On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 31, 2014 10:01 UTC (Fri) by tao (subscriber, #17563)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by dlang
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

I know infertile heterosexual married couples.
I know heterosexual married couples that just don't *WANT* to have children.
I know heterosexual couples who have no common children, just children from a previous marriage.
I actually don't know any heterosexual couples that have children through insemination, but there are plenty.
I know heterosexual couples who have adoptive children.

All of these are apply equally to your "not any more relevant to creating the next generation than singles are", yet they are all entitled to get married.

How about bisexuals, btw? A heterosexual person having a child before getting married to another person than the other parent and then no more children after is no different than a bisexual person having a child before getting married and then getting married to another person after.

No matter how you put it, unless you explicitly tie marriage to childbearing (say through not allowing marriage until birth, or having mandatory divorces after a certain time limit without a child) -- which would be a horrible thing indeed -- then you *ARE* discriminating against non-heterosexuals.

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On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 31, 2014 11:09 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

This is why I used the term 'statisticly' earlier in the thread.

Yes, childless couples are 'cheating the system', but in this case perfection is very definitely the enemy of good enough. And many of the couples that intend to be childless end up having children.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 31, 2014 11:51 UTC (Fri) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link] (3 responses)

http://www.stat.fi/til/perh/2011/02/perh_2011_02_2012-11-...

"The commonest family type in Finland is still a married couple without children, making up 36 per cent of all families in 2011."

Of course that includes couples that have not *YET* had children (but will some time in the future), but it's still far from just a statistical blip.

Still if you accept childless heterosexual couples (something that according to you is a statistical blip), why don't you accept the statistical blip that is childless non-heterosexual couples?

Let's put it succinctly: *WHAT* are the negative consequences do you think equal marriage rights will cause and *WHY* do you consider them so important that discrimination would be justified?

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 31, 2014 12:12 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

I hate to say it, but...this discussion has wandered pretty far afield. Could it maybe be about time to wind it down or to find a more appropriate forum for it? Thanks.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 31, 2014 20:06 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Can you create a forum for such "spillover" threads which is well-insulated from LWN? So that such discussions could be painlessly moved there.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 31, 2014 20:15 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

You can get this kind of discussion anywhere, if you wanted to cater to LWN readers you or I could pretty easily create our own lwn-lounge.net domain and run a forum there as an unofficial and separate thing, it just wouldn't have LWN authentication data.