With this ruling and the fact that CA has no limitations…..Marriage Equality is coming to a neighborhood near you!
Peace!

It’s about time!!!
Dare i think equality is going to become a reality for gay men and women?
Again, it’s about time. The psedu-equality that gays have had to deal with has always been discriminatory.
Perhaps, “with Liberty and Justice for All” is finally going to happen.

If I may paraphrase the starter of the Indy 500, “Commentators, start your blather!!” You can almost hear the motors start and the oil in their jaws/typing fingers burn!
Good for Mass! I love the comment from Romney that their state will become, the “Las Vegas of gay marriage.” This is the home of Sturbridge Village – maybe that was the colonial Las Vegas, but I doubt it. Now Key Wesy! – THAT may be the Las Vegas of gay marriage – except they are part of we – and we are in Florida, land of the everlasting right turn signal and slow moving RVs. This may cause them to form once again the beloved Conch Republic and try to secede. This state is so slow (“how slow is it?”), that we do not even recognize gay adoptions yet (“what kind of punchline is that” – the kind that breaks your heart). Someday we, too will grow up and let adults be adults. Instead we bicker about Creation “science” in the classroom and whether employees can bring their guns to work.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS! Well done, Mass!
2 down, 48 more states to go. A start of equality for ALL. I live in the small state next door to MA and the gay men and women are happy here as they won’t have to go far to get legally married.

This probably will turn out to be pretty meaningless, since Massachuttes is essentially passing laws for other states. They might as well pass a law legalizing gay marriage in China.
“‘It’s extremely important. If something happened to one of us she’d always be taken care of,’ said Spring, who joined Barbano in a civil union in 2006 in New York.”
You know, these kinds of arguments, about custody and inheritance and things, have always bugged me, and I just realized why: gay marriage is just a lazy person’s way of getting out of writing a will. @@
God bless.

“gay marriage is just a lazy person’s way of getting out of writing a will”
So ungay marriage is also I guess?
You might want to do some research; I believe there are things un-willable that marriage gives a right to.

Joey,
And your counter argument is a lazy person’s way not to listen.
In an emergency medical situation thee is not time to go waving around a legal document. However it is critical to have loved and trusted family nearby. Decisions like this allow that to happen. A will covers only some contingencies and consequences.
I continue to believe that no one “loses” with the acceptance of gay marriage, but that society as a whole strengthens as we affirm the prominence and priority of love (in its most profound and widest sense) over legalities. It’s not like heterosexual couples have done much to prove the value and significance of enduring love in their marriages – as proven by the high divorce rate.

One would have to present a legal document anyway jest its just that to marry people based on that reason is not sound and further deteriorates marriage.
There is nothing equal about homosexual marriage its two if the same sex and making the statement that it is equal is sham and opens a door that is not easily closed. It is historically the nature of a nation beset by decadence to grow weaker and not stronger homosexuality is one of the ingredients that will undo this once great nation. “They will declare that which is wrong right.”

“One would have to present a legal document anyway jest its just that to marry people based on that reason is not sound and further deteriorates marriage.”
That situation is no doubt way easier for a married couple. And there’s never an additional problem about insurance. For that and other reasons it’s quite sound to allow homosexual marriage on the same terms heteros are allowed to marry.
We are growing weaker but that’s because of a conservative president who’s depleted our military and our treasury and our reputation and the confidence in our government. If you think granting gays the same right to marry we have would make us weaker you need to think again.

Cknuck:
Somehow I find it impossible to believe that the entire nation will fall apart because homosexuals can marry and enjoy the legal benefits that that gives.(as well as all the other benefits of marriage). It is 2 people in love who are committing themselves to a life time of love. Heterosexuals do it all the time, and sometimes that committmemt breaks down and they opt out. This may happen to homosexual marriage also…but neither has any effect on the stability of this country.

nnmns money is not what makes our nation strong but its easy to see why people would think that especially if those people believe in homosexual marriage. What makes the country strong is unity and far before Bush we were headed away from unity. Our country actually started to fall apart when prayer was taken out of schools and other public places. Hard for those who are opposed to see it but it’s true. Most folk who are for homosexual marriages don’t really live in the real world so it’s hard for them to see the deterioration of the country. No it wasn’t Bush don’t blame it on Bush but a series of events that made us a nation desperate enough to elect Bush.

Our country started to fall apart when prayer was taken out of schools and other public places, cknuck????
And we can’t see that because we don’t live in the real world? Whoa, that’s a stretch.
And the country was perfect WITH prayer in school and public places? Oh please! Key word? PUBLIC. If you want prayer, hit Church, Temples, Mosques, religious based schools etc. I was in the classrooms as a kid during those prayer days. It didn’t seem to make kids behave any better. I taught in a Catholic school, where there was LOTS of praying and attendance at Mass, and I didn’t see kids behaving better. We had several 8th graders who got pregnant in high school, and they had spent 8 to 10 years (started in pre-school) in the school. So guess what…prayer has nothing to do with the condition of this country.

correction: “So guess what…Lack of prayer has nothing to do with the condition of this country.”

“What makes the country strong is unity…”
Unity is a very good thing. Why try to divide us by letting some people marry and others not marry.
Oh, and don’t forget Rove/Bush and now McCain’s strategy of getting 51% on their side while doing nothing the other folks want. No it’s easy to blame Rove/Bush for our disunity, and now McCain is following right along in their politics of fear. And if you watch him and his supporters you’ll see them subtly using Obama’s skin color (your skin color too I think) to make people afraid of him.
And how much more divisive than that can you get?

And btw school prayer is divisive. Some want to pray to one god, some to another (and when the words of the prayer are provided, that matters) and some want to not pray at all. And can you imagine school board meetings when they have to decide what minister or priest or imam or coven leader gets invited to lead prayers at the next public event?
No, we are way better off without publicly lead school prayer. As for prayer in schools, it happens every time there’s a science or math test, at least one given by a responsible teacher.

pagan if your worse experience in public school is pregnancy then I was correct about the difference in worlds.
nnmns you are proving my point for me thanks, both candidates are worthless.

cknuck if you actually care about how low McCain and the Republicans are going to use Obama’s and your race against him and thus to divide us read Bob Herbert in today’s NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/opinion/02herbert.html?th&emc=th

cknuck, the kids I mentioned had spent all their years in the Catholic school I taught in…since you were saying that prayer is important in school…Hello? All they do in Catholic school is teach and pray…and it certainly didn’t keep those Catholic girls from messing about and getting pregnant. So praying and religious education (along with an extensive sex ed class in that Catholic school) didn’t keep those girls from getting pregnant.
No, my years in public school had prayer, until high school when they(the government) finally realized it shouldn’t be in public institutions. I only knew of a couple of girls who got accidently pregnant in high school (public) but I’m sure there were more. And were their kids that got drunk, did drugs, smoked etc.? I’m sure there were but that didn’t happen to be the kids I was involved with.
My whole point is that besides mixing church and state, which in this country should not happen,lack of prayer in public situations has nothing to do with the actions, good or bad, of people.

Our country actually started to fall apart when prayer was taken out of schools and other public places. Hard for those who are opposed to see it but it’s true. Most folk who are for homosexual marriages don’t really live in the real world so it’s hard for them to see the deterioration of the country.
Unbelievable statement, totally unsupportable, and insulting as well as outlandish.
The statement about prayer being removed from schools as the genesis (get it? “genesis” Bible book?…) of the downfall of the country is not “true”, “though it is hard for those who are opposed to believe it”. Convince yourself if you so desire; the rest of us in the “real world” know otherwise.
So my sister who went to grade school in the 1950s and was forced to say a prayer, which made her very uncomfortable, should have just been forced to shut her mouth and suck it up because it was good for the country?
Bro-ther!
Boy. I sure do wish the public schools I went to in the 60s and 70s still enforced a prayer, likely Christian, so I could have turned out to be a better peron than I am today.
Not.
Why in G-d’s name (yes, pun intended again) should public schools enforce or encourage worship of any kind?? What can or should a school do that a family/parents/guardians do not? What if they don’t want their child forced to participate in any kind of religious ritual? Why don’t you ensure instead that worship starts at home?
And those who support the idea of homosexual marriages “don’t really live in the real world”????? What world do you suppose we/they live in? Oz, perhaps?
On what quicksand could you possibly make such an ludicrous statement?
You claim over and over and over and over…. ad nauseum… to be a loving, giving Christian who hates discrinimation, but all your posts do is reinforce that in no way do you walk the walk of love and charity and compassion for others if those others don’t believe as you do, paricularly when it comes to gay folks.
It’s that type of closed-mindedness that leads to the continuation of discrimation against minorities of all sorts.

ec-l? if you have to ask then you don’t know and will probably never know. Christianity over and over has brought light when there is darkness but if you can’t see darkness then you can’t see a reason for an answer.
I respectfully disagree pagan as a person who has been brought in to motivate the kids your wonderful public school has given up on I’ve seen the power of prayer and hope change kids, products of your school system and efforts.
nnmns you assume I don’t know the facts you are trying to point me toward? Also I hope after my post you know I don’t support either McCain or Obama they are both worthless or near worthless as leaders to me and the world will be no better with the US in the leadership hands of either possibly worse with McCain or not, either way it’s going to be bad.
Pardon the spelling and grammar I’m rushed

cknuck, you mentioned that you have been brought in to motivate kids that public schools have given up on (as you put it). That would not be IN the public school, I assume. You’re probably meeting in a private location, not in a public facility. That is entirely different than having prayer in a public school or other public location. It is assumed that the children are there voluntarily. In a public school, the kids are not there voluntarily…they are required to be there. (until they are 16). In that case, they shouldn’t be required to participate in a prayer, which in most cases is Christian. (We recited the Lord’s Prayer in public school in the ’50′s as it was assumed that everyone was a “Christian.”) You may say that they don’t have to say it…but peer pressure is not always easy to ignore.

Well you could assume but you’d be wrong, the only thing you are right about is that my program has never forced or required prayer from anyone. But you’d be surprised at what resources will utilize and what works when the school public school system comes to the realization that for a large part of some people groups they are ineffective. One should be happy and place their religious prejudices aside if a method can prevent even one murder. I cannot give details but the group of kids teachers, and I’m not suggesting you, give up on some of us don’t.

ec-l? if you have to ask then you don’t know and will probably never know.
cop out and a non-answer. no surprise.
But, if being dismissive makes it easier for you to move forward, well, then, whatever.
Christianity over and over has brought light when there is darkness but if you can’t see darkness then you can’t see a reason for an answer.
Christianity has brought as much darkness as light and continues to do so, in some respects.
And I’m asking a totally different question than the one you pretended wasn’t worth the time to answer.
Again, no surprise.

cknuck,
Then you are working in a public school situation and I’m sure details aren’t allowed, for good reason, one being that it seems to violate the separation of church and state, but I guess the people doing the invitation to you and your group need to pull out all the “stops” to get help for kids. An honest question…do you feel that you could do just as much for the kids if religion was not part of the “equation” In other words the fact that you and your group is taking time to listen to, pay attention to and care about the kids, could have the same result even if religion wasn’t involved, right?
The majority of my teaching was in public schools, only one was the Catholic school I mentioned. All teachers in public schools (or private) don’t give up on kids….we try to do the best we can with them.

cknuck:
One other thought, hope can be given without using religion.

The east coast and west coast didn’t have the Lord’s prayer as a required thing in the 30′s to the 70′s. Reading this conversation is like listening to another country. Do all of you come from the south and midwest? Our children went to school in CA from the 50′s to the 70′s and I can’t think of one incident, including unplanned pregnancies ever happening in Jr. H.S. or H.S. There was one incident in our daughters senior year of a kid throwing a molatove cocktail through a girls restroom door making a huge noise that injured a girls eardrum. He was apprehended and expelled from school. Public schools are for learning subjects to carry them through life. Religion was taught at home, Parochial schools, and in Churches. Very simple, they each have their places, and will work together just fine if these parameters are accepted and used.

I come from the midwest and I vaguely remember reciting the LP along withg everyone else. Happily, it didn’t affect me.

Yes nnmns, you have to be careful of what affects you in life.

Hentrietta, interesting you should ask about where we were when reciting the Lord’s Prayer. I lived in Kansas then and was in the 6th grade. Why the heck I remember that I don’t know, as a lot of my school life is a blurr ( I never really liked school). The next year we moved to Alabama. (That was culture shock in the middle ’50′s) I don’t remember doing the prayer in Alabama.

That’s interesting ps that they didn’t recite the Lord’s Prayer in Ala. I think I wrote this before, when I was in the 5th grade my teacher used to read a verse from Psalms every morning after the pledge of the allegiance, which at that time did not have “under God in it”, and then classes began. I liked it as the verses were inspiring, and it was nice to have a moment to relax before studies began. In the 6th grade I went to a Long Island school for one yr. after Mom passed on. We didn’t have any reading of a Bible there. In the 7th and 8th grade we had a teacher that was also Principal of the school, and she read from Psalms again each morning. So I guess at that time in NJ the teachers were free to do as they pleased, and nobody complained.

While we are all betraying our age – I recall clearly saying the Lord’s Prayer in 4th grade (1961) – the teacher was RCC and we were surprised when she ended the prayer before we did. It led to a brief but interesting discussion – our CT suburban town had 3 churches that I knew of; ours – Congregational UCC; theirs, RCC; and the other (smaller by far) – Episcopal. I also recall when the prayers stopped, based on the Supreme Court decision. I didn’t care either way, except it simply meant we plunged into the school work that much sooner – NOT my idea of fun.

If you find praying more fun than school work you are definitely in the right line of work .

“gay marriage is just a lazy person’s way of getting out of writing a will”
It would (if it were true) also be the stupid person’s way – because getting married invalidates any existing will. We had to get our wills re-done when we got married, joey.
Also, wills can be (and often are) contested – by disgruntled “family” members, etc. Much better to actually be a legal (and legally recognised) spouse.

ck,
I don’t think you realize the level of dis-/mis-information (not to mention belittling) inherent in what you post…
“its just that to marry people based on that reason is not sound and further deteriorates marriage.”
Neither you nor anyone else has ever presented anything (other than your opinion) in the way of proof that our marriages in any way “deteriorate” the institution, nor why our reasons for marrying are ‘un-sound’.
“There is nothing equal about homosexual marriage its two if the same sex and making the statement that it is equal is sham and opens a door that is not easily closed.”
No, ck, your “marriage” is a sham. See how sound it is just to type words with absolutley no proof backing up your claim?
Other than the door to equality, exactly what metaphorical door do you think will be “opened” and what, precisely ought to be contained by the closed and locked door you wish to impose on others?
“It is historically the nature of a nation beset by decadence to grow weaker and not stronger”
Scare-monger much? How “christian” of you to call my marriage nothing but “decadence”. How is commitment and love to be diminished and demeaned and debased into nothing but ‘decadence’? Hateful, just hateful, imo.
“homosexuality is one of the ingredients that will undo this once great nation.”

“One would have to present a legal document anyway”
So? I carry a copy of my marriage certificate in my wallet for just such purposes.
Trouble is, I, unlike you betterosexuals ck, need to be prepared for a “Not in my State, you’re not” response, exactly as the Lovings heard from ignorant sherrifs not so many years ago.

“Most folk who are for homosexual marriages don’t really live in the real world”
So dismissive, ck (as usual). Tell us, exactly what world do they live in?

“No it wasn’t Bush don’t blame it on Bush but a series of events that made us a nation desperate enough to elect Bush.”
“I can’t believe I won. I was running against peace and prosperity.” – George W. Bush, 2000

“you are proving my point for me thanks, both candidates are worthless”
Not that making a point about the ‘usefulness’ of any candidate is pertinent to a thread titled, “New Mass. Law Lets Out-of-State Gay Couples Marry”.
Care to make a comment (non-derogatory, please) regarding the topic?