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dick dworkin

Published Letters: 3325
Editor's Choice: 5

Friday, June 5, 2009 01:20 PM

the reason you can only legally be married to one person at a time is that marriage can entitle one partner to speak for the other under certain cirumstances

if more than two people are involved in any way the legal status of the spokesperson would be ambiguous, therefore contractually invalid.

Friday, June 5, 2009 01:14 PM

. If you want a committed relationship to someone (who is not already a family member),

There is no way to define "committed relationship" in law (unless adultery is illegal) so this concept should not be a part of it either. Since a marriage license is not a govt license to have sex you probably have to leave degree of relatedness out of the picture too since it is only a matter of pooling assets and authority. You can still prohibit too-close relatives from having kids on "genetic disease" grounds, but if you do make this prohibition for this reason an equivalent prohibition could be applied, and for fairness reasons might NEED to be applied, broadly.

Friday, June 5, 2009 01:00 PM

If I lost my partner/mother because she died because she could not get an abortion,

If you killed those who had prevented the abortion do you think you could get off with a temporary insanity or reduced capacity defense. Just in case you couldn't you'd probably want to make sure you took more than one or two or them with you.

Friday, June 5, 2009 12:57 PM

so brightstar, would you trade Swedens prostitution laws for our abortion laws?

DOES ANYONE think that a complete cessation of ALL late term abortions for ANY REASON would change a SINGLE THING about the attitudes of "pro-lifers"

Thursday, June 4, 2009 10:24 PM
Original article: Obama befriends the hijab

how can men "gaze predatorialy" if they can't see anything

sounds like we have the makings of a beautiful friendship.

Thursday, June 4, 2009 09:50 PM

and obviously you can only be in one at a time

or you would have the same type of conflicts that would happen with more than two people.

Thursday, June 4, 2009 09:48 PM

any two people should be able to get married

it's a pooling of assets and legal authority, it can only be two because otherwise there could be conflict over who speaks for who. Two, and only two, competent adults, that is it, the only legal requirement. The government is not licenseing you to have sex when it offers the option of a marriage contract. The law used to regulate who could live together too, it doesn't any more.

Thursday, June 4, 2009 07:45 PM

there is a real issue but it is tough to base an argument on it; straight men don't want kids unless they are with women who they like and who REALLY like them

and women can have kids without men, (legally now and soon physically). Most men are not that attractive to women, so, who needs men? A bigger factor though is probably that a large percentage of evangelical men are gay themsleves, some of them know it and some don't, so when they talk about culture "making everyone gay" they are being sincere.

Thursday, June 4, 2009 11:28 AM

if you think that more open gayness means a more feminie sexual style

you don't know much about gay men

Thursday, June 4, 2009 12:14 AM

an egg one second after fertilization, or one day after, is no more a human being than an unfertilized egg by any standard other than a reilgious

the right of the individual involved to have sole discretion in this situation is an ABSOLUTE. ANYTHING ELSE IS THEOCRATIC TYRANNY PERIOD. Now, when the fetus acquires morally significant human characteristics some involvement by society is warranted but the fact that it is not easy to determine when this happens doesn't change the fact that at an early stage the fetus is clearly human ONLY in the sense that an egg or sperm or other cell in the body is human.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009 07:29 PM

there is one legitmate concern here

that these kind of people will breed and others won't.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009 05:51 PM

if you aren't going to mark to market you are going to have to rely on govt audits or auditing firms which are GENUINELY accountable

to somebody (government) and not, directly or indirectly, to the people they are auditing (which they will ALWAYS be in any "free market").

Wednesday, June 3, 2009 04:39 PM
Original article: This Modern World

not cooked maybe, but baked

or at least half baked

Tuesday, June 2, 2009 09:54 PM

it would be interesting to see a woman defend her right to access to the clinic with and ak-47against those blocking it

I'm not saying the political effects would be good, but I'm not sure they would be bad either. I'm leaning against advising it, so far, but then again I'm not a woman being interfered with in this way. I'm not actually sure the effects WOULD be bad. Christian fascism has always enjoyed a privilidged status and maybe a few people actively defending themselves would bring the infection to the surface where it would have to be dealt with.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009 08:15 PM

of course that is what they want

how else will they deter "immorality"

Tuesday, June 2, 2009 10:27 AM

prudery generally is a big help to them, because anyone who wants to defend sex, or defend rationally dealing with it's consequences

is at a pr disadvantage, there is a desire not to talk about it, and there is a tendency to give the proponents of "morality" the benefit of the doubt or least split the difference with them. All of these things work to the advantage of those who wish to intimidate. Feminists might want to think about this the next time they feel the urge to rail against porn, prostitution, "objectification", "the predatory gaze", etc.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009 02:03 AM

if women have free reproductive choice the percentage of males wil eventually go down unless something is done to prevent it

SOME percentage of gay female couples will want to have their own biological children created from the egg of one and sperm created from the stem cells of the other. These children obviously can only be female. No matter how small this segment of the population is it will, eventually, if nothing else changes, result in a mostly female population. The question for the long term is: Will a majority female world (which of necessity women will be mostly running) result in scarce males being valued simply because they are male in a way similar to the way men value women, or will the fact that men have no particular importance in the operation of society make them totally uninteresting to women.

Monday, June 1, 2009 04:32 PM

except among isolated individuals and subcultures I said

obviously they are not, yet, isolated enough, but it won't be long. I realize this may not seem like much today, but it really won't be.

Monday, June 1, 2009 10:04 AM

as should be apparent to everyone by now, it is woman, of all political and cultural stripes

who are serious about controlling other people.

Monday, June 1, 2009 09:36 AM

this should be taken as yet more evidence that, whatever inclincatiion to genuinely control of other people may have existed in the past amoung men,

their focus now is exclusively (except among isolated individuals and subcultures) on trying to matter and trying to avoid wasting their lives and resources on people and situations where they don't. The effort to do this is often mistakenly interpreted as a desire to control others.

Sunday, May 31, 2009 08:04 PM

only complete historical ignorance and/or dishonesty could lead anyone to say that Reagan accomplished anything real

he presided over the (hopefully) temporary triumph by corporate sociopathology and religious fantaticsm and cultural ignorance over the forces of rational regulation and ethical social behavior, as well as over the collapse of the decayed from within Soviet Empire. Any comparison between him and FDR and Truman would be laughable were it not for the fact that there are, apparently, people in positions of authority who take it seriously. It is like being governed by coalition of insane people and imbeciles. A lot like it.

Sunday, May 31, 2009 09:30 AM

Forgive me for being a dense and stupid female, but please explain ".....women who think like this all the time"?

Men deal all the time with women who think they are smarter than men and who think therefore that they should make all the decisions. As has been well documented, in couples where women make equal or close to it or more money than the man the wife DOES in fact make most or all of the decisions. These relationships are generally described as "more egalitarian" since what the wife wants to do is what any non oppressor male wants to do anyway.

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