I’ve always laughed at the photo analysis too.  I remember one picture they took of just Angelina when she was pregnant with her first child.  The caption was, "Angelina, pregnant and alone….  Why has Brad abandoned her."  Based on the photo, he *could’ve* been about ten feet away and not shown up.

I’m certainly glad that people aren’t trying to interpret my life through my photos.  I suppose famous people learn to ignore it. 

The new Star Trek, Lord of the Rings trilogy, Harry Potter films, and the first Pirates of the Caribbean were all quite good and fairly recent so I don’t think it’s really fair to say good movies aren’t being made any more.

I believe you actually are talking about Bash-Back….  Queerfront is merely some dude’s website where he posts GLBT news.  I agree, it is a shame that this particular group disrupted a single church’s services on two occasions.  However, I feel that point to a fairly fringe group is a bit disingenuous when it comes to representing gay men and women as a whole.  It’s sort of like pointing at Fred Phelp’s behavior (you know, the Christian who has disrupted countless funerals) as a example of Christians as a whole.  In your previous post, you essentially painting all gay men and women with the same brush…

I’m still not buying your APA link.  My own google search indicates that all the sites who talk about this essentially quote a single source.  And as far as I can tell, that single source seems to be a guy who hates gays and doesn’t understand how the APA’s voting procedures work.  Now, granted ‘71 was long before I was born, but even in my childhood homosexual activists groups didn’t have that sort of power.  Hell, the stonewall riots were only two years before that…..

In any case, I agree that everyone should respect other people’s rights, even those with opposing views.  However, I believe that voting against someone’s rights *isn’t* respecting them, and so I can understand the anger gay men and women have towards evangelical Christians.  It’s one thing to say that you don’t think that same-sex marriage is recongized in the eyes of your god, and to disprove of it.  It’s another thing entirely to vote against one of your fellow citizens being able to acquire the 1,049 rights associated with the word marriage.   *That* in my opinion, is not respect.

 Why should they be upset, when it has no impact on their pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Ah, but it does have an impact on their pursuit of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.  For instance, if I were unable to legally marry my husband, it would make me quite sad.  It would have made buying a house together more difficult.  It would have made getting auto insurance for our jointly owned cars more difficult.  As a student, I would not be able to access his medical insurance, and so on.  And these are minor compared to the sort of things that can crop up later in life.  For instance, were he to get sick enough that he was unable to make his own medical decisions, I would be allowed to do so.  If we weren’t married, I couldn’t unless his family allowed it.  The list goes on, but the point is there.

If your (unwedded to you) promiscuous sex partner cheats on you (and is it even cheating when there’s no covenant?) and gives you a disease, you’re merely a fool. You might be able to sue for damages (good luck), but you’re not expected to have to use protection in marriage.

Cheating is doing anything sexually that you can not tell your partner about.  There is no straight forward definition.  All couples should have a discussion about their personal definition, married or otherwise.  Only a fool wouldn’t have this important discussion.  If marriage gives sexual protection, why do you feel same sex couples should be denied this protection?

How is a marriage solely a right and not an obligation? And if it is an obligation in order to fulfill certain purposes, how does that apply to gay people? Until humans reproduce by parthenogenesis, the only way a family can be formed is by some union of male and female.

Marriage is a right that confers some obligation.  That obligation has nothing to do with the direct production of biological children.  It’s an obligation to one’s spouse and to any children being raised within the marriage.  Those children need not be genetically related to either parent.  The concept of adoption is an old one….

 I find it particulary dehumanizing that people can bring children into the world with the mentality that they are the sum of the contributions of mere biology. How can a child truly have a sense of family when the parties involved in the conception of his very biological existence have no lasting relationship and mutual emotional investment in his/her upbringing?

You contradict yourself here.  If people are more than the sum total of their biological contribution, then why is it so important that they only be raised by their biological parents?  In any case, the point is moot.  There are hundreds of thousands of children whose biological parents are not a part of their lives, and I see no reason to not let some of them be raised by same sex couples.  The child might not "take after" their non-biological parents, but since people are not just the sum of their biological contributions, the child may take after his non-biological parents.  It’s nature versus nurture.

 The purpose of marriage is primarily for the protection of women and the children they bear by the men who are equal partners in the process.

And you have the gall to say that marriage has been the same for thousands of years….. 

People have been ranting about the horrors of the changes in society since the dawn of time.  Don’t be afraid of change, embrace it.  In any case, you can make your marriage into anything you want.  Just don’t dictate what I can do in mine.

 I believe gay couples should have basically the same rights as straight couples, but that’s not marriage, that’s civil rights.

There is no difference.  We give civil rights to people who marry.  1,049 of them, in fact.  We can either remove all legal value from the word marriage and give all the legal value to some other term, such as civil union available to all couples or give same sex couples the right to marry.  Nothing else will give them the same rights.

If the basis of marriage is raising children, then couples who can not (or will not) have biological children together shouldn’t marry.  Certainly marriage adds stability to relationships in that the legal ties are harder to break, and this can be beneficial to children in that institution.  So why don’t same sex couples deserve this?  Why should their children be deprived of this?  It’s not particularly fair to say they should be denied it due to the "bad" behavior of a subset of the population any more than denying straight couples marriage because of Britney Spears is fair.

Oh come on.  "Biological children" is not the reason that compells straight couples to be monogamous.  Monogamy is not required … nor do all straight couples have biological children (or require mongamy in their relationships).

 Marriage has not been about "the acknowledgment and protection of natural generation of children" for more then fifty years, if ever.  Marriage is a contract used as legal shorthand when two adults wish to form a family.  Children are not a requirement.  Nor is marriage a requirement for children.  Not only that, but plenty of same sex couples ARE raising children and deserve the 1,049 rights associated with marriage to help them do so. 

Marriage has not been the way it is for thousands of years.  This idea that it has been this unchanging monolithic institution is simply absurd.  Read a history book.  And even if it were true (and it most decidedly is not) tradition is not sufficient to deny a group of people rights.  In fact, arguing that something should be so due to tradition is a logical fallacy.  If an idea has merit, it should stand on its own.  After all, there are plenty of things that were traditional which have been thrown out because they were not condusive to a functioning modern society.  For instance, women can own property now.  For a long time in many different cultures, this was not the case.

Oh, I highly doubt that militant homosexuals beating up church-goers is a common occurence.  A quick search on google leads to no new links to anything like that, the only place it is mentioned is in "I hate gays" sort of websites.  However, a search for gay men and women who have gotten beaten up due to their orientation (or preceived orientation!) gives quite a few hits.  Also, many churchs welcome gay men and women, and quite a few of them consider themselves Christian.  Why would they beat up their brothers and sisters in Christ?

 Secondly, Act Up is a group which works against AIDS by spreading information and compaigning.  They are neither millitant nor homosexual.  It’s not the 80s anymore, people who ignore the fact that straight men and women can contact HIV are not helping matters.

Thirdly, complaining that you lose your right to discriminate against gay couples due to legal same sex marriage is like complaining that you’ve lost your right to discriminate against minorities because they are allowed to vote.  A person is free to be as bigoted in his or her personal life as he or she chooses.  When that person attempts to have his or her views legally mandated, as the homophobic bigots do, then we have a problem.

It is simply absurd to believe that homosexuals have so much power that they can deny the APA funding, and yet they can’t get same sex marriage legalized.  The "great gay conspiracy" would be ridiculous if so many people didn’t buy into it.  The APA decided that homosexuality was not a mental illness because it did not prevent a person from functioning.

I stopped watching live TV in 1995….  For almost a decade, I didn’t watch anything at all.  Now I watch a few shows via dvds (mythbusters, BS, Big Bang Theory, Dr. Who) and a few online (Colbert Report and the Daily Show).  The few times I’ve turned the TV on in a hotel room or the like, the commericials have driven me to turn it off almost as quickly.  Besides, I’m not interested in wading through reality tv shows to find something worth watching.

Judo.

To be fair, it’s not really news when the police do their work right.  And statistically speaking, most children are raped/murdered/molested by close family members, especially step-parents and step-siblings.  I’m not saying that they shouldn’t look further, just that 95% of the time they don’t need to.

I suppose for me it was getting myself back in competitive shape after damaging my MCL.  I didn’t need surgery, thank goodness, but I had to sit around doing nothing for nearly a month.  To fight in the US Open a month later I needed to lose about 20 lbs due to the inactivity and get myself back into shape.  So I worked out five hours a day for a month and managed to get back into shape and lose the weight necessary to make my division.

I was not a happy camper during this period.

I’m intolerant of intolerance.  And I don’t people would care as much, except that people who are intolerant of homosexuality vote for things like proposition 8.  When same sex marriage is legalized and most gay men and women feel no need to remain in the closet, it will cease to be a big deal.

And if someone said they weren’t accepting of the Jewish lifestyle, but that was merely their opinion, what would you call them?

The only difference between an atheist and a religous person is that the atheist believes in one less god.  Did you choose not to believe in Shiva?  Or Thor?  Are you saying that you specifically sat down and looked at the pros and cons of all religions and then specifically chose one?  That seems a bit far fetched….

The human default is non-belief.  I don’t believe in fairies, or unicorns, or the tooth-fairy, or any of the other myriad mystical creatures that people have imagined all over the globe.  It’s not an active choice.  I’ve simply seen nothing that suggests these beings exist.  Were someone to show up with a unicorn, I’d change my mind.  Until then, I’m an atheist about unicorns.  Now, I would describe myself as an agnostic because I think that the truth is inherently unknowable.  It may be that the truth is there is no god, but I don’t think we can know that for sure.

It costs more money to test prior to the race because at that point you have to test everyone.