I believe homosexuality is a sin, and I can NEVER approve of it being named marriage. But life is short, and if people want to do that in their own home without throwing it in my face (which some gays apparently feel a deep need to do, to their own detriment) I really don’t care.

Not necessarily. There are species of all female lizards that, of course, reproduce without fertilization. Still, they have lesbian sex.

You do not know what you are talking about.

And people are “proud” of it! Is it some sort of accomplishment? How?

However, such abnormal acts between consenting adults should not be treated as unethical or immoral — any more than a person with six fingers on a hand should be looked down upon.

Also, I notice that you left out the unbiological use of the mouth as a sex organ. Surely you are against mouth to mouth sexual contact, too.

Really? I expect that a single piece of legislation saying that all rights and responsibilities incumbent upon married people under Federal legislation shall be extended to people who are in domestic partnerships or civil unions, as licensed by the states.

And since when does anything in nature have to be restricted to one single use? Is using your penis for sex an “unnatural” abomination because it is also used for urinating? If not, then why can’t an anus or mouth be used for sex? Why do you reduce sex to the sole purpose of procreation? Doesn’t that make any nonprocreative sex “unnatural”, such as with your frigid postmenopausal wife. Humans are SOCIAL animals, and besides making babies, latent and overt sexual attraction underlies many SOCIAL bonds. If we were not SOCIAL animals, then all men would kill each other, and women would kill all their sexual competitors too.

And since when is natural law defined by simplistic observations of selfrighteous douchenozzles? Science draws its conclusions by observing nature as it is, and not against some arbitrary standards set by cranky old men who stopped thinking in 7th grade. Of course examples of homosexuality among humans and other species for hundreds of years, but because of ideological and religious biases like yours they have been automatically discarded as abberations from supposedly real nature.

I would have said that too, until I moved out west and lived among conservatives and go to know them. In truth, I often observe conservatives exhibiting great empathy and making substantial sacrifices to help out others they know. To a degree that I find it difficult to imagine my liberal friends from back East doing.

The way I think of it now is this: conservatives are deeply empathetic, but almost exclusively to people they know. Liberals are mildly empathetic towards almost everyone.

Who’s to say that those other attributes aren’t equally as important to “nature” as procreation? Clearly, not everyone is going to be gay, therefore, the species won’t die out from lack of procreation. In addition, bisexual men/women are capable of both.

Your limited view of sex is…limiting.

I’m sorry that you can’t follow the argument, but let me try to make it very simple. You’re arguing that your definition of marriage represents some sort of universal idea that transcends culture. By pointing out that your definition of marriage (which, BTW, I completely share except the part about excluding same sex partners from engaging in it) is an aberration from a global and historical perspective, I’m arguing that our modern view of marriage arises out of our culture. Please give me an example of a culture prior to the last few centuries where the norm was for young people to choose a spouse based on romantic attraction and then engage in a relationship where the two were on equal footing with neither partner subject to the demands of the other?

And your point about slavery doesn’t make sense to me. You’re saying just because something was an historical norm doesn’t make it OK today. That’s exactly the point I’m trying to make. Just because marriage has historically has been about the acquisition of a woman as property by a man doesn’t make it OK today. Just because marriage has historically not been about a romantic relationship doesn’t mean it can’t be today. And just because marriage has historically not been open to partners of the same sex doesn’t mean it can’t today.

Polygamy would require a massive overhaul of the legal system, as others have already addressed here. Same-sex marriages requires no changes whatsoever other than the occasional gendered pronoun. On a moral level, I’m ambivalent. Historically polygamy has been about a very unequal relationship, with many women being the possession of a single man, so I don’t see that institution reviving in our culture today. But if a group of people was interested in legalizing polygamy, and could suggested a legal framework in which to do it, I wouldn’t close my mind to the possibility.