| | Only individuals have rights, and they deal with each other on mutually agreed upon terms. The roll of government is to protect individual rights. Anything beyond that would be superfluous or in direct violation of individual rights. [snip] To discuss willing your child to an abstract concept seems more than farcical.
On group rights; i agree that my example was poor, it is not rights belonging to the abstract concept of a group, but rights belonging to the individuals making up that group, individuals having a unifying relationship.
Family is one such group, and it's individual members are granted certain rights by belonging to that group. I see marriage as a contract, granting members from outside the family group, the possibility to share the rights of the family - that right should not be limited by gender combinations or number.
If people marry for the sake of romance, they can seek divine-, governmental-, parental-, self- or whatever else sanction serving as the symbolic thing they feel they need. If happiness is found in other than principle, let happiness be the guide for their choice. Those that oppose the governments role in the romantic or spiritual aspects of marriage must be those that give that role to the government, i at least, fail to see it as an intrinsic part of a civil union.
On the topic of being genetically disposed to be homosexual, besides opposing the inherently condemning nature of the question, i think it a strange obsession that we, in complex matters, seem to always seek one grand solution - the missing link will stay missing if we keep looking for one link only. I see no reason why the diversity of reasons making men and women fall in love, shouldn't be similar to the diversity of reasons making people of the same sex fall in love; sex hormones influencing the pre-natal child will change the volume of the central subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, deciding if men feel like women or women like men, that doesn't rule out that the majority of gay people just fall for members of the same sex based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests, and it doesn't rule out that some in uncertainty has a need to break limits to 'find themselves' and it doesn't rule out any of the hundreds of other reasons making it sound like a disease. Everything that is, is natural - everything that is done by a large number of people is normal. Searching for a reason why gay people fall in love, sounds to me as silly as searching for a reason why austrian people fall in love.
We classify people on first impressions, we apply a whole set of generic characteristics to people we have just met, and we refine or change those presumptions as we get to know these people better, as they fill in the blanks. When we meet heterosexual couples, we don't think of them as heterosexuals, we don't classify them based on whatever we think might be going on in their bedrooms - though at times the thought is appealing - we judge them on appearance, language, profession, what they are wearing and so forth... if we meet someone in full-body latex suit breathing through a little rubber tube, what they do for a living will still be high on our list of character defining factors whereas homosexuals seem to be judged predominantly on the fact they are homosexuals.
(Edited by Søren Olin
on 7/20, 5:10am)
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