* A certain amount of thuggishness can advance your cause: Islam in Europe; Blacks in America; Scientologists bullying their way into tax exempt status. One needs to consider responding in kind.
* The upside to gay marriage, mentioned earlier in comments on this site, is that if the trait/behavior is genetically transferred, the earlier they get together with each other the less chance they will procreate and thus pass on the gene. Less chance they will ruin the life of some unsuspecting young, if naive, woman. Less chance they will infect naive women with a disease picked up through whatever dating method has replaced bath houses. Less chance the health downsides of their sexual behavior will ripple through the heterosexual population because of introduction to an unsuspecting woman.
The downside is that marriage as an institution is mostly a function of recognizing the need for child rearing to be a two person activity composed of a male and female. Such a recognition is easy if you first recognize that males and females are wildly different creatures bringing different strengths and weaknesses to the table. If society wishes to reject said reality for something more idealistic, what better way to undermine the former consensus than rejecting the different sex structure undergirding child rearing?
This is mostly a battle of religions, the ancient text religions vs. that religion which yet has to be named, messianic idealism.
* 99% of SSM marriage debates is about self-absorbed gays and lesbians who want to demand that they, and their couplings, be viewed equivalently by everyone, if necessary, by calling the police. But actually, most people, however liberal they are, are creeped out by most LGBT’s. Not because they “hate” LGBT’s, but because of Sullivan calls the “ick” factor. That isn’t going to change.
That’s why, when the armed services validated LGBT rights, most of the people interviewed indicated that they weren’t going to come out to their fellow service members anyway. For all that, if religious people are going to allow themselves to be provoked, we will continue to get these headlines.
* The State has a vested interest in damping down male violence over women. Legalize gay marriage and you defacto legalize polygamy, and get a society somewhere between Saudi Arabia and Salt Lake City circa 1857 with the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
Which btw is exactly where we are headed. One need only look at the Black community and the defacto soft polygamy there and see that the most violent killers have the most kids and the main driver for violence is the sexual and reproductive rewards for men engaging in otherwise stupid and senseless violence. The State has an OVERWHELMING interest in damping down conditions for male violence, and regulating who can and cannot have sex or get married is one of them. Already it is properly illegal for men to have sex with adolescent girls though doubtless most would do so if it was legal. The same holds true for women, and there is no shortage of Mary Kay LeTourneaus either, said woman back in the news with an interview with Barbara Walters.
* Actually, there are no good arguments FOR redefining marriage to cater to the whims of a tiny, deviant minority. Marriage is the basis of civilization and the family. Two men, or two women, cannot produce a family. A homosexual couple does not deserve, therefore, the benefits and status of a real married couple, paid for by taxpayers.
Children in schools should not have to learn about homosexuality as some kind of worthy lifestyle anymore than they would have to consider incest, polygamy or bestiality the same way.
Gay “marriage” didn’t win because it had better arguments; it won because its proponents are rich and influential, and use ruthless and fascist tactics to threaten the opposition. Got it?
* “What I don’t understand then is why gay marriage has never been a legal institution in maybe 3,000 years of human history.”
Mostly because for those 3000 years no arguments were required. Just as no arguments have been necessary to justify why we don’t go out in public naked, or marry our siblings, or swap children with strangers, or why we do recognize private property.
* The Muslims in Europe still are far less wealthy and well connected than other groups. Their power comes from their willingness to kill and otherwise physically attack those who insult their religion.
* Since Muslims (the vast majority anyway) want to impose a violent, 7th Century theocracy with polygamy upon every society where they are more than a tiny minority, anything and everything people who are NOT Muslims do gives offense. One might wonder what the Copts looking for work in Libya did to give offense other than be (native) North African Christians? THEY certainly did not draw any cartoons, and were beheaded anyway.
* There are over a billion Muslims in this world and they control several dozen countries, some of them quite rich. How the hell is criticizing Muslims “punching down”?
Meanwhile, how many countries are controlled by Protestant Christians? Few. By fundamentalist Christians? None.
* From looking at lists of famous satirists down through history, a few common tendencies seem evident:
– They tend to believe they are superior individuals
– They often are, although perhaps not quite as much as they assume
– They aren’t usually particularly nice people (I saw Chekhov’s name on one list of satirists, and it stands out because everybody has nice things to say about him)
– They tend to be relatively privileged by background, although not perhaps as much as they’d like (Al Capp stood out from one list for rising above a difficult childhood, but then who has heard of Al Capp these days?)
I may be generalizing from Waugh too much, but his personality seems to exemplify a lot of the traits of major satirists.
* The best satire, indeed the original satire is, as Gary Trudeau hints, all about attacking politicians and the powerful. It’s all about deflating the pompous, the vain and the conceited – those who really do think that they are ‘better’ than the common man. Indeed, the more pompous the personage, and the more ridiculous the satire, the funnier it is.
A tradition that really started in the pomp of 18th century Georgian England, and the often scatological and nasty colored prints of Gilray, Rowlandson and others.
