Happy for all of them,
-Paul C.

Tom assured me they were charmed by this little error.

Sadly, I couldn't witness the Torcon wedding ceremony due to !@#$# flight delays. Luckily, Andrew had those pictures running in a loop on his Powerbook. Ah, technology ...

List me in the "morning coat and top hat" sub-tribe.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/03/27/MNGOF5SE2A1.DTL&type=news

I have to finish looking through my yearbooks, they weren't in my class or the classes behind me, they may have graduated ahead of me.

It occurred to me yesterday that I've heard "the sky is falling" gay marriages hysteria before. When the Mixed Marriages Act was about to be abolished in South Africa. Some of the stuff about it being against God and nature, what next, marrying your dog will be legal, our society will be destroyed... it's almost identical to the reaction of some of the God-fearing Afrikaaners who genuinely believed that miscegenation was a deliberate insult to God. I hope this one proves as unstoppable - I'd like to go to the weddings of one or two of my friends who don't currently have that option.

May The Force be with you all :)

This is a crime against The Force! The Senate needs to pass a special No-Jedi-Sex amendment!

Well if you want to bring my parents into it, they went on to procreate too - match that :-)

I think it's right that gay couples should be able to have the same status as hetero couples. I think the same rights should also extend to platonic couples - my two maiden aunts lived their whole lives together but when one died the survivor didn't have the same property rights over joint assets as a husband would have had.

Did they? Are you sure? :-)

Seriously, birth technology will make that possible, too. While I never formally joined the Clone Rights United Front (what a 60s sounding name, eh?), I was on their mailing list for a while...their main argument was that cloning would "break the heterosexual monopoly on reproduction."

I would have liked to try raising a clone of me. Someone said "I haven't heard any reason for cloning that respects the individuality of the child thus produced," to which I replied "have you heard any reason for having children that respects hir individuality?" While I'd prefer mixing my genes with those of someone I'm in love with, that technology is probably further down the road than cloning.

Those I've spoken to regarding homosexuality see gays as promiscuous disease carriers. What I fail to understand, then, is why the same people are moving to bar their attempts at promised, legal monogamy.

Actually, there's a lot I don't understand about the arguments against gay marriage. I honestly don't see why anyone would think it takes away from heterosexual marriage. At all. I completely fail to see why people are so threatened by this.

Can anyone enlighten me?

I think they're wrong about its fragility, of course; I think marriage is pretty darn robust, and more importantly I think that marriage-the-concept is composed of millions of marriages-in-specific, none of which will be harmed by having other people married. But I think what we're seeing is a fair amount of pure, straightforward fear of change.

I was reading Will Shetterly's Dogland and thinking about atheists in society, and I think that's part of what made people so threatened by atheism in the early 1960s (and before and since): they don't really know why society hangs together as well as it does, and they're afraid that changing a factor like the rate of folks going to church will cause it to fall apart utterly.

Likewise, if marriage is threatened, it may seem intuitive to some to build a wall about it in order to "protect" it. For some reason, throwing the doors wide and admitting more marriages seems less safe to them than making it increasingly exclusive. I use the word "increasingly" very consciously - one of the main arguments the conservative "defenders" of marriage use is, "marriage is for procreation." Well, then - all of us married folk who have made a conscious, thoughtful decision not to have kids must not have real marriages.

Does anyone have the statistics on childless married couples in the US? How many "traditional" marriages would become invalidated if we took this silly argument to it's logical conclusion? Likewise, does adoption validate the marriage of a couple who cannot otherwise have kids? By that line of reasoning, my friend Jonathan and his partner (adoptive dads of two daughters) have a much more valid marriage than my husband and I do.

Despite the number of other children I spent time with whose parents were separated, I never saw marriage as a fragile thing. Anyone studying couples for a 'successful marriage' formula would get to my parents and chuck all their previous research. Because my parents defy all those rules, yet they're still together, and very much in love. Hard for anyone outside the family to tell, but it's there.

So my view towards marriage has been that it's a method for 2 people who love each other to be joined, legally, financially, spatially. And tax breaks come in there somewhere.

So I've never felt a need to deny that to any 2 people who love one another.

And, tossing the religious equation in, the God I learned about in Sunday school loved all of His creations. He wanted them to love one another, too. It never seemed right to me that God would restrict love.

Eloquent, simple and to the point. Thank you.