Jeremy Taylor wrote:

I would probably agree, if the state could be radically decentralised and limited. At the moment, the strong social and cultural role of the Western state means it unfortunately matters which family arrangements it supports.

I suggest that the role of the organised state is in direct correlation with the state of the family. The cohesion of the (extended) family has been demolished, atomised, so the government correspondingly can take a firm lead in the matters that could otherwise well be handled by the family.

On the side of pro-gays, I have seen plenty of ultra-feminist/hedonist statements to the effect that family at its very heart, parents in particular, are patriarchal, oppressive (to children and women), working contrary to freedom and happiness (of children and women). As if the govt were somehow more caring...

DanielCC wrote:

This really deserves its own post but what good will bringing in the Divine Exemplars do for ID?
 

 The article can be found online. I cannot link to it because I don't have enough karma yet.

I mentioned it because it introduces briefly the entire framework of Aristotelian causes and is therefore useful to the opening poster. I personally don't favour Aristotelian causes or ID, so I think that no matter how they justify each other, they are wrong.

@iwpoe

I see. We don't disagree much after all. JFYI though, I am not an American and I don't care much about the peculiarities of the American case. It's rather difficult to care, when in much of the rest of the Western world it's already very old news.

iwpoe wrote:

You think that this happened two months ago? And not 22+ years ago when this fight started? It's not the law that did the problem but rather the problem that led to the law.

I'd go even further. Slowly but surely, aspects like parental acceptance, spousal duties, punishable adultery, slow and costly divorce have been historically removed from marriage, making it a matter of whim, a game of enjoyment, bringing the concept of "love" gradually closer to "sex for fun". Right now these two concepts are perfectly synonymous for most people. In the 20's, the decadent gay subculture was briefly wildly popular and influential, foreshadowing the loss of relevance of marriage and its final redefinition by means of gay laws. Hippies and feminists have been intermediate stages in this process.

iwpoe wrote:

"Defending" a "traditional" notion of "marriage" or it's so-called "sanctity" is a fool's errand when even most heterosexuals has clearly long lost any thought out bearing on marriage, traditional or not, and when many had even longer ceased to consider it a sacrament.

Any way I think about it, the political battle was doomed. Marriage could not be salvaged. And now with gay laws instituted, the concept of marriage has been bastardised, akin to the analogies I brought.

I personally prefer meaningful laws, but when people at large already saw marriage as an utterly pointless burden, then the only meaningful thing to do is to do away with the concept altogether and maybe create something like "household" or "cohabitation" in its place, where various "configurations" of people can have some relevant official privileges. Those "configurations" may be sexual or not, as the group deems relevant. The

iwpoe wrote:

I think it perfectly comprehensible that homosexual couples see their present situation as not sufficiently serious and want to structure it towards something higher. I've never been in such a relationship, so perhaps this is an inherent impossibility, but I do think it's laudable as an attempt.

 FWIW, I also think it comprehensible, even perfectly comprehensible that homosexual couples see their present situation as not sufficiently serious. However, official normalisation of homosexuality by means of legislation is not going to help them to structure their aims towards anything higher. To the contrary, it tears the rest of society down to the unserious level where homosexuals are. This should also be easily comprehensible.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

I believe, though I am not completely sure, that the popularity of gender as a substitute for the term sex or the sexes is due to those who wish to separate sexual identity from biological or physiological sex.

This must be to do with the kind of language English is, namely English has too many words at its disposal. And it has confused categories also.

On one hand, the controversy arises because there are different words like sex and gender, so some people may suggest, with various motivation, things like what's the precise difference between the words, e.g. to reserve one word for biological sex and the other word for every other case, or if there's no difference between the words, they may debate which one is the more correct word.

On the other hand, English has largely lost grammatical gender, but preserved it at the very heart of language use - pronouns. Grammatical gender may easily be perceived, in a society striving for equal rights or gleichschaltung, as a conceptual obstacle, and it becomes a subject of seemingly legitimate questioning when the language has history of loss of grammatical gender. The only last obstacle is how easy language change is to administer centrally.

Despite the diffusion of English all over the world, central administration of its change still seems possible, amazingly. For example "Negro" has been effectively eliminated.

Other languages may have whole different considerations. In French, German, and Russian, grammatical gender makes no ontological sense whatsoever (das Mädchen?), but is so pervasive in the "logic" of language and has no history of shifting or disappearing as a category, so that it's hard to argue for its eradication or for other major change. The only possible change would be political.

Then there are languages where there's no grammatical gender, certainly not in pronouns. In languages without grammatical gender, words like "man" and "woman" are not perceived connected t