I appreciate your comments. Regarding whether a traditional family with a father and mother provides a better chance for happiness and success, my beliefs on that point are based on faith (see here) rather than empirical study. I have not reviewed the empirical evidence on the topic. I expect that, like most social science research, any facts gathered are open to many different interpretations.

That said, by getting government out of the way, people can disagree about these issues without it becoming a source of contention–even when the disagreement is deeply felt. Thanks again for your thoughts.

You articulate your point exceptionally well. I disagree wholeheartedly that a union between two men or who women should be treated differently, and I think the idea that children have a better chance at happiness and success with different-gendered couples is ridiculous as there’s no valid evidence to support that. However, I agree 100 percent that government doesn’t need to be in the business of legitimizing marriage.

This was the most thoughtful, careful opinion I’ve ever read from someone with a view opposing my own. If this could be the basis of discussion, and not name-calling and labeling, I think the conversation on gay marriage would be much more advanced than where it stands today.

Thanks – this was a good read.

I find these concerns puzzling. Government marriage licensing is a poor tool to combat child abuse or any other kind of criminal behavior, and every state already criminalizes sex between adults and minors.

I suspect that the reason for these concerns is that a government marriage license is a defense to statutory rape. With parental consent minors of a certain age can get married, and their spouses don’t run the risk of criminal prosecution. But it would be easy enough in such cases to replace the government license with a simple affidavit from the parents granting consent for the marriage. Criminal statutes could still establish the minimum age at which such parental consent would be a valid defense.

However, anti-gay advocates of state-controlled marriage will cry out, “How will you possibly prevent things like incest and under-aged marriage?” Silly argument, I know, but what do you say to them?

http://www.twotlj.org/against-consequentialism.pdf

This topic is huge and I’m bad at explaining things in writing without taking a ton of time so I’m sorry that I’m about to just link to a bunch of stuff. To keep things fair I’ll link to some of what I think are the best arguments for and against libertarian(deontological) and consequentialism(you might call it liberal but there are consequentalist libertarians as well). I don’t personally agree with either position by the way.

Deontological
For:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-rights_libertarianism
Against:http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html

Consequentalist
For:http://raikoth.net/consequentialism.html
Against:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/#WhaGooHedVsPluCon

Anyways I’m bowing out for now. Thanks for the interesting discussion Ron Paul 2016!

But the real issue is that your position assumes for you the position of population manager with all the rights and powers appertaining thereto without a shred of justification. What right do you have to tell your neighbors that they are forbidden from owning guns? This is directly contrary to the spirit of the American founding–all men are created equal.

Again, my point about the numbers is that they the anti gun lobby uses them as a red herring. This is not about risk analysis, as the car/gun comparison clearly shows. The shrill shriek reduced to print, aka the article by Paul Rosenberg, plays the same game, pretending that individuals have to justify their rights, to prove their existence. You and Rosenberg have it all backward. Insofar as an individual is not infringing on the rights of others, her rights are unlimited. It is government that bears the burden of proving that there is good reason for any restriction, and a red-herring numbers game doesn’t cut it.

Regarding your question about government possession of nuclear, biological, chemical, and other types of indiscriminate-killing weapons, I do not believe governments should produce/possess them.

I’m afraid I still don’t understand your point in the car analogy. Are you saying that the gun control activists don’t believe what they believe for the reasons they say they believe them? And they must not because otherwise they would be worried about cars too? If so, my critique of false-equivalence still applies.

Your indiscriminate qualifier seems subjective. Are you saying our government shouldn’t have nuclear weapons, cruise missiles, tanks, biological weapons etc. either?

As I stated previously my main criticism of your post is that I believe it misunderstands the actual reasons an intelligent person would disagree with your viewpoint. So here’s a very well argued piece by Paul Rosenberg. I myself disagree with a few of his points but if you want to understand better why gun control activists believe what they believe this is a good departure point.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/20121226104857715225.html