Mr. Gay Pride: The Blog

I have not been updating this blog recently, in part because I have had a respiratory infection that drastically reduced my energy and ambition, and in part because most of my writings on this topic have been in the form of comments at the end of online news stories. Such comments may not individually warrant inclusion in this blog, any more than would a single brushstroke on canvas warrant display in an art exhibition. But collectively, many such comments paint a picture of a stance against bigotry and for self-assertion by gay men. So from time to time, I will include comments that other people might see as useful in their own argumentation.
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Today's 81 comments relate to a news story on Yahoo May 16th ("Civil rights group [ACLU] calling for 'Modern Family' gay wedding: Marry Cam and Mitch!") You can ordinarily infer the points I am answering.

(a) You're wrong; polls show that a majority of Americans favor gay marriage; (b) it's a TELEVISION SHOW; it you don't want to see it, don't watch.
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Flagged. Keep your sexual fantasies to yourself. As for Nate [who claimed that 99.3% of Americans are hostile to gay people], you are a pitiable liar, given that 53% of Americans now favor gay marriage, and it will be more next week, and more the week after, and more the week after...
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If you watched ANY episode and didn't notice that there is a committed gay couple, you are not the target audience, people with a brain.
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Why do you insist on reading things you say are gross?
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They can get married in other states [than California, where it is set], now 12 in number, plus the District of Columbia; or in Canada; or Mexico City; or the Netherlands or Britain or France or a number of other countries. Lots of shows like to do travel episodes.
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Prig, the CDC does NOT say that gay men comprise 2% of the population. That is a FABRICATION by the Radical Right. NO ONE knows how many gay men there are, because no question is asked on the Census, and people hide, so wouldn't answer truthfully. As for HIV, it is not a disease; nor is AIDS, which is plainly not following the pattern of an infectious agent. Do you believe EVERYTHING Government says?
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TV shows have long played a role in changing society's attitudes, for instance, JULIA, I SPY, and THE COSBY SHOW played a major part in changing the image of black Americans. The ACLU isn't spending a lot of time on this. It has put the idea out there and now just waits for people to act. And no, the ACLU does NOT have anything better to do than to promote social justice. Indeed, that is its core mission.
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Yes, it is extremely odd that Hollywood acts as tho no producer or writer has ever met so much as one gay man. It's appalling, really, that the ugly stereotypes keep getting renewed in the public mind by TV and film.
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You do mean by "losers" all the Radical Right bigots who keep complaining that people outside their tribe are finally getting some attention, right?
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No, they already did an episode in which Mitchell met a girl he tried to take interest in, in high school. Mitchell sorted himself out thereafter and found the courage to be himself.
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Television is a medium driven by ratings, which translates into eyes for ads. If producers detect an audience of size for a given storyline, they might well see an advantage to pursuing it. I don't regard people's saying they'd like to see Mitchell and Cameron marry is pressuring anyone.
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The characters are much too intelligent to travel to Uganda. Keep your ugly bigotry to yourself.
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The ACLU defends free speech, not child molestation, a distinction you maliciously obscure. Nobody is suing the Boy Scouts. The issue was settled by the Supreme Court long ago, and people who disapprove of antigay bigotry by the Boy Scouts make their displeasure felt in other ways, as by boycotts and barring use of school and other public facilities for Boy Scout activities.
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There is no God, so all else you say from that premise is void. You confuse the God of Wrath with the God of Love. They are NOT the same God, and Judaism is not Christianity. I DEFY you to find one single sentence in all the teachings of JESUS hostile to homosexuality. Look thru a red-letter Bible as carefully and as long as you dare, and you will NEVER find anything Jesus said that condemns homosexuality. Quite the contrary, you will find these words (or a variation upon them) that expressly APPROVE of homosexuality: "As you would have others do to you, so too do to them." As for the parts not fitting, that has to be among the stupidest things ever written. If the parts didn't fit, there would be no homosexuality, and you wouldn't have to fixate on it.
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Nate, find another hobby than being a one-line TROLL fixated on homosexuality.
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I don't know that Rustin advocated gay marriage, but one could expect that if he were alive and active now, he would indeed see the extension of full marriage rights to gay men as a natural development in the evolution of civil rights in the United States.
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They're not SUING the producers, only gently nudging them.
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It is certainly not the ONLY thing civil-rights activists have to complain about. There's always that nasty attempt by bigots to stop members of minorities from voting. And other things. But yes, we have addressed some of the worst issues first. Now it's time to address less onerous matters.
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Vander, don't blame Christianity. Jesus's Golden Rule EXPRESSLY EMBRACES homosexuality. As for Dea's recitation of abuses suffered by blacks, essentially every last one of them holds for gay men (not so much for lesbian women). The Bible was used to justify slavery too, in that slavery was a long-established institution in Biblical times. That's the problem with religion: it is quintessentially evil, because it removes from individuals the obligation to think about issues of right and wrong for themselves, but substitutes some unknown someone's pronouncements as "sacred", as must be obeyed.
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You couldn't define "perversion" if your life depended on it.
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Never do the absurdists in these comments areas accept that people can draw distinctions between incest and loving relationships between people born strangers. As for polygamy, that was commonplace for thousands of years, and is smiled upon by the Bible that these same people thump to condemn polygamy!
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Nope, a wedding is an ostentatious public ceremony, often absurdly expensive. Marriage is the right to avail oneself of some 1,000 marital rights, such as filing joint tax returns, visiting a spouse in the hospital as of right, inheriting without a will, etc.
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Nonsense. Not everything is about money, and taxation is the LEAST of the rights of marriage.
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Try to stay in the real world, where ADULTS can draw distinctions between things that are hugely different.
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A real marriage is whatever the GOVERNMENT, which decides the LAW of marriage, says it is.
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That is truly an astonishlingly dopy remark ["I'm so sick of activists, activism, agendas and the offended. Please just shut up and live your lives."]. Do you think that change just HAPPENS, by itself, without anyone proposing, advocating, and agitating for change? Do you think the United States just sprang spontaneously into existence, or that slavery was renounced by the South, or the poll tax just vanished? Be quiet.
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Kathleen cannot, of course, rebut any point in Crowsticks' remark. One-line trolls never can. Sexual orientation is NOT a lifestyle choice. No straight person ever thought, "I think I will be heterosexual". They just found themselves thinking of the opposite sex. Same thing, in reverse, for gay men.
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Vander makes the famous "distinction without a difference". Every TV show makes a number of social and political points in its cast of characters, racial casting, topics discussed, situations resolved, etc. A show that has nothing but straight people says, by inference, that everyone is straight and gay people don't matter. A show that has single people hopping in and out of bed with other single people takes a moral stance about casual sex without commitment. Etc. If people favor the stances of a given show and would like to see them taken further, that's up to the people inclined to exert themselves. I see no basis for anyone to complain that people express their opinion about possible storylines. It's no skin off your nose if 175,000 people urge the producers of any show to do anything.
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I thought Eric must be making a joke, given that "Al Bundy" was played by the same actor who now plays "Jay", the paterfamilias of MODERN FAMILY, who loves his gay son as much as his straight daughter. Then he went on a rant about God-shmod and made a fool of himself. Eric, do yourself a favor and try to find any condemnation of homosexuality by JESUS. You can't do it. His Golden Rule expressly accepts homosexuality as moral; read it aloud.
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If gay people aren't special, why do you keep treating us as special, rather than the same as everybody else?
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Now, find a red-letter Bible and search for a condemnation of homosexuality by JESUS, not Saul of Tarsus ("St. Paul"), who persecuted Christians "even unto death". You can't. So shut up. Paul is NOT Jesus; never MET Jesus; never heard a word Jesus said; and substituted his JEWISH rantings for Jesus's Christian teachings. But in any case, there is no God, so nobody need concern him- or herself with words put in God's mouth by dopy ancient bigots.
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The Radical Right is certain that if they flood comments areas online with short, nasty, viciously antigay comments -- or longer posts they cut and paste from a word-processing document stored on their computer -- they can persuade people that bigotry is the majority view. They tried that for four years with regard to Obama, using multiple logins to 'prove' that the great majority of Americans hate the President and he was going down to defeat if he dared run again. Then we had an actual election, and he was re-elected by 5M votes. Here too we see that actual polls of public opinion show that the bigots are not just in the minority, but on the RUN. In the past 6 months, 5 states have legalized gay marriage! The bigots are terrified that their total defeat, everywhere, is only a matter of time.
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Cue the TWILIGHT ZONE theme! [About the "2nd coming"] Jesus was a very nice MAN who had very wise things to teach, such as the Golden Rule, which you might try reading aloud in connection with homosexuality. But he died almost 2,000 years ago, and no one has ever come back from the dead.
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Your "shove it down [our] throats" language shows your sexual anxiety. Nobody is trying to take you against your will. As for your invented statistic, NOBODY knows how many gay people there are, and all statistics on that subject are FICTION.
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Your fingers actually forced you to tell the truth: "I do go around pushing my life style on them". Repeat, you DO push your lifestyle on others.
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Keep your Jewish [Sodom and Gomorrah] fiction to yourself.
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You do realize, Kenny, that your argumentation about the unknown and undetectable applies to "God"? But the argument has no logic to it. You are saying that sterile people have no rights, and that the only way people provide for the future is children, not their work to support society, teach children, and protect basic values of the civilization. Your "logic" is total drivel. Gay people who create things and defend values and pay their taxes and educate the young do everything people are supposed to do. Some even CHOOSE to have children, not by accident, but by design, and take care of their children instead of running out on them and having to be dragged into court to pay child support. You are not the moral superior of gay men -- indeed, you are not even our equal. We don't deny you the right to live your life by your lites. You DO try to stop us from living our lives by our lites. Be quiet.
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To me, heterosexuals are perverts, but I don't go out of my way to call them names. FIVE states have legalized gay marriage in the past six months. Antigay bigots ARE losing, and you know it. Suffer!
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Gary, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. Polls show 53% of Americans favor gay marriage; and nobody knows how many gay people there are, so your 1% 'statistic' is an ugly, dopy fiction. If gay people were really so few, there would be no gay-rights movement, and you wouldn't have HEARD about gay marriage. Res ipse loquitur.
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Saying what you'd like to see does not constitute giving orders.
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I just love the Radical Right's insistence that they are oppressed! Be quiet. No one is so stupid as to believe that.
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The ACLU fites for people's constitutional rights. You are opposed to that. That says more about you than about the ACLU.
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Thank you for being so forthright in your bigotry. It's refreshing to see an open racist nowadays. Most people have better sense than to subject themselves to social disapproval for voicing the attitudes of 60 years ago.
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Yes, A.D., David reveals his ignorance about what is possible in biology today, tho he is right that two men cannot have their OWN child together without a surrogate. At least not yet. But, what will happen if science DOES find a way to combine two sperm with a very large cell, be it an ovum from which the nucleus has been removed, and the merged embryo then grows to term? Then what argument will the bigots have left?
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There are VERY few gay characters on TV shows, so gay characters cannot be a reason for not watching "many" other shows.
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The peripheral characters in most of those shows were unimportant, and not the reason for the shows' cancelation. The problem with the other shows is that Hollywood insisted on pushing tired stereotypes of gay men as nelly fruits, and not even gay men wanted to see that.
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David, cut your stereotyped, bigoted garbage. As for divorce court, yes, there will be some gay divorces, but most gay people take marriage a lot more seriously than does the typical heterosexual couple, so won't be rushing into a marriage they cannot expect to work long-term.
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Prig is willfully and maliciously misrepresenting the issues. The Federal Government INTRUDED into states rights in the "Defense of Marriage Act", by asserting that states could NOT let same-sex couples marry. The real issue is ENDING Federal intrusion and requiring the Feds to live up to the "full faith and credit" provision of the Constitution. Nobody cares if dopy bigots vent their spleen. They just show themselves to be detestable excuses for human beings, and we can fite back more forcefully than they can, because we are SMARTER than the bigots.
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Where to start? David, good riddance, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. No, cancel that: do let the door hit you on the way out. As for all this nonsense about gay people forcing themselves on others, the bulk of gay people are IN HIDING, and force nothing on anybody, but do not even let people know their orientation. As for God, there is no such critter, and no intelligent person -- repeat: NO intelligent person -- believes in God. As for canceled shows, I have watched the awful show GO ON several times and never noticed any lesbian character. I also do not identify with lesbians, so am not interested in lesbian characters on TV. I just don't like the show, so stopped watching. At end, however, your argument is ludicrous: all the shows with only heterosexual characters have been canceled because people don't want to see heterosexuals? Be quiet. Writers who are not gay don't know how to deal with gay characters, so cannot create compelling TV around gay storylines. At least THE NEW NORMAL had a funny antigay bigot, played by the brilliant Ellen Barkin, whose over-the-top witchiness was entertaining. But one of the lead characters was nelly, and gay men are very tired of that ugly, stupid stereotype. You'd think that HOLLYWOOD would know better than to resurrect that dying stereotype.
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It really is that simple [if you don't like gay news stories, don't read them]. The stories don't pursue you into your very home, shouting at you no matter how you try to evade them. They are passive, and require you to ACTIVELY SELECT to read them. And then you complain that you are being imposed upon. Maybe. But not by us, not by anyone or anything outside yourself.
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Fictional characters don't want anything. Writers create storylines and words for them.
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There are plenty of jurisdictions, in the U.S. and abroad, in which Mitch and Cam could get married. The writers could "take the show on the road" to NY or Vancouver or Amsterdam or Paris or London or Mexico City. All kinds of possiblities present themselves with such a range of destinations.
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Ronnyp, take your Jewish garbage to the nearest trash receptable. Read Jesus's Golden Rule aloud, with homosexuality in mind. As for anyone who believes in God, you are entitled to believe in any nonsense you wish, just don't "shove it down our throats". Many criminals DO believe in God, David, and untold numbers of criminals "find God" in prison and then insist on being forgiven for their sins. Nonbelievers don't call their actions "sins"; we call them "crimes", and punish them for them.
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If, as seems at present unlikely, the Supreme Court upholds antigay legislation, decent Americans will simply demand change thru the legislative process, as has produced the legalization of gay marriage in five states in six months. You won't be laffing long.
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I've seen the show regularly (tho not every episode) and never saw a commitment ceremony. Nor do I think Jay would pay for Mitchell and Cam's wedding.
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The ACLU does not sue Christians. It defends against impositions by Christians upon Government and non-Christians, and defends Christians against Government impositions.
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Much less than 1/2 of 1% of all storylines on American television have ANY gay angle. Stop being so silly.
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There is no uniformity of opinion in major media. "The media" as you use it is a fiction, a lie.
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No, gay men are not freaks, and people working for social justice are trying to IMPROVE the country.
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We also use the term "homosexual". Is THAT a euphemism? There is nothing perverted about being sexually, esthetically, and emotionally attracted to one's own sex, any more than it is perverted to be so attracted to someone of the opposite sex. You can't think beyond the confines of your own little mind. That's your problem. Don't try to make it ours.
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If the gay couple on MODERN FAMILY plays roles -- which most gay men do NOT -- it is probably the other way around, given how nelly "Cam" is. But since these are not real people, it is pointless to speculate about their sexual activities. As for breast-feeding, I suppose you never heard of bottles. Bottles with rubber nipples have only been around for 168 years! And earlier devices date back to prehistory.
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Wishful thinking is sad. Antigay bigotry is dying out, not growing. Read the polls; look at the five states in six months that have legalized gay marriage, and stop lying to yourself -- and us.
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Miles... is wrong about everything. Sad. Atheists want to end impositions upon them by the religious. What a howl there would be from religious people if the Government put "There Is No God" on all the money! But putting "In God We Trust" is OK with them. Government is supposed to be religiously neutral. It does not require churches to marry gay people; it must not permit churches to forbid gay people from marrying. As for 'perpetuating society', heterosexuals are destroying the planet thru overpopulation. Do you think all these "baby mamas" who have multiple children thru multiple "baby daddies" perpetuate society? Sure, but they also subvert society. In gay marriage, there is not such subversion, only support for society. Think about it: a spouse takes care of his spouse, so Government doesn't have to do it. That can save HUGE amounts of taxpayer money, that could instead be used to benefit other people.
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You probably have no idea what the ACLU has done, and how much of our liberty has been defended successfully by the ACLU and its local chapters.
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The ACLU has NEVER attacked Christianity, only attempts by religious groups to violate the separation of church and state.
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You do realize that your sick fantasies of eternal damnation is SADISM, right? Harry Hay founded ONE organization. There were organizations in Europe long before Harry Hay, and there were myriad organizations after Harry Hay who did not share much of any of his values. I founded one in 1969, and at the time I had never heard of Harry Hay. Once I found out something about him, I detested him. Not all gay men are alike, any more than all heterosexual men are alike. You are asserting total nonsense. And to say that having a satisfying sexual relationship makes one into an out-of-control sex fiend -- which IS what you are suggesting -- is just plain crazy. The present issue is gay MARRIAGE, not promiscuity nor sadism nor any other irrelevancy.
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News media don't make up news; they merely report it to people who want to know it. That includes YOU when it comes to gay stories.
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The opening paragraf was lite-hearted, not serious. Liten up.
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I guess you didn't get the news: Jesus is dead. He can't hear you, and in any case would have no power over events. There is no God, and Jesus was NOT an antigay bigot. Read his Golden Rule aloud, with homosexuality in mind.
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I'm sure you do hear such a saying [the only good gay person is a dead gay person] at KKK meetings and other social gatherings of enemies of society.
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Most people can do more than one thing. The ACLU has many projects; this is only one.
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Search for fotos of Richmond, VA in 1865, then picture YOUR community destroyed by the winning American side in your desired second civil war. And picture yourself and everyone on your side sterilized so that there will never be a THIRD civil war.
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There is no God, so if your only argument against homosexuality is God, you have no argument. So be quiet.
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Flagged for incitement to genocide. You need to be banned from civilized discussion boards.
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You are not just bigoted, but also illiterate. You misused the word "there" multiple times. Nobody cares what an illiterate wants.
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Civil marriage is not about religious marriage. A person can "marry" as many people as his/her church permits, but such "marriages" are legally void, and carry no rights. So you misstate the case.
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Gay people are no longer intimidated into silence. Deal with it.
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And what will you say if the Supreme Court rules that a 52% majority is not enuf to take away the right to marry, and that DOMA is void as in conflict with the "full faith and credit" provision of the Constitution?
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Why do so many Rightwingers think that covering the news is issuing propaganda?
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Why do you insist on seeing a suggestion as an imposition?
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Weddings aren't political, and myriad TV shows and films show weddings all the time. NOBODY sees a heterosexual marriage as political, so seeing a gay marriage as political is dishonest. It would simply show the legal reality in, for instance, NYS, Canada, Mexico City, Paris, London, Amsterdam or wherever "Mitchell" and "Cam" decide to get married.