DOMA and Prop 8. Both History.

[LemmingofGlory]

The gaming communities you participate in tend to be more mature, so you don't notice it as much.

Intelligent forums can spoil you to a lot of things, like expecting people to understand the difference between attacking their idea and attacking their character.

Now, often those rules are a result of a female raider's actions leading to guild breakups/drama; perhaps you've heard of the horror stories of the Female Raider Who Sleeps with the Guild Master for Perks. Those stories, however, ALWAYS blame the female and never the male, as in "that wench seduced our GM and broke up the guild." Takes two to tango.

I never got into WoW, so these kinds of Yoko Ono stories are all new to me. I don't really understand guild power structures. When last I played online, Bnet channels were used to organize gaming communities, and hardly anyone had voice chat capabilities so everyone was sexless sentient text.

It may be that the guilds you describe are essentially like the tribe of Bushmen in "The Gods Must Be Crazy," except considerably less charming. A glass coke bottle falls from the sky, and everyone in the tribe wants it because it is so special. This causes fighting. The only solution is to call the bottle an Evil Thing and throw it off the edge of the world. In this context, the group shows inadequate sophistication to adapt to changing circumstance and their response is conservative: return to the status quo. I guess a profound lack of insight goes hand-in-hand with people who've never had to stop and understand the world from an entirely different point of view.

As far as the Lounge goes, when I think of LemmingofGlory, I think "mature, well-written Diablo 1 fanatic with nicely thought-out posts" more than I think "gay gamer." As you said, with gamers, social backgrounds tend not to matter since it's the games that bring us here. Then we stay for all the political bickering anyway.

I've had the crappiest unique item in Diablo as my user avatar for ten years and I'm being accused of maturity? Well, maybe that is true. I mean, I'm resisting talking about Turkish incest even though it sounds like somebody's hilariously specific search history.

-Lem

[eppie]

Marriage isn't really the issue then. It's that these married cousins are procreating and having higher rates of offspring with defects. If they didn't have offspring, then it wouldn't be an issue. Rather than try to control marriage, or intercourse, why not change your immigration rules?

I read about similar issues in other European nations, where the same consanguinity problems (increase in birth defects) are arising due to immigration policy and the immigrants social norms. The public policy issue you've raised is the health care burden upon the Dutch society, rather than any sense of moral outrage. I suspect however, that for some people, like Mr. Wilders, there is also an anti-immigrant (nationalistic) sentiment permeating their call to action. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3419292/

So, how about changing the rules so that a naturalized immigrant cannot confer citizenship upon their spouse. The immigrant spouse must pursue naturalization like any other immigrant. A natural born citizen would be able to confer the short cut to naturalization.

But then again, this may also lead to other unintended consequences, where people have many natural born "Dutch" children and marry them off at a young age to older relatives to get them into the country. Such is the nature of law, it makes people adapt their behaviors.

My opinion is that once an immigrant has gotten full citizenship, he should be treated exactly the same as an autochtonous Dutch person. So I wouldn't want to create legal differences there.

But some good arguments were posted here by you and Jester. Indeed there are many 'loopholes'. Don't get married but get children. etc. What you hope is to have a population that is sensible enough to make a good choice.....but that is a bit too much asked of course.

[LavCat]

Isabella I married her cousin Ferdinand II. If I'm not mistaken their family is still reigning in the Netherlands.

[kandrathe]

What you hope is to have a population that is sensible enough to make a good choice.....but that is a bit too much asked of course.

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow. " -- Kay

[Nystul]

Isabella I married her cousin Ferdinand II. If I'm not mistaken their family is still reigning in the Netherlands.

Never should have happened but it's easy to get confused about these things:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW4vOpOEGhg

[Hammerskjold]

Isabella I married her cousin Ferdinand II. If I'm not mistaken their family is still reigning in the Netherlands.

Never should have happened but it's easy to get confused about these things:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW4vOpOEGhg

Then there's the case of Springfield V Shelbyville:
(from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0757018/quotes )

Jebediah Springfield: People, our search is over! On this site we shall build a new town where we can worship freely, govern justly, and grow vast fields of hemp for making rope and blankets.

Shelbyville Manhattan: Yes! And marry our cousins.

Jebediah Springfield: I was- wha... what are you talking about, Shelbyville? Why would we want to marry our cousins?

Shelbyville Manhattan: Because they're so attractive. I... I thought that was the whole point of this journey.

Jebediah Springfield: Absolutely not!

Shelbyville Manhattan: I tell you, I won't live in a town that robs men of the right to marry their cousins!