What additional rights do they deserve? They deserve the same rights as every individual person in the country. Nothing more. Nothing less. The gay rights movement has turned into a flaunting public show. Gay parades? We have never had straight parades. The military? Last I heard, nobody in the service has ever joined as a hetrosexual soldier. Don't ask, Don't tell applies to both sides. I have a problem with the whole marriage/civil unions all together, regardless of sexuality. Personally, I believe the government has too much business in the marriage business as it is now. The whole government approach to marriage should be shelved and restructured. The rights should be applied to the individual, not a couple. Let the insurance companies and businesses determine if they want to cover families or other partners, not the government (with public healthcare, this no longer applies). If you want visitation rights, then get the appropriate legal documentation stating that, regardless if its your gay partner, family or your best friend. Children? Unless it your the natural parent or adoptive parent, you have no rights just as anyone else, regardless of sexuality or color. What we don't need to do is turn the gay rights movement into another failed affirmative action movement, and thats exactly where its headed. Rights belong to individuals, not groups!
You are discharged from the military for being a homosexual if discovered. There is no punishment in the military if they find out you are straight. While gay parades can often go over the top, straight people don't need parades for equality, and thus don't have any.
Who Wants to Sex Mutumbo? someone needs to make that show, seriously, and the contestants could be either sex...
I'm sure polls looked entirely different five years ago. 53% repeal is just BARELY repealing it, where I imagine 20+ years ago it probably would've been 90%+. The country is slowly turning. Get ready for it.
You can have a straight parade if you want. The gays can have one if they want. They seem to want to a lot, but if they want to and it gets approved, they can. If you're straight, you can join the military. If you tell them you're straight, you can still join. If you're gay, you can join the military. If you tell them you're gay, you can't join any more. That's a restriction of one sexual orientation over the other. That's not equal rights. Straight couples can marry. Gay couples cannot. That's not equal rights.
At one point in our nation's history, public opinion supported slavery, denial of women's suffrage, segregation, discrimination, and all manner of things that are unconscionable now. That is what mark was pointing out, that the people who overturned the Maine law are on the wrong side of history and will eventually be seen for the bigots they are.
This whole post is full of so much suck, I'm baffled. Don't ask, don't tell applies to both sides? WTF are you talking about? That is by far and away the dumbest argument I've ever heard in favor of that policy. Straight people can join the army, talk about banging some Thai chick, paying for a BJ in Nam, and having a gang bang with Lebanese strippers, but if a gay person joins and even says "Hey, I like to have sex with dudes" he's gone. Now, tell me again how that policy applies to both sides? Unfreakingbelievable. Straight parades? Are you serious? Go do a parade and get as many straight guys as you can to go with you. Maybe you could march down Main St. and demand equal rights! Maybe you could demand the overturning of "Don't ask, don't tell" since it prevents heterosexuals from joining the army just like gays! Maybe you could demand the right to share property in a divorce! Come to think of it, you're right! Why in the hell aren't we straight men demanding these rights that have been denied to us? As for visitation rights, I'm with you. I definitely think that everyone should have to pay a few grand to an attorney to visit the person they share their lives with in a hospital room. I thought your post was stupid when I first read it, but now I realize it is just awesome. Edit: I've never been more bad about an argument on this board. I'm a conservative, but bs like this infuriates me. If you want to be opposed to something, fine, be opposed to it. But at least have the guts to come out and say "My religion or my morals tell me this is disgusting behavior and I don't want them to get any benefits because I hate what they do in their bedroom" or "If I were in the army I wouldn't want some gay guy coming up behind me in the shower!" At least be honest about it. I have more respect for people who will just come out and admit their prejudice. Don't hide behind this crap of "Don't ask don't tell applies to both sides."
all those soldiers who come home to their wives and children are kicked out the next day when the army finds out about their straightness, dontcha know? all eunuch army!
Marriage existed before your religion and it will exist long after. It's changed and morphed as well so why can't it change again?
Why is the government's job to define marriage and discriminate accordingly? Everyone has a right to their beliefs of what marriage is and is not. It is now a fight over state defined legitimacy and its a joke. Promote the separation of state and marriage.
justtxyank, your ownage of space ghost was awesome (although, that's a pretty easy task, honestly). Nevertheless, I'm afraid:
I would love to promote the separation of marriage and state, but the reality is that the government is going to remain in the issue of marriage for quite some time. As such, homosexuals deserve to enjoy the same rights and privileges as the rest of us and that includes marriage.
They would rather have to shower with a bunch of closeted gays. There are plenty of gay guys in the military, that often live lies to protect their job security.
Uh, oh. Where will the new babies come from then? I guess we will have added meaning for "made in China."
Exactly right. What on earth would possess a group of people to try to seize a centuries old religious term and tradition and redefine it to suit themselves? What good can it do to try to steal such an important term from very large, millennia old, religious groups? I think most people favour equal rights, but I’m sure it’s the intolerance and hate behind the attempt to steal the term marriage from the traditions it came from that has turned people off. It comes across like an attempt to push over a little old lady and steal her purse. Governments aren’t helping the problem, of course, because they currently use the term marriage to describe something that is not a marriage. The government has no interest in marriages, in fact. It is interested in the legal rights attached to civil unions, and if governments would give the term marriage back to the religious traditions it came from, and properly define the kinds of unions it’s interested in as civil unions, whether they are same sex or different sex unions, then this issue would largely go away. Most same sex couples don’t actually want to be married in the way the Catholic Church defines marriage, for example. They want equal legal rights, but that has nothing to do with the term marriage, and therein lays the major source of the confusion and the key to the problem. Originally governments wanted to give certain rights to people who were married, but now they rightly want to give the same rights to other kinds of couples, and to properly reflect this change they now need to change their terminology to talk about rights afforded to people in civil unions, and to stop using the term marriage. Trying to redefine the term marriage is intolerant and hateful, and it will never work. It’s a recipe for political failure, and we’re seeing that happen. Trying to bully millennia old religious traditions with literally billions of members into redefining their millennia old tradition of marriage is just a non-starter. And, apart from the hate and intolerance that is inherent in the attempt to steal the term, it is completely pointless, because the real issue is, or at least is should be, equal rights.
Marriage is not a religious institution, it existed before the most popular religions of today. They shouldn't define marriage for everyone, just for the people who follow those religions. Somebody posted the code of Hammurabi earlier, that's the earliest known record of marriage. Throughout recorded history, government has had a role in marriage.
