It appears that same-sex marriage is being groomed for a major issue in this election. With Jay Carney insisting that President Obama remains clear that his views are unclear, Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann stepped forward this weekend to put the issue front and center in their campaigns. Gingrich this weekend announced that he will lead the fight against same-sex marriage to stop the nation from “drifting toward a terrible muddle.” He said that he would be looking for ways to “defend that view as legitimately and effectively as possible.”
Critics are likely to charge that Gingrich certainly has more experience in the area with three prior marriages — making the campaign sound more like a pitch that marriage should be restricted to a man and a woman and a woman and a woman.
The decision of New York to become the sixth state to recognize same-sex marriage guarantees that it will be a hot issue in the campaign. Bachmann is calling for a constitutional amendment.
For the purposes of full disclosure, I have long argued that the states should uniformly adopt a civil union standard and leave “marriages
Source: Reuters
KDE,
I really don’t get what you’re saying here. I said that since gender was the sole qualification for marrying a man, that it’s discrimination based on gender. Which is more or less forbidden by the 14th Amendment (equal protection and all that).
Now you say that it’s not gender based discrimination because sexuality isn’t a protected class. Now setting aside the fact that I never mentioned sexuality (although it is implied, still marriages between a closeted gay and a woman are still legal, so one would assume that two men getting married for no sexual reasons would still be legal), those two don’t follow. A lesbian that’s passed over for a promotion because she’s a woman still gets to sue. So it seems to me that you’re expecting me to agree with you just because you say.
You’ve provided an example of why the state is allowed to sometimes discriminate based on gender. I’ll admit that I skipped over the state interest angle in my simplification (there’s a reason I called it a real simple run through).. So, you have one of three options if you want me to continue this conversation, you can: explain the state’s interest in denying gay marriages (and no, the majority of the people believing something’s good doesn’t make it a state interest); give me some reason other than your say so as to why this is an issue about sexuality and not gender (I’ve provided you with a reason why it’s about gender, that is that the law doesn’t consider the sexuality of the male\female couple), or both.
In order for it to be my turn, you have to take yours first. Picking up your pawn and setting it down in the same place doesn’t count.
@Elaine
You shouldn’t trust research associated with bad men.
Lord Monckton is a bad man.
Therefore, you shouldn’t trust this research associated with Lord Monckton.
As I said, classic ad hominem stuff.
In order to show you how foolish it is to engage in ad hominems.
Everyone has biases; no one is immune. Nonetheless, we point out flaws in arguments, not in the people themselves.
I see seven separate articles. Only one authored by Monckton.
Let’s assume arguendo that none have any qualifications/credentials. That must mean they no nothing about the science of climate change. So, you or some real ‘expert” should have no problem showing how flawed their arguments are. And yet, I see no such rebuttal. Instead you rely on ad hominems and appeals to authority. I wonder why.
kderosa,
“Thanks for that classic example of an ad hominem attack.”
And what would that “ad hominem” attack be?
Just have to question the motives of scientists who work for NASA and NOAA and other scientific institutions, don’t you?
What…no response about Monckton and no provision of his bona fides to show he’s a qualified expert on the subject of climate change?
@Elaine
Thanks for that classic example of an ad hominem attack.
By the way, who pays the grants for the various climate “researchers”? Or do they just work out of the goodness of their hearts?
kderosa,
Ah…the venerated Science and Public Policy Institute–a right-wing think tank. Lord Christopher Monckton is the institute’s Chief Policy Adviser.
Nice try!
🙂
No. 2: Lord Christopher Monckton
Meet the 12 loudest members of the chorus claiming that global warming is a joke and that CO2 emissions are actually good for you.
Mother Jones
— By Josh Harkinson
http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/dirty-dozen-climate-change-denial-10-lord-christopher-monckton
Excerpt:
Lord Christopher Walter Monckton, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, lends an air of nobility to the ignoble job of confusing the facts about climate change. A self-described former special adviser to Margaret Thatcher on matters ranging from hydrogeology to epidemiology, he has more recently devoted himself to climatology. During a whistle-stop tour of the former colonies this year, the grandiloquent Cambridge classics major addressed a Friends of America rally in West Virginia alongside Ted Nugent and Sean Hannity, visited Canada on a speaking engagement titled Apocalypse? No!, and warned a House Ways and Means subcommittee that regulating carbon dioxide—”a harmless and beneficial trace gas”—will create “fiscal incontinence.”
In 2006, Monckton, who declined to comment for this story, burst onto the climate denial scene with a story in the Sunday Telegraph claiming that “politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St. John the Divine than of science.” It received so many hits that the paper’s website crashed. Since then, the tweedy personage has been embraced by cranks on both sides of the Atlantic. The Heartland Institute sent him to crash the 2007 UN climate talks in Bali and featured him at its renegade climate change conference in June. He is chief policy adviser to the Virginia-based Science and Public Policy Institute, a warren of climate skeptics whose most notable victory was identifying a mislabeled illustration in The Down to Earth Guide to Global Warming, a children’s book.
**********
Lord Christopher Monckton: Meet A Leader Of Climate Change Denial
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/11/lord-christopher-monckton_n_388701.html
Excerpt:
So who is Lord Christopher Mockton? “Mother Jones” describes him as a “self-described former special adviser to Margaret Thatcher on matters ranging from hydrogeology to epidemiology [who] has more recently devoted himself to climatology.” The book “Climate Cover Up” notes, however, that he has no background in science whatsoever, and he’s studied only classics and journalism. He shows up at events to make his global warming-denying case at the behest of groups funded by dirty energy interests such as Friends of America and The Heartland Institute.
Despite the fact that he no scientific training, he’s been called upon twice by Republicans in Congress to testify before subcommittees as a climate “expert”…
@Gyges
The former (sexual orientation) is the correct framing. The latter is a demonstration why the gender framing leads to absurd results. Get it now/
So now it’s consent that is the deciding factor? Really?
If your mother consents to marry you, she should be able to marry you under your consent theory? Yet, the state won’t let her marry you regardless of consent. And, please don’t tell me that the state has some valid interest in protecting the health, safety, welfare, and/or morals of their communities against incestuous unions and isn’t allowed to have an interest in protecting the health, safety, welfare, and/or morals of their communities against homosexual unions due to an equal protection theory.
You’re up.
KSE,
How exactly is my example based on sexuality but yours is based on gender? You can’t have it both ways. Either my example is the state discriminating on Gender, or yours isn’t.
Once you get done deciding which it is, let’s get into the issue that implicate in my example is the consent of the second party, but in yours it’s missing.
Once we get past that, we’ll get into the issue of what exactly the State Interest is in preventing men from marrying men.
@Elaine:
Collection of Papers in Response to NOAA’s “State of the Climate in 2009”
In a “Highlights” report of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s State of the Climate in 2009 document, which was prepared under the direction of the U.S. National Climatic Data Center, we can read the principal findings of what the document describes as the work of “more than 300 scientists from 48 countries.” Their primary conclusion, as stated in the Report’s first paragraph, is that “global warming is undeniable,” and the Report goes on from there to describe “how we know the world has warmed.” But this, and all that follows, tells us next to nothing about what has caused the warming, which is the crux of the whole contentious matter.
Mespo727272:
It is a lawyers job to ask the right questions, and know the answers in advance. Since she so supremely failed on both those points, I see no reason to believe she provided her client their moneys worth.
But I do agree that a technical background is helpful to a generalist and a general background is helpful to a technical person. Right brain/left brain are both necessary.
Bachmann Backers Edit John Quincy Adams Wikipedia Page, Emulate Palin Camp: Gaffe-prone presidential candidate Michele Bachmann‘s supporters are changing history to support her claim John Quincy Adams was one of our nation’s Founding Fathers.
http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/110814/bachmann-backers-edit-john-quincy-adams-wikipedia-page-emulate-palin-camp/
Mespo727272:
climate change is real? I should think it is, it has been changing for around 5 billion years.
You cant put one over on those boys at the Science Academy, no sirree. They are bright bulbs. And right on top of the latest science.
You certainly do have a good sense of humor. Climate change is real, indeed. LOL
Research says climate change undeniable
By Fiona Harvey, Environment Correspondent
Published: July 28 2010
Financial Times
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6d1fd25c-9a69-11df-87fd-00144feab49a.html#axzz1QbRD2I42
Excerpt:
International scientists have injected fresh evidence into the debate over global warming, saying that climate change is “undeniable” and shows clear signs of “human fingerprints” in the first major piece of research since the “Climategate” controversy.
The research, headed by the US National Oceans and Atmospheric Administration, is based on new data not available for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report of 2007, the target of attacks by sceptics in recent years.
The NOAA study drew on up to 11 different indicators of climate, and found that each one pointed to a world that was warming owing to the influence of greenhouse gases, said Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK’s Met Office, one of the agencies participating.
Seven indicators were rising, he said. These were: air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, marine air temperature, sea level, ocean heat, humidity, and tropospheric temperature in the “active-weather” layer of the atmosphere closest to the earth’s surface. Four indicators were declining: Arctic sea ice, glaciers, spring snow cover in the northern hemisphere, and stratospheric temperatures.
@Elaine M — looks like you and George got your colonial history wrong again. Too funny.
@mespo727272 — The charge rebuts itself when you point up the unreliability of the accuser. Call it a lawyer’s trick — or maybe just common sense.
Or maybe just a lack of a defense.
Kills ’em every time.
kderosa:
” I almost missed the fact that you didn’t try to rebut the charge. Well played, sir.”
**********************
The charge rebuts itself when you point up the unreliability of the accuser. Call it a lawyer’s trick — or maybe just common sense.
PS: Get me a list of those stand-up dates. You look like a Catskills guy to me. Maybe the Adirondacks?
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/gay-weddings-to-ring-in-new-york-revenue-2011-06-28?link=MW_latest_news
Roco:
“there is a large scientific consensus disagreeing with man made global warming.”
********************
Not really, but there is a cottage industry of nay-sayers who derive a pretty fair income bucking the consensus. The truth is that there is little debate. The National Academy of Sciences has chimed in and while absolute certainty is not present, the NAS represents reasonable certainty — unless you are looking for a reason to deny it, that is.
Here’s the press release from the Joint Science Academies that begins with the words, “Climate change is real.”
http://nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf
I agree that technical matters require technical proficiency but generalists still are needed to look beyond the present issue to see the broader path. While the lawyer in question asked the wrong question, she likely handled the case properly. Isn’t that the important question?
The problem with generalists is that they think too broadly; the problem with technicians is they think too narrowly. The proper course is the combination, in my view.
Actually, it seems to have comes from Doris Lessing visiting Stalin’s Soviet Union. In any event, regardless of the source, it still fits you.
Good play though, distracting us from your example of useful idiocy by focusing on the source of the quote. I almost missed the fact that you didn’t try to rebut the charge. Well played, sir.
Mespo727272:
there is a large scientific consensus disagreeing with man made global warming. That Chinese guy didn’t say shit. The Chinese do that a good deal. When they say no they may mean yes.
He didn’t say he was signing onto Kyoto and limiting carbon output did he.
But I do agree with him that there are too many lawyers running our country. It has become too complex to allow lawyers and non-technical people to keep running things. They don’t understand the underlying scientific principles for the most part.
I once testified in court and had a lawyer ask me if steel in hardened concrete could have moved. I asked her to repeat the question and made sure she was talking about hard concrete, she was. The judge couldn’t control himself, he answered the question for me as her client was sitting at the table with his head down, face buried in his hands. When the judge was finished looked at me and I said you are exactly right your honor.
Needless to say, the person I testified for received a nice chunk of change for her award.
time to testify – 2 hours
time to wait – 1 hour
watching a judge answer a lawyers moronic question? – priceless.
“without the physical application of theory, there can be no true knowledge.”
Please, I knew you’d go all pedantic if I just wrote democracy, that’s why I wrote democratic republic — wherein, as you know, the will of the majority is expressed through a majority of their elected representatives.
No, because we’re not discriminating on the basis of gender.
Classifications based on race trigger heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection clause, but the Supreme Court has never ruled on the issue of classifications based on sexuality (see Loving). Because sexuality is not a classification for which the Supreme Court has demanded such heightened scrutiny, the decision to let opposite-sex couples marry and to deny the same opportunity to same-sex couples falls under the traditional powers of government to enact economic and social regulation—the so-called “police powers.” These powers go beyond economic and social regulation. States are traditionally understood to have the authority to make laws to protect the health, safety, welfare, and morals of their communities. This means that states can justify their actions by stating that they decline to endorse or provide encouragement to forms of behavior—in this case homosexual intimacy—which the community considers immoral. As long as rational basis scrutiny is being applied, states can justify their actions perfectly well by stating that they decline to endorse and provide encouragement to forms of behavior—in this case, homosexual intimacy—which the community considers immoral.
Don’t like that basis. Fine. Pick another. There are lots of rational bases the State can rest its hat on.
With me so far?
Now, let’s say my male friend wants to enter into a female restroom. He wants the government to let him in, just as it does with every female. The State says “no, because you’re a male. If you were a female then you’d be able to.” That is pretty much the definition of discrimination based on gender.
How do you like that, apparently the State can discriminate on the basis of gender. Thanks for the lesson, Gyges.