Except there are people with XXX or with XXY chromosomes.

And even if there weren't, just because there's a binary pair of genetic conditions doesn't force us to treat people in a binary way, just to suit your anxiety at ambiguity.

Because marriage offers many protections, some legal and others social, as well as conventions guiding the behavior of parties within the marriage according to mutually recognized expectations.

Your ignorance of the many benefits of marriage, despite the penalties for violating it, obligates you to look into it more before talking like an authority on it.

You're arguing semantics. These people aren't "gender changers", they're "gender identity changers", going to more or less extreme effort to change gender identity cues.

They certainly can pick their gender identity. Many of them do on the basis of an involuntary compulsion that defines their every moment just as much as a person without the compulsion is defined by their own identity - and its voluntary cues. That is who they are, which is different from others.

As long as they're not doing anything to you, why should you care? Why should you even care if someone has surgery to look like a different species, if that's how they feel?

That's right: involuntarily identifying completely as the opposite gender is just like thinking you're a different species. And people who cross-gender identify are exactly like people of the opposite gender. That's not a salami, that's a sack of fallacies.

And gender has been redefined the more we've learned about it.

We don't have "a universal checkbox" that says "male" or "female", except in your mind. People don't have to pick anything just to avoid reminding you that you're gay.

All Americans are free to marry only members of their own race. Freedom!

You're a bigot. Probably homosexual, hiding behind incomplete logic, afraid to have compassion. Get over it.

The Constitution nipped that kind of "democracy" in the bud by giving us representatives and a Constitution each more powerful than the democracy that creates them. I don't know whether we agree, but I know that "the end of democracy in America" that Card mourns was executed by 1789.

He's talking about "the end of majority tyranny in Utah". Good riddance.

Nonsense. The phrase "taken away" doesn't mean "removing what once was given" here, but rather "depriving of an option for some that's available to others".

Before women's right to vote was protected a century ago, they had the right, just as men had the right. Exactly as Black people's right to vote prior to 1865. But the government wasn't instructed to protect that right. Their right to vote was taken away by the refusal of the state to register them. If you say that's not "taken away", your disagreement is purely semantic, and irrelevant.

The issue for Conservatives is that you're bigots. Period.

The Constitution instructs the creation of government as representatives who have the power, elected by people who have only the power to vote and to petition for redress of grievances, and implicitly to exercise rights the government is instructed to protect. The government of representatives has all the other power.

That is the definition of a republic.

Though of course I'm a fan of the 13th and 15th Amendments, the democratic process for passing them required the killing of hundreds of thousands of people, the forced abdication of their elected leaders, and the military occupation of their lands after destroying much of their infrastructure. I am grateful for the outcome of the Civil War, but the ends contain the means, and more than just democracy produced those Amendments.

The rest of those Amendments and laws weren't purely democratic in their process, either, but rather republican and otherwise political outside of simply voting, whether by citizens or by their representatives. Indeed, even the Civil Rights Act was enforced by threat (and sometimes exercise) of violence. As, sorry to say, are most laws that prevent some people from taking without permission from others.

It forces the government to deny equal protection (of marriage) to some people but not to others, based on a difference that does not conflict with the public interest in applying the protection to anyone. That is why this is a marriage equality issue, just as it was when the difference was racial, not gender.

Slavery was popular. Violating people's rights like that should not be. Judges have the power to throw out laws for this very reason.

Old people and others can't reproduce, but there's no fertility test for marriage. Nor do we require marriage for reproduction. Because marriage isn't primarily for the purpose of reproduction: it's for the purpose of people joining their lives together akin to a single person, and for joining families and property as if to a single person.

BTW, sex change recipients are almost always sterile.

Rights aren't given, we have them and we create governments to protect them.

Oh, and you're citing "an affront to religions everywhere" while insisting "you do not have the right not to be offended". The remedy for people trying to silence you is not for you to kill them.

You are wrong about everything. You are a pretty sick person. You are probably gay, terrified that our society is gradually removing excuses for you to stay in the closet, and hate gay people because they make you feel things you want to repress. Just like nearly every person who hates gay people, and gets all worked up to talk about killing people over gay freedoms.

Just kiss that guy/girl who makes you feel funny already. The rest of us won't even notice, except that you finally shut up about your personal hangups.

Or you might be a non-American who so fetishizes their own fellow citizens that you think only American mobs are tyrannical. A bigot, in any language.

What about spousal abuse, child abuse and other domestic abuse? There's lots of threats to the "sanctity" of opposite sex marriage, coming from heterosexuals.

Why don't you actually try to convince your church of your idea, instead of putting it in the purely hypothetical conditional? You're a Christian, you're supposed to take action especially among Christians to do what you think your church says is moral. See what people who say they agree with your morals actually do when you try to actually live by them.