Nick Anderson for March 26, 2013

There’s no pot of gold at the end of THIS rainbow.

Good, now .001% more of the population will now get married. Next.

This.

And with any luck this trend will cause the leadership of the Westboro Baptist Church to have Annurisms so that we know longer have to listen to their hate and filth.

I hope the Republican party is paying attention to this trend because the Party leaders talk a good game of smaller government and less government intrusion in our lives but all they seem interested in is: Denying Science, Forcing everyone to adapt to their morality through laws, and participating equally in the distortion of the market place.

“Denying science, like ignoring that abortion kills a living being? Liberals have been forcing everyone to adapt to their values and morality for decades.”Nobody’s forcing you to approve of abortion. I don’t approve of it myself. What I do want conservatives to finally get through their skull is that making it illegal won’t stop it from happening. All that time, energy, and money so-called conservatives put into making abortion illegal could be channeled into something positive, such as charities and services that help give women a reason to “choose life.”

Semantics: actually, a fertilized human egg is called a zygote only at the initial point of fertilization and until it hits the 8-cell division, a very short time. After that it becomes the blastocyst, and after implantation is considered an embryo, although the blanket term “embryo” can be extended to cover all of this.

In point of fact, though, it isn’t a “human being” at this stage, it is a group of undifferentiated human cells, no different from the stem cells that one finds in certain reservoirs in adult human beings. It is quite arguably not a “human being” until the point that it develops a nervous system of its own, and has some capacity for individual identity.

I know, I know, that’s not nearly so simple and neat a picture as “fertilized egg == human being”, but at least it has the virtue of being true.

“Voters alway vote it down, even in California.”

You mean, except where they don’t. Most of the anti-marriage equality legislation was drafted before 2011; attitudes have shifted by miles since then.

Also, nobody is “stealing” anything. A minority group of people want to share the same rights as the majority, period.

@ansonia@SpicyNacho“Life begins at conception” makes as much sense as “Your home is complete as soon as the blueprints are assembled.” and yes, a developing potential child crosses a point where it can live outside the womb before it’s actually born, but the points in between fall into the “is it warm dough transition or under-cooked bread” realm. In this arena, we need a legal definition of “brain alive” — the equivalent to “brain dead”, but at the other end of your lifespan. Anything else is a mater of faith, which has NO PLACE in government.

Likewise, the legal construct of marriage (right to make health decisions, tax penalties, rights of survivorship, etc.) has no bearing on the religious aspect of marriage and you’re free to attach what ever mythology you want to YOUR legal marriage, just hands off everybody else’s.

The one thing that both of these have in common, is that the only affect of the legal definitions have on the religious is that the are no longer able to force their mythology on other people.

The rights of the minority should never be subject to the whims of the majority.

When a person gets married in Virginia and two other states where I’ve attended weddings, at the end of the RELIGIOUS service, the CIVIL requirement is given in the form of the religious leader saying, “By the power granted me by the state of Virginia” I now pronounce you man and wife.^Is there going to be a requirement that religious leaders or their churches will be REQUIRED to perform marriages for gay couples? I know two people who could not get married in the church the wife to be went to because her husband to be was not a “believer.” I know another pastor who told me he will not perform marriages for mixed race couples.^Church is the last “country club” where people can ban people based on philosophical interpretations of religious doctrine. Were I to go to a mosque or synagogue, I would not expect to sit on the front bench. Am I wrong to think that the Separation of Church and State clause of the Bill of Rights protect churches from having to marry gay people? I certainly believe it protects me from intolerant and dogmatic beliefs of some of the churches. I know churches to which gays go to worship even though they know the church would not, under its doctrine, marry them. It’s religion, it doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but the person who attends and believes. ^This issue is only important as it effects the way people in a committed relationship have access to each others’ care, and property, childcare rights. However, as long as the option to be “married” in a civil service exists, even if a church will not marry the couple, the money and attention this issue is getting should be easily resolved. In the Bible, when a two people were going to be ‘married’, there was no service, they just told their friends and family they were setting up house together. If the gov’t didn’t have such control on property, estates, and privacy regulations that hospitals and others have to follow, this would be a non issue anyway.^Can we let people in love be together and move on to jobs and repairing an infrastructure that could be devastated by cyber attacks? If heterosexual marriages were the best way to go, the divorce rate wouldn’t be so high. I’ve been married to the same woman for 30+ years. The average marriage lasts 6 years. And those who are judging people for what they do between themselves or with their own bodies forgets the admonishment, “Judge not, less YE be judged.” Pray FOR people, don’t Prey ON them.(copyright pending)Respectfully,C.

Left alone, around 70% of fertilized eggs are lost before they can ever develop to term, most before the woman ever knows she’s pregnant.

And no, a fertilized egg can be created in a test tube. It cannot survive there, unless you stick it in a freezer and suspend all biological activity. Otherwise we could just cook up kids in some high-tech version of crock pots, and save women the danger and discomfort of pregnancy. (NB: obviously not all women would want that, but I would certainly be in favor of it as an option!)

And finally: my liver is “human.” My eyes are “human.” My hair follicle cells are “human.” None of these are “a human being.” There are a great many life scientists who hold the position (as do I) that in order to be a human being there needs to be at least a rudimentary form of a human identity, brain activity.

When life begins is not a religious decision. It is biological.

When life began is, in this context and for this question, meaningless: it began at least 3 billion years ago, and every single one of us has descended in a line of life, an unbroken chain of living cells, from that. When you are talking about when a life begins, then people start having opinions all over the map – and your opinion of “conception” is frankly not more workable than the opinion of “functional nervous system.”

I was actually thinking about this on my way home from work. I need to amend my own statement in order to be fully true and also fair to the people who genuinely lost children.

I don’t know the circumstances of Bruce’s loss, so I can’t and shouldn’t comment. (I’m sorry about your mom’s loss, Tigger.) What I lost was a pregnancy — but it barely had time for it to become even the idea of a child, to me; it was more “something which became a life-threatening crisis not long after I knew that it existed” than it was anything else.

There is a whole range of experiences out there.

“To Bad Gay’s just want to Steel the name Marriage instead of coming up with their own name………Who cares what they do………..”

As Lynne B pointed out, nobody’s stealing (or “steeling”) anything. The legal definition (and the rights and responsibilities therewith) of “marriage” is being EXPANDED to apply to male/male and female/female partnerships as well as to male/female partnerships.

If the “new name” you want same-sex couples to come up with does not confer identical privileges and protections under the law as those attendant to “marriage,” then it is not sufficient. If it DOES confer the identical privileges and protections, then a “new name” is redundant/unnecessary/inefficient.

If you and those who think like you do are uncomfortable with sharing the word “marriage”, it seems like YOU should be the ones to come up with a new name. You can even trademark it, if you like.

the foundation of a nation is the family.Since Adam, marriage has been the institution commanded by the Creator of the human race: one man married to one woman, ideally for their lifetime.-Marriage has been the model for 6,000 years of human history. The pattern protects women from becoming homeless, it protects children and produces adult citizens to work and pay taxes and raise new generations of children.-Satan is in his last days of power over humans working his hardest to sabotage the basic family unit, thereby destroying nations from the basement up to the top floor. -God will in His own time punish any nation so anti-God as to legalize gross sins….the US has now gone from legalizing murder of the millions of unborn children——all known by God—-to trying to destroy the meaning of the word “marriage”….-Free Will allows evil people to defy God, but there is a day of accounting to God for every word and action that each individual person has done, and Revelation in the Bible describes the earned wrath of God that is due sooner than most people think. The future is 100% in God’s hands.

Words change their meanings all the time, for many reasons. Of course, the meaning of the word “marriage” as YOU would insist upon it still exists. No opposite-sex marriage anywhere would gain or lose a thing by the recognition of same-sex marriage. So again, how is this “stealing” if you retain what you already have?

Liberal propaganda is swaying people. However, God established marriage in the book of Genesis. God calls it a relationship between a man and a woman. If homosexuals want to have relationships, that is up to them; however, stop trying to re-define marriage. The Bible calls a homosexual relationship a sin, just as it calls incest a sin, and just as it calls rape a sin. If all the world were to support homosexual marriage, it would still be sin. God did not put it up for us to vote on.

My dear masterskrain:Clearly you are failing to understand the “thinking” of fundagelical christianity here in the USA. Let me enlighten you:1) Bible passages that involve a change in one’s own lifestyle (selling all one has and giving to the poor, fasting, wives submitting to husbands and servants to masters, women not wearing makeup, blessed are the peacemakers, etc.) are “culturally conditioned” or “not applicable in this dispensation” or just ignored.2) Bible passages that involve the opportunity to take out one’s hatreds against others (especially gays, but in a pinch, blacks, Jews, women, atheists, and Muslims will all do nicely) are the WORD OF THE LORD.3) Things that are neutral with respect to lifestyle (creationism; most modern questions that are not dealt with in the bible; abstruse theological questions), are picked and chosen in accord with one’s personal preferences, and defended with tenacity, mendacity, and duplicity.4) Everything else is made up as needed; especially right-wing political positions (I think there is little doubt that the bible speaks clearly in favor of laissez-faire capitalism, unlimited gun rights and a larger American military; you just have to know Greek and Hebrew to see it).Further details upon request.

Please stop taking myths literally; it makes you sound like a doofus.On the other hand, this give me a chance to say that Richard Dawkins’ book “Unweaving the Rainbow” is a great read. In my edition, on page 41, he asks: “What is so threatening about reason?” Heckuva question for the religious!

This was lots better than my version. Thanks!

“Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.” Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

We presume that you have arrogated to yourself the right to define “sexual perversion.”

Wow!! What an education — zygotes come before blastocysts, fertilized zygotes can exist outside the uterus — (good luck with that one) and history only goes back 6,000 years. I learned it a little differently on my way to a PhD in anthropology, but you guys are the experts.

I didn’t bring the whole “when life begins” argument in, ansonia. SpicyNacho brought it in, King responded to that, and you started in on King’s response with your claims that zygotes can live independently. I chimed in after that. Take responsibility for your own argument, thank you.

So, if at some point in time we gained the knowledge to know that it was a true fact that abortion is murder, then what?

I would deal with it on its merits, then. However, I don’t find it likely; it would take a fairly extraordinary level of evidence to demonstrate that a fetus without a functional nervous system has as much perception, awareness, consciousness and level of rights as an already-born woman.

quoted Jase99 “stop limiting my rights based on your beliefs.”

and asked:“Aren’t you promoting gun control?”

Gun control isn’t based on beliefs.