12.07.2004
The marriage issue
Arguments for gay marriage like this will go away after we pass the egg & sperm law, because a person will only be allowed to procreate with a person of the other sex. And there is law upon law affirming that marriage grants a right to procreate. The way to prevent people from procreating together, such as a brother and sister or mother and son or with someone married to someone else, is to deny them a marriage license. The obviousness of this perhaps blinds people to its significance. We need to prevent people from procreating with a person of their own sex as surely as we need to prevent brother and sister from procreating.
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3 comments:
Banning people from getting married won't keep them from procreating, and banning reproduction other than sperm and egg would not prevent same-sex marriage. Right now, FF couples often use sperm banks, or pick one of an endless number of volunteer male sperm donors that think that they are "getting lucky."
Limiting reproduction to sperm and egg doesn't even prevent 2 women from making a baby together. With only a little more difficulty, and a few thousand more dead mice, your poor mouse could have been generated like this:
1. Remove gametes from F1's egg.
2. Replace Gametes from sperm, with gametes from F1's egg.
3. Allow Sperm with F1's egg gametes to fertilize F2's egg.
Banning conception that joins same-sex gametes will either ban same-sex marraiges or it will change marriage so that it no longer conveys a right to conceive together. If marriage is so changed, then other classes of marriages could be prohibited from conceiving together, such as marriages where a partner carries a gene associated with a disease. The government could begin insisting that couples use modified genes instead of their own. The only way to ensure our right to have natural children is to preserve marriage's inherent right to conceive together, using both spouse's gametes.
And gametes from an egg can not be swapped into a sperm, because male and female gametes are different. They aren't interchangable. It is a common misunderstanding, but crucial to understand. It isn't just the outer packaging that is different about the egg and the sperm, the genes inside are specifically imprinted to be male or female and both must be present for the meiosis to occur. Otherwise, duplicate copies of active genes and missing active genes create havoc with the conception and it just fails completely.
And, banning same-sex conception, or rather, non male-female conception, would be a huge significant difference in rights for same-sex couples. If I married a woman, I would have a right to procreate with my spouse, but if I married a man, I wouldn't. So why pretend these are equal marriages? Even if my fears of losing individual conception rights are far-fetched, the mere fact that the rights are so different depending on the combination of sexes calls for a different name to be used. If we later decide to make same-sex conception legal again, we'd convert CU's to marriages.
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