and of course it is important to understand that in the U.S. marriage is a civil contract. As such it is purely an issue for civil law not religious law.

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no I am arguing that before you can enter polygamy into the discussion you ned to show that under the U.S. legal system there is a reasonable approach to implementation.

Unless it can be shown to be practially implemented, discussions about polygamy are purely hypothetical and have no practical impact.

And as such I suggest that since polygamy has not shown to be practical to implement, your arumnets on polygamy are moot and dilatory.

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But lets give your argument the benefit of the doubt and assume I am wrong, which does happen occasionally, and thus the rejection of legalizing polygamy has only been done so because of impracticalities.

First I would like to hear your examples of additional estate issues heirs and devisees would face in a culture that permits polygamy. Since we permit unlimited divorce and remarriage, the complexities already exist. Why are existing complexities acceptable but additional complexities not acceptable?

I don’t see how legalizing polygamy is kin to treating people like chattel. Please explain.

As far as I know, contractual agreements are permitted by individuals with as many individuals as each wants to go into partnership with. Why should that be any different for marriage contracts? And each individual can enter into as many separate contracts as they want having a foot in all sorts of doors. If avoiding impracticalities are the motive for contractual law in this country, then we missed that boat years ago.

Your comments sound wonderful on the surface, but they contain no substance. You have not made any reasonable argument as to prove that polygamy is rejected in our country over reasons of practicality as you imply. Therefore the idea of gay marriage as well cannot be argued from it’s practicalites or lack thereof. Instead, it is a moral issue and that is how we American’s decide it.

To try to bring the idea of gay marriage into any other arena but the moral arena, is bringing it into an arena where the culture does not decide on it from. And even amongst those without a religious penchant, there is a split on this because there is an innate feeling that gay marriage is just not right, thus it is a moral issue.

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Hello and g’day to you. I truly don’t have time to continue an argument with you. It has become rather obvious to me that “society” has become to you what God’s truth is to me–the foundation upon which you and I respectively have formed our values.

In many cases and on many principles, these two are diametrically opposed, unfortunately, so, on most things we likely will not be able to agree.

“I suggest then that marriage as a civil contract is in fact the correct definition and your arguments about the garden of eden (do you have evidence that this actually happened as described???)”

Your existence is proof that there was, indeed, a first couple that consummated their marriage….that is, unless you come from the zoo…or outer space…or bacteria…whichever belief you hold regarding the origins of human life. In fact, your existence is proof that a male and a female became one flesh…unless you were the rare product of a laboratory science experiment.

It is possible I was mistaken if the Born Alive Protection Act is at present the law of the land…I guess that point to me is moot as living child sacrifice HAS recently been legal, and likely will again become legal in this country…and the point I was making was regarding whether or not something is legal does not necessarily make it RIGHT. You never answered the question I asked regarding the issue, however. This is very telling.

Either fortunately or unfortunately I will not continue to respond here.

Thank you to Worldmag for the opportunity to express personal viewpoints here regarding important issues which we all must face.

Furthermore, I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving, as we have very much to be thankful for to the Most High God, Creator, Sustainer, Sovereign Lord, Redeemer, Savior and Friend of sinful men.

“Oh that men would praise the Lord for His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men!” Ps.107:8,15,21,31

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so lets look at your challenges.

first remember, that so long as no kmarriage is involved, and no children result, rights of privacy would seem to allow any consensual sexual arrangement one wants. So the issue is not the sexual activity, but the contractual rights, a point apparenlty missed by truthtllr.

Also remember that humans inthe U.S. are not chattel. We can not treat them as property.

So the first issue that I suspect you need to address for you to seriously pursue your proposal would seem to be how we wold contruct what is at root a muti-party contract with equal rights for all participants and perhaps more critically how we would dissolve such a contract. There are also some complex inheritance issues and you would need to protect the rights of any and all children which ensued.

The children issue becomes interesting when we consider that there could be multiple men as well as women, and I assume you will address this as well.

Then we must consider the case where a single person could be a member of multiple contracts (fully consistent with what I believe is your model). We now have itnerlocking contracts which make the process more complex. I will look forward to your thoughts on how we would manage these.

Of course you could decide not to answer any of these questions.

In which case I suggest you were being contrary when you asked the question.

Failure to answer my question would suggest that your question was not raised as an honest concern in the discussion of gay marriage but rather was raised to to derail the conversation.

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What is impractible about providing some to venture out into the workplace who could never do so otherwise because now there is an additional parent home who does not desire to pursue a career but raise children?

What is impractible about additional income coming into the home?

If the people who would get involved in a polygamous relationship desire to do so, knowing full well of the situation, then who are we to stop them from marrying the one they love. That seems kind of hateful don’t you think?

I would like to know what these impracticalities are of a polygamous relationship that deem it necessary to keep this sort of thing illegal.

The impracticalities of a divorce proceeding are difficult even between two people, but that does not mean we refute marriage altogether. There needs to be more reason than that to disallow polygamy.

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I find that in discussions it is usually simpler to stick to one topic and address that,

Society for whatever reason (and indeed there are good practical ones) has concluded that marriages are a couple. We can discuss the advantages of this structure if you like, but the simplest one is that divorce proceedings are simpler if there are only two parties.

And if society offers marriage as a civil contract between two persons, then anti-discrimination arguments lead one to the plausible conclusion that this should not have restrictions as to gender. There are some additional specious arguments that can be entered here, and they can be dealt with one by one if someone insists on contaminating the conversation.

If you are against gay marriage on objective and logical gruonds, I suggest this is not discrimination. I have been asking for objective and logical arguments against gay marriage for several weeks, and no one has provided any.

If you are against gay marriage out of an animus towards gays, then this is discrimination and some would argue hateful.

When we extend this to multiple partner marriages, the first issue is not hate, but rather practicality: how wold we make this work effectively. We know that gay marriage can be made to work effectively: it has been working in Massachusetts for five years or so. No one has yet, however, provided a plausible model for making multiple partner marriages workable in the U.S.

If you were to provide a working model for multiple partner marriages AND the model was agreed could be executed AND people still resisted it on discriminatory grounds THEN such resistance wuold indeed be discriminatory AND would then possibly be considered a hate approach by some.

So if you want resistance to multiple partner marriages to be considered hate, you have a long road in front of you: you must first show that it is practical within the context of U.S. society. Given the level of equal protection applied in the U.S., my sense is this is a very hard task.

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Why is a person who opposes gay marriage considered hateful etc for not approving of two same gender people who love each getting married yet the person who opposes a man marrying two women who both love the same man or two men who both love the same woman not considered hateful but reasonable for opposing this?

Someone above defined in a common law kind of way the definition of marriage as “always being two people” historically but in fact it has always been a man and a woman which is an even finer breakdown and more accurate description of the common law definition. But that would not serve the gay community well to break marriage down to it’s most precise historic definition. To them, 4/8ths is 2/4ths, not 1/2.

They are “forgetting” a step in the reduction process for convenience of argument, their argument.

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now I believe that the Federal Born Alive Infant Protection Act and the laws on murder makes it illegal to sacrifice living children in the U.S.. Any fetus who is born and is viable is considered a human being subject to the protection of the laws of the land.

It sounds as if your argument is mistaken here. Can you clarify?

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ah I now see our problem,

You seem to have theperception that marriage has a meaning outside its civil context.

an interesting argument BUT have you tried to argue this with the state legal systems?

Can a cleric marry a person without the leave of the state (it is usually automatic BUT it is still enabled by the state)?

Can a person be married without involving religious institutions?

I suggest then that marriage as a civil contract is in fact the correct definitoin and your arguments about the garden of eden (do you have evidence that this actually happened as described???) have little impact here. Besides, where was it recorded that there a marriage ceremony between Adam and Eve?

And we are back to marriage as a civil insitution.

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