California Proposition 8

[top gun]

The very act of putting the "blessing" on marriage between two of the same sex DOES HURT OTHERS. It is a psychological harm to many, many married couples.

The fact is no one "owns" a word. It's like saying that because Gays are called "Gay" that no one but a Gay person should be allowed to use that word because it is so much a part of their lifestyle.

As a married person it damages me in no way nor does it lessen or threaten my marriage in anyway that somebody else is or is not married.

Let the gays name it something else. Let them be as legally bound with all the benefits (and divorce pain) as married folks. But to allow them to tarnish and stain the word "marriage" is wrong to those of us who feel that the word means something important.

From a purely legal standpoint I would have no problem with this but it is ridiculous if you really think about it.

It's comparative to this...

Let's not let Gay people have something called a Drivers License. They can have a piece of plastic from the BMV that has their picture and identification on it and the authority to drive... but it must be called a Operators Permit... not a Drivers License.

I don't mean to hurt anyone's feelings, but why can't gays name it something else? They are so "proud" of their different sexuality, why try to be what they aren't...a hetro couple???

I'm guessing they would tell you that they see marriage as a monogamous union by two people in love that want to be treated no different than any other couple in that same situation.

We could play this out further. What if someone wants to name their child Jesus Christ Smith or God Jones? Those are very religious words. Should they be legally taken out of play because of a particular religious section of the population?

Or should all references to cows be put off limits because American Hindus find cows sacred?

We're just making far to much over a simple word. It's not like someone wants to say marriage now means mowing the lawn. Now that would be something totally different.

 

[Unite Our Nation]

Totally disagree with ya TopG. It is more than a word. It's an "institution". It would harm many people.

Don't be silly with comparing it to a drivers license. You aren't comparing apples to apples. The fact is gays have their basic rights the same as everyone else.

It is there "choice" of action in their sexual activity that has put them in this situation. No one but them did it. Just the same way that people who chose to have sex with animals put themselves in that position. I've heard people lobbying to "marry" their dogs. I see it in the same light.

Many people are named "Jesus". Again, it's not the same. You honestly don't get it do you?

LOL about the cows. Let's move to another part of the globe and ask me that question!!!

Let the gays name their "unions" something else! They are not the same as a normal married couple. The Mormons have wanted marriage to be between more than one woman and man...you know how far they've gotten with that.

TopG, just because it's not important to you, doesn't mean it's not important. KWIM?

 

[top gun]

And that brings me back 'round to the question of the oddity and deviance of homosexual relationships.

When you see two gays together, invariably, one is "butch" and the other "fem", no matter which gender you're referring to. So they're already emulating the male/female relationship. My question is, why?

OMG ... you're kidding right? You need to come to town a little more my friend. You're making statements like you're reviewing a Gay Pride parade not real life.

I've known at least 20 couples both men and women that I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles were just friends sharing an apartment or home. Not one fem guy and one more manly guy... both just regular guys you'd never even know were gay if they didn't tell you.

And many, many SMOKIN' HOT girls that were couples that were actually dancers in Gentleman's Clubs that any single guy on this board would think were some of the most beautiful women they've ever seen... Gay as the day is long.

You need to get out more. Come to the big city ... I'll introduce ya around.

 

[Unite Our Nation]

And why do big muscle gays seek out effeminant ones to dominate as if they were with a woman? Could it be that the butch dykes and the effeminant gays are the only ones truly "gay"? And why do they end up doing the domestic voilence thing too? And want to adopt and raise kids? Clearly somewhere along the way there are complex psychological issues afoot that even the gays themselves don't fully understand.

And that's why I've put out that mistraining the sexual drive at vulnerable puberty is the likely culprit for all the confusion in homosexual people. On the one hand they seem to seek out hetero-type relationships. On the other hand they only want sex with the same gender. So it's the sexual drive that was skewed while the "nesting" drive stayed the same.

And given we learn socially and upholding social norms for our impressionable kids to follow is how we 'hand off" our culture to the next generation, upholding something that may in fact be a form of mental illness due to childhood/adolescent mis-development as "normal" or condoned may be a huge mistake.

You make some excellent points. Everyone notices the behavior that you have described. I've never seen a dyke-dyke, or fem-fem couple and often wondered why if they clearly emulate the hetro relationship are they not with the opposite sex?? My daughter has two friends who were "boy crazy" in high school. Very beautiful girls, very popular and from "money". The one was sexually abused by a family member in jr high. When they went off to college they both had their hearts broken by boys and "went gay" for about a year with each other. That didn't last and they went back to boys and later married and have families.

Humans have MANY psychological issues. Some steal and can't help it. This "group" of thieves don't need a special allowance for their problem any more than gays do for their sexual choice. After all, that is the only thing that "makes" them gay.

 

[Mare Tranquillity]

I was going to say, all the data that I posted was scientific. It was found in medical journals and research done in Brazil were homosexual marriage is legal. The long term consequences have been all negative. What exactly is not scientific about clearly documented evidence? Because it doesn't support the opposing side?

You're right, Andy, your information may have been from medical journals--of course you had to go to research done in Brazil and then you applied it to all the gay people everywhere as an argument for persecuting them, but compared to Siho or Unite, you are the Tycho Brahe of gay-bashing! Good for you.

 

[Mare Tranquillity]

OMG ... you're kidding right? You need to come to town a little more my friend. You're making statements like you're reviewing a Gay Pride parade not real life.

I've known at least 20 couples both men and women that I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles were just friends sharing an apartment or home. Not one fem guy and one more manly guy... both just regular guys you'd never even know were gay if they didn't tell you.

And many, many SMOKIN' HOT girls that were couples that were actually dancers in Gentleman's Clubs that any single guy on this board would think were some of the most beautiful women they've ever seen... Gay as the day is long.

You need to get out more. Come to the big city ... I'll introduce ya around.

And one of the Bond-girls (from the James Bond movies) is a male to female transsexual, bet you can't pick her out though.

It's easy for people who spend their lives in feedlots and farrowing houses to miss a lot of human society and end up with a fairly skewed view of things. You can't educate someone who already has all the information they think they need. For centuries Christianity has been making a virtue out of ignorance--and believe me, some of them are virtuous indeed!

 

[Mare Tranquillity]

The NAACP?? You are kidding me right? What *sses that group is.

Gays are not the same as a racial group.

Got proof or is this just UON speaking ex cathedra from the belly-button?

 

[Sihouette]

The Mormons have wanted marriage to be between more than one woman and man...you know how far they've gotten with that. ~ Unite

Good point. We have decided, as a society, that the word "marriage" involves two adult people of the opposite sex in union for the implied purpose of bearing young together.

I must disagree with one point though, that gays are gay by choice totally. Child molestation by a same gender adult does not give the child much "choice" when they "suddenly" become hypersexual towards the same gender. That was a crime of improper contact and imprinting. And the damage is often lifelong. Many more gays were made this way than are willing to admit. And the problem is it is like a social infection. Once made, they then convince themselves that it was automatic,,"part of them"; especially if they refuse to remember the original assault(s) by the adult perp. Then they go on to want "rights" to parade their deviant "preference" to other impressionables.

This is THE reason why gay marriage should not be legitimized.

Not all gays are made this way. Some are made from frustration and only having access to same sexed partners at the critical imprinting age. Some are made from loathing members of the opposite sex set by example from an abusive family member or caretaker of that gender. A rare few are born with hormone imbalances or hermaphrodites.

Why do I give examples from what sounds like a gay pride parade? Because these are also the people seeking legitimate marriages. Once it happens, any sexual deviant may marry another and call it "marriage"....

 

[Mare Tranquillity]

Mare must be beside himself with joy. This thread is deteriorating into a flame war when instead it was going along quite nicely as a debate.

As I said before, to me this is an indication that the points I was and am making are finding their mark and it is challenging Mare's status quo of denial. So Mare is retaliating with all she has left: flaming.

I can always tell when people don't have any more useful things to say to me because they change my gender in their statements in an attempt to insult me. Won't work, I've been called everything already. I've been lied to as well, why one poster here even claimed to have majored in biology.

I still haven't heard from Mare about the Twinkie phenomenon. Mare, I'll ask you again. What do you think of the Twinkie phenomenon where older gay men seek to rope in impressionable young men into gay experiences with them?

Why do gays seek to "initiate" young people into something that is supposedly in place since birth? Hmm? I'd like to hear your thoughts on the Twinkie thing. I notice you've been a bit silent about it.

What? You can't look out the window at the feedlot and come up with some pithy and cute "twinkie" animal behavior observation? One of the things that I know about is "grooming", a term that refers to adults working to set up sexual encounters with children. I know that this grooming is done by pedophiles, not necessarily hetero or homo oriented people. Child/adult sex appeals to a percentage of the population, just as having sex with virgins appeals to a certain percentage. Pointing the finger at any one group is myopic unless you are speaking of pedophiles specifically.

No, no, I don't expect to convince you. I know that the dinosaurs just died of old age and faster, smarter, mammals took their place. It happens, it's called evolution (change over time). People have always been foursquare against change, it took women a long time to get away from being chattel, slavery was a fact of life for thousands of years, insanity was demon possession and the people were beaten and tortured to drive out the demons, the Earth was flat, the Sun revolved around the Earth, crippled or handicapped people were shunned, witches had be burned at the stake... human folly has always been
popular.

Sorry it took me so long to respond, sometimes I have to work for a living and it really cuts into my free time.

 

[Mare Tranquillity]

Totally disagree with ya TopG. It is more than a word. It's an "institution". It would harm many people.

Don't be silly with comparing it to a drivers license. You aren't comparing apples to apples. The fact is gays have their basic rights the same as everyone else.

It is there "choice" of action in their sexual activity that has put them in this situation. No one but them did it. Just the same way that people who chose to have sex with animals put themselves in that position. I've heard people lobbying to "marry" their dogs. I see it in the same light.

Many people are named "Jesus". Again, it's not the same. You honestly don't get it do you?

LOL about the cows. Let's move to another part of the globe and ask me that question!!!

Let the gays name their "unions" something else! They are not the same as a normal married couple. The Mormons have wanted marriage to be between more than one woman and man...you know how far they've gotten with that.

TopG, just because it's not important to you, doesn't mean it's not important. KWIM?

Often wrong but NEVER uncertain.

 

[Mare Tranquillity]

And sexual preference is 'fixed and immutable at birth' eh?

Nope.

I assume that you go to a veterinarian when you are ill? Some kinds of flies can have their sexual orientation changed by genetic manipulation, using your method of analogy that must mean that sexual orientation is genetic.

Where did you major in biology? Whassamatta U?

 

[Sihouette]

More abuse. So I can see we're at loggerheads. You are convinced that gayness is genetic and puberty isn't a time of sexual susceptibility, and therefore gay marraige should be modeled as "OK".

I am convinced that gayness is conditioned and that the onset of puberty poses high risk for adolescent coercion via what society models as "OK".

I wonder which one of us is right?

 

[Mare Tranquillity]

So, yes, this was the first time I learned that you're a lesbian, at least if the logical conclusion from the "our" deaths phrase you posted that you say the Bible calls for was your intended message ... though I also read where you've been married for some time, so I do still wonder somewhat if you are a lesbian.

I'm not a lesbian, I'm a transsexual. Now that we know that the XX and XY chromosomes are only 2 of 9 patterns found in humans and that they are not necessarily predictive of gender, we can no longer assign gender to someone in a scientifically precise manner. I have fairly normal male body with testosterone receptors in it, I have a fairly normal female brain with estrogen receptors, so am I male or female? Neither one actually, like a hermapaphrodite or more correctly and intersexed person, I am both. I was born out in the middle between male and female. Since my brain works like a female one and I am more comfortable dealing with the world from the female perspective, I changed my body to match my brain (we don't yet have the technology to change brain structure to match body type).

I got married before I transitioned, to a woman who knew I was trans, we have remained legally married even though I am now legally female. Does that make me a lesbian? Or my wife a lesbian? No, neither one of us has ever had lesbian sex, I had to give up sex as a side-effect of the surgery I had to change gender. I was just unlucky, many transsexual retain full function.

And yes, it does matter, with respect to bias.

Do you mean "bias" or "prejudice"?

I find the constant clamoring for "sources" of obvious realities and simple English phrases to be an indication that the clamorer has ran out of substantive arguments and is now nit-pickingly attacking with absolute nothings.

And I suspect people unwilling to define how they use words to be hiding in the obscurity of sloppy general usage. Almost all English words have more than one denotation and often even more connotations. Asking for clarification is the only way to find out how a person is using a word. In face to face conversation we have all kinds of clues that can be used to tease out meaning but here on the web we have only soul-less typed communications and misunderstandings are rampant.

Definitive propriety is a common English phrase that simply means "with appropriate respect for definition".

The long-standing, time-honored, cross-culturally traditional definition of marriage acknowledged by the overwhelming vast majority of the world's population, obviously, is appropriately "between a man and a woman as husband and wife".

You can save the effort of using colors, I'm pretty badly colorblind and I can't see them. In fact, some of the colors people use for text are unreadable for me because they reduce the contrast to the point where the letters become essentially invisible.

It's really that simple.

If you have to resort to nit-picking obvious realities and absolute nothings then you might as well wave the white flag.

We've always done it this way so we will always do it this way. We have always performed female circumcisions, so we always will. We have always sold children because the Bible says we can. We know that dark skin is the Mark of Cain and God intends those people to be punished by being our slaves. We don't need to research ways to ease women's pain during childbirth because that is God's punishment on women for Eve's sin.

I think you should look up the etomology of the words "faggot" and "gay" before you talk about "appropriate respect for definition".

Your devil, the Bible and Christianity, and those who read into it what is convenient for them, can be downright scary to many.

Nevertheless, this matter is not one of religion, and your focus on religion, though understandably scary for you, functions, perhaps unintentionally, as a divertive red herring from the foundtional truth of the matter that the passage of Prop 8 was voted for by religious and non-religious alike and with respect for definitive propriety of what marriage is all about.

For those who are married in respect to definitive propriety they do indeed form a kind of club, and they understandably feel irritation at the thought of that club being "crashed" with obvious impropriety, just as dog owners would feel irritation at cat owners trying to force their way with obvious impropriety into the dog show.

Your argument would bear the weight better if the same things had not been said about interracial marriages, and marriages between black people.

It's not the religion that's scary to me, it's the people. My bumper sticker says, "Dear Jesus, Save me from your followers!" You may talk all you like about how people "read into" the Bible what they want, but the ugly fact is that it says what is says, and either it's true or it's not. I'm condemned to death by Bible-beaters because they don't know the difference between gay and trans, there is not a single word about trans-people in the Bible, but that has not stopped the self-identified Christians from threatening my life, attacking me, denying me medical care, abrogating my Constitutional rights and lumping it all together under "definitive propriety" because we've always hated queers, we always will hate queers, and the truth doesn't matter.

You have not presented a single non-religious source for anti-gay marriage sentiment. The barking-mad Mormons funded a huge amount of the Prop. 8 nonsense. I see where Pat Boone equated "...the movement against Prop. 8 to the terrorists who tortured and murdered hundreds in Mumbai." This despite that fact that nobody was hurt or (as far as I know) even threatened by the people against Propaganda 8.

It would be best if you didn't talk to me about the proper respect for the definition of the word "marriage" while you blithely ignore the definition of the words in the US Constitution.

I asked if you were really a counselor.

 

[Chip]

I have fairly normal male body with testosterone receptors in it, I have a fairly normal female brain with estrogen receptors, so am I male or female?

So are you saying that you were able to tell for a medical biological certainty that your brain was physiologically incompatible with your body?

Do you know for a certainty that you were genetically made that way?

What would have happened if you had not had the surgery? What were the plusses and minuses of remaining as you were?

What are the plusses and minuses now that you've had the surgery?

If given the chance to do it again, would you still have the surgery or would you try a different option?

I asked if you were really a counselor.

I don't know who told you that. I certainly don't recall posting recently that I was a counselor.

Nevertheless, yes, I am ... but I remove that cap before I come here to play.

 

[Mare Tranquillity]

So are you saying that you were able to tell for a medical biological certainty that your brain was physiologically incompatible with your body?

We have evidence to show that the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis is larger in men (gay and straight) than in women, brain autopsies on Male to Female transsexuals show that they have the same smaller size bed nucleus as women. This is based on a small sample (17 transsexuals, I think) because it's hard to get transsexual's brains, there aren't many of us to start with and the autopsy requires our death--not all that many volunteers. However, in the more than 35 years that the American Medical Association has been treating us with the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care they have discovered that cross-gender hormones can cause depression and hopelessness. A brain flooded with the other gender's hormone but no receptors to make it work suffers badly. My depression started when I began puberty around 11 years of age, by 15 I was suicidal and I dealt with suicidal ideation, fantisizing about my own death, and struggling with a sense of hopelessness that was worse than the depression on a daily basis. I could not look into a mirror without feeling a sense of rage and hatred that was so strong that it made me want to take a knife and cut myself to get out of me.

This depression and hopelessness lasted more than 3 decades, I lived a hermit-like existence, I had counseling, they gave me every drug known to man and two that only horses are supposed to get--including anti-psychotics--but nothing worked, nothing helped. I have always had a very strong internal prohibition against taking my own life, but I always believed that eventually I'd get worn down and exhausted to the point where I would commit suicide. I never even knew that transsexuals existed until I was 30 years old and it wasn't until I was 47 that I got enough information to suggest that I was trans and get to an endocrinologist in LA who specialized in trans-hormone therapy. He gave me testosterone blockers and an implanted estrogen supplement, within a few days my depression and hopelessness went away for the first time in my adult life. For the first time I walked out of the cave I had lived in and stepped into the sunshine. Even now, more than 10 years later, I can't write about this without tears in my eyes. I longed for my own death for so many years, that having the darkness dissipate was joyful beyond my ability to express. Except for the weeks before I had sexual reassignment surgery when I had to stop taking the estrogen and testosterone blockers, the darkness has never returned. I quit being a hermit, I became a social being in a way that I had never imagined possible, I gained freedom from solitary confinement in an internal prison and found love and happiness. I was driven from my home of 40 years by the fear and hatred of the Christians, my life was threatened, I was harassed, people I had known for 30 years simply would not speak to me any more. I closed my business, moved to a big city, and started over again. I own my own company in partnership with another transsexual, we're both in long term relationships and we're happy. I lost both of my brothers who are fundamentalist Christians, they don't agree with each other, but they agree that I'm evil. Neither one speaks to me.

Do you know for a certainty that you were genetically made that way?

Do I know to a scientific certainty? No. Do I know from my own experience and what I have learned in my research? Yes. Science makes very few statements with certainty, what they say is that the evidence is strong. In layman's terms it goes something like this: all babies start out as female, in potential males there is a blast of hormones that makes the body shift over to the male development track, a few days or weeks later another blast of hormones shifts the brain over to the male development track. If either of these hormone blasts is ill-timed or inadequate, then one can get a baby with a discontinuity of some amount between the body and the brain, it can be very slight or quite extreme. We know that babies are born with both sets, incomplete sets, or odd combinations of visible sex organs--why in the world would anyone think that the visible parts are the only ones that could be effected? My reactions to testosterone and estrogen are classic examples of the cross-gender hormone issue--am I certain? Yes, 30 years of the darkest kind of depression and hopelessness are a strong argument. The joy I live with every day now is another strong agrument. Prove it? When I'm dead cut my head open and measure the bed nucleus.