You’re a tool. Can I have five dollars?
Calling them anything else would bring us right back to the “separate-but-equal” position. You can’t have it both ways.
Depends. What kind of tool? I’ve always wanted to be a jigsaw, or maybe a lathe.
I was thinking more along the lines of a 9/16" Allen wrench (Allen key, if you’re not American).
I’m slightly bent and I get lost a lot but I can put IKEA furniture together?
Works for me.
Bing-freaking-go! Thank you! I expressed a similar sentiment in post 49, but I like your explanation better 
Nah, IKEA’s metric innit? You can only put together cheap American knockoff furniture.
And them’s fightin’ words.
.
9 16ths of an inch is exactly 1.4cm, so there’s probably a metric size on something, somewhere that it will fit.
If you’re calling same-sex relationships marriage, then the default prefixes could be the traditional “Mr”, “Mrs”, “Miss”…the same connotations as opposite sex relationships. It’s only if you demand that same sex relationships aren’t MARRIAGE, and something else, that you open the can of worms for different prefixes.
True…but Mrs. means “belongs to Mr”…Traditionally.
14 mm Allen key, then.
Which means I go both ways. 
Of course . . . but if I rate a 9.5 on someone’s scale, I welcome an explanation (without frothing) of why I’m not a perfect 10. Perhaps I can learn from it, and make up that remaining 0.5.
Nope. Besides, that would be “Mr’s”. 
I didn’t demand that. In point of fact I said that would only be acceptable if “traditional” marriages were renamed also.
IOW, let’s say you’re a man. You want to get hitched to a woman. You go down to the courthouse, each take a breathalyzer or whatever, fill out a form, and the notary waves her magic stamp. You are officially civilly united.
Then you get divorced, and want to marry a man. You do the same.
If you want to be married (to a man or woman) after being united, you can do that too - you just have a ceremony with an officiant of your choice, and bingo bango bongo - married.
So is magellan01 (who seems to be the prime anti-use-of-word-marriage-to-describe-couples person in this thread) a bigot?
Well, I’m not sure, but if his honest opinion is precisely as he describes it, he’s bordering on being a totally nonempathetic sociopath, in that if a gay marriage proposal were up for vote, he would weigh his actions in the following fashion:
PRO: allows citizens who love each other and want to form stable relationships which are the bedrock of our society to publically and legally express that, grant them a huge number of fundamental legal rights that straight couples possess, prevent a fair amount of misery without forcing anyone to do antyhing they don’t want to
CON: Changes meaning of a word, “corrupts language”
Now, one might argue about (and, in fact, we HAVE argued about) whether his CON is actually a con or not. What I can’t see any justification for at all, though, is how that CON could outweigh the PRO. I mean, it’s one thing to say that he prefers the hypothetical separate-but-equal-civil-unions plan to the gay-marriage-plan. But he also seems to prefer the current totally-unfair-reality to the gay-marriage-plan, and that I can’t sympathize with or support at all.
As for the question of language, I think he’s wrong about that as well. What’s a coconut? It’s a brown round fruit with a thick shell that falls from palm trees and has white sweet flesh and milk. What if I go out tomorrow and discover a new type of palm tree that has a fruit that is precisely like a coconut in all ways except that it is red instead of brown. What should I call it? Well, I’d like to call it a “red coconut”, which will mean that “normal” coconuts, when they need to be differentiated from red coconuts, would have to be called “brown coconuts”. After all, we have red and green apples, red and green grapes, etc. But the old definition of coconut definitely included “brown”, and I want to toss that aside. Is that a reasonable thing for me to do, or am I corrupting language?
One might argue that it comes down to whether brown is an absolutely essential and fundamental part of what defines “coconut”, as Magellan claims that male+female is an absolutely essential and fundamental part of what defines “marriage”. And at some point, this is an issue where points can’t be proven, because no one can get inside someone else’s head and really understand what a word means to them. But consider the following statement: “Hey, wait, before going on with this story… are you two married?”.
What do you think the context is in which that question would be asked? What information would the person asking it already have, and what would they be trying to get?
It seems to me that that question would be asked when you knew that two people were a romantic couple of some sort, but you didn’t know how serious, how committed, etc. Or possibly when you didn’t even know if they were a romantic couple at all. But it makes no sense at all to ask that question in order to determine the gender of the people involved. Thus, I conclude that the important parts of the definition of “marriage”, the things that differentiate it from other similar things, are the level of love and commitment, not the gender.
Even in a hypothetical future world where there is “marriage” for straight people and “civil unions” for gay people and everyone is totally happy with that, so the language is not corrupt, if you hear someone saying “oh, Pat and I celebrated our 10th anniversary yesterday”, and you don’t know (“Pat” being a non-gender-specific name) if that person is gay or straight, and you wanted to find out, you wouldn’t say “so, are you and Pat married?” in an attempt to determine Pat’s gender.
This question really does nothing to further the discussion as it makes the question one that is clearly personal and, even if rhetorical (and I’m not sure it was), invites other posters to make insulting comments about another poster simply by answering in the affirmative.
And, unless you are a trained psychologist who has examined him professionally, (and not by reading message board posts), this comes way too close to a personal remark, as well. (Not to mention sounding like some sort of pop psychology emanating from Dr. Phil or a visitor to Oprah.)
Let’s keep the discussion in the realm of ideas without making every disagreement personal.
[ /Modding ]
If I find it important to be a perfect 10 on their scale.
I don’t form my opinions to suit other people. I form them to suit me. Suiting other people is a happy accident. Now, I DO form my actions to suit other people. If I’m in a room full of Texas Republicans, I tend to smile pleasantly and steer the conversation gently in the direction of sports and television and well away from anything dearly controversial (I can’t help it if there’s Aggies and Longhorns in the room, admittedly). If my grandmother’s in the room, I don’t use fun four letter words. If I’m helping someone set up for the Austin Atheist Festival And Sex Toy Swap Meet, I don’t go back to the car to grab a Bible to whack people in the face with.
And when I’m hanging out with my gay buddies and buddettes and they talk about the struggle for equality, I express my honest hope to them that one day we will all be equal in the eyes of the law, but meanwhile they have had some wonderful ceremonies in the eyes of God or Goddess or gods or each other to solemnize their pairings. And while it isn’t enough, not by a long shot, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
I do not try to be what these people want me to be. They don’t get to decide that. And I completely get where you’re coming from – you want marriage to be for everyone, and I respect and support that belief. Heck, I even agree with it. I just have different ideas of going about it. You can think they’re wrong, and that’s fine. You can find it insulting, which is your right, though I think you know that I’m far from intending insult to anyone. You can find my take-it-easy mentality to be obnoxious and self-righteous and condescending. I’ve been called those names before, and maybe I even deserve them.
At the end of the day, though, this isn’t my fight. I’m not in love with a woman, not in that way. I know two men who want to get married, but they fight and on their own terms. I cannot fight for everybody.