Phanto

Again, I never said that de facto marriages are inferior to ones formalised by church and/or state.

Marriage is a social construct, and different societies at different times have had different ways of marking and defining it. If we as a society decide that government should have no role in recognising formal marriage, I would not be particularly concerned.

But we are debating marriage as it is understood and practiced in this time and this culture. Most marriages nowadays are neither religious nor de facto, but formalised in ceremonies by civil celebrants conferring a legally recognised and state sanctioned status of marriage on its participants. Under current laws, gays are excluded from this form of marriage, for no good reason

I accept most of that but you are only debating it under the presumption that because government approved marriage exists that it has a right to exist. Your whole argument is founded on this basic premise and I am questioning this premise. It is like debating which form of capital punishment is best – the presumption is that you agree with capital punishment if you are debating which form is best.

I can only presume that you think government sanction of marriage is reasonable and all I am asking is why you think this is so. If it is so obvious why the government should be involved then it should not be difficult to give a good reason why they should be involved. Governments have to have reasons for doing things and should be able to explain them. Just like you are asking them to explain why they discriminate against same-sex marriages I am asking you why they think they should be involved in marriage at all.

You say you would not mind if they were not but government involvement has to be reasonable. If you would not mind either way then you would still have to come up with reasons why you think it is a good thing for them to be involved and reasons why it is good for them not to be. What are these reasons?

You just run the risk of showing no integrity by refusing to take a stand. You are debating an issue and yet you would not mind either way if governments were involved. It does not sound very convincing. No one is questioning the rights of homosexuals they are questioning the right of the government to be involved in marriage. It has nothing to do with discrimination. How can it be discriminatory to want governments to be out of marriage altogether which naturally include heterosexual marriages? Both groups get the same result.

So what are your reasons for accepting that they have a role in people’s marriages?

maxat:

"Whether the institution is worth supporting is clearly a very different question from whether or not it is unfair to exclude gay persons from its benefits."

I am certainly not questioning whether the 'institution' is worth supporting. I am only questioning whether it is reasonable for the government of the day to be involved in that 'institution'.

What are the benefits that gay persons are being excluded from by not having a government approved marriage?

Phanto

I am not advocating a particular form of marriage. But IF government is to be involved in deciding who is married and who isn’t, THEN it should do so in a non-discriminatory fashion

“There are, however, many people, including those with religious convictions, who are undecided or strongly oppose reform.”

‘Reform’ is the incorrect term to use with regard to legalisation of so-called same-sex marriage (SSM).

“To reform” means to “make changes in (something, especially an institution or practice) in order to improve it”.

It is irrational to propose that SSM legalisation would improve traditional marriage.

It is illogical and nonsensical to argue even that SSM is equal to heterosexual marriage. To so argue is to assert bizarrely that the act of sodomy (or the sexual practices of same-sex-attracted female couples) equates to the heterosexual marital act.

The real motive of the SSM movement is not to improve marriage, but to destroy it.

On overseas experience, SSM legalisation is about prohibiting a definition of heterosexual marriage as normative. Instead, it is about establishing the ‘normative’ nature of SSM and thereby ruling out as discriminatory essential arguments about the complementarity of male and female or the procreative purpose of marriage.

The SSM movement strategy is to have the federal government introduce SSM, then to use planned new anti-discrimination legislation to force compliance on church organisations and schools. As an indication, witness the SSM lobby’s move to stop Tasmanian Archbishop Porteous distributing in Catholic schools the booklet about the Catholic Church’s teaching on marriage, which he is entitled to do under Section 116 of the Commonwealth Constitution.

It should be noted that same-sex couples are not being discriminated against. Federal law recognises that same-sex couples have the same rights as de facto heterosexual couples with regard to federal benefits.