I'm confused. Is there anybody on Slashdot that doesn't just like to argue?

A small subset of people who happen to live in the area, have religious believes about that land, and are really, really tired of having other people trample on their culture time after time.

The referendum was taken after the Anschluss, and was conducted under Russian supervision only. The 98% vote for incorporation into the Russian Reich is extremely clear evidence that it's bogus.

A negotiation tactic used by largely powerless people who resent what happened to their ancestors and culture and why they are powerless. They have legitimate gripes.

Which means that the majority can just trash on the culture of the minority. Considering what happened to Hawaii and its previous culture, I can't blame the descendants for being sensitive.

Nobody is forcing you to marry someone of the same sex. As far as churches go, they're sacred while in use as churches, but there's no problems with leaving a church building and building another one. Some cultures have sacred land, which isn't really something other cultures understand, and there are problems with swapping out land.

People like having tradition, even if they pay no attention to it in daily life. It gives us role models, a sense of belonging in history, and other things. I'd be upset if English and Swedish cultures were utterly destroyed, and my grandparents were born in the US.

Since Hawaiian culture was largely destroyed by force, and Hawaiians were disenfranchised by force, it seems reasonable that there are still bad feelings.

The old Hawaiian government was overthrown by private US interests, and never restored despite court orders. I don't know that there ever were any treaties (not that the US government has done a good job of living up to treaties with the natives). I don't see this as reason to continue to mistreat the natives.

However, the typical white idea of moving on is to maintain power, not let Indians control the resources that nominally belong to the tribes, and use the established imbalance of power to take what more they want. The Federal government is defaulting on treaty obligations all the time.

This doesn't happen if all the details are nailed down. If you ever find such a project, with all the details nailed down, that isn't in one of those fields where they spend lots of money for verification like NASA, I'm sure you could charge programmers admission to go in and see it in amazement.

Matchmaking? In most matchmaking services, the service gets paid by both sides. There are matchmaking services where the woman gets paid, but they have a somewhat different reputation.

There have been up to three popes (when some Catholics decided they'd settle this two-pope business), but at the moment there's only one, but the Vatican is very roughly a sixth of a square mile.

Ah, so not only do you not have evidence, you have to cover that fact up with shrill emotional attacks that are themselves false. That implies things about the strength of your position.

It's a lot more than that. A list of things marriages do legally would be quite long, and I don't know that they can all be covered in other ways.

Gender is changeable. Race is a primarily a social construct (in any biological sense, Obama is not black). People can change their citizenship. Meanwhile, sexual orientation appears to be largely innate. There are people who are more or less bi, and they can switch back and forth. That doesn't apply to everybody.

As far as families go, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that two loving parents are better than one. It's true that not having a father is bad, but that's at least partly because it reduces the number of parents. Do you have any stats for children of same-sex couples vs. opposite-sex couples?