the conservative case for same sex marriage

[INDY500]

Originally Posted by Diemen

Maybe because they were voting to give Americans rights, not take them away.

Well, you call same-sex marriage, collective bargaining, health care, abortion, etc, "rights" because you hope to silence debate and provide a moral high ground for their advocates. As well as justifying a vision of an ever expanding list of "rights" granted from an ever expanding government.

Enumerated and inalienable rights must be protected and defended but good gosh everything is not a right. Most issues are meant to be debated and decided by "the people."

I don't see a right for same-sex marriage but in New York there is now a bill and a law making it legal. Indiana has no such law. Democracy in action.

[deep]

Originally Posted by BoMac

So Cuomo signed the bill making it law, right?

Does that mean it's too late to make one last visit to NYC before the inevitable chaos and anarchy takes over the state?

Also, I've scoured E-bay and have yet to find David Tyree's Super Bowl championship ring. I'm sure it'll turn up soon enough.

he signed last night, I posted about it

but the law does not go into effect for 30 days,

there is always a chance the Lord will intervene,
he did close the lions' mouths for Daniel,
and he opened and closed the Red Sea for his chosen people,
the Lord does intercede on the side of righteousness.

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by INDY500

I don't see a right for same-sex marriage but in New York there is now a bill and a law making it legal. Indiana has no such law. Democracy in action.

so what would you call the ability to now freely enter into a contract that had formerly been denied on the basis of sexual orientation if not a "right"?

was it a "right" when you were allowed to marry your wife?

anyway, and i don't want to put you totally on the spot because i know you're generally a lone voice in here, but i do want to point out that the argument about "silencing debate" is little more than a rhetorical judo technique now employed by the anti-gay right (heck, it was a GOP controlled state senate). you know, it's really the gays who are the bullies and it's the good Christians who need to be told that "it gets better." you know, it's really that the laws are unbelievably biased in favor of gay people. you know, it's really that the judiciary is stacked with liberal activists activists. these are arguments made by people who are losing the big argument.

that's what's really happening. public opinion is shifting dramatically. and the reason why is that there's really no intellectually defensible reason to deny people the right to marry who they love. yes, you can point to referendums and to laws passed in 2004, but you also can't deny the enormous speed with which public opinion has changed on an issue that wasn't even an issue 10 years ago. you're not being silenced. you're losing support. your arguments are unsustainable. all NOM is left with are political "... and your little dog, too" threats.

the reason why? gay people are people, and as with most prejudices -- be they about the elderly, Latinos, the French, or whatever group -- they seem really silly when you actually get to know people.

as Frank Bruni explains so well.

Marriage equality in New York

In the mid-1980s, when I was in college, what concerned and frustrated my peers and me was how few states had basic statutes forbidding discrimination against gay men and lesbians: laws that merely prevented someone from being denied a job or apartment on the basis of whom he or she loved.

At that point only Wisconsin and the District of Columbia provided such protection. The decade would end with just one addition, Massachusetts, to that meager list.

Same-sex marriage? I don't recall our talking — or dreaming — much about that. We considered ourselves realists. Sometimes idealists. But never fantasists.

As it happens, we were pessimists, and underestimated our country's capacity for change.

That was my thought all week, even as it remained unclear what the endlessly dithering New York state Legislature would decide and even as President Barack Obama, speaking at a gay gala in New York, stayed the closeted pro-gay course, giving coy signals of solidarity without tying the knot.

The fact that same-sex marriage was drawing such serious attention at such high levels was public proof of what I could see in my private life — in my own family. Where we are is a long way from where we were.

Outside New York, five states, along with Washington, D.C., already permit same-sex marriages. Twenty-one states, along with D.C., outlaw anti-gay discrimination. And both numbers will grow.

That's what recent polls telegraph, and that's what the shape and flavor of the campaign for same-sex marriage in New York irrevocably demonstrated. This issue will increasingly transcend partisan politics and hinge less on party affiliation or archaic religious doctrine than on the intimate, everyday dynamics of family and friendship.

As The New York Times' Michael Barbaro and Nicholas Confessore have reported, the biggest and most influential donors to the New York campaign were Republicans. A New York City mayor without any huge strategic stake in the matter devoted considerable money and muscle to it.

And public-service announcements in favor of it were recorded not just by actors and artists but also by athletes like the hockey player Sean Avery, and by the city's former police commissioner William J. Bratton.

Why such widespread backing, from such surprising quarters? One major reason is that the wish and push to be married cast gay men and lesbians in the most benign, conservative light imaginable, not as enemies of tradition but as aspirants to it.

In the quest for integration and validation, saying "I do" to "I do" is much more effective — not to mention more reflective of the way most gay people live — than strutting in leather on a parade float.

We're not trying to undermine the institution of marriage, a task ably handled by the likes of Tiger Woods, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Edwards and too many other onetime role models to mention. We're paying it an enormous compliment.

But an even bigger reason is how common it now is for Americans to realize that they know and love people who are gay. AIDS had a lot to do with that. This month is the 30th anniversary of the disease's emergence, a ghastly dawn chronicled in the current Broadway revival of "The Normal Heart."

And it's worth pausing to note how drastically the epidemic raised the stakes of secrecy and silence, pulling homosexuals from the shadows. If we wanted people to take up arms against a scourge associated primarily with gay men, we had to make them appreciate how many gay men they were close to.

Over the last quarter-century the love that dared not speak its name turned into a veritable motor mouth, to a point where the average American, according to an astonishing Gallup Poll last month, thinks that about 25 percent of the population is homosexual.

Hardly. But that perception underscores how visible gay people have become. And familiarity changes everything.

Same-sex marriage is personal for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, whose longtime companion, Sandra Lee, has a gay brother. It's personal for Paul E. Singer, the most impassioned of the Republican donors. At a fundraiser for same-sex marriage last year, he recalled leafing through the wedding album of "my son and son-in-law," married in Massachusetts.

"At the moment they are pioneers," he said, according to a transcript, "although I felt like a loving father and father-in-law, not a pioneer, as we were looking at the pictures."

It's personal for the New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser, who on Monday wrote, "I give in."

She recounted the recent Massachusetts wedding of her niece and another woman and said: "Despite abstract discomfort over normalizing gay unions, I don't know of a soul who would discriminate against the nice guys next door. Nor would I deny my niece happiness that is evident in the size of her smile."

In voicing his support for same-sex marriage, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has mentioned — and appeared with — his niece Rachel, who is lesbian.

"It brings it home," he told me on the phone this week, though he added that beyond his desire for her to have everything she wants in life, "Government should not tell you what to do unless there's a compelling public purpose." He sees no such purpose in blocking same-sex marriage.

I asked Avery how he arrived at his support. He mentioned gay friends whose weddings he thinks it would be a blast to attend.

I asked Bratton. "My sister, Pat, is married to her partner in Massachusetts," he said, adding that the two women have been together for decades and have a grown son.

To reckon with the gay people right in front of you is to re-examine your qualms. I've seen that in my father, a 76-year-old Republican.

Years ago he would quietly leave the room whenever my sexual orientation came up in a family conversation.

But when he urged me to attend a Halloween party he gave for his friends last fall, he insisted I bring Tom, whom he has come to know well over the two and a half years we've been together. And as he introduced us to his golf partners from the country club, he said, "This is my son, Frank. And this is my other son, Tom. Or at least I think of him that way."

Only once did he look unsettled: when he realized he hadn't run that language by Tom. "I'm not making you uncomfortable, am I?" he asked him.

I called Dad the other day to get his permission to share that story. I also brought up something else — for the first time.

"Do you support gay marriage?" I asked him.

"I don't know," he said, explaining that it still seemed strange. He added: "But not if you know the person."

"Meaning me?" I said.

"No," he said. "I mean Tom. He's a good person. If you and he got married? I guess that would be

OK. Yeah, that would be fine."

Frank Bruni is an editorial writer for the New York Times.

[martha]

Originally Posted by INDY500

Well, you call same-sex marriage... "rights" because you hope to silence debate and provide a moral high ground for their advocates.

No. It's a right because equal protection is in the United States Constitution.

And since when have debate on this been "silenced"? No one can shut the "traditional" crowd out or up. They are a noisy bunch.

It could just be that fewer people are listening to them.

[martha]

Originally Posted by INDY500

Enumerated and inalienable rights must be protected and defended but good gosh everything is not a right. Most issues are meant to be debated and decided by "the people."

You mean like Brown v. The Board?

Or the court decision that stopped segregation in the South?

I don't recall asking your permission to marry my husband. Why do gay people have to ask you first?

[maycocksean]

"Government should not tell you what to do unless there's a compelling public purpose."--Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City.

Can I get a hell yeah, INDY?

[deep]

Originally Posted by BoMac

So Cuomo signed the bill making it law, right?

Does that mean it's too late to make one last visit to NYC before the inevitable chaos and anarchy takes over the state?

just to be safe
wear two pairs of pants at all times.

[martha]

And a cross around your neck. That way the gays can't talk to you if you don't want them to.

[Irvine511]

in a way, it's good that these groups are still kicking around. putting out stuff like this will go a long way towards discrediting them to the masses as well as furthering the growing understanding that this is a hate group.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=awJ1S1vGVUU


also, it's particularly sick for them to use HIV infection as a tool of emotional manipulation.

[kramwest1]

Glad to get home and read about NY.
I should put my HRC "equals" symbol sticker on my rental car when we hit Syracuse in a week.

Sorry OT, but I wanted to quick post this:
I also was heartened while in Michigan's U.P. to overhear a group of relatively scruffy biker guys talking about "the fucking Koch Bros." and "the rich are silencing us with their money by crushing our little-guy unions" and "no fucking way do I want my public tax dollars to go to fund a private education at some rich-kid school."
This was in the U.P. for heaven's sake! I think at least a few of them were from WI, but still.

[INDY500]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

so what would you call the ability to now freely enter into a contract that had formerly been denied on the basis of sexual orientation if not a "right"?

One of the rights we do have is of individual sovereignty--some of which we may consent to loan to a legislative power to enact the laws under which we live in a civil society.

I'd say gays in N.Y. are no longer restricted by law to marry.

gay people are people, and as with most prejudices -- be they about the elderly, Latinos, the French, or whatever group -- they seem really silly when you actually get to know people.

And what of Americans with the where-did-they-come-up-with-a-crazy-notion-like-that belief that marriage is a union of one man and one woman? Any silly prejudices exist about them?

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by INDY500

And what of Americans with the where-did-they-come-up-with-a-crazy-notion-like-that belief that marriage is a union of one man and one woman? Any silly prejudices exist about them?

what's silly and prejudicial is the notion that it is only and can only be between a man and a woman as a matter of law.

we know for a fact that gay couples exist and are asking for inclusion into the the most basic tool people are given to start families.

why deny them this unless for a silly prejudice?

[PhilsFan]

It's a battle of rights. In one corner, we have the right for homosexuals to get married, and in the other corner, we have a percentage of heterosexuals' right to a sense of superiority over gays.

[cobl04]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

the reason why? gay people are people, and as with most prejudices -- be they about the elderly, Latinos, the French, or whatever group -- they seem really silly when you actually get to know people.

This is very true. Amazing though how some people still hold prejudiced views even after they've gotten to know someone.

[BVS]

Originally Posted by INDY500

And what of Americans with the where-did-they-come-up-with-a-crazy-notion-like-that belief that marriage is a union of one man and one woman? Any silly prejudices exist about them?

When someone in here makes a joke(on in your case several dozen) about the way you were born, or who you are and not some belief you have then come and talk to me.

A grown man shouldn't me making such analogies.

[maycocksean]

Originally Posted by INDY500

And what of Americans with the where-did-they-come-up-with-a-crazy-notion-like-that belief that marriage is a union of one man and one woman?

They are people too.

What silly prejudices did you have in mind? Acknowledging that they are against gay marriage and believing they are wrong about that hardly constitutes as silly prejudice. Even suggesting that they are being discriminatory or hateful doesn't qualify as silly prejudice. After all, no one is taking away their rights.

[Canadiens1131]

Originally Posted by INDY500

And what of Americans with the where-did-they-come-up-with-a-crazy-notion-like-that belief that marriage is a union of one man and one woman? Any silly prejudices exist about them?

They're welcome to adhere to that belief inside the boundaries of their own religious denomination

That's the great thing about America, Indy.

Now if you will excuse the rest of us not hogtied to a particular faith, it's time to get back to the public buggery and men grinding other men in public in front of your kids at public swimming pools and throwing free condoms at grandmas on park benches.

[INDY500]

"What you saw was the people of New York having a debate, talking through these issues. It was contentious, it was emotional, but ultimately they made a decision to recognize civil marriages. And I think that's exactly how things should work."

So the president agrees with Indy, the process IS important. Now I don't believe him for a second because instead of reversing DOMA by the same process by which it became law, legislation. The president deems it "unconstitutional" (knowing he would lose) and his Justice Dept will no longer enforce it.

I, on the other hand, have been consistent and explanatory on this point. Regardless of whether you think same-sex marriage a civil right or not, it is important not to trample on clearly stated constitutional rights (free speech, freedom of religion) or the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers, to secure it.

Actually, considering what a phoney Barack Obama is regarding this entire issue I'm rather embarrassed to agree with him so often.

[PhilsFan]

God forbid someone think that DOMA actually was unconstitutional.

[Canadiens1131]

Originally Posted by INDY500

Actually, considering what a phoney Barack Obama is regarding this entire issue I'm rather embarrassed to agree with him so often.

You're right on the head of the nail on this point (I know, WTF????????). Obama has had a very public, very lame, and very metric-driven "coming to terms about thinking about rethinking how he feels about gay marriage". I don't blame Barry for a lot of dumb shit that goes down in Washington, but this is one case where he is being embarrassing.