One of the characters looks and acts suspiciously like you...did they cast him after you said no?

For freedom to be complete, it has to include the freedom to choose not to be free.

how long it will take someone in the audience to get into his cell phone.

Now that was most definitely an ad hominem. How come Red Hat gets to protect their name and straight married couples can't?

Wow, combination straw man and ad hominem. I think we'll have to agree to disagree.

1) I'm not advocating any such thing. I said right in the beginning that I believe all the legal rights conferred to married straight couples be conferred to gay couples, with the sole and single exception being the ability to call it "marriage". As much as we might like things to be absolutely equal, the fact is that there are differences. We don't hear men protesting the gender inequality of not having been given vaginas in addition to their penises. Some words just aren't appropriate to be applied to circumstances other than the one tradition allows.

2) That's a larger issue that I am choosing to not consider, since it's sort of tangential to the topic at hand. You are probably right, there, but I've have to think about it more before I decided what my opinion would be there.

3) I'm not married, but if I was, I think I would still feel the same way. Me and my future wife will have a beautiful wedding and an amazing day, if and when that happens. Having gay marriages would diminish that day...we'd no longer be part of a tradition, rather going with something else, far removed from what we grew up with and what we believe now. Scroll up for my Champagne analogy to understand why.

Debase is the right term, sorry you don't like it. Go look it up sometime, it means more than you think it does.

Let me give you an analogy to illustrate my meaning...Champagne is a sparking wine, made from grapes from the Champagne region of France. Now, people all over the world grow grapes, and all over the world those grapes get made into all sorts of wine, some of them even sparkling wines. But only the ones from that specific part of France can legally be called Champagne. Why is that, you ask? Tradition. Now, what if the very talented winemakers from California wanted to be allowed to call their sparkling wines Champagne...they use the same grapes, the same techniques to make it, why shouldn't they have the same legal rights? But they don't, because of tradition. So the California growers have to call theirs "sparkling wine". If, somehow, the California growers did and end run around the law, then there would be Champagne from Champagne on the market as well as this fake Champagne from California, which debases the value of the original Champagne by it's mere existence.

Yes, I know wine bottles and people are different, but tradition is tradition.

Perhaps what is needed is for us to learn from history. I don't think separate but equal was ever intended to actually be equal...certainly not by the people who implemented it. It could have been implemented equally, but that wasn't what happened. Maybe if we took more care to ensure and defend equality, we could do it right this time.

Do you have a source for that statement? I've never heard of gay marriages in the Middle Ages...gay people, gay unions, possibly, but not "marriages". I like being proved wrong, though.

See, that's a fantastic idea. Divorcing legal unions from religious marriage (pun not intended, but welcome) would solve the debate for everyone. For straight couples, it'd be pretty much the same...go to city hall, fill out your paperwork for the legal benefits, then have a religious ceremony if you choose to and if your religion permits it.

I'm all for gay couples having the same kinds of rights as straight couples, but I don't understand why they have to use the term marriage. There are all kinds of examples where very similar products can only be called by a certain name under certain conditions...champagne versus sparkling wine is a good example. Why can't they keep marriage as referring to a man and a woman, like hundreds of years of tradition, and simply have a legally identical "civil union" or some other name? I don't see why they need to debase the term marriage to achieve their ends.

I would so watch that show! Every week, they take us to a company to look over their pathetic network and re-do it properly and with moar power. I can see it now...the teary-eyed IT manager is brought in to see his new network...it'd be like Bob Vila for geeks.

I remember reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand in Grade 11. The whole class read it, and we spent days discussing and dissecting it. It had a fairly graphic rape scene, as I recall, and nobody seemed to have any problems with that. And it was a Catholic school!

Give it to them??

Well, I did say it was only five seconds of googling. I doubt the BASIC of 'Bill Gates and Woz' would be appropriate for a modern device, anyways. I have some very unfond memories of trying to produce graphics in BASIC on my VIC-20 when I was very young, and it only had 176 x 184 pixels.