[Skybird]

Oh dear, we end up with a huge amount of open ends again that to master in a dialogue becomes more and more complex and finally probably impossible, like in the past. I therefore answer only to some of your comments

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Believe it or not, I agree with that, and always have. I've quoted more than once the old saying "Your freedom ends where my nose begins". If you're going to live in any kind of society you have to set limits for yourself. Since so many are unable to do that, we have to set limits externally, in the form of laws.

And I always understood your claim, from beginning on. But the continuing argument of yours I saw in discrepancy with your claim back then. I saw a man claiming to do one thing, but actually doing something different. I decided to go with what I saw him doing, not what he was claiming to do. That always was the core of the conflict as I have seen it, always.

I see the opposite as being true as well. I think it's possible to go too far, setting rules limiting what individuals can do based on the thought of what evil might happen, rather than limiting what is happening. Do that and I think you cross the line into the trap of attempting to legislate morality.

That fear is justified, and yes, a state craving for more and more control of his people is a threat. Any ideology and its manifestation that claims more and mor e control is dangerous: states, organisation, religions, anything. However, it makes them strong to the outside - the great temptation . Also, such a state is the consequent result of what I criticise: people want to get nannied and vote for the party that promises to nanny them and run a big redistribution program to pay for that. In return the citizens allow the state to implement more and more legislations to nanny them in the right way, which is the politically correct way, since it does not disturb the collective peace and does not question the very system. That way, politically correct tolerance for politically correct things - threatens the very basis of tolerance itself. This kind of misled tolerance necessarily must lead to growing totalitarianism and collectivism. I must not see the bitter end to conclude that is is running that way - the logic of the chain of thoughts as well as what I can already see taking place in our societies is enough. I already try to brake when I see there is a car in my way - I do not wait until I impacted to conclude that it would have been a good idea to brake while maybe there still was time.

What is the reason for science, learning knowledge and education, thinking about things, if not to try plotting a save course through the future instead of just passively waiting to see what will happen by itself? The original argument we had regarding this detail was either about WWII and Nazism, or Islamic radicalism, I do not remember which of that dispute was first. Well, I see the historic precedents and make conclusions on their grounds. I am not willing to let history repeat past mistakes once again, and just hope that this time it will go out better. The evilness of Nazism is beyond question, history has proven it, the totalitarian and inhumane nature of Islam has been demonstrated by history since over 1 thousand years and is fixed in its writings as well - I must not give any of the two the space to unfold and see how it ends. I know - we all can know - how it will end. We have been there before. Why must we go back there?

The problem with that has already been pointed out by others. The definition of what constitutes a "family" has changed over the years. Another principle I believe government needs to adhere to is that of Plato: "Do not forbid that which you lack the power to prohibit."

I see it last but not least from a psychologists and psychohygienic POV, sorry, but that was my profession once. And I question the new understandings of family, from right that perspective. these new definitions of "family" serve economical interest,a dn the serve ideological socialist interests - but they stand in wide violation of much of what development psychology since the 60s knows for sure about childrens' relation to mothers, and phases of early childhood and their importance, and in general children'S psychological development of cognitive and emotional abilities. That so many children live in a world now where these elem,ental insights are being ignored by the living environment, is major part of the reasons why they lack orientation and healthy development. The lack of qualities is the reason why they turn to misleading false idols from the media. Because children and juveniles need and actively seek idols and mentors and things that give the orientation and to test their skills against and to rub their character against to find out where their limits are, and were their strengths and weaknesses are, and where they end and others and society begin. Last but not least feminised pedagogics denies them - especially boys - these opportunities, because it is "too dangeorus", too "rude", too "male". Well, Steve, whole books are published about these psychological things, from babies and mothers to teenagers'S revolt years. I can only point one or two fingers at it and must leave it to that, else I would end up writing all night here.

Well, you can put me into that "social wreck" category, and a lot of others as well. As far as I can see, allowing gays to marry legally won't change my status one bit, and wouldn't change it if I had been happily married for the past 39 years rather than divorced for 28 of those years. As I paraphrased Jefferson earlier on his "twenty gods or no god" writing, it doesn't affect me at all, and I don't see how it affects my children or grandchildren.

It will. They live in that changing culture you accept to change in the way iot does. I question that it is wise to allow all these changes, and I question the value and positive nature of some of these changes. Not every realities we allow to manifest themselves are good ones, sometime sits better if we would try to change them while there still is time, and to prevent some things realising. As Lao Tse said: a wise man tries to tackle problems while they still are small, not when they are grown up.

The biggest boon to the change of status from "Civil Union" to "Marriage" would be in the inheritance tax, and since I think the inheritance tax is wrongful theft by government anyway, I see gay marriage as a good thing socially, just as I see any shortening of government control and legalized theft as a good thing.

Ah, Thoreau, I assume. Well. to me the one has little to do with the other. I can thunk like Thoreau - and still consider family to be important and equal status of gay marriages as wrong. Thoreau's personal reasons and intellectual arguments were completely different ones and did not even imagine for the future issues like those discussed here.

Of course families should look to themselves before blaming other causes. That said, what do you propose? Do we make it illegal somehow to worship false idols? Do we attempt to create laws forcing inhibition? Violence is already against the law. Yes, we can blame the families, but how do you enforce that? Create laws forcing couples to stay together? Forcing couples to love each other? Not possible.

I'm talking about a cultural climate. The 50s felt different than the 70s than the 80s than the 90s. they did due to many things changing. It is not that linear as you make it sound. A child of the present does not become somebody feeling like in the 60s and following the "in"-things of that time and the values of that time - just by letting it listen to rock n'roll and driving a pink Cadillac. It's all more subtle and complex, but still creating more solid outcomes.

You say the importance cannot be overestimated. Again, how would you enforce that? There used to be laws against divorce. They didn't work. In ancient Rome Caesar Augustus passed a law placing heavy taxes on bachelors, in an attempt to get them to marry. We have similar but more subtle tax laws today. Married couples get a lower "Joint Filing" tax rate, plus extra breaks for each child. Here in Utah that backfires, because couples have always been encouraged to have lots of children. The result is that many couples with large families pay no taxes, and single people end up paying for the education for all those kids.

One thing is certain: we will not help it by list letting things slide in fatalism and saying: its all useless anyway to try to change them for the better or referring to some of the better "old" values. Not all values that came later were better. And as I said: much of the crap people today accept as idol an orientation gets accepted for the lack of better quality values and idols, and because the new rubbish ones get implemented because the economy can make a profit from them and can sell stuff. the latest mode, "in" labels and "cool" gadgets, this or that noisy dirtbag being promoted as the coolest thing in the history of music, this or that half-naked bitch being the hottest thing in the history of pop...

To me, the garbage people follow today illustrates one thing more than anything else: a terrible, huge, dark inner void.

I understand your point here, but what is the alternative? Should children not be adopted? Only adopted by heterosexual couples? Should parents who later turn to a gay lifestyle be forced to give up their natural children? As soon as you start talking about drawing a line you end up having to talk about where to draw it. And the next one. And the next one.

I think I made that clear enough before. Adoption only by couples were there is social and economic stability, and a female mother and a male father. Rolemodels that psychology knows to be so very important for the development of psyche and character in young people. It is tragic if one parent dies. Or divorces separate parents. That cannot be an argument to now declare the psychological turmoil that means for children as a normal thing that now also should represent the new statistical norm of natural normality. It is not normal, and not healthy. That there is a father and a mother - that is the natural norm, and that is the healthy environment best suited for children. It is so very very important. Hell, I cannot believe that nowadays I must even explain this, is the modern world already so much beyond hope? Social desintegration we see in the society around us, everyhwhere. Egoism, isolation, fatalism, phlegmatism, predatory selfishness, lacking willingness to claim responsibility for oneself and for others. This does not come just from nowhere. What is "soziale Verwahrlosung" in English? It comes from the way the adults of today got influenced in their younger past, and it feeds back on the way young people today gets educated and experience the early years of their lives. From the wallstreet yuppie putting his kids aside in a oriv ate school in Switzerland, to the brokjen alcoholic grabbing for the whip three times a week - the society we have today is product of the things that were before.

Intact families. Appreciation for the valuable effort parents accomplish. A warm, protective home, giving children and teens a good start into life, from the basis of having experienced love and safety even when failing, and having discovered and unfolded their personality an individual skill in the company of role models of a father and a mother, to which both sons and daughters react differently. Yes, I know that genderists and ideologists try to ignore and destroy the data we have on these realities since decades. Its just that I still have not seen a single scientific study about genderism that has not been shreddered by people knowing this stuff by profession and have a more profound scientific background in research or in eduation. Genderism is not at all that scientifically founded theory as which the left and feminists are promoting it. It is no scientific theory, but an ideological project - this cannot be said often enough and loud enough.

I've never said otherwise. I said I saw the ideal as a starting point. Everybody has a starting point. Mine was that freedom was an ideal that must be striven for at all costs. Yours was that freedom is an ideal that can be swept aside whenever it gets in the way of what we think "needs to be done". At least that's how I saw the difference between us.

That is what I call your absolute approach on it, while you claim at the same time that you have no absolute approach to it. but you argue on the grounds of an understanding of freedom as an absolute. And since always criticise me that I tell you that you argue about it on the basis of freedom being an absolute. I do not sweep aside freedom when it is opportune. Not at all. I just understand that this demand of yours for absolute freedom - of which you claim it is not absolute, I know I know - is unfulfillable and finally necessarily will prevent freedom by allowing those wanting to destroy freedom to be successful. Sun Tzu: he who wants to defend everything, will lose everything. You reminded me on a story by Buddha, a man get struck by a poisonous arrow. He holds back the people trying to help him, wanting to pull out the arrow, cleaning the wound and closing it. He says: no, first I must know who shot at me, and why, and from where, I want to know what poison it is, and how the arrow was crafted and what master build the bow. Said it, and died. I wold propose to you, and Popper would, too, that you just pull out that damn arrow and get yourself treated. If that makes the destroyer of your freedom and right to know, then you cannot be helped.

No, you believe Popper is absolutely right.

Heck, no! That guy is extremely left! I think he got some things right. I know he also got many things wrong. And that his paradoxon indeed is true.

This may be because his reasoning appeals to you, or because it agrees with what you already believed. I can see his, and your, point, but I argued that the opposite is also true. I see in both of you the potential to tamper with freedom to the point where you create an absolute tyranny, all for our own good.
That's why I said at the time I perceived you as an enemy, intellectually if not physically. It's easy to make that comparison, but as always I have to ask: Where do you draw that line?

Individually different, depending on one case at a time. There is no blueprint in one size that fits all. Reality always is bigger, and more diverse. Neither Popper - a left intellectual, btw, so you can take it for granted that my sympathy for much of his stuff is limited - nor me demanded a total tyranny. What he says is that the tolerant ones will spell disaster if they tolerate the intolerant so that the intolerant can proceed until they have secured victory - a victory that means destruction of tolerance, and the tolerant. Tolerance has to end at this challenge, and must claim the right of self defence. And you wonder why I shake my head when listening to you when you continue to tolerate the intolerant? WWII, fascism and Nazism. The evilness is beyond doubt, it is proven, it has costed mankind dearly, without a shadow of a doubt. Why tolerating to give these ideologies the space to unfold again - what do you expect to be different if you let it grow this time? Do you think it will mutate into a new idea of philantrophic humanism? Or Islam? Have 1000 years of violent and racist history and the written dogma that is taken literal by most Muslims worldwide not given enough info to you to assess what you are dealing with?

How much more "evil" must happen before these ideologies are seen to be too dangerous to be tolerated? And is the defender against these by the act of defending against them as evil than they are themselves? I time and again got confronted with this claim, by others. I do not even reply to that nonsense anymore. Its like saying a girl defending herself against a rapist is as criminal as the rapist himself, because she used force to defend herself. Pah. "When you turn violent" against a violent attacker, you are not better than he is. Ha! Logic for headshot Zombies, advanced course.

It seems I am drawing that legendary line in the sand a bit earlier than you do, i think that is the best ground we can hope to meet on.

And we're back to that. I see the opposite that you fail to. You seek to destroy freedom in the name of defending "society". How are you different from the people you seek to defend it from?

Oh my. Feels like having a deja vu.

I'm well aware of that. I have two of my own. The problem I see with your whole line of reasoning here is that I see no evidence that allowing this change in the law is going to affect any of that negatively. Homosexual couples currently living together are no more "singles" than heterosexual couples living together. I've seen the whole "children" argument, and have even made it myself in the past. The problem is that many straight couples, while seeing the likelyhood of that possibility, don't get married just to have children, just as no one has sex just to have children, even though that's the whole purpose of its existence.

Be pragmatic a bit. When I play golf and have a drive from the Tee on a par 3, it could happen that the wind pushes the ball more and more, and it finally rolls towards the hole, where a mouse jumps out and bites the ball and races away, but it doe snot get far, becasue a falcon strikes down and catches the unlucky mouse with the ball between the teeth, and while the falcon flies and passes over the fairway a sudden lightning strikes him in midair and he falls down, dead, and the mouse falls, and the ball falls and the balls drops right into the hole. In a universe as big as ours, that could happen when you play golf, yes. Do we now need a special rule in golf, deciding whether an event like this still is a valid golf score, or is just making fun and the stroke must be repeated?

We do not want to drown in bureaucracy and a thousand laws. So be pragmatic. Man meets women: baby. Partnership. Family. Still is the norm in much of the world. Not always happy marriage, but still. Babies never will be where there is two men or two women. Whether there are two men or two women, means nothing for anyone else than these two. It is uninteresting for the community. It is unimportant for the state. It is in itself uninteresting for the couple whether the world takes note of their private life or not, and they certainly have no right to demand everybody must take note. And Skybirds are known to not give one second of thinking about it either, this private life of theirs. But where there is a boy meets a girl, things look differently. Yes, not all hetero couples have babies, for various reasons. For pragmatic reasons, and to keep the number or regulations about exceptions from the rule as low as possible, so: privileged status for married couples, saves a whole damn lot of complications in bureaucracy. Or would you say we still have not enough laws and rules? Also, it is fair towards singles and homosexuals couples alike, since both are on equal terms. (I find it interesting that in over one year I make this argument now, nobody ever has answered my question why the discrimination of singles by giving financial privileges to homosexuals that singles do not share is considered to be acceptable). But last posting, I met you halfway, I said: okay, lets give privileged status not to hetero marriages, but only to those who have had babies of their own, or soon will have. That givers the protection for families that I demand, and gives no privileges at all to hetero couples without babies, homo couples, and singles. I see that as a compromise becasue I fear that it will be tried to use it as an entry door again some time later to nevertheless enforce the relativising of families by upgrading all marriages nevertheless, but okay, the world is not perfect, I have to play the cards I have.

We both now that it will not happen. No politician dares to tell voters that something is being taken away from them, and no activist will accept that his crusade only leads to others being valued down, not himself being valued up. What it all comes down to, is this: everybody wants the money. And I accept that to be thrown only after families, regarding the discussion here. Not gay or lesbian couples. Not singles. Privileges I only accept and demand for families, becasue they are important, More important than gays. More important than singles. More important that lesbians.

On a sidenote, the German constitutional high court, or to name it precisely: the carricature of it, recently has demanded that homo and hetero marriages must be put on equal status. That is highly interesting because it represents an open violation of the constitution. And the court even admitted that indirectly. The judges opened with declaring clear and beyond doubt that the authors of Germany'S basic law were basing on an understanding of 1 man + 1 woman when the BL talks of marriage, and that homosexual couples are explicitly not falling under this term of marriage. Formally there is no doubt on that in German jurisdiction. But in the next minute, the court ruled that homosexual couples must fall under the BL's terminology of marriage. that means the court has ordered what it is not legitimised to order, and it has broken the constitution and actually has rewritten it. The violation lies in the fact that the court itself is not legitimized at all to rewrite the constitution - its job is just to protect and hold up the constitution as it is. Adding articles to it, changing them, deleeting, is only possible by the parliament - not the Constitutional High Court. But this carricature of a court has a longer record to betray the constitution, its record of waving through violations of the BL decided by the parliamant that has voted to disempower itself for the sake of the EU and the Euro, is quite long now. The court is no longer the guardian of the BL, but helps to dig its grave.

I see problems there. First, there are never enough families willing to adopt all the children that need it. If, as you say, infertility is spreading, I haven't seen it in the adoption rolls. There are many more children needing families than there are families to take them in. Maybe this is changing, but not fast enough.

Hm. Some people also advocate that we should open prison doors when there are too many prisoners and the costs for prisons run too high. Lets turn from pragmatism to opportunism. We could also send children to other countries, or into factories. Or educate them and send them into the army when they are old enough.

Do you know how big the number of adoptions is in Germany for foreign orphants from other countries outside Germany? I recall one detail for 2008. In that year Germans wanted to adopt more children from foreign continents, than German orphants. Maybe it is a good idea to prohibit foreign orphants as long as there are national orphants...

Also, it may be a possibility to make it legally more difficult to get an artificial insemination. One cannot ban it, I think, that would be too authoritarian indeed, but one could rearrange the legal context in a way that makes it more attractive for couples to adopt, by encouraging them in some ways, and making insemination not impossible, but more difficult.

Second, how exactly do you know that gay and lesbian couples make bad parents? I have read more than a few accounts of children raised by the same who say they grew up to be perfectly well-adjust adults, and heterosexual for the most part.

Where have I said that - "bad parents"? You could as well say a dead father is a bad father. He is not. He is a missing father. two lesbian women are a missing father, too. I talked about the psychological need for gender role models, and we know from data about children that are risen by one parent only that they have raised vulnerability scores for certain personality disorders and social abberations as well as psychological diseases. It's what I say all the time: a missing father or mother cannot be completely compensated that easily, it leaves a lack in the child'S inner structure.

Third, just because you hand an orphan over to a heterosexual couple, what do you do when they get divorced five years later? I think in this case it is you who are setting your ideals too high, and trying to make an impossible dream come true.

That is tragedy. Like one parent getting killed. Should we base our education models now to mainly base on the scenario that children'S parents, one of them, get always killed?

Divorce has negative consequences for the development of children and teenagers, no doubt. Why that should be an argument to allow adoption into such settings (homo couples or singles) from all beginning on, escapes me. That tragedies do happen, does make neither them nor their consequences desirable circumstances. I recommend we still focus on the dominant model that has brought us to where we are. And in the end, we are a heterosexual design, and our biology as well as your psyche is designed to reflect and support that. Exeptions from the basic rules exist, yes. But they are exceptions, both functionally and numerically - not the base design. Some people have pigment disorders. They too are humans, and exceptions. Pigment disorders of theirs are not the main line of human design.