“The Ruling Class Drinks the Blood of the People! The Raw Truth!”
Or
“Ratio of Useless Parasites Sponging on Your Taxes Up This Month”
Or
“Batboy on Food Stamps! Recipes Inside”
I know. I feel special enough being a Charter Member!
Maybe I’ll get to rub Cecil’s feet! That’d be such an honor!
I think the hope & expectation of the gay rights groups is that by the time it gets that far, there will be hundreds of thousands of married gay couples across the country, and people will see that the republic actually hasn’t come crashing down around their ears and decide (with the exception of a few reactionaries) that it’s not worth fighting about.
That’s where I stand, anyway. I’m not a foaming-at-the-mouth liberal, here, but come on. We have young men and women dying in Afghanistan and Iraq, a sluggish nationwide economy, looming budget crises in the federal government, and a quickly-approaching oil crisis. And here come our heroic national leaders, boldly fighting to make sure that two men or two women can’t get married. Well, you know what? If we can shore up Social Security, reduce the deficit without excessive taxation, get the Iraq situation stabilized & bring our troops home, get some serious research on alternative energy sources going, give Osama bin Laden a bang-up funeral, and get inflation and unemployment under control, then I really don’t give a hoot about whether Jim & Joe are entitled to spousal benefits. Let’s see some perspective, shall we?
Hmm. On a somewhat tangential note, does anyone know anything about this study mentioned on a blog, or about the principals involved? I’m just curious, because if this paper spreads, even though it involves “conversion therapy,” it could very well be used in this debate; the quoted editorial already does it, after all…
Let’s not derail this thread into an argument over the incalculably evil “gay reparation” movement. Such fiction has no place in this debate.
Yeah, I was concerned about that. I’ll start up another thread about it.
But… but… I was all set to blow things up! Suffice to say for this thread that the study is crap.
Will wait for thread to elaborate.
You know, Leaper, if I was you, I wouldn’t…well, I just wouldn’t, if I was you. You know?
It could make some sense to say that, depending on whether or not sexuality is a constitutionally protected category the way that religion or race is. We already know it’s not constitutional to discriminate against Catholics or blacks, but it’s still being debated whether or not it’s constitutional to discriminate against gays.
The retort you will hear is that gays are not forbidden to marry, they are merely forbidden to marry who they want to. If they want to play it Ozzie and Harriet, the state will place no impediment in their wedding path.
That’s some catch, that Catch-22.
Indeed.
However, the problem that they don’t see is that most of us just don’t want to live in an America where people live by strict rules of what you can and can’t do.
After all, if you limit marriage to be between heterosexuals, our neo-eugenics/human branching/genetic freedom friends might make it possible to only marry within your race!
Slippey slope, indeed.
But John Mace, won’t the proposed federal amendment prevent this issue from being dealt with at the state constitutional level?
As I understand it, your object to the Massachussetts decision was that the state court over-reached in its interpretation of the Massachussetts equal protection clause, and that this issue should only be dealt with by the electorate or elected representatives. But what if supporters of gay and lesbian marriage proposed an amendment to the state constitution’s equal protection clause, or the state constitution’s clauses relating to marriage, that explicitly entrenched the right of gays and lesbians to marry? And suppose such an amendment actually passed? That presumably would respond to your objection to the way g&l marriage was achieved in Massachussetts, but the proposed federal constitutional amendment would prevent that local state action from coming into force.
What’s the logic of saying that we trust the voters of a state to recognise g&l marriage by statute, but we’re going to bar them from providing constitutional protection for g&l marriage?
The problem with the FF&C clause, as Dewey Cheatem Undhow finally succeeded in driving home to me, is that it’s effectively tautological in current constitutional case law, much like the Ninth and Tenth Amendments are. They may say noble truths, but the practical application is that they mean only what the courts are willing to say they mean – and the courts are unwilling to construe FF&C to say that if Vermont or Delaware decides to permit people to do something as between themselves, that decision is binding on Texas or Georgia courts and bureaucrats even when the “public policy” of the latter states holds otherwise. There’s a rather infamous bit of case law where a couple are legally married to each other in one state, the husband is not married to the wife in another (but she’s married to him), and the reverse of that (she’s married to him, he isn’t to her) in a third state, and neither are married to each other in a fourth.
But bluntly, I don’t give this proposed amendment much chance – not only are liberals, libertarians, and most moderates opposed to it, but so are some of the paleo-conservatives, who believe that it unduly trammels individual rights and/or the states’ rights to decide for themselves who shall be legally married within their bounds. So effectively we have a large but not majority group of neocons who are the principal supporters of the measure in Congress. And a few of the people speaking out on the subject are probably much like Southern Senators during the Civil Rights Era – they themselves don’t have a problem with gay marriages, or at least are not vehemently opposed to them personally, but need to make noises like they are to keep their neocon and Christian-right supporters happy with them. Several Southern Senators during the desegregation/Civil Rights period were privately supportive of what was eventually done, but made speeches that kept their redneck supporters thinking that they stood by the segregationist positions of the latter. (Cite: Hugo Black’s biography, which discusses his stance and that of his colleague from Alabama and his replacement in the Senate at the time of Brown v. Board of Education.)
I’m not sure I understand what you are asking me. It sounds like you are implying that I would support the proposed federal constitutional amendment, which I don’t. I only wanted to point out that the new one (though bad) is not as bad as the old one.
The new amendment would still ban states from enacting constitutional amendments allowing gay marriage, but it would allow states to pass laws which do so.
No it would not:
"Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups."
Even if in a public referendum 99% of the people of a state voted in favor of allowing gay marriage, the Anti-Gay Amendment would prevent them. The closest one could get is the separate-and-not-equal civil unions halfway point, and even that could only be instituted legislatively – even if the lack of gay union rights is in violation of a state’s constitution, the Courts would be barred from their rightful duty of ordering the repair of that inequity.
I’m sorry, that was my mistake. I meant to say that the new amendment would allow civil unions while the old one would not (which is what I posted earlier in this thread). Can I blame my hangover for that slip up? :smack:
And once again, I really don’t want to see **ANY ** amendment about marriage (gay or straight or what-have-you) at the federal level. Leave it up to the states.
See the second paragraph of my post #53 above. John Mace is a classic conservative with whom I’ve butted heads on sociopolitical issues before in this forum, but he’s a good example of the sort of conservative who opposes this amendment on grounds quite different from those of the liberal/gay-friendly opponents.
'Taint gonna pass! 
Wrong. Where did you get that idea from? All the polls taken here when it was an issue started with a rough split, solidifying into solid support (after more people thought about it). 50-38 in favor right after the court ruling.
Sure. How much are you willing to pay to find out otherwise?
There haven’t been any public polls since it became reality, but it’s part of life now. It’s normal here, and will of course be increasingly accepted as such. In 2 years, do you really expect that we’ll go along with even the weak-ass amendment that did barely pass the Convention, and take away a name from stable, loving couples? I think I know the pulse of this state a little better than you, frankly, and I can assure you *we’re * not spiteful enough to do it. Maybe things look different from 2600 miles away, though.
Don’t pay attention to Romney’s statements or efforts to spite gay couples - he speaks only for himself and for his *national * party, in which he is widely thought to have future aspirations.
You might want to be more careful about that “ramming down throats” rhetoric, its sodomistic connotations aside - you won’t find many of us married heteros in MA who feel that our own marriages and lives are affected in any way at all, not even among those who continue to decry the breakdown of morality and values etc. They’re hard to find, too - for instance, the Boston Globe ombudsman ran a fascinating column in response to a few readers’ complaints that almost all the Op-Ed letters they ran were in favor of allowing SSM. The reply was that the proportion of letters they did receive was far *more * strongly in favor, forcing them to print virtually everything coherent from the Anti side just to have any semblance of balance at all.
The federal thing? Not gonna happen - where the hell is a 2/3 majority of both houses going to come from? Even if all the GOP members are whipped, how are a third of the Democrats going to hand Bush a victory of any kind in an election year? Just more grandstanding for the religious base here, that’s all.
I swing to the right on this one. By to the right I mean government should stay the fuck out of our lives.
Sorry gay people, marrige is between a man and a woman. That’s it’s historical definition. What you want is something else. Equal rights.
The government needs to recognize that marrige is a sacriment in catholithism and get out of its endorsment entirely.
If we as a society belive two person unions are usefull then we should provide for that.
A two person union could be two guys going to school that intend to disolve the union after college.
An aged mother and her surviving unwed son.
A brother and sister who both date but share household expenses.
Two boys or two girls who decided to live in the same house and share expenses and sometimes touch each others genitals.
The state needs to make good on it’s pledge not to enforce religion and issue tax licences to all.
Just dont call it marrige.
Sorry, “EvilGhandi”, except I ain’t. If this is too vitriolic to be appropriate for Great Debates, I suggest that the mods kindly move my post along with EvilGhandi’s into the Pit. I’m just fucking sick and tired of letting this kind of bullshit stand.
What you’re spouting out here is complete bullshit, just like the notion that a “civil union” is an appropriate definition for two people who are in love. It’s second-class citizenship; you might just as well suggest that all of us homos use separate drinking fountains and move to the back of the bus.
“Marriage” is the union of two, exactly two, adults who are completely capable of their own decisions and are in love with each other. None of your asinine examples are remotely appropriate for the topic at hand, because they’re not about marriage. Marriage is about the union of two capable adults who are in love with each other and want to acknowledge their love before God and society as a whole. None of your bullshit assumptions about mothers & sons, or roommates, or by extension polygamy and fucking pedophilia, will change that.
What you’re talking about is irrelevant and of course, because you can’t fucking avoid it, talks about sex and incest because that’s all you fucking recognize. For whatever reason, you were born with the “accepted” sexual attraction between a man and a woman, but you still can’t recognize when two people regardless of gender are truly in love. And for that, I pity you.
If that kind of “logic” helps you sleep better at night, thinking that you’re not a knuckle-dragging bigot who’s suppressing the basic human rights of other human beings, then whatever. It’s still a pack of lies.
And it’s spelled “its” and “marriage,” you fucking moron.