Gays in California now have the right to be miserable too.

[Guitzilla]

Think about it from kid point of view: A) Homosexuality is taught as equal to heterosexuality and ordinary B) Babies are taught to be made from sexual intercourse C) Child says, "Hey, if men and women have sex with penis and vagina, how do gays do it?" Maybe you could avoid the sodomy answer, but you have to have some answer. No matter what, you end up in a discussion that shouldn't be needed.

 

 

I can tell you that in my family, my neices and nephews knew us as Uncle Brian and Uncle Dan. They were never told about the sexual aspects of our relationship. My neices and nephews have never asked me about it, they just accepted it. I don't think that kids are looking for quite as specific answers as you are thinking about giving.

 

By the way, none of my neices and nephews are gay either. I was not exposed to any gays (that I know of) as I was growing up, and it was not included in my sex education by my parents or school.

[John Sayers]

surely there is an arrangment between the society (Government) and two individuals. It organises their tax, their parenting rights, their rights to ownership of property and the distribution of that property on the death of either party. I know I signed an agreement to that affect.

Marriage on the other hand is a religious ceremony that should be optional.

[UstadKhanAli]

In short, it's the ME system. ME is the ONLY value, therefore everyone else does not have value. I could kill them, ignore them, watch them get hurt... doesn't affect ME - value skewed. I misquoted whoever I was paraphrasing but the message was the same. Tell me the world is not HUGELY EMBRACING "MEism" What's the connection? gay marriage doesn't affect ME and MY FAMILY so who cares. See the devaluing going on?

 

 

No, that's not what anybody is saying. What I am wondering is why YOU care so damn much when it doesn't affect anything you do.

 

I am anti-discrimination, and don't feel that gay people should be left out in the cold as far as legal rights and benefits go.

 

What I am asking is why YOU and other anti-gay marriage people care about this so much. In light of infidelity, skyrocketing divorce rates, rampant sex trafficking, slavery, and other human rights abuses, why do you care so much about something that is, quite frankly, utterly harmless to you and your family?

 

There's no devaluing of principles. On the contrary, anti-discrimination places INCREASED values on principles.

[Dreabfly]

Obviously not everyone wears these. Actually, I had the misfortune to be driving with my children through Provincetown, MA, and there must have been some kind of gay festival going on or something. Anyways, the hole in the pants was not even the most lude thing going on in public, but it was the thing that my kids unfortunately noticed as I was hurriedly trying to get out of there.

Okay - dude. This is the basis for your logic about gay marriage? Get a guide book. A gazillion places on the planet to take your family to on vacation and you pick - P-town. P-TOWN!!! For those not in the know - P-town happens to be a mostly gay-owned sleepy beach village on the further most point of Cape Cod. It is a gay mecca because for decades it was the ONE single gay-friendly vacation spot in the whole country that we could go to to be on vacation as ourselves without being harassed, beat-up, glared at, INSERT OTHER HATEFUL BEHAVIOR HERE.

So you pick P-Town - OUR TOWN - get offended that there - in OUR town - away from YOUR neighborhoods, which we have been clearly told we are not welcome in - we are doing what we want - and you have the nerve to say - when I wandered through the gay village they had the nerve to be...well - GAY - and I had to hurry my children out of there pronto before their little brains exploded (read: I had to do some real parenting and figure out how to teach my children something valuable about people, rather than just sit them in front of Disney feature for answers about love, life, and sexual behaviour.) For the record, my parents made the same mistake when I was a kid. And they are fundamentalists. But they didn't freak out about it. They simply said, "Some people are different than us." and moved on. My brother went onto to be a "normal" straight man with a wife and family. I came out. And they've never felt the need to fear either gay people or me.

Secondly, if you've never seen any lewd heterosexual behaviour in public, then you're living on a different planet than I do. I've seen plenty. From people almost screwing each other on a dance floor, to girls being felt up by their drunk boyfriend on the street. But don't panic - you don't have to explain away this bad behavior, you just get to turn to your kid and say, "Oh, honey - that's just how mommies and daddies make babies." Smile. Wink. Oh, so cute. Parental crises solved.

Thirdly - I can't help but point out how this conversation quickly devolved from a conversation about gay marriage to where/when/how and if I have to witness men taking it up the a** by each other, which betrays your real insecurity about this whole thing.

Nobody seems to have any problem imagining/seeing/fantasizing the women together - because that's so sexy, so cool, so HETERO. Hell - your wife even probably thinks it's okay. Bring on L Word so we can spice up our marriage a little.

But two men. OH. MY. GOD. Hide my manhood! They are threatening my freedom! My children! My life! Social morality!

You sound like a caricature. Please prove to me that you're not one. I want to believe in you - really - I DO.

[rasputin1963]

 

It occurs to me that gay pride parades and festivals hurt the cause of gays much more than just about anything else. It's a wonder people still feel the need to participate in these in such outlandish ways. Don't they realize the damage they're doing to their own cause?

 

 

Only then you get in that delicate dialogue about "showing who you are", with the old hetero saw, "I don't care what they do in private... so long as they don't shove it in our faces!"

 

Then you start wondering whether a person working in an office cubicle is "shoving his orientation in someone's face" if he props photos of his wife and children on the desk...

 

"Oh, but that's DIFFERENT!"...one might say. Yet is it?

 

The nugget at the bottom of this argument might be: Just who "owns" society? Does "society" belong to one group....which they can mete out in a niggardly fashion to another group? I believe this is an unexamined core belief which many Americans tacitly hold.

[wwwjd]

No, that's not what anybody is saying. What I am wondering is why YOU care so damn much when it doesn't affect anything you do.

 

 

OK, let me explain.

I DO care about the re-writing of communication, language and society - which this is a symptom of.

 

At some point, our lives will be devalued to the point of worthlessness, and being human will be no more important than that speck of sand on the beach. This will be from the negation over generations and lost ability to understand things from the breakdown of communication. When "Bad" becomes GOOD, good has lost it's value. When Fat, Ill, Sick and Garbage are considered GOOD things, which is "bad" anymore? There isn't any. At that point life, death, murder, rape, molestation, abortion, marriage, all of it becomes meaningless and all black and white runs into a river of gray... where EVERYBODY is lost and ethics are individualised. It'll be pathetic, but I am glad I will be dead.

 

Websters used to say "the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex" and now adds "SAME sex" to keep up with society. That's fair, but when words, actions and meaning ALL blur, they have no meaning in the end. Neither will our lives as it slowly and quietly get nullified.

 

I know this sounds like quite the stretch, but think about it.

[UstadKhanAli]

I do think about this quite a bit. Websters, and the English language, and culture, for that matter, are fluid, ever-evolving things. I don't see this as "bad" becoming "good" at all.

 

And I see things as evolving, while you apparently see gay marriage, or perhaps homosexuality in general, as being bad. OTOH, I see laws discriminating against an entire population of people as being bad.

[humancertainty]

Not quite correct. In the case of GWB getting elected over Gore, the courts were involved to decide about whether the recount in Florida was justified. The courts in this case, were not making laws. And in case you didn't know, the president of the United States is NOT elected by popular vote under any circumstances. We have a Republic. Our Electoral College system has no requirement to be the same as the whole USA popular vote, and it never has.

 

 

Yes, I'm well aware of the Electoral College.

Thanks for the civics lesson.

 

I don't believe our courts are bound by popular vote, either.

[rasputin1963]

 

OK, let me explain. I DO care about the re-writing of communication, language and society - which this is a symptom of. At some point, our lives will be devalued to the point of worthlessness, and being human will be no more important than that speck of sand on the beach. This will be from the negation over generations and lost ability to understand things from the breakdown of communication. When "Bad" becomes GOOD, good has lost it's value. When Fat, Ill, Sick and Garbage are considered GOOD things, >

 

 

 

The fact is, the whole world IS changing.... and the re-writing of language is but a mere tiny part of it.

 

None of us can stem the tide now.... the dam has been sundered. For one thing, the rise of the Internet is a boon every bit as astounding and life-changing as was Gutenberg's movable type in its day.

 

The globe is becoming internationalized, gender roles as we once knew them have become irrevocably changed.

 

The best attitude for any of us to have is one of vigilant optimism... Longing for a "good ol' days" that may or my not have existed is futile.

 

You must read Stephanie Coontz's book THE WAY WE NEVER WERE: AMERICAN FAMILIES AND THE NOSTALGIA TRAP. She crunches some real statistics to reveal that those supposedly halcyon 1940's, 1950's and early 1960's had plenty wrong with them... inequities, epidemics, teen pregnancies, truancies, murders, sex crimes, violent crimes, war, corrupt officials, you-name-it (to say nothing of racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, abrogation of women's rights and other miscellaneous xenophobias). The "Good Ol' Days" were plenty {censored}ty for lotsa folks...

 

A review of that book from PUBLISHERS WEEKLY:

 

The golden age of the American family never existed, asserts Coontz ( The Social Origns of Private Life ) in a wonderfully perceptive, myth-debunking report. The "Leave It to Beaver" ideal of breadwinner father, full-time homemaker mother and dependent children was a fiction of the 1950s, she shows. Real families of that period were rife with conflict, repression and anxiety, frequently poor and much less idyllic than many assume; teen pregnancy rates in the '50s were higher than today. Further, Coontz contends, the nuclear family was elevated to a central source of personal satisfaction only in the late 19th century, thereby weakening people's community ties and sense of civic obligation. Coontz disputes the idea that children can be raised properly only in traditional families. Viewing modern domestic problems as symptoms of a much larger socioeconomic crisis, she demonstrates that no single type of household has ever protected Americans from social disruption or poverty. An important contribution to the current debate on family values.

Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

 

Try to find a fresh new role for yourself in this new world we're all jointly creating... Eschew thoughts of hatred and concentrate on making a world where you can be happy living... and letting others live.

 

Try this: See if you can be even weirder than the people whom you deem weird. You'll love it.

[John Sayers]

The problem is that you all grew out of a Puritan society where homophobia was rife.

It's now 2008 - it's time to get real.

[Tusks]

There are at least three sides to every question.

 

There seems to be an emerging national perspective that gays and lesbians should have the legal rights of heterosexual partners, if not the title "married". In my home state of CT, civil unions granting "all the rights and responsibilities of marriage" have been in place since 2005. The current question posed by CT advocates is ... well if it is marriage in all but name, why can't we have the name too? In other words, can we be equal if we are separate?

 

Part of this debate is about what marriage means. And who has rights to certain meanings. Carry on ....

 

Jerry

[franknputer]

surely there is an arrangment between the society (Government) and two individuals. It organises their tax, their parenting rights, their rights to ownership of property and the distribution of that property on the death of either party. I know I signed an agreement to that affect. Marriage on the other hand is a religious ceremony that should be optional.

 

See, there's the rub. Once again: marriage as far as the law is concerned is a social contract, period. Religion has nothing to do with it - they are all "civil unions" in the eyes of the law. That's why you can get married in any church, or none at all. You fill out the papers, file them, & pay the fee - bingo, you're legally married.

 

Incidentally, people who support civil unions but not "marriage" are splitting hairs over the use of the "M" word. It's the same thing - telling someone they can't use the "special word" is just dumb.

[amplayer]

Okay - dude. This is the basis for your logic about gay marriage? Get a guide book. A gazillion places on the planet to take your family to on vacation and you pick - P-town. P-TOWN!!! For those not in the know - P-town happens to be a mostly gay-owned sleepy beach village on the further most point of Cape Cod. It is a gay mecca because for decades it was the ONE single gay-friendly vacation spot in the whole country that we could go to to be on vacation as ourselves without being harassed, beat-up, glared at, INSERT OTHER HATEFUL BEHAVIOR HERE.

 

 

We were on a vacation on Cape Cod. We were just exploring. Yes, I probably should have known about P-town, but I stupidly didn't. That doesn't excuse the lewd behavior in public, and any public town in the USA ought to be a fine place to bring your kids.

[UstadKhanAli]

I see lewd behavior by heterosexuals. We should not allow them to be married.

[wwwjd]

"....and it all happened so slowly that most men failed to realize that anything had happened at all." - THX-1138

 

I realize, of course, the world is changing. But there sure are a lot... or rather, the MAJORITY of "ME" peoples throwing up their hands and saying, "there ya go. it changes, and we can't stop it. why try." That is EXACTLY that mentality that allows the changes to go unchecked. Now, backup and reread my repetative post about the devaluing of everything including people. IS DEVALUING BAD? Yes or no.

 

Yes, marriage is JUST a word, and I will state again so it is perfectly clear *I* am not concerned one way or the other with other people's bedrooms... BUT, if you pull the rug out on the language, you condemn society to a confused, lost future. "Morals", if one chooses to accept their current definition as valid, will lack definition as bad is good and good is "elephant"??? and nothing makes any sense anymore which pretty much defines a breakdown in society.

From Webster: ETHIC: the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation

IF Good and Bad are no longer clearly defined, Ethics (Morals?) no longer matter. If ethics, morals, integrity, etc are not important [or valueless?] to one, then that is not a big deal.

 

So, which are we? The ones who take a stand and say, "Um no, probably shouldn't do that to our communications" or the ones who throw up their hands and say, "meh... what are ya gonna do?"

 

That's all topically related as per my very first [and repeated post]. Should gays get "Marriage"? No. They should get all the legalities and tax breaks due them. And then I can get tax breaks for CLAIMING to be gay with my male room mate. That'll be SWEET!!!!!

 

But "Marriage" defines opposite sex. Or used to. So lets change our definitions, our communications, our langauge, devalue everything, then I can marry that hot 10 year old down the street, kill her when she gets to old and marry another one. And it won't matter anyway because there will be no communication to inform anyone of my issues, and if they found out they wouldn't care anyway since it doesn't affect them.

 

You are right. I shouldn't care.

[Super 8]

In short, it's the ME system. ME is the ONLY value, therefore everyone else does not have value. Tell me the world is not HUGELY EMBRACING "MEism"

 

 

WWJD, are you embracing "Me-ism"? I'm certainly not. I care about myself, my family, people in my community. Most of the people I've met here aren't apathetic toward others. How about you? Do you devalue others?

 

I think the perception of "Me-ism" is different from the reality.

 

 

What's the connection? gay marriage doesn't affect ME and MY FAMILY so who cares. See the devaluing going on?

 

 

No, I don't. Nobody is devaluing anything. They're saying, that a same sex marriage does not affect their marriage. A lot of "moralists" live under this notion that if gay people can get married the 'family unit' is somehow threatened. I don't see how that can be so. Nobody has been able to offer a convincing explanation of how that can be so. If there's no good reason why gay people shouldn't be allowed to marry, then there shouldn't be anything preventing them from doing so if they choose.

 

 

but I take issue with the VERY SLOW and DELIBERATE deconstruction of our systems that define right and wrong and even, dare I say it, morality

 

 

Once again, you have not explained why this is a moral issue. How is it a "deconstruction" of our system. It's clearly a progression from my vantage point.

 

I equate this with women's suffrage, which also had plenty of critics.

[UstadKhanAli]

"....and it all happened so slowly that most men failed to realize that anything had happened at all." - THX-1138 I realize, of course, the world is changing. But there sure are a lot... or rather, the MAJORITY of "ME" peoples throwing up their hands and saying, "there ya go. it changes, and we can't stop it. why try."

 

 

That's not the attitude at all. There are changes underfoot. Including less discrimination. And see, many of us consider less discrimination to be a positive thing, an increase in values. It's not about "ME"; it's about EVERYONE.

[wwwjd]

I think I posted seconds before you did. Please read the post previous to yours

[amplayer]

I see lewd behavior by heterosexuals. We should not allow them to be married.

Well, just return your X-rated videos, and ... Problem solved!

[Guitzilla]

We were on a vacation on Cape Cod. We were just exploring. Yes, I probably should have known about P-town, but I stupidly didn't. That doesn't excuse the lewd behavior in public, and any public town in the USA ought to be a fine place to bring your kids.

 

 

 

This is a point where I agree with you. From your previous post, I believe that we are not talking holding hands, or kissing. Behavior beyond this is unacceptable in public places becuase of the influence this can have on children. I have seen people groping and fondling each other in public (I'm not talking about a hand placed on the butt either,) hands down the pants, hands up shirts, sex in cars...most were straight people doing it though.

[BerkleeBill]

We were on a vacation on Cape Cod. We were just exploring. Yes, I probably should have known about P-town, but I stupidly didn't. That doesn't excuse the lewd behavior in public, and any public town in the USA ought to be a fine place to bring your kids.

Epic fail! There isn't a person in New England who doesn't know what P-TOWN is all about. Jesus Christ, where's the Player's 2008 family vacation slated for? Ogunquit? :poke:

[Jeff da Weasel]

Next year's trip: Castro District and West Hollywood.

[Dreabfly]

We were on a vacation on Cape Cod. We were just exploring. Yes, I probably should have known about P-town, but I stupidly didn't. That doesn't excuse the lewd behavior in public, and any public town in the USA ought to be a fine place to bring your kids.

 

 

I think we could say that about a lot of places about a lot of things. Any public town should be safe for people of difference. They aren't. I'm not excusing their behaviour - as I wouldn't excuse the behavior of straight people doing the same thing. But I wouldn't take my kid to the S&M festival if I didn't want them to see that. And if I wandered into one by accident, I wouldn't blame them for having it.

 

And I'm pretty sure I could come up with a way to teach my children something about the experience, even we did, without having to reduce ourselves to banning S&M festivals from happening at all.

[Hard Truth]

amplayer-You can relax, your kids probably aren't as terrified and confused about human bodies and their natural bodily functions as you are................yet. If you work to become a little more educated on the topic, you can become more comfortable about discussing these things with your kids.

 

People of all types participate in outlandish behavior- ie. St. Patrick's day, Mardi Gras, New Years Eve, Spring Break., because its fun to let loose and be yourself, or a different side of yourself, for awhile.

 

No apologies from me for being outlandish on ocassion. (and I'm not gay)

[yermej]

I'm mostly just a spectator here, but...

But "Marriage" defines opposite sex.

"Marriage" used to be defined as, essentially, ownership of a woman.
"Marriage" also used to be defined as two people of the same race.

Should "marriage" still be defined that way? Did changing those definitions lead us further down the slippery slope to evil?