...the 'promiscuous gay lifestyle,' yet they don't want to allow us to make legal commitments to one another that might have the chance to ameliorate such behavior (marriage has certainly done that for the straights--yes, indeed). What are these people saying? That's easy: they don't want gay people to exist.

I am so fucking tired of being used as a wedge issue. If I could get a good job and move to Canada, I would in a heartbeat.

It really is uncanny how their arguments seem to call for a rollback of the "no-fault" divorce laws, rather than a ban on gay marriage. At first it was the gay community and their supporters who cried, "You want to sanctify marriage, why not just outlaw divorce, huh?" But now the anti-gay-ites seem poised to do just that, judging from their rhetoric.

"There is no scientific evidence that children of homosexual parents are more likely to suffer abuse, psychological hardship or homosexual tendencies."

No one "suffers" from "homosexual tendencies" because being gay is not a disease; it is not something horrible like child abuse or psychological hardship.

Furthermore, one is gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender. No one has "homosexual tendencies" any more than they would have "hetero tendencies" or "brown-haired tendencies" or "Irish tendencies." For the record, there is also no "gay lifestyle," no one is a "practicing homosexual," and gays cannot recruit or convert others.

I appreciate the otherwise well-written and well-argued article. It's true that gays are not detroying the U.S. nor hetero marriages.

I wonder how many of the straight people who want to dictate who and how queer people can love are even aware that they're next?

Do they really think that once the religious wrong are finished kicking the queers that they're just going to stop telling other people how to live their lives? When that (happily) ever-shrinking majority of Americans who oppose marriage equality can't use contraception with their legally wedded spouses, after the wife has already been denied a life-saving vaccine for a preventable STD, and then can't get an over-the-counter morning-after drug and later find they can't get an abortion (and the list will not stop there) -- will they wake up then, I wonder?

And who are they going to turn to for help?

Oh g-d, this again?

I live in Massachusetts, which is, as everyone knows, the only state where homosexual marriages are allowed. I was there for the hearings and the demonstrations two years ago -- there for the hatred spewed by right wingers, there for the hugs from my queer compatriots, there for an interesting discussion with a man who opposed gay marriage and actually could talk with me about it, there for the kids on both side, the gay parents' kids treated lovingly and respectfully and many of the right-wingers' kids shouting lewd anti-gay slogans I hope they did not understand, there with the gay couple who'd been with each other for 50 years and hoped beyond hope that their union would be recognized, there to have vomit thrown on me by someone on the other side, there for several hundred supporters of gay marriage filling the statehouse with patriotic songs while the right-wingers (the leaders almost all bused in from out of state) seethed because we'd "stolen" "their" songs.

And gay marriage became legal, and guess what? The sky hasn't fallen, the milk hasn't curdled, Massachusetts families are about the same as they were before, except there are some thousands of same sex couples who've made a state-sanctioned commitment to each other, more kids have parents who are legally married (an important thing since gays in our state disproportionately adopt special-needs kids, who need the protection of stable families more than other kids), people go about their lives much as they always have, and nothing terrible happens. We rank among the lowest in the country for divorce rates, teen pregnancy rates, and so forth, just as we have for years. It is such a non-issue for most people here... Now I just wish the rest of the country would pay attention and actually see what gay marriage HAS NOT done to our Commonwealth.

George Bush and the Republicans may see the Christian psychos as their base, but the American public better view them for what they really are: a cancer on the nation. Going after gays makes perfect sence. They're an easy target. Its not surprising that all of the Christian fueled rhetoric against same-sex marriage is really aimed at hetersexual marriages. Its no secret these radical christian groups are striving to reshape the nation as a Christian theocracy. Banning gay marriage is seen as an easy scheme, but,like with the Terri Schiavo issue, they may have miscalculated. If they are successful in securing a constitutional ammendment banning same sex marriage don't expect them to stop there. The groundwork is being laid to expand...which is why most of their arguements seem aimed at heterosexual divorce.

Too many americans have allowed themselves to be bullied and threatened by these cancerous christians, and it time to cut the cancer out...for the good of the country. The voting booth is our scalpel.

"What is it about gay marriage, civil unions, or whatever you want to call it, that undermines heterosexual marriage?" They can't answer that question because there is no answer. Rosie O'Donnell marrying her lesbian partner has absolutely nothing to do with my wife and me, no matter how strenuously James Dobson insists it does.

Unfortunately, there exists in the United States of America a significant core group of ignorant, superstitious, regressive people, which Dobson and those like him cultivate as we do our backyard tomatoes. They are the ones who will do just about anything, go along with just about any ridiculous idea, or put up with just about any gross injustice, if Dobson, or Falwell, or Robertson tell them it's for "Jesus." The existence of this core of ignorance undermines the very foundation of the republic we founded two centuries ago in Philadelphia, and it's growing like a cancer on our body politic.

We are also unfortunate that there are few national leaders today who represent what President Kennedy once termed "profiles in courage." Even after decades of watching this same group of ignoramuses being led by the nose by the same group of charlatans to send the same gang of thieves to Washington to eat away at the fabric of our representative democracy, no one of national sigificance has had the courage, or the nerve, to challenge them, to just say, in plain language, that we are being fed a steaming bowl of bullshit. No, most of them are afraid of who they might offend, as if the truth were some form of vile pornography that ought to be kept under wraps, or pixellated so that the most offensive portions are obscured, or just blacked-out. God help us.