Who knew?

[wombat_socho]

Overheard in the Diversicon con suite while en route to a panel:
"You know, the Republicans' first priority this year is to stop gay marriage."

Boy, the things you miss when you take a year off from going to the caucuses.

Comments

ummmm

[qob.livejournal.com]

I went to our caucus and while the DOMA was an issue, the taxpayer's league and the freedom to smoke were more important As far as I could tell.

Re: ummmm

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

The real punch line to the joke is that the person who made this asinine claim is one of the regulars at Diversicon, a professional author who I went off on last year for repeating the "Bush is a draft dodger!" meme. To borrow Bill James' phrase, she knows about as much about actual Republicans as a swallow knows about the Feast of the Epiphany.

Re: ummmm

[tokenfanboy.livejournal.com]

I assume you had a lively panel on Friday with your politcs discussion. How'd it go?

Quite frankly Gay Marriage isn't even a deciding factor in determining how I'm going to vote. The courts are going to decide the Gay Marriage issue anyways. There's definitely a need for them to have the same legal rights as everyone else and I doubt any court would deny that. I'm fine with the whole Civil Marriage part of it. The only thing I would object to is if they tried to force churches to provide religious ceremonies for it against their will. That would be a violation of the separation of Church and State.

Re: ummmm

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

The polarization in politics panel was surprisingly free of Bush-bashing and demonization by the panelists, for which much credit is due to Martha Hood as the moderator and Rick Gellman. Martha managed to keep us on track for the most part and Rick is more interested in explaining history to people than scoring partisan debating points. Some of the audience were definite moonbats, though, but having been around Diversicon for a while I can't say I'm too surprised.

I agree with you about the gay marriage issue; there are already provisions in contract law that are the same thing as civil unions; the only thing a civil union law would do is allow "one-stop shopping", which would be a good thing. Marriage, on the other hand, ain't going to happen, courts or no courts.

Re: ummmm

[tokenfanboy.livejournal.com]

I have yet to have someone explain to me what the difference is between a Civil Union and a Civil Marriage? Do they have different legal rights, or are they the same thing with just a different word attached at the end?

Re: ummmm

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

There really isn't any difference between civil unions and civil marriages, except that "marriage" has a lot of emotional connotations for a lot of people. Civil unions are also not performed by judges, as far as I know.