Like the pleasures of parenting, sharing property, comforting each other in a hospital when death is near. Pretty decadent, those elites.

That was snarkier than I intended. Obviously I differ with you on the question, but I don't have to be a jerk about it.

That said, I think the reason your side is doomed to ultimately lose this battle--whether five, 10, or more years from now--is this sneering at "elites," when, in fact, there are regular people (who happen to be gay) who have regular friends and family and want to be able to take advantage of the civil right of marriage. (The religious right is another thing, and between them and their denomination.) In this context, the contempt for elites becomes its own kind of elitism, a willful blindness to the ordinary desires of ordinary people a bit different from yourself. I don't want my friends to have the right to marry because that'll give us something to feel smug about over charddonay; I want them to have that right because they love each other, share their lives, and deserve to do so.

I won't convince you of that, I know. But your hatred of gay marriage would best be served by tempering your contempt for those who desire it.

They can share their lives without corrupting the concept of marriage.

Joel, good to see that you immediately corrected your Whig instincts with good Toryism.

Kate, I think your assumption that it would somehow corrupt the concept of marriage, assumes that there is some shared concept of marriage. Also it assumes some sort of pshychic value in a shared societal concept. Some folks are married to shrews, and others to rich princes and beautiful maidens. As much as I would sometimes wish it a concept cannot substitute for reality. Far better to pick a good partner than depend upon some sort of nefarious "concept of marriage".

Homosexual marriage would only violate my concept of marriage if I woke up married to some dude. That would be some night in Vegas.

Homosexual marriage is mainly opposed because of the bubble in education, which has fueled writtings about "conceptual understandings of marriage".

Oh the poor Tory's and their "conceptual understandings", what happens to the english language and all this puffery if your school can no longer back its promise of 85K jobs in nursing?

My damn concept of an education is shattered, am I going to marry a conceptual understanding or work a conceptual job?

Your calling out "promissory estoppel" Tory, in a world of Whigs!

As a Whig might say: Fuck this shit!

Bad choice of words?

You are talking variations on a theme. We know the sex of various shrews, maidens and princes and they have always been married to "folks" of the opposite sex. Marriage has been a shared concept; it is only for those who would make the world anew that marriage must now change. People can conjoin in any manner they wish, but to marry you need a man and a woman in something deeper than a partnership.

Oh, thank heavens! Marriage has been saved. The Larry Craigs of the Free State must surely feel better.

(Mind-boggling silliness. And this helps to create jobs how again?)

'Marriage' is a particular thing: the union of a man and a woman. You can put whiskers, a tail, and fur on a pencil and call it a dog, but it will still be a pencil. As usual, it comes down to who's in charge: God or man.

Providentially, libtard idiocy dooms itself in the end. Remove the liberal's dominance in education (easy to do for one's own kids: homeschool), and their disproportionate influence will disappear, leaving behind only the natural influence parents have on their children. Usually ~80% of kids will believe about the world the way their parents do. But here's the thing: libtards reproduce very poorly. What with abortion, homosexuality, and the whole 'the-eart'h-is-overpopulated' meme, your average libtard has 2 kids at most. Many have just one designer child at 39 when the bio-clock's ticking just got too loud to ignore.

I have 4 kids. My kids say they're going to have lots of kids. Guess whose worldview they'll have? Just think of it as evolution in action. Survival of the fittest. Last man standing.

If marriage and family were fundamentally about playing roles, you might have a point. But nature (not the Darwinian one put forward by Doc) has a power and purpose aside from our wills. And I would not use as a model of marriage someone who violates its most fundamental duties. Marriage is about refining our natures, not rationalizing them.

Re Ken's comment:

Actually I agree with you. My 'evolutionary' remarks were meant to be ironic: those who claim to believe that we're the accidental byproducts of a cosmic burp some umpty-billion years ago (i.e. evolution) actually pursue a lifestyle that has negative reproductive value, whilst those who supposedly 'believe in a fairy tale' (theists, primarily conservative Christian theists) tend to reproduce, shall we say, more robustly.