Sanctioned domestic partnership contracts are a legitimate government interest.

1) On claims of bald assertion: given that CON has given concession on all of these points through acceptance, he has accepted the following claim without challege: the duty of government is to fight that which does insult to the freedom of its citizens to be, as well as to codify for future reference what is not within our freedoms, and to allow people as a group to determine what constitutes explicitly acceptable behavior, both for the government itself and for the people who are members of it. 2) It is not a bald assertion to note the fallacy of "argument from authority". CON has made a positive claim as to the nature of government, and in so doing has accepted a burden of proof on that claim. He has provided nothing that constitutes "proof", merely the statements of men without any actual support as to the validity of those claims. No amount of credentials can make an inaccurate utterance anything but; Surely Sir Isaac Newton was a great physicist, but no amount of discussion of his physics will ever make his writings on the physics of alchemy any more correct, nor does it make his discoveries on thermodynamics any less susceptible to refinement with modern discovery. Simply put, Newton was wrong in many extents about many things, and so too were Jefferson and Paine. Their claims on the nature of government as a necessary evil in its best of states must see corroboration not from additional people that agree, but rather from actual reasons.Further, he makes a claim at IS may interfere with OUGHT, which is itself a spurious claim; This is the IS/OUGHT problem of philosophy[1]. Simply, you start with RULES, and apply it to the REALITY, to get the prescription. The reality doesn't modify the RULES.Finally on this section of CON's argument, he is mischaracterizing my own claims, particularly an equivocation as to where the "evil" exists. Within the function and existence of government, itself being in the best of real cases a perfect implementation of ethical considerations as per (1), there is no evil present there; instead, the evil rests in the world which it regulates and corrects. It is the difference between a correct math which can answer a problem, the math being in this situation governmet, and the problem itself. "Math" is not "The Problem". Math is the solution to the problem. In such a similar way, government in this claim IS NOT the evil, Government is the solution to resolving and removing the evil. Nowhere here is it evidenced that in the best of cases government itself is some form of evil, evil being defined as that which does harm to freedom.3) The nature of government I have argued is that Government is in the best of cases a pure implementation of the collective responsibilities of society. to that extent any argument that THE PEOPLE as a group should want as much domestic partnership as possible IS THE SAME AS the claim that Government should seek as much domestic partnership s possible; I see this as a concession of CON on this point, and further, CON still must establish that government action is itself coercion. Further, in the previous round, it has been established that because people DO seek public sector remediation and recognition and solutions in their domestic partnerships, that private solutions previously offered are in the people's eyes insufficient. This directly counters CON's claim that people will simply seek solutions through the private sector.CON claims that government has authority to FORCE some outcome that it view is within the public good; however, as I have stated time and time again, THERE ARE OTHER CLEAR OPTIONS, and in some cases it is clearly not the case that the government has such an authority to force a particular state. This is the difference between a "stick" and a "carrot". Further, CON still lacks any sufficient backing to this positive claim that the govrnment has such authority, and that the government action in various cases can at all be classified as coercion. There is the implicit assumption in CON's argument here, an invalid assumption, that the existence of a law implies the coercion of participation in that law. Someone could, for instance, decide to cohabitate and not engage a domestic partnership contract. It is only of their willing and informed consent tt individuals could ever be bound under such a law. Such participation could by no means EVER be considered a "coercion" under any commonly understood definition of the word.CON seems to fall into some mythical thinking that private interests are always acting in the public good; private interests are driven by AMORAL market factors; the market is not concerned with what OUGHT be; the market is only concerned with what IS the path to the greatest possible profits, and in many cases is demonstrably short sighted in this pursuit. This can be seen through the efforts of MONSANTO, and their administration of GE crops, themselves a great boon to mankind, but handled as MONSANTO wishes to handle them they have created widespread economic hardship. 4) In On Privatization, I have already conceded that I do not find it particularly necessary that government intervene or encourage for cohabitation to take place, at least in most settings... however there ARE situations where government encouragement and formalization are outright necessary, and mong these are domestic partnerships for military members. A highly structured environment is arguably necessary to the fulfillment of the mission but because of natural evil there is a need in those individul soldiers for companionship and ready availability of mates, particularly when they have picked a specific mate in the way that most humans do. A lack of formal government recognition in this setting would ENTIRELY deprive the soldier of their ability to cohabitate in the best possible way. The formal government recognition of such a state would in fact be directly supportive of the psychological welbeing of the soldier, and as the military is itself involved in the welbeing of the state, such would be in the public interest. There are a great many other things which public recognition and sanction of marriage enables which private enterprise cannot, such as immigration, legal, mandatory partner benefits, and other such legal protections.Additionally, CON has argued the specific positive claim that "Private actors would see it in their best interest to cohabitate and dictate the terms of their own living arrangements WITHOUT government intervention" This was his claim. Since private actors DO NOT see it in their best interests to do so, this statement is clearly invalid. He said A. I provided a real example of NOT A. Therefore any warrant that he draws from this claim is suspect. Either this claim has nothing to do with supporting CON's argument and thus the claim is invalid and to be ignored entirely OR my example which disproved it by example is sufficient to invalidate thergument and thus it should be ignored entirely.I have previously shown how CON's next claim is logically invalid; that participation in some laws, this particular law included, is entirely based on the informed consent, and that there can be no such coercion implied by this situation.Further, CON has already accepted and conceded that "In [a couple's] lack of consumption, those resources [that they do not consume in their continued activity] remain available for society." The consumption of additional resources presents a clear and present danger, through increased costs of living, to society as a whole. Hence it is to be encouraged. Non-cohabiting persons present a risk of increased burden for society. This in and of itself constiutes a benefit that people have been willing to pay a penalty to get. Further, certain benefits to the freedom of society cannot be quantified in such a manner but rather must be evaluated as "is this the cheapest way to increase freedom".[1] http://en.wikipedia.org...