Otherwise sixteen-year-olds should go to jail if they sex with each other. Mutual rape.
Yeah, that's wrong. Neither party is capable so neither party is at fault. It's like suggesting two three year olds should be able to sue each other over a contract they wrote in the sand. Rape requires one party that knows or should know better.
Since when do we require an animal's consent to use it for our own ends?
Sex always involves consent, to be legal. It's a distinct kind of use. There are all sorts of activity that you can't do with things you own, legally.
What was the litmus for the SC ruling on abortion?
Too serious and off topic for me to spend the time here on it. If you don't know and want to discuss it I'd be happy to in a thread dedicated to that particular.
I think we can agree that where the word "marriage" appears in states' laws, the contemporaneous definition of the word "marriage" could be substituted to accurately reflect the intent of the law. Later, when states "scrambled" to include gender-based language they were most certainly clarifying the laws' true intent, not altering it.
It's a bit of a semantic point we're playing at, so I'll say this: they "clarified" an unconstitutional point.
That might depend on how loosely you define "religious." Are murder laws religious? Is the idea of unalienable rights religious?
It really doesn't depend on one's view of religious. We live in a society bound by secular law. An atheist may feel as strongly about rights as a fundamentalist. What you're speaking to is motivation. It may be that the framer of a law is motivated by his moral or religious understanding. But what is certain is that understanding, as it is expressed in law, must meet the qualifications of the secular institution it serves.
Self-reported attitudes don't always match actual attitudes.
Which wouldn't be the question. The question would be, "Do they mostly?" An exception that doesn't become the rule doesn't negate the value of the data presented in support of it. The data doesn't support your notion of impact. People seem to carry their own notions, largely.
I think behavior might be a better measure of actual attitudes toward abortion. For example, if you want to know how many people are willing to get abortions, just look at how many people actually get abortions.
That would preclude any number of people who might never find the choice in a moment, but who might yield to the temptation of it were it presented. At best it invites all sorts of speculation. Absent reason to believe otherwise, I'll take the word of people asked an honest question and hope they give me the same latitude.
Certainly being brought up in an environment in which the government allows and even provides abortion, will lead people to believe certain things about it. The opposite must also be true. If someone were brought up in an environment where abortion were illegal, they would think differently of it.
I definitely think legality impacts a thing, though largely among people who are rudderless on it. That is to say, if you have a moral code by which fornication is forbidden and you invest yourself in that belief, the fact that there's a legal brothel in the next town won't lead you to its use.
Government does have something of a social engineering effect, intentionally or not.
In ways good and bad. Sure.
So what is family, then? And what is its value and role in society? Should we define it to mean anything and everything, and therefore nothing?
The family will always be something personal to those involved in it and something literal to the law. To the state it's manifest in a contract between two parties who mean to be legally bound to one another in a reflection of an internal commitment.
The Church distinguishes between natural and sacramental marriage. If an atheist man and woman, for example, marry - they have entered into what the Church would call natural marriage. Just because they don't recognize God, doesn't mean God doesn't recognize their marriage.
This feels semantic. Are you saying that God blesses the marriage of those who hate Him? Or just that he would recognize their intent?
I am. It's illegal for people (not animals) to engage in bestiality, even in the privacy of their own bedroom, even when no people or animals are harmed. Why?
Answered in the first or second bit above this one.