Response to Proposition 8 advertisements

Proposition 8 has galvanized the gay rights movement, and is one of the most heavily funded state ballot initiatives in history, with both sides raising a combined 70 million or so (according to Wikipedia).

I have yet to hear a really solid argument for prohibiting either homosexual behavior or same-sex marriage. By "solid", I mean an argument that has sound premises and a valid logical structure.

I'd like to look at some of the more popular arguments against same-sex marriage first, and perhaps later, arguments "against" homosexuality. One argument that I saw used a lot in the Proposition 8 campaign had the general theme of "protect the children" or "don't confuse the children".

This is one of the arguments that bothers me the most, because it implies that the legalization of same-sex marriage would harm children in some way. I will try to construct the argument (P for Premise, C for Conclusion):

P1) If same-sex marriage is legal, then young children will be forced to learn about it.
P2) Young children will be confused by the concept of same-sex marriage.
C1) If same-sex marriage is legal, then young children may be harmed.
(Implied: Young children should be protected from harm, so same-sex marriage should not be legal.)

It seems that this is the general line of thought of the following videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75J3TN9Zzck
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8j2y9WtTPw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI-GjWY-WlA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5qdOQ-yzFU
http://protectmarriage.com/video/view/8

Commonly, Premise 1 is tied into classroom education specifically. However, in one of the videos, the child of a gay couple questions her parents after talking with a friend, so I will not limit the discussion to classroom education.

There are several problems with this argument, both with its logical construction and with the validity of the premises.

Suppose that both premises are true. That is, suppose that young children will be forced to learn about same-sex marriage in some environment, and suppose also that the concept will be confusing to them. This does not entail that the child is being harmed in some way. Even if they did not grasp the concept, there is no reason to believe that this would be damaging to the child's psyche.

For example, I was adopted before birth, and my parents explained this to me when I was about five or six. At the time, I did not understand the concept, and it confused me. However, it appears that no harm was caused. Should adoption be illegal because the concept confuses young children?

This is not to say that the argument is impossible; I just have yet to see the link between confusing young children and harming them spelled out in any detail.

I also find Premise 2 suspect. Would the concept of same-sex marriage really confuse young children? Opponents of same-sex marriage tend to emphasize that marriage is primarily concerned with procreation, or at least the theoretical possibility thereof. I grant that if a young child had been taught that the primary concern of marriage was procreation, then two men or two women or two men being married might be confusing.

However, I doubt that many young children would fully understand this concept. In "kid terms", they might end up with something like this:
"It takes a man and a woman to make a baby."
"Men and women get married so they can make babies together."
But this child would probably also be confused by single parents or childless couples.

I think the standard line here is probably more along the traditional "When a man and a woman love each other very much..."
And if love is at all a part of the equation for marriage in the child's mind, then it seems the concept of two men loving each other or two women loving each other is not too out of reach for a child, and therefore neither would the idea of same-sex marriage.

I am clearly not an expert in child psychology, so take the above with a dose of skepticism, if you like. But also realize that Premise 2 isn't backed up by child psychology experts, either (so far as I know).

Synchronizing Ubuntu desktops

So I want to synchronize my work computer and home computer, both of which are running Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. When I say "synchronize", I mean that I want all the files in my user profile for each machine to be the same. This includes Firefox bookmarks, Pidgin plugins, etc.
Also, since I have root access on both machines, I want the packages lists to be identical. That is to say, if an application is installed on one machine, I want it to be installed on the other.

Synchronizing the package lists didn't turn out to be too difficult, at least part of it. I created a shell script that grabs /etc/apt/sources.list from both computers, runs a diff and creates an install command accordingly. It then passes that command back through ssh. It does not, as of yet, uninstall programs. I would need to do something with times or timestamps to implement synchronous uninstallation.

And to synchronize the desktops I successfully implemented unison. Anyone trying to synchronize anything on two or more computers should look this utility up. One nice feature is that it will work across multiple OS's. So I can set it up to sync Users\username\Documents on Vista with /home/username/Documents on Ubuntu if I like.

I ended up tossing both scripts into an hourly cron job on my roommate's web server. It's always on, and always in Linux, neither of which is true for my work and home computers. The next step will be to have each computer ssh the server and invoke the scripts at logon (and maybe at logoff?). That way, I wouldn't have to wait for the hour mark if it was important.