Two consenting adults... check, done, nail it shut.

What if you're a man but you're pseudo hermaphrodite and you don't know it then you have sex change and your mate was born a male but disfigured so 'her' parents decided to castrate 'her' and rear her as a female.......

are not obssessed/paranoid/paralyzed by concerns over their status and attractiveness these relationships are probably not as rare as the raw demographics would suggest.

Anyone seeking same-sex marriage in Maine cannot currently do so. Typically a bill does not take affect until 90 days after the adjournment of the Legislature. However, if sufficient signatures are collected as a petition by this deadline, the law will not go into effect and a vote by the electorate takes place in November. If Maine votes against the law, then gay marriage will have never happened.

As a resident of Maine, I hope that this does not happen, but after California, it's difficult to say what will happen.

Gee the world hasn't ended without gay marriage, either ....imagine that. There is a significant level of support for same-sex unions....that is civil unions. It's the word marriage that 53% of the country supports keeping between a man and a woman. Let's stay focused.

It's a difficult concept, so try to break it down.

Genotype: XX, XY. There are also XXX, XXY, X0, and other combinations. Pretty much immutable.

Phenotype: Male and/or female genitalia. Androgen insensitivity syndrome, surgery, accidents, etc. can change this.

Sexual Identity: Do you see yourself as a man or woman (occasionally androgynous)? When asked, what do you respond with? Which sex do you dress as?

Sexual Preference: Now, we finally get to it. Do you sleep with men or women?

All combinations of these exist, and will end up with all combinations of partners, given enough time. Approximately 1% of Americans have genotypic or phenotypic variations from XX-woman XY-man at birth. Many more have different sexual identities and sexual preferences. It's stupid to try to come up with laws for all of them. Marriage is between 2 consenting adults.

I'll bet this happens far more often than we hear about.

Happen all the time, that is. People with genetic deformities, or the intersexed are pretty rare. Most make a decision by adulthood what sex they are; most people accept this as a final decision.

So what we are really talking about is transsexuals. I do not care in the least what people want to go around dressing like, but problems like this arise when you permit people to have physically mutilating surgery to cope with emotional/psychological problems -- ONLY in sexual identity problems do we permit people to mutilate their natural bodies. Our society NEVER permits people with, say, phantom limb disease to cut off their arms or legs.

There is currently no uniformity in how each state treats transsexuals. Some states permit the person to CHANGE their birth certificate and driver's license to reflect the surgical sex change; others do not. In any event, any marriage such individuals embark on is NOT gay marriage -- I actually think most transsexuals would be offended by this tag. Certainly the intent is to form a HETEROSEXUAL marriage.

The problem worsens when you consider there are even MORE "pre-surgical" transsexuals, like "the pregnant man", who create an outer appearance of one sex, while maintaining the genitalia of another.

Ms. Harding suggests that transsexuals simply be banned from any kind of marriage, which strikes me as too extreme. I do think we need to re-examine what we mean by man and woman -- we are getting entirely too flippant about this, basing things on imbecilic "gender studies" courses from liberal colleges and not on common sense.

Unless you have a genetic defect (like an extra chromosome) OR are intersexed -- both fairly rare -- if you are NORMAL and are clearly XX or XY, then THAT solely determines your sex. Period. Paragraph. You may have the ability to cut up and rearrange your parts, but you are essentially what you were born, male or female.

In any event, most people would consider the marriages between surgical transsexuals to be the same kind of mockery of traditional marriage and family that gay marriage represents. I think it has "slipped between the cracks" of various state's legal systems, due to what I say above (confusion, "gender studies", overly liberal legislatures, etc.) and a lack of uniformity among the states. I do agree we need a more consistent set of laws to deal with this -- something like DOMA (which clearly sets standards for what is and what is not "a marriage") that states what is and what is not FEMALE and MALE.

And those standards need to be set BY THE PEOPLE, and not by a bunch of arrogant, self-proclaimed "correct thinkers" who want to re-engineer society according to their own set of politics.

It is helpful when discussing this to realize that we are talking about a very, very tiny minority of people -- WAY less than the one percent quoted. Probably closer to 1/10 of a percent -- keep in mind that the most liberal, pro-gay researchers can only identify about 1.5%-2% of the population as gay; even considering people who are "in the closet", the highest figure accepted by gay spokespersons is 3% -- and transsexuals are much rarer than homosexuals.

Probably inadvertently, Kate Harding gives YET ANOTHER example of why changing the definition of marriage will -- if it proceeded unchecked (which I doubt) -- be a tragic disaster for everybody.

Lastly, in response to a couple of posters who say that "any two people" should be allowed to marry, I ask this: ANY TWO? Seriously?

A mother and her (adult) son? Two (adult) sisters? A niece and her uncle?

And -- why two? The Yearning For Zion ranch certainly won't be satisfied with only TWO. What on earth makes you pick TWO as the optimal number? It surely isn't THE BIBLE!!! It surely isn't that there are TWO SEXES, both required to create new life!!!

If there is no special justification for TWO -- and there isn't, by your logic -- then why not THREE...or FOUR...or TEN? You don't have a reason anymore. Therefore, gay marriage is a straight line (so to speak) to POLYGAMY...and not even polygamy between men and women, but to absolute chaos. To formless ad hoc relationships, without any benefit to society or any stability for children, who will grow up without normal kinship relations (who is your grandparent, or your cousin -- when you are the spawn of 5 or 8 sexually ambiguous, loosely paired-off people? NO ONE!).

It's time to sink this selfish and socially destructive concept -- and I hope the intelligent and decent people of Iowa and Maine do just that.