Actually, your vote counts more with an electoral college than it would in a straight popular vote. Your vote only matters to the degree that it's the swing vote--meaning that you changing your vote would change the outcome of the election. Your odds of being the swing (more precisely, the statistical degree to which your vote is the swing vote) are higher with the electoral college.
In practice, the electors vote the way they were pledged to vote when they signed up--and they're selected to actually be electors based on that. You might recall a Democratic elector from the Midwest (Wisconsin?) who publicly stated that she would vote for Clinton regardless of the outcome of the primary, and was removed from the pool of electors. The vote of the electoral college is a formality, and anyone proposing differently is huffing chads.
He has released a state provided birth certificate proving that he was born in the U.S., and the state in question has come forward to validate it. He thus fulfills all the requirements of the 14th amendment to be considered a natural born citizen. College transcripts are irrelevant. Dual citizenship is irrelevant. He was not born in Kenya. He has proved otherwise.
Why do you care? Seriously. I mean, if there were real problems with his citizenship that might make him ineligible, don't you think that the Clinton and McCain campaigns would have raised the issue? All the lawyering that's gone on in the last few elections shows that candidates are rarely shy about pursuing legal avenues to victory. All the points you list are either flat out wrong or based on legal interpretations as tortured as a tax resister's.
What do you get out of this? Does it comfort you to think that, if Obama's a bad president, you can feel smug in the knowledge that you knew he shouldn't have been president in the first place? I have trouble believing that you take seriously any question about Obama's eligibility.
Remember that the U.S. was not formed as a nation of people but a nation of existing states. The people didn't (and don't) elect the president, the states did (do). It's an historical artifact from the days when people believed that the U.S. would be a very light layer of government on top of a bunch of state governments that would do most of the actual work of governing--more like a co-ordinating committee for common defense and interstate dispute resolution than a superior body. That's why you have a Senate where Rhode Island has as many senators as California--it's the body where the states debate as equal members, regardless of their respective sizes.
Nowadays, the purpose it serves is to force politicians to campaign more widely than they would on a straight popular vote. Ohio has been a swing state in the last three elections, but (no longer) has major metropolitan areas that would draw candidates. Most campaign activity would be concentrated in California, New York, and Florida, leaving the midwest with even less attention than it gets now.
The proposal is to de facto abolish the electoral college by having states pass laws dictating that their electors votes match the popular vote--meaning that if a state has 100 electors, and the winner gets 60% of the popular vote, then 60 electors vote for the winner and 40 for the loser. It's not the case that all the state electors vote for the winner, giving him or her a unanimous victory in the electoral college.
It's a flawed proposal for several reasons, but it's not a liberal conspiracy. It's an attempt to eliminate the situation where someone wins the popular vote and loses the presidency.
That is to say that our society is maiming and killing certain people
We're not 'maiming and killing' anyone, and this is an absurd way to look at it. It's trivially true that someone who reacts to the vaccine is not someone who could suffer from not getting vaccinated. It's also irrelevant--it's paradoxical to think that they could be the same person.
For a given population, if vaccinating leads to X deaths, and not vaccinating leads to Y deaths, and Y is greater than X (as it is in real life for pretty much anything for which we have a vaccine), then it's obviously better to vaccinate. Some will die regardless; I think choosing fewer number of deaths over the larger number is obviously the moral choice.
we should be aggressively and continuously searching for alternatives.
It's what I was told to do by the other consultants who are in the same (generally web-based stuff) field (and who refer work to me or subcontract out to me). They're doing it, and I haven't received any pushback on it. When I was an IT manager, it was also standard practice for large consulting outfits who worked with us. It limits the screwing either side can give each other, and everyone I've put this to seems to recognize that.
As I said, though, large projects are broken down into manageable chunks, so in practice, half up front is somewhere between a couple hundred and several thousand dollars. It's different if they simply want to pay me hourly over a period, but for project based fees, I've never had a problem doing this.
I figured out an hourly rate based on my skills and the prevailing rates. When someone wants me to do something, I get a clear statement of what the work entails. I give an hourly estimate in the form of a range (e.g., 20-25 hours), and tell the client that the top of the range is a cap--after that, I turn off the clock and finish the job, and count the 'lost' hours as an expensive education in estimating (clients quite like that there's a ceiling on their costs and that I'm apparently willing to take a hit for doing things badly).
Then, when I'm estimating, I make sure that I understand the requirements clearly enough that I (almost certainly) won't ever hit that cap. I'm generous in my estimated hours, and if possible, come in at or below that floor of my estimate, which also impresses clients. I'm very upfront about the time taken being a range to handle unexpected difficulties.
For larger jobs that I quote, I break it up into estimable pieces, and call them milestones.
For jobs under five hundred dollars, I do the work and bill. For jobs over five hundred, I get half up front and half on delivery. For large jobs with milestones, the half up front, half on delivery is for each milestone. Milestones are structured with a clear deliverable so that the client feels like, if they stop at that point, they've got a recognizable thing for which they paid.
So far it's worked pretty well for me. The most important part has been long discussions beforehand so that a clear statement of requirements is agreed to before work starts. Then, if the client says they want something different, I've got clear grounds for either revising my estimate or calling it 'out of scope' work with a separate estimate/bill.
Yes, there's a non-zero risk of an adverse reaction that can be quite severe, even including death. That risk is vanishingly small in comparison to the possible consequences of not having widespread vaccination. You can die from most vaccinated diseases, and if we didn't have herd immunity from widespread vaccination, your risks of death from those diseases would be far greater.
The problem is that the risks and consequences of degrading herd immunity appear to be individually small because the consequences are spread out across a large number of people. A correct risk-benefit analysis should lead anyone to get vaccinated, even in the face of stories like yours.
The risks that a vaccine pose to an individual are far outweighed by the benefits gained by society.
More specifically, the risks posed to an individual are far outweighed by the same individual's benefit gained by living in a thoroughly vaccinated society. It's not a question of individual vs. societal benefits, it's that people who refuse vaccinations for spurious reasons are free-riding on the herd immunity (whilst simultaneously degrading it a tiny bit) of all the other individuals who properly weighed the risks and got vaccinated.
Yes, in North American, AIDS is significantly a demographically minority disease. Yes, it receives a hugely disproportionate amount of funding. Yes, it's a valid counterexample to the categorical statement "all minority diseases receive disproportionately less funding." That's not, however, what I said. I said that minority diseases *tend* to receive disproportionately less funding. A single counterexample does not in any way challenge that statement. A long list of counterexamples would *appear* to dispute my statement. One high profile example doesn't.
I'm not sure what your point is. Because one disease that (in North America) was strongly concentrated in an identifiable demographic minority has received vast funding to fight it, that there are no other minority diseases that are underfunded?
A single counterexample to a non-categorical claim is irrelevant.
Breast cancer is a huge success from an awareness and fundraising perspective, so much so that it gets accused of stealing money from other diseases (like prostate cancer) with higher incidence rates.
It's not just that the diseases that afflict the majority get proportionately higher funding. It's that they get disproportionately higher funding because awareness of those diseases, both from ad campaigns and from personal experience, crowds out awareness of minority diseases to the point of starving the latter for any attention at all (and thus, for fundraising dollars).
Diseases that affect minorities tend to receive, not just less, but disproportionately less funding than better known, "white" diseases, just because they get crowded out of the awareness space that correlates directly to fundraising dollars. CUSA could have accomplished the same intent of switching to an under-fundraised disease without the absurd act of saying "we don't want to help white males". They could have said "we want to help fight this disease that's been overlooked until now because it's mainly minorities that suffer from it." Their heart was in the right place, from all the stories I've read. They were just shockingly tone-deaf in their do-goodism.
Yes, you're hyperbolizing. You make it sound like he was an unproblematic defendant who simply didn't move fast enough, and got 90 days in jail.
In reality, Freeman refused to sit down on being instructed to by the judge. He started to sit and then got back up. The judge told him four times to have a seat. Instead, he asks "are you making law?" The judge instructs the bailiffs to take him into custody, and only then does he sit down, saying that he's doing so under duress. According to the blog you link, "He was viewed on closed circuit TV as he continued to question the system and not consent, and drew two further contempt of court charges, all three for 30 days in jail."
In other words, he was trying to jam the system as a "liberty activist". Anyone willing to co-operate with the basic procedures of the court will not risk the same consequences.
It's difficult to imagine a robot capable of dealing with the complexity of the battlefield without running into the same cognitive traps that humans do. The OP quotes a bit about 'scenario fulfillment', namely the tendency to absorb new information more easily if it confirms the scenario you have in mind; conversely, the more important information, that which contradicts your preconceived notions, is ignored or absorbed more slowly. A fast changing, complex situation like a battle will favor those who don't get bogged down in second guessing themselves. If it's a robot churning through decision trees, it'll be just as useless as a human soldier who insists on second guessing every bullet.
Re:I don't like books by Bigots.
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 1
To clarify something I wrote above and provide a specific example, after reading his argument against gay marriage in one of his columns, I viewed him as an intellectually dishonest debater. He argued that homosexuals have exactly the same right to marry that heterosexuals do: they can marry someone of the opposite sex.
This is the argument I described as asinine. You can parse it a few ways as a logical fallacy, but the bottom line is that it deliberately misses the point of the whole situation, the whole reason that gay people want a change in the status quo. It evades the basic axis of the conflict. After reading that, I saw Card as someone more interested in scoring empty rhetorical points than really resolving anything.
Re:I don't like books by Bigots.
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 1
That is exactly, completely, and totally what it is about.
Undoubtedly it is, for some. For myself, and several others here, it's simply that Card's assinine arguments in the Rhino Times make us less inclined to charitably interpret the moral positions in his books.
Because he holds a different belief from your own?
Because, when arguing something in the real world, as opposed to the stage he dressed himself in his books, he's really bad at it. He's deeply illogical and unconvincing. I have no problem with the positions he holds, though I disagree with them. I have problems with his arguments for holding those positions--they suck. There are reasonable people who agree with him for far better reasons than he offers.
Does this mean they have less literary merit? Of course not.
The literary merit remains the same. The speculative ideas explored in his books loose some of their sheen. It's like watching a martial artist demonstrating his moves and being really impressed, and then seeing him lose a fight badly. Afterwards, his demonstrations don't look quite so convincing.
this is nothing more than punishing him for what he believes.
You can tell yourself that all you want. Doesn't make it true.
Mentioning Jar Jar brings to mind the two best./ posts ever. The topic was the name of the second prequel, which hadn't been announced yet. One poster said:
It's called "The Passion of the Binks". It's two hours of Jar Jar getting beaten.
Again, you are missing the point, probably purposely.
Please don't ascribe hidden motives to me. I try very hard to argue in a clear, rational way.
But it does weaken the definitions of normalcy and family at a time they need to be strengthened.
Why do the definitions of normalcy and family need to be strengthened? The problems we face today are war, terrorism and recession, caused by neoconservatives, fanatical Islamists, and Wall Street. I don't see how preventing gays from marrying addresses those problems. If anything, it would allow more stable families that are the lifeblood of a stable society and a strong economy to be created.
The LAST thing I would wish for him is to be homosexual.... because it's a hard life, and not fun being on the outer edge of society.
It's a hard life because those who aren't homosexual practice bigotry against them, not because of anything they essentially are. I can sympathize with not wanting your son to suffer from the negativity associated with homosexuality, but you don't seem to notice that the negativity is coming from you, and is within your power to change. It's a bit perverse to pity homosexuals for suffering from attitudes you hold yourself, isn't it?
In point of fact, if you know homosexuals in gay friendly cities, you would know that their lives aren't really harder than yours or mine. San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, Montreal... gay persons in those cities typically lead very normal lives largely because the bigotry you would fear if you had a gay son is absent from daily life.
Society defines what is 'normal' and clearly, most members of our society have decided that gay 'marriage' is NOT normal.
Don't confuse winning a referendum with an indication of societal attitudes. Surveys consistently show that the majority of Americans support gay marriage or civil unions. The various laws and amendments scattered throughout the U.S. are heavily influenced by election dynamics.
It gets worse when you consider people under 35--a massive majority of them support gay marriage. I guarantee that in 50 years, gay marriage will be a reality all across the U.S. just because of generational change. They will consider it normal and look back on our generation as we look back on the generation that fought to prevent mixed-race marriages.
And just why isn't that enough? Why must homosexuals force themselves and their lifestyle on the rest of us trying to raise families without the very definition of that being called into constant question?
I don't understand how their lifestyle is being forced on you or forcing you to change how you raise your family. I can understand that the change in definitions is jarring to you if you haven't before questioned those definitions, but it seems that what you're really complaining about is that the world is changing from your expectations.
This isn't about some sort of civil right, this is about forcing an agenda on people who DO NOT WANT.
You haven't demonstrated to me yet how this affects you directly. It doesn't change your marriage in any material way. It doesn't force you to do anything. It doesn't infringe on your rights at all, because you don't have a right for the world to be a certain way.
Why must you take yet another word, if not institution, and claim it as your own?
FYI, I'm not gay. I'm interested in this topic as a matter of social justice.
Oh please, I weep not for homosexuals in California - ESPECIALLY in California. I'm sure they can handle it just fine.
Do you know why the push for gay marriage got started? It coalesced around a lot of incidents where the longtime partner couldn't get health benefits from their partner's job, or was
Slashdot Mirror
Well, my God, you are correct: the NPV proposal would result in a unanimous electoral college victory for the winner of the popular vote. My mistake.
Actually, your vote counts more with an electoral college than it would in a straight popular vote. Your vote only matters to the degree that it's the swing vote--meaning that you changing your vote would change the outcome of the election. Your odds of being the swing (more precisely, the statistical degree to which your vote is the swing vote) are higher with the electoral college.
In practice, the electors vote the way they were pledged to vote when they signed up--and they're selected to actually be electors based on that. You might recall a Democratic elector from the Midwest (Wisconsin?) who publicly stated that she would vote for Clinton regardless of the outcome of the primary, and was removed from the pool of electors. The vote of the electoral college is a formality, and anyone proposing differently is huffing chads.
Mod parent -1 pure, unfiltered horseshit.
He has released a state provided birth certificate proving that he was born in the U.S., and the state in question has come forward to validate it. He thus fulfills all the requirements of the 14th amendment to be considered a natural born citizen. College transcripts are irrelevant. Dual citizenship is irrelevant. He was not born in Kenya. He has proved otherwise.
Why do you care? Seriously. I mean, if there were real problems with his citizenship that might make him ineligible, don't you think that the Clinton and McCain campaigns would have raised the issue? All the lawyering that's gone on in the last few elections shows that candidates are rarely shy about pursuing legal avenues to victory. All the points you list are either flat out wrong or based on legal interpretations as tortured as a tax resister's.
What do you get out of this? Does it comfort you to think that, if Obama's a bad president, you can feel smug in the knowledge that you knew he shouldn't have been president in the first place? I have trouble believing that you take seriously any question about Obama's eligibility.
Remember that the U.S. was not formed as a nation of people but a nation of existing states. The people didn't (and don't) elect the president, the states did (do). It's an historical artifact from the days when people believed that the U.S. would be a very light layer of government on top of a bunch of state governments that would do most of the actual work of governing--more like a co-ordinating committee for common defense and interstate dispute resolution than a superior body. That's why you have a Senate where Rhode Island has as many senators as California--it's the body where the states debate as equal members, regardless of their respective sizes.
Nowadays, the purpose it serves is to force politicians to campaign more widely than they would on a straight popular vote. Ohio has been a swing state in the last three elections, but (no longer) has major metropolitan areas that would draw candidates. Most campaign activity would be concentrated in California, New York, and Florida, leaving the midwest with even less attention than it gets now.
The proposal is to de facto abolish the electoral college by having states pass laws dictating that their electors votes match the popular vote--meaning that if a state has 100 electors, and the winner gets 60% of the popular vote, then 60 electors vote for the winner and 40 for the loser. It's not the case that all the state electors vote for the winner, giving him or her a unanimous victory in the electoral college.
It's a flawed proposal for several reasons, but it's not a liberal conspiracy. It's an attempt to eliminate the situation where someone wins the popular vote and loses the presidency.
Haiku only has three lines, and 17 syllables. To wit:
Perl does not matter
Pomo Larry became chaos
Academics... Yes!
We're not 'maiming and killing' anyone, and this is an absurd way to look at it. It's trivially true that someone who reacts to the vaccine is not someone who could suffer from not getting vaccinated. It's also irrelevant--it's paradoxical to think that they could be the same person.
For a given population, if vaccinating leads to X deaths, and not vaccinating leads to Y deaths, and Y is greater than X (as it is in real life for pretty much anything for which we have a vaccine), then it's obviously better to vaccinate. Some will die regardless; I think choosing fewer number of deaths over the larger number is obviously the moral choice.
Who said we're not?
I live and work in Vancouver, Canada. What sort of contractors do you work with? How does it work for you?
It's what I was told to do by the other consultants who are in the same (generally web-based stuff) field (and who refer work to me or subcontract out to me). They're doing it, and I haven't received any pushback on it. When I was an IT manager, it was also standard practice for large consulting outfits who worked with us. It limits the screwing either side can give each other, and everyone I've put this to seems to recognize that.
As I said, though, large projects are broken down into manageable chunks, so in practice, half up front is somewhere between a couple hundred and several thousand dollars. It's different if they simply want to pay me hourly over a period, but for project based fees, I've never had a problem doing this.
I figured out an hourly rate based on my skills and the prevailing rates. When someone wants me to do something, I get a clear statement of what the work entails. I give an hourly estimate in the form of a range (e.g., 20-25 hours), and tell the client that the top of the range is a cap--after that, I turn off the clock and finish the job, and count the 'lost' hours as an expensive education in estimating (clients quite like that there's a ceiling on their costs and that I'm apparently willing to take a hit for doing things badly).
Then, when I'm estimating, I make sure that I understand the requirements clearly enough that I (almost certainly) won't ever hit that cap. I'm generous in my estimated hours, and if possible, come in at or below that floor of my estimate, which also impresses clients. I'm very upfront about the time taken being a range to handle unexpected difficulties.
For larger jobs that I quote, I break it up into estimable pieces, and call them milestones.
For jobs under five hundred dollars, I do the work and bill. For jobs over five hundred, I get half up front and half on delivery. For large jobs with milestones, the half up front, half on delivery is for each milestone. Milestones are structured with a clear deliverable so that the client feels like, if they stop at that point, they've got a recognizable thing for which they paid.
So far it's worked pretty well for me. The most important part has been long discussions beforehand so that a clear statement of requirements is agreed to before work starts. Then, if the client says they want something different, I've got clear grounds for either revising my estimate or calling it 'out of scope' work with a separate estimate/bill.
Yes, there's a non-zero risk of an adverse reaction that can be quite severe, even including death. That risk is vanishingly small in comparison to the possible consequences of not having widespread vaccination. You can die from most vaccinated diseases, and if we didn't have herd immunity from widespread vaccination, your risks of death from those diseases would be far greater.
The problem is that the risks and consequences of degrading herd immunity appear to be individually small because the consequences are spread out across a large number of people. A correct risk-benefit analysis should lead anyone to get vaccinated, even in the face of stories like yours.
More specifically, the risks posed to an individual are far outweighed by the same individual's benefit gained by living in a thoroughly vaccinated society. It's not a question of individual vs. societal benefits, it's that people who refuse vaccinations for spurious reasons are free-riding on the herd immunity (whilst simultaneously degrading it a tiny bit) of all the other individuals who properly weighed the risks and got vaccinated.
*sigh*
Yes, in North American, AIDS is significantly a demographically minority disease. Yes, it receives a hugely disproportionate amount of funding. Yes, it's a valid counterexample to the categorical statement "all minority diseases receive disproportionately less funding." That's not, however, what I said. I said that minority diseases *tend* to receive disproportionately less funding. A single counterexample does not in any way challenge that statement. A long list of counterexamples would *appear* to dispute my statement. One high profile example doesn't.
I'm not sure what your point is. Because one disease that (in North America) was strongly concentrated in an identifiable demographic minority has received vast funding to fight it, that there are no other minority diseases that are underfunded?
A single counterexample to a non-categorical claim is irrelevant.
Breast cancer is a huge success from an awareness and fundraising perspective, so much so that it gets accused of stealing money from other diseases (like prostate cancer) with higher incidence rates.
It's not just that the diseases that afflict the majority get proportionately higher funding. It's that they get disproportionately higher funding because awareness of those diseases, both from ad campaigns and from personal experience, crowds out awareness of minority diseases to the point of starving the latter for any attention at all (and thus, for fundraising dollars).
Diseases that affect minorities tend to receive, not just less, but disproportionately less funding than better known, "white" diseases, just because they get crowded out of the awareness space that correlates directly to fundraising dollars. CUSA could have accomplished the same intent of switching to an under-fundraised disease without the absurd act of saying "we don't want to help white males". They could have said "we want to help fight this disease that's been overlooked until now because it's mainly minorities that suffer from it." Their heart was in the right place, from all the stories I've read. They were just shockingly tone-deaf in their do-goodism.
Yes, you're hyperbolizing. You make it sound like he was an unproblematic defendant who simply didn't move fast enough, and got 90 days in jail.
In reality, Freeman refused to sit down on being instructed to by the judge. He started to sit and then got back up. The judge told him four times to have a seat. Instead, he asks "are you making law?" The judge instructs the bailiffs to take him into custody, and only then does he sit down, saying that he's doing so under duress. According to the blog you link, "He was viewed on closed circuit TV as he continued to question the system and not consent, and drew two further contempt of court charges, all three for 30 days in jail."
In other words, he was trying to jam the system as a "liberty activist". Anyone willing to co-operate with the basic procedures of the court will not risk the same consequences.
It's difficult to imagine a robot capable of dealing with the complexity of the battlefield without running into the same cognitive traps that humans do. The OP quotes a bit about 'scenario fulfillment', namely the tendency to absorb new information more easily if it confirms the scenario you have in mind; conversely, the more important information, that which contradicts your preconceived notions, is ignored or absorbed more slowly. A fast changing, complex situation like a battle will favor those who don't get bogged down in second guessing themselves. If it's a robot churning through decision trees, it'll be just as useless as a human soldier who insists on second guessing every bullet.
To clarify something I wrote above and provide a specific example, after reading his argument against gay marriage in one of his columns, I viewed him as an intellectually dishonest debater. He argued that homosexuals have exactly the same right to marry that heterosexuals do: they can marry someone of the opposite sex.
This is the argument I described as asinine. You can parse it a few ways as a logical fallacy, but the bottom line is that it deliberately misses the point of the whole situation, the whole reason that gay people want a change in the status quo. It evades the basic axis of the conflict. After reading that, I saw Card as someone more interested in scoring empty rhetorical points than really resolving anything.
Undoubtedly it is, for some. For myself, and several others here, it's simply that Card's assinine arguments in the Rhino Times make us less inclined to charitably interpret the moral positions in his books.
Because, when arguing something in the real world, as opposed to the stage he dressed himself in his books, he's really bad at it. He's deeply illogical and unconvincing. I have no problem with the positions he holds, though I disagree with them. I have problems with his arguments for holding those positions--they suck. There are reasonable people who agree with him for far better reasons than he offers.
The literary merit remains the same. The speculative ideas explored in his books loose some of their sheen. It's like watching a martial artist demonstrating his moves and being really impressed, and then seeing him lose a fight badly. Afterwards, his demonstrations don't look quite so convincing.
You can tell yourself that all you want. Doesn't make it true.
You're so cool. You're, like, the OpenBSD user of keyboard layouts.
Mentioning Jar Jar brings to mind the two best ./ posts ever. The topic was the name of the second prequel, which hadn't been announced yet. One poster said:
To which someone else replied:
Please don't ascribe hidden motives to me. I try very hard to argue in a clear, rational way.
Why do the definitions of normalcy and family need to be strengthened? The problems we face today are war, terrorism and recession, caused by neoconservatives, fanatical Islamists, and Wall Street. I don't see how preventing gays from marrying addresses those problems. If anything, it would allow more stable families that are the lifeblood of a stable society and a strong economy to be created.
It's a hard life because those who aren't homosexual practice bigotry against them, not because of anything they essentially are. I can sympathize with not wanting your son to suffer from the negativity associated with homosexuality, but you don't seem to notice that the negativity is coming from you, and is within your power to change. It's a bit perverse to pity homosexuals for suffering from attitudes you hold yourself, isn't it?
In point of fact, if you know homosexuals in gay friendly cities, you would know that their lives aren't really harder than yours or mine. San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, Montreal... gay persons in those cities typically lead very normal lives largely because the bigotry you would fear if you had a gay son is absent from daily life.
Don't confuse winning a referendum with an indication of societal attitudes. Surveys consistently show that the majority of Americans support gay marriage or civil unions. The various laws and amendments scattered throughout the U.S. are heavily influenced by election dynamics.
It gets worse when you consider people under 35--a massive majority of them support gay marriage. I guarantee that in 50 years, gay marriage will be a reality all across the U.S. just because of generational change. They will consider it normal and look back on our generation as we look back on the generation that fought to prevent mixed-race marriages.
I don't understand how their lifestyle is being forced on you or forcing you to change how you raise your family. I can understand that the change in definitions is jarring to you if you haven't before questioned those definitions, but it seems that what you're really complaining about is that the world is changing from your expectations.
You haven't demonstrated to me yet how this affects you directly. It doesn't change your marriage in any material way. It doesn't force you to do anything. It doesn't infringe on your rights at all, because you don't have a right for the world to be a certain way.
FYI, I'm not gay. I'm interested in this topic as a matter of social justice.
Do you know why the push for gay marriage got started? It coalesced around a lot of incidents where the longtime partner couldn't get health benefits from their partner's job, or was