The relevant sections of the Civil War amendments mention gays exactly as many times as they mention blacks, and they apply equally to both groups. How do you justify applying them to one, but not the other?Calculus Crusader wrote:JohnStuartMill wrote:The drafters of the Civil War amendments certainly did not contemplate that they would be used to argue for the illegality of miscegenation bans, or to integrate Southern classrooms. According to your jurisprudential standard, Loving v. Virginia and Brown v. Board of Education were decidedly incorrectly, and African-Americans should have meekly waited another 50 years until the legislatures deigned to advance their cause.
I am a contextualist, not an original-intentist. Blacks were explicitly granted equal protection under the law via constitutional amendment and the U.S. had almost 100 years of data at the time of Brown to demonstrate that they were denied equal protection under segregation.
I don't care about whether it was "properly democratic", because the important part for me is that it was majoritarian -- it certainly followed the "will of the people", which is the defense that religious idiots have used in the aftermath of Prop. 8 to justify their tyranny.JohnStuartMill wrote:I have noted a relevant similarity between Germany under Hitler and the state for which religious conservatives pine: in both, majoritarian rule grants insufficient respect for minority rights. If you think that an electoral popularity against equal rights for gays legitimizes that opinion, then you have nothing to say against Hitler's crimes against the minorities under his rule.
Dear hayseed,
Appeals to analogy are known as the weakest form of argumentation for a reason. Your analogy is not valid; Nazi Germany was not a proper democratic state.
What do you find improper about his interpretation? If you have issues with it, you should say what they are instead of dancing around it like a little fairy princess.JohnStuartMill wrote:Actually, there's quite a bit more. There is very good empirical data suggesting that gay marriage bans are becoming more unpopular: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/04/ ... riage.html (The guy who runs that site graduated with honors from the University of Chicago economics department, which is famed for its mathematical rigor.) This trend is not surprising because, as already mentioned, the younger generations of voters are more likely to support gay marriage, and there is no evidence to suggest that this belief changes over time. Obviously, there are always qualifiers and caveats to the conclusions to statistical analyses, but you do not have sufficient warrant to believe that the caveats necessary to cut against my conclusion obtain.
A. I don't care if he "graduated with honors from the University of Chicago economics department." That does not mean he knows how to conduct a legitimate sample survey and/or correctly interpret a sample survey.
B. I do not necessarily dispute that the youth demographic is more accepting of gay "marriage" in some regions. What I dispute is that survey results give you license to prognosticate to 2060.
I find it ironic that you don't apply such a strong skepticism to the religious beliefs your mommy and daddy inculcated into you.
If the population of country X is composed of segment A, which favors drowning puppies by 75% to 25%, and segment B, which opposes drowning puppies by the same margin, and if segment A is not expected to exist in 30 years, then the population of country X can be expected to oppose drowning puppies in 30 years. This isn't hard.
They make you do statistical analyses for social science degrees, too, you know.