This entire issue has become a pet peeve of mine. As a single male of advancing years with a, shall we say, sometimes less than macho demeanor, I have been mistaken many times in my life for a homosexual, and have indeed had gay friends and considered myself for years to be pretty progressive on the issue of homosexuality.  What I have most decidedly never been is a homophobe.  Indeed, the term itself is sort of ridiculous, and I think it good to clarify that not only do I not fear homosexuals, in most cases I actively enjoy them as people.  I don't have to like their sex habits, and I don't have to care.  So for years, I didn't care.  Live and let live, right?  It's the American way.

In the last decade, any hint of resistance to the idea of gay marriage has garnered anyone, no matter their previous beliefs or attitudes, the label of bigot by gays who are quite frankly lying when they make the comparison to race and gender to support their political agenda. One does not have a male or female "orientation", or a African or Caucasian or Asian "orientation". Race and gender are physical traits. Homosexuality, whether it is an "orientation" or not, whether it is a choice or not, is expressed as a behavior, and we are none of use required to check our brains at the door when discussing this issue.

I am sick to death of it. Marriage? Benefits? Why? To what possible social goal do we extol the virtues of an abnormal, if not clinically so, sexual orientation or behavior? You can live together, you can have sex together. You can even be married under any spiritual tradition that accepts this for gays. Why the perks? What need for sharing benefits, and why would any sane person want to set themselves up for the inevitable extension of divorce law into their lives should they decide to part?

I think it is nothing more fancy than a direct attack on freedom of religion. By selling this issue as a civil rights issue, leftists (who have been directly involved in the gay rights movement from its inception) hope to place a permanent wedge between the Christian religion, which cannot with any honesty condone homosexuality, and the government.

It's nothing noble. It's the hardball politics of destruction at its utter worst

Let me see if I cannot put this into a cogent form.

The problem with the Socialist tendencies in our Democratic party is that these are people attempting to take money ostensibly to help with economic inequity, and instead they use it primarily to garner votes from a constituency they have created from illegal immigration and extensive social engineering.

Having seen, in my own lifetime, the benefits of workfare and the disaster of welfare, the idea that we are slipping back into that previous unaccountable model is indeed offensive to me.

However, the Republicans, or conservatives if you will, have scant reason to complain.  They have likewise undermined the economic well being of this nation by encouraging false fears, arguing immigration alone is the cause of low wages when in fact, if other safeguards were in place it would simply mean that people who sneak in would have wages the same as a citizen until they were deported.  They have capitulated entirely to business interests who happily outsource labor to markets where economic disparities and even outright government abuse keeps wages artificially low, thus helping to further damage the economy here at home.  Worst of all, they have refused to keep responsible oversight here at home, with the end result that no matter how you try to slice it, the housing and credit scandals began fully on the Republican watch, and were largely the result of typical Republican "deregulation", albeit with the complicit aid of certain Democrats, most notably Bill Clinton.

Things can be done to reform regulation that would make our economy more egalitarian without resorting to large scale power and money grabs by the government.  Through proper regulation, limited liability could always come at the price of including safeguards for labor that would make the concept of the union obsolete.  It would require absolutely no government usurpation of the open market.  Coupled with some workfare financed by progressive taxation, the economy would begin to very naturally function in a way beneficial to all, as the natural rewards would go out to those who thought and organized in terms of social progress rather than individual progress, and yet this would be equally as self serving as our current system.  

You simply remove the rewards for hoarding and replace them with rewards for enlarging ones power through the most complete and efficient utilization of human resources possible.

When wealth and power accumulates into the hands of the very few, they lost any real motivation to keep investing or inventing.  That is the problem we are observing now.  That's the problem things like the Jubile were designed to address in the Old Testament.

testHere's an article that I hope is not lost.  I saw it, commented, and then noted it was removed from the main page for contributors' articles.

http://townhall.com/Columnists/RogerSchlesinger/2009/06/16/what_is_apr

I believe the real problem here is not in nomenclature, but rather in the industry itself simply operating poorly. This is hugely important because this is really the fundamental cause of our current economic situation.  For whatever reason, people simply did not believe there would ever, ever be an economic pull back in the real estate industry, and when it happened the entire business model of real estate sales and investment was turned on its ear.

I don't really understand the point of the article.  Is it to ban variable rates, or what? If the rates were up around 13% a variable rate might be a really good deal. In fact, folks might refuse to buy without the option. Use of the APR or not is irrelevant. What happened was twofold -- people were being shoe horned into things they could not afford because the people doing the loans thought they could make a profit on repos and resale, and these risky investments were never separated from more conventional (and easily identifiable) sorts of loans, thus poisoning the entire world credit market.

Someone please tell me how this relates to APR, variable rates, or anything else under the sun except greed and utter stupidity.

Conservative thinkers have taken to blaming Obama worship for a whole variety of things.  I think it's high time we put aside the issue and moved on to things we have more control over.

Folks. Obama did not win this election by any huge margin. Liberals just in general are given to the sort of emotional idol worship that we see in some quarters, and have heaped it on Kennedy for decades. Few who admire Reagan do so by kissing his statues and weeping. Speaking in generalities, it's the nature of the beast.  Beatles fans cry for Lenin; Zeppelin fans roar for Bonham.  Certain types of folks react to their environment in certain ways.  All of this Obama "worship" is merely the result of the immature mindset and latent belief that there are hidden, almost magical solutions to real problems intrinsic to all devoted leftists.  It's lamentable, but nothing new.

That's not the problem with the broad middle though, and conservatives better get this through their heads quickly.

The majority of this nation that still supports Obama does so because conservatives continue to demonize simple, working class people and belittle their role in the health and welfare of this nation. If big government policies are not going to help, what you need is a cogent plan for making progressive economic changes without the government running the show completely. One way or the other, money needs to stop accumulating in the hands of a tiny minority and begin again to circulate naturally.

Too large a percentage of wealth in too few hands results in the same kind of totalitarianism you complain of in Obama. People have seen through the laissez-faire capitalist's argument.

We need balanced, well thought out regulation where the means of production are privately owned, but the government has the resources necessary to prevent abuses. It's really just that simple.

Stop blaming Obama.

Gay rights activists claim that marriage is not about family, children, and financial issues unique to men and women.  When you point out that this is in fact exactly what marriage is about, and what it always has been about, they claim that this is a weak argument because it merely appeals to old, tired traditions that have no current use in a modern and enlightened society.

The argument is demonstrably not, "it's always been done that way." No one has shown that there is no longer a need to regulate heterosexual sex and the resultant children in some way to ensure the child is taken care of and the finances are arranged fairly. No one has shown how a gay couple, who will either never have children, or if they do will have them in such a controlled way that they can negotiate every aspect of who takes care of what, is the same as a male and female couple for whom at the very least the role of mother and father are defined during child bearing, and generally speaking beyond that in various tangible ways.

No one has shown how these roles are obsolete. Indeed, despite repetition of the same assertion about marriage changing, no one has really shown any fundamental way that it has.

What has been shown is that many liberals will just repeat the charge, "you are making an argument from tradition."

Appeal to tradition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Study the actual use of this term, "appeal to tradition."  We who oppose gay marriage are not arguing that traditional marriage values were proven right at their inception.We're arguing that marriage by definition has been about kids and finances. Whether or not this was the correct way to go is not necessary to refute the oft stated opinion that marriage has nothing to do with kids and finances.

Now I move on to the assertion that marriage is no longer about kids and finances. Well, in fact, if you look at the laws governing marriage, they are indeed about kids and finances, or more precisely, the laws about dissolving a marriage are about kids and finances.

If we move on to the assertion that marriage is not MOSTLY about kids and finances. Again, looking at the laws governing the institution, all of them are about kids and finances.

How about the assertion, "marriage is also about love and romance." Looking at the laws governing the issue, none of them are about love and romance.

How about, "marriage is a spiritual issue that the government has no business interfering with."

In that case, we look at the laws preventing people from getting spiritual marriages within their own faith traditions. Such laws are nonexistent.

So, we know from the past that marriage was about kids and finances, we know the laws currently on the books, so much as they exist, are about kids and finances, and we know that there are no limits on spiritual marriages.

We know that homosexuals come by their children, if they have any at all, in a functionally different way than heterosexuals, and we know that they have more control over this than heterosexuals do.

We know that homosexuals, as far as gender inequalities are concerned, do not have any legal issues. We know that gender inequalities exist in every heterosexual marriage.

We know that for the most part, homosexuals come into a relationship with independent lives, and leave that relationship equally independent. If there have been any decisions for one to, for example, sacrifice career and stay at home, this is fully negotiable between them, and any financial issues can easily be negotiated along with such decisions. We know with heterosexual couples, no matter how hard they may wish it to be otherwise, women are always going to be the ones getting pregnant, and men are by extension more often going to be the ones in a situation to maintain an uninterrupted career. We know that women still make less than men on average, and sometimes even make less than men for doing the same job.

We know from psychology that men and women fulfill different roles in a heterosexual family. We know homosexuals will not be able to fill those roles. One of the two will be excluded.

Everything we know from antiquity to the present dictates that there are indeed differences between gay and heterosexual couples as they pertain to living together, having a child, raising that child, and separating from one another. There are actually almost no similarities between gay couples and heterosexual couples other than the fact that they have sex and feel emotions.

This is not what the law concerning marriage is about.

Add to that the atrocious damage done to our society by high divorce rates brought on by sexually libertine behavior introduced from the exact same political influences as the ones now pushing gay marriage, and what I see is a big, flashing red warning sign stating, "DO NOT ENTER".

We've been here before. We've actually been here dozens of times over the past few decades where divorce, sex, porn, and other moral issues related to sex have been sold to us as progress, and instead have done great damage.

In response to this, what we often hear is, "well, that's just an argument from tradition," from people who do not use the phrase in the same way as it has traditionally been used.

I think the traditional understanding of what an argument from tradition is holds.