“Either way you see this, it is so abundantly clear to me that those who view gay marriage as a civil rights issue, which will certainly be more people if gay marriage is allowed, will logically follow through on their views, and with time, religions that teach against homosexuality, or against gay marriage, will be no different than KKK members today. Some proponents of gay marriage look forward to this day consciously, others are but sheep in the bigger chess game. Either way, allow gay marriage, and the road is clearly paved in that direction.”

uh-oh. Did someone let some underlying motivations escape? This is VERY different from the protection of children and sanctity of marriage points that you have been sticking to. I’m sure you’ll explain that this is not your “reason” or your “motivation” but, “it is abundantly clear” that this is a concern, and this is pretty much exactly what I was referring to when I said that people who defend their stance on “tradition” and the like are masking other motivations. You fear that gay marriage is an attack on your religion, and an attack on your belief that homosexuality is an abomination. It may well be, but this certainly changes the debate to a place that you probably wanted to avoid. If you make this a debate about religion then you will lose because a particular religion’s (bigoted) dogma is not supposed to be reflected in our laws as a nation. It undercuts the base of your argument, which is that government is merely protecting it’s own interests.

The ancestors of most of us were poor peons who were, man and woman alike, viewed as chattel – animals bound to the land. And animals needed no rites of marriage. This only began to change as mercantilism began to transform into capitalism during the middle ages, when the politcal and commercial elites realized that they needed a way to control all those peasants who were being freed from bondage to the land and flocking to the growing industrial centers to labor in the production of goods other than foodstuffs. Yet again, the church conspired; spreading marriage to the masses became, purely and simply, a record-keeping process; a way keep track of the pairings of two peasants and record the future laborers their “union” produced. And, as if that’s not damning enough for the institution of marriage, it wasn’t until this time that child rearing became the duty of a male-female unit. And there’s by no means conclusive proof that such a unit produces better, more stable off-spring. One need only examine the anthropological literature to discover the falsehoods in that premise. Most all primitive peoples – in the past and those still existing – do not view child rearing as the duty and sole purview of the biological parents; *everyone* in the tribal band is responsible for caring for and protecting and nurturing the childern of the tribal band. Jesus, you can watch the tv specials on the Yanamamo of Amazonia, or any of the other primitive tribes – in Java, say – still being studied to learn that basic fact.

Get a grip. Your opposition is conditioned solely on your religious biases, not on historical or anthropological fact.

That example was in reference to the difference between a behavioral attribute as opposed to a non-behavioral attribute. I was not referring to, either in the affirmative or in the negative, whether or not homosexual acts are genetic/from birth or not.

To explain myself further, let’s say we are talking about ‘left handed’ people. This is a behavioral attribute, meaning that you define those type of people (left handed) by actions they perform. Now, does this imply that people who are left handed are born that way? No, it doesn’t speak to that. Whether they are left handed by birth, or left handed by choice (as my old boss at work is, he says switching is good for brain communication or something like that) the statement remains the same.

When I say ‘homosexual’ people, I am referring to people who engage in homosexual acts, period.

In other words, there is no such thing as a homosexual man married to a woman?

It’s times like these when I really envy those kids that are growing up with English only classes, cuz them damn ESL classes really fucked me up. I have such a hard time discussing semantics.

Here, let me try and explain it this way. The way liberals tend to define homosexuality is to group the two elements involved, the inclination to perform homosexual acts, and the acting out of those homosexual acts. In addition, they to emphasize and concentrate primarily on the inclination as opposed to the act.

For example, there are those who are married to the opposite sex but who still have homosexual inclinations. To a liberal, that person is just as homosexual as the person who has the inclinations and acts upon them, by being with members of the same sex.

However, to us conservatives, and I would say to most philosophical/moral discussions regarding homosexuality, the two things are completely seperate, and I would say, independent of each other. If, for example, a person with no inclinations to be with a member of the same sex wanted to marry another member of the same sex, my arguments above would be unchanged. In other words, the arguments focus primarily, more than that ONLY , on the act itself. Regardless of whether or not you are wired towards such acts. So in discussions like this, I am only speaking about the act, and what that specific act entails, I can careless whether you are wired to such acts or you just want to do it for experimentation, or whatever.

Does that explain my point better?

So what you’re saying is that the only difference between a homosexual and a heterosexual is who they choose to sleep with/marry?

In other words, there is no such thing as a homosexual man married to a woman?

So if Oso and I wanted to marry, all the arguments I used above would apply equally to us, as they would to John and Frank who have sexual inclinations and would also like to marry.

In other words, our inclinations, or innate sexual desires, are completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. What matters, and what only matters, is the final act.

Even if you definite homosexuality as merely an inclination, if you say you are a homosexual who is a virgin for example, that still implies an act. That implies that if you were to perform a sexual act, your preference would be an act with those of the same gender.

So homosexuality, unlike gender, unlike nationality, unlike skin color, has its definition tied to an action. So comparing it to other things that are not tied to an act, is not comparing apples to apples.