I still want a different word for 'gay marriage'

You mean, like you can with your girlfriend? What makes you think that people don't do this now? All you have to do is pop down to city hall. Seriously. Call up a girl you know and go get married, just for a lark. You gotta plop down a couple bucks for the license, and then in a few days, you can have the marriage annuled. You don't even need to tell anybody.I mean, what might give you pause in the situation you describe above is, if your "buddy" gets greedy, he can contest the annullment. He can force you to have to divorce him. Without a prenup, maybe he takes your sweet dirtbike. You've never noticed that even Catholics have second marriages? Do you know how they get around it? It's called "annullment." It's the legal recognition that, in reality, a marriage never existed. How about this - you get married to your buddy (with a prenup so he doesn't take your dirtbike in the divorce), you call it a "civil union" or whatever keeps your conscience clear, and then you forget all about it when you meet the future Mrs. Scientist. This way, you don't screw over thousands of gay couples for whom their gay marriage is a real marriage just to salve your dishonest conscience (and let's be realistic, marrying someone just for an insurance benefit is fairly dishonest.) Whose definition? When I got married, I made them take out the language that implied that marriage was only for a man and a woman, because that's not how I define marriage. I'm married to a woman, and we're the ones that define the terms of our marriage, not you. I find it rather arrogant of you to anoint yourself into the position of defining marriage for everybody else.If you don't want to consider gay people married, that's fine. If you want to marry your buddy and not consider it your first marriage, that's fine. But your dishonest intentions shouldn't be an obstacle to the thousands of gay couples whose desire for committment and intimacy and legal protection constitute an actual, legitimate marriage.

Well, if we make gay marriage legal, then it gets legitimized, now doesn't it? If you got married to your buddy, your first marriage would have been to your buddy. We're talking about the hypothetical fake marriage to a girl, here, right?No, it wouldn't have really existed. If you got married without any intent to have a marriage, but rather to game the system, that's not a real marriage. And that's why you can get an annullment - a marriage never existed.It wouldn't be real. It wouldn't be legally real, it wouldn't be morally real. You seem to intuitively understand that - you don't want your first marriage to be fake - but if it's fake, it wasn't a real marriage in the first place. You can call it whatever you like, I guess. The rest of us are going to call it "marriage". When I meet my uncle-in-law's husband, that's how I'm going to refer to him - as a husband. Because he's married to my uncle-in-law. No, seriously. They have a house and everything. Ok, but I don't see why your dishonesty is anybody else's problem. I don't see why my uncle-in-law would have to be barred from his husband's room at the hospital simply because you don't have a problem with being dishonest. Can you explain it to me? Obstacle to what?

Because, sometimes, the extra red tape keeps you from doing something you'll regret.People disappoint each other, critically. When they do, the massive amount of societal pressure to "make marriage work" helps outweigh the mind-bending levels of doubt, dispair, anger, and hurt that pile up on the other side.There are some committments that are so important that your own willpower just isn't going to be enough. Sometimes society needs to be there holding you in place when you simply don't know what you want to do.

Seems like marriage is just fine the way it is. That's been my experience, anyway. What problem does your solution solve?AbE: Just fine, except for that it's straight-only, currently. Sorry if that was unclear. That isn't fine at all, of course.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Well, I didn't say that it was insurmountable. But most people feel bad and embarassed when their marriage falls apart. They feel like they've failed. Maybe they didn't, and I'm not saying that they did. But society definately gives that message, in ways that it doesn't about other kind of relationships. There's not so much a pressure on making a casual relationship "work", for instance. When you break up with your girlfriend, you're rarely made to feel like you failed some ideal. Maybe you have to be married to know what I'm talking about. And I'm trying not to divulge a bunch of personal details, here. Believe me when I tell you that I don't love my wife any less now than the first day we met - if anything, I love her more. Much more.But if we hadn't been married, I wouldn't be with her today. And that would have been a mistake - a mistake that being married prevented. A mistake that having made a promise of that level of seriousness prevented.

I thought that you might. It's just something you have to live through to know, I think. It can't be explained in a way that makes sense.

But, not because I've communicated the concept sufficiently clearly; rather, it makes sense to you because I've alluded to a situation we've both been in.

The rather idiotic presumption behind this argument is that healthcare is some kind of nonrenewable resource so, if more people are taking - and there's no evidence that this would be the case - there's less for everybody.Honestly? In a nation where health care services are the leading growth industry, I don't see any indication that a few more people getting health care hurts anything.Also, something else to keep in mind: having people on elective healthcare early in life or early in the course of an illness means cheaper treatment. Honestly? If your fake gay marriage gets your buddy on healthcare 20-30 years earlier than he would have had otherwise, odds are pretty good that they're going to find and treat illnesses a lot earlier, and therefore a lot cheaper. We all wind up paying less, not more, because you've scammed your buddy into the healthcare system.Which, when you think about it, is a pretty good argument for universal public healthcare.

They should, in fact, be forced to tolerate everything that isn't any of their business. You're asserting a right of people to butt in to everybody else's life that I don't believe exists. Maybe you can justify that? I sure don't. Can you explain it to me? Because what you're suggesting is as ridiculous as asserting that it's unfair that criminals get punished, but law-abiding citizens don't.How could one take a position of tolerance without being intolerant of the intolerant?

I don't see how. Obviously, everybody who butts into things that aren't any of their business thinks it's their business. So what? That doesn't sound like hypocrisy. That sounds like justice. If you tolerate intolerance, then you aren't tolerant. Promoting tolerance means being intolerant of intolerance. How could you possibly be considered tolerant if you're tolerating intolerance?

By simple logic, you can't be for something if you support its opposite. A != ~A is the most elementry proof in logic.Being for tolerance means you have to be against the opposite of tolerance. You can't be tolerant unless you're intolerant of intolerance. That's an obvious fact. If they're not endangering the tolerant society, then it's because they're not taking actions against what they claim to not tolerate.Which is tolerance. Therefore, the people that Rawls is talking about are not actually intolerant at all. He's playing a word game, but his position doesn't agree with yours. According to you, tolerant people have to let the intolerant oppress others lest they be intolerant themselves. But that's obviously false. You can't be tolerant unless you oppose efforts to oppress; unless you oppose the intolerant.

Look, we can play this all day. But you can't refute A != ~A. (Surely they still teach symbolic logic? I mean I trust that meaning is clear, right?) Tolerance doesn't mean you can't be disagreed with. People have every right to express their vocal disagreement with people who are expressing their vocal disagreement.I guess we've found the hypocrisy, though. You believe that homophobes have every right to speak out against a group, but nobody has the right to speak out against them. Pretty hypocritical, I'd say.

What's being imposed? If you don't want to get gay married, you don't have to. If someone you know gets gay married you can pretend that it isn't real. I mean, what exactly are you being forced into?

It's "crashfrog", actually, and I'll simply repeat it, since you didn't refute it: I mean, what else are we talking about, here? Nobody's suggested that we're locking up homophobes - just, telling them what we think about them. Which they feel perfectly free to do in regards to how they feel about gays.So, you're defending the right of homophobes to say what they like, but you don't feel that the opponents of homophobia have the same right. In other words, we've finally discovered some hypocrisy - yours.

Oh, I'm sorry? I didn't realize you were prevented from leaving the country.Seriously, you're free to abandon this society at any time for one more to your liking. Might I suggest Saudi Arabia?