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.