I find a lot of the debate around this very deceptive. That "near-universal acknowledgment that the system wouldn't work" means that it can't block every pornographic image out there. That's a lot like complaining that speed cameras "don't work" because people still speed on other lengths of road, or that aeroplanes "don't work" because occasionally they crash, or that firewalls "don't work" because sometimes attacks come through port 80. You'd be stupid to have a firewall installed, right? They don't work - some attacks still get through!
And "effectively told ISPs to lie"? That's bullshit. You have a filter which will be turned on unless you take an action to turn it off. But by default, it will be on. Sounds like default-on to me. The ISPs want to label it some active choice plus garbage, but that's what it is. The letter suggested they call a spade a spade.
I think it helps even if you have that "moderate education in information security and encryption." This sort of data capture exercise is probably not about looking for specific intelligence giving, say, the details of a bomb plot. It's more likely to be about spotting people who have travelled to Pakistan and who have searched for bomb recipes online and who regularly email someone at their local sports club who has regular contact with a known militant. That kind of pattern is a bit easier to find automatically. From there it's not evidence that you're plotting to blow up a building, but it could be taken as an indication that it might be worth spending the money for someone to check you out in detail.
Your encryption probably doesn't help here. Sure you've encrypted the mail contents, but your message was sent using SMTP, so the NSA now knows who you've sent an email to, even if they haven't got the contents (yet).
This comment proves what I've been saying all along - Skynet already controls the internet. Now it starts an astroturf campaign to turn that control from de facto to de jure.
contracts are a fairly modern invention, which reply on a state level society with rule of law
I think state-level society and the rule of law are older concepts than you think. Certainly contracts are. The very earliest forms of writing are records of commercial agreements. This is beside the point of the universality of male-female marriage; a red herring.
a man and as many women as he can afford to marry
Note that I didn't say "one man and one woman". It's not accurate to say that marriage is regarded as a union between a man and one-or-more-women; this situation is (AFAICT) universally regarded as several marriages. Ancient societies that allowed polygamy certainly did not consider this some sort of union between the women involved, but between the man and each woman. This is again beside the point of marriage between men and women; a red herring.
if the man has no brothers, but has sisters, the sister's might be expected to take over the husbandly duties).
I've never heard of one - care to offer a reference? At any rate, generally speaking, ancient societies that operated in that way regarded the family member as acting as the representative of the dead man - so any children would be legally his. There was no general acceptance of same-sex marriage. This is, again, a red herring, though slightly nearer the point than the others.
For the vast majority of Western history, women were treated like property, and marriage was an exchange of property which happened to include a woman.
That is a popular myth, but I don't think it's even close to true. Certainly the formalities have always said that it is not true. If we are restricting ourselves to Western societies in the past thousand years or two then we are basically talking about Christian traditions of marriage. The Christian ceremony of marriage has always included a longish preamble that sets out the purpose of marriage and it certainly doesn't describe it as a transfer of property. It is centrally a promise to love and to cherish, not to own. Ecclesiastical (ie church) law has always recognised the invalidity of a marriage where one partner did not freely consent to the marriage and has provided for annulment of marriages on this basis. If we further restrict ourselves to Anglo-American culture, English law has always recognised the presumed agency of wives with respect to their husband's property - that is, a wife is free to enter into any and all contracts regarding her husband's property and the law will presume that she has the right unless there is specific evidence to rebut it. This is not a wife being part of her husband's property but having control over it.
I'm not making an argument in the women-always-had-it-good-they're-just-a-bunch-of-whingers line; there have certainly been gross injustices dished out to them and often the law has failed to protect them. But your description of marriage is just gross fabrication. People haven't changed much, you know; people have always grown up, fallen in love, got married, had children, died. It's not always perfect, in fact often enough we manage to hurt each other a lot, but yes, it's an institution that I think is worth legally enforcing. Since the nearest you can come up with to an argument for changing that definition of marriage is a gross caricature, count me unconvinced.
Glad to see moderation is working as it should. Mods are free to mod as they see fit.
I realise this discussion is pretty dead, but if you're still reading, I have a question for you. It might take me a few minutes to explain it. Sorry.
Reading through this whole discussion, I think what I'm seeing is that your priority in this situation is for government not to interfere wherever it is at all possible for it not to interfere. You think that government should not restrict the freedom of publishers to make agreements fixing their offering price because that is a restraint on the freedom of those publishers. You think that the free market will solve the problem because someone will see the opportunity to set up a publisher that's not part of the cartel and will undercut the cartel members. But the arrangements of the publishing industry is not what you really care about; for you, it's about government not impinging on freedom of individuals. Is that fair? It's what you might term a "very small government" position; perhaps you think the government should concern itself with a simple sort of criminal law & enforcement, foreign relations and enough taxation to support that and leave it at that? Note that I'm using "government" here to refer to all levels of government, not specifically the US Federal government.
Would it also be fair to say that you see this model of government as inherently right, as the only legitimate form of government? You use terms like "inalienable rights" and "proper role of government" in a way that seems to indicate that you don't see this as one possible model of government that might be chosen by a given society but rather the only legitimate model of government. Is that fair?
If I've read correctly and the above is a fair description of your position (at least as far as it goes), then here is my question for you: What makes that the only legitimate form of government? Why is it an intrinsically valid form of government and all other forms intrinsically invalid?
I hope that it is fairly clear to you that this is not the model of government currently in operation in the United States. The USA is a democratic constitutional republic which means that the form of government in place is whatever the people want it to be, and if enough of them can agree on a different form of government then they can change it by changing the constitution. You could easily become absolute dictator for life - all you have to do is get the right number of people to vote for a constitutional amendment that makes it so. My point is not whether this would be a good or bad thing, but that power fundamentally derives from the will of the people and the only "right" form of government is whatever form the (required majority of) people agree on. It recognises no absolute right or wrong way of doing government, only the will of the people. So I am curious about how you can claim that you know the "right" way of doing government as opposed to how government is actually practised.
I suppose it's possible that you think that the reason your model of government is the right one is because it's the model that is set out in the United States constitution and that the current incarnation of government is in fact not following the will of the people as set out in the constitution. That changes the question from, "What is the proper form of government," to a specific legal question, "Is current antitrust law set out by congress within the authority granted to congress by the constitution?" The specific legal basis of antitrust law is article 1, section 8, clause 3 of the constitution, which gives congress the power "to regulate commerce... among the several states..." The elisions are of powers to also regulate commerce with foreign nations and with the Indian tribes. While I would generally agree that the way the commerce clause is applied goes a long way beyond the regulation of commerce (attempting to use it to regulate gun possession, violence against
No. Two wrongs don't make a right. There's nothing wrong with having a monopoly, as long as you don't abuse it to hurt consumers. Amazon, so far, hasn't. In fact they've used their monopoly to keep prices low.
Collusion to raise prices is illegal and rightly so, even when it breaks a monopoly - especially when that monopoly position was not being used anti-competitively.
God you talk some crap. There, I've given you an excuse to write this off as argumentum ad hominem.
Which right is being violated by these voluntary agreements between individuals?
The agreement between Apple and the publishers removed Amazon's right to set their own retail price for goods.
If that is the agreement that retailers voluntarily agreed to abide by, why is it anyone's concern?
Because the law explicitly says the type of agreement Apple and the publishers entered into is unlawful. That's democracy for you.
What prevents Amazon from leaving the agreement and choosing not to sell those publishers' products?
Yes, they could do that. It's analogous to giving someone the choice between being shot and jumping off a cliff. When they jump, you can wash your hands - it was their choice to do it! But because we as a democratic society don't like businesses to collude in a way that reduces the competition in a marketplace, we've made it illegal.
Because they contractually agreed to that price. It would be a violation of their voluntary contractual agreement, and if it was a willful violation, it would be fraud.
If it was a willful violation, then it would be breach of contract. Fraud is something else.
Then why did they agree to that?
Because the only other choice was to leave the market. They can't just say, "Fine, I won't carry your books then - you'll lose because all the other publishers are going with us," because all the publishers had made an unlawful agreement to fix the same set of prices and conditions.
What prevents Amazon or anyone else from starting up a competing publishing film, or choosing to sell the ebooks at the agreed-upon price, or to buy the physical books instead, or to use the library, or to find a similar book through a different publisher, to choose not to read the book altogether? There is plenty of competition.
Sure. Of course, all the authors are contracted to the big publishing houses, so Amazon will have to write their own books as well. The suggestion is absolutely absurd. There'd be nothing wrong with mining companies fixing prices for metals with the refineries, would there, because any car manufacturer can just go and set up their own mining arm, invest billions in exploration, dig the stuff up, set up their own processing business and produce their own steel. Then do it again for copper, aluminium, zinc, nickel, tin and gold. They're still perfectly free to make cars, right? Or there's nothing wrong with farmers fixing prices for food with the supermarkets. After all, your average New Yorker is perfectly free to buy a couple of acres of land upstate, and he has a whole two days every week to go and farm it and produce his own food if he doesn't like the supermarkets' fixed prices.
Bad example. My rule of thumb when buying guitar kit is that if you've paid more than 2/3 of the advertised price, you've been had. Comprehensively. If you're any good at negotiating, you'll be well under that 2/3 mark.
I think the point is though that Amazon haven't shown any sign of trying to do that yet. So far they've undersold everyone else and reached a dominant position but there's nothing wrong with that so long as you don't then abuse that position to manipulate the market. If Amazon ran everybody else out of the market and then used that position to hike prices or to destroy publishers, then yes, that's bad, but they haven't done it yet and it's only speculation that they will. Apple, on the other hand, definitely colluded with publishers to fix prices and manipulate the market. That is bad, whether they are dominant or not.
What Apple did might even have been arguably good for the long-term market by reducing Amazon's dominance, but two wrongs don't make a right, especially when the first wrong is only, "We think they're about to do something bad!"
It's tricky. Amazon did have a dominant position in the market and were selling at very low prices, sometimes below cost. They were willing to this because they could make profits on other sales that they were happy with, and also arguably because they could price everyone else out of the market and then use their dominance to raise prices (though this is speculation and it never got that far). This created a considerable barrier to entry for other players in the market. So Amazon might well count themselves lucky that they weren't on the wrong end of a competition probe themselves.
When Apple wanted to get into that market, what they probably should have done was complain that Amazon's business was anti-competitive and got the regulator involved. Instead, what they did was go to all the publishers and convince them to switch to the agency model. In this model, the publishers don't sell books to the retailers. Instead the retailer acts as an agent for the publisher and the contract of sale is direct between the consumer and the publisher, through the agency of the retailer. It means that the publishers get to set the price of books, not the retailers. An extra term in the contract said that the publishers wouldn't enter non-agency agreements with any other retailer and they wouldn't sell through any other publisher for less than they sold through Apple. Funnily enough, the price the publishers chose was basically the old retail price + Apple's 30% cut.
This was obviously good for Apple, as it meant Apple could compete with Amazon while still taking their 30% cut on every sale. It was also good for the publishers, because it helped break Amazon's dominance and so gave the publishers room to negotiate prices upwards. It might even have been arguably good for the market, at least in the long term, as Amazon were using their position to fend off new entrants and increase control. They might then have used that control to increase prices.
So this prosecution is basically saying to Apple, "Two wrongs don't make a right." Amazon wasn't behaving very well before Apple entered the market, though it looked like short-term good for consumers, but collusion and price-fixing is not an acceptable way of breaking that sort of market dominance, either.
Soooo.... shouldn't Amazon be free to set whatever price they choose for what they sell? But, oh, wait, Apple colluded with publishers to set up a market that forced a particular price on Amazon. So, yes, you are right: Retailers should be free to choose what price they sell for, and disrupting this is specifically what Apple is being whacked for.
Hard to see how this was ever going any other way when the publishers involved all settled, including admissions of guilt in the settlement.
According the the BBC, Apple will 'appeal against the ruling and fight "false allegations".' Apple has now definitively departed from the reality-based community.
God, no, artists using their artistic medium and influence to spread a message? What is society coming to????
You disagree with him. That's fine. Dismissing him as ignorant because he disagrees with you is not fine - it's called argumentum ad hominem and it makes it look like you don't actually have any good arguments to make. Show some respect - even for people who disagree with you. Respect them enough to engage with their ideas and demonstrate the superiority of your own, rather than dismissing them with (rather vicious) insults and put-downs.
Whether gay marriage is an equal treatment question really does depend on your definition of marriage. For all of recorded history up to about 1990, marriage has always, in every society, meant a contract of union between a man and a woman. If that definition is allowed to stand then homosexuals have always had equal treatment - a homosexual man has been free to marry any woman who agrees to it and no-one will try to stop the marriage because of his homosexuality. He has the same right to do this as anyone else - he is treated equally.
If you're going to argue that gay marriage is a question of equal treatment before the law then you need to justify redefining marriage as a union between any two people who agree to it and who are not already married (perhaps necessarily on the grounds of a sexual union, either existing or intended). You need to argue either that marriage has not really always been between a man and a woman or you need to justify changing that definition.
No no no no no, owning guns is an American right. After all, "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Or a good guy with a WMD, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
Or tumblr for that matter.
I didn't see anyone mention "illegal content". Blocking The Sun would be a first step to a better Britain, though.
I find a lot of the debate around this very deceptive. That "near-universal acknowledgment that the system wouldn't work" means that it can't block every pornographic image out there. That's a lot like complaining that speed cameras "don't work" because people still speed on other lengths of road, or that aeroplanes "don't work" because occasionally they crash, or that firewalls "don't work" because sometimes attacks come through port 80. You'd be stupid to have a firewall installed, right? They don't work - some attacks still get through! And "effectively told ISPs to lie"? That's bullshit. You have a filter which will be turned on unless you take an action to turn it off. But by default, it will be on. Sounds like default-on to me. The ISPs want to label it some active choice plus garbage, but that's what it is. The letter suggested they call a spade a spade.
I think it helps even if you have that "moderate education in information security and encryption." This sort of data capture exercise is probably not about looking for specific intelligence giving, say, the details of a bomb plot. It's more likely to be about spotting people who have travelled to Pakistan and who have searched for bomb recipes online and who regularly email someone at their local sports club who has regular contact with a known militant. That kind of pattern is a bit easier to find automatically. From there it's not evidence that you're plotting to blow up a building, but it could be taken as an indication that it might be worth spending the money for someone to check you out in detail.
Your encryption probably doesn't help here. Sure you've encrypted the mail contents, but your message was sent using SMTP, so the NSA now knows who you've sent an email to, even if they haven't got the contents (yet).
I'm not clear. Does this help because the USA has no mosquitoes? Or because you can now use assault weapons on them?
Suuuuure you have. Then you woke up, right?
It's only a guess, admittedly, but then this is slashdot.
This comment proves what I've been saying all along - Skynet already controls the internet. Now it starts an astroturf campaign to turn that control from de facto to de jure.
A bit over the top, no? The night of the long knives was in 1934 - I don't think we're up to mass murder of political opponents yet.
You're welcome.
I think state-level society and the rule of law are older concepts than you think. Certainly contracts are. The very earliest forms of writing are records of commercial agreements. This is beside the point of the universality of male-female marriage; a red herring.
Note that I didn't say "one man and one woman". It's not accurate to say that marriage is regarded as a union between a man and one-or-more-women; this situation is (AFAICT) universally regarded as several marriages. Ancient societies that allowed polygamy certainly did not consider this some sort of union between the women involved, but between the man and each woman. This is again beside the point of marriage between men and women; a red herring.
I've never heard of one - care to offer a reference? At any rate, generally speaking, ancient societies that operated in that way regarded the family member as acting as the representative of the dead man - so any children would be legally his. There was no general acceptance of same-sex marriage. This is, again, a red herring, though slightly nearer the point than the others.
That is a popular myth, but I don't think it's even close to true. Certainly the formalities have always said that it is not true. If we are restricting ourselves to Western societies in the past thousand years or two then we are basically talking about Christian traditions of marriage. The Christian ceremony of marriage has always included a longish preamble that sets out the purpose of marriage and it certainly doesn't describe it as a transfer of property. It is centrally a promise to love and to cherish, not to own. Ecclesiastical (ie church) law has always recognised the invalidity of a marriage where one partner did not freely consent to the marriage and has provided for annulment of marriages on this basis. If we further restrict ourselves to Anglo-American culture, English law has always recognised the presumed agency of wives with respect to their husband's property - that is, a wife is free to enter into any and all contracts regarding her husband's property and the law will presume that she has the right unless there is specific evidence to rebut it. This is not a wife being part of her husband's property but having control over it.
I'm not making an argument in the women-always-had-it-good-they're-just-a-bunch-of-whingers line; there have certainly been gross injustices dished out to them and often the law has failed to protect them. But your description of marriage is just gross fabrication. People haven't changed much, you know; people have always grown up, fallen in love, got married, had children, died. It's not always perfect, in fact often enough we manage to hurt each other a lot, but yes, it's an institution that I think is worth legally enforcing. Since the nearest you can come up with to an argument for changing that definition of marriage is a gross caricature, count me unconvinced.
Glad to see moderation is working as it should. Mods are free to mod as they see fit.
I realise this discussion is pretty dead, but if you're still reading, I have a question for you. It might take me a few minutes to explain it. Sorry.
Reading through this whole discussion, I think what I'm seeing is that your priority in this situation is for government not to interfere wherever it is at all possible for it not to interfere. You think that government should not restrict the freedom of publishers to make agreements fixing their offering price because that is a restraint on the freedom of those publishers. You think that the free market will solve the problem because someone will see the opportunity to set up a publisher that's not part of the cartel and will undercut the cartel members. But the arrangements of the publishing industry is not what you really care about; for you, it's about government not impinging on freedom of individuals. Is that fair? It's what you might term a "very small government" position; perhaps you think the government should concern itself with a simple sort of criminal law & enforcement, foreign relations and enough taxation to support that and leave it at that? Note that I'm using "government" here to refer to all levels of government, not specifically the US Federal government.
Would it also be fair to say that you see this model of government as inherently right, as the only legitimate form of government? You use terms like "inalienable rights" and "proper role of government" in a way that seems to indicate that you don't see this as one possible model of government that might be chosen by a given society but rather the only legitimate model of government. Is that fair?
If I've read correctly and the above is a fair description of your position (at least as far as it goes), then here is my question for you: What makes that the only legitimate form of government? Why is it an intrinsically valid form of government and all other forms intrinsically invalid?
I hope that it is fairly clear to you that this is not the model of government currently in operation in the United States. The USA is a democratic constitutional republic which means that the form of government in place is whatever the people want it to be, and if enough of them can agree on a different form of government then they can change it by changing the constitution. You could easily become absolute dictator for life - all you have to do is get the right number of people to vote for a constitutional amendment that makes it so. My point is not whether this would be a good or bad thing, but that power fundamentally derives from the will of the people and the only "right" form of government is whatever form the (required majority of) people agree on. It recognises no absolute right or wrong way of doing government, only the will of the people. So I am curious about how you can claim that you know the "right" way of doing government as opposed to how government is actually practised.
I suppose it's possible that you think that the reason your model of government is the right one is because it's the model that is set out in the United States constitution and that the current incarnation of government is in fact not following the will of the people as set out in the constitution. That changes the question from, "What is the proper form of government," to a specific legal question, "Is current antitrust law set out by congress within the authority granted to congress by the constitution?" The specific legal basis of antitrust law is article 1, section 8, clause 3 of the constitution, which gives congress the power "to regulate commerce ... among the several states..." The elisions are of powers to also regulate commerce with foreign nations and with the Indian tribes. While I would generally agree that the way the commerce clause is applied goes a long way beyond the regulation of commerce (attempting to use it to regulate gun possession, violence against
No. Two wrongs don't make a right. There's nothing wrong with having a monopoly, as long as you don't abuse it to hurt consumers. Amazon, so far, hasn't. In fact they've used their monopoly to keep prices low. Collusion to raise prices is illegal and rightly so, even when it breaks a monopoly - especially when that monopoly position was not being used anti-competitively.
Go read the final judgement in the case. It sets out a long list of admitted facts both parties agreed to.
The agreement between Apple and the publishers removed Amazon's right to set their own retail price for goods.
Because the law explicitly says the type of agreement Apple and the publishers entered into is unlawful. That's democracy for you.
Yes, they could do that. It's analogous to giving someone the choice between being shot and jumping off a cliff. When they jump, you can wash your hands - it was their choice to do it! But because we as a democratic society don't like businesses to collude in a way that reduces the competition in a marketplace, we've made it illegal.
If it was a willful violation, then it would be breach of contract. Fraud is something else.
Because the only other choice was to leave the market. They can't just say, "Fine, I won't carry your books then - you'll lose because all the other publishers are going with us," because all the publishers had made an unlawful agreement to fix the same set of prices and conditions.
Sure. Of course, all the authors are contracted to the big publishing houses, so Amazon will have to write their own books as well. The suggestion is absolutely absurd. There'd be nothing wrong with mining companies fixing prices for metals with the refineries, would there, because any car manufacturer can just go and set up their own mining arm, invest billions in exploration, dig the stuff up, set up their own processing business and produce their own steel. Then do it again for copper, aluminium, zinc, nickel, tin and gold. They're still perfectly free to make cars, right? Or there's nothing wrong with farmers fixing prices for food with the supermarkets. After all, your average New Yorker is perfectly free to buy a couple of acres of land upstate, and he has a whole two days every week to go and farm it and produce his own food if he doesn't like the supermarkets' fixed prices.
Bad example. My rule of thumb when buying guitar kit is that if you've paid more than 2/3 of the advertised price, you've been had. Comprehensively. If you're any good at negotiating, you'll be well under that 2/3 mark.
Bullshit. Go read the final judgement in that case - the publishers all explicitly admitted guilt.
I think the point is though that Amazon haven't shown any sign of trying to do that yet. So far they've undersold everyone else and reached a dominant position but there's nothing wrong with that so long as you don't then abuse that position to manipulate the market. If Amazon ran everybody else out of the market and then used that position to hike prices or to destroy publishers, then yes, that's bad, but they haven't done it yet and it's only speculation that they will. Apple, on the other hand, definitely colluded with publishers to fix prices and manipulate the market. That is bad, whether they are dominant or not.
What Apple did might even have been arguably good for the long-term market by reducing Amazon's dominance, but two wrongs don't make a right, especially when the first wrong is only, "We think they're about to do something bad!"
It's tricky. Amazon did have a dominant position in the market and were selling at very low prices, sometimes below cost. They were willing to this because they could make profits on other sales that they were happy with, and also arguably because they could price everyone else out of the market and then use their dominance to raise prices (though this is speculation and it never got that far). This created a considerable barrier to entry for other players in the market. So Amazon might well count themselves lucky that they weren't on the wrong end of a competition probe themselves.
When Apple wanted to get into that market, what they probably should have done was complain that Amazon's business was anti-competitive and got the regulator involved. Instead, what they did was go to all the publishers and convince them to switch to the agency model. In this model, the publishers don't sell books to the retailers. Instead the retailer acts as an agent for the publisher and the contract of sale is direct between the consumer and the publisher, through the agency of the retailer. It means that the publishers get to set the price of books, not the retailers. An extra term in the contract said that the publishers wouldn't enter non-agency agreements with any other retailer and they wouldn't sell through any other publisher for less than they sold through Apple. Funnily enough, the price the publishers chose was basically the old retail price + Apple's 30% cut.
This was obviously good for Apple, as it meant Apple could compete with Amazon while still taking their 30% cut on every sale. It was also good for the publishers, because it helped break Amazon's dominance and so gave the publishers room to negotiate prices upwards. It might even have been arguably good for the market, at least in the long term, as Amazon were using their position to fend off new entrants and increase control. They might then have used that control to increase prices.
So this prosecution is basically saying to Apple, "Two wrongs don't make a right." Amazon wasn't behaving very well before Apple entered the market, though it looked like short-term good for consumers, but collusion and price-fixing is not an acceptable way of breaking that sort of market dominance, either.
Soooo.... shouldn't Amazon be free to set whatever price they choose for what they sell? But, oh, wait, Apple colluded with publishers to set up a market that forced a particular price on Amazon. So, yes, you are right: Retailers should be free to choose what price they sell for, and disrupting this is specifically what Apple is being whacked for.
Well, I said "definitively" because if they hadn't already, this makes it definite. But you are probably right.
Nope, still no non-Latin-1 characters allowed.
Let's try some Chinese text then:
Hard to see how this was ever going any other way when the publishers involved all settled, including admissions of guilt in the settlement. According the the BBC, Apple will 'appeal against the ruling and fight "false allegations".' Apple has now definitively departed from the reality-based community.
God, no, artists using their artistic medium and influence to spread a message? What is society coming to????
You disagree with him. That's fine. Dismissing him as ignorant because he disagrees with you is not fine - it's called argumentum ad hominem and it makes it look like you don't actually have any good arguments to make. Show some respect - even for people who disagree with you. Respect them enough to engage with their ideas and demonstrate the superiority of your own, rather than dismissing them with (rather vicious) insults and put-downs.
Whether gay marriage is an equal treatment question really does depend on your definition of marriage. For all of recorded history up to about 1990, marriage has always, in every society, meant a contract of union between a man and a woman. If that definition is allowed to stand then homosexuals have always had equal treatment - a homosexual man has been free to marry any woman who agrees to it and no-one will try to stop the marriage because of his homosexuality. He has the same right to do this as anyone else - he is treated equally.
If you're going to argue that gay marriage is a question of equal treatment before the law then you need to justify redefining marriage as a union between any two people who agree to it and who are not already married (perhaps necessarily on the grounds of a sexual union, either existing or intended). You need to argue either that marriage has not really always been between a man and a woman or you need to justify changing that definition.
No no no no no, owning guns is an American right. After all, "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Or a good guy with a WMD, I guess.