Aren't you under-selling the advantages of the Holy Roman faith? I
thought
there was free *wine and cooties* as well...?

True...but if I want wine and cooties, I can either subject myself to
an hour of so-and-so begat so-and-so, or I can splurge $5 on a box of
wine, pull my pants down and bend over a shopping cart in an alley.

Which, incidentally, is more preferrable than an hour of Catholic mass.

Enkidu the Atheist <Enkidu.the.Atheist@gmail.com> wrote in
news:Xns9669CC7C99944255229@130.133.1.4:

Nancy Norton <nospam@nospam.net> wrote in
news:VIKdnTQiR5vzIALfRVn-qw@comcast.com:

The other Donald wrote:

"Stephen Stink" <not4udude@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1117730163.378530.140150@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

Sure they should.

We already do....this Saturday is eleven years for me and my atheist
wife.

Today is 26 years for me and my atheist husband!

(Gad, I can't believe it's been that long.)

Twenty this July.

What a bunch of young whippersnappers. In a couple weeks it will be 34
years for my wife & I.

"DianaC" <dianaiad@vernoyoudontizon.net> wrote in message
news:XzOne.7694$vK5.

Call all the benefits one gets from marriage 'legal civil unions". ALL of
them. For EVERYBODY, heterosexual, homosexual, whatever. The whole thing
is about legal contracts anyway, yes?

[snip]

So. Let everybody win. Wouldn't that be a refreshing change?

Certainly. However, everybody *wouldn't* win, psycho-dynamically speaking.
You see, the average nitwit's unreasoning, inchoate, violently intense
feelings about what should and shouldn't constitute 'marriage' stem in large
measure from the unreasoning, inchoate, violently intense feelings they had
about the 'primal scene' in which they started (and usually didn't
finish...!) growing up: mommy, daddy, me. They genuinely and passionately
love their mommy, except when they genuinely and passionately hate her; and
they genuinely and passionately hate their daddy (insofar as they are aware
of him) except when they genuinely love him, or when they genuinely pretend
to themselves and/or him that they do. Now, wanting mommy all to yourself,
and wanting daddy dead and gone and fucking buried, causes great, if
ultimately repressed, fears and guilts in the little *****-head -- and as an
adult (or semi-adult...) he or she (though it's usually 'he') finds these
unconscious fears and guilts *unaccountably re-awakened* in some shadowy
form whenever the subject arises of any kind of family unit that's *not*
like the one he's spent all these years desperately pretending to himself he
was *really perfectly happy with*: 'mommy, daddy, me'...

I'm sure you get the picture. *You* might not give a ***** about two guys
getting a 'marriage', or a 'legal civil union', or whatever. *I* might not
give a ***** about a same-sex couple even adopting a child -- hell, every
other day I seem to be reading about yet another *heterosexual* American
killing his or her family: how much worse could gays possibly do?? But in
the mind of Mister Fucking Brainless Q. Public, what's gonna happen is that
he becomes *terribly upset* at the feelings he starts to get in response to
thinking about how hundreds, thousands, millions of gay couples are all
going to be getting something which *flies in the face* of *the holy
sanctity of the family* in the form he was forced to convince himself he
'wanted' and 'revered' as a result of all the fear and guilt and fear and
guilt and fear he felt whenever he thought about how much he fucking wanted
to rip it apart and destroy it...

So he wants these other people not to have what they want. In fact, he
doesn't even want to *hear* about the subject, ever again: whenever the
thought of them 'doing it their way' crops up, he feels with all the
incoherent and uncomprehending intensity of a terrified 2-year-old that *the
sky is about to drop in* ... that the world is going to end ... that it's 'a
step too far ' ... that it's 'a slippery slope' ... that it's the 'road to
hell' ...the 'end of America', etc, etc. And if they seem to be *about to
get it*, he wants them fucking *dead*: on an unconscious level, it feels
like it's 'him or them'... It isn't of course; but then that's what you get
when you get a 2-year-old to do your thinking for you...

It's as simple, and as complicated, and as pathetically, ridiculously
*stupid*, as that.

No, I don't have a solution, mass sterilisation apart...