That's a weird measure. I have a religious practice I do every day. I never attend services. By this measure, I would be counted as completely irreligious. So maybe what's changing is that people are learning to be more self-reliant. A lot of Christian churches rely on teaching people that what matters is that you believe, not that you do, and we can see this reflected in the weird representation of Christianity in the U.S., for example, where compassion and charity are no longer considered Christian, but ostentatious demonstrations of faith, which were specifically advised against by Jesus in the new testament, are considered the most accurate indicator of piety.

This is actually how cults work. Any congregation that has an element of cultishness to it is indeed at risk from the Internet, and that's a good thing. But there's plenty of religion thriving online—it's just not as much the sort that has the qualities of cultishness you're talking about.

IOW, the internet is bad for fundamentalism. Actually, it's just fine for religion that tolerates skepticism. I grew up atheist, and I'm a Buddhist now. I became Buddhist by choice, because it made sense to me as a philosophy and a practice. Having skeptics online to debate with is good for my practice, because it helps me to discard junk thinking and keep what works. Actually most of the communication I have with other practitioners and with accessing lectures and reading materials happens online. Wikipedia has huge volumes of information on religion, much of which is useful, although you have to take it with a grain of salt.

But most people just aren't that interested in religious practice, and for them it's easy to see that the same thing that is good for my practice will just knock away theirs, because there isn't much there. I would not necessarily count this as a bad thing, but there is a strain of nihilism in some of the trolling I see online that could stand to be attacked as well; for that you need some kind of ethical framework to discuss, whether it's religious or secular.

Christian zealots, you mean. So they will drop off the Internet, and stop hassling us. Sounds like a win. I jest, but only partially.

So basically you'd fuck over an entire class of people on a totally bogus matter of principle: that you don't think courts should set precedents.

Um, NAMBLA doesn't advocate "exposing children to sexuality." They advocate coercing children into having sex with adults (claiming that it's not coercion doesn't make it not coercion). I don't agree that children should be shielded in the way you suggest, because it's tremendously harmful to them, and bad for society. The reason we have so many hangups about sex, including letting men marry men and women marry women, is because we try to control children's sexuality, and children grow up to be adults. Coercing them into living up to some fantasy we have of them being chaste and innocent is probably less harmful than coercing them into having sex, but it's still coercion, and it's definitely harmful.

On the contrary. While you can certainly describe it as one right, that's a shorthand. My description of it as two rights is equally valid, and not fallacious. To be clear, I am not saying your description isn't valid. I'm simply saying that it's no more valid than mine. The logical fallacy you committed was in essentially saying that x+y=z is not equivalent to x=z-y, and attempting to use that to invalidate my argument.

The NAMBLA argument is a red herring. It's telling that you think it's not, because you are asserting a right to force people to conform to your beliefs. So is NAMBLA.

If court rulings didn't matter, then your argument here would be more convincing.

Hm. So suppose you work really hard to get a law passed that makes my relationship with my wife illegal. You don't do anything illegal while working on that—it's not illegal to try to get a law passed. It's perfectly legal for you to argue in favor of making my relationship with my wife illegal. Now suppose I later decide not to hire you when you apply for a job at the company I run. Are you seriously arguing that in so doing, I have curtailed your freedom of speech?

Now, suppose I owned an ISP, and you wanted to do your organizing to pass a law to make my relationship with my wife illegal using the connection that you get from my company. And suppose I found out, and prevented you from doing so. And so I canceled your internet connection, preventing you from exercising your freedom of speech. I really have curtailed your freedom of speech here, haven't I?

So if you are arguing that both of these cases are a curtailment of your freedom of speech, I think you're out to lunch. If you're arguing that the latter is, I'll give you that, although I think you will find that the law at the moment is not on your side. But that's why it makes sense to treat internet service as a regulated utility: so that you can have free speech rights there, where I think we can all agree you should have them, even if I don't agree with what you might do with them.

I don't know if any men challenged the selective service law on the basis that it was discriminatory. And it is not at all clear that it is legal. I certainly don't think it is, and the last time it was tried, there was very strong resistance to it. We haven't had a draft in 40 years. I think if it were tried again, it would fail. It used to be legal to prevent black men from marrying white women and vice versa, so this is a lousy argument anyway.

It is precisely because Prop. 8 domestic partnership doesn't confer the precise legal status of marriage that it failed: it confers no federal benefit, and a lot of what you get when you marry _is_ federal benefit. Very little is state-specific.

In the United States wives and husbands have the rights I described, by default and by presumption. Yes, you can get legal documents that afford some of these rights (although not the right of inheritance, because spouses do not pay inheritance tax, and you can't get out of that by writing your will). But that's not the same as having them presumptively. Hospital staff are often not qualified to evaluate legal documents, particularly the ones who are there at 2am on a Saturday. So when the family says "get that fag out of my baby's room," the staff often does so, particularly if they are homophobes as well. A piece of paper isn't much help in this situation. Marriage has force of law, and force of precedent; while duplicating that for homosexual couples is possible in theory, it would require hundreds of years. Declaring a gay couple "married" gets all of that precedent in the bargain, and that's why it's important. Well, one reason. The other is that it's just hateful to assert that someone who wants to get married shouldn't because your beliefs trump their wishes.

My wife and I chose not to have children, so I guess you're saying that the state shouldn't have let us marry. That aside, the state actually grants these rights because it's to the benefit of couples and society if couples can take responsibility for each other. It saves a great deal of court time dealing with probate issues that married couples automatically inherit each others' property. It makes it easier to make decisions when someone is incapacitated if there is someone handy who can act on their behalf. It is a comfort to the person who has taken on this responsibility for a person they love if they are not denied access to that person, against that person's wishes, because that person is incapacitated.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with procreation. If the state wanted to encourage procreation, it would have created a very different set of rights, that inhered to people who had kids, as a reward for having kids. The idea that you would need to have a state-sponsored "illusion" that marriage is about love is so patronizing that I would be rendered speechless if that were possible for me. If the state has in interest in there being more babies, it does so by rewarding the production of babies, not by making up fairy tales.

I say "it does so" because in fact some states DO do so.

You aren't being a pedant. You are making an invalid argument by restating what I said with semantics that make it appear to be a different statement.

State-sponsored marriage is a collection of rights. It is nothing more than that. A married person has special inheritance rights, special rights of access, and special rights to making medical and financial decisions when their partner is incompetent, all with respect to their partner. At present, in some jurisdictions man are allowed to have such rights with respect to one woman, and women are allowed to have such rights with respect to one man. So if you represent the problem using these semantics, then it's clear that in these jurisdictions, men are being denied rights that women have, and women are being denied rights that men have. In this view, Brendan is denying all women the right he has.

Or you could use the semantics I started with, which is that some people have these rights with respect to their spouse, and other people do not, and Brendan took successful action to ensure that he had those rights, and people of whom he disapproves did not.

I think this semantics makes the most sense; if you disagree, you could make an argument for why your semantics is better for expressing the problem, but you didn't—you just proposed it, as if it somehow invalidated the conclusion I'd drawn using different valid semantics.

The right to inherit property from a man to whom you are married, make medical decisions for them when they can't, and visit them at their bedside when they are dying, is not a right that is denied to all. It is a right that is denied only to men. The right to inherit property from a woman to whom you are married, etc., is not a right denied to all. It is a right denied only to women.

You could assert that I am using semantics to get around your argument, but your argument is a semantic argument, so I'm just rephrasing it in a way that illustrates that it is invalid.

Actually Ender's Game, particularly the short story, was pretty well written. Of course, it was written to drag you into the author's viewpoint about how to think, which is a pretty weird viewpoint, but I'd criticize the viewpoint before I'd criticize the writing. The story had quite an affect on my thinking when I was in my twenties.

As far as the biblical verse goes, it seems irrelevant. The reason for laws on molestation and statutory rape is that we've decided as a society that people below a certain age aren't realistically able to give consent. In order to protect their rights, we make it illegal to have sex with them. This is a case of conflicting rights: the child molester wants to fuck the child, and the child has a right not to be fucked. So while it's hard to see how anybody could disagree about the interpretation of the bible verse you've paraphrased, if you paraphrased it accurately, it has no bearing on whether we should be tolerant of NAMBLA.

In fact, I think we should be tolerant of people who want to fuck children, but not to the extent of letting them do so. Having desires that can only be satisfied by taking away the rights of others is not a happy state of mind. A compassionate person would try to help the person who has that state of mind. At the same time, they would try to prevent that person from acting on that state of mind. Preferably in a pleasant custodial setting.

You could make the same argument for gay people, but the issue of consent isn't present if both are old enough to give consent. If you feel that their state of mind is still wrong, you are free to tell them so, and to try to help them. And they are free to tell you to fuck off, and to get a restraining order if you don't.

And by the way, if someone is openly a member of NAMBLA, chances are they're going to have trouble getting hired to clean toilets, much less be CEO of Mozilla.