20 States ban gay marriages

Be all for what? Me not marrying you!? I'm crushed!

-Kiamat Dusk

I thought you had a crush on Neehai...

Well, in that case I change my mind!

-Kiamat Dusk

No, no. You got it all backward. Neehai (aka Turbo Hand) *pretended* to have a crush on me. See? But he was only pretending cuz he was a closet heterosexual. Ok? So he pretended to have a crush on me because it was safe because he knew I would never reciprocate.

Poor, Neehai.

And, Juro, we better settle down with the flirting before your boyfriend comes knocking on my door. hehe


-Kiamat Dusk

Ohhh, thanks for clearing that up (smokescreen). I was so confused

Ya it will never happen, same sex marrage is here to stay now, it will never change; especially now with a minority government and a high likely hood of minority governments to come.

I myself look forward to perhaps one day using the new law to my advantage

I said just what you said. I was talking about how that statistic wasn't really all that useful, and definatley not strong enough to claim "half of marriages end in divorce," outright, due to other issues, not that you stated it, but Groucho did later, which half of my previous response was focused on. It's really just an inadequate statistic to support anything off of, nothing more, atleast IMO.


I ignored your "POINT" because I agree with it. I don't fixate on evils of same sex marriage. I support stripping marriage from law, and letting churches do whatever they want with it, and having the government use the term civil union for its legal contracts that reward civil privlidges to people under legal union.

You know what? Sharing the term marriage with homosexuals would just be easier. It's just a shame some feel the need to enforce their moral standards onto the lives of others, when it really wouldn't affect anyone else negativley if they didn't intervene. I didn't know the law came down to "we got dibs."

J/k about the darn devious part..

Well okay then! =)

For what it's worth, I honestly think the only way to get the most rabid and frothing conservative wingnuts to back down is to have the loudest most shockingly over the top drag queens start espousing arch-conservative ideals more loudly and flamboyantly.

Chase the opposition back to the middle!

I can see it now... a 6'7" (in heels) person named Mz. Stachio snapping 'her' fingers all over going: "No way honey, marriage is for boys that like girls... don't you be locking up none of my go-go's in none o your monogamous marriage thangs. MmmMMmm, can't have that now."

Of course you butchered it. You quote numbers that are 25 years old and are mostly irrelevant to today (e.g. that 54 million number). You dispute the methodology, which I agree was suspect in 1980, but circumstances have changed. And you repeat the red herring that "The people getting divorced are most likley not the same people that got married that year," which is meaningless unless we're counting as "successful" those marriages that last longer than a year.


Is the number inaccurate or is it an oversimplification? Maybe you're not too good with statistics, but that is exactly what statistics mean. I'm sure your marriage will be okay because of your age, education and strong moral fibre, but half of all marriages will fail.


You don't need to prove anything, but then why did you start down this track. If you're just going to go with your gut feel then you probably should have just kept quiet.


That might be what someone who is bad at maths might think. However, I'd be surprised if the number of divorces exceeded that of marriages for more than a few hundred years or so.

Look at the trends, math doesn't lie. There can be years where the numbers fluctuate greatly (i.e. the number of divorces exceeds that of marriages), but the numbers taken together cannot be ignored.

So you know, absolutely know, that that 50% number is wrong, but you have no evidence of what the correct number might be? Oh, but you state it might even be 2%. Please explain how it can possibly be 2%, using whatever stats you like. That is math at its fuzziest.


Now you're just being silly. Can we agree at least that a divorce implies "failure"? Hopefully so.

Now of all marriages that do not end in divorce, what percentage do you consider successful? Go ahead, pick any number you like. I'll be generous and grant you whatever number you pick, 90%, 99%, whatever. Let others decide whether your assumptions are realistic. However, that number is certainly not zero, so my statement still stands. Throwing up your hands and claiming "it's subjective" doesn't mean you can just make up whatever numbers you like.

Based on the numbers that I looked at as a result of this thread...

I would GUESS that the 2% number is "The percentage of all the existing marriages that fail in an a particular given year."

hahaha! Oh! So you're gonna discriminate against heterosexuals is that it!?

-Kiamat Dusk

so that's Rudy Giuliani's plan all along!

Republican arguments against gay marriage center on predicted erosion of heterosexual marriages if gay marriage is allowed (just click through the ad to read the full opinion piece) :

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/06/06/gay_marriage/index_np.html

Uh, so what has been causing the ever increasing erosion of heterosexual marriage for decades now?

Lovely how they refuse to talk about the actual issue, isn't it?

What a crock.

Duh! Television, video games and the internets.

The good life has made a lot of people more materialistic. Conveniences and the fast life have made people less tolerant and patient, many things are instant now so we lean towards expect everything to be like that, even other people (friends, family, partners and spouses).

Lack of tolerance and patience combined with selfish and unrealistic expectations are the #1 reason that breakups (partners or married couples) happen. Most causes of breakup (money, sex, behavior, etc) can be traced back to that.



Absolutely.

It's not only in the US that the "conservative" folk are like that.


P.S.
You don't have to look farther than these fora to spot examples of people who have no patience or tolerance and have habits of making unrealistic expectations. Just look at all those who complain (note: "complain" not "comment" whenever they encounter the slightest problem.

Yes, I've advocated this for a long time. But in order to sell it to the public at large I think we need to jazz it up. I suggest we replace the word marriage with a symbol. Then we can refer to it as "the institution formerly known as marriage".

Let me know when you submit that resolution, because I'll be starting up my own line of purple tuxedos.

Hmm... I've always wondered...

Which gets more money per year... Advertising? or Education?

How about this?

Another way to look at it is that marriage is no longer so much of an economic necessity. These days it survives (or fails) on love and sense of duty to family.

I was actually trying to avoid those terms because "love" in particular is next to impossible to drill into political heads. Then again it's next to impossible to drive any kind of sense into political heads just about anywhere in the world.

But those terms you use are precisely correct. Love is being patient, tolerant, and being realistic about expectations of your spouse, and is best when both are that way. Sense of duty to family is about responsibility which people lately are so "it's never my responsibility and it's someone else's fault."

Too many people are marrying the wrong person. They're marrying an image of what they wish/want/imagine that person to be rather than marrying the image of what the person is and what that person is going to turn into.

A very very old song comes to mind but its words sing frighteningly of what we have today:

"You've got to love me for what I am, for simply being me. Don't love me for what you intend or hope that I will be. If you're only using me to feed your fantasy, you're really not in love so let me go."

Nor is it a social necessity, it's not required when a woman accidentally becomes pregnant and it's not even necessary to get laid anymore. There are a lot of good reasons why marriage rates have gone down (and divorce rates have gone up).