"But Gays Can Marry Too!"

Another response to Dust in the Light, Febrruary 23, 2005:

OK, so opponents of SSM (same sex marriage) are consistent in that gays and lesbians are free to marry persons of the opposite sex just as heterosexuals are.

But this ignores the fact that gays are lesbians are not allowed to marry the person who serves the same role in their lives as spouses do for heterosexuals. In this sense the marriage laws are discriminatory and inconsistent.

I understand that from a religious point of view, many religions don't recognize SSM. OK, so respecting the First Amendment, no church shall be compelled to perform a ceremony it does not approve of.

But from a governmental or legal standpoint, marriage is a set of legal relationship between two people that assigns certain rights and responsibilities between two people. Some of these rights and responsibilities concern children resulting from the marriage, but there is no requirement that married couples actually produce children. Heterosexual couples who cannot conceive children due to medical reasons are not prohibited from marrying in any way. So the inability of SSMs to produce children without the help of a third party is not a valid reason to prohibit them.

In America, we respect the rights of all to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In general, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness should not be impeded except when it interferes with the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of others.

While opponents of SSM repeatedly claim that "marriage will be destroyed" by SSM, no one has explained exactly how heterosexual marriages would be destroyed, or how heterosexual couples who want to create the healthiest possible family environment in which to raise their children would be prevented from doing so.

Can Atheists be moral?

Today I posted a response to a posting on Dust in the Light, which claimed that self-interest as a moral compass is not as viable as a belief in God. Here is my response:

Self-interest or what I call "expanded self-interest" can certainly be a viable moral compass for non-theists.

Self-interest is not just interest for the self. The urge to procreate extends self-interest toward our spouses and children. This is why parents willingly give up a great deal, including body organs in some cases, for the well being of their children. Beyond the immediate family is interest toward the person's clan, or whatever group they belong to. This is why soldiers give up their lives for their countries.

During World War II, thousands of Russian soldiers gave up their lives to liberate their homeland from the Nazi invaders. While it is impossible to know how many of these soldiers subscribed the official atheist beliefs, certainly many of them were, and they didn't require a belief in God to give up their lives for their families and communities.

The problem with using only religion as the moral compass is that there are almost as many versions of religious morality as there are religions. The assumption that many people arguing in favor of theism make is that important moral values are derived from religion, and can only be derived from religion. But what happens when a religion, or someone's interpretation of it, interprets moral values differently. Osama bin Laden's religion interprets the death of 3000 people on 9/11 as God's plan. It's ALL moral relativism, and in the case of religious believers morality is relative to one's religion and one's interpretation of it. That's why I believe religion is a reflection of the person who practices it.

Another way of looking at this would be what I call "moral maturity." A morally immature person acts in narrow self interest only. If he wants to do something, the question is "Is it allowed?" If not, he asks "What are the chances of getting caught?" For the morally immature, the only factor moderating behavior is the fear of punishment.

Religion is useful for moderating the behavior of the morally immature. If you parents, teacher, or the police are not watching you, but you believe in an omniscient God that watches you all the time, you may think twice about doing something forbidden, even if punishment may be deferred until the afterlife.

But for the morally mature, behavior choices are not on fear of punishment, but on principals. For me, these principals are based on respect for others, and acting as much as possible as if the world was the way I'd want it to be. If I find a lost wallet containing cash, I will make every possible effort to return it to it's owner, because in my vision of the perfect world, that's what anyone finding my lost wallet would do. If I kept the cash and threw away the wallet, I wouldn't fear God's wrath, but I would feel hypocritical for not extending a courtesy to others that I expect them to extend to me.

Protecting the Value of Marriage

What are the folks who are working to defend the sanctity of marriage from the threat of same-sex marrages and civil unions doing to protect the sanctity of marriage from Mary K. Letourneau and Vili Fualaau?

Dumb Thinking Part 1: Averages Don't Apply to Individuals

A lot of public discussion on various issues is logically faulty due to thinking mistakes. This is not a right/left, blue state/red state issue. Both sides are guilty. I'll describe them in a series of posts. The first: Averages don't apply to individuals.

Havard University President Lawrance Summers recently created a controversy with comments suggesting that the reason most science and math professors are men was because of innate differences between men and women.

The people upset Lawrence Summers are forgetting that statistical averages don't apply to individuals. It is a statistical fact that men are on average a few inches taller than women. But that information isn't useful if you're talking about actor Danny DeVito and actress Gina Davis. Recent research has shown that boys tend to excel at math and spatial skills, while girls score higher in language skills. But just as there are tall women and short men, there are women who excel in math, engineering and science, and men who excel in language. If most science professors are men, and most English professors are women, it's not discrimination or anybody's fault. I'm surprised that Summers' comments are controversial.

Another example is the continuing battles over affirmative action programs to correct past racial injustices. These programs are justified by the generization that minorities are "disadvantaged" and need an extra boost to achaive eqaulity. This puts to the supporters of affirmative action into the uncomfortable position of supporting racial discrimination (treating people differently according to race) to avoid racism. They claim that to not discriminate according to race (by treating people of different races equally) is actually racist!

While it is true that on average, white people continue to have higher incomes that black people, at this point in American history plenty of well-educated black people earning good incomes, and there are still lots of poorly educated, low incoming white people. And the fact that most of the top one percent wealthiest people are white is of little help to poor white people.

And as for access to education, it is true that some segments of society have easier acccess to higher education than other segments. But are these differences based on race? I don't think so. I have a hard time believing that a young black person whose parents hold graduate degrees and earn a six-figure income would have a difficult time getting into a university. He or she would certainly would find getting into a good colledge easier than a white young person raised in a poor single parent household who has no relatives who made it past high school.

I am not against affirmative action programs that make college admission easier for people who have the odds stacked against them. But base the programs on factors that actually stack the odds against the applicant. The affirmative action program would weigh factors such as

1. The applicant comes from a low income household, especially one led by a single parent.
2. The applicant would be the first in his or her family to attend college.
3. The applicant comes from a low-income community where relatively few people attend college.

Such a program would certainly enable many black and other minority students who otherwise not have such an opportunity. But it would not discriminate according to race against white applicants who are disadvantaged by the same factors.

B-List Caveman

Here's an interesing blog about celebrity worship.

B-List Caveman

The TRUTH about the GAY AGENDA!

Here it is folks, the GAY AGENDA revealed!

BTW folks, I am not gay myself. I just can't stand stupidity in public discussions, and the proposed "protection of marriage' amendment (as if same sex marriages will cause hetersexuals to get divorced) is the stupidest idea since the anti-flag buring amendment (as if flags were becoming an endangered species)!

Elvis Protects Marriage

My wife runs a Las Vegas travel web site, travel2vegas.com. A few years ago she received an email from a lesbian asking for Vegas wedding venues that would perform tasteful and touching though non-legally binding ceremony for her and her partner. To answer this question, my wife made a few calls. One prominent Las Vegas Strip wedding chapel responded coldly and curtly to her question. "Gay marriages are NOT legal in Nevada. We do NOT perform them."

Isn't it comforting to know that folks who will perform your wedding in Elvis or Star Trek costumes are refusing to cheapen or make a mockery of the sacred institution of marriage?

Manzanar 2001

Here on Bainbridge Island, the contraversy over the Japanese internment during World War II continues to this day. A curriculum given in schools is criticized by some as making inapropiate comparisons to more recent events.

Tonight, we saw a documentary on the Sundance channel called "Persons of Interest." The film of a series of interviews of some of the several hundred Arabs in this country who in the weeks following 9/11 were randomly arrested and detained for weeks or months until investigators could determine that they were not terrorists. Ironically, many of them came to America to escape the kind of persecuition.

While the post-9/11 Arab internment was less organized and shorter lived than the one experienced by the Japanese, there is certainly a parallel worth discussing.

The Iraq Election

While the Iraqi election may represent a significant historical milesone, it is a bit premature for the Bush fans to gloat over the success. Success will be when Iraq has a stable government that is better to its people and its neighbors than the previous one. George Bush's vision of the beacon of freedom inspiring democratic movements in other Arab countries may come to pass, or it may elect leaders who establish an Iranian-style theocracy. Or cival war may erupt.

Prisoner Torture

I haven't seen anyone discuss one of the main reasons for Geneva Convention was that the countries signing it were concerned about the welfare of their own prisoners held by the enemy. You can't torture enemy prisoners and expect the other side not to.

Remember April 2003 when American prisoners were questioned on Iraqi TV? Many of the people who were so upset at the treatment of Americans are now trying to justify the way prisoners in Iraq and Guantanimo are treated. I don't buy that. Can you imagine the reaction of the insurgents captured Americans and posted pictures of them laying naked on each other on the Internet? Yes, beheading is worse, but If we are to maintain a moral high ground, then the standard for treating prisoners has to be the minimum standard we would expect for our soldiers held by the enemy.