If we believe that gay/lesbian/transgendered/queer people are equal, then they deserve EQUAL in everything. Civil unions, while creative and a first step, are not equal.

As long as heterosexually-oriented people don’t have “civil unions”, we shouldn’t settle for less than equal.

I think I’m going to agree with leftcoast on everything.

Mark me as another I started to write that very point when I saw his post. Marriage should be an official contract period (from the state’s point of view) and should be written out as prenupts frequently are now anyway. The contract might vary according to the realities involved, not a one size fits all after the fact, as is the case now.

And yes there should be such things that have nothing to do with sex. Even a man and a woman living together in the same house, or any combination, up to and including dozens in a communal situation, there may need to be special family rights (biologically related or not) and responsibilities, that are now very informal and therefore subject to change and misunderstanding.

That the some religions have a special relationship for procreating pairs only, this is indeed their business, that others are polygamous, that should be their right also, as long as everyone is old enough to sign a contract. That still other religions have a special relationship available to any pair of members, that is also their business.

The Government has no business deciding that one religion’s ideal should prevail over another, and certainly has no business deciding who has sex with who (as long as everyone is voluntary and adult) or what that means to a contract that was never signed or spelled out.

Golly, there I go running off my mouth again.

Perhaps the most heartening thing about this 4-3 court decision is this line from the article: “The three dissenters argued that the majority did not go far enough. They demanded full marriage for gays.” So it’s only a matter of time before the line from Brown v. Board of Education, “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”, can apply to marriage as well as to education.

Steve is definitely right that it is sobering to see the political reality in other states of the US. The state I vote through, Oregon, was one of the many states that passed anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendments in 2004, even though I voted against it. And Oregon is a blue state, too!

There seems to be a natural 10% (I don’t know where that number comes from,) of any given population, at least in the mammalian world, that have homosexual tendencies.

maybe you remember the king penguins? But i’ve heard that it could even bigger, about 20% - and considering the bisexual, it could be up to 50%, think of the relationships on ships and in monasteries

Gay Marriage in the Animal Kingdom:
“Against Nature?” is the name of the exhibition in the red brick building on the edge of Oslo’s Botanical Gardens.
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Scientists even discovered, to their great surprise, that approximately one out of ten couples in some king penguin colonies were homosexual.
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They have also found evidence of some same-sex relationships that last an animal’s lifetime.
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And so it should come as no surprise that it is above all families who crowd the dimly lit museum halls on the weekends. The merry sound of hollering children is constantly reverberating throughout the museum. “I am pleased that families continue to come here,” Söli says. “We don’t have any shocking images here, we don’t want to hit anyone over the head.”