There will be a meeting on February 27th, from 7-8:30 p.m. at the Medford Unitarian Universalist Church at 147 High Street to organize against the initiative amendment to ban same-sex marriages. Only 50 votes are needed to advance the amendment to the ballot. Similar measures have passed in every other state where they’ve made it to the ballot, spurred by hate-filled publicity campaigns funded by national right-wing organizations. Preserving marriage equality in Massachusetts is critical to the security of the families of gays and lesbians. In Michigan, a state with a same sex marriage ban, an appeals court recently held that public employers cannot offer health benefits if the benefits are based on treating same-sex relationships similar to marriage. Similar arguments could remove pension benefits, family medical leave and health care decision-making, inheritance rights and other legal protections. This isn’t the future that anyone of good will should want for Massachusetts.
The legislature has one more chance to get it right on marriage. Please come out to help stop the misuse of the initiative amendment process to deny rights to a minority. The impact will be devastating if 50 legislators who don’t understand or don’t care about gay and lesbian families allow their rights and relationships to be put up to a popular vote.
Directions are available at the church’s website: http://www.uumedford…
I hope they can attend and help out. It pays to remind folks who live in solid pro-equality districts that they are not off the hook yet! đŸ™‚ Their help is much needed in neighboring, not so friendly districts.
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And a friendly nudge to the annoyed: if you’re past tired of hearing about marriage, it is in your own best interest to give it your all to kill this amendment right now. Otherwise, if the legis. passes the issue on to the voters, expect to hear about this non-stop at least until Nov 2008, if not Nov 2010.
I think you mean that even if Cambrdige, Arlington, and Somerville are represented by pro-equality representatives and senators, there’s still a problem in Medford that requires addressing. People nearby could really help put this issue to bed early.
Thanks for puzzling it out! I encourage people living elsewhere in the state to contact MassEquality at 617.878.2307 to see what they can do, whether in their own district or a neighboring one. Additional ways of helping are listed on the MassEquality Take Action page.
What’s wrong with having a vote? I think this would be a good thing for the state of MA. In fact I think it’s a good thing for Democracy.
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What is wrong with letting the people decide?
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What are you afraid of????
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this has been hashed out here many times. The people voting is part of the process, but not the whole thing. The MA constitution isn’t an accident. It allows legislators to vote down an amendment before the vote of the people. This too is a legitimate part of the process.
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Why should this vote go right to the people instead of having to pass the legislature, completely ignoring the farking constitution?
MassResistance is reporting that there’s a new House bill filed by Rep. Byron Rushing that we’ll all have to attend the hearings on. This is the bill that will actually legalize same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. This is what would actually legalize same-sex conception, and we should not extend conception rights to same-sex couples because of safety and ethical reasons.
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Reluctantly, I dive back in to this absurd discussion about Kaguya the lucky mouse with a simple query.
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On your website you concede that same-sex conception “is currently legal.” You go on to argue that “To protect children, as well as protect everyone’s natural conception rights and preserve human dignity, we need a law that says children can only be conceived by the union of a woman’s egg and a man’s sperm.”
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Yet, here in this latest post, you state that “this is what would actually legalize same-sex conception.”
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Which is it, John? Legal or illegal now?
Marriage would cement it, it would say “these two people are married, and so we cannot prohibit them from conceiving together!” At least, not without changing marriage.
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But these days, people have babies without being married, so prohibitng same-sex conception requires more than prohibiting same-sex marriage. We need a law, unrelated to marriage, that prohibits same-sex conception – or rather, all non egg and sperm conception. In the sense that we have no law against non egg and sperm conception (except the implantation of non egg and sperm embryos is prohibited in Missouri) same-sex conception is legal.
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And then there is the additional question of whether Massachusetts same-sex marriages are legal or not. MassResistance claims that they are not, because the law hasn’t been changed yet to make them legal. I find that to be rather a moot point, but lots of legal questions are more moot than this one, yet seem to carry some legal weight, so maybe they’re right. Maybe these marriages are not legal and therefore not valid, maybe no same-sex couple has yet to be legally given the right to conceive together. for seome reason Byron Rushing thinks a new law is needed. Perhaps he should explain why he thinks this is needed.
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Whatever the lawyers tell us, same-sex conception is unethical, yet there is no law against attempting it.
I’ve read and re-read your answer here several times and I still don’t get what you are talking about.
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Your argument seems to rely on two strange premises:
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1) Once people are married it is impossible to limit their conception rights without changing the definition of marriage. This isn’t true. Compulsory sterilization? Sure, it becomes conceptually more difficult but not impossible if there is a compelling reason for the state to intervene.
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2) More importantly, your second premise seems to be that unmarried individuals do not have a legal right to conceive together. This I really don’t understand. And, if true, it sure is news to me and my girlfriend of seven years that our conception rights are in any way more limited than our married friends.
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I assume you are interested in furthering explaining? If so, I’d be interested in your response.
1) OK, it’s true in the past, they sterilized people and allowed these people to marry, but once they were married, they were still allowed to attempt to conceive, so marriage still retained that right. And we’ve stopped doing compulsory sterilizations, they were found to be unconstitutional because they tend to be applied to unfavored classes of people, and so that established that we all have a basic civil right to marry and procreate.
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Besides, unlike sterilizations, we aren’t looking at one person’s private genetics or assessing their ability to be a suitable parent, we are looking at the public relationship of two people to each other and recognizing that they shouldn’t be allowed to conceive together. Siblings are not allowed to conceive together, but are both allowed to conceive with someone else, just like two people of the same sex ought to be.
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2) Well, there’s a murky area between something being unpunished and it being a right. Unmarried individuals really don’t have the right to conceive together, though that is not important to my argument. Even if there is an official right for unmarried people to conceive together, the worry is that married couples should be guaranteed the right to conceive together, and that same-sex couples should not have the right to conceive together.
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I do think we should once again be prohibiting intentionally conceiving people from unmarried egg and sperm providers. Labs should have to verify that they egg and sperm they are joining come from a married couple. Gamete donation should be prohibited, ASAP. And what Tom Brady and Bridget Moynahan did is unfortunate, but hopefully it was unintentional. I think there is no right to do it intentionally, only couples that are committed to loving each other should be allowed to attempt to conceive. (Oh, but this subject will allow you to avoid the point once again, won’t it…)
This is what would actually legalize same-sex conception, and we should not extend conception rights to same-sex couples because of safety and ethical reasons.
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Um, my octogenarian widowed mother, who cannot conceive at all, can marry a male, under the laws of any state in the disUnion. She cannot marry a female, under the laws of any state in the disUnion, except for Massachusetts.
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Remind me again: what does legalizing same-sex marriage have to do with conception?
Legalizing same-sex marriage means same-sex couples can get legally married (who knows what they are doing currently, considering Rushing’s bill. Are they getting legally married or not?). And, all marriages have conception rights; no marriage is forbidden to conceive, no matter how old they get. Therefore, with legal marriage, same-sex couples get conception rights and can’t be forbidden to conceive.
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True, they don’t need to get conception rights in order to attempt to conceive, which is why we need to prohibit non egg and sperm conception in general, regardless of marriage.
Prohibiting same-sex conception has nothing to do with marriage in and of itself. The thing is, if we prohibit same-sex conception and also allow same-sex marriage, then we change marriage and introduce – for the first time in the history of the world – marriages that are prohibited from conceiving together. This would change everyone’s marriage, it would mean that we could prohibit an octogenarian from conceiving, and it would mean that we could prohibit a 40 year old from conceiving. Maybe that is something that eugenicists want to do, they aren’t happy that dumb people are allowed to conceive together just because they are married, they want to stop them, and stop their genes from reproducing. People also want to stop poor people, slothful people, and republicans from having children. Maybe that is what people want?
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Maybe people want to allow same-sex conception, and maybe people want to stop certain marriages from conceiving. Maybe they want those things more than they want equal benefits and protections for same-sex couples. That seems to be the case, since no one here is saying otherwise. No one here is supporting the egg and sperm compromise.
…Are you 14 years old on winter vacation? This is without a doubt the dumbest post I have ever seen, and that includes the rants from the FreeRepublicans 10 years ago.
is that they are afraid to address the issues. Would you allow a lab to try to make a baby for a same-sex couple or would you support the egg and sperm law? Do you believe that all marriages should be allowed to attempt to conceive, or do you believe that some couples should not be allowed to?
to address the issue directly.
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You obviously need to be on medication. So get it, instead of repeatedly hijacking other people’s threads with the same insane obsession.
And it was in a thread about marriage, so it wasn’t really hijacking.
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You people are all very willing to insult me, but very few of you ever come out and say if you think same-sex conception should be allowed or prohibited, or whether you think married couples should have a guaranteed right to attempt to join their own gametes and conceive together.
to feed into the sexual frenzy of some weirdo who can’t stop talking about sex organs.
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I’m sure there’s some chat room out there where you’d feel right at home.
The thing is, if we prohibit same-sex conception and also allow same-sex marriage, then we change marriage and introduce – for the first time in the history of the world – marriages that are prohibited from conceiving together.
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The thing is, this simply isn’t true.
Give me an example of a marriage that has been prohibited from conceiving together and yet remained a valid marriage.
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When the state wants to take conception rights away from a marriage they anull the marriage. If it is found that they are siblings, or one is already married, they void the marriage.
….here is where your (il)logic fails you. There may be laws against siblings getting married, but as disgusting as it sounds, it is perfectly legal for a sister to conceive, carry and give birth to her brother’s child. You and you alone conflate conception with marriage in this way. You are wrong.
That’s incest, and it is severely punished. We don’t force an abortion, obviously, but we certainly do not allow siblings to conceive together.
….we do. Because there is nothing we can do about it. Incest laws may strongly discourage incestuous conception, but it does not an cannot prevent it. The right to conceive exists mostly outside the law and certainly, outside marriage laws.
There are many examples of judges prohibiting even married people from concieving (deadbeat dads, drug addicts, etc). Though many of these sentences have been struck down as unconstitutional, none of the court’s relied on the person’s marital status in doing so. And some of these sentences have been upheld, again with no discussion of the person’s marital status.
All of the cases I have seen have seen where a judge told people not to have any more children were unmarried couples. Sometimes judges are idiots, so it’s possible that a judge might have said that to a married couple.
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But note that you are running to the cover of prohibiting marriages from conceiving. You haven’t said that you oppose same-sex conception but you must recognize that it is an open question whether or not to allow it, so you also recognize that you have to insist that marriages can be prohibited from conceiving. I think this deserves more investigation, it would indeed be a huge change to marriage, and shouldn’t be cavalierly dismissed as not changing marriage. Besides, if we are going to allow a man to conceive with a woman but not with a man, isn’t that a big enough difference in rights – their public rights – that giving it a different name is warranted? I mean, why not acknowledge the difference in a way that doesn’t jeopardize marriage’s rights? It just would acknowledge reality of their rights. Do you accept that reality?
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Marriages should be allowed to conceive. Same sex couples shouldn’t.
when your parents were married.
Steev-erino! What, was Steverasshole taken?
I’ve enjoyed discussing this (and even learned a little) but I should be clear in my view.
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Despite our discussion and my research in to the issue, I remain firmly opposed to any government prohibition on “same sex conception.” I prefer to leave the ethical and scientific considerations to the scientists. And, most importantly, I believe procreative liberty is a fundamental Constitutional right (under the “penumbras” and “emanations” embedded in the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments) that I’ve yet to be convinced the government has a compelling enough reason to deny under these circumstances.
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But my biggest concern is the implication of your argument that I, as a member of an unmarried couple (opposite sex, I suppose I must add), somehow should have less rights to conceive than my married friends. I hope that the social definition of marriage had changed enough (from a mostly economic and conception encouraging union to one based primarily on the admittedly vague concept of love) that most people don’t feel marriage is still a necessary pre-requisite to having children.
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Which scientists? The good ones, or the crazy ones? You want to allow Dr Zavos to do this now, today? We are talking about whether it should be allowed today! You want to force individual couples to weigh the ethics? They’ll get brochures, study the success rate in pigs (‘oh, but this one had a 60% rate in rats!’) and then decide (‘let’s just do it, why not be the first! We can always have the surrogate abort it if it is not coming out right’)? That is a recipe for disaster, Loq, and unfair to gay people. They are being exploited as guinea pigs, and burdened with conflicting responsibilities and desires. It’s easy for you, a heterosexual, to think that they should have a right to do this, but it’s really asking a lot of them. And remember they are a couple – they might feel pressure from within the relationship to use each other’s gametes rather than using a donor. Couples in love make irrational decisions. And scientists are often crazy materialists who can justify experimenting on people in the name of science. Not a good combination.
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Why not prohibit it now, when it is clearly unsafe, and then allow the scientists to convince Congress when it is safe, so that a better decision is reached? Oh yeah, because that would conflict with marriage, wouldn’t it? That would mean that same-sex couples wouldn’t have equal rights. Well, maybe that dogmatic insistance is slightly irresponsible, considering? If they decide it is safe and repeal the eg and sperm law, then same-sex civil unions would be changed to marriages, and there could be another chance for a wedding! Oooh, that just convinced a lot of people, didn’t it!
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“Supportable basis” is the term used in Loving, about whether a couple can be denied the right to marry and mix their genes together into a mixed generation, generally. The genetic risks of choosing someone of the same sex are a supportable basis to deny that choice. Scientific experiments have shown there to be a less than one percent success rate. That’s enough of a basis to not allow someone to choose someone of their same sex. Choose someone else.
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You’re right, it certainly implies that your married friends have a right to conceive together, but the compromise says nothing about the rights of unmarried people and wouldn’t change them. You could still sleep with your girlfriend without marrying her.
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You do have less rights to conceive than your married friends, 100% less in fact. They’ve got the right, and you don’t. Respect them for it, instead of resenting them for it. If you want it, you know what to do.
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High! Your site is really great! Thank you for it!
http://lesbianheaven… – for girls only