Greenwald thinks that divorce is not traditional and nobody divorced can remarry in a "traditional marriage." This is true in the Roman Catholic church, but it is hardly true in other traditions. Christianity derives from both Jewish and Greco-Roman roots, and both of those traditions did have (and for Jews still do) divorce laws and rituals.

Certainly you might want to speak against an adulterous union that leads to divorce and remarriage, but divorce and remarriage itself is hardly non-traditional.

I believe what you describe in your Saturday 7:06 is The Patriarchy.

If the cons want to get technical about traditional marraige then they would have to revoke legal benefits for straight couples as well because marraige was originally a religious ceremony with no legal benefits attached (of course if they really want to get "traditinal" they would also have to go back to women as property, good luck getting the rest of the country to sign on to that).

To the extent I've followed it, the profile of the people who claim that gay marriage will lead to "backlash" against Democrats is always the same. They're pretty conservative Democrats who aren't talking about reelection of incumbents. They're talking about other conservative Democrats trying to get newly elected.

The undertone of careerism and resentment or rejection of liberal Democrats is always palpable in their assertions. Of course, they're usually only asserting the electorate's supposed deep rejectionism of gay marriage as a shield or spear to voice their own lack of conviction of its legitimacy or necessity. Proposing this lack of conviction to be an electoral virtue, of course.

In short, it's all latent or overt conservative rot and a fealty to social policy cowardice within upper tier Democrats.

The national picture is that Bush won in part, and the Republicans added Senate seats, in November 2004 on a mandate to implement some more social conservatism. It wasn't enough of a mandate to achieve a ban on gay marriage legalization, though it was enough to keep DOMA firmly in place. And it was arguably mostly about abortion rights: it was enough to appoint some more federal judges, who in turn restricted abortion rights somewhat, i.e. the Carthart majority opinion.

The Schiavo affair, probably with help of the summer 2004 FMA debate loosening the ground, blew out the weakening conservative lean of swing voters on social policy in April 2005. Last November's election ended out the socially conservative Republican Senate majority in which the middling socially conservative policy mandate of 2004 was manifested. We are now stuck in neutral, though trend is obviously some amount of liberal mandate after the 2008 election.

(Of course, the other 2004 election mandates in the significant policy areas were some Democratic mandate on economic affairs- manifested in the successful resistance to Social Security "reform"-, and a definite mandate on 'handling terrorism' to Bush. (Which is to kill the Al Qaeda leadership, legalizing it and the means to it by averting eyes from all his actions infringing laws that do not harm Americans directly.) Foreign policy, Iraq/war, and ethics in government were neutral in 2004- The People voted to carry on as before, permitting no new initiatives or termination, until success or selfinflicted collapse and failure of the Republican policies. Of course, it's been all failure.)

I don't think the government has any business legally supporting marriage. Instead of supporting marriage for gay people, I support un-marriage for straight people as pertains to the law. I think the federal government should declare all current marriages to be civil unions. This would mean that the government could regulate civil unions in ways that are supported by constitutional law. If the government finds nothing in The Constitution to forbid same sex civil unions, they would become automatically legal.

As to so-called traditional marriage, if you want to go back far enough, traditional marriage was really polygamy. I believe when Jesus forbade divorce he was actually discouraging men from abandoning their old wives to whom they had made a previous committment. He did not say that they could not take new wives in addition. They could add up as many wives as they could economically support.

Also, while I know that the Mormon Church outlawed polygamy because they wanted Utah to achieve statehood, I don't believe that this was new information REVEALED to the prophet by God. In other words, for legal purposes, the Mormon Church accepted the modern standards of marriage. The prophet NEVER claimed that God had told him that polygamy was religiously unlawful. In other words, the folks who practiced true Old Testament marriage are in Mitt's family tree and not McCain's.

I am no biblical scholar, but perhaps someone can tell me exactly where in the Christian bible it says EXPLICITLY that marriage must be ONE man and ONE woman and that a man cannot merely marry one woman at a time and then yet another one later?

Please, you bible scholars, correct me if I am wrong.

That means that, for the next five months, the Repubs have got to find some way of depicting Iowa, the ur-heartland state, as Gomorrah-of-the-plains while simultaneously campaigning there. Or, of depicting the (elected?) Iowa Supreme Court as a gang of heinous catamite subversives while sucking up to the Iowa voters. Good luck, wingnuts!

Note to Bebop-o/Celery: while you're up in that part of the world, you have got to get yourself up the road to CBI (itself a wonderful place) and thence on the ferry to Newfoundland. Dey's good folks up on Da Rock, I tells ya. Maybe the tough weather makes 'em both tougher and sweeter at the same time. So get up there and hoist a few under the pink-white-and-green. I promise you won't regret it.

Think how long it would take me to list all the Republican freaks.

First, you would have to categorize their vast array of perverts:

Media right pervert category: BillO, Limbaugh, etc.

Political right pervert category: Craig, Vitter, etc.

Religious right pervert category: Haggard, etc.

Of course, true to their Orwellian nature, the more right wing perverts that are uncovered, the louder the "family values party" roar will become.