Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleRedToyota
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i would be curious to know if cramer thinks gay marriage should be banned (not by churches...they should be free to ban it if they want...but by government)?
if he answered that question no, then i would cut him a lot more slack. but, i would bet a dollar to a donut hole that he would answer that question yes.
and that means he favors using government to enforce his intolerance...and that is wrong, imho--and not something i want to be associated with. and it is not something i think it is good for gun owners in general to be associated with.
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Just to focus on that narrow point of gay marriage and the government: Only one side of this issue is looking to use the power of the government to force everyone to behave in "acceptable" ways. Right now, the sodomy laws have been mooted, gay couples are free to live together, to leave each other all their worldly goods, to grant each other the right to visit in a hospital. It's just that they can't force their families and strangers to treat them like they're married (I assume that their friends will play ball, that's why they're friends.)
If the government declines to redefine marriage so that it's no longer limited to one adult male and one adult female, then there are a lot of mandatory consequences, people being FORCED to do things (first one being, where does it stop? 2 men, one woman? 3 men? 2 men and 1 emancipated teen girl?) It changes divorce, adoption, intestacy laws, retirement benefits, housing, and a host of purely private interactions. And it will be the evil government FORCING other people to treat the couple or trio or whatever as a "marriage".
If the government keeps things as they are, people are free to accept any couple or trio or group as a marriage, if they choose. Nothing is stopping a landlord from renting to a
menage a cinq, your employer is free to extend insurance benefits to your dozen Mormon wives if he chooses. The main difference is that government inaction allows other people the freedom to interact with them as something other than a marriage.
Either way, you're going to have some unhappy people, but we should at least agree that it's when the government re-defines "marriage" that you have the most people coerced into doing what they otherwise would not do. That's the whole point of re-defining marriage, so that the government will FORCE everyone to accept these couples, right? If society was warm and fuzzy and accepting, we wouldn't need to change the laws. It's not the "anti-gay bigots" who want to use the government as a hammer here.
It may be good or it may be bad, but the people pushing for the change are the ones seeking to use the big, bad government to enforce how they want people to act.