Except those opposed to SSM won’t lose anything when it’s finally legalized. I think their silence in the fifty thousand instances on this board where they’ve been asked to articulate what they will lose is sufficient evidence of that.
I am not religious and not spiritual. I was married in Vegas where I specifically requested that there be no religious ceremony. I really, really wanted a civil union. However, the certificate I received says I’m married.
I got lazy with my quoting, but I really didn’t have anything to respond to this. I will say, though, the more I think about it, my changes, if implemented will do a number of things: 1) provide a more accurate and descriptive terminology; 2) piss off religious people; 3) get the state and religious institutions separated; 4) force people to think beyond one stupid issue.
Phew, that’s a relief. I’d hate to think some citizens were getting special protection while others weren’t.
Oh certainly. I’m saying there isn’t continued uproar after the fact because they’ve been defeated, not lost anything.
Most anti SSM people are real shit-heads and I would assume whimper with their tails between their legs when beaten.
Hell, all marriages are civil unions, it is merely customary to empower clerical persons to perform them. You want a divorce, you go to court, not to your rabbi/parson/whatever.
And if a man loves another man, it’s called ‘gay’. If man loves a woman, it’s called ‘straight’. Separate terms are meaningful for different things.
A point I made upthread that doesn’t seem to matter much.
Gay is a descriptor not an activity. Sodomy or cunnilingus don’t connote gay or straight. Kissing or dating don’t. Neither should marriage.
It’s amazing how stupid all the arguments are. 
Sure, when the things are substantially different. In the case of SSM, there is no substantial difference. It is the union of two people for reasons of love or convenience. We don’t say “black marriage” or “disabled marriage” or “fat marriage”, do we?
If you are saying that it does not matter why someone holds a certain point of view, they ought to be labelled "bigots’ regardless, I’m going to have to disagree - the word itself is intended to describe what motivates someone.
It is my impression that people use the word because they find it useful in a polemical sense, not because it is accurate.
You can take cunnilingus when you can pry it from my cold, dead…OK, that isn’t going to work…
So what? As long as it says nothing about religion, I couldn’t care less.
To be honest, I have no idea what you’re asking in the last sentence, so I’ll go with the first question. I don’t actually think that it will make people more religious, but it will force people to pay a larger amount of attention to the church, and there ain’t nothin’ like a bunch of people who don’t give a damn about religion but are affiliated with the church anyway just so they can get married instead of civilly unionized to dilute the importance of religion.
It’s funny watching you and magellan01 try to go through these linguistic backflips (although I’ll acknowledge that your particular view is more coherent and logical than his) when the populace at large doesn’t care and will never care. Even if laws are passed to categorize straights/religious into marriage and gays/seculars into civil unions, it’s not going to matter in common parlance. Everyone’s just going to call themselves married because it’s simpler, faster, and provides the necessary connotations people want to convey, and eventually we’ll wonder what the damn point of splitting hairs like that was in the first place.
You want a distinction people will use? Marriage for love, civil union for personal partnerships that don’t have as much to do with love as legal convenience. Then you’ll see people making the distinction, because that’s what marriage connotes. It has nothing to do with religion or sexual preference, but love. That’s how the word is used today, how it makes sense to most people, and how it will continue to be used regardless of what set of laws eventually get passed.
I would agree. My impression is that “civil unions” is a halfway house solution that will not last very long - marriage is what it is and what it will be called; the sole use of “civil union” is to get those leery of change on board with a change that is I think inevitable - an inequity such as having marriage only for straight folk cannot stand.
Can I point and laugh at all three* of you at once and get it over with? I understood perfectly well what DT meant, but pretended not to for the sake of humour. You should try it some time.
Rev, the OP’s honesty about what he thinks doesn’t bother me one whit. His insistence that those with whom he disagrees with are all hatemongering murderous bastards, however, I take less as honesty and more as… well, a clever man like you can figure it out. 
- Unless Lobohan’s grin indicates that his post is a counter-whoosh, in which case, well played, sir.
The other reason why I’m not on board with the “Why don’t you just accept civil unions and shut up?” is because same-sex marriage already exists. It exists in this country, as well as in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Norway, Sweden, South Africa, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Iowa.
Unless you’re prepared to argue that California can never attain the standards of human rights enjoyed in South Africa, which I am not, why should Californians settle for a cushioned inequality when the equality they want is within grasping distance?
I went in my lifetime from someone with no legally recognized rights to someone with the right not to be discriminated against by governments or private actors and the equal right to marry and adopt children. Between the time the Canadian parliament passed a motion affirming that marriage was between a man and a woman and the time it passed the act legalizing same-sex marriage was six years.
The advance of our legal rights has proceeded at a dizzying pace, and what that tells me is that there is no point in backing off or compromising on full equality.
Actually, you said that your position is that you oppose government-sanctioned gay marriage. That makes you a bigot. You dress your position up nicely, and make it sound like you are not a bigot because you oppose all state-sponsored marriage, but that’s just a bullshit distraction, because you know GD good and well that the state is going to continue to sanction marriage. So you use that convenient little fact to obscure your bigotry. It’s just like when David Duke said that he had nothing against black people, but if they get the NAACP then white people should get an equivalent institution just for them. It’s just lipstick and rouge on a disgusting opinion.
Oh, I certainly don’t think I’ll have to wait until you die for your ilk to go extinct. There are some people around now who really believed all the bullshit racist arguments in favor of segregation, but you’ll never hear them make those arguments now. They are too far out of favor with too many people to be safely voiced in public. Segregationists are extinct, even though some are still living. I’m sure in 30 years you will not want the arguments that you have made here brought up. You’d look just like someone arguing that black people are inferior beings, and that segregation does them a favor by easing them gently into civilized society.
No? It’s stood since the beginnings of that institution, some thousands of years. I wouldn’t write it off just yet.
And what’s in a word? If the same rights adhere to civil unions as they do to marriage (and if they don’t they should) then why not leave marriage to describe, as it always has done, the union between a man and a woman?
If it’s just a word, as you say, what do you care if it is applied to same-sex unions?
Not this again.
“It means so much to us! We can’t just let you have it! Why do you want it anyway? It’s just a word.”