Gay Marriage to Alfred: Your Thoughts

holding out for stax/volt tbh

Hoping for "Tighten Up" myself, except he'd be using it to explain why he's caving to GOP budget cutters.

Mr Big Stuff would be a winner imo

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/health/dr-robert-l-spitzer-noted-psychiatrist-apologizes-for-study-on-gay-cure.html

not sure where to put this

btw, i now search for this thread by querying "gay alfred"

funny -- that's how tricks search for me

don't they usually get the Batcave?

Stonewall Was a Wedding?

http://jacobinmag.com/blog/2012/05/stonewall-was-a-wedding/

in a city where 40% of homeless youth are LGBT.

You know, every time I read things like this, I flash back on how happy those gay youth seemed to me in Paris is Burning. They were up at midnight, drinking orange Crush, just hanging out, summertime. Awesome.

And then, of course, I think about how unhappy they must be now, all grown up and domesticated and hitched and bored and boring.

don't be a player hater
being domesticated is rad

Gay marriage proponents feed us two flavors of justification for their crusade. For the romantics they supply fantasy — the notion that legal inclusion brings social justice; for the cynics, they tout the thousand individual rights that a marriage certificate bestows.

And for the lunatics, a third flavor: You were never going to be normal anyway.

hi! who wants to get married?

I do!

So long as it can be loveless, sexless and sheerly totemistic.

/Gay marriage proponents feed us two flavors of justification for their crusade. For the romantics they supply fantasy — the notion that legal inclusion brings social justice; for the cynics, they tout the thousand individual rights that a marriage certificate bestows./

surely it's easier to not come up with any of that dumb shit and just let people get on with it

No, it's true. Marriage is going to make rich gay people start to want to buy stuff from Crate & Barrel and Room & Board and god knows what else. Better to keep them from marriage and force them to continue in their ascetic but charitable tradition.

gay + marriage = rich gay

well if teh gays get all this money then the rich straight guys won't be able to get the buttsecks in subway bathrooms from poor rentboys. I mean, it's simple math really. it's so much more romantic when they stay poor and desperate.

FFS

Stonewall was to let the world know that gays are employable. Oh and human. AND THAT'S IT.

I get romanticising the struggle but this is really kinda ridiculous.

never mind, there's a p healthy supply of closeted conservatives prepared to get their same-sex rocks off in cubicles xp

lol

I can't paste it from my iPad but commenter "Tarzie" does a pretty good job of telling her to STFU

Look no further than Argentina for real leadership in queer politics. While we were busy patting ourselves on the back, the Argentine legislature passed the Gender Identity Law, arguably the most gender-affirming bill in any country, to date. Argentineans can now change their legal genders without having to demonstrate any medical treatment, and the public and private healthcare systems in the country are banned from charging extra for gender-related therapies or procedures. These changes may not have the comforting ring of wedding bells, but they address administrative inequalities that present huge obstacles to trans people in accessing basic services.

Argentina managed to make both the Gender Identity Law AND gay marriage realities.

xp - VG OTM re "Tarzie"( + others)

on the other side of the coin

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3sj5yPIiJ1qace89o1_1280.png

Gay marriage doesn't "infuriate" most ppl who raise questions about current 'progressive' attitudes toward it. They are mostly saying it's not the end of the rainbow.

"Raise questions" is an awfully rainbow-tinted way of putting it.

dunno, rainbows don't mean shit to me

motherfuck them and john wayne

"Don't Worry Be Happy"

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2012/05/31/boston_court_us_gay_marriage_law_unconstitutional/

Namely:

An appeals court has ruled that a law that denies a host of federal benefits to same-sex married couples is unconstitutional.

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruled Thursday that the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, discriminates against gay couples.

The law was passed in 1996 at a time when it appeared Hawaii would legalize gay marriage. Since then, many states have instituted their own bans on gay marriage, while eight states have approved it, led by Massachusetts in 2004.

In 2010, a federal judge in Massachusetts declared the heart of the law unconstitutional in two separate lawsuits. The judge found that the law interferes with the right of a state to define marriage.

awesome

Two of the judges are Reagan and Poppy Bush appointees, respectively.

*tut tut* such activist judges

So, I'm really rusty on law, et al, but angling on state-by-state arguments means tough titty for the 30-odd states that have written gay marriage bans into their constitutions, right?

not if it goes to the Honorable Anthony Kennedy

discriminatory state laws will be struck down as well if the SC rules that discriminating against same-sex couples is unconstitutional. it's the same basic legal principle used to strike down Jim Crow laws.

so it depends how broad the SC ruling is. If SC strikes down DOMA just on grounds of it being an infringement on states' rights, then yeah those state laws will still stand.

But that ruling reads as a federalist argument against the Feds not against the States defining marriage.

well yeah

Part of me is all "well, it's the state's faults for voting the way they did in the first place," but my state's (belatedly) in the same boat this cycle.

It should take, like, 80 percent of the eligible voting body to write stuff into the constitution anyway. ¯\(º o)/¯

A traditional federalist conservative would view marriage as something best left to the States (or the ppl) to play around with. It's a viewpoint that lost a lot of lustre when used to defend racism and segregation but which retains a certain appeal when I think about a host of other issues like whether a county wants to be dry or allow marijuana use or, as our DA is suggesting, reducing all drug personal possession crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.

That reminds me: Lawsuits filed in Cook County claiming state's same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional

The lawsuits by the gay rights group Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois create a new front in the battle for same-sex marriage rights in Illinois, leading activists to say they will continue pushing lawmakers to legalize same-sex marriage while also supporting the new judicial action.

("unconstitutional" referring to the Illinois Constitution)

All of the different angles taken by the different lawsuits really are reminiscent of the multiple angles of attack on segregation. Everybody just talks about Brown vs. Board of Ed, but there were decades of lawsuits before and after that one that went after different aspects of discrimination. So, yeah, this ruling is based on the idea that the feds can't trump state definitions of marriage in a discriminatory way. But it doesn't necessarily mean that any particular state's definition of marriage will itself be found constitutional, under either the state's own constitution or the U.S. constitution. Hence the Illinois lawsuit, e.g.

*blink*

http://www.jta.org/news/article/2012/06/01/3097041/conservative-rabbis-approves-same-sex-marriage-ceremonies

Not complaining, obv.

Always fun to hear the softly spoken and oh-so-sensible sounding Church of England bishops coming up with hysterical Fox News style talking points.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/12/gay-marriage-anglican-church-warning

"Marriage benefits society in many ways, not only by promoting mutuality and fidelity, but also by acknowledging an underlying biological complementarity which, for many, includes the possibility of procreation."