Martin: if you have to ask "what are you on about", I suggest you read the last paragraph of my previous post. As for your series of quoted luminaries and your accusation that I don't know of these people and their views, yes, I do know who Maggie Gallagher is, I do know who Robert George is (and his egregious article "What is Marriage?"), I wanted you to share your sources with everyone following this debate, so everyone can see the darker side of those campaigning against marriage equality .

Frankly, none of these people you loving quote have any credibility in the marriage debate, especially the dreadful Maggie Gallagher. Robert George is a fundamentalist religious right wing thinker who believes that the union of a man and women is paramount above all others, that homosexuality is morally repugnant and that the state has a right to legislate on and enforce private moral or religious beliefs.

I am not ignorant, Martin. I wonder where your intelligence lies though when you berate me for wanting the state to legislate for marriage equality yet post (and support) articles by people who ask the state to do the same thing but AGAINST marriage equality, claiming that, "Give the state that power and you loose (sic) hell."

Vanna: I will no longer debate you on IVF, especially on a Forum topic that is dedicated to marriage equality, because you are clearly small minded and bigoted.

Philo: You really are amazing, aren't you? From your own words, "...you are wishing to impose your values and definitions on me and my society." Firstly, since when was society your personal property and secondly, it is the values that you espouse that are being imposed on others. Can you not see the irony here? Marriage equality will not change your religious life, your view of parenting or even your marriage (if you are still married). You are rapidly falling into the lunatic category with your increasingly inane posts and your lack of ability to debate the issue or answer the questions others have raised directly with you. At least Robert George (as quoted by poster Martin Ibn Warriq) whose "What is Marriage?" paper, while being incorrect in it's argument and conclusion, still managed to conduct a debate using logic even if the application of that logic is faulty. (As pointed out by commentator Rob Tisinai in his series of postings on the Box Turtle Bulletin site rebutting Robert George's argument.)

If you cannot use rational argument and logic to state why marriage equality is unacceptable then I will choose to no longer listen to what you have to say with a critical mindset in place.

Perkin: Robert George is Princeton university professor of Politics and Law. Calling him names because he supports traditional morality is a desperate ruse. We've used to those tactics from the global warming alarmists who prefer labelling people to honest debate.

The state is a monster these days. Prof. Deneen provided a political and intellectual geneology. It's latest grab was for the right to tax every energetic activity in society - you know the ones that produce that trace gas CO2. Now giving that same monster the authority to define nature in whatever way it likes is to loose hell - it ends with biotechnological nightmares. The remaking, conditioning of human nature itself by legal fiat. Brave New Worlds.

No one needs a state to define marriage, no PC police, no indoctrination of children in primary school, no hate speech laws to coerce approval, no socialist agenda underwritten by tax payer funded human rights bureaucracies. It is simple, natural and human cultures arrange it quite spontaneously. It precedes the state, i.e you don't get states unless you have marriages and children first. We have lived with marriage since time out of mind. Your people want to call it bigoted to reject the view of sex and human goods that has grown to dominate in the academy from its roots in the ’50s and ’60s, in Sanger and Hefner, Kinsey and Reich.

Of course I berate you for wanting to install that thinking into law, it would come with enormous cost impeding our flourishing in all the ways Eve Tushnet outlined, cause wrenching division in society, and cede massive political power to a small class of political elite.

I find your use of the word 'equality' cynical. Overwhelmingly homosexuals have taken pride in being utterly unequal to heterosexuals; considering their relationships liberating and freeing and monogamy and child rearing bourgeois moral restriction. Not more than a tiny fraction of the tiny fraction of homosexuals would actually marry. And it isn't "equal" for the children deliberately denied their mum or dad.

Perkin Warbeck
"clearly small minded and bigoted"

Hardly at all.

If the idea is to have lesbian homosexual marriage, where one or both women have children through IVF, (and such situations are occurring), then the matter needs closer scrutiny.

The lesbian women might want children to be conceived in a test tube, but the children may not.

The children may also want a real father, and not an IVF sperm donor, who is just a human incubator of sperm with no attachment to the children at all.

Martin what is "Traditonal Morality", is this some sort of motto for those of the religous right, who denigrate those they consider to be unacceptable.
Martin let some love into your life, as you may quote "academic" essays, but they are just words of a sole person with one outlook on life; and do not reflect the true broad positive spectrum of life.

Ammonite,
For the record: Romans 1:26 "For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, 27 and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error".

The Early Christian Church outlawed participation in the sexual rituals of the Roman God - Juno. Where homosexual acts were considered normal behaviour. Christianity cannot accept sexual perversion as normal and be true to the moral purity of Christ.