That’s never been a valid argument. Adjust the system so only one marriage applies at any single given moment for tax purposes. Alternatively: use one of the multiple “combined income” systems that exist.
I’m fairly sure “taxes” aren’t what prevent it.
I’ve always thought it was because most people are jealous that others can get and support more spouses than they can. 
It’s not the primary reason mainstream society rejects it, but it’s the reason that even many people campaigning for gay marriage will tell you to get to the back of the bus if you want to push for poly marriage. (Well, that and after having heard for so long “OMG if we let GAYS get married then POLYGAMY and BESTIALITY are next!”, they don’t want to prove it true. Even though there’s a huge difference between poly with consenting adults, poly with non-consenting children (hello religious whackjobs) and sex with animals)
Taxes, immigration, and health benefits are currently accorded to spouses, among other things. People like to raise the spectre of “If you can marry 10 people, then people will marry their friends just to get them healthcare!”
… You know how I mentioned that the right response (in my moral code) to “people are so desperate that they’ll sell their livers for cash” is not “ban selling livers” but “make people less desperate”?
Yes, people in the US probably WOULD marry random friends to get health care, and people in many countries would try to marry anybody to get immigration rights. What does this say about the health care and immigration situations in general? 
He’s either a very good troll, or someone who has had some spectacularly bitter experiences in his life which could create such vitriol. I wonder what he thinks about his mother?
My view on gay marriage: Remove all legal benefits (tax exemption, etc) provided by marriage and I’d be happy to support gay marriage. It seems rather silly to me that the government should be in the business of telling you whether you should marry or not by providing monetary incentives. Guess who funds those monetary incentives for married couples? Single taxpayers! Despite this, I bet uber-conservatives would fight tooth-and-nail if you challenged the notion. Do I sense hypocrisy?
Couple things:
I agree, it isn’t taxes. Taxes are a straw man that gets shopped around so they can hide behind the real reasons, which are (I think) primarily religious. ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ and all that jazz. Divorce laws used to be extremely stringent for this very same reason. Even though the protestants split off from the Catholics, they still ultimately were influenced by the more than a thousand years of Catholic supremacy.
There ARE good pragmatic reasons why a 2-member relationship is, in theory, more stable: an n-member relationship is actually n * (n-1) /2 different relationships – each pair of people have their own dynamic. (Just trust me on the math, it’s (n choose 2) if you really want to look it up). Two people have just one relationship; three people have three seperate ones, four have six, and so on.
(I’m even oversimplifying a bit, because any group of 3 people will also have a different dynamic than any two of them alone would have.)
As a practical matter, such large groups are less likely to be stable in the long term. Which, given the old idea that divorce should never happen, would be a good reason to bar it. Now, however … well, the divorce proceedings would be much more complicated, but that’s not a good reason to hide behind.
My view on gay marriage is … well, kind of impolite and a very radical opinion.
Opposing gay marriage is Unamerican. Period. End of story. I know large parts of the population disagree with me – I don’t care. They are all wrong.
I’m fine with stripping the legal benefits from marriage - but you’re then going to need to reform every system which currently depends on marital status. Taxes are the EASIEST one! If the marriage tax bonus gets thrown out, people will complain and some people will lose money but it’s not the end of the world. We can do without.
Hospital visitation rights and emergency care decisions are a much more serious problem. Healthcare (in the US) is a much more serious problem. Immigration is a much more serious problem.
There are probably others but those are the major things that come to mind. Because they’re so important, these are also the areas where in many places policy is shifting even without gay marriage. Some (but not all) companies will offer domestic partner healthcare benefits. Some (but not all) countries will allow monogamous domestic partners to immigrate. Some (but not all) hospitals will allow same-sex partners to be treated as spouses.
guys, its looks like we are getting a bit ridiculously sidetracked…and i dont need TWO threads going head on about social issues
to prevent getting any more off-topic, just as a safeguard i will lock this thread TEMPORARILY. dont worry, i wont ban anyone and i will reopen this thread sometime on tuesday so you guys can continue to talk about the original topic
there’s not much to talk about at this point anyways. lets wait until next week shall we?
thread reopened. lets try this again by staying on-topic please 
Keyword is “EOCS”, though.
So no loopholes then. Everyone in the organization is in agreement that rape is gone. No sudden exodus of studio’s either.
I suppose on the plus side, if they’re going to clean up how their boxes look, EOCS will pass custom inspectors.
Anyone happen to know the URL of the link, that lists all the members of EOCS?
EDIT
Nevermind… found it: http://www.sofurin.org/htm/member/index.htm
To celebrate / commemorate this event, I think everyone should go and buy a rape game today. (e.g. from dlsite or whatever)
I’ve done my bit (NSFW) - now it’s your turn! =P
(if you want recommendations I can offer suggestions)
looks at link - winces
You can talk me into buying nc - I do own bible black after all! - but you’d have to be able to pass:
No brutality (Mind control, blackmail, and drugs are okay, grabbing people and ripping their clothes off is out. Chaining someone up naked and threatening dire consequences until they agree to your demands - or even plead for you to take them instead - is also okay. Or even chaining someone up and non-violently stimulating them until they beg for release. I do angst, not violence.)
No gang rape (personal turnoff, even if it meets the above criteria)
Playable and enjoyable by someone who can’t read Japanese.
I can meet the first two criteria with a couple of titles, but the third is a bit of a killer. =P
I’ve been meaning to get this anyway - ??? ???
Might be stretching it a bit, but it’s dark, includes rape, and the genre is ??? (Internet lovers-suicide ADV).
I do hope there can still be rape. I mean, even Nocturnal Illusion has some things close to rape in it. Crescendo does as well. Totally banning all mention of rape would severely crimp the kind of stories that could be told.
But in truth, this is what EOCS is for. They exist as a censorship organization to self-regulate the industry to ensure there are no problems with society at large. This was already there before this whole blowup happened. And in fact, rape has gotten the Japanese industry in trouble before. In an ideal world, everyone would understand that fiction is fiction and even the most extreme content out there would be OK. I hope I live to see the day that world comes to pass, but it hasn’t yet. It was a lightning rod for controversy. Hopefully, the ban is relatively narrow, but we will see.
Not that I think it should have gone this way, but we lost. We lost. Not the war, though, just a battle. We lost when Thrill Kill was buried and never released. We lost when the threat of unconstitutional legislation prompted the creation of the ESRB. And we lost when the ESRB’s rating system does not permit ‘unrated cuts’, like can be done with movies. The rating system for movies essentially gave up and created a market for NC-17 movies. What would have been NC-17 ten years ago is R now, and the unrated DVD cut is often worse. But it took decades to get there. The ESRB hasn’t gotten to that point, you can’t buy unrated cuts of Manhunt or Halo with extra gore (or the unrated cut of Persona 3 where they don’t fade to black when you max a girlfriend S-link). They don’t exist.
Furthermore, I think, this was inevitable. The japanese companies appear to be starting to get the idea they have to go global. PP is continually expanding its reach, other companies are starting up, and inevitably things like RapeLay were going to go critical and explode at some point. Increased attention was always going to come eventually as these games got a higher profile.
If it [edit: meaning the ban] only covers games where the protagonist is the rapist, and the game is about rape for its own sake (as opposed to games like some Narg reviewed, where you’re assigned to break people for intel – etc) then not a whole lot will change. And I have good reason to hope this is as far as it will go. Look at Bible Black! Have the feminist rights groups complained about that game? No. Is it for sale on Amazon? Yes. But RapeLay glorified rape in a way BB does not*, and this difference seems to be where EOCS should concentrate if they want to make the problem go away while retaining as much artistic freedom as seems to be possible right now.
For PC games, I think there has been at least one that released a download-only unrated version, and some others that have offered patches. Consoles are shut out though.
Well, here’s the start of the banning law:
http://zepy.momotato.com/2009/06/01/fir … -in-eroge/
So maybe the loophole is that companies will just have to change the title and cover art for the games they release. Let’s hope it works
Um, that was in ALL versions of the game. the game is rated 12+ in Japan, so theirs nothing there. where did you hear that rumor? It was ALWAYS meant to be up to the players imagination…