You're talking about defining community by inclusion; everyone who has a stake in the community should be able to contribute/join, and only things very directly relevant to that participation should be considered.
Most of the folks freaking about about legitimization of being gay (or the idea that their money will go to pay things like survivor's pensions for the not-dead half of a gay couple...) define community by exclusion; there's a list of rules you have to follow. If you don't follow them, you're a heretic, and no decent person wants you around.
As a model of social organization, community by inclusion is clearly superior, or at least obviously and demonstrably way better at getting people to co-operate in groups (and larger groups). It won't support a moral-superiority model beyond a sort of vague smugness at how enlightened everyone is, though, so there's a basic primate security ("I am not the guy who the band will feed to the lion so the rest can get away") issue it can't address.
That there are other ways to address this specific insecurity management issue isn't obvious to the folks who want to be standing far away from the heap of heretics in case the Lord starts to feels some smiting coming on, and they're generally using a world view that references difference from absolute, ideal, abstract types, rather than the -- merely factually accurate -- model that assigns qualities to populations based on statistical measurement of what happens to be present at the moment.
This shows up in the arguments about gay parents; one groups is going "that's wrong!" (it's a violation of the abstract type "parent", and probably of the abstract type "gay", too, even if the "gay" type isn't equating "gay" and "pedophile") and the other group is hauling up the available statistics and going "no, no, look, see, gays tend to be better parents than the population average, it's all right" and communication fails to occur, most of the time. (If it didn't occur some of the time this wouldn't be a controversy and being gay would still be a crime.)
So, rawly reduced, the folks freaking out have heads that are running a system with very strong type checking, and they're throwing a compiler error; if this lead to fact-checking the type definitions by default, all would be well, but it doesn't.
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branchandroot
Just because you're being reasonable...
Date: 2008-11-01 04:22 am (UTC)You're talking about defining community by inclusion; everyone who has a stake in the community should be able to contribute/join, and only things very directly relevant to that participation should be considered.
Most of the folks freaking about about legitimization of being gay (or the idea that their money will go to pay things like survivor's pensions for the not-dead half of a gay couple...) define community by exclusion; there's a list of rules you have to follow. If you don't follow them, you're a heretic, and no decent person wants you around.
As a model of social organization, community by inclusion is clearly superior, or at least obviously and demonstrably way better at getting people to co-operate in groups (and larger groups). It won't support a moral-superiority model beyond a sort of vague smugness at how enlightened everyone is, though, so there's a basic primate security ("I am not the guy who the band will feed to the lion so the rest can get away") issue it can't address.
That there are other ways to address this specific insecurity management issue isn't obvious to the folks who want to be standing far away from the heap of heretics in case the Lord starts to feels some smiting coming on, and they're generally using a world view that references difference from absolute, ideal, abstract types, rather than the -- merely factually accurate -- model that assigns qualities to populations based on statistical measurement of what happens to be present at the moment.
This shows up in the arguments about gay parents; one groups is going "that's wrong!" (it's a violation of the abstract type "parent", and probably of the abstract type "gay", too, even if the "gay" type isn't equating "gay" and "pedophile") and the other group is hauling up the available statistics and going "no, no, look, see, gays tend to be better parents than the population average, it's all right" and communication fails to occur, most of the time. (If it didn't occur some of the time this wouldn't be a controversy and being gay would still be a crime.)
So, rawly reduced, the folks freaking out have heads that are running a system with very strong type checking, and they're throwing a compiler error; if this lead to fact-checking the type definitions by default, all would be well, but it doesn't.