You know, I must say...
I feel dumber having read this. Kazan, please, find a little bit of tact. It's common knowledge that the sort of rhetoric you're throwing around (even if it is correct) only makes people respond with more force. You don't have to back off of your principles, just try not to inflame the subject so much.
Liberator (such an ironic nick, isn't it?) and DS9er, I respect your religion and follow it to a certain extent (I consider myself a Christian), but I don't respect using it to justify some of the most ill-informed, bigoted, and biased opinions on the planet. There's nothing that bugs me more than someone who goes around criticizing other peoples' decisions knowing that "I am right and I have God on my side." I tend to group people like that into the same category as Osama bin Laden, and people believing that are every bit as dangerous as any middle-eastern terrorist. Unfortunately it's a trend that all of the major religions are plagued with, and there really isn't anything I can do about it. The truth is, fundamentally every religion is an attempt to understand the will of God, not to interpret or impose it.
Also, the fact that you use the phrase "liberal activist judges" shows a bit of bias toward the unfounded claims Bush is making right and left. He still hasn't learned that just because the President says it, it will happen (or maybe it's the American populace that hasn't figured that out yet) and using his rhetoric will not make many inroads on more liberally minded individuals.
I think that Marriage needs to be seperated from the state and made exclusive to religions. The states would then issue civil unions to all couples, and be done with it. The issue is primarily in the nomenclature, not the principle, of marriage. The child thing is a concern to me, simply because I cannot imagine the trials that a child growing up in a homosexual household would face, both socially and internally. However, since homosexual couples cannot naturally reproduce, there is only limited consequences. Parents putting their children up for adoption should be able to request that their child not go to a homosexual couple, and have that request respected, but that's as far as I would go with it.
And for the record, Bestiality and Homosexuality are two very different things. They may be lumped together as perversions here and there, but think about it. Ok, don't think about it. Nevertheless, one is a sexual interest in a member of the same species (albeit wrong gender) while the other is with an animal. And AIDS did not have to spread into humans sexually, there are other means of infection that, in reality, are far more likely (like blood). Everyone likes the sex route because it's perverse, but there really isn't that much evidense to say that's why the infection came into humans.
EDIT: wow, this thread grew expontially as I was writing this post.
