I don’t believe the bullet points have been proven, so I do not accept them as valid assumptions. That is not to say that I think they are false statements.

You then offer three bullet points with which you’ve stated you disagree.

Jeff, you have a truly bizarre debate style.

To clarify: I didn’t take a position on the bullet points. I stated them because I believe that they are all statements you believe and they form the basis for opinions that you’ve expressed.

I’m not convinced that the statements are false, but I’m equally unconvinced that they are true.

This is what you say in 15:

“I’ll just lay out the assumptions that I disagree with and we’ll probably just have to agree to disagree on all of the conclusions that follow from them.”

You then offer three bullet points with which you’ve stated you disagree.

Then you say in 19:

“I specifically avoided taking a position on any of the bullet points. I did not state, nor did I intend to communicate, that I believed the bullet points were false.”

Again, I’m perplexed. You take a clear position, then claim you took no position on the points you took a clear position on.

Maybe you were dealing with some cryptic point made by Kerwin following #15 that I have missed and perhaps the comment was directed at him, but from what you wrote I can only assume that you were addressing me. Let me know man.

I chose my words very carefully in my last post. I specifically avoided taking a position on any of the bullet points. I did not state, nor did I intend to communicate, that I believed the bullet points were false. It’s just that I’m less certain of their validity than you are, so I attempted to reverse directions on the logic tree in order to find the core points where you and I begin to differ.

P.S. Even if I did want to engage in direct discussion on these points, I would direct you back to comment 15, as your response indicates that you missed a couple important nuances which lead you to make a couple arguments based on things that I didn’t actually say.

I didn’t say this. What I said was that all the social science evidence shows that children prosper best when raised by their own (adopted or biological) mother AND father. Some children do well under other arrangements, but when we are talking about public policy in a nation of 300 million, we must deal with what benefits society GENERALLY. Think about speed limits. Some people a better drivers than others at higher speeds, but there is no provision of customization for each driver based on individual driving skill OR how one FEELS about the speed limit in a given area on a given day.

“The social ills that we’ve experienced since the introduction of the no-fault divorce would not have occurred or are more severe/numerous than those that would have occurred had the no-fault divorce not become legally accepted.”

You are right, there are multiple factros that have contributed to a host of social ills (that you are acknowledging exist). However, one factor is nearly ALWAYS present when we look at the full expanse of these disasters — broken families, meaning fatherless children or children of divorce. The number one indicator of poverty, drug abuse, STDs, intergenerational unwed pregnancy (which is the top contributor to poverty), incarceration, domestic abuse, suicide and many other horrors is when children are raised outside the arrangement you are so loathe to acknowledge is generally most beneficial to children socially, emotionally, financially, legally, etc. Government should be in the business of setting policy that helps children, not creating incentives for behavior that we KNOW generally leads to harm. The problem is, adults have dragged children into adult political battles for their own narcissistic goals and have done great damamge to several generations in the ugly process.

Which parent would you say a child needs less Jeff — his mother or his father? You seem to be saying that it is unimportant whether a child is raised by her own two parents, so please explain how you’ve concluded that any old arrangement will do.

“This would certainly not be the intent and I would advocate that great care be taken so that the new institutions are not more desirable to couples who would otherwise marry.”

This is a perplexing statement since you’ve taken so much time insisting that marriage between one man and one woman is no better than any other “healthy family.” Anyway, a “domestic partnership” scheme does exactly this — in our no-strings-attached world, this kind of this offers all the “benefits” to self-serving people without all that messy commitment stuff for couples who should otherwise marry. Again — government policy should be made with a mind to BENEFIT society. Sorry, two people who happen to be living together in a sexual relationship without the legally-binding commitment of marriage are not a benefit to society and in fact, this arrangement is known to harm children AND women generally, so why would government enact policies and encourage behavior KNOWN to harm society?