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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

As far as I know he is pro-states rights when it comes to abortion and gay marriage. That is, he supports a weak federal government and the right of states to make these decisions.

But either way, the issue of unconstitutional surveillance, and the entrenched interests in favor of it, is by far the single most important issue facing this country. I will be casting my vote with this fact in mind.

It is absurd to judge someone's commitment to liberal ideals by how they weigh the relative importance of issues.

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> he is pro-states rights when it comes to abortion and gay marriage

I don't know about Rand Paul, and certainly many state's rights supporters are sincere, but be aware that state's rights has long been adopted by those who simply didn't like national law on a particular issue, for example on racial segregation. I'm always suspicious when I hear the term used like a philosphical principle.

> As far as I know he is pro-states rights when it comes to abortion and gay marriage.

Presumably, this refers to a different Senator Rand Paul than the one that sponsored the Life at Conception Act with the explicitly stated motivation to ban abortion federally. [0]

[0] http://www.rawstory.com/2013/03/sen-rand-paul-introduces-fet...

Personally if I had to choose between banning abortions or a government that completely ignores the 4th amendment I'd have to choose to ban abortions.

Luckily this is just a distraction issue and even if Paul did manage to get his legislation passed it would never stick. I know the leftists would really like everyone to think that he'll appoint supreme court justices that are literally immortal, but those guys die all the time.

That is unfortunate. But that is a bitter pill I'm willing to swallow for someone I believe will actually reign in surveillance. Backsliding on social issues can be corrected in the future. But there comes a point where the surveillance state is so ubiquitous and their grip on the country so strong, that there's no dialing it back. The direction we're headed with surveillance presents a clear and present danger to America as we know it.

I agree.

Libertarians are the original Gay Rights and Abortion Rights supporters, going back to the 1970s. When Obama and Hillary were still anti gay-marriage (in 2013, before it became something they couldn't ignore) and when Bill Clinton was signing the "Defense of Marriage Act" along with 3/4 of Congressional Democrats approval... and for two decades even prior to that, Libertarians were in favor of getting the government out of marriage.

Notice the Libertarian position is not the same as the mainstream "Gay Marriage" position. Libertarians would legalize Poly marriage as well, while I've had Gay Marriage Advocates give me a list of reasons why that shouldn't be legal.

While some Libertarian candidates are personally against abortion, they would be laughed out of the movement if they advocated actually passing laws at the federal level to restrict it. Hey, I'm even personally not a fan of it (though I paid for one once) but that is completely different from being willing to support their bans, and I wouldn't support someone who wanted to ban them. (And yet I work for the Michael Badnarik campaign for a little while and he was "anti-abortion")

Rand is going to have a tough time getting the republican nomination because that party hasn't quite realized that it's being to conservative and not responsible enough.

So I don't mind that he's not taking a stand on these things.

In fact, if we were in a climate where gay rights were being restricted (increased restrictions) or abortion were being fought (at the federal level) then I might be more worried about it. But we are not. W ran on a strong anti-abortion platform and nothing really happened during his term. He didn't even try. He knew it was a wedge issue, more than anything. Only at the state level are Abortions at risk.

The real crime of our time is the out of control federal spying, adventurism and rights violations.

(this is not a rebuttal to hackinthebochs who said nothing I disagree with.)

EDIT: My statements are historical fact and consistent with what's known about libertarians: They want the state out of these kinds of decisions. Yet I'm downvoted. Is it because I'm pointing out that the Democrats don't really support gay rights? Sorry, but it's true. When clinton signed DoMA with broad democrat support, I was out. Sure the republicans were worse at that time, but I'm not going to compromise the idea that I don't have a right to get married!

Even in the 1990s the Libertarians were the only party that was clearly pro gay rights and so I joined them. The past 20 years have proven me right. I take down votes (without comments or rebuttals) as merely an admission of the frustration at this truth.

Just because people downvote you doesn't mean they disagree with you, or what you said is not factual. Hyper-political comments tend to get downvoted on HN in general because of the type of toxic comment threads they breed. Having libertarianism vs democrats categorization, gay rights, and abortion in one thread fits that category quite well.

I'm being brigaded. It's not just this one comment, it's comments on other threads, non-political and non-controversial ones as well.

Gay Marriage Advocates tend to be skittish of embracing poly marriage because that would make them look more extreme. If they can show that their position is not the most extreme one out there, then they have a better chance of seeing their agenda actually become reality. The funny thing is that while poly marriage advocates might not like that right now, in the long run it might actually help them because it will probably speed up the necessary changes.

The broadest possible reading of the essence of marriage is a single relationship entered into exclusively, voluntarily and with full awareness.

An arranged marriage fails the voluntary test.

A union involving a young child fails the awareness test.

A unions that includes a non-human entity fails the voluntary and awareness tests.

A union of three or more entities fails the exclusivity test. (Between two people there is just one relationship. Between three people there are three relationships.) I have no problem with the idea in theory, but it will require a lot of structural change of law to implement and is therefore sufficiently different to warrant a different technical term in law.

How is exclusivity crucial to marriage in the maximal broadness sense? It might be crucial in the current legal landscape, but that's not what we're talking about here. I tend to think that in the broadest possible sense marriage is just a contract and there's nothing preventing it from including more than two parties. Or, even if you do create a compelling argument for it being a contract between only two people, why should that preclude me from making another similar contract with a different party?

We are absolutely talking about the current legal landscape. If you want to discuss polygamy in a spherical cow universe, that's fine, and I've already said I have no in-principle objection to formalizing polygamy.

However, a union between three or more people (or multiple concurrent marriages) is in an engineering sense a very different mechanism. It has more moving parts and more complicated parts. Most critically, its interfaces to the outside world are different.

It would require substantial root-and-branch changes to a massive amount of existing legislation in every country and state. Using a different word in law (while accepting colloquial use of the word marriage in everyday parlance) is a practical necessity.

> However, a union between three or more people (or multiple concurrent marriages) is in an engineering sense a very different mechanism.

Forming, adding to, withdrawing from, dissolving, and otherwise handling unions of three or more people, including in dealing with how the members of the union deal with their rights and powers vis-a-vis the property and prerogatives of the union as such between each other and in interfacing with outside entities has been dealt with fairly extensively over the past several centuries in the evolution of partnership law. And most of it can be viewed as a fairly direct multiparty generalization of the two party way similar things are dealt with in existing marriage.

There's no real reason that a generalization of marriage law to handle multiparty relationships that reduced naturally to the same handling for two-party cases as status quo rules would deserve any different name.

It is still a very different mechanism.

It is still a very different social construct.

Sorry, but polygamy doesn't get to ride the coattails of gay marriage for free. Despite the howls from conservatives, this slope isn't inherently slippery. You have to change minds before you can discuss changing laws. (And besides, I thought we all agreed the anthrozoologists were next in line? Then NAMBLA. Wait your turn.)

> Between two people there is just one relationship.

no there isn't.

my wife talks to my dad in a way i never have. they get each other. they understand one another, and she respects aspects of him that i didn't know existed until i saw that a lot of what i love about my wife is true of my dad.

my wife talks to my mom in a way i haven't understood until recently. my mom is very loving; i never knew how much more loving she was until recently, when my wife explained just how intense that is.

i have a relationship with mama, my catonese mother-in-law, who understood the importance of computers even when it was the early 90's and she'd never seen one, who grew up during the cultural revolution, who doesn't trust authority figures for the same reason i don't.

my wife is good friends with many of my siblings - that's 8 more relationships there; 13 when you include the in-laws. my brother matt is married to michelle, who's talked to my wife, christine, about a lot of topics, and the two of them have a relationship far more intense than many biological siblings.

no man is an island.

please for the love of all that is good in the world, can we stop pretending otherwise?

Your relationship between yourself and your father isn't marriage.

woah, you said no man is an island 4 times.

It must be extra extra profound and smart sounding now.

I have always wondered why the government is involved with marriage at all. Seems like it would be simpler if we set it up like this:

Everyone pays the same taxes no matter what, and you better write an explicit will and testament to control who gets your stuff when you die/can pull the plug on your vegetative state. Ie. no special benefits/drawbacks for married people.

If you want to get married, great---go find a church or a mosque or a ship's captain; it's none of the state's business. The government doesn't recognize the institution of marriage as anything special. Marriage would be an entirely private association, like joining the Elks lodge or something.

That's "simpler" in the "fewest number of base rules" sense, and more complex in the UX sense.

Given the frequency of the desire to enter into a partnership with something like the kind of mutual exchange of commitments and agency relationships packaged in civil marriage, it makes sense as a UX optimization for government in terms of providing sensible defaults for common needs (with the ability for users interested in different configurations to reconfigure the defaults to a certain degree.)

Funnily enough, I too have often wondered about that.

I've also often wondered why your gender is the state's business at all. One way to make the whole gay marriage thing a non-issue would be to say it's nobody's business what you have between your legs, except your doctor and your partner.

There are a couple of scenarios where it would be an issue, like if you go to jail and there are no mixed gender jails, but it's likely that a little bit of imagination would fix that.

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