MassResistance is reporting that there’s a new House bill filed by Rep. Byron Rushing that will actually legalize same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. Why is this necessary? What does it say about the legality of same-sex marriages performed so far? And does that wording allow a man to marry his brother, or father? I think it does, is that OK? Why should a man be prohibited from marrying his octogenarian mother but allowed to marry his father?
It is another opportunity to explain why we should not give people the right to conceive with someone of their same sex.
House Bill 1710:
An Act to Protect Massachusetts Families Through Equal Access to Marriage
SECTION 1. Chapter 207 is hereby amended by adding the following new section:-
Section 37A. Any person who otherwise meets the eligibility requirements of this chapter may marry any other eligible person regardless of gender.
A) It’s necessary to take the wind out of that “it’s not the court’s job to legislate” junk, which will be important if (hopefully not when) people’s rights go to popular vote.
B) No, nothing has changed about marrying same-sex relatives. If you read it, is says quite clearly:
Any person who otherwise meets the eligibility requirements of this chapter may marry any other eligible person regardless of gender.
Your sister is ruled out by the current law, but your brother isn’t.
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Yeah, they probably have enough votes now to pass this law, and they hope no one will notice (note that none of the papers wrote about this bill). But they’ll have to have some hearings, right? Are you ready for a another school field trip to the state house, where you’ll get to hang out again with your friends and meet other activists? You can make a sign, it’s lots of fun. I’m psyched to have another chance to visit all the legislators and explain the dangers of same-sex conception.
MGL Ch 207, Sec 1 says a man can’t marry his sister, but says nothing about his brother. Same is true about the mother, but not father, etc. I think this law would have to be updated as well, unless it is the intention to allow same gender family members to marry.
Rushing did introduce a marriage bill in past legislative sessions, but there is no evidence on the General Court’s website that he has reintroduced it this session. Can you substantiate your claim beyond the rock-solid & reliable reportage of the
bigotslovers of human kind at MassResistance.I don’t know where MassResistance got the bill number. It IS interesting that it is not found if you search for the bills.
An Act to protect Massachusetts families through equal access to civil marriage.
That’s a problem with the state website being updated slowly. I recently wrote to my representatives about energy things and their responses included some bills that also don’t turn up. In fact, the only things I can find are the inaugural addresses of Deval Patrick and Tim Murray (Senate Bills 1 and 2). nothing else seems to be in the online database. Either that or I just don’t know how to use it.
This is likely just more of Rushing’s tying up ends. He is one of several legislators who has little patience with stupid and contrasdictory laws hanging around. He already did this session’s omnibus bill to clear out a bunch of others.
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The anti-marriage-equality folk love to have it all ways on this. They claim that the Goodridge court decision does not legalize SSM, when of course it did.
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Part of that ruling was to tell the legislature to clean up the existing laws to facilitate SSM. If our Senate President had gonads as big as a field mouse’s, he would have aligned the old wording in numerous sections to fit with the ruling.
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He blocked that, apparently fearful of offending wingers.
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However, if he had, we probably would not have this amendment mess. The VoteOnMarriage folk would have been trying both to override numerous laws and to overturn the effect of the SJC decision. That would have been a much, much, much harder sell.
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Much like the marriage licenses, the laws need tweaking to match the now established reality of SSM. It’s overdue.
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The current hooha is just another winger game.
…and the strategy the second time was to await the Court decision. Never made sense to me. Much of the irrittion for the otherwise indifferent (like somebody who’s been married 30+ years, and doesn’t feel threatened, for instance) is that the Court decision and sneaky tomfoolery of the legislature will not allow a vote.
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A vote by the legislators on actual LEGISLATION would suffice! And could be won! Arlene Issakson has a lot to explain.
“It is another opportunity to explain why we should not give people the right to conceive with someone of their same sex.”
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Au contraire, you’ve had plenty of opportunities to beat this dead horse.
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I’ve always thought you were trying to close some hypothetical loophole, that you believe as things stand there IS a defensible but dangerous right to same-sex reproductive assistance.
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Perhaps you should say instead you have another opportunity to explain why ‘we’ (excluding the people it would most affect, as usual) should take away the right to conceive with someone of the same sex.
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On the other hand, if in fact you believe that the right does not currently exist, here’s an opportunity to stop talking about it.
There’s no right, but it’s not prohibited. Missouri is the only state with an egg and sperm law. Non egg and sperm conception should be prohibited with a federal law. People should only be allowed to conceive with someone of the opposite sex.
In the future, it may become possible for humans to travel to Mars. Travel to Mars will be very dangerous, and some people may be killed in transit. People may reproduce on Mars, but without greater protection from cosmic radiation there will be a much higher rate of birth defects. Children growing up on Mars would have health problems associated with lower gravity.
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The full dangers of a Martian population to society and the natural order would not be apparent at first. Nevertheless, if technology becomes safer, more and more people would travel to Mars. Population on Earth might decrease as the environment here becomes more hostile. If life exists on Mars, human presence will endanger native Martian life.
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Some people might consider emigrating to Mars if it became possible. Given these risks, it would be better if we recognize NOW that human beings were meant to stay on earth.
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We all have the right to be called “Earthlings”. We must prohibit Martian colonization now.
But same-sex conception isn’t just some random future thing that we should prohibit now. I bring it up because we are currently talking about the rights of same-sex couples, and marriage. And we are talking about their rights NOW, and NOW they shouldn’t have the right to do the Kaguya thing. Some couples might try it tomorrow, one doctor said “three to five years’, and that was in 2005!
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Regarding Mars, I agree that we should stay here on earth and not not waste any money or energy or lives on spaceshot ideas.
I would say that it is EXACTLY some far-fetched future thing you are wasting time & energy on. We’ve already sent probes to Mars.
It doesn’t matter how close they are anyhow, though I see no reason not to believe the scientist who said it was three to five years away in 2005. Your side is the one pretending it is possible right now and safe and should be allowed right now. That’s positively crazy, it is clearly unsafe and should be prohibited now. Stop living in denial land and face the truth.
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And we shouldn’t waste money and energy on probes to Mars, either.
I am saying there is no reason to prohibit a hypothetical advance in medical technology when your presumptions are unproven. You make health & safety claims that could only be proven by experimentation, while at the same time would put policy in effect that would prevent any evidence from emerging on how widespread or intractable these effects actually are. Science doesn’t work that way, good policy shouldn’t either.
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A debate to prove or elucidate your presumptions is interesting and gives everyone an opportunity to learn more about genetic engineering, but trying to rally people to ban certain science-fiction reproductive methods is at best premature, at worst offensive and anti-science.
Scientific experiments have been done. They proved that male gametes and female gametes are imprinted differently and cannot be joined together in meiosis. Even attempting to change the imprinting has been tried in mice, and showed a less than 1% success rate. So, it is not a hypothetical advance (and it is not a medical technology at all!) and my presumptions are proven right. Your presumption, that it can be made safe – is proven to be wrong. It would be unethical to allow scientists to create people to be subjects of your long term experiments.
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good policy would not waste energy and money on developing same-sex conception. It would protect children from being subjects to these sorts of experiments. It is anti-science to put ideology ahead of science in determining whether or not to allow people to be created from two people of the same sex. This is not searching for a cure for cancer, this is completely unnecessary. If it is offensive, it’s because you’ve been brainwashed to be offended. Not my problem.
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But thank you for coming forward and going on record as insisting on a right to do same-sex conception. I recommend rethinking that insane demand, and supporting my idea to get benefits and protections to same-sex couples, which they need a lot more than the right to conceive together.
There are MANY people working on this diligently. Other animals have already been cloned sucessfully. It is only a matter of time before babies are created without the benefit of sperm penetrating egg. Don;t you feel the impending doom? The down side is, of course, that people working to stop human cloning have no excuse to attack marriage equality. But buck up. You could still field those whacky reproductive rights rationales. They’re applicable to anything because they’re applicable to nothing.
I’m trying to stop all forms of non egg and sperm conception, including cloning. In Missouri’s Amendment 2, actually, they (incorrectly) defined human cloning as anything that is not egg and sperm conception. Strictly speaking, “cloning” means creating a new person from the genes of an existing person and making an exact “copy”, and so changing or engineering genes is not technically cloning. We need to prohibit all forms of non egg and sperm conception, just like they sort-of did in Missouri, but we need to do it federally, and maybe with looser language to cover the loopholes people might try to create. The language of the Presidents Council on Bioethics is pretty good, though it would be good if, like Missouri, they specified that a sperm comes from a man and an egg from a woman.
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Anyone looking at these proposals to prohibit unethical forms of conception has to notice something: They rule out same-sex conception, which scientists are working on and people are claiming a right to attempt. There’s a conflict here, Laurel, and it isn’t of my making.
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Notice that the people working diligently haven’t been able to get anything done. Instead, momentum is on the side of scientists and reproductive rights activists who are trying to sneak genetic engineering into reality while people’s guards are down, and portray the whole thing as the inevitable march of science. I think those people are going to fail at stopping genetic engineering, and my proposal, which harnesses the issue to the marriage debate by achieving the goals of each side, will succeed.
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It won’t be liked by the extremists on each side, but once it gets to the normal people, they’ll be happy to form a huge majority and resolve these issues.
Then I would have realized that you meant there are many people working on human cloning diligently. I thought you meant there are many people working on stopping it. Both of thseo are true.
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You notice that they say the hold up in getting a reproductive cloning ban passed is that scientists want to be able to do stem cell cloning, but the anti-cloning side is unwilling to settle on a law that leaves embryonic cloning alone. I think that is kind of playing chicken, and we should ban reproductive cloning (like in Missouri, with an egg and sperm law) and then work on banning stem cell cloning.
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I think the animal experimentation is unethical and should be stopped, and there is no need to put money into figuring out to create stem cell lines, esecially when adult stem cell therapies have so much potential, and firstly we should address the causes to prevent many of the famous diseases that stem cells are supposedly going to cure. I also think women are exploited and endangered by donating eggs. So those are reasons to prohibit cloning for stem cell therapies, and we don’t need the specter of cloned people to stop it. And note I am not morally opposed to killing embryos, I don’t think they’re people yet, and indeed, if someone created a cloned or genetically engineered embryo, I’d flush it down the drain myself. I would unfreeze and kill every stored embryo, if it were up to me, without feeling the slightest moral hesitation that I was killing anyone. Setting them free is what I’d be doing. I wouldn’t go as far as forcing an abortion if a cloned embryo was implanted, though. At that point I’d just pray that it survives and doesn’t have too many problems, and look for ways to put the scientists and parents in jail for the rest of their lives, so they don’t do it again.