A Preacher and Gay-Rights (Page 6)

davesdatahut: Ride on, MUST you continually question Zanjan's obvious and reasoned expertise on human relations and society?

Zanjan: Ride On.....uh huh, the stereotypical Texans. Gay Texans are BIGGER than any other gays. Who knew?

FYI, Texas will fit 2.5 times into our province of Nunavut. Oddly, Gay Island in Nunavut has no gays, despite us giving them their own piece of land.

davesdatahut: In case anyone is keeping score at home, Gay Island has no gays because Gay Island.....has no people!. It's uninhabited! At least according to Wikipedia.
Hmmmm, maybe we know someone who could be that pioneering first resident of this place with no gays?

LilMissAlexandria: lesbos in greece has many gay women

Zanjan: Dave, you actually got the humour. Yaaay!

Princess, the legend was before gays decided they had rights. Seriously though, Lesbos isn't named after lesbian women - that's a myth. It's always been a regular Greek Island.

yofolkyj: Jesus said to make your yes a yes and your no a no... when you promise never to leave someone no matter who it is... a promise is still a promise.

Zanjan: True. Jesus didn't support divorce..yet look how many Christians are divorced. But that was another time and another place with different people. They weren't going through the revolutionary changes we are, what with mixed-race, mixed religion, and believer to unbeliever marriages. They kept it all in the family, so to speak. Civilian marriages are outside religious principles.

LilMissAlexandria: so your against mixed race marriages and mixed belief marriages?

Zanjan: No, whatever gave you that idea? The point was the advent those were game changers. Before that, groups were isolated........swimmers across the river tended to meet an ill end.

I can tell you that marriage to someone with different values will definitely meet an ill end.

LilMissAlexandria: just you were saying what is outside your religions principles

Zanjan: Huh??? Religious communities have their own laws of marriage. Civilian marriages are for those who don't belong to a religion.

yofolkyj: I would never ask anyone to stay with me forever, on a promise. If a woman wants to be with me forever she may, and she can have everything without any promises. If she wants to leave me, thats probably because I'm chaotic as hell. I don't believe in any person owning any other person. But people need to stay together to raise a child into adulthood, weather they they still love each other or not. Otherwise you are harming that child. I love my way of life... and promises aren't just promises.

Zanjan: Well, there's no guarantees in life - you can't control the future but you can control yourself. I agree that one should never make a promise they're not absolutely certain they can keep. It's wise to know your limitations and allow for a small margin of error.

For instance, if a person couldn't promise they'd be faithful to me (never cheat), I wouldn't enter into any kind of contract with them. Since this is one promise I know *I* can make to anyone and keep it to my dying breath, I wouldn't waste it on someone who couldn't do the same.

People take vows of responsibility in religious marriage - those vows are different for every religion but by and large, they contain agreement to be guided by God in their marriage. For what it's worth, divorce is hard on adult children too - some never get over it.

LilMissAlexandria: did marriage only start after christianity?

Zanjan: Why would you ask that? As long as there have been religions of any kind, there's been marriage.

I suppose hit & runs and common law couplings (shack-ups) have always been around. Civilian marriage, on the other hand, is a recent practice on the historical timeline.

LilMissAlexandria: i know you believe in the death penalty for homosexual people which i find abhorent but i think you are misguided about your own religion

yofolkyj: Everyone has a guilty filthy soul

Zanjan: Princess, who are you addressing that to? I have no idea what you're talking about.

" Everyone has a guilty filthy soul "

Well, I certainly don't.....which means there are others who don't as well. If what you say is true, religion would be 100% ineffective, as well as any other program of social education - all of it would be pointless because that makes everyone exactly the same - ugly, beastly and unrefined..

Soul's are created pure - God doesn't make junk. And to be guilty, you have to deliberately commit a wrong - not merely make a mistake.

LilMissAlexandria: i delibrately did a wrong by being transgender?

Zanjan: Probably. As in the transsexual, it usually involves deceit, strife and separation. Your soul is not your body.

When you don't like the way God made you, you'll pretend to be somebody else. How you apply that pretentiousness says something about your state of mind, thus the condition of your soul.

If you don't believe in God, well, you're on your own without divine guidance.

Whimsical Fairy: Obama administration steps into gay marriage battle

By Pete Williams, Justice Correspondent, NBC News

The Justice Department Thursday urged the US Supreme Court to uphold same-sex marriage in California and went even further, suggesting it is unconstitutional to block gay couples from getting married in half a dozen other states.

States violate the Constitution, the administration argued, if they offer civil unions to gay couples but deny them the right to marry.

While that position clearly applies to the legal dispute in California, it would also apply to at least seven other states -- Delaware, Hawaii Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, and Rhode Island. Each offers civil unions but not same-sex marriage.

And while the administration takes no position in its brief beyond those states, its reasoning would have even broader implications.

If the administration's legal theory were ultimately accepted, no state could, under constitutional guarantees against discrimination, deny same sex couples the right to marry.

After first suggesting it would not get involved in the California case, the Obama administration late Thursday filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the two gay couples who launched the fight over the issue four years ago.

In a statement, Attorney General Eric Holder said, "In our filing today in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the government seeks to vindicate the defining constitutional ideal of equal treatment under the law ... The issues before the Supreme Court in this case and the Defense of Marriage Act case are not just important to the tens of thousands Americans who are being denied equal benefits and rights under our laws, but to our Nation as a whole."

The Supreme Court hears oral argument in late March to decide the fate of Proposition 8, an amendment to the state constitution approved by 52 percent of California voters in 2008. It banned same-sex marriages in the state and went into effect after 18,000 gay couples were legally married earlier that year.

A federal judge declared the ban unconstitutional, and a federal appeals court last year upheld that ruling, though on narrower grounds that apply only to California. In December, the Supreme Court agreed to take up the issue.

The Justice Department is not directly involved in the case, because the gay couples that brought the lawsuit are challenging a state restriction, not a federal one. But each side had urged the government to file a brief in support of its position.

After voters approved the measure stopping same-sex marriage, state officials in California declined to defend it in court. That defense has been carried on by the original proponents of Prop 8.

The Obama administration last year signaled it would stay on the sidelines. In May, when President Obama first said that "same-sex couples should be able to get married," he added that it was not a matter for the federal government.

"This is an issue that is going to be worked out at the local level because historically this has not been a federal issue. Different states are coming to different conclusions," he said in an interview with ABC News.

Related: Obama administration to express support for gay marriage before high court
But he appeared to express a different view in January, urging legal equality for same-sex couples during his inaugural address.

"Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law, for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well," he said.

In a separate case the administration is urging the Supreme Court to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, a law passed by Congress in 1996 that prohibits federal agencies from recognizing same-sex marriages in states where they are legal. As a result, married gay couples are denied over 1,000 federal benefits available to traditional couples.

"The law denies to tens of thousands of same-sex couples who are legally married under state law an array of important federal benefits that are available to legally married opposite-sex couples," Solicitor General Verrelli wrote last week in urging the court to overturn DOMA.

The law is unconstitutional, he said, "because this discrimination cannot be justified as substantially furthering any important governmental interest."

Nine states currently permit same-sex couples to marry -- Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, and Washington. It is also permitted in Washington, D.C.

davesdatahut: Regardless of Obama's relative successes or failures dealing with domestic economic or foreign policy issues - and there sure are successes and faliures - on the issue of equality and pressing for equal treatment under the law, Obama has few peers as a president. As one impressive example, he has been four-square behind ridding the country of laws preventing gay marriage while preserving the rights of individual religious to do whatever they want about marriage equality, no matter how backward some of their positions may be. He deserves nothing but praise on this issue.

Zanjan: If there is one good thing about legal gay unions, it's sharing legal accountability.

Since the gay community demands to be considered equals, then it should fess up to having the same problems heteros experience. In the gay community, there are predators and victims and vulnerables too.

Shacking up is what users do - but faced down by their partner with the question of legal commitment, they often back out with some stupid excuse. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? More gays are sucked into that dynamic, being misled, than heteros because they've not had the protection - no measuring stick to determine genuine commitment.

If anything good comes out of legal unions, it will be to put these relationships into the spotlight of reality. Like hetero relationships, no marriage will be worth its salt if it began on a sexual foundation. When gays start 'keeping their bodies' to themselves before their legal union, they can enjoy the same honesty of love as heteros who've done the same.

Nymphetamine Ene: this s still going on?

Stassi SUR: Yup.