Thread:Comments:French Senate vote in support of same-sex marriage/Redefining "marriage" silences ideas that the queer community finds inconvenient./reply (2)

Mr. Morris: Thank you for your thoughtful response, for using your true name, and for refraining from labeling me and calling me names. Please join me in exploring what unites you and me before moving on to where we might disagree.

I am a libertarian. I want to see a world in which every human being on the planet enjoys real liberty, real justice, and real economic empowerment. I fully agree with "the queer agenda" as I understand it with the sole exception that I oppose a change in the definition of the word "marriage". In particular, I oppose the use of either violence or economic discrimination against queers, either by the State or by private persons, as a means for promoting the "queers are perverts" viewpoint. On that point, my position is that we are all queer, because queer just means failure to completely and always conform to the cultural norms for gender and sexuality that I often call "the marriage norm". The most important example is masturbation; every person who has ever in his or her life, even one time, masturbated, is queer, even if that person does not identify with "the queer community". So I do not see this issue as "us versus them". We are all queer. Where we differ is whether we think that being queer is morally wrong.

Perhaps you can agree with me on all of the above. I want to establish as much common ground as possible with you because I intend to argue that the values and ideas that unite you and me are more important than the values and ideas on which we find that we disagree.

Before I respond to your points, please confirm for me that you agree with all of the above. Please also let me know where you would draw the line between sexual behavior that is moral and sexual behavior that is immoral by categorizing each of the following:

masturbation ; exclusive monogamous male-female * ; exclusive polygamous male-female * ; promiscuous male-female ; orgy male-female ; violent male-female (sadomasochism) ; male-male ; female-female ; adult-child (pedophilia) ; adult-animal (bestiality) ; adult-corpse (necrophilia) ;

I have used an asterisk (*) to indicate the sexual behaviors that I think are moral. Which ones would you mark?