Don’t dodge the challenge. If you want to ban marriage for any couple that can’t procreate, go right ahead and do it. After all, if gay couples are identical to heterosexual couples, that wouldn’t affect them at all, now would it?

I’m not exploiting their children at all. I’m asking this question because it relates to my experience of their lives: in order to protect themselves, their children, their lives, they have had to (at a cost of thousands and thousands of dollars) hire lawyers, draw up contracts, rights of survivorship, etc.–all things that would be unnecessary with one legal marriage.

More precisely, unnecessary had they been able to produce their own biological children. You seem to be under the delusion that marriage automatically eliminates all the legal procedures around adoption.

I’m not exploiting their children at all. I’m asking this question because it relates to my experience of their lives: in order to protect themselves, their children, their lives, they have had to (at a cost of thousands and thousands of dollars) hire lawyers, draw up contracts, rights of survivorship, etc.–all things that would be unnecessary with one legal marriage.

And not all states recognize what they have done, anyway. If one were to get into an accident in another state, the other might not be able to visit her in the hospital. That’s unfair.

I don’t support forcing anyone to do anything. I support fairness and equality. I support anybody who wants to marry another consenting adult and build a life with him or her. That’s all.

Do you support forcing unmarried parents to marry, then? Or are you simply trying to use and exploit children as hostages?

If you want to ban marriage for sterile couples, go right ahead and propose it. In fact, I challenge gay liberals like unclemike to do that: propose a ban on marriage for all couples incapable of producing children that are biologically theirs.

Such a ban would starkly illustrate the difference: the vast majority of heterosexual couples would still be able to marry, but not a single gay couple would ever be able to marry. It would put an end to the denial that unclemike and his fellow liberal gays have been practicing.

Why let my sterile and childless friends Michael & Katherine marry, while my friends Heather and Renee, who have adopted two children, must remain unmarried? Shouldn’t their children have the benefits of married parents?

Why are couples who have agreed never to have children allowed to marry?

Because not all heterosexual couples are elderly or childless by choice; these situations are the exception, not the rule. However, every same-sex couple, without exception, is incapable of biologically producing their own children, regardless of age or individual fertility status.

Please, Adoption is not subject to a male-female household AE.

Why, then, are elderly couples allowed to marry? They won’t be having children together anytime soon.

Why are couples who have agreed never to have children allowed to marry?

Please tell me what straight people did to enjoy the “benefit” of state recognition for their marriages that gays have failed to do.

They had children together.

What have straight folks done to earn the “benefit” of being able to adopt a child?

An adoptive mother and father are the closest available facsimile to a biological mother and father.

It really shows how actively the left has worked to delude themselves and how deeply their denial runs that they need these simple truths explained to them.

Time to sit down children and let the adults run things for a while

unfortunately, the children, after a prolonged temper tantrum, are taking over.

I’d prefer to see the government get out of the social business entirely. I’ve never understood medicaid for example. Lets take revenue in, then give it out to the states to manage their own programs. Why not let the states just handle it all themselves?

But until that happy day comes, I don’t see the logic in excluding the religious groups just because they’re religious. Let them get off the trough if the strings become too tight, to mix a metaphor.

Ovens indeed. Pop quiz, which party wants to meet uncoditionally with world leaders who hang/stone/crush homosexuals? Which party leaders -have-?

Um… no. You claimed that your explanations were eaten by the Spam filter. When I suggested you repost them to NDT’s blog (where there is no Spam filter), you summarily dropped the subject.

I always thought the difference between a right and a benefit was that the former was assumed to apply to all people by virtue of citizenship while the latter was something earned, over and above those basic rights. Please tell me what straight people did to enjoy the “benefit” of state recognition for their marriages that gays have failed to do. What have straight folks done to earn the “benefit” of being able to adopt a child?

And BTW, Wulf – please learn what “freedom of speech” means. If I hear one more person claim that his or her freedom of speech is being abridged by people criticizing their opinions, I think I’m going to scream. How in hell can you discuss civil liberties or rights when you don’t even understand the freakin’ document on which those rights are based?

“When facing evil it is a better idea to oppose it than to try and bargain with it.”

Exactly which it is why it is so distressing to read the consistent refusal to even take a look behind the facade of the “christian” right.

Conspiracies and facades! You’re rolling out the dough.