Meanwhile:

Why do you emphasize gayness as the basis for special treatment among nonmarriage arrangements and relationship types where children are being raised?

You haven’t said what makes the gay arrangements more worthy to you.

You clearly inject into the word, couples, some sexual meaning, right? Or, more accurately, gay identity, right?

Why do you emphasize gayness as the basis for special treatment among nonmarriage arrangements and relationship types where children are being raised?

You haven't said what makes the gay arrangements more worthy.

I think you’ve misread my comments. I’m not advocating special treatment for gay couples, but rather, equal treatment, compared to straight couples. Both legally and morally, it is impermissible to deny the benefits of marriage to one group but not others. And it is bizarre to try to link marriage to “good parenting,” since gay couples are always permitted to raise children together and society permits convicted murderers and rapists to marry, so long as they’re straight.

Aren’t you uncomfortable advocating that only the children of opposite-sex couples deserve the security of having married parents, knowing that children are better off being raised by married parents? I guess I just don’t have the heart to tell the children of same-sex couples that they’re worth less than the children of opposite-sex couples!

Even at that your comments have not shown how the one-sexed type of relationship you have in mind is different from the rest of nonmarriage. Sure, you pointed at gayness, but that's just you showing favoritism for a particular group. SSM is not about licensing gayness, is it? If not, then, why attach to SSM a special status that is not available to the millions of non-gay arrangements and relationships -- especially families with children -- outside of marriage? Protection equality is based on the vulnerabilities those families experience due to the lack of (or diminishment of) sex integration and responsible procreation in their circumstances. That includes one-sexed arrangements which are not gaycentric.

Why the special treatment among nonmarriage arrangements and relatiionship types?

Do you oppose the special status of marriage?

If yes, okay, that is a logical conclusion of SSM arugmentation, as Olson recently indicated in his opening argument and answers to Judge Walker.

If no, then, plainly state the special reason for the special status of marriage. And show how your answser does not also apply to the rest of the nonmarriage category of relationships and arrangements.

I ask these questions of you Michael Adrian, who is in search of arguments that convince, because Marty is right on target when he said:

We’re not voting on “gay rights” rob, but on the meaning of marriage.

Who gets to decide the meaning of legal marriage, if not We The People? You? Me? 7 judges?

summary of yesterday.

The Framers of the Constitution . . . forbade the Congress to make any law "respecting" the establishment of religion, thus leaving the states free to do so (as several of them did); and they explicitly forbade the Congress to abridge "the free exercise" of religion, thus giving actual religious observance a rhetorical emphasis that fully accords with the special concern we know they had for religion. It takes a special ingenuity to wring out of this a governmental indifference to religion, let alone an aggressive secularism. Yet there are those who insist that the First Amendment actually proscribes governmental partiality not only to any single religion, but to religion as such; so that tax exemption for churches is now thought to be unconstitutional. It is startling [she continues] to consider that a clause clearly protecting religion can be construed as requiring that it be denied a status routinely granted to educational and charitable enterprises, which have no overt constitutional protection. Far from equalizing unbelief, secularism has succeeded in virtually establishing it.

[She continues:] What the secularists are increasingly demanding, in their disingenuous way, is that religious people, when they act politically, act only on secularist grounds. They are trying to equate acting on religion with establishing religion. And--I repeat--the consequence of such logic is really to establish secularism. It is in fact, to force the religious to internalize the major premise of secularism: that religion has no proper bearing on public affairs. [Human Life Review, Summer 1978, pp. 51–52, 60–61]