Polls on Same-Sex Marriage State Laws

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

That's still slightly more Democratic than the country as a whole (51.6R/44.8D).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I doubt marriage was ever intended for the protection of women, given that women were expected to summit to their husbands, and if/when they chose careers, they were taken less seriously than men.

This brings back to my issue and focus on child support and child care.  Marriage was one of the effective legal methods to compel a husband to stay with a woman and their children.
For instance, how is a pregnant woman supposed to work full time?  In the US, women are given at least 6 months of paid maternity leave, but is 6 months of wages enough for a single mom? 

Are you familiar with the term Bastard Children?  Which means that they are fatherless children. 

Its unfortunate, but there are men and fathers who run away from their families and their responsibilities to provide and care for their biological children. 

Instead of focusing on marriage licenses to gay couples, the marriage rate will still decline and in the next decade there will be far less married people, the government should focus on improving child support to bastard children. 

Serious question: Have you ever met an adult human female?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I doubt marriage was ever intended for the protection of women, given that women were expected to summit to their husbands, and if/when they chose careers, they were taken less seriously than men.

This brings back to my issue and focus on child support and child care.  Marriage was one of the effective legal methods to compel a husband to stay with a woman and their children.
For instance, how is a pregnant woman supposed to work full time?  In the US, women are given at least 6 months of paid maternity leave, but is 6 months of wages enough for a single mom? 

Are you familiar with the term Bastard Children?  Which means that they are fatherless children. 

Its unfortunate, but there are men and fathers who run away from their families and their responsibilities to provide and care for their biological children. 

Instead of focusing on marriage licenses to gay couples, the marriage rate will still decline and in the next decade there will be far less married people, the government should focus on improving child support to bastard children. 

Serious question: Have you ever met an adult human female?

Feminists can in theory take care of themselves as single mothers, right?

Parse error, I think you're trying to subtly imply that my revulsion at your understanding of gender relations entails a rejection of the idea that marriages should be stable and are the best environment for raising children (which, by the way, is part of why the institution should be extended to gay couples, who are going to be raising children regardless), but I'm not certain.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Whatever makes you sleep at night.

Although I recommend learning how to lucid dream so you can have a baku come and eat the gay Mexican night terrors. I think we'd all be happier that way, including you.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Whatever makes you sleep at night.

Although I recommend learning how to lucid dream so you can have a baku come and eat the gay Mexican night terrors. I think we'd all be happier that way, including you.

If you want to support Anal intercourse, then that is your decision.  Ask any woman on the street if they enjoy anal intercourse.  You may think its normal and safe to have anal intercourse but there are some things that the human body can't handle. 

Actually I have no specific opinion of anal sex one way or another, and my opinion of sex in general is much more negative than you might think.

The rest of your post is, of course, hilarious.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Actually I have no specific opinion of anal sex one way or another, and my opinion of sex in general is much more negative than you might think.

Do tell.

I don't like it, and I intellectually understand but am viscerally baffled by why other people do so much. I think there are all sorts of really creepy power dynamics bound up in it and I have serious concerns about the philosophical possibility of respecting the agency of a sexual partner.

I am equal-opportunity about all of this with regards to gender.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I don't like it, and I intellectually understand but am viscerally baffled by why other people do so much.

You don't like it personally or you don't like the idea that other people are doing it? In either case, why?

Both. In order, because I don't swing that (i.e. any) way and for reasons below.

It should be mentioned that I am attracted to girls (or people whose gender peformativity is female) aesthetically and in terms of relationships; it's just  my interest in some parts of their anatomy that's lacking.

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Power dynamics like what? People of different ages or positions of authority (boss-employee, teacher-student, etc)?[/quote]

The creation of a power tension between different people in general. I actually have a somewhat more positive attitude towards BDSM because I feel it's more honest about this. There are philosophical reasons for this that might take a little while to explain; some of the reasons are, in my case, religious, but they don't necessarily have to be religious to make sense (since I've elucidated them in my Philosophy Club to not entirely negative or confused response and I'm my Philosophy Club's token religious-in-a-remotely-conventional-way person). So I guess my explanation to you would depend on the extent to which you're interested in my interpretation of what power is and how it works in this case.

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? What, like you're not sure it would actually be consenting? Not sure I understand.
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I'm not sure consent is entirely possible on the most basic level, but it is for all practical intents and purposes, so my main concern actually has to do with 'mak[ing] the loved person an Object of appetite' (quoting Immanuel Kant here). Obviously there are ways to ameliorate this. I'm not one of those crazies who insists that anybody who has non-procreative sex is automatically evil. But my understanding of sexuality does come from both a kind of baffled and a kind of unnerved place.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The creation of a power tension between different people in general. I actually have a somewhat more positive attitude towards BDSM because I feel it's more honest about this. There are philosophical reasons for this that might take a little while to explain; some of the reasons are, in my case, religious, but they don't necessarily have to be religious to make sense (since I've elucidated them in my Philosophy Club to not entirely negative or confused response and I'm my Philosophy Club's token religious-in-a-remotely-conventional-way person). So I guess my explanation to you would depend on the extent to which you're interested in my interpretation of what power is and how it works in this case.

I'm willing to read your interpretation.

I have a written essay on this subject, but be warned, it also touches on...several other issues, including gender identity, faith and how it's distinct from religion, Marxist analysis of religion, and the concept of 'alterity' in extremely dense (and condensed) philosophese  (for example, I define atheism as 'the faith that the first apparent character of the world within the confines of logical perception persists beyond those confines'). I'll see if I can go through it and take out excerpts to maybe make a thread on the Religion & Philosophy board. I'm actually reasonably proud of the essay, for what it is.

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Googles

So basically sex is wrong because people do it out of physical appetite and this appetite disregards the nonphysical aspect of a person (just having sex with a body) so that you're just having sex with a thing/object?

Meh, that seems pretty weird. There is obviously a person inside the body which is why you can rape a person but not rape a sex doll and I'm sure plenty of people have sex with not just the intention of making themselves feel good, but making their partner feel good too.[/quote]

That's exactly the sort of thing that I was referring to when I said that there are ways to ameliorate it and that I'm not a crazy person about this belief. Kant's more hardline on this than I am even though theoretically there's not all that much daylight between me and him.

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This is a function of one's fundamental view of what the physical universe is here for and I suspect probably isn't the sort of thing that can carry over from one view on that to another. The best I can give you is that my view of the physical universe is intensively symbolic, if that makes any sense (again, this sort of view doesn't necessarily have to be religious symbolism per se, even though a lot of it is in my case).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The highly formal and ideologically-charged discussion of anal sex in this thread is relevant to my sense of humor.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I think there are all sorts of really creepy power dynamics bound up in it

The creation of a power tension between different people in general. I actually have a somewhat more positive attitude towards BDSM because I feel it's more honest about this. There are philosophical reasons for this that might take a little while to explain; some of the reasons are, in my case, religious, but they don't necessarily have to be religious to make sense (since I've elucidated them in my Philosophy Club to not entirely negative or confused response and I'm my Philosophy Club's token religious-in-a-remotely-conventional-way person). So I guess my explanation to you would depend on the extent to which you're interested in my interpretation of what power is and how it works in this case.

But isn't the fact that you find these power dynamics to be 'creepy' the heart of your objection?  I mean, you may or may not have a point about the dynamics, but your value judgment regarding them is purely arbitrary.

It's not arbitrary in the context of my other beliefs, which find other-than-explicit, other-than-broadly-social individual power tensions between people (which aren't necessarily the same thing as hierarchy, though obviously they tend to intersect) inherently problematic. I'm sure you can to an extent empathize with this, since you see better than most (even if you're a little...odd in your approach to it) the way civilization as it presently exists is made mostly or entirely of exploitative power dynamics. Imagine the problems with that transferred to a relationship between two (or slightly more) individuals and you have roughly how I look at sexuality, or at least, the way sexuality is done in most of our society.

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I'm not sure consent is entirely possible on the most basic level, but it is for all practical intents and purposes, so my main concern actually has to do with 'mak[ing] the loved person an Object of appetite' (quoting Immanuel Kant here). Obviously there are ways to ameliorate this. I'm not one of those crazies who insists that anybody who has non-procreative sex is automatically evil. But my understanding of sexuality does come from both a kind of baffled and a kind of unnerved place.
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I think you are somewhat mixed up due to the notion of 'love', which should rightly have nothing to do with sex.  Think of sex not so much as a highly specific desire for a particular person or objectification of that person, but rather as a casual and anonymous though very necessary and important personal service - like massage, chiropractic, or dentistry.
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If you please, I'd rather not, since that makes the problem worse, not better, in my thinking (as in, thinking of sex that way makes me almost entirely unable to understand why it's a thing, rather than able with some difficulty since I don't personally swing any way worth mentioning). I...to a great extent I think there's inherently something serious and personal about union of bodies on that level. Being very physically receptive with unfamiliar people unnerves me, personally, even in non-sexual contexts, and in the case of sex that enervation gets to the point of actually having normative ethical beliefs about the matter, since it plays back into the power dynamics and since even a non-loved person is still a person. So even if it's not highly specific or unique to one or even a few people it is still what it is. The goal should be to cultivate love (of whatever kind) wherever possible and the role of sex in that is, as you admit, limited; I happen to think that's more prejudicial to the position of sex than to that of love.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

2/3 is also, of course, veto-proof.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I think it's probably more likely to be sustained in NJ than in WA or MD, though I'm actually pretty optimistic about all three.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Those are comparatively very good numbers for African-American Democrats.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I wonder if this issue is sufficiently polarized that the Iowa question might function as a decent proxy for gauging support of legal SSM.

In other words, I'm wondering if we should put it on the map.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

That would have the added incidental benefit of providing Romer fodder for the idea that gay marriage opponents have nothing better to do than just pick over semantics to create artificial hierarchies for no rational reason.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It doesn't actually surprise me much that most of the mountain West should be better than most of the Rust Belt.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Minnesota is now very, very unlikely to approve SSM in November, says a new SurveyUSA poll:

52% for the man/woman marriage amendment
37% against
  5% won't vote
  6% not sure

GOP: 75-12 support
DEM: 54-38 oppose
IND: 48-42 support

http://kstp.com/news/stories/S2698095.shtml?cat=1

Washington is a different story though, also by SurveyUSA:

"A new law passed by the legislature would allow same-sex couples to marry in Washington state. Should this law be approved? Or rejected?"

50% Approve
43% Rejected

http://www.surveyusa.com/client/PollReport.aspx?g=2786ebbd-3348-4795-b0a8-0ee124a9707d

Ha. That debunks PPP's gutter trash poll from about a month ago.

Why do you care?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Minnesota is now very, very unlikely to approve SSM in November, says a new SurveyUSA poll:

52% for the man/woman marriage amendment
37% against
  5% won't vote
  6% not sure

GOP: 75-12 support
DEM: 54-38 oppose
IND: 48-42 support

http://kstp.com/news/stories/S2698095.shtml?cat=1

Washington is a different story though, also by SurveyUSA:

"A new law passed by the legislature would allow same-sex couples to marry in Washington state. Should this law be approved? Or rejected?"

50% Approve
43% Rejected

http://www.surveyusa.com/client/PollReport.aspx?g=2786ebbd-3348-4795-b0a8-0ee124a9707d

Ha. That debunks PPP's gutter trash poll from about a month ago.

Why do you care?

Mr. Nathan, sir, there is something to be said about the merit of discrediting pollsters that have an obvious dubious agenda and that do not seek to represent the people.

I mean about this issue, not about PPP. For that matter, why are 'the people' terribly relevant to you on those issues and seemingly only on those issues in which the most superficially populist argument is one that happens to support the right-wing position?

These are, you'll understand, rhetorical questions. I, at least, know exactly why you care, and exactly why you think 'the people' have a moral leg to stand on here.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

See, krazen, I totally get everything that you're saying, it's just that it's a cocktail of barely-relevant bullsh**t, astonishing leaps of logic, and mean-spirited spin none of which actually answers my question.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I know I’ll probably be labeled unChristian for quoting this person, but here goes:

"I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!"

Oh, that quote in and of itself is plenty Christian (obviously), it's just completely inappropriate and frankly a little nonsensical in this context.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I know I’ll probably be labeled unChristian for quoting this person, but here goes:

"I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!"

Oh, that quote in and of itself is plenty Christian (obviously), it's just completely inappropriate and frankly a little nonsensical in this context.

Yeah, right...Tell that to the twin cities (mentioned numerous times by whom we've been referring) that once stood near Zoar on the plain.  But, referring to such a story is no doubt also ignorant and unChristian of me.  Might, was well color me a throwback and be done with it...and just for grins: drag my mother through the mud, slap my kids, and kick my dog while you're at it.

Not hugely familiar with Isaiah, are we?

I was at church less than nine hours ago, receiving communion like a good Christian. Give it a rest.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I know I’ll probably be labeled unChristian for quoting this person, but here goes:

"I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!"

Oh, that quote in and of itself is plenty Christian (obviously), it's just completely inappropriate and frankly a little nonsensical in this context.

Yeah, right...Tell that to the twin cities (mentioned numerous times by whom we've been referring) that once stood near Zoar on the plain.  But, referring to such a story is no doubt also ignorant and unChristian of me.  Might, was well color me a throwback and be done with it...and just for grins: drag my mother through the mud, slap my kids, and kick my dog while you're at it.

Not hugely familiar with Isaiah, are we?

I was at church less than nine hours ago, receiving communion like a good Christian. Give it a rest.

Episcopalians have Wednesday afternoon services? I've heard of Wednesday night (though usually from evangelical churches) but Wednesday afternoon is a little odd.

My church does (Rite I Eucharist with healing prayer). I don't believe it's any sort of standard.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I know I’ll probably be labeled unChristian for quoting this person, but here goes:

"I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!"

Oh, that quote in and of itself is plenty Christian (obviously), it's just completely inappropriate and frankly a little nonsensical in this context.

Yeah, right...Tell that to the twin cities (mentioned numerous times by whom we've been referring) that once stood near Zoar on the plain.  But, referring to such a story is no doubt also ignorant and unChristian of me.  Might, was well color me a throwback and be done with it...and just for grins: drag my mother through the mud, slap my kids, and kick my dog while you're at it.

Not hugely familiar with Isaiah, are we?

I was at church less than nine hours ago, receiving communion like a good Christian. Give it a rest.

Episcopalians have Wednesday afternoon services? I've heard of Wednesday night (though usually from evangelical churches) but Wednesday afternoon is a little odd.

My church does (Rite I Eucharist with healing prayer). I don't believe it's any sort of standard.

Your church is charismatic now?

We use a term that charismatic churches use as a more generic equivalent to the technical term 'Anointing of the Sick', which I do regularly because I'm of delicate physical as well as mental constitution. Calling Anointing of the Sick 'healing prayer' is probably the single most low-church thing we do.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

On the bright side, it looks like the good guys will win in Maryland. It's leading 52-43 according to the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/maryland-leans-toward-historic-embrace-of-same-sex-marriage-in-vote-next-month/2012/10/18/a91dedba-1885-11e2-9855-71f2b202721b_story.html

People up here are also considering it almost a foregone conclusion in Maine.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

If we still can't get any non-New England states to vote for gay marriage I might actually be equally or more depressed about this country and its people than I'll be if Obama loses.