In other news, a proposition was accepted in Arkansas that prohibits child adoption by unmarried couples, thus reducing the number of available foster parents.
And in Colorado, amendment 48 was rejected. The amendment gives legal "person" status to fertilized human eggs. That would mean that each year thousands of corpses are flushed down the toilets of Colorado. illepall Still, about 1/4 of the people voted for this amendment.
Sooo, U.S. citizens ... What's it like, living in a developing country?
FWIW In the UK (in one London borough, at least), smokers will not be able to adopt anymore - which seems retarded as there aren't enough foster parents...
And there you have it, viewers: a primary motivation to ban gay marriage. Call it a "civil union" or some such doublespeak bullshit - anything beside "marriage" - and bang! Another birthright gets trampled. Of course, plenty of straight people don't get married for various reasons, and they're getting royally shafted by this redneck bullshit too.
Common sense prevails. Nice one Colorado.
For the small number of friends of mine who live there, it's beautiful and fantastic but also frequently embarrassing and frustrating.
Why the focus on California? Florida and Arizona passes similar amendments, but didn't get as much attention. 25 other states had already passed similar amendments, and 20 other states had already passed similar laws, but not as amendments. The federal government has already passed a law (but not as an amendment). Currently the supreme court is not accepting any cases about this. My guess is that California got more attention simply because the vote was going to be close.
Yes absolutely, fight the fights that are winnable first - most of the rest of America remains too blinkered to recognise discrimination, sadly today California proved it too is not ready for the modern world.
California is also important as Americas largest and most populous state, it is traditionally a trend setter for American politics.
It is also among the most liberal states. Democrats who voted for it were probably partly swayed by the Obama-Biden administration's decision to be against gay marriage.
In California at least, no tangible rights were lost by any group. CA allows domestic partners to 'pull the plug', adopt children, file joint income tax, etc. They have the EXACT same rights, so no discrimination. I live in San Francisco, the most liberal area of the state and the city in which most of the marriages were performed and the general consensus is that the existing marriages will not be annulled because the same judges who voted to overturn prop 22 will also be deciding on the matter.
Note that filing joint income tax only applies to state tax. Since the federal government doesn't recognize same-sex marrige or domestic partnerships, gay couples have to file as single or head of household. Actually marriage tax rates are only a benefit when only one of the household members is working, otherwise it's a penalty.
Some aspects of marriage have legal equivalents. Living wills or medical directives allow a person to designate anyone to make medical decisions if that person is incapcitated. Power of attorney does the same for financial decisions. Inheritence is controlled by a conventional will.
Not true, the "No on 8" campaign included participation by Obama. The only affect attributed to Obama by the some of the news media was the high voter turnout, which included a high minority turnout (Blacks and Latinos) who are more religously oriented than most Democrats.
The right to call your union a "marriage" and have it legally recognised as such is - well, was - a tangible right. Ostensibly allowing everyone the same spousal rights while denying one group of people the right to actually be married, in name and by law, is the very definition of discrimination. It's excluding a portion of the population from rights & privileges enjoyed by the rest of that population based on a narrow set of criteria. If this was happening to Jews, black people or Catholics or fat people or people with fake boobs you can bet your arse it'd be called discrimination by everyone and their dog. But it's not - it's happening to gay people, so that seems to make it ok. Obviously they're not a big enough voting bloc to warrant actually listening to them and treating them like human beings (yet).
"Separate but equal" does not equal "equal". Separate is still separate. Like I said before, the anti-equality crew are only delaying the inevitable. This crap won't last forever - in CA or in any other state - so enjoy it while you can.
I loved living in the US. It's a beautiful country, full of wonderful people. I'm afraid that at the end of the day I simply found it both politically and socially incompatible with the basic principles by which I live. I moved back to the UK and allowed my permanent residency (aka green card) to lapse. I'm poorer as a result, but on balance I'm happier here.
California got more attention because it's historically an indicator for future trends in the nation as a whole--kind of a futurist state in a lot of ways. It's not that hard to figure out.
Personally I view 12 as too young to marry. That is an opinion that I hold, and I would be willing to listen to argument to the contrary. I'll even hear argument from the polygamist Mormons who funded 40% of the yes for proposition 8 budget.
What I wont do is accept that gay rights are in any way directly linked to polygamist rights, if there is such a thing? Especially as the biggest bunch of paedo-polygamists in America - the Mormon church - funded so much of the yes vote campaign.
If you are going to raise the 'slippery slope' argument again, you are going to lose it again.
I don't see any parallels between polygamists and gay rights either. And since the Mormons don't seem to see a parallel, I wonder what your motivation is to claim it, Jeff. Please elaborate.
Becky beat me to the punch in responding to this, but here are my two cents anyway: a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman won't lead to people marrying children or fourteen other people, except of course in the case of the FLDS Mormon church who were indeed responsible for a lot of the out-of-state funding for the Yes on 8 campaign. This was about TWO ADULTS being able to marry each other and nothing more. This slippery slope bullshit is a red herring.
That can be a feeble one, modern monogamy is on large. the result of chritian values being promoted as they sent priests and armies all over the world.
Moral values changes over time, like the issues on pre-marriage sex etc. I peronally supports monogamy because it is difficult enough to love yourself plus another person, but for me it isn't a far fetched idea that there are polygamist and for them in their culture there's nothing immoral or wrong about it, and it might actually works for them.
I don't know how to respond to that. Apart from calling it what it is: a completely false analogy. And a stack of fried bullshit. Sane people don't go around calling themselves black if they're not. Sane people don't call themselves liberals if they're paranoid abstinence-only halfwits. As for this assertion that gay marriage tarnishes the sanctity of straight marriage - my god, you do read some wacko crap don't you...
Bullshit piled on top of bullshit. The only "agenda" gay people have is for equality - just like the feminists and the civil rights movement. The merits of affirmative action are still up for debate but that's not what gay people want. They want a fair goddam go, like anyone else on their street or their suburb. They don't want privilege at the expense of other people - that's exactly what they're fighting against!
Gay don't ****ing well want "special treatment". For chrissake, they want EQUAL treatment, the same as their neighbours. They don't want extra. It's the "Yes on Prop 8" punks that want special treatment - special rights over and above gay people.
You have to stop regurgitating these half-baked GOP talking points and think for yourself. With your laughable analogies and misunderstanding of feminism and the civil rights movement you come off like a borderline racist and a mysogynist as well as a homophobe and it's goddam pitiful...
I'm still waiting for a logical reason to ban gay people from marrying each other. Not one homophobe has even approached logic in this thread yet.
There's no Gay Agenda. There's a desire for equality and there's a bigoted, paranoid opposition who like to play the victim. Also, goddam pitiful.
The point is that in the USA, morality based laws are a reality. Gambling is restricted or illegal. Prostitution is illegal. Bars have to close at 2:00 am. The age of consent in California is 18, higher than most other states where it's 16 or 17.
In California, there are no laws against or in favor of gay relationships or behaviors, but currently USA society is unwilling to include gay or polygamyst relationships as marriage, since it's traditional meaning is between a man and a woman.
The Mormons and other religous groups have a right to support measures they feel are important to them. It's up to the voters to pass these measures. If you're willing to blame the Mormons for donating money, then why not blame the black voters and their "critical support" for prop 8?
Exit polls for The Associated Press found that Proposition 8 received critical support from black voters who flocked to the polls to support Barack Obama for president. Blacks voted strongly in favor of the ban, while whites narrowly opposed it and Latinos and Asians were split.
I'd like to also say I loved living in the USA, I made friends who are among the best friends I've ever had, but I was well aware that the USA is as divided as it is united. Maybe the union as-is just isn't workable.
I was on the phone tonight with my best friend / my band's guitarist / my business partner (who also has an LFS license! but has never visited the forums) and talking about Obama's election. He said I'd once told him "The USA is a country full of really agreeable individuals who as a collective ****ing suck", trying to make me eat my words in light of last night's results, but I stand by that statement. You lot just can't agree. It's like an enormously unmanageable number of siblings all thinking the other ones are spoiled. It pissed me off hugely when I lived there and it still does.
I don't want to assume too much but I probably have more gay friends that 99% of the people here. My girlfriend is a drama teacher who worked in theatres for 10+ years before she took up teaching, all her family work in theatre, most of our friends work in theatre - hence gays up the arse (well, not literally) everywhere I go.
I find it difficult to believe that anybody would think there's a "gay agenda" beyond the simple "We think being gay is perfectly natural and normal and we'd much prefer it if other people were fine with it and basically shut the **** up and let us live our lives like everybody else does, but we're constantly embattled by conservative dickfaces who've been riled up by their churches into a fervent mouth-frothing state of righteous indignation and insist that homosexuality - despite being so widespread as to be literally unremarkable in ancient cultures - is somehow unnatural."
Really. Gay people would rather just get on with their lives. They're really not interested in "converting" people - it's not a religion, they don't make a profit out of it.
That last point may be worth considering for the anti-gay lobbies.
Shit, sorry, I forgot to address the Mormons:
The Mormons are the biggest bunch of credulous, gullible ****faces you can imagine. I've met way more Mormons than I'd care to, thanks to a particularly gullible, credulous immediate family member and consequently I have no patience for their bullshit.
Mormons to me are subhuman. If they're trying to steal the Jews' thunder they're going the right way about it, because there is literally no reason for liking Mormons. I wouldn't go so far as to advocate genocide, but... I'll stop there.
Note that communist China, with no ties to any form of Abrahamic religion (Jew, Christian, Islam, ...), also had laws against homosexuality until the 1990's.
This would imply there's some argument that homosexuality is inherently "natural" or "normal"?
The experts state that homosexuals aren't "born that way" but develop an orientation from life experiences: The American Psychiatric Association has stated "some people believe that sexual orientation is innate and fixed; however, sexual orientation develops across a person’s lifetime.
Once the orientation has set, it remains that way for most people: However, the American Psychological Association has stated "most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation."
Note that some homosexuals do change their orientation, but sometimes they're accused of never having been truly homosexual in the first place, which differs from the APA finding that homosexuality is not innate.
Note that communist China is dictatorial, and its laws are determined by a select few.
There is also ongoing research into the so-called "gay gene", which has not had conclusive results so far.
I don't believe that socialisation is relevant. I could name two kids I went all through school with who - in retrospect - were obviously gay at age 8 or younger. They were raised in normal heterosexual families, had no problems at home, but they were quite obviously very camp and experimented sexually much younger than the rest of us.
I could also name one guy who I've known all my life who had lots of girlfriends in his teen years, picked on one particularly camp kid mercilessly when we were in secondary school, and didn't come out as gay himself until he had already put one failed marriage behind him. But again - in retrospect - it was pretty obvious he was gay.
Homosexuality just isn't an epidemic. It isn't something you see and think "That's cool, I'd like to do that", it isn't something you catch from kissing a gay person, it isn't something that you'd be at all interested in unless you fancied people of the same sex to begin with. Unless we're talking about Johnny Depp, but that's just a given.
Your implication is explicit - allow gay people equality & pretty soon every "non-traditional" relationship will want it. It's irrelevant. The topic of this thread - Prop 8 - is about two people and whether they should be allowed to marry. I'm not imposing limits. Those are simply the terms of this discussion.
Morality to me is a question of harm: will Action A harm be beneficial, neutral or harmful? If it's harmful, examine the probable outcomes and legislate accordingly. It's a question of common sense and most laws in free societies are based on common sense.
And morality applies to homosexuality in exactly what way? Are all gays immoral, simply because they're gay or is there another point in there somewhere? What exactly do gay people do that harms others?
So, "we've always done it this way" is cause to keep it that way, with no room for discussion? Conservatism in a nutshell. Unfortunately, "USA society" is also easy prey to scare campaigns that equate homosexuality with paedophilia, "the gay agenda's desire to teach gayness in schools" and all manner of other egregious lies, which must have influenced some peoples' votes. Had they had the truth available to them and not cheap fear-mongering, they may have voted differently. 52-48% is hardly a landslide.
Fine then, they're ignorant bigots too. I do find it curious that so much support for Prop 8, from Mormons and other groups of religious hatemongers, came from outside California. I wonder exactly what they gain by fighting equality in another state...
I'm still waiting for a logical reason why gay people shouldn't have the same rights as me. That's all I want. "Tradition" just won't cut it. It used to be traditional to hang black people at picnics. It's still traditional (and religiously justified) in some primitive societies to bury women up to the waist and stone to death if they're victims of rape. Tradition, in and of itself, is no argument.
illepall Still, about 1/4 of the people voted for this amendment.
