"touch your dicks together in front of my cereal spoon." ha! brilliant!

"I don't like explaining things to my kids... I don't even like talkin' to them!"

Norbizness beat me to it:P

But I always find that excuse funny. Why would they automatically assume they would have to explain the sexual aspects of it to their kids right away? But then I realize these are probably people who don't like explaining heterosexual sex to their kids as well.

Hahaha. Oh, anti-gay attorneys.

Actually, he fairly accurately sums up my curiousities about the whole thing. I understand that people have religious objections. I understand how come folks have the "ick" factor. I also tend to believe that they're both unbelievably egocentric objections, as an individual is not affected by who someone else chooses to love or partner with. But that's neither here nor there.

But what, really, is the legal argument against gay marriage? What possible rationale could there be for treating these people differently from those people, even though all people in question are citizens of the same country and presumably living under the same laws?

"I never understood anger towards gay people because it doesn't affect your--it's actually the one thing that people can do, sex, that doesn't affect you at all. Nobody's being gay AT you . . .I mean, where do you come in?"

Well, there's my humor for the week.

I'm not up on all the technical legal arguments against gay marriage. I think the success of any legal case against gay marriage hinges on how we, as a society, define marriage. Which is why so many States have rushed to clearly define marriage as a union of the one-man-one-woman variety. It's like when they put "man" in the 14th amendment, to make sure only African-American MEN got the vote, because at that point the women's suffrage movement was saying, "Hey, the constitution doesn't use the word 'man.'"

The anti-gay-marriage people use the "slippery slope" argument a lot: if GAY people can get married (they argue), what's to stop people marrying their pets, or unions of more than two people, or adults marrying children (the homosexual=child molester scare narrative again).

To them there's no middle ground--if it's not hetero marriage, then the floodgates are open. Because it's the external form that counts, that protects people. Whereas, I think, people who support gay marriage tend to ask deeper questions about the nature of relationships and commitment. Our definition of marriage is less about the gender roles of the individuals involved than about the nature of their commitment to one another. Gay marriage makes sense in that framework, because it's an agreement between two (or more?) autonomous adults who are making a public commitment to one another. In my opinion, that doesn't open the floodgates for child abuse, etc., because that sort of sexual exploitation is clearly outside the boundaries of the mutuality that is necessary for a marriage relationship.

The anti-gay-marriage people use the "slippery slope" argument a lot: if GAY people can get married (they argue), what's to stop people marrying their pets...

To paraphrase Ellen DeGeneres: If you can get a goat to say "I do" and sign a marriage license, you deserve to marry it.

Stupidest argument *ever*.

The video is hilarious, though.

There is no purely legal argument against gay marriage, except for precedent: this is the way it's always been.

The other arguments are social arguments about the community's definition of marriage and standards of decency that, while codified as law, are not subject to the logic of stuff like equal protection analysis. Or rather they claim to not be subject to that analysis because it's a matter of morality instead of equality.

I love the definition of marraige as a lifetime commitment by consenting adults. To me that's on a much higher moral plane than defining marriage by the biological sex of the participants.

UltraMagnus, the interesting part is how easily kids(of a certain age, around six or so, in my experience) will ACCEPT an explaination as to why "some boys like to kiss girls, some boys like to kiss boys, and some like to kiss both!"(can you tell i have boys!). seriously, if you catch 'em early enough it doesn't have to be any more graphic than that, but that idea is planted, and there ends up being a little less discrimination in the world.

Maggie was three when we moved next to a lesbian couple. She didn't think anything of it until she noticed that their kids were calling both of them "mommy". When she asked me about it, I simply explained that all families are different and that even though not all of them look like hers, they are all just as good. Her exact response: "Oh, okay."

Now that she's seven, she gets that some people like boys, some like girls, and some like both. We've talked to her about homophobia and why it's against our religious and political beliefs. Not only was it not confusing, it wasn’t even all that interesting. She found it far more perplexing that her best friends don’t all like the same cartoons.

In case it wasn't clear, we explained to our daughter that homophobia, not homosexuality, was against our religious and political beliefs.