“…most critically in the latter’s ability to create children almost casually.”
Yes, like those shame “marriages” entered into by the elderly and infertile.
It’s all quite clear to me now. My marriage is not so much a partnership between loving adults as it is about what goes on between the sheets!

What Petrarca’s proposing is even weaker than civil unions. He’s not fooling anybody.

“The relationship formed in homosexual couples is different in substantive ways from the relationship formed between heterosexual couples…”
Justin, just because your homosexual relationships are different, doesn’t mean everyone’s are different!

Justin, I am just curious, do you have any gay friends ?
Even Sarah Palin claimed to have many gay friends (thou when pressed she could not name any..or newspapers for that mater”
Maybe I should ask, Justin do you have any friends, gay or straight ?

On lawn,
For arguements sake, Let’s consider homosexuality an impairment, like infertility, then they should be considered able to get married. If anything, it is not a real impairment but a variation in the sexual continuum.
You want to deny the “emotional” level of the civil rights, and promote the intellectual level? I find that funny, just for the fact that most people against marriage equality are bible thumpers, not too much intelect in that. When you actually believe a Jonah the whale story as fact, i guess you can believe anything.
But intellectually, gay couples are regular tax paying productive citizens, some even have children! They just want the same things every other RI family is entitled too. To ask them to live a lie and marry someone of a different gender to get it is moronic.

Not an impairment, but a variation.

In a “marital” way? That would include sexual relations, as sex is an important part of a relationship and marriage. In that way, I do not believe a homosexual can marry a person of the opposite gender and fulfill the requirements you ask.
So in your sense it would be an impairment in that “martial way” because of the variation. bringing us back to the first point, you should not exclude people from the activity if they are impaired from doing it.

Fine, Swazool, you can argue that homosexuals are impaired, but I don’t believe it. I know many homosexuals who would go so far as to call you homophobic for claiming such.
Thanks for clarifying that. Its your belief so I’ll move on.
(On the “genetic variation” note, being born without ovaries is not a genetic condition, I’ll skip that as your attempt at arm-chair science).
Lets move on to point number two,
I pay taxes, and taxes go to buying ambulances and police cars. Does that mean I can commandeer either one for my own purposes?

Swazool,
Your “so you are saying” is rather comical. Perhaps you should stick to clarifying your own views, rather than misinterpreting others.
Anyway, you are right, just because you pay taxes doesn’t mean you get the right to commandeer ambulances.
Sounds like you’ve invalidated the only points you presented for neutering marriage.
My work here is done.

Now, while you claim I’ve not made any valid points, you’ve clearly shown you not only agree with the points but will run full steam with them (e.g. “For arguements sake, Let’s consider homosexuality an impairment, like infertility”).
That you are back-peddling after such an effort shows your own ineptness, not mine.
Swazool, you said specifically about the inability to love, honor and cherish someone of the other gender in any meaningful marital way that “it would be an impairment” for homosexuals.
You’ve not said anything which suggests you disagree with that. In fact you’ve done quite the opposite, you illustrated your point with an example of how variants can cause impairment. Specifically you noted how genetic variations could cause a woman to be born without ovaries.
You can’t have it both ways. That you are trying to shows you haven’t really thought this through very well.

I never said I left. I only said I was done, and considering your stagnation in the debate, I believe that was prescient.
Feel free to show where my “selective quotes” don’t represent your position.
From where I see it, you claim there is an impairment dissociated with homosexuality, caused by some variation in something you’ve not quite been able to explain.
Your quotes bear that out, so does your recent comment, “they [homosexuals] are not able to engage in marital love (that being sex) with the opposite gender because they are a variant in the sexual continuum that makes an impairment.”

It seems like you are having trouble following. You ask questions, I answer. You don’t like the answer, but you have not responded to any of the points I have made.
I feel there is no reason to deny homosexuals the right to marry. I believe in full equal marriage.
You can try to dissect the words variant and impairment from here to mars, but saying that homos do have the option to enter marriage with the opposite sex is moronic.
Anyone can love honor and cherish, but if you can’t consummate the marriage, the marriage isn’t worth anything. Even the church will give you an annulment if you can’t consummate… but if you beat your wife, cheat on her, you can’t get an annulment (well sometimes it depends on if you have money like the Kennedys)
We can keep going around in circles with this, but it will probably be better to agree to disagree at this point.

“Oh, they can’t you say? They can’t marry someone of the *other* gender because of their *identity* of being homosexual? Well I think we’ve found the echoes of the segregationists then.”
If you can’t see how stupid this argument is then you have a big problem. The whole point of marriage is to be with the person you love. A homosexual will never be able to love a person of the opposite sex the same way. The way you’re implying it, marrying someone just to get the benefits of marriage, would constitute fraud.

Syrax says, “The whole point of marriage is to be with the person you love.” I mean, we all know that first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes…. ? I don’t know if such an oversimplification really makes a difference in this conversation. But Syrax does continue to validate the very argument Syrax balked at by saying, “A homosexual will never be able to love a person of the opposite sex the same way.” Because, as we all know and I said before we are to believe, they can’t marry someone of the *other* gender because of their *identity* of being homosexual? Well I think we’ve found the echoes of the segregationists then. But to be honest, this is not a major point. Marriage is more than being with someone you love, and marriage is not the only institution which can or should help people who are in love. First come love, then comes marriage, then comes (as the colloquial rhyme goes) then comes baby in the baby carriage. And that just points us once again to what Justin says… “The relationship formed in homosexual couples is different in substantive ways from the relationship formed between heterosexual couples, most critically in the latter’s ability to create children almost casually. It is not bigotry to insist that such an ability is not frivolous, and it is eminently reasonable to suggest that civic policies should maintain room for the encouragement of cultural acknowledgment of that difference. Doing so does not “create two classes,” as Marriage Equality Rhode Island spokesman Bill Fischer asserts; it accurately recognizes two categories of behavior. “There are rights, however, to which people who’ve taken on the responsibility of caring for each other should have access, but they should be assessed on their individual merits. That appears to… Read more »

Swazool says: “Again you are trying to run with a segregationist theory, good thing you say it isn’t a major point because you are not making a point.”
Funny thing is, after talking with you for almost a day, its clear you have no idea what a point is. Re-read the above comments to watch you flail right and left, only to run headlong into the point I made in my first post.
Speaking of flailing, “segregationist theory” it is not. That segregationists like white supremacist complain that their identity purity requires them to segregate is undisputed.
And a correlation between homosexualist theory and segregationist theory has been confirmed by you and another poster at this point. There’s not much to run from there.
But you are right, it is only as major a point as others may want to make their identity the basis for their claim to neuter marriage. And on those grounds, it seems to be a major point considering how much you and another poster have balked at it, yet can’t help but re-affirm it at the same time.
Swazool says: “So, when a homosexual couple, let’s say lesbians, have children, they should be able to marry?”
I think one of the first points I chuckled at your poor understanding of science was when you mistook a genetic variation for the impairment it might cause.
But this is unique. Ask someone you trust, or wait until you reach 7th grade health class, to find out how babies are made. Then come back and we can continue the discussion. Because until you understand how babies are created, you’ll likely continue to offer up a hypothetical of two women having kids together.

A sperm meets an egg.
This can happen in a few ways. One of my college friends was having problems with fertility, after three ici attempts, they moved on to ivf. (this is a heterosexual couple). They have twin boys.
A lesbian couple I know got pregnant with ici, didn’t need to do the more invasive ivf. They have boy and girl twins.
So the heterosexual couple needed more medical intervention than the homo couple.
I am happy for both couples.

If it comes down to money, both couples paid for medical procedures.
“We are talking about equal rights, which to me means everyone’s rights are equally respected and recognized”
But you want to withhold those rights from the lesbian family. You can morn for those children, but you do not have the right to keep rights from their parents. Their family, marriage, and life does not intrude on yours.

Justin beat me to it, and is 100% what I agree with.
Swazool says: If it comes down to money […]
I personally didn’t mention money, if anything my comment boiled down to rights. Specifically the rights of the child, and only a marriage between the man and the woman who combined to create the child can fully realize the rights and responsibilities of all three. That is the observable difference in relationships (not people) that makes marriage unique.
Slavery and human trafficking comes down to money and ownership over other’s rights.

Sorry, we had a cross of context there.
I never mentioned money as the basis for why marriage is what it is, or why what they did causes me to feel sad for them and the child.
Yes, they did pay someone to abandon their child and likely to remain anonymous to the child. But it make no mistake isn’t the money that they robbed from the child. That was just the instrument for finding the accomplice.
Marriage comes down to rights, and marriage equality is best seen as recognizing the rights of the man, woman, and child the potentially have together. That is a unity based on their shared identity.
The unity of a shared identity of gender, to the exclusion of the father (no doubt because of nothing more than his gender) is a homosexual ideal that mirrors that of 50’s white supremacists. And yes, even 1700’s slavery.
There are similarities, no one seems to deny. The comparison is not a totaly likeness, but similarity. And that similarity, in my mind, is significant.

I’ll answer with a poem…
First They came… – Pastor Martin Niemoller
First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
— Or as I believe MLK jr said (and I paraphrase), to speak up for freedom and civil rights anywhere is to speak up for it everywhere.
Why would their loss of rights have to affect me personally for me to care?

Most married couples do not experience infertility problems. Of the relatively small segment that do, most resolve their problems through changes in behavior. Some seek other types of medical treatment for their reproductive disabilities.
Only a tiny percentage of married couples who experience infertility troubles partake of IVF/ARTs. And of these, the vast majority use their own sperm and ova.
Third party procreation (ie. ‘donor’ sperm and/or ova), is extramarital procreation, even when married people partake of it.
The upshot: human fertility is variable and yet less than a fraction of 1% of married couples who experience infertility problems go outside of their marital relationships to partake of extramarital procreation.
And the sideshot: 100% of one-sexed scenarios — gay or not, sexualized or not, SSM’d or not — must go outside of the sex-segregative relationship to attain children via these methods — IVF/ARTs — that depend on procurement of sperm and/or ova from persons of the other sex.
This is a contrast not merely of degree, however, but of kind. Yes, human fertility is variable, however, no one-sex-short relationships is fertile without the other sex. The lack of the other sex is not infertility; the one-sexed scenario is simply, nonfertile (without the other sex). This is not a disability nor an impairment; nothing needs fixing, curing, or even treatment. Nonfertility is part and parcel of a sex-segregative relationsnhip.
So, there is a moral, ethical, and even a legal contrast here that needs to be noted; and not just due to a legitimate concern regarding proporitoinality, but also due to the two-sexed nature of human procreation versus the one-sex-short nature of a one-sexed scenario. Nothing that an all-male or an all-female scenario might do sexual can overcome its nonfertility.

Swazool,
I stand up for the rights of everyone.
After all, the children (who like in your lesbian example) are asked to pay the most price for the prejudice of the lesbians against men, are going to be the ones to judge.
I doubt they will judge people like you, who advocated for such prejudice so happily as you judge yourself 🙂
As we already established in our earlier discussion, this isn’t about expanding rights to homosexuals as marriage to a person of the other gender is something they select themselves out of. Its about removing marriage equality — the equal recognition of the rights and responsibilities of the man, woman, and child they potentially have together. And Massachusetts will always be remembered as the first to deviate from that.
For how can you advocate for equal recognition between the man, woman, and child they potentially have together in a marriage which excludes a man or woman from the whole marriage because of nothing other than the gender preference of the participants?
That is no different than the question that was studied by the Brown v Board of Education, which pondered how you can advocate for equality for all people in a school where all the participants excluded a whole group of people based on their skin color.
History doesn’t look kindly on the white supremacists, or the human traffickers, or the Nazi’s who asked their citizens to stay quiet unless their own rights were affected. Even though they all had plenty of advocates who (like you) imagined the world ahead they liberated at the expense of others would welcome them with open arms.

[This comment was actually written by Swazool, who should be reminded that impersonating other commenters is a bannable offense — ed.]
Oh, I didn’t think about it like that.
You are right, I guess gays should be able to get married.
Thanks for changing my mind 🙂
I think I am going to go watch a Broadway musical after I shave my chest.

The gay type of relationship is similarily situated with the various types of relationships (and types of living arrangements) that populate the broad nonmarriage category.
There is no justification for treating the gay subset of this range of relationship types as superior to the rest of nonmarriage.
Even SSM argumentation, even with its gaycentric rhetoric, has failed to justify a line between SSM and nonmarriage. So why should anyone consider such a line anything but arbitrary favoritism of the gay identity group?
Provision for designated beneficiaries already exists in Rhode Island, and across the country, and does not depend on sexual orientation nor on gay identity. Nonmarriage is not defined by either of those things.
If the Reciprocal Beneficiaries legislation helps to clarify a protective basis for some types of relationships that populate the nonmarriage category, that is well and good. But this cannot be marriage in all but name. That would be unjust — SSMers have not justified such a thing.

swazool-I don’t know if you were serious,but human trafficking(which we used to call alien smuggling before Newspeak took over)can apply to babies.
The homosexual/lesbian aspect doesn’t enter into it.
If a baby is stolen and sold for adoption in another country that is human trafficking.
Legal adoption is just that-adoption.It’s a recognized social practice and can hardly be compared with illegally marketing humans.
Many children’s lives are saved and made immeasurably better as the result of adoption.It just need good oversight.
I had a partner on the job who was adopted as was his sister(from different mothers)and he said he never wanted to know who his birth mother was since his adoptive parents wanted him and obviously she didn’t.
This man is a well-adjusted individual as is his sister.
It works out well in so many cases,but there can be abuses like in any situation.