Thank you for your reference. I have just ordered Kvale and Brinkmann's book from Amazon.

Being an 'objective' kind of researcher, I find it easier to do quantitative analysis (in my case, usually the result of questionnaires or responses to stimuli by a group of subjects, or also comparative word lists -- I am a linguist by profession). My wife, who is also a researcher (in philosophy), has recently started talking to me about the pluses and minuses of qualitative research, and the topic has intrigued me. (A while ago, she and a colleague did a study of attitudes to nature -- 'why do we react so positively to natural landscapes?' -- by taking a group of 12 students (plus me as an extra 13) to a natural park (the Eifel volcano in Germany) for four days, performing a number of nature-related activities there, and asking every student to keep his/her impressions and experiences thoroughly described in a notebook. At the end, those notbooks were her (and her colleague's) data. I wouldn't know what exactly to do with them myself, because each student had very specific and detailed reactions that I would find hard to compare to other students' -- but their reactions made very interesting reading material.

Marriage isn't taken seriously enough, so we should destroy it completely?

No. Why did you think that?

legal marriage has nothing to do with "love." Go ahead and leaf through the civil codes and family law books, and try and find the word "love" anywhere.

And? In what way does that mean gays shouldn't be able to marry?

Marriage is about offering some legal status and benefit to a couple who has chosen to commit to laying the foundation for an ideal family unit, the beginning of which is one man and one woman.

What is "the ideal family unit", and how do we know its beginning is one man and one woman? Your statement obviously begs the question.

Liberals think anything that is "fun" and "feels good" should automatically be subsidized by the government, who should come shower money and benefits on people based on their sexual attractions to each other.

No--the position is that "fun" and "feels good" shouldn't be prohibited unless there are good, pragmatic reasons for doing this. Since you mentioned marriage is not about love, then what are the good, pragmatic reasons for being against it in the case of homosexual couples?

t is really about the government giving some recognition to couples who fulfill a vital social need by attempting to create the basis for healthy families.

Precisely. So why not do that to homosexual couples that fulfil said social need?

The fact that some people simply can't get that idea through their head, and think that "marriage" should simply mean any group of "consenting adults" who like hitting the sack together, and should be rewarded by the government based on that alone, are either pathologically immature or disingenuous.

And I think you're the one who doesn't get the idea through your head (or are being disingenous). Nobody thinks this about marriage -- hell, the people who are all for "consenting adults" tend to be against marriage (see dick dworkin above). Those who are in favor of marriage see it as commitment plus social rights -- which has nothing to do with the sources of your misplaced outrage (which comes from some misconception of liberalism-as-orgy that you've got from some conservative blog).

Today marks the first time in quite a while that New Yorkers can be proud of their state government.

Said the Confederacy, about Fort Sumter.

-- except they said that about South Carolinans, not New Yorkers.

The US Government, like any government (including NY), has done many things it later regretted. As the population changes and our opinions become more mature (and, as Dan Savage keeps pointing out, this seems to be the way of the future--the new generations are more tolerant than the old ones), the laws about marriage will change, as they always did in history when society change. It's only a matter of time.

I begin to think the words "concern troll" would describe better your approach to debating.

What a pity. I thought you were interested in dialogue. Now it turns out you're more interested in writing down sound bites and then leaving, hoping people will get angry (so you can complain about how aggressive liberals are).

OK. So be it.

Over and end.

Really? I'm not saying you're wrong, but it sure seems to me there's bigger fish for Science to fry. How about a cure for AIDS or something?

I mean aren't there more pressing things to study than how and why men like to spank their meatlogs?

Maybe, if you think of science as something that has set tasks to be carried out according to priority levels. But usually science is research done by people who developed a passion for certain topics -- and, depending on available funding, I'm sure you could find people with a scientific mind and interest in doing such a study.

There are indeed bigger fish to fry, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't fry the small fish too. Any such hierarchies end up being self-defeating (like those people who say we should stop caring about, say, fighting racism because there are more important problems like, say, people dying of hunger in Africa, and by working on racism we waste resources that could be used to solve these other more important problems... this ends up discouraging people from doing anything for either problem.)