the release of oxytocin and dopamins are connected to the relationship. Now I'm aware that one can imprint anything from someone of the other gender, to an animal, to an inanimate object to those same biological and psychological receptors but the truth remains that only a situation in which such lined up male to female would have the capacity and fitness to continue on in an optimal course in nature and civilization.

Power of attorney does not entail pension benefits. So a civil union with that restriction is not a marriage, in fact. Plenty of reason to ask for the real thing.

Someone can arrange a system to provide financial benefits to anyone they want if they will. They don't need governmental recognition as a married couple to easily figure out a means to do such.

Explain what the cost to society would be if marriage was expanded. I see none, only benefits.

Children being adopted into or artificialy introduced into relationships in which the idea that they were being raised without a father or mother would be seen as just fine and ideal by society and the government would be detrimental on a grand scale. It's already been demonstrated the issues present when someone lacks a clear and direct parent of each gender. It also stands to reason that a woman, raised just by women parents, would have many deficiencies that would not be present if she had a clear and available father figure. Likewise with other scenarios. What makes you think that these instances would be ideal? What makes you think governmental endorsement of such arrangements would help the children raised is such circumstances more so than an equivilant situation in a heterosexual union?

Re: But don't use that as a guise to make their relationship appear as beneficial to society as traditional marriage is.

The problem I have with your approach is that there's no such thing in the real, tangible world as "marriage. Instead there are marriage(S) (plural!): each one unique and independent. Some (many?) of these are indeed beneficial to society, but others are worse than useless. Just this weekend (to use a ghastly example) a husband and father vacationing with his family in our area jumped to his death from a high rise hotel, and took his two young sons with him, to punish his wife evidently. Where was the social benefit in that marriage? Meanwhile, you'd also find that some gay marriages would benefit society, while others would be miserable and dysfunctional. But I guess I see the principle purpose of marriage as constraining eros into socially useful channels and it doesn't matter whether the eros in question is gay or straight. The notion that marriage is "about
children" strikes me as bizarre since marriage is not what produces children at all: sex is, nor have children ever been necessary for a marriage to be valid, not even in the most traditional societies. Barrenness, for example, was not grounds for anullment under church law. The mantra "marriage is about kids" is a very recent intention of the last few years, not a traditional view at all.

Re: I find it absured that you think the tyrany of the spartan state is even comparable to what governance today in the US.

I never said that. I said there was a lot of tyranny in our world, not our nation. Do you dispute that?

"...only a situation in which such lined up male to female would have the capacity and fitness to continue on in an optimal course in nature and civilization."

If you look at the evolutionary roots of social structure you will see zero nuclear families among our closest primate cousins. Young are raised by the combination of mother and group.

"Someone can arrange a system to provide financial benefits to anyone they want if they will."

Nope. Fixed-benefit pensions can't be arbitrarily assigned to a beneficiary. Of course, when those are history and everyone has a 401(K) your point holds, but the complaint is about the former.

"What makes you think governmental endorsement of such arrangements would help the children raised is[in] such circumstances more so than an equivilant situation in a heterosexual union?"

This implies a false choice. Person A can either marry hetero and make babies, or marry homo and make or acquire babies. Not the case; it's a choice between having a child within a marriage or outside of it. Perhaps legitimizing out-of-wedlock children is a mistake, but it's legal so you already have children being raised by gays. What you won't have more than a miniscule amount of is a gay pretending to be straight and going through the hetero motions.

Bring back the bastardization of children and make homosexuality illegal again and you would get what you seem to want, uniformly hetero marriages and no single parents. I don't see history supporting a view of society as notably healthier back during those times.

What makes you think it's anyone's business how they raise their children? I'm not referring to abuse, but just the structure of home life.

And what makes you think same-sex marriage would be any more than a persistent, but small, minority? All evidence to date shows homosexual percentage of human population at around 10% through all ages and cultures. This does not include the variation in public acceptance or encouragement (or not).

I don't suppose I've persuaded you, and you're not going to change my mind. I see no risk to society, instead a boon in the form of stable families. I have gay colleagues, and have enjoyed gay couples improving the property values on my block when they fix up their house. The women that lived next door were great people, and the guys I work with are competent and reliable, and nice guys who don't make passes in the locker room.

Then your counter argument is non-existant.

One would think you'd be able to demonstrate such a claim rather easily if my argument is realy "pretty thin."

I should have said "narrow".*

*joke

Huh? Our next generation is not being plopped down on a desert island. It is plopped down in the midst of the accumulated knowledge and physical infrastructure of fifty centuries of civilization. We are leaving them with riches untold. Good grief, the innovations of just my lifetime are an enormous inheritance, worth more than all the gold once found in an emperor's hopard!

What good does all that accumulated knowledge do if the next generation is relegated to dealing with just trying to keep society from flying apart or disinigrating around the chaos of demographic implosions occuring in the first world?

What socialist utopia? Please send that strawman back to Dorothy and Toto! As for borrowing from the next generation that happens to be a physical impossibility involving some poorly understood physics of time. We can borrow from the past (or rather we inherit from it; we don't owe anything back to the past except perhaps our respect where respect is due). And the future will inherit from us as well, and it will inherit quite a bit, assuming we don't do something spectacularly dumb (see: nuclear war for an example of that possibility).

All right. With your semantics game we're leaving them to inherit massive explicit and implicit debts and stagnating economic paradigms.

Can't you understand that we humans produce knowledge and that is our true gift to the future? I don't know how many biological children Joseph Smith had, but would you not agree that his legacy was far far more profound than just leaving some children behind? And what of George Washington, St Paul, Elizabeth I, Mother Teresa, Beethoven and Plato-- all men and women who left no progeny at all, yet they contributed to the future more profoundly than if they had had ten kids a piece. We are their heirs far more significantly than if we merely traced our chromosomes back to them. You are selling human beings far short. We produce something far more valuable than mere genes: any tomcat in an alley can do that. But we humans transform the future and giving the Earth mind and consciousness.

Yet their existance is tied to the perpetuation of their parent's lineage. you can't well have a genious or revolutionary without a mother and a father to produce such. Just look who we'd be without if Ben Franklin's parent's had given heed to the zero population advocates of their day! The irony is that the reason that knowledge has both grown and been promulgated is because of all those who've fathered and mothered the children that have passed the torch, augmented to it, amplified it, or just protected it. Yes it's wonderful to have all this knowledge but what good is it if society colapses and we have to endure another dark age? Few people seem to realize how quickly and for how long things can get and remain lost. With a society as top heavy and interdependent as ours it really wouldn't take many failures to reduce us to a point in which the most advanced among us would be the Amish. I say invest in future brilliance by having, and doing your best to raise, as many children as you can. Few people ever realize the role that the parents of all these influential people played in their lives. Their mere existance and presence in the world for starters. Yet you seem to think that these brilliant people can be produced on a larger scale with us having less children per person than ever before.

The principle purpose of sex in human beings is to create an intense personal bond between people. Human society is based on this, and would be impossible without it. Reproduction is only a secondary purpose of sex in humans (in evolutionary biology this is called “co-option” where some trait or behavior that originally serves one purpose is taken over for some other purpose and the original purpose is either lost altogether or becomes secondary.) As proof of this consider the simple but quite astonishing fact that human females do not adverstize their estual cycles the way virtually all other sexual animals do. Rather, they sexually active at all times, even after menopause. Obviously (I should think) this must serve some utility otherwise evolution would not have selected for it since as a reproductive strategy it stinks (why waste time and energy and sperm when no offspring are possible?) Or if you prefer, you can make the same argument about a Creator: either He was incompetent or He had some additional and quite important end in mind for human sexuality.

I'm not sure if you're being intentionally humorous here, because that's almost word for word the argument that Virginia used in Loving. After all, whites could marry whites, and non-whites could marry non-whites, so no one was barred from marriage, right?

To explain further, consider this situation: there are three people, Bob, Joe, and Mary. Mary can marry Bob, but Joe cannot marry Bob. The only relevant difference between Mary and Joe is that Mary is female and Joe is male. That is clearcut discrimination on the basis of sex: one person is barred from doing something because of their sex that someone else of the opposite sex is able to do.

No, it is not clear cut discrimination.

In the case of Loving one race could not marry the other..that was discriminatory against both races.  In your case it does not. Females and males can marry in this society. Neither gender is discrimated against.  Both races can marry and opposite genders can marry.  In short, you cannot show that all males are discriminated against or that all females are discriminated against or both races as Loving did.  The discrimination here is about the behavior that society condones, not any individual.

What you appear to be doing is equating a behavior with an immutable fact. Race is not a behavior and gender is not a behavior. Sex is a behavior. Or to put it, as Gore Vidal said, there is no such thing as a homosexual individual, there are only homosexual acts.

The law can and does discriminate against individual acts, thus we have laws regarding, theft, rape, drunkeness, nudity etc.

All individuals who engage in those behaviors are subject to the laws which penalize those behaviors...that is not discrimination against an individual rather it is their ACTIONS which create the consequences.

With regard to a gradual decline over 5-600 years it's a pipe dream. Only a world dictator could command control over the populace's personal rights that would enable that. The fact is that fertilitate rates have halved over the last few decades.

With regard to the proportionate population allocation to agriculture do you not see increases in the standard of living corrolate with it. Do the best to maintain a truly capitalist system and everyone who wants a job, and the corrolating benefits, will acheive it. If you want to look at the complaint of having jobs that are not necesary to life then you can cut out a vast majority of current jobs, in reality, if we were just talking maintainance of life then very few jobs fill that role.

The more individuals there are the better the overall living standards will be for everyone. That's been what history has demonstrated.

On the national debt--

First off you need to differentiate between deficit and actual debt. The 'surplus' in the Clinton years didn't pay down the acutal debt, it just forstalled it's growty AND had nothing to do with reduced spending of the era. The fact was that the economic growth of the time brought in such over expected revenues that congress, as amazing as it sounds, couldn't spend the money fast enough. Hence the surplus. Contrast that with the economy left to the current administration by the previous.

I"m not talking extinction per se. I'm talking massive devistation though.

On the Hitler Stalin argument you'd have more individuals and cumulative experience to block them. Before they did what they did humanity didn't think what they did was fathomable. As humanity's collective conscious expands their capacity to spot harmful aberations and stomp them out or halt them will be increased. That's the differences in those cases. Humanity will eventualy accept innovation, but once seeing tyrany, and having it seered in the collective conscious, they actively fight it. But with innovation they are more likely to learn to not fight it.

As far as expanding life span it would have to be coupled with a massively expand capacity to produce and rear children in old age. It does you little good to have zero population growth and a majority of your population stuck in a state in which they cannot produce offspring or easily raise such.

The men have the same rights I as a man have--namely to marry a woman. And the women have the same right as all women in society, namely to marry a man.

So you admit that there is a difference between the rights of men and the rights of women. This puts us into intermediate scrutiny territory, where it is necessary to determine if the difference is based on actual biological characteristics between the sexes. The only one that you could bring up is procreation, which is completely unsustainable - there is no way to argue that marriage is based on procreation and satisfactorily account for all of the counter-examples.

No individual, is being discriminated against on the basis of gender. They are being told they cannot marry the same gender. Since both genders cannot marry the same gender, this is not discrimination. Men cannot marry men and women cannot marry women...however both genders have the EQUAL right to marry the opposite gender

Virginia's argument in Loving was as follows:
No individual is being discriminated against on the basis of race. They are being told that they cannot marry a member of a different race. Since all races cannot marry other races, this is not discrimination. Non-whites cannot marry whites, and whites cannot marry non-whites... however all races have the EQUAL right to marry within their own race.

The court rejected this argument as transparently racist. A logical person would reject your argument similarly. As I replied to HiveRadical above, it is incontrovertible that men and women have different rights in this situation: a man has the right to marry a woman, but a woman does not.

EDIT: A tangential hypothetical - the U.S. government decides that the best way to eliminate racism is to prevent members of the same race from marrying each other. Your argument would require you to take the position that such a plan is not discrimination on the basis of race, since everyone is equally barred from marrying someone of the same race.

In short...sex is not gender.

Ironically, you're the one using the word wrong: gender refers to the psychological characteristics of an individual, whereas sex refers to the biological characteristics.

What is illogical and inconsistent is the beleif that same sex marriage gender should be viewed as discrimination on the basis of gender. Since it is very clear that all men are free to marry the opposite gender just as all females are, which means there is no discrimination on the bais of gender. You are unable to demonstrate discrimination on the basis of gender, since all females can marry and all men can marry. From a legal perspective this is really quite clear.

What's quite clear from a legal perspective is that you are making an argument that was rejected as fundamentally discriminatory 40 years ago.

 What's quite clear from a legal perspective is that you are making an argument that was rejected as fundamentally discriminatory 40 years ago.

No the argument was not fundamentally rejected.

 Loving rejected discrimination between 2 groups on the basis of race. In order to be analogous you would need to attempt to demonstrate discrimination between the genders.

 You are not. What you are attempting to argue is discrimination WITHIN a group and that is not possible. Discrimination means that one group cannot do something that another can.

 Loving showed that all blacks and all whites could not marry each other. Racism was between the groups. Not within. i.e. all blacks and all whites could not marry each other. That is not true here. All women are able to marry all men. There is no discrrimation BETWEEN the groups.

 You cannot show that WITHIN the group of women there are some women who cannot marry men. Or vice-versa. There are women who by CHOICE may not marry men..but there are no women who cannot marry men due to the law prohibiting it.

To demonstrate class discrimination BETWEEN the genders you would need to show that. That neither gender can marry WITHIN the group is not discrimination BETWEEN the groups. Loving said just the opposite.

Ironically, you're the one using the word wrong: gender refers to the psychological characteristics of an individual, whereas sex refers to the biological characteristics.

Do you have a source for this definition? Gender is a class of membership based on biological  masculine or feminine traits...it is always a noun...sex is often a verb unless specified otherwise.

The principle purpose of sex in human beings is to create an intense personal bond between people. Human society is based on this, and would be impossible without it. Reproduction is only a secondary purpose of sex in humans (in evolutionary biology this is called “co-option” where some trait or behavior that originally serves one purpose is taken over for some other purpose and the original purpose is either lost altogether or becomes secondary.)

They are co-purposes. The one without the other is ineffectual. The strong bond only acts as an advantage if it inhances the capacity of the pair to pass on their genes. Since homosexual relationships can never pass their genetic material without either artificial intervention or a breach in the companionship they are at an inherent evolutionary advantage to a heterosexual couple with a bond of equibivilant strength and efficacy.

As proof of this consider the simple but quite astonishing fact that human females do not adverstize their estual cycles the way virtually all other sexual animals do.

Certainly they can remain sexualy active throughout, but it has been demonstrated that the symetry and pronouncement of various features peaks at the reproductive zenith of availability of the their cycle. So the overall point on overall bonding being key is taken, but the claim to no advertisement is false, at least on a physiological level.

So there's the refutation. The advantage peaks when reproduction doesn't demand a breach in natural processes or a breach in the relationship which the intercourse is intended to improve.