They are treated as chattel, traded for cash.

How often, and at what percentage? Anything like as often as heterosexual surrogacy and such?

Their guardians are totally preoccupied with their own needs and wants, to the point of minimizing the very personhood of the child.

No evidence of this is presented. None whatsoever.

We are told the child is happy and well cared for

(Nor can you point to any evidence this is false.)

and this justifies violating the child’s rights and treating the child in ways that would be a violation if the children had full personhood.

Which, again, you can’t point to any evidence for that doesn’t apply equally to many heterosexual couples.

Their guardians casually destroy and rearrange their family ties. They are treated as if they exist only in relation to their more important guardians

No evidence again. Long on accusation, short on support.

The only way the gay rights movement has anything genuine or substantive in common with the civil rights movement is not in that gays are similar to blacks during the civil rights movement, but rather that the children of gays are similar to blacks under slavery.

– They are treated as chattel, traded for cash.

– Their guardians are totally preoccupied with their own needs and wants, to the point of minimizing the very personhood of the child.

– We are told the child is happy and well cared for, and this justifies violating the child’s rights and treating the child in ways that would be a violation if the children had full personhood.

– Their guardians casually destroy and rearrange their family ties.

– Their guardians casually destroy and reassign their identity.

– They are treated as if they exist only in relation to their more important guardians – as if their own wants and needs are simply irrelevant – and this is justified by pointing out that, without the benevolence of their caretakers, they’d be living in want, so they should accept what they are given instead of expecting to compare themselves against those other kids over there (to whom different rules apply).

You still are using speculation and superficial (rather than substantive) differences to suggest that A and B are equal.

No, I am saying that if they are unequal, it’s not because of the reason you gave on October 19th, 2011 at 5:35 pm.

I said this wrong: I should have said “the Nazis perceived their violence as legitimate”.

Therefore, a movement can’t be bad simply because it engages in similar behavior.

That isn’t logically sound, either.

And it continues to make the same basic mistakes. You still are using speculation and superficial (rather than substantive) differences to suggest that A and B are equal.

If they’re equal because they’re “radical”, then why should I also not assume that every other “radical” idea that is currently mocked is also a legitimate civil rights movement?

You can’t do it that way. There is no way to piggyback on someone else’s civil rights movement, for just the same reason you can’t use A’s murder trial to prove the guilt or innocence of B.

If A = discriminating against someone based on a passive trait like skin color, ethnicity, or hair color, and B = discriminating against someone based on behaviors, then you can’t logically say,

if A, then B

based on something superfluous like “both movements were ridiculed”. or “both movements are radical”. (NAMBLA is ridiculed, too, but that doesn’t make it a legitimate civil rights movement. The Human Extinction Project is radical, but I don’t think it’s a legitimate civil rights movement, either.)

One more complaint: “they are equal because they are both radical” isn’t even accurate: as I’ve already pointed out, the idea that slavery is wrong was never “radical”.

However much people may have indulged in hyperbole, the idea that all men are equal – and that this applied to Africans as well - was known to the Founders, caused at least one of them angst (which we know because George Washington is on record as having angsted over the dissonance) and was ignored and justified for economic and political reasons.

I will even go further and say that THIS is what makes the civil rights movements of the mid-20th century special, and is THE real reason these movements are worthy of “white man’s shame”: because WE KNEW. We had principles, we articulated them – and we knew we were betraying them.. THAT is the power that Martin Luther King Jr. summoned, in his “I Have A Dream” speech – his “Dream” was nothing more and nothing less than a reiteration of “We hold it to be self evident…”.

That is also the power that Gandhi held over the British – and why Gandhi’s great ideas of nonviolence would not work against the Nazis: because the Nazis’ violence was perceived as legitimate, and not contradicting their deeply-held core beliefs.

The civil rights movement had and has a legitimacy that your movement has yet to establish. Quit trying to use someone else’s legitimacy as a means of avoiding the substance of the argument (even though we know you can’t really answer to the substance, because kinship really is NOT a choice, and cannot BE a choice, and there is no way to make gender irrelevant for children but not for lovers, is there?)

Your argument appears to go something like this:

Er… no.

My argument goes more like:

An entirely legitimate movement that you agree with progressed in stages where more and more ‘radical’ ideas were proposed.

Therefore, a movement can’t be bad simply because it engages in similar behavior.

Repeating something doesn’t make it true.

Your argument appears to go something like this:

X was once ridiculed
X is now recognized as a legitimate civil rights movement

Y is being ridiculed
therefore Y is a legitimate civil rights movement

Sorry, but my only response to that is:

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Logic-Propositional-Revised-3rd/dp/0130258490/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319140415&sr=8-1

If I’m wrong, provide links.

Make sure that whatever you link to is “discrimination” in the same sense that blacks were discriminated against – institutional and independent of behavioral choices.

You really think nobody can tell the difference between discriminating against a race vs. discriminating against people who choose a particular type of behavior?

I’m used to you ignoring past threads, but this is a new record. All I have to do is repeat what I wrote in this very thread earlier today:

“Now, you don’t have to agree with any kind of analogy between Emancipation and racial civil rights on the one hand, and rights for homosexuals on the other. But the pattern – less radical notions proposed first, then others pushing more radical notions – can certainly be generalized. Nor does it require duplicity on the part of anyone.”

Blacks were discriminated against. Gays are not being discriminated against

Relative comparisons are tricky – but this is an absolute statement, and the latter clause is false. Leaving aside beatings and all that, look at the links in the first comment of this thread.