2016.

What a convenient, ass-covering, excuse for those pesky primaries.

Trading the Latino voting block for the anti-marriage equality voting block seems like really bad math.

Surely he knew that once inter-racial marriage was allowed, this would follow?

Good thing they don't believe in math, then, right?

I don't know why any conservatives think of Rubio as presidential material. He looks like a sweaty, weaselly nincompoop.

He's done? Cool, hope he has fun in Cuba.

@1 Politics before country every time.

Rubio is so thirsty to run for President.

@8: Yeah, but it's bad politics. He's got another 20 years in him, easily. And by 2020, at the latest, I'd be shocked if gay marriage isn't the law of the land. He's courting old bigots when he should be concerned with courting the people who are still going to be around when the smoke of this particular battle clears.

Yeah, because being gay is a choice; whereas, being an immigrant isn't.

If you look up douche in the dictionary, there's a picture of Marco Rubio. He's a brown-nosing little skunk riding high on Latino support (for some reason) who'll change his vote at the slightest breeze of public disapproval. In my book that equates to no integrity. I want to just see him try to run for national office. Useless, little, entitled shit.

If he really thinks anti-equality is a winning message on the national level going forward from this point, he's not nearly as smart as people are making him out to be... unless he's actually performing a Palin maneuver and setting himself up to run for a Fox commentator gig.

Anyway, we'll see how long he even retains any pull with the Latino vote if he keeps licking white Republicans' boots like this.

Rubio has wanted off this train for awhile. If it's not same sex marriage that's his breaking point, he just pick some other reason. Poor guy, he thought he had an issue to be a leader on and apparently forgot that his old white constituency only likes minorities who stick to the script, like Cain or Allen.

Call the blowhards bluff.

Equal protection under the law? Fuck that shit.

the republican party is so dying.

Just a reminder, Marco Rubio only became a Senator in 2010 because of low turnout amongst minorities angry about the Great Recession and because Democratic voters divided their votes between Kendrick Meeks and Governor Charlie Crist. And even then he only won with 48.9% of the vote.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Stat…

2016 is going to be a very different election, especially if Clinton is at the top of the ticket and especially with newly elected DEMOCRATIC (and pro marriage equality) Governor Charlie Crist rallying Democratic voters.

If the Florida Democratic Party gets their shit together and if a strong candidate goes up against him, Rubio is in deep shit.

Forget about being president. Rubio has a 50/50 chance of being a one term Senator.

What about the civil rights of the people who were living here before the immigrants and the marriage-minded gays came along for the ride? Where did their rights go? To the collective? The collective is always right?

The collective is nothing more than a group of individuals. Destroy the rights of individuals and the collective no longer represents the rights of all individuals. It represents the rights of some individuals only.

Allowing gays to get married was always possible without calling it "marriage" and without giving them tax breaks for people who can naturally produce children.

Immigrants already have a country to call their own. Why is it necessary to bring them here to destroy our standard of living? Do we do this to their country? The redistribution of wealth from the US to other countries is necessary for destroying the political power of America's middle class, so that they will lose their political ability to fight encroaching world communism.

@19: So I suppose you're 100% Native American, if you're hating on immigrants for taking MUH JERBS.

What about the civil rights of the people who were living here before the immigrants and the marriage-minded gays came along for the ride?

I doubt any of us were here before immigrants.

Still, I'm curious as to what civil rights you believe are currently being denied in the wake of immigration and same-sex marriage. Please be specific.

Where did their rights go?

Again: What rights are missing?

To the collective?

If, as you say, the collective is nothing more than a group of individuals, how do rights bestowed upon the collective amount to rights taken from individuals? Please be specific.

The collective is nothing more than a group of individuals. Destroy the rights of individuals and the collective no longer represents the rights of all individuals. It represents the rights of some individuals only.

I agree. And if you'd demonstrated what individual rights are being threatened, I might be inclined to share in your outrage.

Allowing gays to get married was always possible without calling it "marriage" and without giving them tax breaks for people who can naturally produce children.

Infertile or elderly couples, or even couples deliberately eschewing the manufacture of more humans (the need for which you fail to demonstrate; one organism is as useful as another, and I don't see you arguing for the proliferation of dust mites), currently receive those "tax breaks" (actually, as a man who's been married to a woman for nearly 17 years, I can assure you that our taxes have not been noticeably reduced). In what way is a heterosexual that can't or won't have children objectively, functionally, legally distinct from a similarly unfruitful homosexual union?