Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is a man with a backbone and, apparently a good set of ethics. Too bad we can’t elect him to be our president.
No, it’s tornados you have to worry about. 
Not in the US, they don’t.
The OED doesn’t back up that etymology.
The practice, though, is nigh universal; if one wants to say it is “pagan in origin” one is merely acknowledging that it is also a practice of the oldest known polytheists.
On a tangential note, I need a fucking magnifying glass, the text in my OED is miniscule.
That is the history of its usage, not of its root cognates. As OED relates, “marriage” is an extrapolation of maritus, which while it technically means groom or husband, but itself is dervied from the male (hence the -us ending) in the ceremony of Mari, a goddess most often associated with Venus/Aphrodite or Ishtar. (There were actually numerous deities called Mari, most roughly similar to Ishtar, and there were the cults of Venus-Mari or Aphrodite-Mari, plus Mare being Latin for sea (whose semeny foam created Venus) and later the mother of Jesus having [totally coincidentally] a Hebrew name (Maryam) that Latinized as Maria led to all sorts of puns and word play, but that’s another topic.) The word marriage, though, ultimately derives from a pagan ceremony (again: the WORD, not the concept of marriage).
Wedding ceremonies and marital relationships (by whatever term) are infinitely older of course. Genesis has been pretty much stable since 800 B.C.E. and mentions the wedding ceremony of Jacob to Leah (and a week later to Rachel), while the Iliad of course hinges on a marital abandonment and texts that are a millennium older mention other marriages and weddings. However, these also note that the notion of marriage as a kinship form, while admittedly the union of a single man and a single woman in most (certainly not all) cases, has been one of the most flexible in anthropology through the centuries, changing as needs and climates changed.
Sorry, didn’t mean to get quite so long winded.
I also have to disagree with your rant Sampiro, are you really saying that Rome fell because Gay Germanic tribes were attacking it? That is not what I took in junior high. Oh, yeah, the rant was not weak. Keep up the good fight.
Well, that’s the thing; you probably won’t get a shitstorm. Because the people who think like Blackbird won’t say anything for fear of getting banned, and like you say, it just gives people the “out” to say that any remotely anti-gay speech will get clamped down by the liberal homo agenda of the SDMB. If it were just trailer parks that were the problem, that’d be one thing, but the same sentiments that Blackbird said have been said plenty of times on this board before, from all kinds of people. “What are you complaining about? You don’t have it so bad.” And it always ends up with silence. Seems like it’d be better to let the people with empty “arguments” keep talking to eventually prove they have nothing to contribute, instead of letting them give the impression they would’ve had a valid point if they just had been allowed to talk.
That’s part of what frustrates me so much aboutu the whole thing – the people fighting against equality for gays are so adept at flipping over and claiming that they’re defending themselves against a liberal attack, defending family values, and that it’s the uppity gays who are causing the problem. They’re being compassionate, they claim, and trying to help the selfish hedonists. And then when pressed, and presented with logic, they just respond with silence. Of course, until it’s put up for a referendum.
I have yet to hear an exit strategy from these people. It’s always “stop whining” or “be patient” or “don’t claim it’s like the black civil rights movement” or “civil unions are perfectly valid” or “I don’t care what you do in private, but I won’t condone it with my vote.” Well, how is that not selfish?
If self-described Christians are truly compassionate with their actions to invade on homosexuals’ private lives, then what are they suggesting as an alternative? Even the leaders of the various “ex-gay” movements admit that they have a lousy “success” rate in converting the homos. What do these people want? For gay people to be entering into insincere marriages with the opposite sex, even though there’s no attraction? How is that “noble?” How is marrying someone you’re not in love with anything other than a sin? Some yahoo in a thread a while back said “they can always become priests.” How is being an insincere priest anything other than a sin?
There are plenty of people out there who would say that being gay makes me less than a man. How is speaking out against injustice, doing the right thing by my relationships, refusing to live life ashamed of myself, and fighting for the opportunity to start a stable family, not being a man? That’s what I want to hear from these people – why are you fighting this? What the hell do you want?
I agree in spirit with a lot of the things touched on in the rant. There are just a few things about rants like this that tend to upset me:
I’ve lived in America for many decades now, America is one of the most progressive states on the planet when it comes to homosexuality. Trust me, I’ve been all over the world, I’ve visited over 80 countries. This isn’t an opinion, this is a fact.
I think the percentage of Christians that are “protestant fundamentalists” becomes insanely overstated by these types of rants, I feel that Christianity in general becomes generalized, people on the right become generalized.
And hey, generalizations happen, I understand that. I just have an intrinsic disaste for rants like this because I know that most people can’t just take it at face value, they have to go further, have to extrapolate the rant to cover a huge swathe of people, ideas, even the whole country, when it really doesn’t apply to the whole country.
There are many places in America where being gay is as acceptable as wearing tennis shoes. People talk about how Europe is progressive and America is not and I just laugh. Most of these people haven’t even seen a good cross-section of America let alone Europe. Most of these people forget homosexuality is a huge cultural no-no in most of Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
I have a good internet buddy that lives in Poland, he’s never came out to anyone he knows not because he’s afraid to admit it to himself or anything like that, but because he’s afraid it would get out to society at large and in his profession he assures me that would be the end of his career.
And many European states that explicitly allow homosexual unions are still countries with a very “machismo” culture and homosexuals are somewhat culturally repressed.
Europe > America statements really irk me because I know that anyone who makes such a statement either does so out of ignorance, inability to see the big picture, or simple vindictiveness.
You cannot compare a country as large as America with 300m people and 50 fairly independent states with a continent made up of dozens of countries all with their own distinct culture, languages, laws, etc. and make any very informed statements.
Most people here will steadfastly claim, “we’re not trying to generalize about Americans or about Christians” but the fact is while you may not be explicitly generalizing or casting aspersions on Americans or Christians many of you do so inadvertently when you get on the “let’s hate on huge classes of people that have gay-hating members within them” train.
There’s also the logical fallacies that come out when we have rants like this. People saying, “soon those who are against homosexuality will be left in the dustbin of history.” I would hope that anit-homosexual behavior would indeed disappear from history but I’ve seen nothing to indicate that it will. Homosexuality has been very accepted long in the past, and it’s been very persecuted. It seems to me it can come and go and just because we’re in a phase where it is going doesn’t mean it will be gone forever. Just like I don’t think we can say any sort of bigotry is “gone forever.”
So while I agree in large part with Sampiro’s rant I tend to dislike these sorts of rants because they bring out a lot of idiocy and prejudice from people that start to bandwagon.
It’s difficult to remind gay friends to live in the moment when they are repressed in the moment.
I am trying to figure out where I or anybody else compared America negatively to other countries on the gay issue. The rant and commentary is Americacentric, I’ll grant, but that’s because I live in America and so do most of the other posters. That other people other places (gay and other-wise) have it worse was not only not ignored but was explicitly stated. As far as overestimating the degree to which these arguments are heard, I quite assure you I didn’t, and I very much resent the insinuation that I or anybody else on this thread called for the hatred of any group of people. (I have no love for anti-gay zealots, none whatsoever, but that is not the same as calling for widespread hatred and if our definitions should differ on what qualifies doing so then I dare say that most reasonable people would agree that it is because yours is wrong.)
I did back in post three, I think.
But hatred? Naw. I am an American, it’d be rather odd for me to hate 'em.
Wasn’ t that Scott Thompson?
Don’t think so. Seems to me it was Dave Foley dressed as an old lady. I may be thinking of a different skit though.
I don’t understand why people are so against gay marriage and never will. Letting someone else get married makes my marriage less “sacred”?
And the same asshats who talk about how “all gays are promiscious and spread AIDS” are the ones who don’t want to let gays get married? Can’t they hear just how stupid that sounds? I have gay friends who have been together longer that I’ve been married!
Great rant.
It simply isn’t true that ranting and whining (if it must be called that) is ineffective; reasonable people are capable of changing their minds in response to impassioned protest - complaint shouldn’t ever be the only form or dialogue, but it certainly has an important place in the picture - if nothing else, it pre-emptively deals with such possible arguments as “if it’s so bad, why isn’t anybody complaining?”.
To be fair, if they’d just STOP being gay everyone would be happy!
I mean, really, is that too much to ask?
Oh, and am I the only one who read the “Arrogant, overfed, etc” and thought, “Good thing I’m an athiest or I’d need to get to work on that bomb shelter pronto”?
-Joe
Did he do anything Pit-wise that would get him banned? Or was he just a sock?
-Curious Joe
Nah, it was Scott Thompson. I remember it quite clearly.
-Joe, not a Faggo, just a scary T
(Realizes he posted 3 times in a row)
Well, shit, might as well put in a 4th to apologize. I’m going to blame it on juggling too many threads. Sorry, dudes and dudettes.
-Joe, shamed