KevinSim wrote:KevinSim wrote: I have no problem with black people being able to vote, as long as the speed limit on state roads is 85 miles an hour.
Darth J wrote:Wow KevinSim, everything you say is so true! I agree with you one hundred percent. I think everybody on this forum should be in favor of his law letting two or three adults of any gender combination get legally married. Don't worry about me opposing you any more, because now I see the light.
Okay, this probably wasn't the most mature post I've ever made. Darth J made a post in which he quoted me as saying something I never said, and then I responded by quoting
him as saying something that he never said. Pretty childish, but at the time I just couldn't resist.
Let me just say that if there's a relationship between black people being able to vote and the speed limit on state roads being 85 miles an hour, I definitely don't know what that relationship is. On the other hand, I had
already posted the relationship between making it legal for gay couples to marry and making it legal for polygamous triples to marry. Darth J either didn't notice that or chose to ignore it.
Just to make it absolutely clear for him, I am
not saying that there is
any connection at all between the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment, that were used to support legalizing polygamy and legalizing gay marriage, respectively. Rather, I'm saying that there
is a very definite connection between the arguments used to
fight against the two suggested legalizations.
I just got done reading the website at "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._United_States". The decision of the Supreme Court was that someone cannot use the First Amendment to claim the right to take some action that her/his religion requires her/him to do if there exists a law prohibiting that action. So everything hinges on that law; everything depends on whether the law should remain, or whether it should be repealed. The website says the court observed that the law against polygamy had existed in one form or another "since the times of King James I of England." I think it's fair to say that the law in its original form was a result of the Victorian value system that prevailed at the time. Darth J, do you disagree with that?
My point is that the Victorian value system that prompted the prohibition of polygamy in James' day, just as certainly prohibited homosexual behavior of any kind, and very possibly was a precursor to the sodomy laws many American states had on their books until the Supreme Court struck them down, a year or two back. If we can't count on Victorian ethics to give a sound moral judgement on the question of homosexuality, why should we allow it to make a sound moral judgement on the question of polygamy? To push forward laws legalizing gay marriage is to
reject Victorian ethics; having rejected Victorian ethics, why in the world should we retain other laws based on Victorian ethics unless there's some other good reason separate from Victorian ethics to keep them in force?
That is the connection between legalizing gay marriage and legalizing marriage of polygamous triples. It has nothing to do with the sections of the Constitution their adherents used to try to justify them; it has everything to do with the Victorian-based laws that were in existence that opposed those legalizations.