As far as I can tell the CA threshold is $100. Yet I saw a $50 contribution on the list. Odd. Cite: “Lawyers for Prop 8 supporters want the court to overturn the law that allows donors of as little as $100 are publicly disclosed.”
I think the argument is that certain contexts call for political hardball.
Civil rights issues might be one. Abortion might be another.
That’s where the analogy might lie. Should abortion doctors have their home addresses posted with google maps? As in this case, it’s a little creepy.
I can’t believe that anyone can consider marriages of convenience, can consider the ease with which divorces can be procured in America today, can consider the hustling, predatory matrimonial practices of the late Anna Nicole Smith and millions of men and women like her, and can consider Las Vegas, where marriage has been virtually industrialized, and say with a straight face that homosexual marriage will spell death for the institution.
Depending on the individuals involved, a marriage can either be a public declaration of undying personal commitment, or a pathetic joke. I get the impression from your posts that you seem to be carrying around this idealised, rose-tinted, overly romanticised picture of what “Marriage” means and then flat out deying that homosexual relationships could ever live up to it. This is a bigoted position. Where am I going wrong?
OK, I guess this is going to go nowhere, because you are too fucking stupid to read propositions before you vote for them. Prop 8 was not about “denying gays the use of the term marriage.” It was about denying them the rights of marriage. You know, those things you claim to support.
No it doesn’t matter what you type, you small-minded fuck. It matters how you VOTE. How can you not get that?
The people I know who “love the sinner, hate the sin” do not work in AIDS clinics. They wouldn’t touch an AIDS patient with a 30 foot pole. They bash gays constantly. All in good fun, of course, just jokes between good buddies.
I think you are correct. And as pro-choice as I am (very), I think printing that information about doctors is completely wrong and should not be allowed.
You are correct in that marriage has been made a mockery of in some instances. And that it, as an institution, has been going through a rough time over the past few decades, and is under threat. I don’t see how further diluting the meaning helps that. I think it has the opposite effect. The question is, do we want a word to describe that institution which has been so foundational to our society? So helpful? I think we should not do anything that would make it less likely for a man and woman to desire and enter into what is, potentially, the ideal situation for the raising of children. Lowering the divorce rate would be very helpful in that regard, as well. How we do that, though, is beyond me.
Keep in mind that he is terrifically, terrifically stupid.
Ha! YOU calling ME stupid. You made my day. It’s nice to wake up to a good laugh.
But you’re choosing to interpret my vote. I told you why I voted the way I did, what it meant for me. I’m simply not going to vote for anything that furthers the notion that gay couples should or could enter into “marriage”. Now, when there’s a proposition that asks for legal rights for gays entering into civil unions or the like, I’ll vote for it, and for the reason that I believe they should enjoy those rights. I focused more on what I think is the larger issue. That was my motivation. Look at congress. Very often a congressman or senator will vote against a bill that seemingly would further a cause he advocates. But there may be things in it that he feels undermines the larger cause, so he votes against it. It happens all the time. And it also happens that some nitwit on the sidelines points and screams “Look at Senator X. He hates Y, see, he voted against it.” If you are unaware of this or need it explained further, somehow I won’t be surprised. But you can explore this on your own. Maybe it’ll sink in better that way.
I said “some”. The people you know who “love the sinner, hate the sin” are a tiny subset of a much larger group. I know some of them, too. You were simply painting with too broad a brush. That was my only point. That you seem to be arguing against that is really quite amazing.
The part about Vegas seems terribly misplaced. The criticism there isn’t about marriage - it is about weddings, which is a whole different matter entirely.
I have two brothers - one married in Vegas and the other basically eloped to Key West in the last few years specifically to avoid large elaborate weddings. When I got married in 2001 we did it on the cheap as much as we could - it still cost us about $12,000. That’s considered a modest wedding these days, amazingly.
No, shithead, YOU’RE interpreting your vote. Into something it wasn’t. See, you voted against gay rights. I interpret that as you voting against gay rights. Notice how my interpretation is straightforward and based in reality? You are trying to interpret your voting against gay rights as you actually supporting gay rights. Despite all your mental gymnastics, nobody is buying it. You voted against gay rights. Period. I suspect that your desperate attempts to convince us that you did not are really desperate attempts to convince YOURSELF that you did not. It appears you are much better at deluding yourself than you are at deluding us.
And I specifically referenced my co-workers when I was talking about this. Not all christians. Referring specifically to 15 or 20 people is not what I would consider a broad brush. Maybe in your teeny tiny little mind, 15 or 20 people is a broad sample. But then, you think that you supported gay rights by voting for Prop 8, so there you go.
Actually, the question is, how many people are we going to hurt in order to “protect” the definition of a word? In CA alone, it’s hundreds of thousands of people who are personally affected in a significantly negative way because of people who want to protect a word. Hundreds of thousands of human beings with feelings are having their hopes and dreams of a recognized family, of true equality, sacrificed for your word.
Is it worth it?
Mr Moto, I’m still interested in finding out who would have been harmed if No had won.
bolding mine
Magellan, it’s not who gets married that “dilutes” the meaning of the word, it’s why people get married. Ideally marriage is a romantic union. Biologically, marriage is a way of establishing a family unit with better odds of survival of offspring. Pragmatically, it’s a means of establishing paternity and lines of inheritance. Gold-diggers, spouse-abusers, illegal immigrants, and arguably serial divorcees - these people “dilute” marriage. Gays who want to get married because they care deeply for one another and want to establish a family of their own… not so much.
Which, in itself, is kind of an indictment of the state of the institution of marriage, isn’t it? A monogamous gay couple who’ve been together for 30 years can’t marry anywhere for love nor money, but in Vegas two straight people who met the day before can get hitched on a drunken whim in a photomat sized “Chapel of Love” in a ceremony presided over by a midget Elvis who got ordained on the internet.
In that scenario, variations of which are played out regularly, the gay couple are the ones who “deserve” to get married.
Comedy gold. I TELL you WHY I voted the way I did and you tell me I’m wrong. Whatever you say, Banyan
Try not being so defensive Mr. Panties In A Wad. I made a rather benign comment, using the word “untentionally”:
A more sane, non-assholish response from you would have been something like: “Point taken. But those aren’t the people I work with, that’s for sure.”
But, by all means, knock yourself out frothing over nothing.
I’d just like to reiterate what Ichini Sanshigo said. Marriage is undermined when the “right people” marry for the wrong reasons. When the “wrong people” want to marry for the right reasons, it’s time to expand the definition.
Let me ask you this, aside from not being able to get “married”, what rights were denied gays due to the passage of Prop 8?
Yes, they were only denied the right to marry. Marriage, as a social and legal institution carries a great deal of weight, and confers many social and legal benefits to the participants. Gays are denied the opportunity to use that institution.
No, expanding the institution to include gay marriages does not make everyone’s marriage worthless, or ever the slightest bit less important.
Exactly.
That’s what gets me about arguments like magellan01’s. They attempt to maintain, on the one hand, that marriage is just a word and that denial of marriage doesn’t deny gays any concrete rights and privileges, and on the other hand, that marriage as so fundamentally important to our society that its meaning should be cast in stone.
If marriage is just a word, what’s the harm in letting gays marry? And if marriage is so centrally and crucially important, why is it right to deny it to homosexuals?
This is, perhaps, the thing that amazes me the most. The idea seems to be that there is some limited, finite amount of love or commitment or marriage (or whatever) in the world, and that if we let the gays have some, that means less for us heteros. The level of reasoning behind such a position is staggering in its stupidity, especially given the mockery that so many straight people make of the institution of marriage.
What the hell are you talking about?
Let me cue you into something - the wedding has jack to do with the marriage. My grandparents got married in a small ceremony and then had their folks treat them to dinner - the whole thing cost about thirty-five bucks, I’d guess. They were together for nearly fifty years until Pap died.
Conversely, my wife and I went to a wedding a few years ago that had to cost thirty thousand dollars - and that fiasco of a marriage lasted about three years.
Now, my brothers look to be hitched for the long haul. The fact that one was married in a casino and one in a wedding chapel in Key West has little to do with either. Keep in mind that this wasn’t my preference - I’m Catholic and we wanted a mass. But different things work for different people.
Why do you insist that it be one or the other? I think they both hurt the institution, but in different ways. As far as the dilution of the word, look at my example of the word “hero”. Even better, look at Mensa. People equate membership with intelligence because that organization restricts membership to those who score in the top one or two percent of the population. If they opened it up to the to 20 or 30 percent, that association would then be diluted. Conversely, if they tightened restrictions further, say to the top 0.1% there would be a tighter association between the members and intelligence.