I imagine you're referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, though I'm not sure what court case you're referring to. Or perhaps you're just referring to the battle over school segregation Kennedy talked about eg. here.

What reasons do you have in mind? (I'd like to note I listed none myself beyond a vague sort of analogy.) I also seriously doubt marriage equality will take as long as you suspect in the US, unless you're quite old (I am not).

Sorry about my link on #2, though it should be easy for any techie to fix. Here's a working version.

1 and 3 are not the same thing. 1 is a general sort of background acceptance even for those gay people who will never marry while 3 is a personal reason a gay couple actually gets married.

I don't think you understood 3 at all. My point was that in the minds of other people a married couple is considered "family" to each other, which is the type of recognition couples in general and gay couples in particular often want.

That'd be hilarious. I don't think it would happen though. I've heard nothing of the kind despite, for instance, The Netherlands legalizing same-sex marriage over a decade ago. If everyone just shut up about it, the tiny fraction of gay marriages to all marriages would make the impact nearly insignificant.

The box I've put you in so far is: smart-ish, not particularly good with detail with a particular emphasis on oversimplification, kind of a jerk but also a nice guy to the people he likes, doesn't care much at all what other people think, non-standard political views.... I certainly don't have enough data to give a complete analysis though.

Not really. For instance, Romney has said

It should also be noted he has (at least in the past... he changes positions periodically) supported domestic partnerships, though I'm not sure precisely what he had in mind.

That said, as a gay man myself, this one issue isn't enough to decide my vote anyway, and I prefer Obama's politics on the whole. (I'm also not nearly as cynical about his recent gay marriage stance change as you seem to be. FWIW he said he was going to announce it before the DNC and that Biden just sped things up. Since the political fallout is unclear and this election could be so close, I considered it a courageous move.)

The 1883 Supreme Court case Pace v. Alabama dealt with basically this issue, but in the context of interracial marriage. The Court interpreted Alabama's anti-miscegenation laws as punishing blacks and whites equally, so they said it satisfied the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause. This was overturned in the 1967 case Loving v. Virginian, where the Court completely revised its stance:

With that in mind, I would suggest the "extra rights" argument won't stand the test of time.

The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment is often brought up in this sort of argument:

You might say current state marriage laws are equal--gay guys can marry women if they want to, for instance--but that line of reasoning was rejected by the courts in interracial marriage debates many years ago. Both of these apply specifically to states--I'm not sure what the constitution-based pro-gay-marriage arguments are at the federal level.

The usual counterargument is that the "separate but equal" doctrine is intrinsically flawed since separation implies inequality. Barack Obama shared your view for many years before he evolved to a pro-gay-marriage one. I haven't heard a good non-sound-byte list of reasons why he switched, but my guess (hope?) is that he met some gay parents, saw they were basically the same as everyone else, and said "what the hell, why not?"

That said I'm happy the debate has moved on to this. "I'm all for gay couples having the same kinds of rights as straight couples" is a great way to start.

I've been reading the book Debating Same-Sex Marriage (endorsed by both Rick Santorum and Dan Savage, who gave Santorum its... other... meaning). The pro-same-sex marriage advocate, John Corvino, in this case is in the minority--he doesn't necessarily believe polygamy should be allowed. He explains why in section 4 of his opening essay:

I've clipped some of his discussion for brevity, but his overarching point is that there is ample evidence (which he briefly presents) that allowing same-sex couples to marry is not harmful and is even beneficial, while there is also ample evidence that polygamy is harmful, so same-sex marriage should be allowed and polygamy shouldn't. It should be noted though that he also says,

(I'm having trouble getting through Maggie Gallagher's half of the book, but so far their biggest disagreement is typified by the above. Corvino uses effects-based, what-will-this-do-to-society arguments, and Gallagher uses abstract definition-based arguments. I suspect Corvino won the debate, though again I haven't finished it yet.)

In order of importance...
1. Symbolic acceptance. (I imagine you've never had to come out to your conservative fundamentalist family members; this is important.)
2. Over a thousand on-the-books legal rights.
3. Public recognition of your new status as family members--not "boyfriends", but family.

See (2). You may be using "rights" in some metaphysical sense, but to be honest I care about reality and not your philosophy.

Yes, but Nathan Lane stole it in the 90's and won't give it back!

You are incorrect, that is not the source of my "misunderstanding", and I have explained why several times. Your discussion about arguments makes it sound like you want to be able to object to me without allowing me to object to you. Even if you were a Nobel laureate that would be preposterous (though in that case I would make my objections much more highly refined, for instance discussing them with a third party first).

The "unphysical" thing I'm discussing is a hypothetical newly discovered physical mechanism. I'm just arguing against that hypothetical discovery. I understand it has not been discovered yet, and my argument provides strong evidence that it will never be discovered. The general form of argument, "X is not physically observed so any argument Y that refers to X is fallacious", is itself flawed. It does not work eg. with the Pauli Exclusion Principle, where certain configurations of quantum particles are not observed and yet many solid arguments are based on the statistics that result.

You are correct. Especially in rereading my earlier points, my emotional tone very much hurt my case more than helping it--though I stand by the content of everything I said, the style I said it in was off-putting. I know I am correct in general, and I know that it does not come across that way, especially to the uninitiated, which most of the mods are. That explains why they chose you over me. In my view, you have not addressed my points (or understood many of them, I suppose?) while I have been able to understand and address all of yours to my satisfaction. I'm not sure what more to say. Good luck to you.

Yup, excellent point. I haven't actually seen statistics on how many people get infected that way, but it's of course a possibility. I remember reading an "advice to cheaters" guide that brought this up--it said that, if you're going to cheat, at *least* wear protection so the poor guy you're screwing over doesn't get sick.

I agree with all of your points. I do not agree that they were all actually relevant to my post (for instance, my 1-3 months remark was in the context of someone having bareback sex with multiple partners [note the "If you can't"'s], in which case it's perhaps even generous), but oh well. Actually, I do contest one point--"absolute certainty" about being HIV negative, while not 100%, can be extraordinarily close. One would need several tests after months of 0 risky behavior. I mostly meant to cover the case of eg. two pairs of married guys who want to bareback amongst themselves. And even then, my discussion completely ignores other STDs.

I feel I have listened to you but that you have not listened to me, since many of your points have been repeated in each post without you addressing my already-raised objections. I begin to suspect (just suspect) that you have some developmental problem like low-grade austism that prevents you from holding this debate properly. Still, I will raise my objections one more time.

No, I am not (and neither is my source). The misunderstanding is yours. I (and my source) made no assumptions whatsoever about how tachyons might form. As I said before maybe they've always existed, or maybe some change to special relativity won't alter the relativity of simultaneity in an essential way while also allowing the creation of tachyons from sub-light-speed matter.

I agree with you here, but yet again your statement is irrelevant. I do not care how one might create tachyons, I merely assumed their existence. I would like to remind you that my original FTL travel discussion was in the context of new discoveries allowing FTL communication, so the existence of a tachyon isn't even my own assumption, but rather my interpretation of someone else's probable argument. My original point was that FTL communication would result in such a radical violation of well-tested principles of special relativity as to be astonishing.

You have finally begun insulting me. I insulted you in my first reply and for that I apologize; I was too angered by the combination of your misconceptions and complete self-certainty. I was better in my second reply. I am actually a mathematician, so I probably know many more ways than you for "infinity + 1" to be interpreted reasonably. None of them are relevant here though.

Your argument merely shows the impossibility for relativity to produce a tachyon by accelerating a mass from sub-light speeds to FTL speeds. Barring just one method of production does not bar them all, and I've given two other methods above (twice now; you ignored them the first time so I've repeated them).

You have it backwards. You do not get a causality violation in an FTL special relativity scenario because relativity has "no appropriate application" there. Special relativity has "no appropriate application" to an FTL scenario because you get a causality violation (and most people want to keep causality). Your implication is backwards, and this is a fundamental error.

This doesn't make sense. A light cone is not a collection of frames of reference but rather the set of points in spacetime with zero interval from a given point. You probably meant to say that in "half" of all reference frames (specifically, those where the velocity along the line connecting the missle's start and end points is in the direction pointing from the start to the end point) the missile destroys the ship before it is launched.

Your argument is again backwards. You assume contradictions in both cases without realizing it--in case (1), causality violation is itself the contradiction, and it immediately leads to the paradox that ship B is both destroyed and not; in case (2), causality remaining intact contradicts the prediction of special relativity that causality is violated. Your contradictory and hopelessly vague discussion of "undestroy"ing a ship and one "remain[ing] destroyed" are artifacts of these backwards arguments.

I cannot make this make any sense. I am essentially certain it is incoherent.

Unless you being responding to my actual points, I will not reply again.

Indeed, here's a summary from the CDC from the end of last year. The most relevant part to your point:

I have that link somewhat handy since I'm a gay male. For any other gay guys, to protect yourself...
1. Be monogamous; if you can't,
2. Skip anal and go for oral, which has a much smaller HIV transmission risk to both partners (basically 0 to the guy who's getting head); it's safest not to get cum in your mouth; if you can't,
3. Always use a condom and top--bottoming has a far higher transmission risk; if you can't,
4. Never fucking bareback with a guy you're not absolutely certain is HIV negative no matter what you asshole. You make us all look bad. If you can't,
5. Test yourself often (1-3 months). When you become positive, only have sex with other positive guys. There is no more "if you can't".

It should be noted that condom usage is highly effective but also imperfect. Depending on the study, they reduce exposure risk by only around 80%. For more precise transmission statistics, the Transmission section of the HIV/AIDS Wikipedia article has a good summary and good sources (though you usually need journal access to read them). The Prevention section is also worth reading.

I should note that my "other post" was unmodded for a while and become +5 informative after I had written the above.