Amen, brother. When did America become so un-American?

that looks suspiciously like the alert color code!!

Thanks for the support. Someday we'll all have equality.

Isn't it a sad statement about this country, when acknoledging and celebrating love and commitment between two consenting adults is actually an act of civil disobedience?

I have been asking the same question for years whenever the subject comes up;

How can extending the franchise of marriage to gays damage the married life of heterosexuals?

Hey, just when San Francisco started letting gays get married, Barbie and Ken split up. See, gay marriage is screwing it up for the straight dolls everywhere. I don't know what happened, but I suspect that Ken's love for Barbie has always been ambiguous, and that the public sanction of gay marriage caused Ken to come out of the closet.

Oh well, maybe Ken can get together with GI Joe with Kung Fu grip.

Yeah, I don't quite comprehend how a gay marriage would change a hetero sexual marriage. Are there some clauses in the traditional marriage contract that says that in the advent of homo sexual marriages the hetero thing is null and void? That people are going to feel that the vows and life that they've lived for however many years no longer matters or counts, that it's open season for divorce and affairs and lying to spouses, just because 2 lesbians got married and now can collect each others social security?

Uh oh, does this mean the bushites are going to redouble their efforts to destroy Social Security, just so the gay lesbian couples won't have anything to collect when they retire?

How do they sleep in the GOP?

How can extending the franchise of marriage to gays damage the married life of heterosexuals?

This question, as with any question relating to American "moral" thinking, can best be answered with economics:

By denying marriage to gays (and the other groups to whom we denied it in the past), we have created an artificial scarcity of marriages. Thus, any individual marriage is "worth" more than it would otherwise be.

Were we to end this artificial scarcity, all of a sudden, all those super-valuable marriages out there would see their value plummet on the open market. It's pretty much the same thing that homeowners complain about when black people move into a neighborhood--the property values go down.

I know this explanation doesn't make any sense, but that's because the underlying behavior I'm trying to explain doesn't make any sense, either. Nonetheless, this is as close as I can come to an explanation that ascribes any rationale to America's resistance to gay marriage that doesn't boil down to bigotry alone.

Congratulations to the multitudes who swarmed the San Francisco City Hall to get married yesterday, and to the many hundreds more today and tomorrow. They were marrying one couple every minute yesterday.

I was originally hoping for a more gradual transition to this point, begun by a dozen states following Vermont's lead and followed by a state like Massachusetts legalizing same-sex marriage through the legislature and governor. Although I do not think it is right to deny gays and lesbians equal protection under the law, I do not want a backlash that sets the cause backward for generations. A culture war on this scale will be brutal and ugly, but it appears there are enough of us on the side of equality to prevent a consitutional amendment. Make no mistake, though: the right wing will be out in force. Just as Bush has unified and energized the Democrats, this will bring the right wing back to center stage. I hope the rest of us are ready for the battle, because it is one we can't lose.

While I support the right of people to choose marriage lets not get carried away: marriage is NOT love. Marriage is a legal arrangement that confers certains rights and obligations on those entering into the contract. I can't be the only person who recalls (I'm actually too young to literally "recall") that not so long ago the politics of marriage involved articulating a critique of patriarchy and state enforcement of social and sexual norms--in short "compulsary heterosexuality." Suddenly getting married has been transformed into an act of revolution. Again--I fully support the right of those who wish to get married but lets not fool ourselves.

well I been cohabiting for my SO for 30 years.

we're gonna get married.

One of these days.

Maybe.

(all property & bank accounts in both names. tax filings as single--each keep our own names.)

It works, don't ask me how.