That's a great idea, let the stupid decide what the laws should be. Marriage isn't a religious institution, it's a legal institution. It's a contract and it always has been. The religious ceremony literally means nothing legally. You can be married without a ceremony and you can be not married despite having the ceremony. The ceremony is the fluff, the marriage certificate you sign during (or after) the ceremony is the actual important part. Marriage is civil law.

Furthermore, in America marriage has never been solely the province of religion, and can never be so. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" is the very first amendment of your constitution. If marriage is a religious institution then government has no business making any laws about it. So anyone who believes that marriage is a religious institution and thus gays shouldn't be allowed to get married is wrong, because either it's not religious and the government has no obligation to bow to the views of some Christians or it is and the government is legally prohibited from doing so by it's own constitution.

Additionally, please note that some churches are perfectly happy to marry gay couples and preventing them from doing would be an actual infringement on their religious liberties unlike the bullshit argument that not allowing you to prevent a gay couple from getting married is somehow restricting your liberty.

I knew I'd seen your argument before. People before you believed that blacks didn't need to be married because they weren't really people, and then they opposed mixed race marriages because black and whites shouldn't mix that way. Most likely, 20 years from now you will vehemently deny that you were ever this homophobic.

The latter, of course, but you are engaging in the same bullshit as Fiorina. Has it ever occurred in your sorry excuse for a brain that Tim Cook might oppose both activities? When will you navel-gazing idiots learn that "somebody else did something worse" is never a good reason for tolerating injustice?

Then why pass a law to enable anti-gay people to break contracts with gay people? It certainly wasn't "the left" that passed the law. Get a clue before you spout your ignorant nonsense.

This is all about Fiorina positioning herself for her bid for the Republican presidential candidacy, however, her comments are pure bullshit. You can't require a trillion dollar multi-national company stop doing business in every jurisdiction that has laws or policies the CEO disagrees with and It's not hypocrisy to use your free speech rights to advocate against policies that are abhorrent to you. It's also not hypocrisy to allow people from countries that have policies you're fighting against to give money to your charitable organization. However, Fiorina is holding other people to standards to she would never hold herself to, and that is hypocrisy. Of course, Fox News not only airs this bullshit but airs it uncritically and that's one of the reasons so many people despise Fox News. The only reason this is news is that she is making a bid for the presidency, otherwise this would another be "washed-up has-been says stupid things" story on page 27.

Frankly, I expect better from Fox News and I expect better from someone who wants to be president than moronic reactionary criticism.

I'm with you. I've seen it on LinkedIn when people boast about the amazing lunch at the amazing convention/tradeshow full of amazing people.

Facebook: Actual friends and interests you have.
LinkedIn: Keep it strictly business.
Twitter: To follow the odd interest.
Google+: So you can say "I'm on Google+!"

I hate it when you see someone posting the same tripe across all their social networks. No one on LinkedIn cares what you ate for lunch.

Bullshit. You don't believe this, it's just an excuse to enable your prejudice. If you really believed it you'd be up in arms over opposite-sex married couples who don't have children and supporting same-sex couples who have children (adopted or other wise).

I think he meant Randall Munroe, apparntly he's some kind of blagger who draws stick figures in his spare time...

Good, because if the models predicted events that did not happen, that would be a bad sign for them. The "polar ice refreezing" that you are refering to didn't happen. Polar ice did rebound from a record low, which it was widely expected to do. In fact, every record low polar ice year is followed by a few years that are higher than the record low before until we reach the next record low. However, the overall trend is still downward.

From my understanding, that is correct. Warming in the arctic is changing the wind flow which is allowing colder Arctic air to be pushed over the North East section of North America.

The National Science Foundations seems to think it will be 1 or 2 million years from now. Are you sure you know the difference between reporters and scientists?

Maybe, the flip out at you because it's not true? Mars isn't warming.

You can look at the social contract as citizenship in the country to which you were born. Of course, that makes it a negative option contract, and you can therefore opt-out by formally renouncing your citizenship. However, by keeping your citizenship (and the rights and responsibilities inherent in that citizenship), you are implicitly choosing to be bound by the social contract. In most countries, you are not bound to the rules of the contract at birth, but rather have a graduated system where at certain ages you become more bound by the rules and more entitled to the privileges of adulthood.

While that story is terrible, I am a bit sceptical. Do have any evidence to show that it actually happened, and is not just an urban legend that you're repeating with no supporting evidence? I found nothing related when I did a quick search for the story. Fundamentally, it seems a bit unlikely that the system would release someone who was convicted of murder in the first degree to "make room", and double unlikely when he seems to be highly unrepentant and has not been in prison long enough for his "mentally retarded" girlfriend to move on.

Of course, the recidivism (ex-convicts committing another crime after release) rate is highly variable between countries, for instance Canada has a recidivism rate of around 13% while the United States has a recidivism rate of around 60%. However, even in the United States the recidivism rate for people charged with murder and released is around 1.2%, the vast majority of released murder convicts never commit another crime (let alone another murder). The criminals most likely to be caught and sent to prison again are burglars, drug dealers, fences and illegal arms dealers. And they would never be subject to the death penalty, anyway. I suspect the very low murder recidivism rate for murderers is because most murderers are released long after their most violent years have passed.

So you might frame the question, should society murder the 98.8% of murderers who will never commit another crime to stop the 1.2% who will?

Well, I can think of a few differences:

1. The first case costs the state (taxpayers) significantly more money because of legal bills.
2. There's more time for the error to be discovered in the second case, which means the wrongfully convicted may not die in a cell.
3. The blood of innocent isn't on society's collected hands because they didn't deliberately murder an innocent man.

Executions are never really "fair, equitable, efficient [or] effective". Legals costs make them expensive and inefficient, in America they are predominantly performed on black prisoners which makes them more racist than fair or equitable, and since they are more expensive and have a lower deterrence value than life in prison they are not terribly effective. Frankly, all it does is satisfy a very primal urge to see a simplistic punishment applied to the person who we believe has done wrong. There's a conservative part in all of us that wants to see death dealt to those who have wronged us, but unfortunately, that's neither practical, reasonable nor moral.