Stop buying his movie tickets. He is doing do good beyond his own pocketbook.

wow.

I thought leftists prided themselves on nuance, but I see you simply deal in surface level dogma. When you gain the intellect to discuss the matter intelligently be sure to post.

For the rest, the government can set the terms of its own contracts. However, government’s decision to use an institution does not give them the right to change it. If they don’t approve of its nature they can use something else.

First, marriage cannot be a function of government as it preexisted government by millenia. Government uses marriage to further its own goals. This is different as your commentary proves. If there were no government would marriage end? Since the answer is no marriage is not a function of government. To contrast, if there were no government would we vote?

Secondly, you have stated the arguments about incest and polygamy are specious, but you certainly have not backed up this assertion with logically consistent facts. You state that both events are too infrequent to worry about. This of course is what many people say about gay marriage, so I’m not sure what meaning you think this has. Your point about coersion is a dodge, we are obviously discussing only non-coersive cases. Your comment that you are against recognizing polygamy means nothing since you are advocating a position that the opinions of the population are irrelevant.

Extending marriage to gay couples has less historical and cultural precedent that extending it to polgamous groups. Once you remove cultural approval as a requirement (your position) there is no basis to include gay relationships while excluding polygamy.

It is different with homosexuality. I (and most people today) find that consensual sex between any two non-related adults is fine. I’m not making an argument that it’s equivalent, biologically exactly the same, or that two persons of the same sex could ever produce children without assistance. That’s beside the point. But should two men or two women have the same chance of marriage, in what we believe that marriage has come today. In other words, about two people who love each other and want to commit to each other. We can argue about what the origins of marriage are, whether love has anything to do with it, or whether all married couples should procreate. But that’s not what marriage has become. We encourage straight couples to marry, if they want to commit to each other, whether or not they want to have children. So are homosexual relationships valid enough to encourage that for same sex couples. Or do we say that homosexual relationships are fine, but we should half-ass it.

I understand those who find homosexuality an abomination why they wouldn’t want same sex marriage. Just as I understand why incest is an abomination and shouldn’t be legitimized with marriage. But most agree now that homosexuality is fine.

Which is good, because, since you and your fellow gay liberals have demanded that biological differences are irrelevant and should be ignored in favor of “love”, means that you fully support and endorse the removal of bans on both plural and incestuous marriage in the name of “equal protection”.

first, i believe this incest argument is a total slippery-slope straw man. incest, by and large, exists in the form of sexual abuse, not functional relationships. there is not an abundance of brother/sister pairs out there itching to get married. there just aren’t. frankly, i don’t really care about what two consenting adults do tbh. think about it. the reason we want to prevent incest is b/c the freaky genetic results from siblings mating. but people don’t need to be married to have babies…if they are screwing each other, they’re screwing each other. barring them from marrying doesn’t prevent anything, and allowing incest marriages isn’t exactly going to encourage bobby to propose to his little sis. but anyway, that is a different discussion. the point is that there is a distinction between allowing gays to marry and allowing incestuous marriages.

for one thing, homosexuality is a sexual orientation. incest is not an orientation, it is a behavior. there aren’t people out there (correct me if i’m wrong) who only have attractions to their siblings. by denying gay marriage, gay people are being totally cut out of marriage. by definition, gay people only love people of the same sex, and the government is banning them from marrying that entire sex. with incest, you’re being banned from marrying your sibling. there is a difference there.

polygamy is also not an orientation. polygamy is a lifestyle choice (funny that the right uses that phrase to define gays, who are biologically made to love people of the same sex). while my main concern about polygamy is that women are coerced into it and abused (and children are abused too usually) i nevertheless don’t think the government should arrest men for living with several women if that’s what everyone is consenting to, but i also don’t think the gov’t should consider them all married. we can have a polygamy discussion sometime if people really want, but allowing gay marriage doesn’t necessitate polygamous marriages.

“Voting is a function of government and is therefore properly bound by the rules government sets. Marriage is a social institution government has used for its own ends.”

um…i’m pretty sure this shows that YOU have no understanding of the facts. marriage is, whether you like it or not, a function of the government. you know that little paperwork you have to fill out when you get married? all those signatures and stuff? yeah, that’s you signing a civil contract, aka a government contract. *waits for all the conservatives to pee their pants at the sight of the word “government”.* the government bestows rights and privileges to you based on that contract.

and go do a little research. marriage has evolved tremendously over the years. the “this is the way it’s been” argument is one of the weakest ones out there.

Or at least you hope so, adDave, because that’s the excuse you and your fellow gay leftists have used for decades to avoid any responsibility for your behavior or any sort of impetus to clean up your act.

The problem here adDave, is that you are more concerned about staying popular in the leftist community than you are about right and wrong. That’s why gay liberals like yourself won’t condemn your ACLU allies for demanding plural marriage; you’re terrified that taking a principled stand would alienate them, and you don’t have sufficient emotional or intellectual strength to handle that.

I can’t remember who it was that criticized GPW (and I’m too lazy to scroll up and find out) but if you look around at the various threads more often than not he does not get involved in the comments. Sure, he’s harder on the left wing than he is the right but that makes total sense. Is it hypocritical? Yeah, probably but who on the left is innocent of the same? If you can actually find a truly impartial person I doubt he/she would be a major poster on a political blog.

I’m no fan of left-wing activists, but this monolithic “gay left” you talk of is a straw man you keep setting up just so you could knock it down.

We saw what happened in France when the government gave gays civil unions to save marriage “privileges” exclusively for the ungays. The ungays decided to partake of civil unions, too. They kept gays out of marriage but undermined it anyway.

So if you are willing to accept civil unions, are you willing to insist that they be a privilege exclusively to gays, and denied to ungays?

The simple problem here is that none of the gay left can make a coherent argument to people for gay marriage — mainly because the gay left and its behaviors in several ways are completely antithetical to the value that society sees in and puts on marriage.

So you agree that polygamy will be legal under the civil right standard. Thanks for being vastly more honest than most gay marriage activists.

Now, to the separate and distinct question of whether you have a constitutional right to have your relationship recognized as marriage, I also say no. As I pointed out, marriage has existed for the entirety of human civilization without gay relationships ever being included. The idea that a modern government has the right to redefine an institution which predates it by more than 5 millenia is absurd. Marriage simply doesn’t include gay relationships. It doesn’t mean those relationships or the people who practice them are worth less. It really doesn’t mean anything to those in the relationships, except for those few insecure souls who need a government to validate their lives.

However, supporting this idea accepts that our judiciary has virtually unlimited power to enact any piece of social reform it considers positive. You might want to consider what this could mean for future generations. Leftists seem to accept judicial oligarchy as a positive because they assume the judiciary will always be on their side. But this isn’t how human institutions work. There will be a time in the future when leftists generally and gay activists specifically regret removing virtually all limits on judicial power. I hope it’s a long way off so I personally don’t have to choose between abandoning principle and joining your pathetic group of poseurs.

Your comparison to voting is stupid and reflects that you have no real understanding of the facts. Voting is a function of government and is therefore properly bound by the rules government sets. Marriage is a social institution government has used for its own ends. If they find it an inappropriate basis for those ends they can stop using it.

If Americans want their government to recognize gay relationships in the same way marriage is recognized I’m fine with that. If the government concludes granting benefits to married couples is unfair and instead changes the basis to individuals I’m fine with that too. But neither of those is the issue.

Bob, I did this in the hopes of getting beyond that, and be able to debate the actual topic. I see that you, PeeJ, and Attmay did condemn those things, and it apparently didn’t matter. I tried.

I understand the point about condemning the obvious. And being silent does not necessarily mean that one supports something abominable. Funny, my straight friends and colleagues don’t constantly wring their hands constantly condemning the behaviors of Britney Spears, Newt Gingrich, Mardi Gras participants, James Dobson, parents who excoriate their gay children simply for being gay, or other bad behaviors by straight people.

i’ve never seen someone twist arguments and put words in other peoples’ mouths as much as you.

NDT, I’m afraid you still do that too often. For some reason, it’s not good enough to disagree with you. You seem like you have to make the other person’s position more extreme that it is in order to prop up your own position.

“Can it be that we as a culture don’t want them included”

Then you as a culture can move to Iran.