This was my response --
Fortunately for America (since our next President will probably be a Democrat, barring vote-count fraud), none of the Democratic candidates are bigots with respect to same-sex marriage SSM). They mostly are amenable to legalization of "civil unions," rather than actually calling it marriage. (Pandering, of course, to voters who get whiney about using the word, marriage... as ignorant as such voters are.) But otherwise having all of the benefits of marriage.
Once the unconstitutional blocks to SSM (since nothing in the Constitution restricts the gender makeup of married couples) have fallen, and SSM is fully legal nationwide, I think that the semantic "civil union" challenge to that terminology will vanish. Because it almost certainly suddenly will dawn on people that all opposite-sex marriages that are now being performed in the USA by JPs, Mayors, Ship Captains, Vegas-style Wedding Chapels, etc., are not religious ceremonies. (So much for "sanctity" of marriage, since if any marriages are to be considered sacred at all, it would only be the religiously-performed ones.) And therefore all of those are civil unions. And with there being no difference in benefits accruing from "marriage" vis-a-vis "civil unions," that will likely spell the the end of this silly battle over semantics waged by religious extremists. All couples legally joined, either by civil or religious ceremonies, will be married, plain and simple. Whether opposite-sex or same-sex.
As the race for the Presidency heats up -- no matter what the candidates may say -- don't trust any Republican to be an egalitarian, when push comes to shove, after taking office, if America should be so unfortunate as for one of them to be elected. (Or if the Republicans should manage to steal yet another election, with help from the Diebold electronic voting machines.) Not even Giuliani. He talks like an egalitarian now, but don't expect him to walk the walk. I don't think he'll go to the mat for the assurance of equal rights for all. And we must strive to the utmost to elect the Democratic nominee, so that this won't have to be put to the test.
Finally, you probably noticed the links, above, having to do with vote fraud via electronic machines. If anyone reading this thinks that the Republican Party, heavily steeped in dishonesty since and including Watergate, wouldn't pull out all possible stops to steal the 2008 election, please contact me about a nice bridge in New York that I can sell you.
For more on this most insideous threat to democracy, Google: "diebold" "voting" "corrupt". And -- get yourself a copy of "The Conyers Report" from Amazon.com, or elsewhere.
S.J. Haye (his real name) of Ridgecrest, California made a chilling prediction for the 2008 election -- back on October 20, 2005, in writing a review of "The Conyers Report" for Amazon.com. Reading it, it's hard to believe that more than two years have passed since he wrote it... since nothing has changed to correct this situation. Indeed, the party in power -- the Republicans -- have had two more years since then to fine-tune the mechanisms for destroying democracy in their favor. Here is what this reviewer wrote:
Rep. John Conyers, (D - Michigan, the ranking minority chair of the House Judiciary Committee, led eleven Democratic Congressman (Republicans boycotted this investigation) and their staffers into the swamp that was the 2004 Presidential election in Ohio. Conyers had come to answer an essential question -- What Went Wrong in Ohio? The investigation was conducted despite the difficulties caused by Bush (whose selection in 2000 led to an apology from Justice John Paul Stevens for the behavior of the 5-4 majority of the Court in the matter of Bush vs. Gore) and of the Republican majority in Congress. In the introduction, Gore Videl says that when asked who would win in `04, he said that Bush would lose again, but he was confident that in the four years between 2000 and 2004, creative propaganda and the fixing of elections might very well be perfected so as to ensure an official victory for Bush. As this report shows in great detail with very thorough documentation of sources, Ohio was carefully set up to deliver an apparent victory for Bush even though Kerry appears to be not only the popular winner but the Electoral College winner. This report states categorically, "With regards to our factual findings, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio." These were caused by officials, chiefly Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell who was co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio, and included deliberate misallocation of voting machines so that thousands or even hundreds of thousands of predominately minority and Democratic voters had to wait in long lines, or couldn't even vote, "cheat sheets" supplied to numerous counties to guide those counting the ballots so that Bush would have the proper number of votes to beat Kerry, denial of the right to observe the counting of ballots by impartial observers, illegally removing voters from the voting rolls, and other acts designed to ensure a Bush "win". The outlook for 2008? To date, nothing has been done, either by Congress or the States, to clean up this mess. After all, those benefiting by the corruption are in charge. So, as things stand, expect a Republican "win" in 2008, regardless of who happens to be running. [Emphasis is mine, above. -- ed.]
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