First, say "any two people" can live together and it's not a marriage. That is true, but nobody is talking about "any two people"; you conveniently left out an important word: "monagamous." Your denial of the nature of same-sex relationships indicates your failure, refusal, or inability to put yourself into the perspective of another human being. Those people do not experience their relationships as "any two people," but in the same way different-sex people experience a romantic relationship or a marriage relationship. In that sense, your response is either a non sequitur or a willful failure to engage the real issue.

From Judith Stacy:

"Legitimizing gay and lesbian marriages would promote a democratic, pluralist expansion of the meaning, practice, and politics of family life in the United States, helping to supplant the destructive sanctity of The Family with respect for diverse and vibrant families . . . . If we begin to value the meaning and quality of intimate bonds over their customary forms, people might devise marriage and kinship patterns to serve diverse needs . . . . Two friends might decide to marry without basing their bond on erotic or romantic attachment . . . . Or, more radical still, perhaps some might dare to question the dyadic limitations of Western marriage and seek some of the benefits of extended family life through small group marriages arranged to share resources, nurturance, and labor. After all, if it is true that The Two-Parent Family is Better than a single-parent family, as family-values crusaders proclaim, might not three-, four-, or more-parent families be better yet, as many utopian communards have long believed?"

Second, on the example of a legislation that denies the social reality of a real, existing group of people, I did not suggest that the metaphor was to compare marriage relationships, but to compare the problem of pretending that people who are actually doing something are not actually doing it. You are actually practicing a religion; if it were legislatively re-defined into oblivion, that would not cease your practice, or change anything about how you live your life, but I guarantee it would piss you off, just as same-sex couples and their supporters are pissed off. Again, I think you just willfully refuse to put yourself into a position of empathy for other human beings. My example was an attempt to snap your perspective around into something that might help you realize the enormous damage to many, many people that your views do when they are translated into political action. On the other hand, letting gay and lesbian couples get married would have no meaningful effect on your life whatsoever—one of the points in my previous comment that I note you did not address in your response.

Finally, I did not try to extend your arguments against same-sex marriage to me as an atheist. Your construal of my comments that way indicates, again, either that you refuse to understand them, or that you are incapable of taking a position of empathy for your fellow human beings. The issue is not that atheism and homosexuality are the same, but that the use of political methods to do no more than, in effect, tell a certain group of people that they are not wanted is nothing more than a means of trying to intimidate people into excusing themselves from your consciousness and hiding away, as many of them used to do, so you can continue pretending you live in a world where there are not people with drastically different views than you have.

Your prudery regarding two little words is astounding. Get over it. They have no magical power, except what you invest in them.

Again and again and again when I interact with you and others online, and even as I am reading a book written by the Pope himself, I am convinced, ever more resolutely, that the most effective means ever devised to destroy a person's capability to reason is to inculcate in him the tenets of the Catholic Church.

Hate for 8
Amanda Shaw
Having spent the last hour with the CA constitution, especially its articles on judicial power, constitutional amendments, and the Declaration of Rights, I have yet to discover where Cruz finds or grounds his theory. “The electors may amend the Constitution by initiative,” reads Article 18, and “a proposed amendment or revision shall be submitted to the electors and if approved by a majority of votes thereon takes effect the day after the election.”

Nary a mention of the court.

From a purely legal standpoint, how do you feel about Prop 8?

It is mostly true that if Proposition 8 were struck down, the "money or property rights" of gay and lesbian couples in California would not substantially change, so long as they are Registered Domestic Partners (RDPs) under the law here, since RDPs have already been given most of the same rights as married couples.

To put it another way, the problem is not that same-sex couples really want new legitimacy, so much as they want people among the supporters of Proposition 8, and their sympathizers around the nation and the world, to stop refusing to recognize the social reality of the relationships the presently do, undeniably, exist. Supporters of Proposition 8, while they accuse their opponents of attempting to "redefine" marriage, are really the only people in this dispute who are attempting to do any kind of overt social construction. Their task is to institute a codified legal denial of something that obviously already exists.

An analogue that may give you the right perspective would be something like a ballot initiative that attempted to say that "religion," for the purposes of all laws relating to religion, does not include the Roman Catholic Church. It would be a denial of something that, like long-term, monogamous, same-sex relationships, clearly already exists.

The definition of marriage is only a revision since the "rights", ie money matters, of "domestic partnerships" are in place in CA.

. . .

What will they get if Prop. 8 is struck down? They will get no more money or property rights. They will get legitimacy for their relationship as a "married couple".