Sex with ducks

[pasithea]

Swiped this link from ff00ff

I love these musicians. Heard a couple of their other songs but this one is kind of over the top.

And now, because I've heard the same nonsense from right-wingers about how gay marriage will lead to people marrying animals, a short comment.

Sure! Let's go for it! Just as soon as a horse is able to recite their wedding vows and pick up a pen and legibly sign their name, why shouldn't they be allowed to marry?

Oh gee. Ya'know. I'm thinking that whole leads to marrying animals thing may be obviously ridiculous. Hmm.

Gay marriage also doesn't lead to adults marrying children for the same reason that children can't get credit cards, drive a car, run a corporation, join the military, etc. They might be capable of signing, but they lack the sophistication to understand the full ramifications of their actions. Yes, I'll grant you that this is also true of many adults, but we give adults nearly 20 years of buffer.

The animal one is really just mindbendingly stupid though. I mean seriously. Do you think for a second that if animals could sign legal contracts that cows wouldn't have sued the holy fuck out of McDonalds by now?

Can we be done with this discussion now. I read the bible cover to cover. Nowhere in it is there a commandment that says, "Thou shalt be really really stupid."

Comments

[read-alicia.livejournal.com]

I wrote this "poem", many years ago, which might be appropriate to this discussion.

--------------------------------
Mary had a little lamb
A blow-up one, you know
And everywhere that Mary went
That lamb was sure to go.

Mary had a dildo, too,
A blue with subtle greens.
She popped it in her harness and
She strapped it on her jeans.

She found herself a little shirt
Inside her clothing heap
And wrote on it, "I ain't ashamed
Of lovin' of a sheep."

She walked across the campus
Of her university
To bring her sheep to class on
Human sexuality.

She plopped it in a student's chair
To hold a student's pose.
She took a pair of glasses and
She placed them on its nose.

Her teacher was aghast to see
The sheep and cock and girl.
He hemmed and hawed and asked of her,
"Oh, why in the whole world

Did you bring this to my classroom?
Do I put you to sleep?"
She said, "You speak of gay love like
You're talking about sheep.

When talking about "Lez-beans"
Your brain's still stuck in Freud
And speaking for my sisters here,
We've gotten quite annoyed.

My little lamb won't stand for you.
She'll bite you on the ass.
(Don't worry about grading her,
She's auditing this class.)

I love my little sheep, and for
Her favor I would die.
Look down between my legs, you'll see
I do not tell a lie."

"But loving of an animal
In all states is a crime."
"Well, so is loving women, loving
Sheep just gets a fine.

A sheep gets more protection (if
She isn't killed for food.)
She qualifies for benefits
My lover never would."

But unbeknownst to Mary and
Her teacher in debate,
The little lamb had sprung a leak
And started to deflate.

The teacher pointed to her lamb
And spoke aloud with glee,
"It looks like such relationships
Were never meant to be!"

Mary just sat back and grinned
And let her muscles flex
"I do that to a girl, you know,
She calls it damn good sex."

Her teacher learned his lesson, and
He swore right there and then
To never ever call upon her
In his class again.

[paka.livejournal.com]

Nowhere in it is there a commandment that says, "Thou shalt be really really stupid."

It's my impression that a lot of the OT is written with the assumption that people are going to be really really stupid. You know; lop the foreskins off the kids 'cause we assume they aren't going to take the time to clean themselves down there, forbid eating vultures because if we don't someone's gonna try it and kill themselves, spell out that you need to have accurate measurements before someone tries to cheat on it, yadda yadda, all wrapped up in dogma (so that people will do it) associated with mythology (so that people will remember it).

Ironically, I think that one sentence in Leviticus about not sleeping with a man as with a woman - the thing so beloved by the religious right - is one of those "we assume people are stupid" parts. The language is really specific; like we all know, if there's a hole, someone male has thought about sticking their penis into it; I've heard that contemporaneous Egyptians were cool with same-sex relationships (Akhenaten may have been bisexual, the evidence is debated) but had a horror of anal sex; and if you're a batch of nomads with limited access to baths and condoms anal sex isn't exactly the healthiest activity in the world.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Hmm. You know. That gives things an odd sense of balance.

Early religious law was because educated people were telling ignorant people how to live a healthier life.

Modern dogma is ignorant people telling educated people to follow the same set of rules.


I guess the lesson here is that no good deed goes unpunished.

[emiofbrie.livejournal.com]

Nowhere in it is there a commandment that says, "Thou shalt be really really stupid."

Not in so many words, but the entirity of the Bible can be summarized as "Thou shalt not think," which really amounts to the same thing.



Thanks to my partner invader_tak_1 for the comparison :)

[paka.livejournal.com]

Seriously, you look at a lot of Amerindian taboos and a lot of it is this flatly dogmatic stuff rooted in the reality of a world which isn't always that safe. Then my counter-example is the Kalevala, which is a really entertaining read but it's basically an information dump in mnemonic form.

I dunno about you, but modern society presents the people behind the OT as chosen people who'd clued in on monotheism as this enlightened deal, but really, they weren't. They were just more pre-industrial guys trying to survive and treat each other more or less fairly, and that context makes the OT make more sense to me. Which is great, except I'm not actually a Bronze Age nomad.

Religion has to evolve or else it's stale, useless, like the worst sort of dusty museum exhibit. To be a Jew/Christian/Sikh/Voudounista/Asatruar/etc now by definition can't be the same thing as what it meant in the 900s, and that's not just okay, that's actively good. I think it's ironic that the worst dogmatic people in this country are usually some sect of Protestant, given how Protestantism started out.

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

I do think they're right, that gay marriage opens the door to polygamous marriage. As it should. Personally I think governments have no business granting marriage licenses at all. That's religion. Civil unions from the civil servants, marriages from the religion of one's choice, and contracts between whoever and how many ever consenting and competent adults.

The thing that gets me is that I don't see how this would change anything as far as society is concerned. Gays and lesbians already live committed-for-life relationships. A smaller minority already lives in greater-than-two "marriage" households. The only change that legal recognition of these ways of life would bring would be the rights that are restricted to "legally married" parties, and denying those rights is an intrusion of religion upon the state.

(Belgium already treats things this way, though they're still stuck on the two-people-only civil unions from the government. But marriage is an inherently religious/spiritual concept, and while I will still see it as a victory if gay marriage is legalized, if polygamous marriage is legalized, I'd much rather see governments stop granting marriage licenses or performing marriage ceremonies.

However it's resolved, it needs to be an equal legal action for everyone regardless of who they wish to commit to. (I'm okay with religions deciding who can and can't marry in their faith; people can pick their own religions. It's far harder to pick your own country.)

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

Really? Not the Bible I've read.

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

I've kind thought along the same lines. All of the arguments I see for 'gay marriage' could EQUALLY APPLY to polygamous marriage but whenever I've brought it up a lot of people backpedal and bring up arguments based on tradition and arbitrary standards such as, "But marriage is 'traditionally' between 'TWO' people!" and "OMG slippery slope argument".

Then I get people who argue against polygamy via economic arguments such as the added difficulty in working out taxes, property ownership, custody, and prenuptial situations -- which has nothing to do with the basic concept of whether polygamous marriage should be legal or not.

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

I do definitely draw some lines at "no marriage with children" ... Children simply aren't mentally and/or physically mature enough to commit to sexual relationships and there has to be some kind of lower limit cutoff. Setting a minimum age (like we do now) is easy and fair enough (although some may argue for some kind of 'psychological & physical test of maturity' ... that might work too but I'd think it would be too prone to racism or other forms of discrimination).

I also draw the line at "no marriage with animals" ... at least until such time you could grant citizenship and human rights to an animal (e.g. one with genetically engineered intelligence).

[pseudomanitou.livejournal.com]

Sex with animals... yeah, we already have that, and had it LONG before homosexuality was recognized as a sexual preference.

Marriage with animals... yeah, because a goat can legally sign it's name to a marriage certificate. Morons.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

The thing is, either marriage ought to be a wholly religious affair that confers absolutely no state privilege or it should be strictly business and follow the same rules as joint businesses, corporations, etc.

We have a fairly clearly defined set of rules for who can and cannot enter into legal contracts. There are very few people in present society who would tolerate a legal definition which said that one of the partners in a joint venture could not be black or could not be female, etc. Marriage is the one exception and I assert that in our society, marriage in its present form is ONLY a legal document and has nothing to do with religion.

You could almost think of it as an application with a skinnable interface. the mechanism doesn't change. A marriage grants a set of permissions and applications. The skin is whether it's a simple civil affair, a full-blown over the top performance, christian, jewish, buddhist, etc. Those skins may have their own restrictions but they are not integral to the underlying application. Including gay marriage in that underlying mechanism does not break it in any way. Gays just become another skin.

Poly relationships would probably require a different mechanism that would be more akin to a corporation because you need to deal with aspects of people leaving/entering the relationship and property management rights for assets, children, etc. Legally, polygamy is a significantly more complex device. However, there are many models present in current law which could be used to model it.

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

. . . I think I love you.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Oh, there's an interesting article on the supposedly anti-homosexual passages in Romans that I bet you would like -- it deconstructs them through the lens of history, including historical commentary, and shows an alternative reading that is likely to be more representative of the "original intent", as it were (which, argues the article, has nothing to do with homosexuality being "bad" whatsoever). It basically takes apart the semantic representation of the text and shows how it actually fits together, versus how bigots would like for it to fit together.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

*nodnod* The legal notion of competence (which is why adults can sign contracts and children can't) applies equally to children and animals; two or more consenting adults can be competent to contract marriage, whereas children and animals cannot. So the dividing line is very bright indeed, and the slippery slope argument is shown to be a fallacy.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't know, there are a lot of highly dogmatic Catholics floating around.

I think the least dogmatic Protestants are the Unitarians and the Episcopalians, though I've heard good things about the Evangelical Lutherans (who are apparently in full communion with the ECUSA); an Asatruar friend of mine grew up Evangelical Lutheran and is still actively friends with everyone he knew from church.

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

Even as a Jeffersonian Deist (ie: emphatically not a Christian), I disagree.

I think that the entirety of many Fundamentalist beliefs is: "Thou shalt not think." But that belief has little to do with the Bible.

[yetanotherbob.livejournal.com]

Gay marriage also doesn't lead to adults marrying children

No, because marriage with children pretty much is already allowed. Most often in the same states with the strongest "Family Values."