Bush would back ban on same-sex marriage

This was buried in the International edition of CNN.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- While calling for tolerance, President Bush said Tuesday he would support a constitutional amendment, if one is needed, that defines marriage as being between a man and woman.

one day that man will accidentally trip on his toothbrush and die. because i'm thinking, with darwinism and all, he's lucky he was born at all and so his lifetime expectancy can't be that long.

"It was a very activist court in making the decision it made," Bush said. "As you know, I'm a person who believes in judicial restraint, as opposed to judicial activism that takes the place of the Legislative Branch."

Unless, of course, it makes him President.

owned.

What I love is that recently USAID pulled money out of an education project in Iraq because the books for schools had sections from the Q'uran to help literacy- US statement was 'we cannot support the mixing of state and religion, our policies must be secular'!!!!

Errrr? 'In God We Trust'

Bit off topic I know, but it all just goes to show what a fucking dickhead that guy is.

My hand is firmly up for Olivia's suggestion, but can I borrow someones' overalls cos I don't want to mess my clothes up?


edited for punctuation

[Edited on Dec 17, 2003 by Iago80]

Everyone, please go to the senate and the house of reps. and write to your senators and congressmen. Tell all your friends to do it also. They are required by law to respond. After all, you are their constituents. The more pressure put on them by their constituents, the more they have to address what people think.

Marriage is a religious institution. Whether or not a gay couple can get married should be entirely up to the church doing the marrying. Bush's laws "defining" it are completley unconstitutional.
If I were gay, I'd be perfectly happy to drop the whole marriage battle and have a legal union-- whether or not you have a funeral you're still dead, right? who cares about some religious ceremony?-- but that does leave out religious gays, I suppose.

I see what you're saying... a rose by any other name... but strictly in my opinion, I'd see that as a legal union, not a marriage. I just think a viewpoint shift could help the argument, since it's mostly the christian right fueling the fires.

*high five for the MrSatan*

This stupid son of a bitch not only needs to be kicked out of office, but shot out of it with a fucking cannon.

The Bible mentions homosexuality twice, to the best of my knowledge. The first mention is in Leviticus where all the laws about how to banish a leper, touching and woman on the rag, and what and who not to fuck is detailed. That included the same sex. Darn. The other is, i think, Romans, where Paul makes mention of early Christians having same sex affairs and generally treating each other unkindly.

We'll, leprosy is a treatable disease and same sex attraction is represented in most mamalian species. It's not the weird anomoly moralists claim it is. Some people are just wired that way, and they are capable of being upstanding people or aboslute bastards like the rest of us het's. Either way, banning gay marriage isn't going to destroy the concept. Consumerism and Affluenza is taking care of that. To the chagrin of the Right Wingers, I'd bet gay marriages will probably be more stable that het marriages and kids raised by gay couples equally or more emotionally stable than het's.

The Christians (Rarely) Right say that homosexuality brought down the Roman Empire, which is totally wrong. When confronted with that fact, they say it was an indicator of the total moral collapse of the Empire. Anyone whose read some Roman historians know their morality was built on popsicle sticks in the first place. What brought down the Empire was that it became to reliant on its conquests for food and raw materials after exapserating their own supply base. Sound Familair? But that is another thread.

for anyone reading thing NOT caught up here, marriage entitles you to certain benefits that, say, cohabitation does not. Key being things like putting your SPOUSE on your insurance, hospital visitation rights should your spouse be critiacally hospitalized. Bush's concern should be whether the Xtian church allows it or not. Clearly his issue is not with people making a life together and sharing the benefits and protections the law would offer under the CONTRACT of marriage, but with the notion of gay sex, which I'm sure actual married people probably do (outside their marriage) more than one would think.

edited for some grammar and a few words added

[Edited on Dec 17, 2003 by jnthn]

Yet another log to add to the giant "Bush is a scumbag" bonfire.

What's interesting to me is that the debate about same-sex marriage is always framed in terms of gay rights, thus setting off the alarms of the christian right and other social conservatives, when it's really an issue of gender discrimination.

Civil marriage is a form of legal contract that's currently only restricted to mixed-gender couples. As someone who's legally married, there's no legal requirement that there be a romantic or sexual relationship between a man and woman in order to get married. The county clerk doesn't ask "are you fucking?" before issuing the marriage license.

He believes in JUDICIAL RESTRAINT???? Like the retraint the Supreme Court showed in stopping vote counts, and handing him the God damned Presidency??

Yeah, that's basically what I said earlier...

Aw, forget it.

We can only hope.

Exactly; you can be married in a courthouse and never have to bring God into it in the first place. The legal reasons for allowing same-sex couples to be married are what need to be focused on if it is going to be allowed by law.

That said, I wish there was more of a debate to determine what marriage actually IS. Since at least half of the people who get married today get unmarried later, it's worth discussing what exactly we mean when we are talking about marriage. Maybe I've watched Joseph Campbell lectures one too many times, but it seems like a deeper definition of marriage in the modern conception is lacking. A good, sturdy psychointellectual/mythical explaination of marriage is what I'd like to see come out of the discussion, and I'm sorry for the big words but I'm in a hurry goodbye.