Con_Alma,
I understand what you are saying. Total liberty in marriage is technically possible like you say. I believe it is not practically possible because a civil society will not allow potential abuses of that liberty.

If total liberty from the state were given when it comes to marriage, you would have 50yr old perverts like Warren Jeffs marrying themselves to 13yr old girls. But according to what you said above, you would be ok with that as long as they do not live together or have sexual relations until the girl reaches legal age.

freedom for consenting adults to enter into relationships.

isadore;428796 wrote:freedom for consenting adults to enter into relationships.

They can't do that now? Is there someone knocking on their bedroom?

jmog;428763 wrote:Physical disabilities and homosexuality are not even close to being in the same realm, unless you are suggesting that homosexuals are disabled? That's kind of discriminitory on your part is it not?

And no, to answer your retarded question, the person in the wheelchair does NOT have the same opportunity as everyone else, they physically can't get up out of the chair and walk up steps. So no, its not the same even in your twisted analogy.

Well two gay dudes can't marry each other. That seems like they have a distinct disadvantage in the marriage department.

consenting adults in sexual relationships and in marriage.

I Wear Pants;429186 wrote:Well two gay dudes can't marry each other. That seems like they have a distinct disadvantage in the marriage department.

Well tough tiitties. Two gay dudes can do whatever they want in the bedroom. No one is oppressing them, no more than a 14 year old being denied a driver's license.

^^^^
not the same.
two adults being denied what the Suprem Court describes as a basic human right v a person considered to lack mental and physical skills to have not the right, but the privilege of legally operating a motor vehicle.

isadore;429290 wrote:^^^^
not the same.
two adults being denied what the Suprem Court describes as a basic human right v a person considered to lack mental and physical skills to have not the right, but the privilege of legally operating a motor vehicle.

Marriage is no more of a basic human right than having sex. For the 1,453,346th time, if its about privacy, I'm in on it....if its more than that, I need more convincing.

MB well there is your opinion, and then there is the opinion of the Supreme Court in the 9-0 Loving v Virginia decision,
"Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man,"
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0388_0001_ZO.html

I'm aware of the Loving case, it had nothing to do with two dudes getting married.

20 years ago the idea of gay marriage was a pipedream. I think the gay lobby has done well to get where they are.

My wife's father is gay, and is married (in CA), their marriage is nothing like ours. I don't consider them remotely married, they've had dozens (if not hundreds) of sexual partners during their "marriage." That doesn't fly with Mrs. MB.

^^^^
and not so many years before that mixed raced couples were and harassed.

But of course your strongest point is your anecdote about the infidelities in your father in law's relationship, something which of course we never find heterosexual married couples who consistently practice pure fidelity in their marriages.

isadore;429381 wrote:^^^^
and not so many years before that mixed raced couples were and harassed.

But of course your strongest point is your anecdote about the infidelities in your father in law's relationship, something which of course we never find heterosexual married couples who consistently practice pure fidelity in their marriages.

If you knew the community (and I'm not presuming you are ignorant), you know what I'm talking about. There is a reason why AIDS spread like wildfire in the 80's among gay men. I've been to circuit parties with my FIL just tagging along. Monogamy is not a exactly a virtue for many of them, my FIL as well as others....and he and his partner are among the more conservative in the community.

isadore;429381 wrote:^^^^
and not so many years before that mixed raced couples were and harassed.

....

...yet permissible by law.

Con_Alma;429417 wrote:...yet permissible by law.

not in some states until 1967

...so about just under two generations.

something many people still alive today saw.
The controversy of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

And even after becoming fully legal those couple still suffered ostracism.

Hopefully today we are in a more tolerant society.


In 1991 a Gallop Poll found that, for the first time, more people in the United States approved of interracial marriages (48%) then disapproved (42%).
http://academic.udayton.edu/race/04needs/s98alouis.htm

Manhattan Buckeye;429396 wrote:If you knew the community (and I'm not presuming you are ignorant), you know what I'm talking about. There is a reason why AIDS spread like wildfire in the 80's among gay men. I've been to circuit parties with my FIL just tagging along. Monogamy is not a exactly a virtue for many of them, my FIL as well as others....and he and his partner are among the more conservative in the community.

Marriage cuts down on infidelity, obviously does not eliminate it
In the heterosexual community less infidelity among married couples than cohabiting couples.

isadore;429496 wrote:something many people still alive today saw.
...

,,,including me.

So do gay couples want to get married for the tax and insurance benefits?

one among many reasons

I Wear Pants;429186 wrote:Well two gay dudes can't marry each other. That seems like they have a distinct disadvantage in the marriage department.

How so? I can't marry a man neither, so while its definitely a technicality, they have no less rights in marriage than I do.

jmog;429768 wrote:How so? I can't marry a man neither, so while its definitely a technicality, they have no less rights in marriage than I do.

Jmog, below is one of the arguments used by Virginia to justify it miscegenation law. Virginia tries to make the same point as you that both groups are being denied the same right. In their case blacks and whites, in your case straights and gays. it was rejected by the Supreme Court as an attempt to protect bigotry.
“Instead, the State argues that the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause, as illuminated by the statements of the Framers, is only that state penal laws containing an interracial element [388 U.S. 1, 8] as part of the definition of the offense must apply equally to whites and Negroes in the sense that members of each race are punished to the same degree. Thus, the State contends that, because its miscegenation statutes punish equally both the white and the Negro participants in an interracial marriage, these statutes, despite their reliance on racial classifications, do not constitute an invidious discrimination based upon race. “

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=388&invol=1

WebFire;429757 wrote:So do gay couples want to get married for the tax and insurance benefits?

Married couples have more than a hundred legal rights that unmarried couples (gay or straight) don't have. This is one of the things we're fighting for.

Manhattan Buckeye;429396 wrote:If you knew the community (and I'm not presuming you are ignorant), you know what I'm talking about. There is a reason why AIDS spread like wildfire in the 80's among gay men. I've been to circuit parties with my FIL just tagging along. Monogamy is not a exactly a virtue for many of them, my FIL as well as others....and he and his partner are among the more conservative in the community.

Not really a fair comparison. Marriage as an institution hasn't been around as even an option for more than a few years -- heterosexual marriage has been an institution for how many thousand years?

When a group is denied a right such as marriage, often the response is to do the extreme -- as I think was the case with gays after they made their way "out" in the late 1960s and started to become political. Was it a healthy, reasoned response? Nope. But we're not discussing whether it was the best choice (to flaunt having multiple partners vs. being married), just whether it's a fair comparison.

Give gays the institution of marriage with several thousand years of support from family, community and state institutions, and you are quite likely to see a very different result. I personally know one gay male couple that have been monogamous for more than 25 years, and am related to a couple that has been with one another 15 years and nobody has cheated.

So let's not lump everyone in the same bucket here, and certainly let's not compare the relationships when the parameters aren't even close to being equal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb6gc-Yw5D8&feature=player_embedded