I'm not cherry picking a thing, I explicitly stated you can come up with pretty much any definition of marriage by ignoring the right scriptures, and what you are doing is the perfect example. Earth and Heaven still exist dude... Jesus was pretty clear about what circumstances are necessary to start ignoring the old testament.

What is and isn't relevant when assessing "equal" is an opinion. In my opinion, it's not important when assessing what sexes the people in a relationship are when determining if they should be able to marry, and in your opinion it is. If something or some group is equal always depends on what factors you want to consider when making the determination. This is a fundamental aspect of science, how far down you want to drill before something's so specific that it's meaningless, or how far you want to generalize before it's useless is a decision you have to make in every field. Sometimes it's easy, like sorting elements by number of protons, and sometimes it's difficult, like how far you want to divide groups of people to make a policy proposal, but it happens in every field.

If you want to be consistent in your "marriage is about procreation" assessment of equal, then you need to be willing to make the most basic distinctions between groups to be meaningful. I.e. gays that want to adopt versus those who don't, and straights who want to have children versus those who don't. To not do that is discriminating based on sexual preference, not based on child rearing.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Oct 12 2019 11:31pm

Well, the factors should obviously make sense. Unless you want to create a society where social rank depends on an individual's basketball ability or something silly like that, you will have a hard time finding factors which yield "race A superior to race B" conclusions.

Yes, you need to choose factors that are specific enough to be meaningful/useful, but broad enough to be meaningful/useful. It's not based on junk science that blacks and whites are different, every group is different if you drill down enough. So your assessment can't just be "functionally equal" because what you choose as your variables to make that determination is an opinion that needs grounding.

If you want to say "marriage is about procreation" then simply dividing groups into "straight and gay" isn't specific enough to be useful.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Oct 12 2019 11:38pm

That's just not true though. Even the polygamy of the Old Testament was one man having multiple wives... it wasn't a wife having multiple husbands, or same sex unions. It's not about ignoring scripture.



(Tertullian was on the planet a few years before 1900)

Agreed.



Yes, you got a point there. See also my reply to Fender below:



Being of the opinion that "only couples who can procreate shall enjoy the (extra!) privileges and (extra!) protections that come with marriage" is a valid viewpoint. Not one that I personally agree with, but it's a viewpoint that makes logical sense. And from this point of view, a valid argument against gay marriage follows.

Obviously, such an opinion is only valid if those who hold it are consistent with it and oppose marriage of old/sterile heterosexual couples as well. That the current practice in our societies is to not look at the ability to procreate and grant marriage rights to any heterosexual couple does not 'debunk' this point of view - if someone considered this practice wrong, then he/she consequently had to consider the introduction of gay marriage to be yet another step in the wrong direction.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Oct 13 2019 12:04am

Somebody may hold that position, but we as a society don't hold that opinion, and our current institution of marriage is not designed around that opinion.

Ultimately though, the position that marriage is for raising children then doesn't result in a position that they are against gay marriage. It is better described as being against marriage that does not result in conception or adoption of children. This happens in both straight and gay marriages, so simply saying "X leads to a valid argument against gay marriage" is therefore false, the actual resulting valid argument would be something akin to "X leads to a valid argument against certain marriages that do not produce or adopt children".

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Oct 13 2019 01:54am

https://twitter.com/TeamWarren/status/1182340115999404037
https://twitter.com/ashleempreston/status/1173819504524025856
https://twitter.com/ashleempreston/status/1164350203098308608
https://twitter.com/ashleempreston/status/1135042177896083456
Elizabeth Warren prominently features a black trans woman and has multiple appearances with her
then the autists go through her twitter history;

Hahaha, I love the internet