The Federal Prop. 8 Trial / Gay Marriage Catch-All

Phoenix Rev wrote:

I am fully convinced at this point that the recent polls showing widespread acceptance of gay marriage pushed the anti-marriage equality forces well past Crazytown and into Insanityville.

That is most definitely into Insanityville. I have to wonder if there's a feedback loop going here, polls shift, the very vocal crazy gets crazier, and it becomes hard to ignore that the anti-equality side is just.. that... so the polls sway further, and so on. If so then that kind of works out well for the pro-equality side eventually, it's just a shame the cost of that is hearing the spiteful spiral into madness from the anti side as it happens.

OG_slinger wrote:

According to Sue Everhart, the Georgia GOP Chairwoman, the push for marriage equality is just a giant ruse to allow the takers to take more because straight people will pretend to be gay and have a sham gay marriage just so they can get those sweet, sweet government benefits:

You may be as straight as an arrow, and you may have a friend that is as straight as an arrow. Say you had a great job with the government where you had this wonderful health plan. I mean, what would prohibit you from saying that you’re gay, and y’all get married and still live as separate, but you get all the benefits? I just see so much abuse in this it’s unreal. I believe a husband and a wife should be a man and a woman, the benefits should be for a man and a woman. There is no way that this is about equality. To me, it’s all about a free ride.

Considering the sweet deal that society is getting from my wife and I being childless and paying for public education, I think folks like this really ought to STFU before we get pissed and start going after the privileged status they enjoy.

I had a minor epiphany on my drive home today.

I had read a blog post this morning, which is pretty much on the money with its refrain of:
"Does this impact your daily life? No.
What should you do about it? Mind your own f***ing business."
after each section of how gay marriage might impact other people's marriages.

( full thing here )

And on the way home I was wondering what irrational thoughts it took to feel said impact.
And then it hit me. The model, the analogy that fits.

Not wanting gay people in their idea of "marriage" is directly analogous to not wanting people from particular racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in their neighborhood, country club, school, university, work place. Because they don't want the prestige or property value of said neighborhood, country club, etc. lowered by the inclusion of people they consider to be second class citizens. They simply consider LGBT folks to be less than themselves, as the definition of their own privileged spot. "3/5 of all other...".

Having recently re-watched Forrest Gump, the scene in which he sort of interrupts the National Guard escorting black students into a university in Alabama, and currently teaching "To Kill a Mockingbird" to my students here in Greece...it fits dead on. In the novel, the last bit of pride or self-worth that the horrible white family have, is that they're still above them.

Makes me also think of the piece that Jon Stewart did on the Daily Show last Thursday, that showed a graphic of all the (truly sad) heterosexual marriage/teen mom/teen marriage reality shows available in the U.S. pretty hilariously shows, that as far as actually "lowering the value of marriage"...

I think that theory is totally valid. Along with the theory that anti marriage equality folks are really operating with a thread of vicious sexism, and the theory that religious people view gay sex as the one crime God destroys cities for (a poor interpretation of scripture, but a widely held belief nonetheless), and we've got a whole smorgasbord of choices to fuel bigotry.

So a friend of a friend wrote an article I thought you guys might find interesting, figured I would share -

Conflicted Polls on Same-Sex Marriage.

Nothing stunning or earth-shattering, but an interesting summary all the same. I think that some folks on the pro-marriage-equality side sometimes overstate to each other just how far acceptance is snowballing through the country.

Bloo Driver wrote:

So a friend of a friend wrote an article I thought you guys might find interesting, figured I would share -

Conflicted Polls on Same-Sex Marriage.

Nothing stunning or earth-shattering, but an interesting summary all the same. I think that some folks on the pro-marriage-equality side sometimes overstate to each other just how far acceptance is snowballing through the country.

However, much of the discussion is regarding the momentum and the shift in attitudes. Keep in mind that in 1996 it was 68% against and 27% for. That's a lot of movement on an issue in a little more than 10 years.

Blondish83 wrote:
Bloo Driver wrote:

So a friend of a friend wrote an article I thought you guys might find interesting, figured I would share -

Conflicted Polls on Same-Sex Marriage.

Nothing stunning or earth-shattering, but an interesting summary all the same. I think that some folks on the pro-marriage-equality side sometimes overstate to each other just how far acceptance is snowballing through the country.

However, much of the discussion is regarding the momentum and the shift in attitudes. Keep in mind that in 1996 it was 68% against and 27% for. That's a lot of movement on an issue in a little more than 10 years.

Oh, absolutely. I'm not saying it's a false notion, just a sometimes possibly overstated one. Just more data to look at, in any case.

Phoenix Rev wrote:

I am fully convinced at this point that the recent polls showing widespread acceptance of gay marriage pushed the anti-marriage equality forces well past Crazytown and into Insanityville.

Alan Keyes just claimed that gay marriage was the "archetype of all crimes against humanity."

And, in other news, Stan Solomon is a piece of human garbage.

This clip does make me wonder, though, how social conservatives are going to react to the inevitable when it comes to gay marriage. I simply can't envisage someone like Solomon accepting a SCOTUS decision on something he's obviously very worked up about. I can't see that happening for a lot of the anti-marriage equality folks. They're whipped up into a fervor right now and all that fear and hatred has to go somewhere. My concern is that they'll switch over to violence or take all that unbridled emotion and blindly channel it into the next conservative cause.

Actually, my real concern is that social conservatives are ripe fruit waiting to be picked by a demagogue. They're politically organized and have plenty of financial backing. All that's missing is a charismatic political candidate who's drank the conservative Cool-Aid or who's willing to pretend that he did.

Rachel Maddow just tweeted some numbers; Democrats are 48-7 for marriage rights, Republicans are 2-43. The Senate is 50-50. It's not nearly enough, but it's something that would have seemed inconceivable even 10 years ago that the once-official home of Old White Guy power is up to 50-50.

With Joe Biden as the tie breaker, that's technically a majority of the Senate for gay marriage.

RoughneckGeek wrote:
NSMike wrote:

With Joe Biden as the tie breaker, that's technically a majority of the Senate for gay marriage.

...and now take a look at the count in the house.

Unless you want to have a good day, in which case, just skip that part.

Also, who are those seven democrats not supporting equal rights? If one of them is mine, I'm going to go nuts in a letter to that jerkwad.

Demosthenes wrote:
RoughneckGeek wrote:
NSMike wrote:

With Joe Biden as the tie breaker, that's technically a majority of the Senate for gay marriage.

...and now take a look at the count in the house.

Unless you want to have a good day, in which case, just skip that part.

Also, who are those seven democrats not supporting equal rights? If one of them is mine, I'm going to go nuts in a letter to that jerkwad.

Looks like it's because they don't want to lose their job in the next election

Arkansas, West Virginia, Indiana, Louisiana, South Dakota...

Anyone know what ever happened with Dan Savage's invite to Brian Brown for dinner and a debate?

Nevin73 wrote:

Anyone know what ever happened with Dan Savage's invite to Brian Brown for dinner and a debate?

It was splendid.

Brown, of course, went on to be a dick about it later, but the actual event was cool.

Thanks for that...I missed hearing about the follow-up. I'll enjoy listening to it later.

Demosthenes wrote:
RoughneckGeek wrote:
NSMike wrote:

With Joe Biden as the tie breaker, that's technically a majority of the Senate for gay marriage.

...and now take a look at the count in the house.

Unless you want to have a good day, in which case, just skip that part.

Also, who are those seven democrats not supporting equal rights? If one of them is mine, I'm going to go nuts in a letter to that jerkwad.

IMAGE(http://crooksandliars.com/files/vfs/2013/04/barney%20frank%20quote.jpg)

Oh, good LORD!

The people over at NOM have truly lost their collective minds.

Over the weekend, NOM posted this graph on their Facebook page:

IMAGE(http://www.feastinginphoenix.com/images/NOMgraph.JPG)

The commentary they put with the graph said:

Marriage rates down, out-of-wedlock birth rates up. Conservatives may have correctly predicted the consequences of same-sex marriage.

Seriously?

The graph runs from from 1960 to 2010, but NOM is claiming that the six years of marriage equality (Massachusetts had gay marriage start in 2004) started the decline in heterosexual marriage and an increase in out-of-wedlock births.

Wow. We gays are so powerful that we can have our future acts influence the past which knows categorically what the future will be.

Yeah, I don't get it either.

Seriously, the desperation of the people at NOM have turned them into sociopaths.

Step 1: Figure out if gay marriage's acausal effects can be modulated somehow: Repeatedly legalizing/outlawing gay marriage? Mass marriage and divorce ceremonies?
Step 2: Encode messages to the past in US census data.
Step 3: Laugh in the face of causality. Seize control of all possible timelines.
Step 4: Become Time Lords. Construct TARDISes powered by gay marriage certificates.

@Phoenix Rev I always knew you guys were smart enough to be the first to invent time travel. Would you mind dropping me of in 1997 so I can watch Brian Molko and David Bowie sing Without You I'm Nothing?

I had a dream where I time traveled to Germany shortly before WW2 last night. Now I have to wonder if it really was a dream. Maybe my gay coworker has been taking me on Adventures, and my weak heterosexual psyche is having trouble swallowing the realities of time travel.

That chart is making me wonder if I am color blind. Are Black males the 35 percent one? Would it have killed them to use another color than blue shades? Scratch that, they would have used yellow shades.

KingGorilla wrote:

That chart is making me wonder if I am color blind. Are Black males the 35 percent one? Would it have killed them to use another color than blue shades? Scratch that, they would have used yellow shades.

I think the reason for the chart having a lack of layered, arcing lines of diverse color should be obvious.

KingGorilla wrote:

Are Black males the 35 percent one?

They are yeah, but I had to zoom in and use process of elimination to determine that. If you must use that style of data line you could at least make things a decent resolution and have some anti-aliasing in your plot.

Phoenix Rev wrote:

Seriously?

The graph runs from from 1960 to 2010, but NOM is claiming that the six years of marriage equality (Massachusetts had gay marriage start in 2004) started the decline in heterosexual marriage and an increase in out-of-wedlock births.

Wow. We gays are so powerful that we can have our future acts influence the past which knows categorically what the future will be.

My god, you gays are even more powerful than NOM thinks.

You went back even further in time and convinced Rosie the Riveter to have a kid before she got married.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/VY3aJkA.png)

And you gays have been encouraging more and more couples to live together in sin.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/plLt7mG.png)

I don't know which is worse: cohabitating couples having and raising children out of the holy bonds of wedlock or cohabitating couples making a mockery of their sacred duty to society and f*cking without making babies.

Even more frightening, you gays have obviously established a global fifth column and are making more and more women around the world have children out of wedlock.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/Jtrdg2j.png)

The evidence is overwhelming. Either gays have developed time travel technology and built a global network of nuptial saboteurs or people all over the world are rejecting the religiously driven ideal that people can only bang once an old man in a funny hat or dress tells them they can. Since it can't possibly be true that heterosexuals are the group that is most responsible for undermining the institution of marriage, it must therefore be the fault of time traveling gays.

Even more frightening, you gays have obviously established a global fifth column and are making more and more women around the world have children out of wedlock.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/JP2D9xP.jpg)

Tanglebones wrote:
Even more frightening, you gays have obviously established a global fifth column and are making more and more women around the world have children out of wedlock.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/JP2D9xP.jpg)

I just doubled over in laughter. During a conference call. Tanglebones wins the week.

I find it most amusing because all of those statistics have been used by the Gay Rights Movement as a point of "your sanctity of marriage argument is laughable at best based upon societal trends".

Jujitsu-ing your opponent's strengths into weaknesses is a good idea... except when it makes no f*cking sense like here. A few years of marriage equality in a few states is enough to affect society for decades prior (during times where the majority and further back the overwhelming majority were against gay rights and had no expectation of that changing?)? You guys are teh dumbs.

Demosthenes wrote:

I find it most amusing because all of those statistics have been used by the Gay Rights Movement as a point of "your sanctity of marriage argument is laughable at best based upon societal trends".

NOM also tries to spin marriage as the sacred union of a male and female when a simple look at history will tell you that marriage has nearly always been about locking away a woman so that a man can be reasonably certain that his wealth and property would be inherited by his male offspring and not a bastard.

Marriage didn't become an actual "sacred sacrament" recognized by the Church until the 13th century. And love didn't enter the picture for another 500 or so years. Hell, the modern concept of marriage--a young man marrying a young women because they're madly in love and without any concern of what their parents or extended family think--is only about 200 years old.

At best, NOM's core argument against gay marriage is based on a willful misinterpretation of marriage throughout the ages because of their particular distorted interpretation of Christianity.

OG_slinger wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:

I find it most amusing because all of those statistics have been used by the Gay Rights Movement as a point of "your sanctity of marriage argument is laughable at best based upon societal trends".

NOM also tries to spin marriage as the sacred union of a male and female when a simple look at history will tell you that marriage has nearly always been about locking away a woman so that a man can be reasonably certain that his wealth and property would be inherited by his male offspring and not a bastard.

Marriage didn't become an actual "sacred sacrament" recognized by the Church until the 13th century. And love didn't enter the picture for another 500 or so years. Hell, the modern concept of marriage--a young man marrying a young women because they're madly in love and without any concern of what their parents or extended family think--is only about 200 years old.

At best, NOM's core argument against gay marriage is based on a willful misinterpretation of marriage throughout the ages because of their particular distorted interpretation of Christianity.

Elizabeth needs to open a tear where that place is just an ice cream stand with free sprinkles already. That ice cream stand would do more good in the world than NOM.

OG, you are trying to use facts and reason. This debate does not take place in that realm. Look at the Bible Thread's talk of whether Jesus can beat up Superman. Hell, these people think that every Early American was an Evangelical Christian.