Possible downside: Engaged couples can be some of the most annoying, self-absorbed people on the face of the planet.

And think of the business it could generate in engagement parties and bachelor parties.

it's a fucking ridiculous idea because it basically says "I will do nothing to change the world until bigots decide i can be equal." It's the equivalent of black people in the South telling the KKK "Why won't you allow me to ride at the front of the bus? I am tired. Won't you let me ride at the front of the bus?" You don't get rights by asking for them, you get rights by demanding them, by protesting for them, by sitting-in for them, by stopping business as usual until you get them.

Historian Howard Zinn put it best:

We are citizens. We must not put ourselves in the position of looking at the world from [the politicians'] eyes and say, "Well, we have to compromise, we have to do this for political reasons." We have to speak our minds.

This is the position that the abolitionists were in before the Civil War, and people said, "Well, you have to look at it from Lincoln's point of view." Lincoln didn't believe that his first priority was abolishing slavery. But the anti-slavery movement did, and the abolitionists said, "We're not going to put ourselves in Lincoln's position. We are going to express our own position, and we are going to express it so powerfully that Lincoln will have to listen to us."

And the anti-slavery movement grew large enough and powerful enough that Lincoln had to listen. That's how we got the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments.

That's been the story of this country. Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it's been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn't just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary.

16
Abolition was a small minority view, even in the North, at the beginning of the Civil War,
Had the war been about freeing the slaves the North would not have supported it.
Lincoln's genius was that he was able to keep the abolitionists from destroying support for the war in the early years, then, as the war progressed bring the entire nation around to the view that the war must be about freeing the slaves as well as preserving the union.

Fervent hot idealism more often than not
burns down and destroys
rather than enlightens.
It is political wisdom
that effects actual change,
not Acting Up.

The Homosexual movement has no MLK for inspiration,
no LBJ to get laws passed.

For now we'll have to settle for Savage's immature assholery
and Obama's inept backboneless floundering...

@28 - which would encourage the stores to support gay marriage so these registered items would get purchased, not just sit there waiting for some undeterminable date.