Bezos pledges $2.6M to support same sex marriage

Every one is allowed to have a baby. But, oh dear, if somebody wants to take care of a kid that has no parents.

Personally, i dont think religious people are fit parents. Should i now campaign against religious people taking care of children?

Or maybe, just maybe, people should just give the freedom to others they expect for themselves.

I have no moral authority over any one, nor does any one have a moral authority over me.

Why is it that fascism is allowed to flourish, as long as the fascists call it a religion. And how is that fair towards the 1% of religious folk that are actually religious? ( actually religious == using religion to guide your own lifechoices, instead of using it judge/oppress others and play god)

The kid will still grow up in a same-sex household. He/she will still think of themselves has having two dads or two moms. The only thing you're denying is the ability for the other partner to sign their permission forms, visit them in the hospital, or be officially recognized as a parent by the government and society.

I have a friend who was raised by a same-sex couple. One was a biological parent, and they had to go through huge complex legal procedures to compensate for inheritance rights, adopting the child and others as he was a stranger-in-law to the non-biological parent that raise him.

I have a lesbian friend who has 3 biological kids of her own. The only social issues they've faced are from other adults being uncomfortable with it. But it's a bigger issue when those people vote against civil marriage and deprive those kids of legal protections kids of hetrosexual marriages have.

Yet there it is, in black and white, in every statutory code in the country.

The statistics I was able to Google up show support for gay marriage at 43% of the US and against 47%. So it's not like it's some tiny percentage who are for it, and it's not even a majority who are against it.

Personally, no, I don't want to have this fight. I also don't want to have to fight about evolution being taught in schools. Unfortunately some members of the population render this a necessity.

Are they really decent if they were racist/sexist/homophobic? Just because people were nice to others that didn't fit into their hatepool, I do not feel that makes them generally "decent". No matter what time period you look at, there were people that didn't agree with these "social norms". I would call the such occurrences "decent people".

I understand your message about party differences/etc. but I feel there is a line that can get crossed between differing perspectives and hateful behavior. The latter should not be tolerated, in my opinion.

Marriage, in the legal sense, just a particular type of contract, long recognized because of how commonly people wanted to enter into a particular type of economic arrangement. It is non-sensical to think religious institutions should have any say in defining this type of contract, any more than they have a say in defining the contracts that pertain to, say, residential leases. Should religious institutions be able to use Biblical scripture to argue that implied in any residential lease is a warranty that the landlord will have running water, etc? Of course not, that is the exclusive domain of the secular courts. The marriage contract, being no different, should be treated no differently.

You hear other people's opinions and you make up your mind. It's painfully obvious that there isn't an objective repository for this sort of thing; the whole notion of 'inalienable rights" is rather recent and fluffy to begin with.

>What if I think that marriage should be defined religiously by a religious institution rather than legally by the state?

Yet we live in a society where marriage is legally defined. It's fine to work against abolishing the institution of marriage, but if that's the case witholding that legal definition from an arbitrary segment of the population becomes a petty argument over semantics.

[1] Granted, the Civil War Amendments were imposed under martial law, but calls for the repeal of the 14th Amendment are rare.

That was stupid, this isn't reddit.

libertarians do believe that market pressure should be used instead of government coercion. You'll definitely find plenty of them who do support a boycott of chick-fil-a.

At the same time there are other libertarians who don't support a boycott because they believe that people are entitled to hold opinions that differ from their own.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee#Supe...

1) Awareness raising. A lot of people are partially or completely unaware of what laws are on the ballot, what initiatives actually mean and what the stakes are.

2) Driving turnout. This is actually probably much more important than #1. If you look at the statistics, the percentages of eligible voters who actually vote in elections is not incredibly high. Money can be used to ensure that people who are sympathetic to your cause are properly registered to vote, know where their polling places are, even literally give them transportation if they don't have it. For this issue, to take an example, it is extremely likely that college students are overwhelmingly for gay marriage, but a lot of them are not yet registered to vote, or are from out of state and haven't re-registered in Washington, so this kind of money lets pro-Marriage organizations have a heavy presence on campuses getting kids registered in the state, telling them where they need to go and when to vote, possibly even renting busses or vans if polling places are inconvenient for campuses.

But yeah. 'Round here laws are products, and marketing is a huge part of how they're sold.

People with deep but irrational convictions, can be pulled to rationality or vice versa.

I'm not saying this specifically about PETA, but that's generally how campaigning works.

Besides, it's not like people are saying the Chick-Fil-A president can't say what he said. The story here is that a lot of people are deeply unimpressed with his statement, and are effectively enacting a de facto boycott (not allowing expansion into communities that disagree with his stance).

It's perfectly fine for this to be discussed, and besides you possibly not identifying with the complainants (as you point out in another comment here), I don't see why you object to it. (Note that I am mainly responding to the parent comment from another user: "I find it odd that what people do with their own money gets so much attention".)

Given the variety of marriages in the Bible (A guy, his wife, and his wife's handmaiden, etc), who's redefining anything?

Humans take a very long time to develop so they can have big brains later, but they are not strongly monogamous. (And there are some cross-cultural commonalities like taboos on incest and sex with animals or dead bodies.)

In the brutish default state of things, human women pay a high biological and personal cost (and face significant risk) to get pregnant, bear children and (typically) take on the lion's share of childrearing. After ~18 years they are considered past their prime. And it is typical that they have less social power to begin with and are subject to issues such as rape.

So they are relatively much more vulnerable to hit-and-runs. Since everybody is related to women and probably cares about some of them, also because too many hit-and-runs hurt a society, there is a tendency to support protective measures such as socially recognized marriage. Especially in an environment of scarcity, like what people have normally faced.

It can also be argued that this has good benefits for men, many of whom really do like to settle down with less competition and fighting and maybe also raise some kids. There may be social benefits from supporting and developing men like this. They are more likely to build things and keep the law rather than joining roving rape bands (like you see in some other primate species).

So you also have a lot of arranged marriage, and not necessarily any romance. And if there is a pretty picture it is the one of civilization. Because reality is pretty grim and civilization is a big pile of techniques for managing that grimness most of the time.

Now in the industrialized world we have so much more than mere civilization, including a lot that bears directly on sex: birth control, low maternal and infant mortality, less scarcity, public schools, etc. And just plain fewer kids and more free time. So the risk and cost is both absolutely lower and somewhat more equal across genders. So the linchpins for support of a lot of traditional institutions are removed. And you see that sexual freedom increases naturally, not because of any principle, while opposition is really due to some principle or nostalgia more than any clear practical concern. And divorce is more acceptable and there is much more emphasis on having fun and fulfilling a pretty picture.

So the nature of relationships is greatly changed, more like a kind of romantic and economic partnership lasting 2-7 years. So many other changes too.

Now in this newer kind of relationship, it is really not at all hard for those same behaviors to map to homosexual relationships (which have always existed, just typically in different forms from traditional marriage) because so many of the differences have attenuated. And so many social groups give the same recognition to both and correctly recognize that it is not destroying society in any real or practical respect, except that some people are unhappy because of traditional ideas.

But we have strong taboos (with various practical and biological foundations) about things like childsex, animalsex and deadsex. Even if you are in support of those, they will not be accepted the same way ever. And the concept of a marriage commitment between a man and a corpse, or a man and a child he is raping, will never have parity with the concept of a long-term commitment between equals. And I strongly doubt that incest would ever be accepted outside of specific cultural forms.

Polygamy has been practiced all over the world for a long time and is of course also something which is often mentioned casually in the Bible, so there is really no argument other than that it is not traditional in our mainstream culture and we have corporately decided we don't like it.