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Tuesday, January 10, 2012

How to Read the News

In an article on the National Public Radio web site:
[Rob] Boston [at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State] says of course religious believers want to impose their views on the world — witness the fight against same-sex marriage. 
 Can anyone spot the logic error?
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7 comments:

  1. What do you think are the odds that, even now, Rob Boston cannot?

    ReplyDelete

  2. Hey, it's not fighting if you don't hit back!

    ReplyDelete

  4. I don't get it. There's no fallacy! Gay marriage has been accepted in nearly all times and all places, in nearly every society including ours, throughout human history! And now all of a sudden religious fundamentalists want to come along and use the courts to change the law such that gay marriage may no longer be considered genuine marriage, regardless of what most people think of that definition, thereby imposing their view on everyone!

    ReplyDelete

  5. Marriage has always been a religious activity. There are plenty of same sex relationships throughout history, however marriage itself as a concept was never considered.

    Also, if you want to bring up how it keeps popping up throughout history, witness the fact that as gay, and various other hedonistic, relationships thrive so too does the society it occurs in declines. The Roman Empire being the easiest to compare.

    As the morals of our own society have gone into decline, so too has the prosperity of the nation declined.

    That said, if gay couples wish to get a court approved civil union that is well within their rights so long as the state law allows it. On that note, so long as the particular state's constitution does not disallow a law to be passed regarding the definition of marriage (or doesn't already have the definition specifically listed in the document to begin with) then it is well within the rights of the citizens of that state to pass said law. The US Constitution per the 10th Amendment specifically says that anything not in the Constitution is within the power of the State or the people respectively.

    By that same measure a law can be passed in the state to allow such a union. A law preventing it's acknowledgement before the law however is NOT unconstitutional, since the only Amendment that MIGHT refer to it would be the 1st. The thing is, there is no "freedom of expression" line in the Amendment like so many people like to crow, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Even if the person's religion acknowledges the marriage of a gay couple the state is under no obligation to acknowledge it on a legal level unless a law or its constitution says so. That's the same reason that heterosexual couples being married in a religious ceremony must also apply for a state's marriage license in order to have their union recognized for financial purposes.

    A law that outlawed such relationships would be unconstitutional, but a law that specifically does not acknowledge the relationship for financial purposes would be completely within the bounds of the US Constitution.

    ReplyDelete

  6. "I don't get it. There's no fallacy! Gay marriage has been accepted in nearly all times and all places, in nearly every society including ours, throughout human history!"

    I don't know what universe you come from or how "human" is defined there, but that certainly isn't the case in this world. What a delusional rube.

    ReplyDelete

  7. Humor. It is a difficult concept. (to quote my favorite not-quite-human)

    ReplyDelete

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