I guess I’ve just stumbled upon a couple of people who have life long passions and unending reverence for legal, faith based definitions of marriage. I get it – you simply respect and revere these definitions too much – your dedication to and reliance on them too great – to possibly consider augmenting them for the sake of social progress and equality. Any suggestion that these same definitions and arguments were used to overtly subjegate people/races in the past must be dismissed as irrelevant because your life relies so significantly on these definitions remaining static and narrowly interpreted.

Just sad. Stop hiding behind hypocritical arguments and subjective definitions and stop fearing people who are different that you.

Groups and organizations don’t interest me. This country is about the individual, so I can imagine literally any number of desired marriage possibilities that would necessarily have to be considered – polygamy among them.

As for my revisionist history, I never claimed that the male/female dichotomy turned the tide on interracial marriage. In fact, you would have had to take some major leaps to make that connection. I simply said that your analogy was irrelevant.

In addition, I’m arguiung that prohibiting gay people from marrying based on faith driven definitions of marriage, follows, exactly, the same flawed reasoning that kept inter-racial marriages illegal for hundreds of years. Your “revision” was to suggest that it was the one man/one woman issue that eventually turned the tide on interracial marriage bans/perceptions. That’s simply factually incorrect – if you care, you can read all about the fight/arguments/decisions to legalize inter-racial marriage on any number of legal or civil rights websites. I have a hunch you don’t.

Anyway, I did read your entire post, but I those points you specified don’t help your argument. It seems to me that you are claiming that there needs to be a critical mass in order for legislation to be changed. Apparently if 25% of people are gay (where did you come up with that number…) then we should change the laws, but if there are only 14 million Mormons, we shouldn’t. So, Drew, where do you draw the line? And why is you who gets to draw it?

My point in defining their size and reach was to point out that we don’t need to create hypothetical problems with other, yet to be named groups, when the single, real example touches an extremely small percentage of the populuation.

Jack, your revisionist history and selective reasoning on inter-racial marriage is dangerous at best. The exact same religious/definitional and slippery slope arguments were used to ban inter-racial marriage up through the 60s and 70s (judges, if you look at the numerous cases and decisions, repeatedly stated that interracial marriage was contrary to God’s will and somehow ‘unnatural’). These type of scare tactics, ugly rhetoric, and hyperbolic hypotheticals do nothing but breed institutional prejudice.

How about responding with legitimate reasons for why it is wrong? You think that reducing Mormonism, for example, to a small statistic suffices in dismissing the argument. Putting aside your willingness to marginalize a group of people, you need to make a case for why opening the door for one group (homosexuals) shouldn’t open the door for any others.

Your examples of interracial marriages are also irrelevant because of one common strand between them – they are between a man and a woman.