I sometimes wonder if conservative Christians ever read their own scriptures. In the Bible a traditonal marriage consists of one man with several wives, and he has the perfectly legitimate option of including concubines. It is not a sin for a man to visit a prostitute, though it is a sin for a woman to be a prostitue. The Song of Solomon celebrates a hot, very physical love affair between two people who are not married.

Jesus said (contrary to Old Testament law) that divorce is a sin, and he had absolutley nothing to say one way or another about homosexuality. I know a few divorced-and-remarried evangelical Christians who self-righteously condemn homosexuality as the worst sin on the face on the earth.

is the "argument" I get from conservative Christian family members. I always feel like I'm listening to some kind of Zen koan because the words ALMOST but don't quite make any sense, setting up a conflict between cerebral hemispheres that in a different cultural context might lead to satori.

Usually it leads me to ask: "How does that impair your life specifically?"

And the answer inevitably is:

"Because it defines it for everybody!"

Rinse and repeat.

Some men can afford a string of wives, ex-wives, mistresses and the like, and therefore see no harm in indulging themselves. Some men like rough trade. Without the stigma of restroom assignations, their own psyches would leave be left unsatisfied; clean, well-lighted places and the approval of society at large are entirely beside the point. Some men also leave unwed mothers in their wake. It wouldn't surprise me if regret haunted some of them, while others never give it a thought.

Values can resist circumstance to a degree; that's more or less the point of having them, to avoid making others the victims of our desires, even when it's easy to do so.

When you make laws out of values, though, you leave the door open to all sorts of evils, not the least of which is that the administration of punishment becomes what distinguishes the virtuous from the sinners, and not genuine contributions to the health of the community.

Who does it hurt if gay men and women marry their partners? Is it better to lock up irresponsible fathers, or to fund free night classes at local community colleges, and set up non-punitive child-support payment schemes, maybe even matching grants for those who pay voluntarily? As for unwed mothers, how about storefront day-care centers and pre-natal facilities staffed by local women, with visiting doctors and nurses? How about free school lunches, and clothing vouchers?

If Senator Craig feels the need to grope consenting adults in public restrooms, wouldn't he -- and we -- be better off in a society which encourages him to propose public lewdness statutes which take more into account the actual sexual proclivities of the populace, rather than hide from his own by lending his public support to measures which demonize them when practiced by others?

Small gestures of humility and understanding often do more good in the aggregate than a single hypocritical blast on Gabriel's trumpet. That's the real value of Glenn's attacks on hypocrisy. There have been times when the people were at least willing to entertain such notions; maybe they can be persuaded to again.

As for who's going to pay, liberals and conservatives can argue about public or private funding, but there's no question that, as a society, we can afford substantial experimentation in this area as easily as we can afford B-2 bombers, or unprovoked attacks on Middle Eastern contries.

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.

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.

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.