Gay Marriage to Alfred: Your Thoughts

reading up a bit: the Koch brothers & Richard Scaife favor gay marriage; it's a small sample, but I couldn't find anything on the Waltons or Sheldon Adelson. So I'm thinking I'm wrong on this one.

know a male/female couple who couldn't get coverage
under each other's employers for ages until WA set up domestic partnerships, now they have a lot more protection as a couple who don't want to marry (both are older and divorced, marriage wasn't something either wanted again). So crazy that this is so tied up with if you have a job and who you work for.

― joygoat, Sunday, June 26, 2011 1:47 AM Bookmark

domestic partnership coverage still sucks because the employee is charged 'imputed income' on the entire dollar amount of the premium used to cover their partner, including the portion the company subsidized. So that premium is added into their taxable income for the year. So there's still an extra benefit to marry in that case, as the imputed income would go away.

i think what were seeing is the republican leadership fast realizing this issue is not only no longer an electoral winner for them but is in fact inflicting serious long term damage via alienating the youths

― ice cr?m, Sunday, June 26, 2011 11:50 AM (11 hours ago)

puts them ahead of obama on this front at least

eh obamas prob triangulating this one just right for whatever thats worth

i mean theres running on an anti gay marriage platform theres pushing for full marriage rights and theres a lot in between

theres also you know new york and america

i mean theres running on an anti gay marriage platform theres pushing for full marriage rights and theres a lot in between

― ice cr?m, Sunday, June 26, 2011 11:38 PM (4 minutes ago)

ringtone bi rights

theres also you know new york and america

don't know America too well, actually

its a krazy place

they dont allow gay marriage in most of it, but they do allow deep frying of anything

LOL BURNED U AMERICA

i think what were seeing is the republican leadership fast realizing this issue is not only no longer an electoral winner for them but is in fact inflicting serious long term damage via alienating the youths

― ice cr?m, Sunday, June 26, 2011 3:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

It's becoming a problem for them -- not just gay marriage, but gay rights in general -- because it's still a really potent wedge issue in a lot of state-level politics (e.g. in my wonderful state of Tennessee). But you're not going to hear a lot about it in national general elections, and even in the GOP primaries I think there's going to be this awkward dance of wanting to satisfy the base but not say anything that can be used to make them look too bigoted when it comes to the fall campaign.

Tennessee just had this interesting situation where the whole state Republican apparatus and state Chamber of Commerce were behind this really terrible bill that basically made it illegal for any local governments to add sexual orientation to anti-discrimination laws. But it got national attention from gay-rights groups and at the last minute suddenly all these national and international companies with operations here started backing away and saying they were opposed to it, and that it would make it harder for them to recruit employees here, etc. The state Chamber even withdrew its support -- tho after the bill had already passed. But I think there's going to be a lot of things like that, pandering to a local constituency but getting blowback at national levels. (See also Target, obviously.)

Republicans will keep gay-bashing as long as it helps win elections, but I think it's going to keep getting trickier for them.

As our parents and grandparents start dying, opposition will follow suit. Gay marriage aside, the GOP has a huge problem recruiting the young.

GINGRICH ON MARRIAGE
Thrice married Gingrich says New York state gay marriage law 'muddles' marriage.

just a lil muddling nbd

muddling is awesome, have you ever had a mojito

GINGRICH ON MARRIAGE
Thrice married Gingrich says New York state gay marriage law 'refreshes', 'relaxes' marriage.

no longer an electoral winner for them but is in fact inflicting serious long term damage via alienating the youths

Of these two, only the first matters to them. They have rebranded several times in the past and will do so whenever the old brand loses its appeal.

yeah true, also politicians trying to get elected now and could really care less abt anything else

but on the other hand political affiliations made when young are sticky, so while most of the gop might not really care now, it will affect them long term

muddle of pudd

gross, save that for the deathdrone thread

I'm not marrying you, am0n.

you've heard that gay marriage joke, "Is it mandatory?" Well, it is for some folks at Raytheon and IBM!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304314404576414003229539790.html

morbs i'd have assumed that you would condemn all raytheon employees as full-fledged members of the EVIL AMERICAN WAR MACHINE

cogs in the imperial hardware they have rights too.

The employers most likely to drop the benefits were those that offer them only to same-sex couples; many firms offer benefits to heterosexual nonmarried couples as well.

so... i mean, the real issue is that these company policies are exclusively for same-sex couples, right?

well, in the case of IBM & Raytheon, they don't offer any kind of nonmarried partners benefits.

Interesting:

“Gay inmates married in New York will be allowed to receive the same conjugal visits — officially called “family reunions” — that their married heterosexual cellmates enjoy, officials said.”

Good news:

“Gay inmates were also made eligible for furloughs if their spouse or civil union partner was terminally ill, a privilege granted to heterosexual couples.”

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/29/rhode-islands-senate-oks-same-sex-civil-union-bill/

:/

Hrrmrmrm. The language in that legislation about "protection" of religious organizations from having to recognize same-sex civil unions is concerning (appalling), as usual. Mostly, but certainly not only, because of church-run health care systems having leave to deny the legal right of same sex couple w/r/t medical decisions.

can i be the only one who lols every time he sees this thread title

naw this title is hilarious

This is gathering an incredible head of steam in Australia atm. It feels like the only people who remain opposed to it are a few outlying bigots/murdoch tabloid readers and a handful of politicians (many of whom secretly support it and are just waiting for the right time to speak up). Oh and today the Greens get balance of power in the federal senate and the party head is gay.

(I should say gay AND publicly in support of same-sex marriage (those two don't always go hand-in-hand, sadly))

http://sprudge.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/6a00d8341c730253ef01538f7eedc6970b-800wi.jpg

Hmm, guess it's time for me to get my boutique coffee beans somewhere else.

What does that even mean?

#SorryFolks #NotEqual #WhyBother #ChasngAfterTheWind #SelfEvident

#chasingafterthewind #obscurebigotry

The owner did clarify his position:

Recently, a Twitter post that was made via our company’s Twitter account has exploded into something it was never meant to be and we want to correct the record. In the post, it mentioned the differences between Natural Law and Human Law and mentioned that they were different and unequal. This was a post about CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY and LAWS (a la Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, etc.), not PEOPLE; but somehow people began to twist what was written and added their own lies to the post to mean that somehow we at The Brown Coffee Company are hateful, homophobic, intolerant people. Those are not the facts and we regret that this has descended into something very ugly based on other people’s incorrect reading of the Twitter post. People have begun to attack our friends and business associates based on these incorrect lies and not based on the facts themselves. Other Twitter posts from others began to crop up ascribing words, thoughts and intentions to us and what we said that were NEVER said.

well that really clarifies things

Then he added:

http://browncoffeeco.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/he-smiles/

this person seems k nuts

#chasingafterthewind #obscurebigotry

― ice cr?m, Friday, 1 July 2011 14:32 (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ah right, i've not seen/noticed that phrase before

I couldn't find anything that associated "chasing after the wind" with opposition to gay marriage. I found a pro-gay marriage evangelical pastor (or something) who also gave a sermon about the "chasing after the wind" passage. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough. Is there an anti-gay marriage "chasing after the wind" movement? Dude hashtagging Ecclesiastes when he's feeling philosphical seems to accord.

Brown Coffee guy is probably a little nuts, I agree.

What is the story behind this thread title?

i mean i feel pretty confident stating this guy wasn't making some next-level allusion with #chasingthewind except maybe sorta the larger literary cache/personal spiritual resonance of ecclesiasties.

and even then, its just a nice-sounding phrase he borrowed is all, is what i'm saying, is all

ah okay

bamcquern:

Gay Marriage to Alfred: Your Thoughts

(starting w/ my post b/c it provides context for the set-up to Alfred's stellar knock-down)

that person needs to clarify exactly what it would mean for something to be "precluded by natural law", and until they do so, it's hardly surprising that their post reads as a rejection of gay marriage along fairly typical "you can make it legal but you can't make it right" lines but now with added pseudo-abstraction- (one can hardly accuse Plato and Aquinas of holding similar views about homosexuality, for that matter)

the very notion of invoking "natural law" in relation to homosexuality is a classic ideological move that has no scientific basis but works to reify an image of "straight" Nature- plenty of animals exhibit homosexual behavior- there's nothing "unnatural" about it if the frame here is the, you know, natural world. If, instead of the natural world, this person is hoping to erect some claim about essences or natures in an Aristotelian sense, he's still got a long way to go before this post makes sense. And that's not even touching on the likelihood that Aquinas is the real intellectual center of gravity here. If "natural law" just means "God's law" then this isn't a debate about philosophy, it's someone cloaking their religious views in terms cadged from a seeminlgy less polarizing and more high-falutin' discipline.

ugh the more I think about this move this coffee dude is making the more it annoys me. The basic move is "there's HUMAN law and there's NATURAL law . . . . but, I (a human, note) happen to know BOTH and those foolish people over there are still stuck on the petty human level"- it's pretentious in a very basic way for this person to think that they can somehow speak for / on behalf of this bugbear abstraction that they term Nature with a capital N. In scenarios like this "Nature", invoked with the rhetorical flourish of kettledrums, arrives only to squeak out the thin- pipsqueak sound of the same old Judeo-Christian, entirely and utterly "human", ideas. If they want to look Nature squarely in the face, my guess is that they will find Nature pretty much indifferent to "marriage" as such. Union, bonding, sexuality- yep, plenty of that, from atoms to enzymes to animal behavior, you will find lots of unions, bonds, partnerships, and sexytime. Marriage? not so much.

Plus, if he wants to take the high-ground of "i have my principles and I"m sticking to them" then he could at least clarify what those principles actually are. Otherwise he's a coward who's backpedaling to protect his business while claiming to not care if he loses customers. Why bother to say "I"m not a homophobe" if you're not going to bother explaining the post. In detail.