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There would never be a law that stated "if you are short you can't get married" or "if you are mexican, you can't get married"-that is DISCRIMINATION! People should be able to get married whether they are short, tall, thin, fat, black, white, straight or GAY!

I noticed that many employers state they are EOE- and will hire people regardless of their age, race, gender, religion, and SEXUAL preference. The Senate should step up and apply that policy to marriage as well!

I can only get through the day assuming that the Senate will do better (since they came through on the other thing the other day).

J., I'm not sure your analogy works. The issue is not that gay people can't get married. They can, and some of them do. The issue is that they can't marry the people that they would want to marry - i.e. someone of the same gender.

In some ways, you could think about this whole issue exclusively in terms of gender discrimination - and you might get further legally too. Non-discrimination on the basis of gender is a pretty well established legal principle. Or am I being disingenuous?

I've heard the gender discrimination argument before (maybe from you?), and I think it's interesting.

I also think that it's fair to bring up anti-miscegenation rulings from the bad old days, since a) They specifically referred to not just who could marry, but who you were allowed to marry; b) One of the landmark cases in that mess was "Loving vs. Virginia" (how appropriate!), in which judges established precedent for the right to marriage being part of the whole pursuit of happiness deal, and c) It associates the bad guys with something no one but ultimate frothing radicals could support, and why not take a page from their book once in a while? Or would that just make me part of the problem?

Oh, and did you hear that in the light of the legalization of same-sex marriage here, our own Governor, Mitt Romney (that smirking skull of righteousness!) is enforcing old laws prohibiting Mass. from performing marriages for out-of-staters? Do you know when and why these laws were originally enacted? Why, during the start of the Civil Rights Movement, for the sole purpose of denying interracial marriages to everyone they could! Nice, huh?

We have to remember we're only two generations removed from an America that found it perfectly OK to sterilize people (both with and without their knowledge) so they wouldn't be able to reproduce and thereby contaminate the gene pool. The target group included, besides people with mental retardation: people in mental hospitals, women (girls, really) who had sex before marriage, people convicted of crimes, people of mixed race, poor people, kids caught masturbating, etc. et sick cetera, and so on.

I suspect the sweet folks who brought us the eugenics movement were not dissimilar to this crowd. You'd think they'd be grateful; the one thing a gay couple isn't going to do is reproduce offspring with both parents' genes.

What really gets me is how many of these people call themselves Christians.

That alone would be enough, to slightly misquote Annie LaMott, to make Jesus drink gin straight out of the cat dish.

i like anne lamott's book, bird by bird, but that metaphor is amazing.

The quote is from Traveling Mercies by the same author. It is a sockeroo of a book. I love bird by bird, too, and use it for classes sometimes.