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Comment by yAnonymous | Hacker News Reader

>there's a bunch of people that say it's going to cause the corruption of society

Well, just look at the US. Political correctness is getting totally out of hand and the same is happening more and more in European countries.

Changing traditions causes a lot of entitlement in people who also feel that they should get a special treatment and it seems that there's no end to it. In a democratic society, entitlement from small groups is a societal cancer.

And equal legal partnership rights aren't even good enough for many. They absolutely need to have it called marriage, a word that has had a different religious meaning for hundreds of years. It's like these people intentionally try to cause trouble and I can understand why others don't want any of it.

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Sorry mate, marriage isn't just religious. It's also societal, and Governmental. Many, many people get married outside of church, and for entirely nonreligious reasons - do you speak out against those as well as much as you do marriage between people of the same sex? What about people of a different religion getting married against your religion's rules?

By the way - last time I looked into this, marriage predates organised religion, and definitely predates Christianity. If your intention is to maintain a Christian country to the detriment of those following other religions or none at all, at least be honest about it.

Paul thinks Christians shouldn't marry http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/marriage.html

Other day I read a story a story in NYT (sorry, couln't find it) about a gay couple. They had a large age gap, and since there was no option to legally marry, they decided the best way to legally bond was to have one adopted by the other.

It proved a wise solution when the older one were dying in the hospital and the only allowed visits were from the spouse and the sons.

It's hilarious to me that conservatives will talk about political correctness getting "out of hand", while downplaying or ignoring pathologies that result from their own beliefs that have caused, and continue to cause, extraordinary amounts of death, torture, poverty and suffering.

Come back when lynch mobs have literally hanged thousands of people for being politically incorrect. Or when millions of people are being systemically disenfranchised because they're politically incorrect. Or when a US president is about to trigger a nuclear war over "political correctness".

The 100 million people killed by Communist regimes in the last 100 years were nearly all killed for being “politically incorrect.”

It’s basically a defining feature of Communist-Socialist regimes: imprision or liquidate dissenting voices.

In a lot of ways comunist regimes have deeply conservative - see Chairman Mao and his wish to retain the rural, impoverished peasant lifestyle.

Wanting not to be discriminated against / handled separately != wanting special treatment. It is quite the opposite, in fact. The only people who consider that an entitled position are those who think there is nothing wrong with relegating people to second-class citizen status, even if they refuse to consider it as such.

Heck, it is quite entitled for people to think that they inherently deserve privileges that others are denied simply because "that is how it has always been". Bullheaded traditionalism is the actual cancer.

> Changing traditions causes a lot of entitlement in people who also feel that they should get a special treatment and it seems that there's no end to it. In a democratic society, entitlement from small groups is a societal cancer.

I'd hardly call gay marriage 'special treatment'. It's the opposite: equal treatment. In that regard it's fundamentally different from, say, mandatory wheelchair-access laws.

> They absolutely need to have it called marriage, a word that has had a different religious meaning for hundreds of years.

The emotional baggage of religious conservatives isn't reason enough to deny gay couples an equal right to be officially partnered in the eyes of the law. 'Equal' includes the name of the arrangement.

> need to have it called marriage, a word that has had a different religious meaning

I think the biggest sign that this isnt actually true is that marriage exists in countries across many different religions. That to me indicates that although religion has practices for marriage, marriage itself does not belong to religion. Its almost like a super/subset thing.

"They absolutely need to have it called marriage"

Because that's what it called?

You wrote above that entitlement of minorities is cancer. Isn't limiting marriage based on sex just such a cancer? Most of all, sexual desires and even biological structure isn't binary.

It's not being overly liberal, it's being non-discriminatory.

The key here is 'a binding contract between individuals'.

The 'gayness is evil' trope is not fundamental to even western civilization. It was totally ok to be gay in ancient greece.

>> They absolutely need to have it called marriage

Yes, because that's equality.

We've tried "separate but equal" before, haven't we? It doesn't work out, and it's used as an excuse for continuing discrimination.

This is not entitlement, it's equal treatment.

Gay marriage is like plant-based/fake burgers. Some people will say it is burger, some will say it is not. I'm more inclined to say that it is a "fake marriage", but I have nothing to do with the relationship of any two-person out there.

Just because marriage has traditionally been defined one way in your society does not mean that all societies you interact with must adopt the same definition.

In fact, your burger analogy perfectly demonstrates the point. Yes, once upon a time, "hamburger" meant a patty of ground beef. However the word "burger" has long since lost the implication of meat and is now freely used to refer to any and all grilled, fried, and baked patties served on a bun.

It's not as though the hamburger was created specifically to be a meat product, and the non-meat hamburgers be damned: it's that when the hamburger was created, the only things of its kind were made of meat. A veggie burger can be "fake meat", but it isn't a "fake burger" unless it's not actually food.

Exactly! But... Why get so angry with people that loves meat burger and don't agree that "veggie burgers" are burgers? Unless they go out and attack veggie restaurants, they are not wrong.

Moving this logic to social dynamics, if the majority of the population don't agree two person of the same sex forming a couple is a marriage, why get so angry at this? It is counterproductive as it helps the right wing join forces irrationally around a common ground. People that don't agree with this discussion are not all "cis-gendered white males".

> Why get so angry with people that loves meat burger and don't agree that "veggie burgers" are burgers?

Because said people are often trying to use the force of law to stop you calling your burger a burger.

You can say what you like at home or even in public (and reveal your prejudices to the world), but when it comes to using the state to enforce inequality that's a different matter.

> Because said people are often trying to use the force of law to stop you calling your burger a burger.

This is the definition of society/democracy. Imagine if Scientology started change US laws?

Really not, it's just like marriage involving people of the same gender. There's no practical difference.

Marriage has meant all sorts of things over the ages in various cultures.

> There's no practical difference.

There're a lot of practial differences and I can give you some:

- male/female couples might have offsprings

- Children change the amount of resources consumed and available

- States need to plan based on these numbers and their variation

- Married couples behave differently than single male and females both short and long-term which also affect governmental planning.

So there are a lot of reasons to say that's wrong to add a lot of noise to this only for the sake of calling it marriage.

There's not even a single reason there, let alone many.

Older people get married past the age of childbirth, infertile or avowed child-free opposite-sex couples marry too.

The 'signal' is already hopelessy noisy and not fit for any sort of purpose. Plus, "we were using those numbers for something they are inherently unsuitable for" is no valid reason to continue discrimination.

At this point it really looks like you're grasping at straws to justify what is just a prejudice.

Gay couples can't have offspring?! Lots of them do, actually.

What makes it fake?

As a social dynamics that evolved for safer copulation and procreation, what in 2 people bonding together looks like a marriage? You can pretend that they are just like every other couple (fake until 'we' make it?), but this is exactly what I call fake.

...and now its evolved again. So what?

Who say so? That is exactly the problem. Some people think it evolved and some don't. Are people willing to go to war because of this? It is interesting. The American Civil War was because of slavery and never again it was accepted world-wide so it might happen again.

Some people think it's evolved and some don't, but that's a very good reason to get the Government out of the business of regulating what is a marriage and what isn't - otherwise you're forcing one social group's beliefs on another group.

My getting married - according to my definition of married - doesn't affect you in any way, shape, or form, so why would the Government prevent me from doing so?

I have interacted with people online who seemed to genuinely think that the ability of a same-sex couple, that they have never met and never will, to get married would deeply affect the value of the ongoing relationship they had with their opposite-sex spouse.

I never did get to the bottom of how that was supposed to work.

I know a large amount of married straight couples who don't have children for whatever reason - are they in a fake marriage too? Is there as much moral outcry about this, should there be law to enforce that married couples have children?

I also know married straight couples who've adopted children rather than having their own - are those fake families? Would a gay couple who adopted a child be creating a fake family?

The only thing consistently binding marriages across cultures in the US and my own country, IME, is that two people have agreed to love and care for each other "until death do us part".

> As a social dynamics that evolved for safer copulation and procreation

I'm not ever going to have kids with my girlfriend, am I to be restrained from marrying her?

My mother was well past the age of childbearing when she married her current husband.

Your argument doesn't hold water.

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