Halleluiah and amen! I was going to say the exact same thing and you beat me to it.
I’ve never had much respect for magellan’s opinions, and now it’s zero.
Well, all I know is that my husband and I have been married for 27 years, and I’m still waiting for teh gays to threaten my marriage. The waiting and worrying and wondering how it’s going to happen is really stressful. If we get a divorce due to the stress of waiting to see how the gay marriage already in place in several countries and states will destroy our marriage, I’m definitely going to blame it on the homosexuals.
Oh no no no no, hold on. We’re childless by choice*, so I guess our marriage isn’t much of a marriage anyway. Whew! What a relief! Carry on homosexuals.
Perfect perfect perfect answer. I notice there’s no response from Mr. Uppity Gays Should Stay In Their Place.
- I have a son from an earlier marriage, one that only lasted a few years. Maybe that counts for this marriage too? I’m so confused about all these rules.
In fairness to magellan, I only posted that about four hours ago, and it’s the middle of the day on a Monday. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s got something a bit more important to do right now than go round 1,254 of this debate with me.
If the word ‘marriage’ is so inconsequential, why do so many people on the anti-SSM side get themselves into a fit over it?
One man one woman is more natural than one powerful man, many women? Do tell.
We won’t even go into the gay penguins now.
My daughter got married last summer. Though she had been living with her boyfriend, and they had a registered civil union in Oregon, she has found being able to say she is married is important to her. (And she’s the one who resisted getting married.) Why anyone would want to prevent any population from having this emotional rush is beyond me. Especially when it seems to be a matter of semantics for him.
If the main body of anti-SSM people thought the way magellan01 does, there would be a rush by the right to enable civil unions with equal rights for all, since that would take a lot of the wind out of the movement. That there hasn’t been such an effort is telling.
I disagree. I’m pretty sure in fact that i’ve suggested to you ways in which your methods don’t grant all the rights and privileges to you before; I tend to recall others doing so too. There’s considerably more than that single presupposition.
I’ll give it another go, then.
The law is not just what’s written down on paper. Read the text of your Constitution; could you, if you had no knowledge of current Constitutional law, correctly guess from the text every result of a legal case brought up? You’d probably get a fair idea, but you’d not get it quite correct, and wildly wrong in many cases, i’d think. Because the law isn’t just the text, it’s the interpretation. It’s the findings of juries, the interpretations of juries all the way up to the highest levels. It’s precedent as much as it is textual. Add “and all the rights and privileges accorded to marriage will be accorded also to civil unions” to the texts, and you’ve still got no guarantee whatsoever that the storm of legal cases that will ensue (and I think we can at least agree that there will be such a storm) won’t result in a judge interpreting the text differently. And this hurts your ideals, too, because just as it’s possible a judge may consider civil unions less worthy of rights than marriage, it’s also possible they may consider them more worthy. Keeping the two seperate means potential problems in that regard either way - your method may well mean the opposite of what you intend, by leaving the door open for civil unions to be considered by the law to be *superior *to marriage.
Think of it like this. In this thread, we have many people disagreeing, as we tend to do. We all have our own ideas about what we mean, what this issue means, and what our opponents on this mean. Which is pretty inevitable, coming as we are from our own different viewpoints. But here’s the thing; judges are just as human. The text provides a framework for them to work with, but there’s no guarantee that one judge’s view will agree with the next. Keeping marriage and civil unions seperate means those judges have greater wiggle room still. So really, your method is a risk - the landmark decisions might be made by judges who think like you. Or they might be made by judges who think like me. Or they might be made by judges that think like Miller, or Der Trihs, or kanicbird. Or it might be made by judges with wildly different opinions and cause a huge mess of it all. Because the text doesn’t dictate. Judges dictate from the text. And your method means they’ll have quite a lot of room to maneuvre in deciding precisely what rights and responsibilities mean, what comes under that “all”, what precedent applies between the two systems, what new changes to one also affect the other.
And I disagree with your method. It’s considerably flawed - I don’t simply disagree with the principle behind it, I think it will fail to do what you want it to do, too. You’ve failed to show what you believe you’ve showed. Should I accuse you of mischaracterising my position, when you say that you have showed that?
Two things with this.
First is your false premise that a man and a woman are the “ideal.” I call cite on that one. I think your just showing prejudice rather than actually having any data to back that up. Not to mention the fact that you yourself say that two gender parents are better, except when they’re not.
Second, what happens when comes the day that two women can have a biological child? Or with some further technological gains, two men? Are you going to tell the child that it’s not a “natural” child. Should we call them something else? Maybe civil sapiens? Something to know that they were produced by hte gays. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=4725121&page=1
Civil Sapiens? Not most of us. 
I’m holding out for good old cellular mitosis. I will be able to create exact duplicates of myself.
I shall call him
Mini Me
IME, there’s nothing a repressed group will get behind more quickly than repressing another group farther down the totem pole.
-Joe
I’m not anti-SSM, but for me, if true civil unions were enacted, there’d be equal rights for gays, the economy would not be distorted, and, most importantly, I wouldn’t have to listen to all the disingenuous, distasteful arguments about purity and tradition. It would cross over into more easily ignored whimperings and rantings about how teh gays want to poison our precious bodily fluids and the like.
Well there wouldn’t be equal rights for gays. They wouldn`t have the freedom to marry, like straights have.
No, they wouldn’t have the freedom to call themselves married. If they’re not happy about that (and apparently they’re not), then I fully support their choice to press for what does make them happy- including participating in sign waving campaigns and the like against Florida Prop 2 (fat lot of good that did).
Personally, though, if I were told tomorrow that I couldn’t get married in the US because I’m not a citizen, I wouldn’t consider my rights to have been abridged (assuming I was offered the alternative of a Permanent Residentcy Union with all rights and privileges appertaining to married people)
Which would never, ever happen. “Seperate but equal” is never equal; that’s the whole point.
Hence my support for SSMs to be called SSMs instead of civil unions.
And round we go. It shouldn’t be called same sex marriage. It should simply be marriage. No prefixes, no discriminatory qualifications, no equivocations. Simply marriage, for every consenting adult couple who desires it. Period.
That’s what I meant. Sorry.
No problem. Please pardon my hypersensitivity.
Now, now. I’ve been in some schools in the Mississippi delta, and I can assure you that I’ve seen plenty of plaques that disagree.
-Joe