Fence Sitter wrote:What does the propensity to make a decision have to do with the right to make it?
Let's explore that a little bit.
Wade has put a lot of stock in the 2010 U.S. census, even though way upthread I posted a link discussing the methodological problems in how that census determined how many same-sex couples there are in the United States. But keeping with that 2010 U.S. census so we can do an apples to apples comparison, Wikipedia summarizes thusly the figures for mixed marriages in the U.S. of A.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracia ... statistics
White Americans were statistically the least likely to wed interracially, though in absolute terms they were involved in interracial marriages more than any other racial group due to their demographic majority. 2.1% of married White women and 2.3% of married White men had a non-White spouse. 1.0% of all married White men were married to an Asian American woman, and 1.0% of married White women were married to a man classified as "other".
Got that? Just barely over 2% of the white people in America decided to marry someone of a different "lineage." Yet Wade, in a spectacular demonstration of what a non sequitur looks like, somehow managed to voice his approval of an equal protection right to mixed marriages, as announced by the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia:
wenglund wrote: However, it would be more fitting to compare my argument to the one's made in the rulings in McLaughlin v. Florida and Loving v. Virginia that over turned Pace v. Alabama.
As with those rulings, my argument unqualifiedly affirms the right of adults to marry adults of the opposite sex--which includes mixed-race couples.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=31082&p=749967&hilit=virginia#p749967
So why isn't the tiny percentage of white people who marry a spouse of a different race an unintended negative consequence of a right to enter a mixed marriage, if the alleged small percentage of gay people who want to marry another gay person is a negative unintended consequence of a right to enter a same-sex marriage?
Keeping in mind that even if you very generously accept Wade's assertions about the percentage of gay people who enter a same-sex marriage, that percentage is substantially greater than the number of white people who marry a non-white person.
As a side note, according to Gallup, 87% of the people in the U.S. currently approve of mixed marriages, while only 4% approved of it in 1958.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/appro ... hites.aspx
That shift in public approval is that vast, even though in practical reality only a tiny percentage of white people actually do enter mixed marriages. Wade's blog keeps inexplicably linking to data indicating that the reason for some of his "negative unintended consequences" is not that gay people inherently have something wrong with them (other than being gay, which is a grievous sin to Wade's deity), but that they are marginalized by society.
The change in public acceptance of mixed marriages that followed Loving v. Virginia suggests that the way to cure Wade's "negative unintended consequences" is for society to stop marginalizing same-sex couples and grant them the same rights that every other couple has. In other words, Wade is unwittingly refuting his own argument. But we can't have that, because that would mean a final surrender to Babylon. Wade does not want to solve the problem. Wade wants to impose the sexual taboos his church has co-opted from the ancient Hebrews onto society at large. But First Amendment says using that basis to determine what substantive legal rights people have is a non-starter. Thus, we have Wade's ridiculous Gish gallop, in the hope that people whose thinking is as fatuous as his own will believe that there is a coherent argument against an equal protection right to same-sex marriage that is based on something other than religious dogma (religious dogma that not all religious people share, I might add).