zlacker

>>Mayson+(OP)
Before making moral evaluations, it's really useful to look at these situations, and try to automatically reverse the "polarity" of the actors involved. If you see people doing something and you think they're on your side, imagine a similar scenario in which people are taking the same actions for a cause you are violently opposed to, or on behalf of a group you find deplorable. And vice versa. This helps reduce the chances you'll get confused and take a hypocritical position.

>>karate+mh
or even simpler, stop being on a side, then you don't have to do mental tricks like "reversing the polarity". you can just see things for the way they are, without personal identity invested in the situation. this is exactly what being independent is.

>>clairi+gi
I think of the abortion issue as like a necker cube. You can view the optical illusion as extending inward or outward. But it is difficult to see it both ways. You could easily see it as flat, but then you aren't really seeing it at all.

Partisans may object "but in the abortion case it is objectively extending inward and the other perspective is the optical illusion". But that objectivity is a moral illusion.

>>hirund+bj
remember that the abortion issue, as a matter of law, is about the state's interests in the body. it does not litigate religious or social mores, but most of the "debate" is of this latter type.

i personally agree with the recent supreme court ruling that abortion rights shouldn't rest on privacy protections, but rather on a robust reading of the constitution that bodily autonomy is a fundamental right above and beyond states' interests (nation state or US state). i'd extend this to the issues of euthanasia and suicide as well. the state should have a very narrow and rigorously limited set of concerns (foreign relations and interstate disputes, in the case of the US federal govt).

>>clairi+gr
>remember that the abortion issue, as a matter of law, is about the state's interests in the body. it does not litigate religious or social mores, but most of the "debate" is of this latter type.

It seems specious to claim this when the states' interests in the body in this regard (as well as gay marriage and any other rights formerly predicated on the right to privacy asserted in Roe) are based on conservative Christian beliefs and mores.

>>krapp+it
there's a whole body of political science literature that would heartily debate that stance. at most, political discourse and religious discourse grew up together and influenced each other, but to say one is based on the other is a rhetorical diversion at best.

gay marriage shouldn't be predicated on privacy either. two people want equal protection under the law as any other two people who have enjoined their lives together. that's basically it. certainly the gender/sex of those two people isn't the state's concern, because reproduction is not a state concern, but rather a private matter.

>>clairi+Fv
> reproduction is not a state concern

But population growth rate (or decline) is absolutely a concern of the state, and reproduction is a significant contributor to that. In fact, one could argue that if a state has an interest in providing health care (including things like contraception) then it must have an interest in reproduction too.

>>dane-p+ZK
no, it absolutely is not, for a democratic republic like the US. the US is designed to have a minimal federal government that doesn't interfere in the individual life and liberty of its residents. this is very unlike governments that came before it and even peer governments now, like the social democracies of europe. our federal government was not meant to be a central planner, but rather simply an interstate and international arbiter. therefore, it cannot have any interest in population control in any way. that's up to the will of the people, and only the will of the people. it's not even a state concern because it would encroach our civil liberties, which are inalienable by the constitution.

>>clairi+0T
Providing free (at the point of use) health care, and making sure children don't go hungry, and even providing tax benefits to couples who raise children, are all perfectly constitutional policies that don't encroach on civil liberties.

All of those policies can be motivated by a state/federal desire to grow the population. In fact, some people believe that the federal government has a legitimate interest in providing a free (or discounted) service for healthy women to abort healthy children at any stage of their pregnancy, so if the government has an interest in preventing children then surely it can have an interest in producing them.

>>dane-p+uG2
All of this assumes that same-sex marriage has some effect on rate of reproduction or population growth, when it doesn't.

Notwithstanding the facts that marriage isn't necessary for sexual procreation and that LGBT people can and do procreate, if the primary interest of the state in regards to marriage was to define it in terms of procreation, then the greater concern by far should be heterosexual marriages which don't produce children and rates of divorce. Yet no one is attempting to argue that heterosexual married couples should be required by law to produce a child within, say, two years.

Also, there is a difference between government providing access to services which citizens can choose to avail themselves of, and government legislating reproduction directly. The government doesn't have "an interest in preventing children" in the case of providing access to abortion clinics, rather the interest there is providing access to medical care. The government isn't forcing anyone to have abortions. So the government banning gay marriage in the interest of "producing children," aside from not making any sense as described earlier, isn't a valid countercase to the government providing abortion access.