Perhaps you're not as familiar with them as you think you are?

Me?

No i know quite a few who bring up marriage as a sacrament between man and women and God as an argument against gay marriage. And then are inconsistent when it comes to state marriage of non gays.

Maybe its you whos not.

You do realize that this an entirely different point than what I responded to?

Your still arguing my point. So...

Rephrase that to "traditional marriage isn't under attack." One word here and one word there makes a world of difference.

Correct. Traditional marriage isn't under attack. Nothing about your marriage, or my marriage, changes on iota. You can mean whatever you want by it, attach whatever religious significance you want to it, get it done precisely as before and as traditionally as you like. The question is whether one aims to deny the same freedom to others. Perhaps someone can give a justification for such a position that doesn't rather quickly devolve into painfully tired homophobic tripe. But it is rarely, rarely seen.

How prevalent are "pray the gay away" ministries in Europe?

What is that world of difference?

Exactly. You can't get past "my" marriage and your own opinions. I couldn't either when I was a closed-minded egoist and a humanist-atheist.

Everything changes: Kids ask mommy and daddy why Sarah and Sue are getting married. Kids ask parents why parents are not attending. Kids ask parents where marriage comes from. Kids ask parents what the Bible says about marriage. Kids ask parents why Sarah wants to marry Sue even though most Sarahs don't want to marry most Sues. Little boy goes "yuck" and asks mom why Stan is kissing Steve.

A Christian might ask why the same people spitting on them in front of abortion clinics feel it is important to adopt religious idiom and make a mockery of sacred institutions when they already possess their own secular equivalent. They have every right to be suspicious of the motives of the liberal-humanists. And so on and so on. This has already been done to death.

You are anti-christian, and so cannot even conceive how an assault on traditional family values might affect those who hold fast to notions of traditional family values.

Is it the end of the world if it ever happens? No.

But let's not pretend that legalizing marriage between two people of the same gender 'has no effect on anything.' Nobody can truly be that closed-minded.

I think of it more as something the church just doesn't do than something God disapproves of. I wouldn't expect a Catholic church to marry a Jewish couple, for instance, but it also wouldn't object to the state doing so.

I'm not just using it out of convenience. I've heard nearly all anti-SSM arguments that I can imagine exist, and pretty much all come down to a feeling of hatred or disgust towards homosexuality.

So outside the 2 minutes of explanation, how exactly is this going to affect your family?

Is this the big reveal? This is the horrifying consequence of allowing gay marriage? That it is apparently (its not, btw) hard to explain to kids? At one point it was hard to explain why Sarah was kissing the black man. Yuck Mommy, most white girls only kiss white men. This is your "everything changes?"

While it is true that changes in society can have wide reaching consequences, the simple fact is that people can - and do around the world where gay marriage is legalized - enjoy the practice of their own marriages as they ever had it before. The utter failure of "defenders of traditional marriage" to articulate cogent consequences to them or to society of gay marriage being legalized is a huge problem for them.

This has been my experience as well. It is surprising, I generally tend to feel that most cases of bigotry can be well hid by someone who sufficiently grasps the kind of statements they should refrain from stating to prevent from the appearance of bigotry. I would expect there are people capable of all kinds of sophistry and coming off clean as a kitten. Yet, it is pretty shocking how quickly and easily almost any attempt by people to try and justify their view immediately reveals the underlining homophobia. Perhaps there are some counter examples out there, but I am still searching.

The kids are going to ask why Sarah is living with Sue and Stan kissing Steve isn't going to be dependent on them being married. When the kids ask those questions it seems reasonable to answer them?

How is marriage a sacred institution when it can be done entirely secularly? I don't consider it an institution but even if it were to be considered one it's not one that belongs to a church. If people outside of your faith can be married how does your faith get to dictate what should constitute a marriage?

If there's a legal framework for marriage surely that framework belongs to the state whose separation from the church is enshrined in law.

I still don't get what your marriage or your kids questions have to do to the rights of others. Your rights aren't changing here.

Seriously? You too?

You can't fathom how the government sanctioning a redefinition of marriage itself has lasting cultural repercussions? If this is so, then why fight so hard for it?

Are you guys just faking me out?

I disagree with you. What you say sounds like the following:

"People who want to change the rules of social security and medicare to reduce the benefits must either hate old people or don't care about them."

----

We can approach the question from another angle. In your view, is it logically possible to be opposed to SSM for reasons other than hatred or disgust?
* If not, then you have declared all arguments to be rooted in "hatred or disgust" as a blanket assumption. I'm not saying that you can't do this, but you need to accept that you've created a system in which you are logically precluded from other possible interpretations of the opposing position.
* If so, what are the other grounds? (Edit: For example, would you accept an economic argument? A sociological argument? What is in the realm of possibility?)

State them. What are these disastrous cultural repercussions? I certainly agree that social changes probably will have a range of consequences. But can you actually identify what these alleged big negative things that "change everything" are?

I live in a society that has accepted gay marriage for about a decade. Sorry, but I don't see anything major.

Marriage is, allegedly, between a man and a wife (and god). That fact remains. You can talk about cultural repercussions all you want (even as you fail to name them), but that fundamental aspect of a marriage remains identical. Your relationships with each other, and with god, do not change. The only question is whether you want to stomp on the rights of others to enjoy the freedoms you have.

You don't agree with my ridiculous assertion?! Inconceivable!

Saying this is very different from saying "nothing changes."

His was not an argument that it logically followed. It is just that usually people who do try to justify this end up having arguments based on these basic homophobic tendencies, and this manifests itself surprisingly quickly. This is an observation about arguments people give, not a claim about what logically follows. This doesn't happen to be the case with people talking about social security reform. Of course it is logically possible that someone has some argument not so rooted, but it seems very rare that this is actually the case.

Why do you keep bring it back to "my" marriage?

What about your daughter's marriage? What about your son's? What about the cultural norms that you and they are now subject to? How do they affect you? How do they affect how your belief system is perceived? How is your culture perceived in general, then? How do your kids view it?

You are so asking the wrong questions.

I know you don't "get it." You can't "get" other people when your perception of them is shallow and one-dimensional. They have deeply-held beliefs that they cherish. They have children that they have to raise. They don't want to be alienated or made to be marginalized and excluded. They don't like it when people who don't believe what they believe set out to make a profane mockery of things they believe in. And so on.

Christians are not hand-puppets and cartoon characters. They are your neighbors and coworkers and acquaintances. Perhaps brothers and sisters and parents.

Personally, *I* could care less if homosexuals are allowed to marry. My tendencies are libertarian. Rather, I believe that this issue is simply political capital for the liberal-humanists. I don't believe for a second (having run in the atheist-humanist crowd once) that they give a damn about homosexual people.

We know you don't. And *I* don't believe for one second that this belief is motivated by anything else than your irrational hatred of atheists.

So I suppose we are at an impasse.

Yeah dereds, you might even know a Christian.

Of course he needs to keep bringing it back to that warm, cozy spot where 'nothing much happens.' Everything is the same for you!

That's just ridiculous. I've been trying to prompt you to see this issue through the eyes of a Christian parent, and not from the eyes of a Christian "who is married." This whole issue, to the average evangelical, is just territory lost or gained in a culture war-- not with homosexuals themselves-- but with the liberal-humanist crowd, who have adopted the homosexual cause as political capital.

The very same people who mock their beliefs with profane gifs and profane art and all kinds of depravity "just so happen" to have their gentle hearts punctured and bleeding over the fact that two homosexuals cannot call themselves married, or get married in a church. Yeah.

Whatever.

The least relevant point is all that's left of my post so I'm not really sure there's much point continuing.