No, it's a 'waste of space' because it's a product that people can choose to pay for, or to not pay for, and this article addresses it as though there's some serious reason why they should.

Hey, I live a stone's throw from Capitol Hill, the very gayest neighborhood in Seattle. Some of the very coolest people I know are gay. My girlfriend's fetish troupe performs in the downstairs section of a gay nightclub (and until recently the sign on the front of it did bill it as a 'gay nightclub'. But I digress!)

I have no problem with gay people or gayness or anything like that, but let's accept 2 things, K?

If there was one instance of something in the books, then it's in the game. This insipid whining about how something didn't happen very often so it shouldn't be included is a judgement call that some writers may make. That's fine. And when they make their Tolkien-based MMO, they can exclude those things. That's not the call Turbine made, so suck it up, or don't play. I know there are a lot of mathematical illiterates here, so let me explain. 1 (the number of times something happened in the books) times ∞ (an infinite number of potential players) equals ∞. With me so far? Cool. Now, 0 (the number of gay marriages in the books) times ∞ equals . . . 0. That's the call they made, and that's the way it is. Whine all you like, that's just how it's going to be.

Secondly (though primarily, for me) this is ostensibly a ROLE-PLAYING game. Now, I realize that the role-playing aspect in any MMO is pretty weak, but nevertheless. People are whining in this section as though a role-playing game owes the player the ability to do whatever they like, but that is backwards. It requires you to take on a role, not create your personal Middle-Earth analog avatar, OK? Role-playing means you accept the world, pick a role, and play it. If that role is in a world where gay marriage doesn't exist, you don't get your little dwarf to make a little picket sign, then head down to the mead hall with his life partner to try and change the 'old dwarfs club' that runs the mine, alright? Why the hell are people too thick-headed to get this?

In the meantime, you can try to force the issue and make a loud show of 'voting with your dollar', but I'm pretty sure that you'll lose that one. So the best bet is to just start complaining online about how other people aren't as open-minded as you because they won't twist some dead writer's legacy to suit your particular political causes, K?

For reading through this idiotic bile and sifting out falsehood after falsehood. Honestly, I can't deal with this sort of idiotic self-righteousness at all, so you have my thanks for actually delving into it, day after day and pulling out juvenile crap like this.

The funny thing is that if it wasn't for bloggers like yourself (and firedoglake and DailyKos and so on) bloggers wouldn't be taken seriously at ALL. But once again, the right-wing has tacked itself onto a successful movement and hoped that the term 'blogger' will now add credibility to their insane rantings - casting themselves as underdogs, when all they really do is attack anyone who reports anything they dislike - over and over again, without fail, and when they happen to get 1 out of every hundred spurious claims right, they crow about it as though there weren't 99 arrogant, condescending mistakes immediately preceding it.

So thanks again. Seriously. That level of smugness ingested daily from the weblogs of G.E.D.-level thinkers talking down to anyone who doesn't share their ideological bias would give me an aneurysm. Keep up the good work.

I read this, seeing flaws in just about every sentence attributed to the workers at the 'museum'.

I go to the "Answers in Genesis" website to see their 'arguments' and it's all just babble couched in scientific-sounding terminology - and it really makes no sense. A series of non sequiturs. Their only purpose is to convince the poor people visiting that they really do have some sort of cunning argument that really SHOULD win against evolutionary principles, so that those same people don't actually LISTEN to the evidence for evolution.

I see all this, and yet it doesn't matter at all. Truth doesn't matter in the slightest when your opponent's trump card is "my religious beliefs are right because my religion tells me so".

Don't lose the kind of humor in the last line. Being liberal is so often like being in a race where the person who gets the most offended the fastest wins (unless you're a white male, in which case you're a whiner!) and thanks for ignoring those reactions.