“Also Chris S., in your catching up you might answer my query to you @ January 28th.”

Do you mean this awkwardly phrased question?

“Chris S, did you mean that the lack of a legal requirement for something (say, for procreation) is decisive against that something being a legitimate basis for making laws on eligibility to marry?”

If I understand you right, my answer is “Yes, obviously.” If the ability to procreate is not a legal requirement of marriage, then it is illegitimate for the government to deny people the right to marry based on their lack of ability to procreate. Especially when you are only using lack of procreation ability as an excuse to deny that right to same-sex couples–you would not deny that right to opposite-sex couples who cannot procreate.

Your argument is that we should only allow opposite-sex couples to marry because only they can procreate, but we should still allow opposite-sex couples who can not procreate to marry because they are of the opposite sex. You can try as hard as you want, but this will never be anything but circular reasoning.

Bodily union is not a logical concept, but a mystical one. It’s magical thinking. “Organic biological union” is not a scientific thing. And frankly, the only people I’ve met who have ever used this term have been Christian conservatives. Like most anti-gay arguments, it’s a religious argument that you are attempting to dress up in secular clothes in order to make it seem more legitimate. Try as he might, Robert George can’t hide his desire to impose his version of Christian dogma on the rest of us.

Barry Deutsch has perhaps written the definitive rebuttal to the “bodily union” argument here:

http://familyscholars.org/2010/12/21/what-is-bodily-union-a-response-to-what-is-marriage/

Most married couples during childbearing years do not experience infertility. Of the subset who do, most already have children and most will resolve their fertility problems through changes in behavior. Of those relatively few who make use of medical assistance, most do not use IVF or ARTs. But even the small subset who do partake of such methods, most (better than 93% according to CDC data) do not use ova and/or sperm from outside their marital relationship. Te tiny subset who use 3rd party procreation have thus engaged in extramarital procreation. Their example points outside of marriage and not at its core.

The lack of the other sex is not infertility. Rather, that lack precludes both fertility and infertility of the relationship. Fertility is an ability that is two-sexed. Infertility is the disability. But the lack of the other sex denotes an intrinsic inability. That inability is an inherent feature of the lone individual acting alone, of the same-sex twosome regardless of sexual attractions, of the same-sex threesome or moresome regardless of group identity, of a parade of persons of the same-sex regardless of age or consent or political priorities. No such inability is an actual disability. Surely no gay advocate wuld claim gay is a disability.

SSMers swat an infertility strawman argument manufactured to mislead. It is no mere misunderstanding. It merits debunking as well as mockery.

The lack of the other sex is decisive. Even the proponents of SSM say that the lack of the other sex is both a desirable and a definitive feature of the type of relationship they have in mind for those who’d SSM. That lack means that there can be no bodily union, not aimed at nor achieved.

This decisive distinction means that both the unitive and the procreative aspects of marriage are purposefully set aside. If these are not the ends of SSM, then, what might be its ends and how might that distinguish SSM from the rest of the types of relationships that are not marital? Zilch.

Note that bodily union is not the superficial notion of PIV that you referred to. The man is not just his penis and the woman is not just her vagina. Also, bodily union is necessary but on its own it is insufficient to form the marital type of relationship.

As for the racist analogue, mockery is not a rebuttal of the argument. There is one human race and its nature is two-sexed. Marriage integrates both sexes of the human race. If you would rely on racist criteria to define “interracial” marriage and insist that gay is a race-like identity, then, you confirm that the SSMer is the racist analogue. Deal.

I apologize if i misconstrued your previous comments, I have been extraordinarily tired the last few days. Artificial insemination often uses sperm from another male than the one who will be the father, as was the case for my grad school chaplain and his wife when they discovered he could not father children biologically. The law already condones this, so legalizing same sex marriage will have no effect here. I’m not sure I agree with you on knowing one’s biological forebears to be a basic human right, since I view raising a child as what makes a parent, not contributing genetic material. The law also agrees with me on this, as parents who give their children up for adoption are not required to develop a relationship with those children, and they can make no legal demands on their biological parents if they decide to seek them out.

A Reader, this still doesn’t make any sense. Marriage, whether same-sex or opposite-sex, doesn’t make babies. Same-sex marriage does not make a “laboratory produced child.” You are, once again, describing ART, a practice which is legal for both gay and straight people in this country. If you don’t like this, you should focus your efforts on banning or at least further regulating ART. I might even join you! But once again, this has nothing to do with same-sex marriage.

Many, if not most, same-sex couples will never use ART. They will either adopt, have children from previous relationships, or just not have children at all. How is it just to deny these people a civil right because of a small minority of them might take advantage of a legal procedure? It makes just as much sense to ban straight marriage to stop ART, since straight marriages are the largets customer base.

Again, same-sex marriage does not deprive children of anything. Most of the children raised by same-sex marriages will have already been deprived the right to be raised by their bio- mother and father. A gay couple taking them in at that point is just as good as a straight couple taking them in. You are arguing that we should deprive these children further by refusing to allow their adoptive parents the benefits of marriage simply because of their genders. This does no good and a lot of harm.

“Once that is done, all unique and particular protections for the natural family (blood relationships) which have historically existed and were over-ridden only in matters of extreme urgency will be erased from the legal codes. This has already happened in Canada.”

I’m sorry, but this is absurd. Are there no inheritence laws in Canada? No child custody laws? No child abuse laws? No spousal abuse laws? No divorce laws? No federal marriage benefits? If these things exist in Canada, can you understand how your statement that “all unique and particular protections for the natural family” have been “erased from the legal codes” there is false?