Fast forward to the 2:40 mark for why I can't take the Mumia movement seriously.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhvrfdoDd4g

"We are nihilists... we believe in nothing... NOW GIVE US THE MONEY!"

this has officially become a pissing match. we're saying the same damn thing.

"some couples win, some have the penalty. "

yes, that was my point. and it's not something you appeared to understand until i pointed it out in a separate comment. some gay couples are better off being taxed as individuals, some are not. if you're desparate to have gay couples treated the same as hetero couples for tax purposes, great, but I have a feeling many gay couples would appreciate maintaining the status quo.

"I only pointed out that denying gay couples the right to equal status under the rules is, well, unequal treatment. And your statement is totally disingenuous. "

No, you didn't "only" point this out in your last post. You see how the second sentence belies the first? You also accused me of not arguing in good faith because. God only knows why, but it's probably because I'm reaching a conclusion contrary to yours.

And if your "only" point was that treatment of people differently is unequal treatment, then congratulations on such a fresh new idea.

Bob,

you wrote:
Just because some married couples pay more because of that quirk, does not mean all suffer.
* * *
Show me where I said ALL married couples suffer from the marriage penalty. As I stated in my comment, it is "not necessarily" the case that married couples attain "improved tax status."

We already decide that schools can’t segregate on the basis of racial discrimination. I don’t think this is materially different.
* * * *
The material difference is that this is a PRIVATE, RELIGIOUS school. The latimes article you cited does a great job of explaining the legal basis for allowing a religious institution to limit its membership as it sees fit.

Also, check out the Kamehameha schools decision out of the 9th Circuit, which ruled that private schools may discriminate on the basis of race under certain circumstances.

I'm so vain, I probably think this post is about me. but yes, this is the sort of detail i asked for in comments to one ofyour earlier posts on this issue.

that said, most of the rights you've enumerated (if they can be appropriately described as "rights", at all) are not fundamental, at least legally speaking. that is to say, they are not implicit to the concept of ordered liberty in a civilized society. the rights to which you refer are not analagous to the right to vote, co-habitate, use contraception, etc.

Let's unpack these rights:
1) access spouses medical insurance- having health insurance is, of course, vitally important, but gays in civil unions still have access to their own health insurance through their employer. if they are unemployed , they can get medicaid.
2) improved tax status- not necessarily so. just wiki marriage penalty.
3) guarantees to their spouses property in the probation of a will- already available. just draft a will. same goes for life insurance... just add a beneficiary.
4) improved claims to custody of a spouse’s children in the event of death-- you may have a point here. but this is more of a case for amending state law to recognize gay adoption.

Several problems:

1) Why would we guarantee 5 to 15% returns for private investors? It would be more efficient to just invest directly in the crap assets and take our chances.
2) What would be the macroeconomic ramifications of the government guaranteeing a 5% return? If the government were to guarantee 5%, why on earth would anyone buy a treasury with a 4% coupon (10 year note is at 2.5!!!)? And if the government were to GUARANTEE a 5% return, you would have every private equity firm levering up and gobbling up the crappiest assets around knowing that they will be assured 5%.

3) What of the political implications of the government handing over a check for $200MM to the KKR or Blackstone to "make them whole," while kids go without health insurance?

4) The problem is larger than the banks are letting on. The banks have written bah bah billions of bond default insurance in the form of credit default swaps, hidden in special purpose vehicles off the banks' balance sheets. The notional value of these credit default swaps exceeds the value of the assets, acc. to some estimates, by ten-fold. In other words, you can buy all the crap assets you want, but the banks will still be on the hook for default insurance that, if triggered, would wipe them out... maybe 10 times over. Of course, you could encourage the holders of default insurance to close out their position, but that would cost the government as well.

The only solution is for the banks to get real about the valuations of their holdings of crap mortgage backed securities. The last large-scale purchase of MBS was a few months ago (by lonestar) at 20 cents on the dollar. Banks are currently valuing these assets far higher by using exceptions to mark to market accounting. Banks should be forced to value their crap assets at 20 cents on the dollar or lower. This would wipe out shareholders, and likely bondholders, but who cares... yes, pension funds, poor widows, blah blah blah, but i have no appetite to pay for any more baby boomer screw ups. our generation is already forced to pay for trillions of dollars in debt b/c of the bad decisions of the boomers... who i have renamed, in the spirit of tom brokaw, the "Worst Generation."

Anyway, the banks would give bondholders their worthless stock, thereby shedding debt. This solution has its own problems, but it seems more equitable to wipe out those people who make bad investments.

Thank you.

As a believer who went through several years of atheism, I firmly believe that reasonable people who take a skeptical view toward the existence of god can end up with different views on the topic.

Note: i did not have a "come to jesus" moment, i was not knocked off a horse, and I was not confronted with a burning bush.

Bob,

Many married couples pay higher taxes than they would if they were to file separately. Remember the "marriage penalty"? In fact, if two people making roughly the same salary as one another enter into a civil union, they will reap huge tax benefits by maintaining their separate filing status.

You are right that SS benefits are not available for those people in civil unions. But is the right to collect someone else's social security a fundamental right? Is this what everyone is worked up about?

* * * *

Fred,

Your reasoning here is difficult to understand. You haven't identified any meaningful differences between civil unions and gay marriage, so I assume that you don't believe that there are any. In fact, you referred to civil unions as a facsimile (virtual copy) of marriage. So, again, your position is that the difference between civil unions and marriage is nomenclature only.

I'm unmoved by your repeated use of the phrase "separate but equal" because I don't believe the comparison to Brown is apt, and in fact, many people would find it insulting. As you know, at issue in Brown was whether black children could be excluded from state-run public schools, thereby excluding them from each successive level of society and perpetuating the quasi-aparthied that existed at the time. Somehow, you have drawn from this decision that when gays live together, they have a constitutional right to be called "married" rather than "civilly united." Even if you take the position that marriage and civil unions are "state institutions" in the same way as public schools and that civil unions are inferior to marriage, I don't see how allowing gays into marriage would "completely integrate them into the American experience" (whatever that means).

As the south park underpants gnomes would put it:
Gays can get married
?????
Gays are accepted into society

My original point has gone unchallenged. For better or worse, the state wants children and they offer citizens many incentives to have children. Most hetero couples can procreate, and most gay couples cannot or will not have children. If you can get me stats from states where gay adoption or in vitro is legal indicating that gay couples procreate or adopt at the same rate as hetero couples, then you would have a point that gays should be allowed to marry. Otherwise, the state would have a policy justification to favor straight couples.

You wrote: There are literally hundreds of rights and privileges conferred through marriage that cannot be duplicated through other means.
* * * *
The question is what rights are conferred by marriage that are not conferred by civil unions. So what are they?

The debate is improperly framed.

Marriage is a religious institution that the State has decided to recognize to further purposes that the State considers important, to wit, social stability and reproduction. at least one of these policy goals (reproduction) is absent in a same sex marriage. of course, some hetero couples won't ever have children, but it would be nearly impossible to identify these couples.

also, i'm not sure what the goals of the same sex marriage movement are. a change in nomenclature alone? if so, this seems like an awful waste. most advocates of same sex marriage rely on vague concepts of "equality" or "justice," but what exactly are the rights sought? and why should these rights be granted in light of the fact that there seem to be legitimate differences in the way that gay couples can fulfill the state's policy goals?