North Carolina, regressive as ever

[Jeremy]

I think that you may be giving them more credit than they deserve, the topic is hot right now but considering that the LGBT population is only about 3.5% (9mil people) it is hard for a group that small to have a lot of pull. I do give you that the entertainment business has a greater population and that that might help with influence.

You might be giving him less credit than he deserves. The LGBT population may be fairly small, but they're active, and their cause is championed by many outside their own small population who see it as a discrimination/equality issue. So there's more people behind the cause than just the LGBT population specifically. A healthy percentage of younger voters in particular seem to get behind this issue, and that group also tends to be in favor of socialized healthcare, so he may be trying to get a stronger hold on a particular voting block.

Time will tell whether it hurts or helps, but it is undoubtedly a politically motivated move.

[WilNJ]

Time will tell whether it hurts or helps, but it is undoubtedly a politically motivated move.

Biden may have blown what ever value it may have had. Supposedly, Obama intended to take this position closer to November, it's harder for it to have the same impact 6 months ahead of the elections.

http://www.timesunion.com/news/article/ ... 551038.php

[C.R. Krieger]

Krieger, believe it or not I was trying to be polite. While you never expressly said "separate but equal," your option effectively comes about as close as possible to that.

... End result is separate but equal. Which I do not need to explain to you is now a legal fallacy.

Any restriction on marriage that looks to gender at all creates unequal treatment under the law.

In your neverending struggle to categorize me as a homophobic bigoted dinosaur, you're trying very hard to miss what I'm saying. You keep bringing "marriage" back into the discussion when I've already said it's out. So I guess I have to write the whole damn thing out even though I figured you were a bright enough kid to understand it the first time.

Government should not be in the "marriage" business. Government is in the business of defining rights and granting privileges. In doing so, they can and, IMO, should, be granting the same basic set of rights to M-M and F-F pairs as they do to M-F pairs. They should come up with another name for it because "marriage" only pisses off the religious extremes and raises the issue of government interference with religion.

Where your weakness shows up, Aaron, is in a typical lawyer's failure to understand and use simple math terms. I said "subset" and by that I mean as used in a Venn diagram. I said that all "marriages" would be a subset of all government-recognized civil unions. So, while all marriages are included as civil unions, not all civil unions would be called "marriages", although they would have the same sets of rights and privileges. So; equal, yes. Separate, no.

'Separate' is only to the extent that those who are empowered by both state and church to "marry" people get to pick and choose - just as they do anyway. We cannot and should not have the government interfering with that, else we would require rabbis to marry Catholics and priests to marry Baptists. The various religions certainly would continue to get to define "marriage" as they wish, but this would have no effect on the government recognizing other combinations of pairs (or more - but I don't want to go into polygamy right now) as unions. The government simply grants the rights and privileges equivalent to a religious marriage to everyone who qualifies for a government-sanctioned union. We could - and should - then abolish all references to definitions of "marriage" from government statutes and documents except as a reference to those religion-based pairs, but not as a restriction on non-religion-based pairs. If that's not clear enough, I'll have to ask your dad to kick your ass ...

[Matt]

CR is actually mostly right here.

Tammer: you said something I disagree with. You said that the state _does_ have the right to restrict incestuous marraiges for "health reasons".

You are wrong -- and it's important that you understand this if you are going to make the "civil rights" argument.

The case of father-adult-son marraiges must be exactly as legal as unrelated gay marraiges.

Either the state has an interest in defining which consenting adults may get married or it doesn't. If the state has such an interest, then the argument of gay marraige advocates that a fundamental civil right is being violated is problematic.

If, on the other hand, the state doesn't have an interest in limiting which consenting adults may marry, then father-daughter, brother-sister, and all sorts of other things are allowable. They are allowable even if you think there are "health risks" because

1) the state doesn't ban a long list of "health risk" behaviors (like skydiving, or smoking in your own house)
2) the "point" of getting married isn't to have kids -- a point that should be entirely clear to gay people.

I personally think the way out of this for politicians to put legal discrimination protections in place (i.e. nobody -- either in church or in business -- is forced to accept a state definition of who is/isn't married) and then dismantle all of these anti-marraige restrictions -- including ones that prohobit adult incest.