padren

They definitely have higher taxes in other first world nations, but they also all have nationalized healthcare, competitive public schools and generally substantially more safety-net programs. The main offset I see is our military budget is pretty big relatively, but I am curious to know if they simply get a better rate of return on some things, whether public or private. Kind of hard to suss that out though - not sure where to even find that sort of information.

Not quite following this, the bucket at a time part. Can you elaborate?

Honestly though, how do other nations manage to handle their entitlement programs? All of these issues are by far not American issues, they are general issues of government, yet we seem to be lost in trying to figure out the right way to go. Even if we ultimately do feel we don't want to copy other nations (which I agree with, never copy when you can improve upon them) I am sure we could learn a thing or two and give us some much needed insight.

Just an addendum to the "Pink Unicorn" comment: Go for it. Change your legal name to "Scrappy the Pink Unicorn." Prince changed his name to "The Artist formerly known as Prince" and used a symbol to write it that doesn't even exist in the alphabet. Have at it - knock yourself out. Describe yourself as a Pink Unicorn, people do a lot stranger things. "I am a pink unicorn that looks like a normal human male" - good for you, no one will care. Change your legal name and the state will even let you sign your checks that way. Get a driver's license that has "Scrappy the Pink Unicorn" and when you get a speeding ticket you'll demonstrate on your proof of registration you are in fact "Scrappy the Pink Unicorn" and he may blink but he'll fully respect your legal right of your chosen name. So do it - enjoy your legal rights, and be glad your options aren't limited due to legal double standards.

I don't think we ever started talking about how many people could be convinced of what - we've been talking about what is in line with constitutional law, what is discriminatory and what is not. There's a pretty big difference. Also keep in mind the supreme court is not supposed to even take popular opinion into account but solely consider arguments on legal qualifications and constitutional interpretations. Lets stick with the topic, shall we? Those straights (not the straights) can keep their narrow definitions, just allow others to have their definitions. It's a simple, clean, elegant solution. Your comments about "can only settled by opinion" are an oversimplification of the issue. We do use facts and logic in deciding what is constitutional. You can pretty much do what you want on your property minding your own business yes? That is an opinion - one based on our constitutional protections of liberty. Now, if your "business" that you are minding just happens to be dumping large amounts of arsenic into the ground water, facts about arsenic and logic regarding it's potential to contaminate other people's drinking water come into effect, and your liberties are curtailed to protect the general public. Can you take a moment to consider this subtlety: We have opinions about the role of government and individual rights, that are long established and went into the drafting of the constitution and bill of rights. We also introduce facts and use logic to deduce if a person's liberties should be curtailed as a necessity to safeguard the welfare and liberties of other citizens. In absence of such facts, we err on the side of individual liberties instead of constraints. That's how it's always worked, it hasn't always been done flawlessly - but that is how it works. Reread my comments, as I am rather tired of restating them. Read them, address them, but don't just repeat questions if you feel the answers already provided have holes in them - challenge the answers. I've bolded the most relevant answer to that question in my above comments just to point you in the right direction. I really wouldn't care, though I don't see how a legal marriage could be applied as it wouldn't change anything about your legal status. You already can't testify against yourself, you already make your own medical decisions and you already share all your property with yourself. But honestly, I don't care what you do as long as it doesn't mess with others unwarrantedly. I am not 100% up on the current status of transgendered rights, but it is worth noting that a person can be born one gender, and be called another legally. Should someone who is born male and undergoes surgery to become a woman be called a "surgically altered male" or a woman? I mean, their chromosomes haven't changed. But hey, if you follow a religion that says if you are born a male it doesn't matter what you do with the plumbing - you'll always be a male to God? Believe that, it's fine as long as you don't try to mess with other people's beliefs to the otherwise. We do protect that despite very strong traditional definitions. Honestly your argument works more in my favor - thanks for bringing it up, I hadn't thought about that one. As to the unicorn deal: The Dali Llama goes around calling himself the reincarnated leader of Tibet. Priests call themselves "servants of God" and the Pope calls himself the closest mortal to God on Earth. Knock yourself out pinky. A discussion about legality and constitutionality is not the same as a discussion on whether something is politically viable in light of prevailing public opinion. I have already made that very clear in a ton of posts in this thread. It doesn't happen to address what to do while government is in the business of marriage though. Aside from the issue of gay rights however, there is the issue that a segment of society has claimed the right to usurp and monopolize a legal term to a narrow definition on the basis that "sacredness" trumps personal liberties for nonsecular reasons. No one group no matter the size should get away with that. It's a battle that gets fought over in many different facets of culture and law. Personally I have no problem claiming human life begins at conception if the science demonstrates this but any politician attempting to claim this (and thus afford rights to a cluster of cells) solely based on scripture making this claim is something I consider dangerous. I would hope you would agree with that. I am only arguing on the issue of the constitutional legality of Prop 8, which exists in a nation where marriage is a legal term. It doesn't matter to me how you get states to change their minds (since you are talking about states, not people... far more than 4% of people support gay marriage), or at least while I find the topic interesting it's also outside the scope of this thread. If we call gay marriages marriages, then there is no double standard. If we don't and give them those rights via DPs, then while they have rights we have a double standard in place. Double standards are bad. They allow harmful things. Doing something once legally makes it far easier to do again later, even when it's unpopular. I had a client who had a dating website that received a legal notice from a company claiming to hold the patent on "sending video over the internet" demanding he shut down all online video or begin paying royalty fees. Failure to do so would result in legal action and an increase in royalty percentages. Essentially it was extortion. Sadly, it was all legal. Yes, he could have gone to court, but he didn't have a large enough legal budget. How did this happen? Well, the company bought a badly issued patent (that actually claimed all digitally compressed visual and audio data that was ordered so it could begin decoding before the last byte of data had been received by the recipient) and proceeded to make legal claims against porn sites. Why? Because judges love shutting down porn. They chose not to go after big companies with legal teams that would crush them, only small ones that judges would be biased against. Then, after establishing some legal precedent they went after other small companies using video on the internet, such as my client who after investing many thousands of dollars, closed down his entire site. This is why legal precedent is dangerous when we only ask "what's the big deal?" whether it's gays getting "a lot better deal than they had" or "who's going to miss some smut peddlers?" Legal precedent matters. Setting a bad precedent is harmful to our society and legal system. This precedent would be bad because it allows for a group to set arbitrary limitations on another without just cause. It also sets a double standard. Those things are bad. (Unless of course, you are of the opinion that they are great things in a constitutional republic.) Already addressed above, so I won't repeat my comments on this. Did you even understand what I was saying about the deconstruction of arguments? It's not a pride issue. Demonstrate that it is or stop repeating it. I addressed this in my previous post to you regarding your comments to Sayonara³.

If you disagree with a point, voice it. You asked the same question earlier and I addressed it - it is not unusual or hypocritical to disagree with the opinion of the supreme court! Anti-abortionists have been doing just that since Roe vs Wade as I pointed out, and it's their right to feel that judgment was in error. Seriously, that's about as off base as saying "If you believe the legal system is a good thing to have, and you still think OJ Simpson killed his wife and her lover after he was acquitted then you must be a hypocrite. There was a ruling - you must change your mind!" Since I already made this point and you didn't address it I thought you let this errant tangent go. If you think it actually has merit though, would you mind explaining exactly how disagreeing with a ruling makes one a hypocrite? I think I just made a decent case as to how it does not.

...can I have a black car if it has no AC, or you just... turn it off? What about in winter up in the mountains - black cars will need less heat than white cars. I say each community should either black or white cars, but white cars clearly should not be allowed to enter cold mountainous regions in the winter... So, basically I could get a white hummer, but that black 4 cylinder geo is out of the question I guess - what was I thinking?? I must be such a selfish bastard!

I am a big fan of the guy but I am not familiar with any work of Tesla's that would provide anti-gravity or free energy. I assume by "free energy" you mean "otherwise untapped bountiful potential energy" since free energy does not exist, but I really don't know of anything he could have conceivably worked on that could even vaguely stumble on such a thing. He didn't even believe you could harness atomic energy - thought it was a pipe dream. He was only familiar with chemical/mechanical energy, and hadn't considered that energy/matter were convertible and involved a huge amount of energy in a small mass... This gives me the impression he wasn't exactly even open to the idea of tapping energy sources with a higher than chemical output, let alone researching them. He worked in energy distribution and mechanical to electrical energy production, and a few interesting and creative ways to use that energy once generated. So why would I be interested in handing out fliers for something I find improbable? Why would anyone take up your idea, when there are tons of people calling to hand out fliers for a whole other manner of crises: Equally substantiated claims of: * Aliens have warned us we are going to run out of air in 40 years * The government is hiding advances on the Mayan Calendar algs that show the world will end in 2012. * Jews have conspired and "took all our money" and created the economic crash. * ...add many religions and a handful of cults that espouse a critical need to act now so Things Will Be Really Good because if we don't do as they say really fast then Things Will Get Really Bad. Honestly your request hits a wall of white noise in the background din of a million voices and gets drowned out pretty quickly. That's why substantiating claims with clear empirical evidence and falsifiable theories are critical to the sharing of ideas.

Lot of options to choose from. There's Chi, there's The Force, there's "Hacking the Matrix" if robots are in fact concealing a catastrophic spoon shortage. For fun, it would be interesting to pretend various fruits and vegetables contained psionic energies that could be consumed and absorbed, then harness the powers of a great many bananas and unleash wrathful blasts of telekinetic power upon all my enemies.

Well, since it was set in modern times when the article was read, we can assume it was 90% fluff and at most 10% science.

I hope this is considered within the scope of this topic but - what countries are running at a surplus, and what are they doing that we aren't? Granted, nations like China or Saudi Arabia are no brainers, and I don't mean nations with what amounts to slave labor or giant oil reserves - what are first world democracies doing to run in the black? I can't believe the US has a more generous "entitlement" system than places with universal healthcare. I know the taxes are a lot lower and military spending is a lot higher but that can't account for how bad things are can it? Are we just spending too much money overseas and not producing enough to sell overseas? I think it would be interesting to see how other nations manage to run in the black, and if there may be some obvious economics 101 stuff we are missing here.

First, let me say that is equivalent to the claim that one person's opinion is that slavery is wrong, and another that it is not, so a discussion on the topic is a matter of opinion. Technically everything is a matter of opinion in that case. The whole basis of this argument though, is to distill common ideas we share - to come to say, a similar opinion on "discrimination" that we can agree on, and one side tries to make the case DOMA is discriminatory, and the other side makes the case that DOMA is not. The elements on both sides are about facts and logic and at times opinions that can then be challenged until they can be buttressed with facts and logic that demonstrates those opinions are sound. You can't just dismiss it all as opinion though. Challenge specific things you find to be a matter of unsubstantiated opinion and then those elements can be debated, but don't use generalized blanket dismissals that "it is all" just opinion. This was argued over, and the point was conceded that gays are discriminated in the institution of marriage, was it not? Isn't that why we started discussing whether DPs with full marriage style rights would be an adequate means to address that discrimination? This seems like backpedaling to me, but I'll reiterate the main points as to why it's discriminatory: The union of marriage addresses the common occurrence of two humans to pair-bond and which to be considered unified in the eyes of the law. Not all pair-bonds last and some don't even involve love - after the institution was established many even engaged in marriage with no pair-bonding at all for other legal reasons, but the primary issue that marriage addresses is that humans form pair-bonds and wish to share all property and debts as a single unit. Since Marriage only recognizes pair-bonds between opposite sexes and homosexuals pair-bond with the same sex it is blatant discrimination. That's why we moved on to further explore the sub-topics is it not? As I said before, and will say a thousand times over: No one should own it. Not gays. Not straights. Not the Chinese. Not the Scientologists. No one. The term should be legally open enough so that no one owns it. Have I not made this clear? I've gone to great lengths to explain why I feel no one should own it, so why are you asking me if the gays should own it instead of DOMAers? That's a false dichotomy and you should already know by now my answer to that question so please stop asking it. Ask me why no one should own it if you are unclear as to my reasoning, but I've already made clear who I feel should own it - no one. I find this flippantly brief and uncommunicative. If you wrote a large explanation to something and I simply commented "Too illogical" you'd want to know why I thought it was illogical, because it's not exactly a stretch for me to realize you wouldn't have posted it if you yourself saw it as illogical. I'd say that I found it illogical, then explain why I did, so you could understand too. I don't see how my statement has "Too much conjecture" so please illuminate me as to the err in my comment. As far as I am concerned I was pointing out how if the wording was slightly different and happened to discriminate against a different, larger social group it would never stand. I did this to demonstrate that the "original definition" of marriage is irrelevant, as if it discriminated against atheists, or protestants, or other races the wording would be challenged and changed. It should not be any different because it "only" discriminates against gays. Please demonstrate why this is too convoluted. How do you draw that conclusion at all from what I wrote? Why would my stating that "making a sweeping law that limits the freedoms of people you do not in any way even associate with is a dangerous legal precedent and should be opposed on principle with pride being no factor whatsoever" become "DPs should be 'enough' for the gays then" exactly? You didn't exactly draw a straight line between A and B there, in fact, I am not sure how you managed to get to B at all. Can you please explain? Consider this: "Legally limiting the freedoms of another group that you do not even associate with without demonstrating in any way how those freedoms of theirs would harm the public or any individual is a dangerous mindset for any constitutional republic." If you, myself, and Joseph Stalin were having this conversation, I doubt he would agree with the above, and we'd end up arguing over that. However, in a conversation between us, if you disagree with the above we can probably argue over the details as to why it would be harmful or not harmful to indulge that mindset within our government, and come to some form of agreement that either A) it is harmful, or B) it is not harmful. Once we agree on either A or B, if it happens to be A that we agree on, I would continue to argue that DOMA is an example of that mindset, therefore harmful, therefore wrong as should also agree we do not want to pass harmful laws. Statistical facts are not going to be the key element in this debate. Taking the things we disagree on, and deconstructing them into smaller units until we have units we can agree on, then analyzing and debating the process in which we rebuild those constructs to ensure we agree with each step until we track down the exact point of disagreement - then track that... that's really the only way we'll end up on the same page in the end. Even then, someone that doesn't agree to the same basic constructs will take issue with it. A dictator that believes he has the right to tell every citizen in his nation what to do probably has no respect for many of the things we both find vital to a healthy government, but that's because we see a government as something different from what a dictator might. I mention this because you seem to argue it's all about opinion - and on some level everything is yet we all make progress in legal debates despite that fact, and the key is everyone in the debate has some common ground. The trick is to deconstruct the disagreeable units until we have units we can agree on and build back up from there and debate as we go, using logic along the way.

Scrappy man, I was quoting you: How can you draw a distinction citing like there is some objective "Real Marriage" to try to pick apart my argument, and then say it's all about opinions when I challenge that? Exactly my point. A slight difference in the wording and - look at that - atheists do not have access to marriage, and we'd be propagating bigotry. A large number of people do define marriage as between a man, a woman, and God. It's just those people accept there are other people that define it a little differently, and if they ignored that fact they'd be bigots. So really, is the only reason Atheists can get married is due to the luck of wording, that we are just lucky they "threw us the crumb" and we should be thankful for it? What if it happened to be "two people and God" instead? Would it no longer be bigoted to prevent atheists from marrying, yet acceptable for LGBTs that do believe in God to marry? Really? How's that? And by the way, since when did it become their marriage institution? So if every atheist was to loose the right to marry due to some DOMA 2.0 but could "technically" still have a DP, the only reason to oppose such an action would be pride? Legal precedent and the sort of dangerous laws that tend to come out of that sort of thinking would somehow not be relevant - it's all about pride? It has nothing to do with pride. I have no gay pride as I am not gay, I just have an idea of what individual rights are, and that matters to me regardless of whether I am part of that group. Please try to think from another perspective, I've made a point of trying to see arguments from your perspective - try the reverse. You can't look at the facts and continue to claim it's about pride simply by stating it. Not pride, discrimination, as already stated repeatedly.

Real marriages? Depends on who you ask. Lets say the majority now support interracial marriage (unlike say, when this country was founded and the first marriages were performed here) and look at all the others. What about atheists getting married? If marriage is a Sacrament how the heck can atheists enter into real marriages? Or Hindus for that matter? Or if you go back far enough, Protestants? As I have said many times I am not discriminating against DOMA people. I am not desiring to interfere with their beliefs or opinions at all. They get to do whatever they want with their lives. I am pointing out that they simply need to accept or ignore (either way, I don't care) other people who are living their own lives their own way. Can you not see how this works - the inclusive vs exclusive thing? Pride doesn't matter at all. It's a non-issue. To define harm, threat to public or individual health, undo interference, etc. Are you serious? Of course I am as fervent regarding everyone's rights. Polygamists have a bit of an uphill battle for a number of reasons, and the issue is actually pretty complex due to secondary aspects that are often tacked onto polygamy through the practitioners' secondary beliefs... but any time someone's way of life is interfered with despite the fact their way of life does no harm I consider it a miscarriage of justice most certainly. The main reason I am not fervent about other minority issues is this is not a thread about other minority issues. Don't take my absence of an opinion here as evidence of no opinion at all.

In the context of this thread, I found this article especially funny: http://www.cbs8.com/global/story.asp?s=10058128

Good post Pangloss. I'll play devil's advocate and look at it a bit from the other side: I can understand that if say, a mother wanted to be registered on a child's birth certificate as the father, and felt she was being discriminated against by having to be registered as the mother - we'd say "Hey, the term Father is for the sperm donor, not the person who gave birth to the kid, sorry." The terms Mother and Father have pretty tight, biological definitions. Likewise there was a case a while back of a woman wanting to get her driver's license photo in a burka completely covered except for her eyes. I believe the ACLU actually took on her case. Personally, I think a "Photo ID" is pretty clearly a form of identification whereby the person can be identified by photo, and if you don't want to be identifiable by your photo in such an ID it's not a photo ID. I think they'd have had a better case saying the requirement of any form of Photo ID is discriminates against religions that prohibit identifiable photos - but that would still have lost I am sure because we've already established the state has the allowance to require photo identification for certain privileges to prevent potential abuse and harm. The point is, that case and the scenario above fail because of the strict definitions of the terms. To people who believe traditional marriage is marriage plain and simple, it seems to be the same argument: That to them, a marriage is based on the archetype of a man and a woman who will generally have kids. Even if surgery or biological abnormality or personal preference renders the pair "nonbreeding" they are still primarily identifiable by that overall archetype of a man and a woman who become one unit in the eyes of the law. I don't agree with that - but it's fair to say that is often how it's seen by opponents. If a man has no arms and can play a mean kick drum, he can be called a drummer, and a musician, but if he advertises he's a banjo player it doesn't matter how badly he wants to be in his heart - he's still not a banjo player. If he's not able to play the banjo, there's just no way he can be called a banjo player. If someone feels that a marriage is literally between a man and a woman, I can see how someone could feel a man and another man simply cannot be called married. So really, I just want to put that out there in case anyone feels I "don't get it" when it comes to that argument. I already accept that argument and feel I the above are decent similar examples of that argument where it works. But I still think it fails because ultimately we have to discuss whether the term should be opened up to include gay marriage legally. In the case of the burka woman, it can be demonstrated that it is harmful to give someone what we call a photo ID, when they cannot be identified by their photo. A birth certificate is supposed to record the biological parents in their biological roles, regardless of whether they have some odd religion whereby the mother considers herself the father for some reason, and it would be harmful if the records contained medical inaccuracies. In the case of marriage, there is no demonstrable harm, and whether GBLTs were simply quiet or even if they did not exist before they do now - and they are petitioning for the right to marry. There is a case for the arguments that the majority believe marriage means heterosexual marriage, and that the legal definition has been intended to reflect that. Personally I accept that argument completely. I just don't think it is relevant in face of the other factors I mention. If we had some odd definition of golf being a white person's game as per some "traditional" definition that was never an issue because it just happened black people never seemed interested in playing before... should they end up challenging that definition it would not be enough to say "they can play as long as they call it something else" - we'd legally recognize the term cannot be legally defined in such a closed definition. So why would we do that? Equality? If "they could play if they called it something else" they wouldn't be being denied the game, right? Bias? If white people cared that much about golf being "white only" they wouldn't volunteer to play with a black person even after the courts ruled, so it wouldn't have an effect there, right? We'd say "regardless of the majority opinion that having white skin is critical to the definition of a player of golf, black people should be able to play golf if they choose." No harm can be demonstrated by allowing the more open definition, and keeping it closed discriminates, so we'd be forced to open up the definition. Likewise, I can't help but to see it as the same with marriage.

Scrappy, I think I address this here, post #248 in this thread. I would actually like it if you could address those points actually, when you have a moment.

Just ran across this article, and I didn't realize it was this black and white: http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20090322/LOCAL/303229940/-1/LOCAL11 Getting a traffic ticket, and no charges yet you can have cash seized because the officer decides you don't have a good enough reason to explain that much cash? I knew if you had even a small amount of drugs a vehicle they can seize any money and the vehicle, but I had no idea they could just take your money and run. What are everyone's thoughts - is this constitutional?

If I recall, you do support "Domestic Partnerships" or "Civil Partnerships" for same-sex couples that afford all the rights of marriage, it is just the definition of marriage you don't feel SS couples should have access to. To answer your three questions: 1) Who gets harmed if we don't call gay DPs "marriages"? It's errant regulation, imposing a limitation without any merit being established that the limitation is necessary. Who gets harmed if we keep marriage for only non-interracial marriages and let interracial marriages be called domestic partnerships? You could argue it does no harm, but it is still discriminatory. Sure, it could be argued that since people with partners of another race still has the same right to marry someone of the same race, just like those who have partners of the same race - that technically they are "treated equally" but we know that would still be discriminatory. If you want to know why it would be a bad idea, you don't have to look any further than to the fact it is a capricious limitation imposed with no case for harm prevention made. 2) Who gets harmed if we do? No one gets harmed, though the religious folks that believe that the legal definition of marriage should have as much "Sanctity" as their religious definition may have their egos bruised. The facts already support this though, and it's only a matter of denial: Atheists and drunks in Las Vegas have long since taken any "Sanctity" out of the legal term. 3) And whose opinion counts most here on this broad landscape of political reality? The rule is, if you are at a stalemate regarding "no one can demonstrate harm" on either side, then you always rule in favor of more freedom. Our freedoms and liberties are only to be regulated as needed to prevent depriving others of their liberties and freedoms (such as harm, demonstrated by studies and statistics) and if that cannot be done, then less is more.

Actually, it's a simple way of stating one of the most important guiding principles in our legal system. As for prostitutes and nudists, there is demonstrated evidence that those things are genuinely harmful, not amoral. I don't personally agree with those arguments - but apparently most children and drivers alike can't handle seeing random public nudity. Likewise, there are arguments that prostitution is generally harmful to the prostitute psychologically causing tangible harm. They are arguments that are not based on "how some group defines a word" and as such the laws can stand. I don't claim the arguments have enough merit to stand on, and I think both are genuinely debatable, but they are also not the issue. They are also entirely different arguments from SSM as arguments of harm, not "tradition" as the basis for their remaining illegal. When you have arguments of harm you can debate them and even overturn them based on merit and evidence of the claim, when you argue "tradition" you end up with a system that would not have allowed the protestant faiths to even come into existence, since all Christianity was traditionally Catholic. One is tolerant and based on reason, the other is not. While people may attach a "moral" argument to say, prostitution laws, that argument is not part of the issue that gets debated legally, only the evidence of harm is. Edit: I want to clarify something: I am not saying "moral indignation" is never a cause in the passing of laws. A community may pass a law banning pornography, claiming it is deviant and leads to deviant behavior including harmful criminal activity. If the community is all of the same mind and already has that moral bias, they may pass that law without ever considering any need to prove tangible harm. However, if that law then is challenged, they'll have to demonstrate their arguments of harm are credible or the challenger's first amendment right will trump their argument and the law will be struck down. That's how our society works.

I understand it could be seen to them as that, but I cannot accept that it in any way could literally be a violation of their rights. That is the very sort of intolerance that results in Islamic states - the idea that if anyone drinks alcohol or any woman doesn't wear a burka that their religion and rights are being attacked. If we truly adhered to that belief the only thing that would separate us from an Islamic state would be which holy text was referenced. However, no matter how many Christians there are, we are not nor ever will be within the spirit of our Constitution be a Christian nation. We make laws based on statistics and impact studies because they can be debated rationally, not based on which passage of which book said what and who believes that book to be the word of God. If the "Sanctity of a Marriage" affords the Christians so much power then why can judges marry people, and why can atheists get married? Did they take pity on us because we didn't gross them out as much as the gays or something? Is it just a crumb they threw us that we should be thankful for, instead of an equal right? I have no problem with legislators drawing inspiration from religious texts, and then digging out research that backs up why a similar law to their religious beliefs should be enacted. But the merits on which their proposed legislation lives or dies must boil down to hard debate - not a competitive reading of favorable bible passages. Roe Vs. Wade had to be a very hard ruling to make, yet the SCOTUS made their ruling based on law and facts, not religious bias. These principles are the sort we should consider most important in my opinion, as they are the surest way to safeguard our constitutional rights. I also smoke, and I also consider it questionable whether an establishment should be forced to ban smoking. I only give a small amount of benefit of the doubt to the concept of "workers rights" but it is still very dubious in my mind. Personally I think most people who like to tax cigarettes and ban them from locations and such are more concerned with making smoking so difficult people quit - with eradication of the habit being the ultimate agenda, not protecting non smokers from smoke. I'm just waiting for cigarettes to be banned while driving... That's a tangent though, and one that I happen to feel is another instance of often unfair mob rules that should be opposed. I do respect that, and I've already made my arguments as to why I consider "Traditional" and "Legal" Marriage to be inherently separate already, and only seek a more inclusive definition of Legal Marriage. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged No one is asking them to believe in the same diversities, only to respect them. Do you believe that should the majority believe in Islamic law, that the majority would be justified in forcing everyone to live under it? If so, what is the point of even having a constitution, separation of church and state, the bill of rights, or any of those things that have shaped America into a culturally diverse and tolerant nation in which the role of government has been to provide the minimum it needs to ensure "one's rights end where another's begin" and allow people the most freedom to live their lives as they see fit?

Fair synopsis, but I would like to ask you where you find fault in my arguments in favor of gay marriage. For me, it's more about maintaining a philosophy of openness in our legal system that allows multicultural legal acceptance and allowing those within their various subcultures to live their lives as they choose to the extend that they embrace a general "live and let live" policy unless harm can be demonstrated as a result. I want to draw the distinction between "they will" and "they should" since we are not discussing the prediction of the legal results, but what legal results are ethical. The "angry majority" argument may be relatively well founded but there was a backlash against racial integration to the degree that the first black students had to be escorted to school by US military personnel. I just want to make that point as this argument has in the past not been deemed worthy of continuing an unfair policy. I do agree that on more basic principles the government should have nothing to do with marriage and only recognize legal partnerships. My only opposition (other than practicality, which admittedly does against my own argument that we should argue "what is right" and not "what is feasible") is that since marriage does now have a legal definition, it should be inclusive legally in the spirit of all our other laws, and allow the diversity within our culture define their respective more nuanced non-legal definitions. There is something to be said though for removing the legal bias, even if you can't remove the cultural one. Marriage has become a legal word far outside any religious definition. Hence, heterosexuals can use marriage to create any kind of partnership regardless of love or traditional marriage factors. The legal word has already been watered down. All I am arguing is that the legal word should be inclusive. I really am not trying to force my opinion on anyone, nor am I trying to get anyone to change their definition of marriage. I am pleading with people to see that we are a multicultural nation, and no group defines the legal definition of the Sabbath, anyone who wants to adhere to Islamic laws can to the extent that it does not cause harm to others - I am only asking that we respect that we have differences of opinion and that all those opinions should benefit from equal protections under the law. It is already a fact that we have a GLBT culture that believes in SSM and they are a decent sized minority. No one is telling Christian churches they have to marry SS couples or face legal consequences. The only request is that they don't meddle with those who do. As a diverse culture why is this so hard to achieve?

Why does the status quo even matter? If it's discriminatory, it's discriminatory. No one is forcing those that believe marriage is between a man and a woman to believe otherwise - just accept that there are others who do. This is a basic principle of our society and one of the finest in my opinion - we allow many different types of people to live in harmony by respecting our differences and that many of us choose options that others would not. Why is this a problem only when it comes to marriage? There are documented health risks to nonsmokers by your smoking in their presence. Even then, you can still smoke in your own home. What are the documented health risks to people in heterosexual marriages by those in SSMs? Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Maybe I'm "petty" but by the majority attempting to make the word "marriage" apply only to heterosexual couples they trampled on one of the finest principles of our society: That we can do things our way and accept others will do things their way with mutual respect within the same nation. If you believe you cannot work on Saturday but can on Sunday you are free to do so, and you respect that others are free to work on Saturday and not on Sunday because they have different beliefs. No one should try to reinforce the "status quo" in a "Defense of the Sabbath Act" to say that only Sunday should be the Sabbath - even if the majority of Americans believe that. Anything that demonstrates this mentality in my mind runs against this very important principle of peaceful yet diverse co-existence. I want to see all instances of it crushed - but swept under the rug by changing the name. It really isn't realistic for this to ever happen anytime soon. Marriage is a word that will continue to have legal use for a long time to come. This is why I think the term should be "legally open" and then social groups can place whatever distinctions they want on it themselves - whether they want to believe divorce is not possible under God or what have you... as long as they understand no one gets to "own" the term.

Not my proposal but: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/40518

What about women that have had surgeries for cancer and no longer can have sex "the old fashioned way" and instead have sex in a manner more consistent with homosexual couples? Should they be forced to be limited to civil unions instead of marriage, since they biologically cannot have sex in the manner you denoted as "the right way?"