In his statement praising presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s “Inclusive Tone” yesterday at the NAACP Convention, Log Cabin Executive Director R. Clarke Cooper added that “it is unfortunate that he countered his outreach to gay and lesbian Americans with a gratuitous attack on the freedom to marry.”
He did?
All he said about marriage was simply this, “As President, I will promote strong families – and I will defend traditional marriage.” He never said he would deny individuals the freedom to form couples and define their unions as marriages.
Now, this is not to say I join Mr. Romney in supporting a federal constitutional amendment allowing states to recognize only traditional marriages as such. I don’t; I oppose this change to our national charter.
Clarke’s statement, however, suggests that marriage doesn’t exist in the absence of state recognition. To the contrary, marriage has existed as institution long before governments recognized it. And many marriages exist today without the benefit of state sanction.
The issue in the marriage debates is not whether gay couples are free to marry, but whether the state should recognize their unions and grant them the same benefits they offer to straight couples.
Freedom doesn’t come from the state, but the state can limit its exercise. Recall what Mr. Jefferson wrote in our nation’s defining document, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Clarke would be right to fault Mr. Romney for supporting a constitutional amendment defining marriage; he’s wrong to say the Republican is attacking freedom.
—–
*in most jurisdictions–and at the federal level.
By defending “traditional” marriage, his beliefs encourage states (and those who live in them) to limit benefits available to heterosexuals. That Romney panders to the so-con crowd for votes turns off independents who may have given up on Obama’s economic policies. In November, we’ll be able to stick our finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing and if it was worth it for Romney.
Since you speak of “limiting benefits available,” that suggests that you see same-sex marriage strictly as a cha-ching from the government.
The gay-rights movement has spent over forty years asserting that those attracted to their own sex are different from those who are not—and, indeed, the post-Stonewall movement was founded on, among other things, dedication to the destruction of marriage.
When did marriage go from must-destroy to must-have? Why should anyone believe that this is not merely a Cloward-Piven tactical change by a movement which was founded, pre-Stonewall, by Communists and expanded, post-Stonewall, by Maoists and New Leftists?
By defending “traditional marriage” his personal beliefs do not, in any way, encourage states to “limit” benefits. He has his opinion and states can have theirs. From what I can determine, Romney supports or has an open mind on domestic partnerships that “bestow certain rights” and that works for me. Not everyone walks in ‘lock-step’ to someone’s professed ‘all gays have to be for this or all gays opposed to that’ to be ‘in the club’. Personally, I oppose gay marriage, the glitz, the flag waving but I don’t recall having to sign a pledge card or a membership card to be a gay person. What I care about is the economy, jobs and encouraging people to be successful and not dependent on a cradle to grave care-taking guarantee by the government. With all of the problems facing America today, if someone bases their vote strictly on the a pro or con gay marriage position of the candidate I call that a totally uninformed voter, the same as for someone who votes for or against someone based on religion or color.
Clearly, a fissure is opening up in the GOP. A majority of Republicans continue to oppose marriage equality, but, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, the party’s younger members, those 18 to 44, are evenly divided. That’s why, after years in which the gay rights movement has relied solely on Democratic support, the group Freedom to Marry sees a new opportunity for outreach on the right.
On Tuesday, the organization launched Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry, an initiative to mobilize Republican supporters of marriage equality. It’s also hired a Republican lobbyist, Kathryn Lehman. In the 1990s, while serving as chief counsel for the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Lehman helped write the Defense of Marriage Act. Since then, she’s come out as a lesbian and turned against the law but retains her conservative connections. “We’re spending about half of our lobbying time and resources meeting with Republicans,” says Freedom to Marry’s national campaign director, Marc Solomon. “It’s a central part of our effort.”
YBut Mehlman, a Freedom to Marry supporter, believes there’s potential in his party. “The nation is changing quickly, and conservatives are also changing,” he says. “That change is enhanced when young and old conservatives hear fellow conservatives, whether they be Dick Cheney or John Bolton or Ted Olson or others, make the case in conservative terms. That’s what Freedom to Marry is doing, and that’s what I’m trying to help them do. I refer to this as the nightingale effect. A nightingale will only sing if it hears other nightingales singing.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/12/freedom-to-marry-for-young-conservatives-the-gop-gay-marriage-push.html
Love the language. Romney is talking about traditional marriage and leaving arrangements for civil unions or “gay marriage” up to the states and all of a sudden we are told this is some sort of “freedom of choice” issue.
Coincidentally, California is presented with a bill to recognize that a family may have more than two parents. Strange that the Mormon loathing gays would go the multiple partners route.
Traditional marriage equals one man and one woman and a traditional family includes their children. A “freedom of choice” marriage is wide open to what ever floats the boat of those wanting to call themselves married. Like the Manson family?
I beg of you “marriage equality” people: define your terms.
Upon what authority do some, who want to overturn traditional marriage get to dictate the terms to others who have different appetites in the freedom on choice?
Gay ‘marriage’ not a right, prohibiting gay adoption not ‘discrimination’: European Court of Human Rights (REJECTION OF THE SOCIAL ACTIVISM OF THE APAs/ABA AND THE SWEDISH MODEL IN THE INTEREST OF CHILDREN)
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/gay-marriage-not-a-right-prohibiting-gay-adoption-not-discrimination-europe#
Russians overwhelmingly endorse ‘gay propaganda’ ban
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/russians-overwhelmingly-endorse-gay-propaganda-ban?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com%20Daily%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=448adc7414-LifeSiteNews_com_Canada_Headlines_04_19_2012&utm_medium=email#
I totally get it. It’s women and voting in the US before 1920. Women were endowed by their creator with the moral right to vote, and they could declare their preferred candidates and define that declaration as a vote. So when the government didn’t recognize their votes it wasn’t denying them the freedom to vote.
To paraphrase your post, the issue in the debates over women voting was not whether women were free to vote, but whether the state should recognize their votes and grant them the same benefits (eg, being counted in the election) they offer to votes from men.
Brilliant.
All of this is a side-show. The US economy is going to hell in a handbasket. …Or to trope another metaphor; there’s field of icebergs ahead, and you’re arguing over whether our deck chairs should be in the sun or the shade.
Twenty years ago John Carville was right, “…It’s the Economy, Stupid.”
I could make a nice ‘real looking’ drivers license. I could be one of the best drivers to ever get behind the wheel of a car. I could follow every ‘rule of the road’. I could have top notch auto insurance.
The moment someone rear-ends me; me and my ‘driver’s license’ will be behind bars.
Perhaps it is ‘Just’ that one group gets to decide what protections of the law another group receives. Long after the final outcome of all this marriage hoopla subsides, there will still be fiery opinions on the matter.
But I think it goes to the integrity of those who entered into these ‘symbolic’ unions, without the under girding of societal support, that they still manage to maintain that commitment. Even while some groups actively seek to pull the union asunder; or, at the very least, seek to render it a sub-standard union.
It makes one wonder what all this looks like to young people. Does all this ‘baring’ of certain couples from the societal definition of marriage send the message that marriage is special? Or rather does it send the message that it really is just a ‘piece of paper’? To be recognized at the whim of the majority. That if a heterosexual couple wants to forgo that piece of paper, that’s fine. As long as they really-love-each-other then that’s all that matters. If there is any substance to this prospect at all, then I suspect that ‘marriage’ as an institution really IS getting the Jack Kevorkian treatment.
The State should be concerned with civil unions, nothing more. Marriage is between you and your partner(s) and your church. If you want your marriage to be registered with the State, and it’s a form that the State will accept, fine – register your union and get whatever benefits you think that will bring you. If it’s not one that the State will allot benefits, then either work to change the law to allow your particular type of union to be accepted, or do without. And if your union IS one that’s acceptable to the State but you don’t want to register it, you shouldn’t be required to do so. I’d just as soon divorce marriage from government, myself. Why should I have to get a state license before my church will marry me? And why should my living arrangements be any of the State’s business?
homer:
You totally do not get it.
In many states, women were not allowed to vote on account of sex.
What state denies a gay man the right to marry on account of sex?
homer, if you choose to marry a woman, can you? Or does being a male prohibit you from marrying a woman?
What is that you say? You don’t want to marry a woman? Well, I’ll be darned. What if a woman has the right to vote, but doesn’t want to vote?
What if homer wants to marry everyone at the Elks Club? What if a woman wants to vote for everyone on the ballot?
How confusing do I have to make your confusion in order for you to see that you really don’t get it?
homer, get a grip.
homer, your comment is absurd. And you missed my point entirely. Voting in elections for federal and state representatives is an institution entirely different from marriage.
You need to qualify to vote in a federal election, but you can get married without a state license; it may, as per my title lack legal recognition, but you remain free to marry. A church or synagogue could sanctify it; your friends, family and neighbors could recognize it.
Do see you even see my point and the distinction I am making?
It does seem Southern Man gets it. 🙂
Are you promoting NAMBLA?
If not, on what basis do you accept some state restrictions on one’s living arrangements and not others? Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wanye Gacy might have gotten the short end of the stick, right? No, I am not comparing gays to cannibalism and child molestation, I am just asking where the bright line between legal and illegal “living arrangements” is drawn and who draws it.
To my knowledge, gays cohabit nationwide without state intrusion on their living arrangements. Seems that the public square is basically uninterested in gays quietly going about their private business. But, would you agree that if there is a lot of domestic disturbance taking place within the domicile, the state has a reason to come in and deal with the safety and tranquillity of the domicile and neighborhood?
Comment by homer — July 12, 2012 @ 10:25 am – July 12, 2012
You’ve earned a Madison, congratulations.
http://youtu.be/8HoaFWI5S0Q
Over @ inde gay forum Miller posts
Our friend David Lampo has written a new book that fits in nicely with this effort, A Fundamental Freedom: Why Republicans, Conservatives, and Libertarians Should Support Gay Rights. He explains why “an anti-gay agenda succinctly exposes the hypocrisy of those who talk of limited government and individual rights but ignore both when it comes to gay rights and other personal freedom issues.”
A New Generation: Not Your Father’s Conservatives
by Stephen H. Miller on July 11, 2012
Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry is a new campaign to highlight and build support for the freedom to marry among young conservatives. According to its website, the campaign is reaching out to “the rapidly growing numbers of young conservatives across the country that agree all Americans should be able to share in the freedom to marry. The freedom to marry is not a partisan value and is consistent with basic conservative values of responsibility And community, . . .
“You need to qualify to vote in a federal election, but you can get married without a state license; it may, as per my title lack legal recognition, but you remain free to marry.”
And before 1920, women could do something that they might choose to define as “voting.” The vote may have lacked legal recognition, but women were free to do something that they defined as voting.
Yes, of course this is ludicrous — and it’s exactly as ludicrous as your post. I’m pretending there’s no substantive difference between legally-recognized voting and a non-recognized action that a woman chooses to call voting, just as you’re pretending there’s no substantive difference between legally-recognized marriage and a non-recognized status that a couple chooses to call marriage.
Interesting considering the Jeffrey Dahmer reference. One of his victims, a teenager, actually escaped his necrophiliac cannibal lair without any clothes and bleeding from the rectum, and when cops found the boy, he was drugged beyond communication; to the protest of the boy and the two women who found him, the officers sent him back into Dahmer’s arms, who had convinced the cops the boy was 19 and they were involved in a domestic dispute. The boy was later sexually abused, killed, and dismembered.
From wikipedia:
[The officers] were terminated from the Milwaukee Police Department after their actions were widely publicized, including an audiotape of the officers making homophobic statements to their dispatcher and cracking jokes about having reunited the “lovers”. The officers had never checked the boy’s ID or verified his identity. The officers did not check Dahmer’s identification; had they done so, they would have discovered that Dahmer was a sex offender previously convicted for molesting [the boy’s] older brother.
“In May 2005, Balcerzak was elected president of the Milwaukee Police Association.” He was later not reelected in an election held over four years later.
“The gay-rights movement has spent over forty years asserting that those attracted to their own sex are different from those who are not—and, indeed, the post-Stonewall movement was founded on, among other things, dedication to the destruction of marriage.
When did marriage go from must-destroy to must-have? ”
This post takes the cake
I remember in the 80s, when I barely knew what gay meant hearing debates on national TV from heads of gay organizations about how the traditional male-female marriage was a pathetic theatre based on nothing but casual pregnancies, desperation and co-dependency (yes, those were the exact words and worse than that). The gay liberation front (now deceased in theory but still alive under other denominations) was a socialist/leftist driven group that had among its intents to destroy the nuclear family. Nowhere you were reading that their final aim was to ‘ape’ what they hated the most.
The ones of us who paid attention are not going to be duped.
the only thing i have to say is that marriage may be a requirement of the entitlement but the entitlement is not necessarily a benefit of marriage.
eliminate the entitlement and it will have no effect on the laws of marriage nor will it have any effect on the purpose of marriage.
opposition exists only when seeking the laws of marriage to accomodate the homosexual.
seek to change the laws in regards to the entitlement requirements and you will not have the opposition that exists now.
Cinesnatch, I do not envy the police authority. They were probably scared to be labelled “homophobic”.
/sarc
Gay couple left free to abuse boys – because social workers feared being branded homophobic
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-480151/Gay-couple-left-free-abuse-boys–social-workers-feared-branded-homophobic.html#ixzz20QpVBnHH
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-480151/Gay-couple-left-free-abuse-boys–social-workers-feared-branded-homophobic.html#ixzz1OdR2UHO3
homer, you claim that I am “pretending there’s no substantive difference between legally-recognized marriage and a non-recognized status that a couple chooses to call marriage.”
I do no such thing. In fact, I do exactly the opposite. All you need do is consider the title — and read the post.
In that case, Dan, I don’t know what point you’re making with this post. It seems to boil down to this: gays and lesbians can still form couples and call those relationships “marriage” even if the government doesn’t recognize them.
And of course marriage equality activists would agree with you: “Exactly! Our relationships are marriages, which is why it’s wrong for the government not to recognize them as such.”
So I’m left wondering where you’re going with this and what point you want to get across.
Love is blind, and a relationship is also hard to explain..but if you love someone, regardless of ages, sex, races..just go for it when you feel it’s the right decision.
Gay marriage advocates: “We are incapable of making committed relationships unless the state gives us benefits.”
Terrific, V — that’s a great parody of how opponents of marriage equality distort the other side’s arguments. Got any others?
Susan @ #19 must have worked extremely hard to misunderstand my post so thoroughly.
She admits that the post-Stonewall gay-rights movement was utterly hostile to marriage in all forms, and quite public about it; she admits that the old “Gay Liberation Front” may be defunct in name, but still active—as indeed it is. It was and is the template for the modern day gay-rights movement, and some of the people who survived the horrors of the early days of the AIDS epidemic are still active in the present-day movement.
Yet then she falsely claims that I suggested that pre-AIDS movement suddenly did an about-face and endorsed marriage. I said nothing of the kind; rather, I said that today’s movement is the child of that earlier anti-marriage-in-all-forms leftwing movement (again, she admits this), and this latter-day movement, at some point, went from marriage-must-be-destroyed to marriage-must-be-had-at-all-costs.
When? How? By whose determination did that change come about? And, again, my question: why should anyone believe that a movement born in the most radical Leftism has changed its spots? Why should anyone believe that the current agitation for same-sex marriage, which occasionally reaches a pitch of hysteria better suited to an Occupy encampment, is not merely a tactical change by the movement in furtherance of a Cloward-Piven strategy?
I don’t think homer’s analogy about extending the voting franchise to women is totally absurd — at the very least, it makes sense to me as an argument that states may have some sort of ethical obligation to offer some sort of legal recognition as an option for same-sex couples if they’re already in the business of offering opt-in legal recognition for opposite-sex couples. (And needless to say, ALL states currently offer opt-in recognition for opposite-sex couples, in the form of a marriage license that you can get for a modest fee!)
Which is to say, I think homer’s example can work as a moral rebuke to states that have banned all forms of “domestic partnership” law and currently recognize ONLY one-man, one-woman marriage. But the women’s suffrage comparison doesn’t necessarily work in the Prop 8 case, since California’s DP law provided so many practical and substantial benefits.
P.S. On the other hand, homer’s argument is weakened by the fact that same-sex couples can get some of the legal protections of DP/CU/SSM in a piecemeal fashion even in states that ban recognition of non-traditional-marriage (e.g., by obtaining wills and durable Power-of-Attorney, etc.). But when women didn’t have the vote, there were no semi-satisfactory piecemeal solutions available — except, perhaps, that married women could attempt to influence the votes of their husbands, Lysistrata-style!
Especially since gay marriage’s strongest supporters are the same people who say traditional heterosexual marriage is an oppressive/hateful/archaic abomination.
buzzsawmonkey I have confirmed what you have said
Susan @ 30: If I misunderstood your post, I apologize.
I will be honest. I absolutely love being married and I love the institution. Personally, I think gays who want to experience the institution should be able to do so. Whether or not a gay couple is married or not married has no bearing on my own marriage. The state I live in recognizes gay
I also very much think it is unfair that in many states a gay couple has to jump through tons of legal hoops to get protections that only required my husband and I to sign a paper.
So whether it is civil unions or a marriage I really don’t care.
I will also state that if the government decided tomorrow they weren’t going to recognize any marriage relationships, I would be any less married to my husband. Marriage for me is the institution not necessarily the government goodies that come with it.
Nothing to say about it, just how I end up reading those sorts of ramblings.
Really? Who are they and why haven’t I ever heard of them?
As noticed over and over, stupidity never pays attention
The point, I am making with the post is simple, homer, we have the freedom to marry, we lack state recognition of our unions (in many jurisdictions).
And I think it’s disingenuous to call the movement for state recognition of same-sex unions as one about the “freedom” to marry. That notion suggests that freedom comes from the state. And that until the state grants that, people won’t be free to get married.
And that suggests as well that we need state sanction to get married.
Wait, am I basically just paraphrasing what I already said in the post? Did you even read it?
To borrow your expression, I’m saying there’s a “substantive difference” between the freedom to do something and the state sanctioning that something. So, I’m faulting those who say this is an issue about the freedom to marry. It’s not. Gay couples aren’t being arrested when they move to one state after getting married in another.
The issue is about the state recognizing our unions, a distinction I have been making for at least as long as I have been writing on this blog.
Yes, Dan, I read the post and summarized it pretty accurately. My statement, “gays and lesbians can still form couples and call those relationships “marriage” even if the government doesn’t recognize them,” is pretty close to your, “we have the freedom to marry, we lack state recognition of our unions (in many jurisdictions).”
So yes, I did read the post.
But what’s the point of your observation? As I said, most marriage equality activists would agree with you. So where are you going with this?
Is it Halloween? Has the Oxymoron gone “trick or treating”?
The euphemism “marriage equality activist” is just too rich. Would some NAMBLA jerks just love to marry some of their young meat and dump them when they age up? Wouldn’t they, too, be “marriage equality activists”?
How do you intellectually respond to someone who argues in code? Lets just list some of the likely “marriage equality activists”: polygamists, child lovers, fans of incest, perverts, gold diggers and the senile, and on and on and much kinkier.
Gays who are “marriage equality activists” can not escape that the essential difference between them and heterosexuals is how they express their powers of lust. Clearer translation: how they do sex. So, what is sex all about? Can you get sex without marriage? Do you need to marry to be faithful? Does marriage legitimize who and what you are? What is the point of marriage? What “equality” is the “marriage equality activist” demanding?
“Oh what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive.”
Child lovers? Really? That’s my cue to exit.
Heliotrope, when someone reveals they can’t distinguish between two consenting adults getting married, and an adult marrying a child who still lacks the emotional or mental capacity to consent to marriage (or to contracts in general), then it’s best to end the conversation until that person learns that adults and children are different, different in ways that have led us to treat children differently from adults in our legal system (and life in general), and that allowing two consenting adults to marry will do nothing to alter that view of children.
Unless of course you’re understand that distinction perfectly but are eliding it just to confuse the issue, in which case: “Oh what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive.”
Heliotrope, you MUST get your hands on a copy of The Little Blue Book. it will help you figure out how to deal with the cognitive dissonance a conservative must confront when dealing with a
fascist“progressive.” Linky love: http://preview.tinyurl.com/7nt4qdr.Warning: if you’re taking medication for high blood pressure, make sure you’re full stocked before you read it.
Ah, but you see, homer, that’s YOUR problem.
You said “equality”. “Equality” demands that everything be treated the same regardless of distinguishments or differentiations. You yourself are stating that it is WRONG to deny marriage based on “differences” or “distinguishing”.
Heliotrope called you on it, and you can’t answer, so your response was to call him ignorant and a bigot.
That is because you, by your own definition are “anti-equality”. You are completely and totally hypocritical, and you are trying to manipulate language in order to get what you want like a child throwing a tantrum.
This is an adult discussion, homer. You have demonstrated that you are neither intellectually or emotionally an adult, so yes, it is best that you go elsewhere to protect your fragile ego and have your laughable fallacies and bigotry reinforced.
I think it’s pretty obvious that “marriage equality activist” means people promoting same-sex marriage equality among consenting adults. Though it’s a poor choice of words, to play semantic word games here is a bit silly.
That said, heliotrope asks “What “equality” is the “marriage equality activist” demanding?” The answer is fairly simple – the same federal and state legal protections, rights, and privileges afforded to heterosexual couples that can get married.
In case anyone is interested, here are my personal answers to heliotrope’s other questions:
* What is sex all about? That’s a fascinating topic of discussion, but ultimately irrelevant to this discussion.
* Can you get sex without marriage? Obviously yes
* Do you need to marry to be faithful? No
* Does marriage legitimize who and what you are? As an individual, no it does not. But it in many ways legitimizes the relationship. Not necessarily between the two people involved, but in society’s view of that relationship. Dating someone is different from being married to someone. Marrying them legitimizes it in the view of society that you are committing yourself to that person and are willing to live up to the standards expected between married people. Think about the couples that you know. Do you have different expectations of their relationships if they are just dating vs. being married? I do. I hold them to a higher standard. I call my partner my husband because I want people to know that I’m committed to him. Calling him my ‘boyfriend’ in some ways feels like it degrades the significance of the relationship we have (in society’s eyes, not ours).
* What is the point of marriage? That’s also a fascinating topic of discussion. I suspect some people on here would argue that it’s strictly for reproduction and protection of any children involved. I think that’s important, but I think it extends beyond that. Unfortunately, I don’t have time at the moment to flesh out my thoughts here.
* What “equality” is the “marriage equality activist” demanding? see above
Cool!
Great! As long as Alan goes along with the “marriage equality activists” to make sure that the what he thinks is obvious and a pretty “silly” choice of words, there is no issue. Wow!
So, Alan rules out polygamy by “definition.” I suppose that heterosexual polygamists, somehow, can not be marriage equality activists “simply” because Alan has defined them out.
As usual, NDT nails it dead on. Marriage “equality” is in the eye of the beholder. homer, with help from Alan has decided it is only about “gay” marriage. Funny how closely allied homer is with his local radical Islamist, except on the issue of being gay. But on being “marriage equality activists” they are regular blood brothers. See, the “coexist” bumper sticker is where its at. Or not.
If anyone is hiding behind “marriage equality” he might want to look around to see who is hiding behind the phrase with him. Politics makes strange
bedfellowspartners.Listen. Prop 8, DOMA, FMA are not topics and laws dealing with polygamy. So when someone says “marriage equality activist”, I take it to mean the people that are currently activists around the topics and laws that are currently being discussed in courtrooms, ballot boxes, and on TV day after day (like same sex marriage currently is). Like I said, not a great choice of words, but *to me* it’s obviously referring to what’s happening in the news right now. As soon as there’s a large polygamy activist group and ballot initiatives and votes on polygamy rights, then yeah a different choice of words is definitely in order because of the differing meanings.
If you really want to discuss polygamy, that’s fine. But jumping on the term “marriage equality activist” to tie homer (or anyone else) to NAMBLA, radical Islamists, an pedophiles is just silly.
Again, just *my* opinion…..
The use of precise rhetoric is never silly. If you mean “marriage equality for gays” that is not too much of a mouthful to say. If you mean “marriage equality for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and the transgendered” then I suspect that is a mouthful to say.
Because you, in your insular world, understand the shorthand in your insular world sort of way is hardly seminal. (Seminal: the power to originate further development. Not the second meaning of denoting semen.)
You brand being articulate as being silly. Fine. That and a laptop will get you 20 minutes of free wifi at Starbucks.
You may not hang around with CAIR and the Shari’a crowd, but while you have been dozing, marriage equality activism under Shari’a has already made substantial inroads in court decisions in many places in Europe, Canada and even the US. Where were you to stop it?
You go right ahead and issue a pass on imprecise language and then tell everyone how silly it all is and was when (cue: Reverend Wright) the “chick-en-n-n-n-n-s come home to r-o-o-o-o-s-t.”
Semanitcs and articulating sensible rhetoric are extremely important. Just ask anyone who thought they had a firm grasp on the meaning of “hope” and “change” and the “fundamental transformation” of America.
Sancho Panza called; he has found another windmill for you that needs tilting.
“Comparing two consenting adults to children blah blah blah blah.”
Age of consent in California was once 10 years old. using the 9th circus’ ‘logic’ in addressing Prop 8, that’s a law that needs to be voided. Now explain to me how vacating Prop 8 is any different than wanting to roll back age of consent laws to 10, or lower.
We need to amend the Constitution because of judges who interpret a constitutional provision first enacted in 1868 to require legal recognition of same-sex marriage.
If such an amendment were ratified today, same-sex marriage would still be legal in New York, D.C., Iowa, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont. States will still have plenary power to recognize same-sex marriages from other states or nations, and will still have the plenary power to define marriage to encompass same-sex unions.
What is wrong with that?