What I find striking is that you think anyone BUT a person of some wealth could possibly pay $800/month for such an accommodation.

I'm for smaller living spaces, in principle . . . if the rent is so low on them that one can replace what is lost in private space (room to work out, personal entertainment systems, spaces in which to have a home office or run another kind of business, kitchens) through more "public" channels (public workout space, public entertainments, spaces in which to operate a business, prepared food that fits all dietary needs and constraints) for an amount equal to or less than what will be saved in rent.

This isn't going to happen if one is paying $800/month for what amounts to a cubicle.

There is possibly an issue of class at work here, but it's one that plays into the hands of conservatives who dismiss liberals as urban elitists--it joins voluntary simplicity and locavorism on the list of things that sound like simple, even quasi-monastic solutions for materialistic living, but that exist far beyond the wages paid to the average working person, let alone the minimum wager or the struggling artist.

@Everywhere-Seattleblues-continues-to-peddle-his-psuedo-intellectual-drivel:

The "consequence" of not being able to marry the person with whom you can actually tolerate ongoing sexual relations and cooperative cohabitation is not a natural consequence. It is a fabricated consequence; what's more, with marriage being a civic contract, it is a socially engineered consequence, denial of access to an engineered legal and socio-economic advantage granted to households no more procreative (the elderly, the medically infertile, those willfully using contraception to avoid pregnancy; in fact, fewer than half of all marriages at any given time involve progeny, a number that can only partially be accounted for by couples who simply haven't squeezed out womb-rats yet).

Thus the objection to this inequality is not reflective of an unwillingness to accept natural or even logical consequences, but an objection to a fabricated inequity no less arbitrary than any other form of segregation.

Faggots and dykes choose the sole thing that they're claiming differentiates them, their aberrant sexual choices.

The alternatives to those choices being celibacy or romantic engagement to an individual for whom one is biologically incapable of harboring erotic desire.

Second, show me one area of life in which fags and dykes are substantially punished for their deviancy. Jobs? Nah. Statistically fags and dykes do as well as their sexually healthy peers.

Largely because they are disproportionately represented in high-paying jobs like technology or high-prestige jobs like the arts and academia. Statistically, homosexuals seem to have higher than average IQs, but I think that's a sampling bias; the smarter you are, the less danger there is in coming out. Still, it seems to me that any statistic (not that you offered any) suggesting that "fags and dykes" are "doing fine" will tend to be skewed, as an average, by those who are doing considerably better than fine, and ignoring those experiencing real discrimination.

Ability to buy or rent a home? Again, nope. Even the best neighborhoods often have a faggot or dyke in them.

Indeed, even without controlling for anti-gay violence, the very best neighborhoods in Western industrialized nations are those with a greater number of homosexuals.

There is no such thing as gay marriage, whatever my or any other state says. Marriage is, marriage always has been, and marriage always will be between a man and a woman. No faux legal definition will make decent people ever think otherwise.

Except that marriage doesn't exist except by engineered definition. The way the state defines it has already stood at odds with the way churches, families, and communities define it. Civic marriage, then, has always been the state's to define, the state's to sanctify.

Your marriage may always be between a woman and the man who has shocked and abused her into fearing to leave for a better life; may we breathe a sigh of relief that we don't all live such a life.

Washington could legally redefine gravity, but it won't change anything about how the thing works.

One could argue that the theoretical nature of our understanding of gravity makes it a collective subjective construct, but it's still distinct from marriage in that sense. Marriage is more like art; it only exists at all by virtue of how we discuss and recognize it.

It's knowing reality works one way, and trying to force it to work another. Having sex with the same gender for instance, or trying to force others to bear the consequences of your lifestyle choices.

But reality doesn't work "one way" when it comes to human sexuality. The female orgasm, for instance, can be achieved through procreative coitus in less than 25% of women; in that sense, all female orgasm lies outside the purpose ascribed to "normal" sexuality.

What I wrote was that neither she or I had a choice in skin color. What I've written before is that judging someone based on what they had no choice in is silly and unjust, a mark of an inferior mind.

Yet you feel comfortable judging someone for acting on a (by all clinical appearances immutable) proclivity with a willing partner of legal agency rather than engaging in celibacy or loveless and/or sexless marriage (the only alternatives). I don't see that as very far removed.

Gay men can't donate blood for sound medical reasons if in fact that's true. I give blood often and have yet to be asked if I'm gay, though I am always asked about whether I've had anal sex or injected drugs, again for sound medical reasons.

The controversy over the blood donation ban on those who have or have had anal sex is that it's too far reaching. It basically asks whether you're a man who's had sex with another man since the '70s.

I will rent my houses to whomever I choose. It really isn't the business of anyone else. When you buy a rental, you can do the same.

I'd like to think I'd be a bigger man than to deny rental to, say, a Christian. And if I weren't a bigger man, I'm not sure I morally object to a law forcing me to be so, and suggesting that my ideological differences with a prospective renter--who otherwise demonstrated the qualities of being a good tenant--are inadequate basis to deny a lease.

What I know is that modelling healthy adult roles as a father, husband, son to my parents and so on is among my most serious obligations in life. How is a boy supposed to know to lovingly and respectfully treat his girlfriends and eventual wives?

I doubt he'd learn it from you.

A girl deserves a dad who shows her that she deserves to be treated with those qualities. Those with unhealthy sexual behavior choices simply can't do this.

I fail to see (because you and your ilk have failed to illustrate or demonstrate) how knowing how to treat a loved one with respect and dignity would be influenced in any way by the gender of either party.

Skin color, gender and so on aren't chosen. We as a society have decided that common justice is served by protecting people from discrimination unjustly based on non chosen characteristics. Faggots and dykes choose the sole thing that supposedly differentiates them from their fellow, perverted sexual behavior.

Sexual behavior is distinct from sexual orientation; the percentages alone bear that out. At least 10%, and by some metrics 25%, of individuals have had at least one homosexual experience; this is a far higher percentage than of those who engage primarily or exclusively in homosexual behavior, or those who lack significant heterosexual attraction.

Now there are classes of choice specifically Constitutionally protected. You bring one up in the bottom of your post. And I do agree with the majority of the ruling, since it goes to a protected right, that of free expression of religion. The choice to express a faith or a journalistic bias, or to publicly air grievances against the government are protected. Fags and dykes choose an expression not specifically protected, and must accept the consequences of that choice like adults.

I disagree. Because even religions without any hard and fast sexual proscriptions (say, Buddhism or Taoism) comment on sexuality, and how one wields it, as a field fraught with moral conundra, I would suggest that sexual expression is implicitly protected as a form of religious expression.

As to sexual so called orientation you're just using different terms to say the same thing. If a person has schizophrenia, we don't say 'born that way' and go on.

We can point to the ways in which schizophrenia has consequences that aren't legally engineered.

But asking that it be treated as some kind of mark of superiority is a bridge too far for me.

In what ways are homosexuals or their supporters asking for "superior" treatment?

I refused to renew their lease, yes. Just as I refuse to do business with any suppliers or subcontractors who are owned by or hire fags or dykes. If they wish to make war on decent people, marriage and family, I refuse to make it easier for them with my hard earned money.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that you actually own property or a business of any kind, perhaps you should explain in what way your (former) tenants, suppliers, or subcontractors are "mak[ing] war are decent people, marriage and family."

As always, please be specific.

I'd have thought the baby murderer supporters would have cheered Castro's amateur abortions.

Castro committed assault on women that resulted in "amateur abortions." We don't have to--and, in my opinion, shouldn't--presuppose the personhood of the evicted embryos or fetuses in order to find his actions criminal.

Of course, we've already been over this. As usual, refusing to reply to posts that expose your ostensible "reasoning" for the paltry sophistry it is allows you carte blanche to continue posting the same smug, self-satisfied, intellectually threadbare drivel you've been peddling since day one.

How do you libs feel about this guy in Cleveland getting the death penalty for killing unborn babies?

I reject the legal reasoning behind that, for sure. Inducing a miscarriage against the mother's will, or in a situation (like this) where consent is seriously compromised, is battery/aggravated assault/what-have-you, and the victim is the woman whose pregnancy is being forcefully terminated.

I do not support any law that defines a fetus as an entity deserving legal protections, whatever questions I may still have as to how we ("we" being the community or communities to which I am bound by common moral or metaphysical concerns) should morally define personhood.

I mean, they're just organic tissue without human value, amiright? He didn't kill a PERSON, just a fetus!

For legal purposes yes.

This is outrageous that anyone should be charged with the death of these worthless lumps of tissue!

"Worth" is not intrinsic; it is assigned, imposed. You and I only have worth because we value ourselves and, possibly, because others value us. The distinction between a fetus and, say, you is not that one has more objective worth than the other, since no one has objective worth; it's that you, as a conscious entity, are a party to the social contract in a way that the fetus is not.

That distinction becomes muddier when comparing fetuses to children, who are sort of people and sort of not, and whose participation in the contract is contingent on, and filtered through, parents. But there is utility in drawing a line to define personhood, and birth is as sensible a place as any.

I mean, they were the product of rape (one assumes) so the women didn't want them anyway!

Maybe, maybe not. Shouldn't she be the one to make that call?

Hell, the 6 year old should be killed too, since the mother probably doesn't want her either!

See above regarding "drawing a line." If you want to draw that line, say, after the child starts reading Sartre and listening to the Residents, I could possibly be convinced, but until then, I'm pretty satisfied with birth as a nice, bold demarcation.

And that is the end result of your sick twisted thinking regarding abortion. In a just world every abortion doctor would be standing beside Castro in that court for capital murder. In a just world the millions of human lives extinguished for maternal convenience in this nation would be listed in the books as the Holocaust or Pol Pot as an incomprehensible crime against humanity.

I think we may actually reach such a level of understanding, though I think it would only come after provisions have been made to ensure that the compulsion to carry a pregnancy to term is attached to a corollary level of choice with regards to whether and how ambivalent mothers will participate in the raising of the child, and that the society that makes carrying that pregnancy to term compulsory takes on a greater responsibility for raising that child. The terms by which we do so, however, are going to need to come from a being with a capacity for moral reasoning far beyond your own.

@56 - I admire your principles. But the same reasoning by which you determine that animal life isn't meaningfully distinct from, say, human life (reasoning with which I agree, by the way; more on that in a minute) is easily extended to say that it also isn't meaningfully distinct from plant life, or bacterial or viral organisms. Have you taken antibiotics? Used medicated shampoo to get rid of lice? Do you eat onions?

You may suggest that such equivalencies aren't to be taken seriously, but why are they less serious than asking us to assume that the life of a cow is something about which we should be morally concerned?

The fact is, the only reason I don't eat you, or you me, is that we have a social contract with one another. That is largely a function of our being the same species, thus sharing the same essential properties and modes of communication; there's no more reason that we should have a contract with the cow than there is for the lion to have a contract with the gazelle.

So kudos for your choices. But don't frame them as moral imperatives.

Actually, Venomlash, I kind of do believe an assault on a police officer, for instance, should be treated as an equivalent crime to an assault on anyone else, which is my own misgiving with hate crime laws. Intent to kill matters, but intent is different from motive. Motive matters in sentencing. Intent matters in determining what, if any, crime has been committed. There is a broader and more interesting discussion to be had on this, but I think we can both agree that Seattleblues lacks the social grace and sense of moral nuance, if not indeed the intellectual capacity, to participate in that discussion.

As for you, Mr. Blues, the posts to which you do not respond and the questions you refuse to answer say more about you than the responses you do offer (however deficient the latter may be). Deny as you will, and have, but your neglect does start to look a bit like, if not concession, admission, at least, that you can elucidate no rational basis for your position.

Foremost among these: What privileges are homosexuals currently enjoying or currently seeking that you and I do not already enjoy?

Want to keep your deviant perversions in the privacy of your home, and I really could care less. Were there a move to criminalize the perversions involved in homosexuality among consenting adults I'd fight that as vociferously as I do the move to canonize gay citizens as special people with more rights than others.

What rights to gay citizens have or seek that you or I do not enjoy? Please be specific.

It's only when the fags and dykes make war on core institutions like family and marriage that I fight back.

What empirically measurable damage--or, indeed, what empirically measurable effect of any kind--does protecting LGBT individuals from loss of housing or employment on the basis of sexual orientation or consensual sexual behavior (or, if you insist on conflating all LGBT matters on every thread where they're mentioned, the extension of marital rights and privileges to same-sex couples) do to core insitutions (read: malleable social constructs) like family and marriage?

My marriage is between a man and a woman. Throughout history, accross divergent cultures, this is what marriage has always meant. The number of wives or husbands has changed. The idea of love as the basis of marriage or money or politics has changed. But always it has been the natural joining of a man and woman.

Exceptions have existed, but they've been outliers, to be sure. Of course, the mixing of races and the inclusion of the disable in the social contract have also been exceptions, rather than the rule, in most cultures.

Fags and dykes redefine marriage for their convenience at the expense of the institution.

If anyone other than a foreign national attempting to get a green card is marrying for "convenience," I will gladly tell them, from my happily married position, that "convenient" is not a word I'd use to describe marriage.

Making the legal adjustment to abolish laws banning mixed race marriages merely affirmed the key nature of marriage.

And what is the key nature of marriage (in terms of its status as a legally recognized contract)? Please be specific.

In that I have one at all?

What evidence do we have of your having a moral code, of the other poster lacking one, or of your ability to discern what does or doesn't qualify as moral? Please be . . . ah, fuck, you know.