On Gay "Marriage": First of all, I've always considered marriage more of a religious issue than a legal one, and have considered legislation regarding marriage as being primarily affected by freedom of religion. Consequently, I am loathe to dictate what types of unions can and can't be approved by the government.

However, two points. Gay couples shouldn't pretend they're being discriminated against until everyone calls their union a marriage. Real discrimination is what happens to poligamists, or what used to happen to interracial couples in some states. These people are thrown in jail and locked up. Gay couples are, at least, left alone.

Second, trying to change the definition of marriage is both silly and superfluous. There's a good dialogue on it here, but there's a simpler way to think about it.

Let's say all of this goes down just like homosexuals think they want it to. "Marriage" now includes any union. To distinguish between them, people start calling them "heterosexual marriage" and "homosexual marriage." Everybody realizes these terms are still exclusionary, so finally somebody steps in and gets it decided that the term "heterosexual marriage" must include homosexual marriage. So in order to distinguish between the two, the media starts calling them "heterosexual heterosexual marriage" and "homosexual heterosexual marriage."

Do you see how silly it starts getting? Do you start to understand now why we're fighting to get the definition of marriage left as it is? It's not out of spite, or hate, or some type of conspiracy to control what happens in bedrooms. The fact is they're just different. Why try to make them the same?

Should my poligamist ancestors have tried to get the definition of monogamy changed to include being married to more than one wife? Or should they have strived to help people understand and accept polygamy? Would they have been better off using linguistic tricks to slide under the radar of existing law, or would they have been better off if everybody accepted them for who they actually were and what they were actually doing, and accepted them on those terms?