Define Marriage

[Silver]

All that is actually required is they enter into the contract legally.

No wonder Chad is has not made a response.

[robvalue]

Marriage is nothing to do with religion anymore, that's what people need to get through their heads.

It can optionally have a religious ceremony, or any other ceremony. But the ceremony, or what the person running the ceremony says in addition to what is required by law, is not the marriage. The legal contract is the marriage. If two people get "married" in a church, but the marriage license is not legally issued, then they are not married.

And since no one is forcing theists to get married to anyone they don't want to, forcing them to get married outside a church, or even forcing churches to perform certain weddings, it boggles my mind that some theists think they have the right to dictate how the legal contract should operate among people who share none of their religious beliefs.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

And yet, on an intellectual level I cannot ignore the likelihood that alternative forms of marriage will have negative cultural effects. Many of those will eventually affect me and the people I care about. Anyone that is concerned about crime, equal opportunity, income disparity, and social stability should seriously reflect on such changes.

Can you demonstrate that gay marriages would threaten such effects?  Cite your sources.

He's just saying lots of liberal-esque things that he thinks will resonate with his audience then shoehorning in a scapegoat for their destruction. 

Much like Hitler and the Jews and the Kims and the U.S.  He doesn't have a justification except prejudice. Why he doesn't just come out and be fucking intellectually honest I don't know, neither why he thinks we can't see through the smokescreen. 

[Pyrrho]

... it boggles my mind that some theists think they have the right to dictate how the legal contract should operate among people who share none of their religious beliefs.

Many are fascists.  Think about Europe in the middle ages, when the Catholic Church was dominant.  They wanted to control pretty much everything that everyone did.  The Inquisition gives one an idea of how far they were willing to go to force people to do as the Church told them.  

We see the same sort of thing in some Muslim countries today, where some religionists want to control pretty much everything that everyone does.  

It seems quite natural to religion to be fascist.  And we see that in this issue of gay marriage, with religionists wanting to control other people in their private lives.