Selfie sticks are, at best, narcissistic nonsense, but the person who whipped one out on a rollercoaster was risking injury to himself and his fellow riders. How much of a grip can you have on a stick with a weight on the end while hurtling through twists and turns? And if you lose your grip, the best case scenario is that your phone falls and shatters below. Worst case scenario is it hits into someone and injures them. All because he "needed" to get a photo of himself.

Great work on Disney's part shuttig down the ride until that selfie stick was confiscated.

Whenever a religious right type tries to argue that $SOME_RELIGION should be the law of the land - beyond this history lesson - one of the first things I think of is: Do you REALLY want this? Do you REALLY want POLITICIANS to decide how you practice your religion? Because even if they choose your religion as the Official State Religion, chances are they'll be as "successful" implementing it as they are successful at anything.

By the way, mass is now held at the Blu-Ray/DVD aisle in Wal-Mart. You must buy at least seven Blu-Rays/DVDs to atone for your sins. Thus saith the prophets of the MPAA and their lobbyists... I mean, disciples.

It's not just having sex and children. Married couples get hospital visitation rights, get inheritance rights, and get certain burial rights. Before this ruling, a state could say "We know you've been in a relationship for 30 years and would get married if you could, but you two are the same gender so you don't get to see your partner when they get sick, must pay more taxes when they die, and can't be buried next to them if they are buried as a soldier. But that couple who met last month and took a quick trip to Vegas get all those rights (until they get divorced a month from now) because they are different genders.".

"Endowed by their Creator" is a fancy way of saying "these rights aren't granted by any people." Thus, nobody can say "well, I just decided NOT to grant you these rights because I decide what rights you have." "The Creator" is a concept beyond any human's control. You can picture that to mean the god of Christianity, the god of Judaism, the god of Islam, the god of some other religion, or just an abstract concept and not any actual being at all. Either way, these are rights that are ingrained in our very existence and thus cannot be violated by a person's laws.

Specifically, when this country was formed, we were breaking away from a country (England) that had a ruling monarch who was also the head of the state religion. The founding fathers made sure that this wouldn't happen with the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances - to keep one branch of government from becoming too powerful - and the First Amendment - to prevent any Official Government Religion.

If anyone wants to practice their religion, that's great. Go right ahead. But they'd better not think that their religious freedom means the ability to tell me how to live my life.

Jacob also married two sisters AND slept with their handmaidens. I guess we need to follow the Bible and make polygamy legal. Affairs are legal too if you can get at least one of your wives to approve of it.

The Supreme Court's job is also to decide when a law is unconstitutional. Say Congress passed a law tomorrow saying "Everyone needs to convert to Christianity" and the President signed it. Forced conversion to Christianity would be the law of the land. Of course, it would be tied up in lawsuits immediately and one of those lawsuits could make it to the Supreme Court. There, they could declare it unconstitutional and make it null and void.

If we assume that the Supreme Court's only duty is to decide the intent of the law, there's nothing protecting us from unconstitutional laws. Congress could simply pass any law they wanted. They wouldn't even need the President's approval if they had enough votes to override his veto. With a big enough majority, Congress could do anything they wanted.

That's why the Supreme Court's ability to check Congress' Power (and the President's) by ruling laws unconstitutional is so important. They aren't perfect, but they form one more barrier against the Constitution being violated.

I agree. The problem I have with the gay marriage opponents is that their arguments seem to boil down to either a) It was always done this way so we can't change it or b) My religion says this is a marriage so we can't go against that.

In the case of A, we change things all the time. At one point, "people were always kept as slaves" but we realized that was wrong and changed that. At one point "women and non-whites were always kept from voting", but again that was changed. In addition, things weren't "always" the way people think they were always. Taking multiple wives and having concubines was pretty standard practice (if you could afford them since women were basically regarded as property) for much of history. Just try arguing "but it always was this way" when you try to apply to marry a second wife without divorcing the first one.

In the case of B, a person can't use his or her religion to impose restrictions on another person. I don't say that nobody else can eat bacon because I'm Jewish and bacon isn't kosher. Go ahead and eat all the bacon you want - or don't eat any. It's none of my business. Similarly, a person can't say "my religion forbids gay marriage and therefore even people who don't observe my religion must obey this rule."

As a side note: nobody is saying that priests and rabbis HAVE to marry any two people who walk up to them. If a rabbi doesn't want to officiate in the marriage of a Jewish man and a non-Jewish woman, he doesn't have to. He's free to decline and someone else will officiate. The same will go for priests who don't want to officiate in marriages between two men or two women. However, this ruling does mean that somebody acting as an agent of the government can't say "I don't believe in gay marriage and thus won't recognize it as real." A Justice of the Peace can't refuse to marry two men. An IRS official can't deny that a woman and her wife are filing jointly. They need to follow the government's rules, not their own personal religious rules. Then again, this is true for a lot of their job so anyone who can't deal with this should probably find some other line of work.

With a GOP split, you could also have a candidate who is conservative financially but progressive socially. Right now, no GOP candidate is considered viable unless they pledge allegiance to the extreme right-wing religious types. Any GOP candidate who voices more progressive views is quickly kicked out as not being "conservative enough."

I might be tempted to vote for a fiscal conservative/social progressive, but I'll never vote for a fiscal conservative who thinks social progress should be rewound to 100 years ago. Or worse, to an imagined "in the good old days" that never really existed.

*makes a note to go home and check my wife's pulse*

I'm married with two children. I know many Slashdotters are also married. The "all Slashdotters post alone in their parents' basement" meme has been dead for awhile. (Maybe we need a poll to see how many single, married, etc Slashdotters there are?)

A very similar Supreme Court decision was made decades ago striking down bans on interracial marriage. At the time, very similar arguments were being made in favor of the interracial marriage bans (it's not God's way, states should decide, etc). In both instances, the reason the bans are struck down are the same. States don't get to say "We declare discrimination against Group X legal because Bigger Group Y says so."

You might learn that our Constitution was written to LIMIT the powers of our GOVERNMENT. It was NOT written as a list of the "fundamental rights" of the citizens.

And thank goodness is was written in this way or every technological progression would come with more and more limitations. "Yes, I know you have a Constitutional right to free speech in face to face communications and in hand-written letters, but the Founders never addressed the telephone and Internet so you have no free speech rights there!"

For thousands of years, marriage was defined as "Parents of a girl gave her to some guy in an exchange of property in order to win some sort of social or political favor." So obviously, we can't ever change the errors of the past and must continue to treat women like property instead of equals in marriage!

I was shaking my head with his dissent. It basically read "How dare the Supreme Court decide whether a law is constitutional or not!" Um... that's the Supreme Court's primary function! They were asked to rule on a gay marriage ban and they said such bans are unconstitutional. Way to read your job description, Scalia!

If Scalia had his way, it would still be legal for a state to declare interracial marriage illegal.

I'm still hoping the Republican party will tear itself in two. The kooks will become the "Tea Party GOP" and will slowly spiral into oblivion as we all laugh while munching popcorn. The actual sane Republicans (yes, there are some of those left) will form the "We're Sane Again GOP" and will field actually viable candidates that don't see their primary demographic as ultra-religious, old white guys.