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Post by Browning35 on Jan 12, 2014 12:13:28 GMT
The thing is most of the struggling couples that I knew didn't get any social assistance. They just got robbed by the state and then had to struggle along as best they could after.
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Post by NamelessStain on Feb 9, 2014 13:00:42 GMT
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Post by Gundogs on Feb 9, 2014 14:46:39 GMT
To me same sex marriage is immoral . It gets even worse when these couples are allowed to adopt children & raise
them in this immoral environment. Our society is slowly going to shit...wonder if Caligula will rise again
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Post by RTF Squared on Feb 10, 2014 0:22:44 GMT
I'm honestly curious why people find homosexuality and the marriage thereof inherently immoral. I could see if we lived in a world where procreation meant survival of family and species, sure I'd buy that, but we're far from that in 2014. I'm meaning zero offense to anybody's religion here, but I don't often find the Bible the end-all of all moral construction. Gross, sure, hard to look at, fine, but what legitimate (from the perspective of do what you want until you harm others) moral harm do they cause others? Let's leave the people who march in parades in pleather banana hammocks of the table, because I'd consider it immoral for hetero people to do.
I have a cousin who had two daughters before 18. Uses nearly any available drugs when not in jail, habits continue to this day. We're talking meth addict, smoked pot every day, tried every drug ever offered to him not requiring a needle, meaning he only snorted the heroin. Never worked a job longer that a couple months in his life. DUIs, domestic violence, multiple drug charges, failures to appear and escapes. In prison right now. The girls' mothers are both about the same class acts, except the second one didn't mind shooting up heroin.
It wasn't long before both were taken by social services, about a year apart from each other. They both ended up in the home of a lesbian couple that takes good care of them, has them in a good school, good home, way better life. My question is how is a homosexual couple adopting these children immoral? Are these kids better off with their parents? Are they better off in a group home where kids are treaded like inmates for their parent's mistakes? Better off on the streets? Better off dead? Sure, I'll grant they might be better off with a hetero couple that has their shit together. Butadoptive parents are generally well-vetted to make sure they aren't fuckups like the families these kids come from. I know exactly zero people that were adopted that came from a peachy background, but I know several that ended up in much better places in life than they were born into.
I personally find taking in a couple third or fourth generation drug addict children that had pretty much zero real prospects given to them in life and giving them something more a very moral thing to do. Just one case, every circumstance is different and YMMV.
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Post by Browning35 on Feb 10, 2014 1:59:03 GMT
In my opinion it has to do with normalcy. Neither having drug addicted parents nor having homosexual guardians is normal. In society they should both be discarded as choices for parents or guardians as they both have the potential to do a great deal of harm just in different ways. Since you're talking about it from the vein of adopting or fostering children there's more of a chance that homosexuals will sexually molest or rape children than a properly vetted heterosexual couple. www.frc.org/?i=IS02E3Homosexuals more likely to molest kids (*Click*)They can portray themselves as normal, but they aren't and allowing them to be in unsupervised situations where they might abuse kids given their high incidence in proportion to their percentage of the population is just stupid. What happens in the bedroom of two consenting adults isn't anyone's business. When a child is in that bedroom it's a different story. Society has a vested interested in making sure that the child in question isn't abused, molested, raped, taken advantage of, neglected or that nothing else that's negative happens to him or her. I'm not Christian though, so I don't really think in terms like that. I just think in terms of what is natural and unnatural and homosexuality falls into the unnatural category. Others that are Christian may have different reasons for being against it, but those are mine. |
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Post by RTF Squared on Feb 10, 2014 5:36:56 GMT
I can see that normalcy is something to be somewhat desired. We have very different perspectives of what is normal. The lower paragraphs will explain a bit further what is more normal to my upbringing. When I was 18, it was somewhat normal for people in my neighborhood to smoke meth. A lot of my friends at the time and some family members we're doing it regularly to the point it was abnormal among the people I was around to not smoke meth. A friend I consider a brother's family universally has felony records and/or smokes meth aside from him and single one of his many cousins. As in all of them except two. Most of them, including him, unwed parents. Normality was definitely not desirable.
I also look at the sterotypical "normal" person in 2014 that is totally clueless to the world around them, has no situational awareness, is scared of everything and work jobs that they hate to buy crap they don't need with money they don't have. Not even prepared or aware enough that somebody just punched their ass in the mouth until they're on the ground and unable to react. Nobody here comes off as that "normal" and I doubt they desire to. With both these above situations, normalcy is a horrible thing and one should desire to be as abnormal and individual as possible.
Honestly reading an article about the harm of homosexuality sourced from "The Baptist Press" feels a lot like reading about the harm of guns from the Brady Campaign. Statistics are easily manipulated and cherry picked for any argument. I can't lend much respect to the second article.
The first article is much better written and cited than the second. It lends a lot to your argument, and thank you for supplying it. This is the most educated and logical response to the question I asked I have ever received, which almost always goes straight to the Bible. The majority of this article is very well written. One part I don't really agree with:
"Pedophiles are invariably males: Almost all sex crimes against children are committed by men." I have to not only disagree with this statement, but argue that it hardly even pertains to the arguement.I would argue a lot of crimes perpetrated my hetero females go unreported/uncharged. I hate to admit having knowing gay people, sex offenders and child molesters in front of the guys I talk guns and prepping with, but unfortunately I do in all categories. Neither my gay uncle, my gay great uncle or any of my mom's gay friends ever made a pass at me when I was young. None of my mom's lesbian friends made passes at my sister. A close married and hetero female friend of my mother's sure did and put me, my brother, my sister, my above mentioned cousin, possibly her own children and several of our friends in a lot of uncomfortable circumstances I'd rather not discuss too much further. Police said there wasn't enough evidence to file charges, but I wouldn't make this shit up. There was at least three cases that by that law she was guilty of and she wasn't charged. It sucked to deal with. Of all the registered sex offenders I've known, five including my great uncle, all but the great uncle were hetero and their victims were female. Look, none of this shit is fun for me to talk about, but I've been around enough of these groups to know that it doesn't correlate. Of the gay people I've known one was a molester, of the molesters I've known one was gay. I don't think this really argues against a majority of 'Lesters are men, but I would say certainly that "invariably" or "almost all" is BS from personal experience, and adds nothing to the argument of gays being more "lester" on average.
I also have to wonder how many hetero statuatory rape charges go unreported. When I was in high school a few girls we're openly and consensually dating men who were definitely outside the age bracket. They did it as a matter of preference for their own various reasons too. Perhaps these were "normal enough" by the standards of the partners and the people around them to not be reported, but definitely not right by the letter of the law.
Or how about my hetero father and his wife that is three years my junior that came right off the plane from the Phillipines to the chapel in Vegas? I don't care what the law says about what age is kosher, she was 22, I was 25, that's molester as fuck to marry somebody younger than your son. But by the law this is a normal and acceptable marriage? I've met gay and lesbian couples a hell of a lot less 'Lester and much more stereotypically normal than this "socially acceptable" marriage.
I guess to sum it up, I'll go with my personal experience and gut over the studies presented here. Of the truly unsavory, totally immoral moefauxs I've met in my day, none of them were gay. My great uncle, convicted molester of a male teen (happened many, many years before I was born), was much more in the "mentally retarded/feeble" stable than dangerous predator. He was the least savory of the gay people I've met in my life, most of which were/are pleasant, immaculately groomed, well adjusted people who on average were about my definition of "harmless." They just happened to sleep with the same sex, which on average was pretty damned gross if you ask me, but their business.
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Post by Browning35 on Feb 10, 2014 16:09:12 GMT
There's going to be some disparity in what people consider 'normal'. For an American family I think the generally accepted version would be a mother and a father, house in the burbs, baseball and hotdogs, civics classes, learning to ride a bike, having vacations where the dad threatens at least once to turn the car around or come back there (but doesn't), getting a job at 15 as a stockboy or something, learning to drive at 16 and so on. Everyone having enough to eat, a job/going to school and no meth or homosexual uncles anywhere in sight.
That your upbringing (and mine for that matter, just differs in the details) wasn't exactly ideal doesn't mean that the ideal isn't there or that it isn't something that we shouldn't strive for, it just means it didn't work out that way.
At any rate there's been plenty of studies that link pedophilia and homosexuality. They're just usually buried and considered politically incorrect as now days everyone is supposed to be all sensitive to everyones sexual preferences. For homosexual males they'll usually target adolescent boys and for heterosexual males that are bent sexually it's usually adolescent or pre-adolescent girls. I'm willing to bet that you're right and that many of the crimes of women aren't reported, but I'm also willing to bet that the bulk of the problem of sexual abuse is male perpetrated.
The first link is better, but I had the second one on hand and figured I'd throw it in and hoped you'd excuse the site that linked it. I'll look around and see what I can find that has a better source.
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Post by RTF Squared on Feb 11, 2014 8:13:00 GMT
The first link is well documented, cited and comes off unbiased enough to make up for the second. I agree with the disparity in the term normal. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the majority of openly gay people I've met fit the stereotypical American "normal" much better than the average person I was around growing up. I agree that everything is too politically sensitive. People get too hurt over everything, and many people nowadays think their entitled to something if their in a minority group outside that stereotypical suburban family. On the same note, people like that are stupid regardless of race, economic status or sexual preference. We could go deep into statistical mathematics and flush out the rate of homosexuals to straights to truly figure out what group on average does more, sure. In fact, considering that the overwhelming majority of the population is straight non-chomos with 4 sex convicts versus one in a much smaller group of gay people, I would say my experience may even somewhat support that claim. But as to a higher rate of homos being chomos being grounds to disqualify them from family life, I think that we kind of have to agree to disagree here. I hate to say I've been around enough of both to have enough personal experience to disagree. Denying gay people the same rights that others have to live that stereotypical American family life you described is wrong. Punishing the whole group of them for the behavior of some of them is a lot like punishing all gun owners with magazine restrictions and AWBs because people illegally shoot up innocent people for pretty much no reason. I'm not the type to agree with punishing innocent people for the actions of others. It really doesn't matter to me if its 95% of a group of people are totally immoral degenerates by any reasonable standard, it's still wrong to punish the five. This hypothetical 5% are Americans just like you and me and have the same right to life that we do. If the stereotypical American dream or normalcy is the picket fence, Labrador and family life you described, denying it to any group of people is wrong. There is also the two-edged sword of the American dream. Anything you have the right to EARN in this country anybody else has a right to EARN. If you live that "normal suburban American" and are successful, you probably earned it. If you earned it you probably did so through some quality combination of morality, work ethic and/or education. Anybody who legitimately wants to earn and live that life has a right to regardless of sexual preference. Besides, the average gay couple in surburbia probably isn't going to be the one the HOA is going to be getting angry with due to lack of property maintenance. You also said "Neither having drug addicted parents nor having homosexual guardians is normal. In society they should both be discarded as choices for parents or guardians as they both have the potential to do a great deal of harm just in different ways." Well, have ya tried asking some drug addicts not reproduce irresponsibly? Turns out their other favorite thing besides getting doped up 24/7 is generally unprotected sex. I'm pretty sure their pick-up lines are something like "Hey, I have some meth, wanna go breed and trade some stids?" We can want to discard drug addicted parents all we want, but it's not going anywhere. They are at no point "choices" for parents, they don't literally choose to procreate when they have wholesale unprotected sex. If we could choose a totally crackbaby free society, I'm sure we would. Taking their kids and putting them into group/foster homes often doesn't work any better and often leaves them with issues as bad as they would have had with their natural parents. So lets say we have a crackbaby, degenerate parents and Social Services takes the kid. The whole family is drug addicts, nobody SS will let the child live with. The options are a group home or adopting out. For this hypothetical situation there is only a gay couple available. We somehow know without a shadow of a doubt they are normal in every fashion aside from being gay. (impossible to truly know, sure, but same goes with anybody) What moral harm are they imposing? This kid is otherwise growing up in a effed up home and will grow up to be the same as the parents or worse. Or will grow up in a minimum security prison for children, with access to the shittiest schools, meh food, being bullied by kids who actually should be in a minimum security prison. There isn't any bike, dog or picket fence, not enough food to eat, and instead of actual nurturing parents they get to grow up with a bunch of juvenile delinquents and their crackbaby peers. If these otherwise normal people can provide a better life than that, its better than where they came from. Hands down. Also of note, a good number of adoptive parents (0ver 50%) cite infertility as reason for adopting. www.statisticbrain.com/adoption-statistics/ What I'm getting is adopting crackbabies is generally nobody's first choice. Generally is people can choose to be fertile, or not gay for that matter, they will just have children and not adopt. I also doubt that gay couples are the generally the first choice for Social Services to send this hypothetical crackbaby to live with/be raised by. I will say that if a government agency can see that a gay couple is better than a group home past the ass their head is stuck in, I don't see why logical, intelligent and reasonable Americans can't. |
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Post by Browning35 on Feb 11, 2014 17:01:14 GMT
Cool. All I was going for.
The ones I've met seemed to often have something wrong with them mentally or emotionally, but then again I don't know every homosexual in existence either.
See the thing is I'm not talking about disqualifying homosexuals from family life, just adoption or fostering children.
That doesn't disqualify them from family life. Assuming that it does isn't factoring in the fact that some of these people produced children in straight relationships before they came out of the closet or that there aren't businesses such as sperm banks.
Can't stop people from producing children on their own. Completely unenforceable. Don't even think that the government should try.
If they're shitty parents and the child in question is being exploited, neglected, or abused physically or sexually then they should be removed from the home and their parents custody. Same thing goes for straight parents for that matter.
Living a life of sexual deviance doesn't exactly sound like the way to earning anything except maybe a venereal disease. Same couple be said for many straight people as well.
I was actually responding to the comments about choosing guardians for adoption and foster homes. No, I don't think either should be chosen. Plenty of regular people out there that want kids.
If drug users who have their own kids can't take care of them then see above about having them taken away.
Actually while they may not be going anywhere, many of their kids are going to a foster home.
When I was a kid it was common to see kids stay in jacked up homes year after year, but largely that's becoming a thing of the past.
If I tried to count up the number of welfare check calls and calls where PD asked us to come out to check out a kiddo before CPS took them away I wouldn't even know where to begin.
If they get some help then there's often a chance to get their kids back, but if not then they don't and their custody rights are severed.
That means that those kids have a chance at life instead of becoming a product of their environment and being the next generation of junkies, hookers and criminals.
That depends largely on the quality of the adoptive/foster parents and getting them long term placement instead of shuffling them around and making them feel unwanted.
As far as the hypothetical crack-baby goes I'll tell you about an actual call I went on.
My partner and I arrived at the scene of these section 8 apts we always went to. There was this crowd and a guy (later identified as the mothers boyfriend) was holding this 5 year old boy who had a bunch of blood coming out of his mouth and ears with some decerebrate posturing. The mother and a small crowd of neighbors were there as well.
Got him in the back of the ambulance, tried to intubate, but couldn't as his jaws were locked (we didn't have RSI or PAI back then...almost lost a finger). Couldn't nasally intubate due to the obvious head trauma. Tried some Ativan, that didn't work and at that time we didn't carry Etomidate, Versed or Succ's (got it a year later...thanks).
So we just put a collar on him, bagged and beat feet to the nearest ER and had a chopper meet us there. After the Doc at the ER got him intubated the chopper landed, we put him back on our cot and they flew him to Children's.
Turns out that he was a drug baby and he had some developmental problem as a result. Mother got frustrated at something and beat his head in. He ended up blind, paralyzed, brain damaged and vent dependent for the rest of his life. The mother eventually got 40 years. I testified at the hearing to sever her parental rights and two years later at her trial as to her and her boyfriends statement on-scene ("This is what happens when you're so mean to him").
At any rate my whole reason for telling about this call is that even with his developmental disabilities and his physical disabilities where he was left vent dependent he still got adopted by a nice family north of here still willing to deal with it all. I got to meet them after the trial, the DA arranged it. I only wish he'd been taken away from his POS mother before all this shit happened. So there are loving families out there willing to adopt and foster kids that have had it rough, even when it means that it'll be severely disrupting their lives to do so. Insurance paid for some of his care, but the family in question absorbed a significant part of it on their own.
So if these kids are coming from poor circumstances to begin with I don't see a reason to lower the standards just so people who've chosen to lead a deviant lifestyle can feel better about themselves. That's what it really what it boils down to isn't it?
If a child with these kinds of problems can get adopted I'm thinking there's some hope for others a little more fortunate.
If you disagree, that's cool. :Shrug Like you said we'll just have to agree to disagree. I'm just unlikely to change my mind as I feel pretty strongly about it.
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Post by RTF Squared on Feb 25, 2014 11:26:26 GMT
Thank you for sharing that story. I can imagine that was extremely frustrating to deal with, and hopefully meeting the parents made that better in the long run. Extra respect for dealing with the additional stress first responders go through. I'm glad to see the mother was imprisoned for a good long time, she not only deserved it but it could serve as a good example.
I've taken some extra time to think this one through since I lost my original reply to my computer sucking. As always you raise a lot of good points to be thought about, this last point more exceptionally than usual. I'm an open-minded person to an intelligent argument, so I've really thought about what you've said.
I made an assumption that if adoption wasn't something acceptable than neither the sperm bank option or natural parent methods would be acceptable either. If homosexuals are unacceptable as parents in the same sense as drug addicts, shouldn't the divorce of a married couple that one partner went gay result in revocation of parental rights? Why would it be acceptable for them to use a fertility clinic and a surrogate mother if adoption shouldn't be an option? I agree that government shouldn't interfere in people having children, but nothing involving gay people having children is natural birth. I don't understand why these situations that government could easily intervene in it's ok for gays to have children. Is it for no reason other than being against further government intervention into individual life?
As far as giving equal marriage/parenting rights to gays, I don't think it's about just "making them feel better." I'm like most here who are tired of the politically correct BS and people being so butthurt over the labels they're attached to, often by choice, even when not referencing them. I'm tired of people getting hurt when somebody says something is gay and acting like it's hate speech. It's pretty retarded and way past old. It's making for an uptight nation of a bunch of people who love to play the victim. On that note, it's more about giving people equal access to whatever their perception of the American dream is as long as they can earn it. From the evidence you presented much earlier in this thread, I could see how one could believe they are getting that handed to them.
I think a big source of our disagreement is not only what we consider normal, but also deviant/deviance. I guess I could have come off as pretending to know them all, but I've met a lot of gay people in my time living/working so close to Boulder. They're pretty common around those parts for sure. A lot of them (not all) came off as pretty normal people in most aspects, which for Boulder is on average douchey/weird in many aspects. There were also some of them that were total tools just like anybody else. If somebody came into my store and dropped a bunch of money decking out their typically gay car, they are probably just as well off (or in debt for that matter) as anybody else. They may be deviant in the bedroom, but that's their business as long as nobody else is harmed. Whatever they have earned, they probably earned it the same usually mundane way as everybody else, not through their lifetime of deviance. Probably earned it in a much more legitimate fashion than the average meth user.
You probably deal with seeing a lot more of the shitty side of people in your profession than I ever will. I deal with zero injured or abused people, nor see the direct consequences of these actions. In general I'd say we see pretty opposite sides of the spectrums of the general public on average. My average former customer (don't really deal with the public anymore) is generally happily spending money on fancy electronic shit they don't need. Your profession probably leads you to a wiser perspective of the average person if your dealing with them when injured/abused.
I also think we have pretty different views on marriage. At this point I'm pretty convinced marriage is an absolute travesty of what it used to resemble, a total joke. People are getting divorced left and right, marry people younger than their children after divorces and get married just to bring state/employer recognition just for benefits. It's more acceptable for me to let people into the club after all the mess is made up of it.
Either case, you make it easy to "agree to disagree" with. Your perspective isn't one forged in hyperbole and emotion, but one of statistics and experience. Makes it a hell of a lot easier to respect a point of view that I don't necessarily agree with. Definitely not the thoughts of what I would consider a bigot in the slightest.
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