LGBTQ+ Rights and America

http://www.newsweek.com/south-carolina-republicans-gay-marriage-811839

In South Carolina, six Republican lawmakers have proposed a new bill to amend state law and have gay marriage listed as "parody marriage", arguing that non-heterosexual marriage is "against human design".

As unlikely as this is to pass, this is still a load of bullshit.

Never change, Republicans.

Actually, no. Please change. Or leave office. ASAP.

edited 20th Feb '18 12:08:43 AM by M84

...really. "Parody marriage"? They couldn't settle for using the old "Civil Union" as a name, they just had to add an insult to it?

You mean like the President's?

Well, plenty of straight marriages are sad jokes, so it looks like they're unintentionally going for a self-own again.

Marriage is a human design. A human word, a human construct...

If only because they still run on the notion that biblical men NEVER had hundreds of wives.

Is it just because they care about "tradition" and are too afraid to change anything?

Gender's a human construct (technically so is sex, since it's trying to categorise the result of billions of years of nature slinging mud at a wall, but I digress), but most people who want to "abolish gender" want to do it to stop trans people from expressing themselves.

Marriage has its uses, and if it's ever abolished, it'll be to spite same sex couples. You mark my words.

I believe some states tried to abolish marriage exactly to spite gay people.

Sexes in the human context are decidedly not social constructs (the concept of sexes as purely binary on the other hand...), as they are defined as the biological differences between males, females, and the various intersex or otherwise atypical sexual phenotypes. This is in contrast to gender, defined as the socially and culturally constructed differences between sexes, and in my view, it would be preferable for these behavioral archetypes ought to be either discarded or decoupled from the underlying biology such that they become more a matter of personal preference comparable to the color of one's garments rather than a normative social compulsion.

edited 13th Mar '18 5:38:00 PM by CaptainCapsase

Sex is absolutely a social construct, it is a generally simplified model of biological differences that offers a convenient shorthand for expected traits. In humans there are five factors considered to determine sex: Gonads, external genitalia, hormone levels, secondary sex traits, and sex chromosomes. Of these five, people are assigned based on just external genitalia and maybe gonads.

Sex (for humans) is determined by chromosomes. The externalities are easy ways to read the chromosomes. Unless there is a glitch XY is penis and XX is vagina.

edited 13th Mar '18 6:55:49 PM by RAlexa21th

Those aren't the only options, though. Folks get three sex chromosomes from time to time. Which doesn't strictly contradict what you said, but does highlight that this shit gets complicated.

@Sixthhokage1: A purely binary conception of sex is a social construct yes, but as far as I recall of (I'm speaking here as a graduate in biology starting a PhD program next fall), all of those indicators you mentioned exhibit a highly bimodal distribution in humans, upwards of 95% for several of them.

Moreover, many of the atypical phenotypes and genotypes falling outside of the normal range of variation within the male and female archetypes are associated with moderate to serious health problems, particularly the aneuploidies of sex chromosomes like Turner Syndrome and, as alluded to, Klinefelter syndrome.

edited 14th Mar '18 8:14:50 AM by CaptainCapsase

"If you were to make a kid, would it grow inside you or not?" is a pretty concrete metric, although it doesn't work for people who can't reproduce.

(Klinefelter syndrome is not actually a particularly "serious" condition, infertility is its main symptom)

My mistake. Though from an evolutionary fitnesss perspective infertility is a very serious problem.

Sure, but it doesn't matter for species survival if it stays very rare.

Yet again, I feel the need to point the bleeding obvious out: we've evolved to work in kin groups. We are of the branch of monkey-apes that have trooped about in troops for a good six million years, if not far many more (I personally bet on "going right back to the lemur-like critters that eventually became monkeys before giving ape a whirl" — so, going back a good 50 million years).

A mother can find utility in having a brother or sister who doesn't have their own kids if they care for or protect hers against other people (including herself) or in the event of her own death. That is family survival. So, having even a quarter of the group swing in LGBT directions can benefit the troop's overall genetic survival, even if at the cost of many of those individuals not directly contributing to it by having their own kids.

A bug made into a feature is still a feature.

edited 14th Mar '18 9:20:56 PM by Euodiachloris

Infertility can even be very common within a species and still be evolutionary fit. Most ants never breed.

Ants have very different lives than mammals, for example, in our case, Fertile rulers dont have a inhnerently longer lifetime.

But who cares? Humans dont have to live according to nature

Seriously? Nothing we do is inherently "unnatural". False dichotomies, ho! (Yup — everything we are and do abides by laws of physics, chemistry and biology. Psychology is all about biochemistry, evolution and anatomy, dude.)

Plastic? Sure, we've made it through a lot of chemistry. But, you can find those molecules in gas giants. So, big whoop.

That is kinda the answer, there nothing unnatural because everything is still a part of nature.

Which makes the natural moniker totally pointless.

Albeit, I was talking about the whole "need to reproduce and survive". We dont need to continue using it as a rule to measure the utility of someone to society (there way better means to do that)

Sure, it's a great idea to reproduce enough as a group to survive, but nothing says that to manage that, every last individual in the group has to, nay, MUST reproduce.

As long as enough kids grow up to produce the next generation (and if an uncle helped pay to bring them up and/or baby-sat all through their childhood without any of his own kids eating up his time, he contributed to their survival — so, he participated!), a species is golden. And, even if a species doesn't produce enough offspring: it doesn't matter. In only 100,000 years, there'll be another one along filling in most of the gaps they left behind.

Extinction is perfectly normal, too. Most species that have ever been have done it.

edited 15th Mar '18 9:05:22 AM by Euodiachloris

That line just sounds weird.

I understand your point, but I think that you are missing my point.

We should not give a fuck if something is "natural", "normal" or anything like that, just if it helps to raise the overall happiness.

Basically, we agree, just that we have different reasons to that.

It literally means the difference between normal things and sobrenatural stuff.

edited 15th Mar '18 9:09:43 AM by KazuyaProta

"natural" is a really poorly defined word.