I was under the impression that the law was specifically crafted to not go into affect until it was constitutionally vetted. If that's true (I'm no legal expert), then not filing suit against it could prevent it from ever being enforced, right?

I liked it.

I could see how someone might call it boring - everything is boring to the wrong person, the person with nothing in common. But pretentious? Some of you people consider anything to be pretentious, as far as I can tell, unless it deals directly in the travails of dire poverty.

As far as I know, every state in the Union allows for mothers to legally abandon their child and walk away from all parental responsibility...

In every state of the union, a man who wants to keep a child can do so and hit up the woman for child support in the case where the woman wants to give the child up for adoption.

Women do have several levels of choice (at least for now) that are not available to men.

This is, indeed, an accident of biology. The unfairness is biological, not legal. Adding in a legal unfairness to the child would merely create more suffering for the most helpless. Two wrongs don't make a right.

...someone new to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...

In the event that the latest martian probe brings back some aliens, I'll keep that in mind. Do you really need every article about Hamas to harp on what we already know about them? Many people I know were positively shocked that Hamas won the elections. They were shocked because they were ignorant. Ignorance, IMO, doesn't help Israel or anybody else.

...you forgot to mention the women that are killed in the Arab world for being kidnapped and then returned to their families.

I really think that when making statements like this you should include the fact that you're talking about the backwoods of Pakistan. Shall I play the same game with the Western world? It's pretty easy.

Robert Franklin, Sharon 629 was 100% correct in asserting that any disparity in post-birth adoption rights is unfortunate but ultimately tangential to the child's right to support. Your arguments about adoption rights would be very interesting and all if we were discussing adoption cases, but impoverishing children is not a solution to abortion rights. The cases you cite note the child's best interests. That seems to be a blindspot in your deliberations on all related subjects.

So, if in a given year, you use RU-486 to have an abortion and a car to go to work, you're more than 11 times as likely to die in a car accident than to die from complications related to RU-486.

Scary pill, indeed.

I don't get allowing the people who hurt and anger you to take control of your decisions.

That's a strange claim for you to make, given that that's precisely what you've advocated: allowing the father's brief statement of fact to control her decisions and make her do something she otherwise wouldn't. There's no need for her to give the father that kind of power over her.

Diva. Boot. Camp. I am so there.

As a recruit, or as Sergeant? ;)

The worst case being that man that was on 60 Minutes and had several wives, including one that was "married" at the age of ten or so.

...

Then there are my friends who define themselves as "poly-amourous". Free thinkers that collect themselves in groups of different sizes and compositions... MFF, FFM, FFFFM, FFMM, etc.

...

As much as I dislike the first group, I can't condem them while condoning my friends choices...

Sure you can. Condemn them for pedophilia (nevermind de facto slavery). Ten years old? Ick!

I can't help thinking that, after all the times the Democrats have let Bush steamroll them, that "straw-men" isn't a bad characterization of his opposition.

But Bush was just getting started. He said he has a message for "people" who say that the blessings of liberty should only be "for one group of people": You -- whoever you are -- are "denying the basic rights to others."

Erm, denying rights to detainees is YOUR position, PotUS.

My understanding of the purpose of this clause is to allow people to defend themselves by presenting the evidence against them to them; i.e., the jury shouldn't have information that the defense cannot offer rebuttal against. I don't see any reason why it should apply against videotaped testimony of any kind (remember, this stuff didn't exist when the constitution was written). That does not, by itself, turn the court into any sort of kangaroo.

Forced marriage is very wrong. It's also illegal. Pedophilia is very wrong. It's also illegal. Polygamy, well, people here are debating whether it's inherently wrong (though there seems to be agreement that when it involves forcible pedophilia, that's wrong regardless). However, it's worth noting that polygamy is also illegal. So, these horrible cases in Utah? That's a question of enforcement, not the morality of polygamy itself. The legal status of consensual polygamy is not going to change anything one way or the other. It's already illegal, and that's not working to solve the problem.

Trying to conflate the two issues is disingenuous.

If a person really is serious about putting the person who says they love them, then beats the shit out of them, in jail; then the prosecutors need to convince the victim to come forward just like in any other case.

What if they're NOT "serious" about it? That doesn't necessarily make the perp's behavior any less of a crime. What if murder victims had to press charges? Should we let all murderers off the hook because their victims can't testify against them?