10 Reasons why Gay Marriage is Wrong!!

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi


If gay men and women can find happiness when married to women and men, respectively, then why are we saying that the only option for them is gay marriage.

Its not. Given the continuing stigma that still surrounds being gay, I suspect that anyone that can truly find happiness in a straight relationship will do so.

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi

If we say all gay folks ought to get married to each other, then we are directly cutting off this option for folks who are not happy with their life.

I , for, one, am not saying that anyone OUGHT to marry anyone. In each case it is an individual choice and they should marry who they want IF they want

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Arrian
Which is why I want a link to the actual study. It's possible, I suppose, that the Dutch study was using married gays as their data set and the fundies from the "Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family Institute" just couldn't stomach using the word marriage when referring to gays, other than the first time when they put it in quotes.

-Arrian

I would also be more interested in the median case than the average. With relatively small numbers of marriages a few whackjobs that get married and divoced multiple times of short duration can really screw an average . ..


But if the median marriage lasts 1 year or 10 years, thats a much more important statistic

[Kontiki]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi


And you don't think that I can anticipate the arguments against a particular source or citation? I expected the earlier argument about a lack of representative source, which raises the question as to how can one obtain a representative source when there is no definitive agreement as to what constitutes a gay person?

Besides, I don't see the gay marriage proponents taking the time or effort to cite any sources in their favour, in buttressing their arguments with empirical evidence.

No idea what you're getting at here. You cite research you know to be dubious and draw conclusions from it. If there are problems with finding reliable data, maybe you shouldn't be making claims you can't support. As for gay marriage proponents finding sources, there's no need. You're the one making assertions of causal links, not the other way around.

No, I rebutted the point about a representative source. You use the research available.

When the research available is poorly constructed and you know this before hand, it's probably better to not use it at all, much less draw conclusions from it.

Good rebuttal. It really shows how you couldn't possibly have seen or been aware of the follow up studies since it took about a minute to find it. Also a bit confusing since you just confessed you knew the research to by dubious in the first place.

Yes, I have and the worst that comes out is the author of the source claiming 'misrepresentation', and the horrible fact that they are all Christians! The horror!


Go back and read Kontiki. I'm tired of saying something and having no one read what I have already answered. The source for my argument that gay people suffer from substantially higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse has already been cited.

No, you didn't. To quote Arrian "You cited statistics. You interpreted those statistics and concluded what you've stated above. One can interpret them differently, however."

I might also add that your study looked at drug use within a 30 day period prior to the interview, not drug abuse.

I think we're all tired of you trotting stuff out and drawing your own conclusions and presenting them as fact.

Now as to a genetic link, I already answered that question. You are the only one who has asserted that I ever claimed a genetic link between the two, when all I said is these are the studies that show a link, but not necessarily a genetic basis.

You answered it and got shot down. The question posed to you by more than one person was if being gay in and of itself increased one's susceptibility to drug and alcohol abuse, which you answered affirmatively and posted studies that drew no such conclusions. Further, in order for there to be a link in and of itself, it would have to be genetic.

[Arrian]

Heh, I was just browsing news headlines and...

Why Men Report More Sex Partners than Women Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Managing Editor
LiveScience.com
Fri Feb 17, 11:00 AM ET

Most surveys about sex find impossibly that men have had far more partners than women, typically two to four times as many.

Either there are a bunch of phantom females out there, or somebody is lying.

Or perhaps men just have lousy memories.

Psychologist Norman R. Brown at the University of Michigan has done several studies on the apparent flaw in these surveys. The latest was a web-based survey of 2,065 heterosexual non-virgins with a median age in their late 40s.

The women reported on average 8.6 lifetime sexual partners. The men claimed 31.9.


Rather than let it go at that, Brown and his colleagues later in the survey asked the participants to rate the truthfulness of their response. About 5 percent said they lied. In addition, more than 10 percent said they knew their answer wasn't accurate.

"They gave an answer and then two minutes later admitted they had lied about the answer," Brown said.

But there's more to the discrepancy. Men and women use different methods to calculate their past dalliances.

Women rely on a raw count, a method Brown says is known to result in underestimation.

"They tend to say, 'I just know,' and if you ask them to explain how they know, they say, 'Well, there was John, Tom, etc.'"

Men also rely on a flawed strategy.

"Men are twice as likely to use rough approximation to answer the question," Brown said. "And rough approximation is a strategy known to produce over-estimation."

Then again, maybe Brown's study is flawed, too.

His next survey will be done by telephone, to find out if people lie and fudge as much in that medium, or if the Web-based surveys invite such behavior. The self-proclaimed liars "could be liars who lie about lying," he said.

I wonder if surveys of gay males run into the issue of men inflating their # of partners (whether it's actual lying or just bad gestimating...)?

-Arrian

p.s. 32 partners? Bloody hell! Now, if I were a person who wanted to show that society was going to hell, I'd take this (web)survey result, highlight the 31.8 reported partners and make wild claims about it (instead of noting that it's a webpoll, and noting that guys do seem to inflate their... numbers).

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

32 partners heck that was just last week.
































2 minutes later OK so I lied.

But my member is clearly 12 inches long























2 minutes later.......

[Arrian]

Followup on the above:

It isn’t possible if you take the average to be the mean, for the reason given in the first post to alt.rec.puzzles. But if you use the median it is quite possible. One respondent said, ‘This fits with data I've heard from other surveys, that there are a very few women who go round sleeping with all the men, skewing the statistics in precisely this way.’

The diagram gives an example with seven men and seven women. Each light grey dot represents a man and each pink dot represents a women. A line connecting two dots indicates that they were sex partners. The men have fourteen liaisons in total, for a mean of two. Obviously the women must have the same number of liaisons (since every line has two ends) so the women's mean is also two. But the median is a different story. Sorting the men's data gives us 0 1 1 3 3 3 3 for a median of 3 partners. After the women's data is sorted we have 1 1 1 1 2 3 5 for a median of 1 partner. The medians do not necessarily have to be equal.

And of course there may have been a little bit of bragging.

-Arrian

[Arrian]

More on the issue:

Women lie about sex
Monday, 7 July 2003


C'mon girls, time to 'fess up (Pic:BBC)

Surveys suggesting that men are more sexually active than women may be wrong because women are more likely to lie when answering questions about their own sexual activity, a clever new U.S. study has found.

Men typically report engaging in sex at a younger age, having sex more often and with more partners than women do, but the study shows that these reported gender differences might show up because women think they should give answers expected of them, according to Dr Terri Fisher, a psychology professor at Ohio State University, a co-author of the study in the Journal of Sex Research with Dr Michele Alexander, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Maine.

"Women are sensitive to social expectations for their sexual behaviour and may be less than totally honest when asked about their behaviour in some survey conditions," said Fisher. "Women appear to feel pressure to adhere to sex role expectations that indicate women should be more relationship-oriented and should avoid being seen as promiscuous."

"Before the study, we thought men would generally over-report their sexual behaviour and women would under-report it under certain testing conditions. However, we found that women were more likely than men to have different answers depending on conditions when they were surveyed."

The researchers asked 201 unmarried, heterosexual college students to complete questionnaires about their sexual attitudes, experience and behaviour, and the age at which they first had sexual intercourse - but in a twist, the participants completed the questionnaire under three different conditions including one in which they believed they were connected to a lie detector.

In that group, participants had electrodes placed on their hand, forearms and neck and were told they were being attached to a polygraph (lie detector) machine, which in fact was an old model that didn't actually work. They were also told the polygraph was sensitive enough to detect dishonesty even in written responses, then left alone in a room to answer their questionnaires.

A second group filled out the sex surveys alone in a room and were told their answers would be completely anonymous, while the third group was led to believe the researcher might view their responses and the researcher sat right outside the testing room with the door open.

Women's answers were closer to men's in some areas of sexual behaviour when they thought lies could be detected. Men's answers didn't change as much as did women's under different testing conditions.

The women who thought their answers might be read, for example, reported an average of only 2.6 sexual partners, but those who thought they were monitored by the lie detector reported an average of 4.4 sexual partners. Women who were not attached to the lie detector, but who had privacy during testing, gave answers in the middle - an average of 3.4 sexual partners.

Men's answers didn't vary as much: those who thought they were attached to a polygraph reported an average of 4.0 sexual partners, compared with 3.7 partners for those who thought their answers might be seen.

In a media statement, Fisher said it was not entirely surprising that women changed their answers more than men: "We live in a culture that really does expect a different pattern of sexual behaviour from women than it does from men."

The results showed that gender differences still existed and that they needed to be taken into account in a variety of ways, she said.

Many respected sex surveys, for example, were based on face-to-face interviews with participants, which might lead women to rate a socially desirable response as being more important than a completely honest one.

As well, medical professionals needed to be aware of how women respond to questions about their sexuality, she said: "Based on these findings, a doctor may need to ask female patients about their sexual behaviour in different ways than they would for male patients."

In short, any survey about sex... well, take it with a grain of salt. The methodology is quite important if you want accuracy.

-Arrian

[Agathon]

This thread is FABULOUS!!!

[MrFun]

Ogie's poor lying skills


Ted Striker

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Flubber


Its not. Given the continuing stigma that still surrounds being gay, I suspect that anyone that can truly find happiness in a straight relationship will do so.

I'm having serious difficulty in understanding how a man who is truly gay can ever be happy being married to a woman. And vice versa with a lesbian and a straight man.

[Q Classic]

That's because there seems to be an assumption that sexuality is binary. You either are male or female. You're either homosexual or heterosexual.

I don't quite bi that.

So to speak.

[chequita guevara]

Why is it any of my business, or any of yours, about who gets married to who?

[Q Classic]

Well, depends on who's getting married. If it's my brother, he can marry whoever he wants, but if it's MrFun, he should only be able to marry a suitable woman.

[chequita guevara]

Ah, okay.

Answer my PM you bastahd

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Q Cubed
Well, depends on who's getting married. If it's my brother, he can marry whoever he wants, but if it's MrFun, he should only be able to marry a suitable woman.

So in other words you want to deny gays equal legal protection and rights for their relationships with another person of the same gender.


You and BK need to start a club for ignorant heterosexists.