It seems that people are only looking at 1 facet of a relationship and a marriage. Sex is only 1 part of a marriage it does not define it for those of us who have been married for along time. There is much more to love and loving someone other than what happens in the bedroom.

This is the root of what bothers people....they obsess about the act behind closed doors and don't want to see that there's way more to marriage and love that that 1 aspect

There are 3 phases of sex in a lasting marriage; house sex, bedroom sex, and finally hall sex. Most of us here have been around long enough to have experienced hall sex. Why shouldn't gay people have the same opportunity?

You forgot shrubbery sex. Those were the days!

It seems that people are only looking at 1 facet of a relationship and a marriage. Sex is only 1 part of a marriage it does not define it for those of us who have been married for along time. There is much more to love and loving someone other than what happens in the bedroom.

This is the root of what bothers people....they obsess about the act behind closed doors and don't want to see that there's way more to marriage and love that that 1 aspect

There are 3 phases of sex in a lasting marriage; house sex, bedroom sex, and finally hall sex. Most of us here have been around long enough to have experienced hall sex. Why shouldn't gay people have the same opportunity?

You forgot shrubbery sex. Those were the days!

Hehehe...growing up on the Jersey shore it was beach sex. That's when I found out that the green stuff growing on the sand dunes was poison ivy.

Whatever. Just leave the f-ing English language alone. Where did the authority to re-define words to fit your own desires or belief system come from? Who grants that authority? Something about that just rubs me wrong. For starters, granting yourself that authority is arrogance beyond belief.
IMO

You have just stated Justice Scalia's opinion on every issue.

Isn't circumcision a sacrament?

You want to weigh in on that alloak?

Without revealing too much... I have a friend who was circumcised in the hospital... No incense, no blessings, no kind words...

Did that redefine the sacrament?

What are you talking about? How is circumcission a sacrament? Christians don't even follow it.

What we have here is a Federal government takeover of marriage, a sacrament that's meant one thing and one thing only for thousands of years.....I'm wondering if it's legal and/or constitutional for the Federal government to re-define a sacrament to achieve some political end. I can't believe they have this authority.

And let's prohibit the States right to make their own laws while we're at it.

Nine unelected individuals were able to pull this off.

They are not at all referring in this ruling to the RELIGIOUS CEREMONY of marriage, but the legal contract also referred to as marriage that the federal government absolutely has authority over. They're two distinct and mutually exclusive things and thus religious entities who wish to determine who they'll marry in their religious ceremonies can still do so.

It's predicated on the separation of Church and State. It's that simple.

[Edited on 6/28/2015 by Chain]

Actually the federal government has no authority over it. The state governments do. And the Supreme Court held that laws banning gay marriage violate the 14th amendment.

quote:
Isn't circumcision a sacrament?

You want to weigh in on that alloak?

Without revealing too much... I have a friend who was circumcised in the hospital... No incense, no blessings, no kind words...

Did that redefine the sacrament?

What are you talking about? How is circumcission a sacrament? Christians don't even follow it.

Do Christians have a monopoly on sacrament?

But you are correct. I don't know enough about Jewish myth and ceremony to know if the circumcision is a sacrament, rite, ceremony...

So I looked it up. Wow. That Bible is full of some strange ass thinking.

Biblical Data:
A religious rite performed on male children of Jews on the eighth day after birth; also on their slaves, whether born in the house or not. It was enjoined upon Abraham and his descendants as "a token of the covenant" concluded with him by God for all generations, the penalty of non-observance being "karet," excision from the people (Gen. xvii. 10-14, xxi. 4; Lev. xii. 3). Aliens had to undergo circumcision before they could be allowed to partake of the covenant-feast of Passover (Ex. xii. 48), or marry into a Jewish family (Gen. xxxiv. 14-16). It was "a reproach" for the Israelite to be uncircumcised (Josh. v. 9; on "the reproach of Egypt" see below). Hence the name "'arelim" (uncircumcised) became an opprobrious term, denoting the Philistines and other non-Israelites (I Sam. xiv. 6, xxxi. 4; II Sam. i. 20; compare Judges xiv. 3; I Sam. xvii. 26), and used synonymously with "tame" (unclean) for heathen (Isa. lii. 1). The word "'arel" (uncircumcised) is also employed for "unclean" (Lev. xxvi. 41, "their uncircumcised hearts"; compare Jer. ix. 25; Ezek. xliv. 7, 9); it is even applied to the first three years' fruit of a tree, which is forbidden (Lev. xix. 23).

Original Significance.
This shows how deeply rooted in the minds of the ancient Hebrews was the idea that circumcision was an indispensable act of national consecration and purification. Nevertheless, there are several facts in the Bible which do not seem to be in full harmony with this view. According to Ex. iv. 24-26, the circumcision of the first-born son was omitted by Moses, and the Lord therefore "sought to kill him"; whereupon "Zipporah took a flint and cut off the foreskin of her son, and made it touch [A. V., "cast it at"] his [Moses'] feet," saying, "A bridegroom of blood art thou to me." Thus Moses was ransomed by the blood of his son's circumcision.

Strange as was this omission on the part of Moses, the omission of the rite on the part of the Israelites in the wilderness was no less singular. As recorded in Josh. v. 2-9, "all the people that came out" of Egypt were circumcised, but those "born in the wilderness" were not; and therefore Joshua, before the celebration of the Passover, had them circumcised with knives of flint (compare Ex. iv. 25) at Gilgal, which name is explained as "the rolling away" of "the reproach of Egypt" (see Gilgal).

Attention has also been called to the peculiar attitude of Deuteronomy and the Prophets toward circumcision. Deut. x. 16 (compare ib. xxx. 6 and Jer. iv. 4) says, "Circumcise the foreskin of your heart," thus giving the rite a spiritual meaning; circumcision as a physical act being enjoined nowhere in the whole book (see Geiger, "Urschrift," ii. 79, and Montefiore, "Hibbert Lectures," 1892, pp. 229, 337). Jer. ix. 25, 26 goes so far as to say that circumcised and uncircumcised will be punished alike by the Lord; for "all the nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel are uncircumcised in heart." Obviously, the prophetic view of the sacredness of the rite differed from that of the people.

Circumcise the foreskin of your heart

hooboy

Marriage has meant many different things over the years. This is a great overview:

MAY 31, 2004 The New Yorker
Love Supreme
Gay nuptials and the making of modern marriage.
BY ADAM HASLETT

In December of 1990, Genora Dancel and Ninia Baehr, a lesbian couple from
Honolulu, applied for and were denied a license to marry.They decided to file suit
against the state for discrimination.The local branch of the A.C.L.U. declined to
represent them, and the national gay legal organizations initially kept their distance,
considering the issue premature. But the couple persisted, and three years later the
Hawaii Supreme Court became the first in the nation to support the right of same-sex
couples to wed. Conservative religious groups poured money into the state and
eventually helped pass an amendment to its constitution declaring marriage an
exclusively heterosexual institution.

More was at stake than the laws of Hawaii. Article IV of the United States Constitution
establishes that “Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts,
Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.”This is the reason that a couple
married in New York can fly to California and still legally be husband and wife when
they land.Worried that other states might one day extend marriage rights to same-sex
couples, conservatives in Congress introduced the Defense of Marriage Act, which
defined marriage as between a man and a woman for the purposes of all federal law, from
taxes to Social Security, and released the states from any constitutional obligation to
recognize same-sex marriages that might be performed elsewhere. President Clinton,
seeking to deny Bob Dole a wedge issue in his 1996 reëlection campaign,signed the bill
late on a Friday night, after the press corps had gone home.

The issue’s sudden prominence during the past several months stems from a decision of
the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts last November to grant same-sex couples
full civil marriage. For the first time in this country’s history, a state has sanctioned the
marriage of two men or two women; because the Massachusetts constitution can’t be
amended any sooner than 2006—the process is under way but by no means certain to
succeed—it will do so for at least the next two years.The Bay State thus joins the
Netherlands, Belgium, and three Canadian provinces in offering gay couples not only
the rights and obligations of marriage but the word itself.

The ensuing national ferment has become a struggle over the meaning and purpose of
matrimony. For marriage as we know it today is the product of a particular history—a
history that explains both its public character and the private expectations we have for it.
The advent of same-sex marriage brings into focus a much larger transformation in how
we have come to imagine the institution.

For centuries in Europe, formal marriage was a private contract between landed
families, designed to insure that property remained within a particular lineage.In
the upper classes, families essentially married other families, forging political alliances
and social obligations among relatives and kin.It was during the Reformation, with the
emergence of the early Protestant idea of “companionate marriage,”that the emotional
bond between husband and wife came to be seen as an end in itself. As the social
historian Lawrence Stone noted, this was a marked departure from the Catholic ideal of
chastity, which considered earthly marriage a more or less unfortunate necessity meant
to accommodate human weakness; “It is better to marry than to burn,” St. Paul had said,
but he made it sound like a close call. So when the Puritans wrote of husbands and
wives as mutually respectful and affectionate partners they were moving toward a new
understanding of marriage as a kind of spiritual friendship.

It was Milton who took this concept to its logical conclusion. Having married a woman
with whom he soon discovered he had nothing in common, he became a staunch
advocate of divorce.When the “meet and happy conversation”that is “the chiefest and
the noblest end of marriage” ceases, he argued, no authority should have the power to
force a man and a woman to remain wed.It was hundreds of years before the law caught
up with his notion that irreconcilable differences might be grounds for divorce. But what
his tracts on the subject demonstrate is that early Protestant thinking about matrimony
contained the seeds of our own more radical individualism.

These days, few would disagree that respect and affection are central to a successful
marriage. But most of us would add another ingredient, which had long been viewed
skeptically as a reason to wed: romantic love. Burton, in his “Anatomy of Melancholy”—
the most widely read book of the seventeenth century after the Bible—reflected a
common view when he described marriage as one of several “remedies of love,”which
was itself an illness to be overcome. Not until the confessional diaries and novels of the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries started to influence bourgeois notions of
what Jane Austen called “connubial felicity” did romance begin its steady ascent in the
marital realm.Today, needless to say, the most respectable reason you can give for getting
married is that you have fallen in love.We have managed to create an ideal of matrimony
that combines both lifetime companionship and the less stable but more intoxicating
pleasures of romantic ardor.

Such great expectations of marital happiness belong to a larger history of the Western
emphasis on the self.The philosopher Charles Taylor, in an examination of how our
attitude toward interior life has changed over the past five hundred years, argues that the
trend line runs in one direction: from a self-understanding gained from our place in
larger entities—such as a chain of being or divine order—toward purpose discovered
from within, through what we consider to be authentic self-expression.This is the
distance Western culture has travelled from the church confessional to the therapist’s
couch.In turn, the choice of whom to marry has become less about satisfying the
demands of family and community than about satisfying oneself.When you add the
contraceptive and reproductive technologies that have separated sex from procreation,
what you have is a model of heterosexual marriage that is grounded in and almost
entirely sustained on individual preference.This is a historically peculiar state of affairs,
one that would be alien to our ancestors and to most traditional cultures today. And it
makes the push for gay marriage inevitable.

f agreement between two people were all that was required, of course, gays and
lesbians would have been marrying for some time already. According to the 2000
census, the first to collect such data, there are five hundred and ninety-four thousand
same-sex couples living in the United States (and that’s no doubt an undercount, given
people’s reluctance to report their sexual orientation to the government). But marriage
requires the consent of a third party—namely, the state.

This fact, too, can be traced to the same early Protestants who gave us companionate
marriage. As the journalist E. J. Graff tells us, in her newly reissued popular history
“What Is Marriage For?”(Beacon; $16), at the time Luther nailed his proclamations to
the door, Rome had no requirement that a priest be present at the wedding ceremony;
vows spoken in private were sufficient to create a binding marriage.That caused the
aristocracy no end of trouble, given that disobedient children were liable to threaten
carefully negotiated contracts by running into the closet with a servant and whispering
sweet promises. For the northern European Protestants, the solution was to require, for
the first time, a public ceremony with the presence of witnesses.They also transferred
the power to enforce the new rules to the emerging secular states.In England,
precaution had long taken the form of “banns”: a couple’s intention to wed was
proclaimed in church on three successive Sundays, thus giving a community plenty of
time to determine whether either party was committed elsewhere.The state-issued
marriage licenses we employ today originated in magistrates’ offices and enabled well-todo
families to avoid the banns by attesting to the fitness of the parties in a document.
Informal arrangements nevertheless persisted among those who were less well off, or
who lived in less regulated societies.In the early days of the American Republic, with a
population scattered across the continent, there were simply too few ministers and
justices of the peace to go around. Largely for the practical reason of not wanting to
declare so many children bastards, most state courts recognized common-law marriage,
established by mutual consent and cohabitation.If you said you were married and the
neighbors tended to believe you, then in the eyes of the law you were. (In eleven states,
including Texas, this is still the case.) In the decades after the Civil War, however,
government bureaucracy,spurred by the moralists and social scientists of the Progressive
movement, began to regulate marriage far more aggressively. For the first time, people
who sought to wed had to submit to medical examinations, and those with syphilis or
gonorrhea were prevented from marrying by criminal statute. By the century’s end,state
legislatures had all but mandated that couples obtain a license to marry.
These government-sponsored contracts are at the center of the fight over same-sex
unions.In the modern administrative state, civil marriage condenses within a single
document a vast array of legal, financial, and medical rights and benefits. Like
citizenship for the immigrant, it is a passport to a more secure world. As the old status of
marriage has come to include such a range of contractual benefits, the debates over
equality within and access to the institution have intensified.

Owing to the reforms of the past forty years, men and women now enter the married
state with more legal parity than ever before. Under the old doctrine of coverture, a man
owned not only his wife’s property but her body as well.Today, in nearly every state,
men’s and women’s rights and obligations in alimony, child custody, child support, and
property division in divorce have been made formally gender-neutral. Arrests and
prosecutions for domestic abuse, rare thirty years ago, are now routine. As recently as
1984, a man could not be prosecuted for raping his own wife; today, it’s a crime in all fifty
states.

During the same period that the old patriarchal rules were being revised, the Supreme
Court struck down a series of laws limiting the right of individuals to marry in the first
place.In the most famous case, Loving v. Virginia, a unanimous Court held that antimiscegenation
laws were unconstitutional.“The freedom to marry has long been
recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness
by free men,” Chief Justice Warren wrote in 1967. A decade later, a Wisconsin law
preventing people from marrying if they were behind on their child-support payments
was overturned as too burdensome to the “basic civil rights of man.”In 1987, the
Rehnquist Court deemed the freedom to marry so fundamental that it could not be
denied to prison inmates, whose other constitutional rights are routinely abrogated.
Those who opposed extending this right to same-sex couples used to cite the fact that
many states outlawed sodomy: how could you sanction the marriage of people who could
be arrested for what they did together in the bedroom? Then, last summer, in Lawrence
v.Texas, the Court struck down the thirteen remaining sodomy laws in the country, and
established a broad constitutional right to sexual privacy.The force and scope of the
opinion surprised even its supporters.In a rare gesture, the Court not only overturned
Bowers v. Hardwick, a 1986 opinion upholding a Georgia sodomy statute, but in essence
apologized for it: “Its continuance as precedent demeans the lives of homosexual
persons.”The majority was careful to point out that the decision said nothing about the
“formal recognition” of relationships. But opponents of same-sex marriage realized the
decision’s importance. As Justice Scalia warned in a caustic dissent,“If moral
disapprobation of homosexual conduct is ‘no legitimate state interest’ . . . what
justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual
couples exercising ‘the liberty protected by the Constitution’? Surely not the
encouragement of procreation,since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry.”

Five months later, the Massachusetts high court cited Lawrence in its decision.
Social conservatives now fear that, in the absence of a constitutional amendment to ban
gay marriage, the Supreme Court will combine its precedents on the fundamental right
to marry with the more recent decisions in favor of gay rights to give same-sex couples
their own Loving v. Virginia—nationalizing gay marriage through constitutional
interpretation. As a doctrinal matter,such fears are well grounded. Few legal scholars
would disagree with Justice Scalia that Lawrence has made this outcome far more
plausible.

Politically, however, a gay Loving is unlikely in the foreseeable future.The Supreme
Court is seldom a force of social innovation.The first state to strike down its antimiscegenation
law was California, in 1948. For nearly two decades thereafter, all through
the period of Brown v. Board of Education, the Court avoided the controversy over
interracial marriage, exercising its discretion not to hear a case. By the time it decided
Loving, fourteen states had followed California’s lead, and only sixteen still maintained a
ban.The Court endorsed what had become a majority position, if not in public opinion
at least in legislative fact; the same can be said of Lawrence.The modern conservative
obsession with what is selectively dubbed judicial activism has much to do with Roe v.
Wade, and the fact that it struck down thirty state laws criminalizing abortion. No less
an advocate of abortion rights than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has suggested that it
may have been precipitate not to allow the states to come to a stronger consensus before
the Court brought the reform process to an end.In the informal electorate of the states,
the vote on full civil marriage for same-sex couples now stands at forty-nine to one.It is
difficult to conceive of the Supreme Court recognizing a right to gay marriage under
these circumstances.

Meanwhile, interest groups on both sides are lobbying legislators and filing more
suits, in an attempt to shape the outcome in one jurisdiction at a time. As a legal
matter, these are contests over the expansion of the rights and obligations of marriage.
As a political and cultural matter, they are contests over something less easy to codify:
the official recognition of love. Here the two most important developments in the
history of marriage—secular regulation and the rise of the romantic-companionate ideal
—become intertwined.The state is being asked not only to distribute benefits equally
but to legitimate gay people’s love and affection for their partners.The gay couples now
marrying in Massachusetts want not only the same protections that straight people
enjoy but the social status that goes along with the state’s recognition of a romantic
relationship.

This is the difference between civil unions and marriage: one is a legal certificate and the
other is a public endorsement. Not surprisingly, many Americans who might support the
first remain uncomfortable with the second.In “Gay Marriage”(Times Books; $22), the
journalist Jonathan Rauch means to persuade such people that same-sex marriage will be
good not only for gay people but for marriage in general. Rauch is a conservative—how
many books garner blurbs from both George Will and Barney Frank?—and his
argument for the benefits to gay people is based largely on the social discipline he thinks
it would impose: once gay men and lesbians are allowed to wed,society can begin
expecting them to do so, as it does straight people.“The gay rights era will be over and
the gay responsibility era will begin,” he writes.This soft coercion is a civilizing force,
because “no other institution has the power to turn narcissism into partnership, lust into
devotion,strangers into kin.”We shouldn’t expect results too soon, however: “As with the
coming of capitalism to the Soviet empire,so with the coming of marriage to gay culture.
Freedom and responsibility take time to learn.”With analogies as inviting as this, one
wonders whether snuggling gay lovers ought to take a bus tour of Putin’s Russia before
heading to the altar.Though clearly a true believer in matrimony, Rauch doesn’t make it
sound like much fun.

The real threat to marriage, he says, is the growth of registered cohabitation, from
domestic partnerships to civil unions, which increasingly includes unwed heterosexuals.
He warns that we are heading to the day when marriage—straight or gay—will become
“merely an item on a mix-and-match menu of lifestyle options, a truffle in the candy
box.” For Rauch, whose view of marriage is more medicinal than confectionary, letting
gays marry will actually help marriage by relieving the pressure to create alternatives.
What’s undeniable is that the battle over same-sex marriage arrives at a time of declining
participation in the institution itself.The number of marriages performed each year in
the United States (2.3 million) is as low as it has ever been relative to the adult
population. As Andrew Hacker has pointed out, nearly half of Americans reach the age
of thirty without having married, and almost twelve per cent of women and sixteen per
cent of men enter their forties still never having wed—the highest percentages in the
nation’s history.

As the numbers wane, though, the fantasy seems to grow more intense.The wedding
industry generates at least seventy billion dollars a year in revenue, which is double the
earnings of the movie business. Bridal magazines are some of the most profitable on the
newsstand.The ersatz courtship of the Bachelor and the Bachelorette has provided some
of the highest-rated television programming in recent years. At the same time, the
pressures on the partnership that follows the wedding day are enormous: in an era of low
civic participation and high economic insecurity,spouses are ever more relied upon as the
sole providers of continuity and human solace. A state-sponsored, lifelong, intimate
relationship—or the prospect of it—now carries a heavy and often unbearable
responsibility for personal happiness.

What effect will allowing men to marry men and women to marry women have on our
peculiarly modern venture of marriage? Proponents typically say that it will have hardly
any—that there is no shortage of marriage licenses, and all that will happen is that more
citizens and their children will have the benefits of existing family law.The opposition
argues that one of the organizing institutions of our society will be imperilled.
History suggests that neither view is quite accurate. Despite comparisons to the repeal of
miscegenation laws, no other expansion of the marriage franchise—to the sterile, to
slaves, or to interracial couples—has required an alteration in the basic definition of the
term: the union of a man and woman as husband and wife.To discount this as mere
semantics misses what the definition points up: that marriage, through all its
incarnations, has been a procedure that assigns people a new identity based on their
gender. For centuries, it has been the ceremony that makes males into husbands and
females into wives. Until very recently, this meant a lifetime commitment to both the
security and the constriction of a well-defined social role.The symbolic danger that gay
marriage poses to such an arrangement is obvious.It alters the public meaning of the
word by further draining it of its power to reinforce traditional expectations of behavior.
What does it mean to be a husband in a world where a man could have one of his own?
This is up to each individual couple, one is tempted to say. Fair enough; but the words we
use to describe our relationships are shared cultural property.There is no private
language.In this sense, granting the word “marriage”to gay couples will eventually affect
everyone.

The mistake is to consider the change in meaning particularly drastic. After all, undoing
customary expectations for how a husband and wife behave toward each other has been
one of the goals of the women’s movement since its inception. Rather than an abrupt
departure,same-sex marriage is the culmination of a larger and ultimately more
consequential change in the nature of marital relations between men and women.

Which is one of the reasons that the opposition to it is so fierce.It has come to
symbolize what is, historically speaking, radical about contemporary marriage: the
decline of the patriarchal legal structure and the rise of the goal of self-fulfillment. Gay
marriage is unsettling, to many, not because it departs from modern meanings of
matrimony but because it embodies them.

[Edited on 6/29/2015 by JimSheridan]

[Edited on 6/29/2015 by JimSheridan]

What we have here is a Federal government takeover of marriage, a sacrament that's meant one thing and one thing only for thousands of years.....I'm wondering if it's legal and/or constitutional for the Federal government to re-define a sacrament to achieve some political end. I can't believe they have this authority.

And let's prohibit the States right to make their own laws while we're at it.

Nine unelected individuals were able to pull this off.

That's actually a good point. Why does the govt. want to get involved in defining marriage? States, towns and municipalities perform legal marriages for those wanting to forego a pricey church wedding. So those authorities should be the ones to decide what is acceptable for the communities they serve. San Francisco wanted gay marriage, but that would not be the case for Muskogee, Oklahoma, so let the local authorities handle it as they have for years. Those who do not choose to live in communities where most of the people are gay, can live in more traditional towns with the values they hold.

What is the govt.'s agenda defining marriage?

Now that the definition of marriage has been trashed, one can only wonder what else lies in store. Changing the meaning of words is just good policy!

In 1964 would you have said "Now that the definition of equal protection and voting rights have been trashed, one can only wonder what else lies in store. Changing the meaning of words is just good policy!"?

Well, God said that the man was the head of his family. Women had to be silent in church, the reason being man was the glory of God, and woman was the glory of man, which is why she needed to cover her head in a church setting. The Muslims took it further and created segregated areas between men and women in the masjids (mosques) and other places to stop temptation and adultery.

So, God would not be a fan of women having the vote, and he does not want women pastors, preachers.

Didn't marriage in the bible once include polygamy?

And isn't there something in the old testament that if your brother dies before his wife has a kid then you get his wife?

I'm no bible scholar but I don't think marriage has always been narrowly defined as one man and one woman.

And how did the world get repopulated after that flood?

No there was no polygamy, but there were concubines back in the day. One wife, and then some concubines, some of which were taken on into the household as servants to the wife's. Some of the wives could not conceive, so they permitted their husbands to procreate with their hand maidens (domestic staff). It wasn't done on the sneak, it was discussed between the husband and wife and the desire was that his lineage would carry on if he had a child with the other woman.

The Mormons allow polygamy as do the Muslims, but the Muslim situation is different. It is to have as many children for the religion as possible, and also to take care of widows and orphans. When there are wars and men are killed, the women are left with no one taking care of them, thus they allowed a man to take more than one wife to provide for these women. Some abuse the idea of polygamy and use it for status, ie. some commanders think it shows they are successful if they have 2 or 3 wives, or when one gets older, they take a younger one to always have that excitement in their marriages. For the most part though, they only have one or two wives.

It seems that people are only looking at 1 facet of a relationship and a marriage. Sex is only 1 part of a marriage it does not define it for those of us who have been married for along time. There is much more to love and loving someone other than what happens in the bedroom.

This is the root of what bothers people....they obsess about the act behind closed doors and don't want to see that there's way more to marriage and love that that 1 aspect

There are 3 phases of sex in a lasting marriage; house sex, bedroom sex, and finally hall sex. Most of us here have been around long enough to have experienced hall sex. Why shouldn't gay people have the same opportunity?

The gay couples are living together so how are they not having sex in those places anyway without being married? (and by the way you left out the kitchen and bathtub! 😉

Your ceaseless chatter is an insult to Muslim femininity. I am surprised one of your Muslim boyfriends has not solved this problem in the accepted way.

Or maybe you are one of those new "liberated" Muslim women. You smoke Virginia Muslims and wear a mini-Burka. And a stoneproof vest. "You've Come a Wrong Way, Maybe."

[Edited on 7/4/2015 by BrerRabbit]

Must have been that blotter overdose at Syria Mosque.

Now that the definition of marriage has been trashed, one can only wonder what else lies in store. Changing the meaning of words is just good policy!

In 1964 would you have said "Now that the definition of equal protection and voting rights have been trashed, one can only wonder what else lies in store. Changing the meaning of words is just good policy!"?

Well, God said that the man was the head of his family. Women had to be silent in church, the reason being man was the glory of God, and woman was the glory of man, which is why she needed to cover her head in a church setting. The Muslims took it further and created segregated areas between men and women in the masjids (mosques) and other places to stop temptation and adultery.

So, God would not be a fan of women having the vote, and he does not want women pastors, preachers.

No, god didn't say any of this. Men said it, men with a vested interest in consolidating dominion over women. God never said anything to anyone on Earth because god is an imaginary construct devised for the purpose of allaying fears of the unknown or subjugating people to others' will and maintaining control and power over the superstitious, ignorant and fearful. This shit is all make-believe from a time when people believed the world was flat.

Man, she/it is just cooked. That's all I can figure. Thinking total hallucination at Syria Mosque, transported to Aladdin's Lampland, enough LSD to stone a herd of elephants, Coricidin bottle on the high E string ripped open the skull, and it was Down the Duane for old Gina.

"They are not at all referring in this ruling to the RELIGIOUS CEREMONY of marriage, but the legal contract also referred to as marriage that the federal government absolutely has authority over. They're two distinct and mutually exclusive things and thus religious entities who wish to determine who they'll marry in their religious ceremonies can still do so.

It's predicated on the separation of Church and State. It's that simple."

Absolutely. To become legally married, one must obtain a license from the state. To get divorced, one must undergo a court proceeding to dissolve a legal contract in a manner agreed to by both parties and the state. Marriage as a legal proceeding is absolutely overseen and regulated by the state. Thus everyone in the US gets equal protection under the law for access to this state function. Separation of church and state prohibits denying anyone access to such a proceeding on the basis of religion (or race, gender, or sexual orientation). This could have no other outcome in the US.

Nine unelected individuals were able to pull this off.

The "unelected" talking point when referring to the SCOTUS is one of the most ridiculous talking points of all time, and that's saying something.

Nine unelected individuals were able to pull this off.

The "unelected" talking point when referring to the SCOTUS is one of the most ridiculous talking points of all time, and that's saying something.

When do these elections take place?

Nine unelected individuals were able to pull this off.

The "unelected" talking point when referring to the SCOTUS is one of the most ridiculous talking points of all time, and that's saying something.

When do these elections take place?

They are confirmed by a vote of the senate. You voted for a senator to represent you. That is how it works in a republic.

How is it that all of those on the right like to make up stories about Obama not following the constitution, and yet here we see them complaining about a process outlined in that very document. Maybe those on the right only think they love the constitution?

[Edited on 7/6/2015 by 2112]

Nine unelected individuals were able to pull this off.

The "unelected" talking point when referring to the SCOTUS is one of the most ridiculous talking points of all time, and that's saying something.

When do these elections take place?

We realize you're eager for a vote so you can elect 5 Scalias & 4 Thomases.

Why don't we change the system so we can always get favorable results similar to Citizens United, no gay marriage, overturn Roe v. Wade, no Obamacare, etc. Is that what you're looking for in a Republic?

Nine unelected individuals were able to pull this off.

The "unelected" talking point when referring to the SCOTUS is one of the most ridiculous talking points of all time, and that's saying something.

When do these elections take place?

We realize you're eager for a vote so you can elect 5 Scalias & 4 Thomases.

Why don't we change the system so we can always get favorable results similar to Citizens United, no gay marriage, overturn Roe v. Wade, no Obamacare, etc. Is that what you're looking for in a Republic?

Another reason there should be term limits and the sitting POTUS should not be able to appoint the judge's IMHO. Yeah I know they must go through confirmation hearings but it still allows the sitting President to stack the deck in his parties favour. I don't have an easy answer on how best to select the judges but there has to be a better system then what we have now

We realize you're eager for a vote so you can elect 5 Scalias & 4 Thomases.

Better: 8 Scalias and 1 Thomas. Thomas just copies off Scalia's paper anyway.

Nine unelected individuals were able to pull this off.

The "unelected" talking point when referring to the SCOTUS is one of the most ridiculous talking points of all time, and that's saying something.

When do these elections take place?

They are confirmed by a vote of the senate. You voted for a senator to represent you. That is how it works in a republic.

How is it that all of those on the right like to make up stories about Obama not following the constitution, and yet here we see them complaining about a process outlined in that very document. Maybe those on the right only think they love the constitution?

[Edited on 7/6/2015 by 2112]

Stop stereotyping. I don't complain. I recognize that we have 3 branches of the federal government.

I do find the hypocrisy of pretty much everyone humorous. Everyone loves the Justices when they agree with their political positions. Supreme Court on gay marriage=great. Supreme Court on Citizens United=awful. And vice versa. I support both decisions.

Nine unelected individuals were able to pull this off.

The "unelected" talking point when referring to the SCOTUS is one of the most ridiculous talking points of all time, and that's saying something.

When do these elections take place?

They are confirmed by a vote of the senate. You voted for a senator to represent you. That is how it works in a republic.

How is it that all of those on the right like to make up stories about Obama not following the constitution, and yet here we see them complaining about a process outlined in that very document. Maybe those on the right only think they love the constitution?

[Edited on 7/6/2015 by 2112]

Stop stereotyping. I don't complain. I recognize that we have 3 branches of the federal government.

Maybe you didn't, but an awful lot did. This post is an example. Mike Huckabee is another:

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, blasted the decision Friday as "judicial tyranny" and said he would "not acquiesce to an imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch."

Really? Has Mike Huckabee ever read the constitution?

Doug, you might be an exception, but I get really tired of those on the right implying that the left has no regard for the constitution, and then they come out with crap like this.

Ted Cruz really takes the cake...Watching him pander to his ever shrinking base and calling for the end of the Supreme Court really shows how some politicians will whore themselves simply for attention and grandstanding. Seems like every other speech he makes he babbles on about being a patriot, the president is "trampling the constitution", "we must take back our country", blah , blah, blah...He's so phony.

I do find the hypocrisy of pretty much everyone humorous. Everyone loves the Justices when they agree with their political positions. Supreme Court on gay marriage=great. Supreme Court on Citizens United=awful. And vice versa. I support both decisions.

You can put me in the camp of those who believe SC decisions on gay marriage=great & on Citizens United=awful. But I too support both decisions as they reflect the findings of our judicial system. Until there is a different system, then we need to support the SC decisions. Unfortunately there are too many people coming out of the woodwork now that a couple liberal decisions have been rendered as of late. The system cuts both ways.

Some of the public statements made by GOP leaders in the last few weeks reflect an ignorance of how our three branches of government work. Or maybe they're just pandering to the base & trying to raise funds.