I think we all need to stop being one issue voters. My rights are extremely important to me and I will vote for the pro-equality candidate when I can. Obama must be pro-equality, we all like to say, and he offers so much more, so most in this movement are voting for him. Fine.

For completely different reasons I am not. I can’t vote for McCain because of his religious pandering and what that means for the future of the Supreme Court and his tax stances, wanting to tax my healthcare benefits!..Shame on him!

I have big problems with Obama too: his own religious pandering, which I could get over, his lack of support for equal marriage, which I understand and is a non-issue for me, his goal of expanding government (can’t get over that one) and the new taxes on I don’t care how much they make, we should be eliminating, not creating, new taxes!

Now I live in MASS which will go for Obama, so my vote doesn’t count really. So I’m voting libertarian for 4 reasons: Libertarians won’t tell you who to sleep with, it is against the entire philosophy. Libertarians won’t tax success and try to redistribute wealth and Libertarians will work tirelessly on basically one thing: reducing the size of our bloated government. Fourthly, a vote for a 3rd party when not a risky vote (again, MA here) is always the best choice. We need a multiparty system and to get it we must legitimize 3rd parties. Imagine if Obama had to form a coalition with the small government libertarians? We’d have fiscal responsibility, true leadership and a fair minded government!…We need 3rd parties.

Good luck tomorrow..its going to be a long night. Since Barr won’t win, I’ll be routing for Obama, who has so much more to offer than McCain, just not enough to earn my vote.

I think you’ll see that Obama is in support of full legal equality for gay and straight couples.

Absolutely. Do I support granting same-sex benefits? Absolutely positively. Look, in an Obama-Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction from a constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple.

This sounds good, right? Notice the specific use of the words “constitutional” and “legal.” It seems to me that he uses these words precisely to specify what he’s talking about so that he can come back later and talk about a kind of marriage that is non-constitutional and non-legal.

The fact of the matter is that under the Constitution we should be granted — same-sex couples should be able to have visitation rights in the hospitals, joint ownership of property, life insurance policies, et cetera. That’s only fair.

It’s what the Constitution calls for. And so we do support it. We do support making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits as it relates to their property rights, their rights of visitation, their rights to insurance, their rights of ownership as heterosexual couples do.

Again he reiterates that that, from a legal standpoint, same sex couples are to be treated the same as opposite sex couples. This is a far cry from McCain’s stance, which basically “allows” us to spend thousands of dollars in lawyers fees to enter into contracts that garner us only some of the rights that opposite sex couples get with one document.

This is not a gift, McCain, we can do it already, and it doesn’t work out so well.

No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically the decision to be able to be able to be left to faiths and people who practice their faiths the determination what you call it.

Here’s the line that gets hisses and boos. Again, though, I think the wording here is again very deliberate. Notice how in the first sentence he says they don’t support redefining marriage “from a civil side” and how it’s up to people of faith how they define marriage. This is where that non-legal marriage idea comes in. This is where he’s reassuring the religious that the government isn’t going to come into their places of worship and telling them what to do, rewriting their holy books, etc.

This is good, because the government has nor right doing that. From the legal and constitutional standpoint, however, Biden rightly says that marriage is equal for hetero and homosexual couples.

The bottom line though is, and I’m glad to hear the governor, I take her at her word, obviously, that she think there should be no civil rights distinction, none whatsoever, between a committed gay couple and a committed heterosexual couple. If that’s the case, we really don’t have a difference.

Here again, he repeats the stance of the Obama campaign; that homosexual couples are equal in the eyes of the law to heterosexual couples.

If you’ll remember, the Connecticut Supreme Court said the exact same thing a couple of years ago and left the legislature to decide how to make gay couples equal in the eyes of the law. They chose civil unions. The reports came in, civil unions were not garnering gay couples the rights they were promised by the courts and thus the courts revisited the case and determined that gay couples could not be denied access to marriage.

Honestly, the rest of the country should take this as a lesson, but this does show that civil unions are a stepping stone to marriage equality

Wayne,

You can start here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk_-VucELn4

Sincerely,

Thanks.

Are you, “Blacksteel“, such a sycophant that you don’t question anyone you follow? If so, then that puts you in the very same category as many of the “Night of the Living Dead” zombies that drool over every inane word that drips from McCain’s twisted lips.

Dissent is necessary for a free society to evolve. It is very important that people should not fear telling others that they don’t agree with them and they will not accept that their only choices are to either jump aboard the bandwagon or to be thrown under it.

So lighten up! And give someone else a chance to speak their mind too.

—–

James, busy day and all, any way you could just post Obama’s answers since you have them readily available? Thanks.

You do not have to search hard. Last year HRC and LOGO held a forum where the candidates for the Democratic presidential nod held a forum on gay rights. We talked about that here at 365Gay (we were VisbleVote back then), the comments by the pols got major press, was covered by CNN. As I said you can be critical of Obama’s stance but to act like the info isn’t out there is to misread the facts.

http://www.youdecide2008.com/video/logo-visible-vote-08-democratic-presidential-forum/

Sincerely,

James