It is childish to presume government should get out of the business of governing people. By definition, government governs. Government will govern people, and eventually government will govern whatever higher intelligence may replace people. The question that cuts more to the chase is whether government should govern people through families or by replacing families and rendering them obsolete.
No doubt, many people have emotional or intellectual grievances against the notion of families. Some presume replacement by government, run by benevolent elites, would be better. They may wish to transition to such a system by having government place home and school monitors and bureaucrats, to ensure parents and teachers do not inculcate children with politicially incorrect ideas. ("I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you become politically correct. Don't worry about me. Watch my NWO pendulum and pay attention only to more pressing concerns, such as the lifting of all boats by acceding to the free trade of international crony capitalists.")
These people want to undermine any spiritual or religious component of marriage by denigrating all literalisms of religions, thereby hoping to attack all traditional values that have grown up in every culture that is not to their liking. They also undermine any traditional values of culture simply by dividing culture with multi cultural diversity --- as if diversity merely for the sake of diversity were a guaranteed good in itself.
Marriage can be understood, in part, as representing a cohabitation contract that is subject to enforcement not by the federal government, but by state governments. If cohabitors do not otherwise specify, the government, by law, for the protection of children and ordered decency, imposes a default contract. Cohabitors can expressly choose such contract by entering into formal marriage, or they can become bound to the State sanctioned contract by their actions, by entering into marriage at common law. Cohabitors can amend such default contracts by entering into prenuptial agreements, or by undertaking relationships alien to marriage. The state sanctioned default contract for cohabitations among monogamous pairs of persons of opposite sex tends to proscribe such contracts between persons who are already married, too young, or too closely related. It often encourages cohabitors to have children, as by respecting the authority and rights of parents and by giving them various tax incentives. It provides for inheritance, in default of a will, and it confers certain rights of representation among familial persons who are next of kin. Much of this could be done by express contract, but most people, as they are starting out in relationships, tend not to foresee or prescribe for such contingencies.
So a role for government in prescribing default provisons for cohabitation contracts is appropriate. Only those who want to "fundamentally change" America argue that States lack such interests and authority. What human secularists and their social upheaval apologists vent their disgust against is that such contracts should be called "marriages," rather than merely "contracts in default of other provisions upon entry into monogamous cohabitation." They want to force each State to recognize that there is nothing special about its interest in encouraging the celebration of certain aspects about how the next generation is to be raised. Why the disgust of opponents of society's interest in defending marriage should outweigh the disgust of ordinary persons with the irresponsible exemplars and polyamorous behavior of many homosexuals is not a point that is justified in logic or science. Rather, it is a point that is insinuated and forced, as by the slithering of a snake, by infiltrating to control what is broadcast in media and academia.
I am wrapping up a reading of Sam Harris' The End of Faith, as well as The Moral Landscape. I find he inventories the moral and religious concerns of humanity quite well. I agree with him that much good could be done by bringing the tools of quantitative science into closer interface with concerns for the quality of conscious well being among human beings. (I regard the field of consciousness as implicating religious overtones for empathy at a higher level; he seems to regard it as having spiritual overtones. Religious, spiritual; tomato, potato; interfaces of fluxes of perspectives of consciousness, souls --- how much is his disgust with the values that continue to evolve with religious influence affected by his semantics?) Regardless, if Harris denigrates opponents of same sex marriage as being unscientific, as if implying proponents were scientific, then he oversteps --- and offensively so.
No doubt, many people have emotional or intellectual grievances against the notion of families. Some presume replacement by government, run by benevolent elites, would be better. They may wish to transition to such a system by having government place home and school monitors and bureaucrats, to ensure parents and teachers do not inculcate children with politicially incorrect ideas. ("I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you become politically correct. Don't worry about me. Watch my NWO pendulum and pay attention only to more pressing concerns, such as the lifting of all boats by acceding to the free trade of international crony capitalists.")
These people want to undermine any spiritual or religious component of marriage by denigrating all literalisms of religions, thereby hoping to attack all traditional values that have grown up in every culture that is not to their liking. They also undermine any traditional values of culture simply by dividing culture with multi cultural diversity --- as if diversity merely for the sake of diversity were a guaranteed good in itself.
Marriage can be understood, in part, as representing a cohabitation contract that is subject to enforcement not by the federal government, but by state governments. If cohabitors do not otherwise specify, the government, by law, for the protection of children and ordered decency, imposes a default contract. Cohabitors can expressly choose such contract by entering into formal marriage, or they can become bound to the State sanctioned contract by their actions, by entering into marriage at common law. Cohabitors can amend such default contracts by entering into prenuptial agreements, or by undertaking relationships alien to marriage. The state sanctioned default contract for cohabitations among monogamous pairs of persons of opposite sex tends to proscribe such contracts between persons who are already married, too young, or too closely related. It often encourages cohabitors to have children, as by respecting the authority and rights of parents and by giving them various tax incentives. It provides for inheritance, in default of a will, and it confers certain rights of representation among familial persons who are next of kin. Much of this could be done by express contract, but most people, as they are starting out in relationships, tend not to foresee or prescribe for such contingencies.
So a role for government in prescribing default provisons for cohabitation contracts is appropriate. Only those who want to "fundamentally change" America argue that States lack such interests and authority. What human secularists and their social upheaval apologists vent their disgust against is that such contracts should be called "marriages," rather than merely "contracts in default of other provisions upon entry into monogamous cohabitation." They want to force each State to recognize that there is nothing special about its interest in encouraging the celebration of certain aspects about how the next generation is to be raised. Why the disgust of opponents of society's interest in defending marriage should outweigh the disgust of ordinary persons with the irresponsible exemplars and polyamorous behavior of many homosexuals is not a point that is justified in logic or science. Rather, it is a point that is insinuated and forced, as by the slithering of a snake, by infiltrating to control what is broadcast in media and academia.
I am wrapping up a reading of Sam Harris' The End of Faith, as well as The Moral Landscape. I find he inventories the moral and religious concerns of humanity quite well. I agree with him that much good could be done by bringing the tools of quantitative science into closer interface with concerns for the quality of conscious well being among human beings. (I regard the field of consciousness as implicating religious overtones for empathy at a higher level; he seems to regard it as having spiritual overtones. Religious, spiritual; tomato, potato; interfaces of fluxes of perspectives of consciousness, souls --- how much is his disgust with the values that continue to evolve with religious influence affected by his semantics?) Regardless, if Harris denigrates opponents of same sex marriage as being unscientific, as if implying proponents were scientific, then he oversteps --- and offensively so.
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To respect God, our concepts of morality will at some point need to respect the consciousness that unfolds and is expressed all around, in every form of life, as well as in every form of stored information. Would it be moral to hold a human embryo as sacrosanct, above every other form for giving expression to consciousness? Absolutist positions on morality often become absurd when pushed to or beyond their limits.
Take the "caring indifference" of atheists, for example. Consider: In any moral sense, "ought" one robot to care whether another is defectively programmed to express (or believe?) that the earth, since its existence, has only revolved around its sun some 5000 times or so? If the other is only a robot, why should the one care? Why should the one any more want to reprogram the defectively programmed robot than to reprogram itself not to care about the eccentricities of such robot? Indeed, if a robot cares, is it not the more defective? Perhaps a question for atheists should be: just how committed are you to seeing yourselves as mere unfoldments of robotics, following only the grooves of a double helix blueprint? How morally caring are you about the quality of your stance on, or the moral supremacy of, scientific indifference?
The privacy ship has sailed. We now have in-line, parallel-computing functions, computing trillions of functions a second. Your passwords are not even child’s play. Gadaffi owns the twitter “ly” domain. OBL won’t go near a cell phone, because “they” can hear you, even when they’re off. Hackers have compromised large domain data bases for passwords, credit cards, social security ID numbers, and military secrets. Illegal aliens have coyote “friends with benefits” — able to provide faux identity cards — cheaply. Now, to save privacy, we must kill it. (Lol)
To ensure doppelgangers are not degrading your identity, you will have to surrender your identity — so that everything and everyone who is interested knows where you are and much of what you are doing, 24/7. Think pre-crime punishment, per Minority Report (Tom Cruise movie). To save our nation, and our individual identities, we will need national identity cards. No — make that national identity database matrixes. Your ID, credit card, driver’s license, resume, family history, and genetic code will be available, depending on level of authorized access, to everyone who sees your fingerprint, looks into your retina, scans the triangle of your eyes and nose, or decodes your voice recognition pattern. Anytime you want to buy something, you will gaze into a ubiquitous camera and state your order. The delivery and charge will be automatically processed against your default account. From the time you are born, a balance of credit-debit and merit-demerit points will be kept, and every transaction thereafter will be automatically applied against it.
Benefits: Hypocrisy, petty crimes, border jumpers, checkbooks, credit cards, ID cards, and fiends accessing nukes or WMD will be obsolete. Detriments: Challenges to the existing regime will be impossible; unstable characters will not be availed higher level access; socially unacceptable imagination will be stifled. Thus, the individual has met the Borg, the Borg has met the Matrix, and the Matrix has met the Men in Black. Thus, technology has made, or will make, freedom a communitarian thing. Population increase, centralization, and relative loss of freedom go hand in hand. American technology can hardly keep Americans free of the depredations of the rest of the world, when it is American technology that is making possible so much of the rest of the world’s centralizing reduction of any free-thinking middle class.
Thus, freedom will be made a delusion. If powers that be are entertained by your interests, your interests will be appreciated and facilitated under an illusion of freedom. If powers that be are not entertained, your range and degrees of deluded freedom will likewise be restricted. To thrive in the NWO, you must become a consummate blue-pill-taking sell-out. Regardless, you will always have Soma, X-box, and Hollywood.
Under the 10th Amendment, abortion and the definition of marriage should be left to the States. Although there should not be an income tax, however the Feds get their funding, I see no reason why Congress ought to refrain from prioritizing financial and tax based incentives in order to assist families in the raising and educating of the next generation of workers and defenders. I see no reason why conservatives ought simply to lay down and not defend against attempts to alter precedents and laws in ways that would require Congress to avail tax money to fund abortions or to treat every kind of social living arrangement as if it were a family. Often, it is not social conservatives who are pushing the lines on these issues, but the Rino and Dino human secularists who seem to be operating under some kind of confusion about the biologicial mechanisms under which succeeding and viable generations are brought forth, in order to sustain any kind of viable demographic. In effect, conservatives are blamed less for pushing agendas than for not surrendering to a flood of non-viable secularist notions. Just do the demographic math: what kinds of citizens are having children and what kinds are not? Is this really the time to increase incentives for the kinds of citizens who tend to be the least socially responsible? Maybe a governor would make a better candidate ... if a viable governor with good sense can be found.
What is a secularist? I might hazard take a pure secularist would be someone who believes you cannot legislate morality, while simultaneously believing there are no moral issues that are relevant to society outside of law.
Well, please provide your evidence for how evidence can convince those who deny the (unequal) differences between male and female. Please provide your evidence for how basic competence in understanding evidence can be imparted to those who are deepest in denial. Maybe start with funhouse mirrors.
Given the moral confusion of society and its perversion of economics, I expect there is considerable investment in "evidencing" the normality of nearly every kind of absurd deviance. Indeed, people are adept at "empirically proving" the legitimacy of whatever the hell they wanna do. Indeed, I suspect different foundations may be made appropriate for different cosmos of consciousness. If so, the WILL of consciousness (mandate of heaven?) has more to do with fundamental issues of evolving social organization than "scientific" empiricism.
Regardless, there is "evidence" that supports marriage as a foundation for decent individual freedom within currently relevant society. Google yields: http://wwwdoteconomistdotcom/debate/days/view/634/print/all; and http://wwwdotfisheatersdotcom/gbannex.html. What this "evidence" appears to prove is a triviality: those whose oxes are gored are quickest to protest.
For teaching how society morally "ought" to be, I do not think the better argument abides in scientific empiricism ("is") . Rather, the better argument is in taking moral responsibility for ourselves and our desired form of Republic. That is, examine our roots and consider our possible futures. What kind of civilization do we want for our progeny? How will erasing the meaning of traditional marriage affect the unfolding of human freedom and dignity? Will dissolving the meaning of marriage likely devalue the Family, thereby further empowering the State? Those concerns cry out for informed vision, not absurd, vain attempts to discover empirical "evidence" for moral oughts, nor gland-driven wannas posing as principled arguments.
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