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Bipolar in General
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Profile #21
Sometimes it's feasible to alternate medications, although unfortunately there are cases where only one thing will actually get the job done, but the job is gonna have to get done so often that eventually it'll stop working. And there's also the unfortunate biological fact that if a problem is congenital, treatment will ultimately at least somewhat become a 'crutch' - that is, without an actual cure (or when the cure is unwanted or worse than the disease), the effects often get stronger and stronger in response to the treatment. I had a long period of my life in which my asthma was just getting worse and worse and I was on enough albuterol to kill a small horse. Not fun.

At that point, it becomes a personal question - namely, is it more important to be OK now or to be OK later? This varies from person to person, and is largely your own to make.

Ideally, the role of the medical professional will become just that - enabling people to make choices about their physical and, ultimately, mental condition; taking those choices away from the machinations of cellular biology and putting them in the patient's hands.

One final note: I'd like to quickly note that as far as creativity goes, as someone who's had to choose between that and happiness, I'll go with happiness anytime. As bothersome as it might sound, think about it: at least if you're happy you're not gonna be spending all day making ostensible art about how miserable you are, and then crying about it.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Happy Birthday, Drakey! in General
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Profile #5
quote:
Originally written by Jumpin' Salmon:

Caresses for Drakey! Eight is such a magical time of discovery. :P
Yes, and it will be magical when we all 'discover' the eight-year-old. Come on now, don't be shy! I mean, everyone except for Drakey - you're supposed to be shy, don't go trying to kill my buzz here.

EDIT: Added sunglasses to imitate the resident expert on fondling, Imban.

[ Friday, December 21, 2007 01:11: Message edited by: Najosz Thjsza Kjras ]
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Bipolar in General
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Member # 6388
Profile #19
Well, there's a major question to that. Some drugs actually don't have much tolerance associated with them, or in other cases the harmful dose is so far above the effective dose that tolerance is more inconvenient than anything else. Fans of pot can observe that for themselves: while there is definitely a tolerance at work with marijuana, so far as the reliable clinical data seem to indicate it'd take drinking a gallon of THC syrup with every meal to start physically hurting yourself - and that's a level that it'd take centuries of regular use to build up to.

Basically, 'OK, the drug works, now how do we work it into a treatment regimen?' is the major question that comes after the clinical trials, and usually requires... usage, more clinical trials, and sometimes, unfortunately, some serious suffering. If you're really lucky, you'll have inherited data from someone amoral - there are various fields where the levels of whatever it is that start killing off humans are well-established by experimental data, the largest cache of which having been that collected in Nazi Germany, but certainly irresponsible scientists and companies add new pages on a daily basis to the depressingly close libraries of human knowledge and human depravity.

[ Friday, December 21, 2007 01:08: Message edited by: Najosz Thjsza Kjras ]
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Bipolar in General
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Member # 6388
Profile #17
Synergy: From what I've heard, borderline patients are literally impossible to deal with without extreme dedication on the patient's behalf. That is, either you need the power of life and death over them (e.g. they've been committed and don't have much to say about it) or they consider healing their condition Priority #1.

I've heard about people in conventional therapy for BPD for years who come out of it as if they've never been in it a day. BPD is characterized by the part of the brain where normal human relationships go being largely defined by an incredibly adaptive shapeshifting void, kind of the way all people would behave if we were how Objectivists believe we are.

Either you medicate the Christ out of them or any 'progress' you make with them is, 99 times out of 100, going to be an illusion fostered - mostly consciously! - by them. Doesn't matter if it takes them a week or a decade, once they've got you convinced they're sane it's pretty much back to square one.

It's really kind of depressing, because both Sam's mother (note: we're not on speaking terms) and my grandmother (who I wish wasn't on speaking terms with us) have it. It's a really nasty thing and not only screws up the sufferers but everyone around them. My father is possibly the state's best surgeon in his field and has successfully raised a difficult family, but when pushed beyond his limits he has a temper tantrum like a child. This is a common characteristic of the children of BPD mothers, unfortunately.

[ Thursday, December 20, 2007 23:48: Message edited by: Najosz Thjsza Kjras ]
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Rocky's Revival (World of Avernum Factional RP Revival Discussion) in General
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Profile #37
We should probably call the circus thing a mulligan. You basically murdered the Avernum section of the RP by being so goddamn hilarious. :P
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Happy Birthday, Drakey! in General
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Drakey is eight today! Let's all fondle him.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Rocky's Revival (World of Avernum Factional RP Revival Discussion) in General
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Profile #33
The Enlightenment is what the Hunters used to be, and there's undercurrents of the ideology present there.

The group isn't particularly complex - kill-'em-all cults don't tend to be. Might want to give it another shot?
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Omaha Mall Shooting in General
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Profile #428
By which logic, mind you, the Emancipation Proclamation was a terrible mistake.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Bipolar in General
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Member # 6388
Profile #11
quote:
Originally written by Ephesos:

Honestly, I'd agree in part with Synergy, in that managing your life choices (sleep, diet, etc) is probably the most effective thing you can do for just about any illness, long-term. It probably won't cure most things, but it'll keep the symptoms from being made worse.
Sleep is important, yes - but it's something that most people have little way of managing. The modern American work-based lifestyle makes sure of that; 'eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what you will' has in many ways gone out the window, unless 'what you will' happens to involve a grueling commute, overtime, and work from home.

Diet is far less important. In reality, the problem with the American diet is excess rather than deficiency. If we were all firemen, yes, we'd have an unbalanced diet - but as it stands it's a situation closer to having 200% more fat than we need and only 20-50% more protein. Doing away with the binge-purge cycle would help a lot, but on the balance we're getting everything we need to fight infection.

It's a common misimpression that there is anything productive to be gained from strengthening the body's 'natural defenses'. In reality, those natural defenses were designed by evolution - and the hard necessities of evolution mean that if those defenses are useful at all, you'd better damned well hope they're so redundant that it'd take a physiological crisis for them to be underpowered.

In fact, it's worth pointing out that one of the most consistent trends within social groups with a hypertrophied regard for 'health' in the diet-nutrition-exercise sense is a profound increase in allergies. Allergies occur when the immune system is working when it shouldn't be, and are more or less ubiquitous in modern society.
quote:

Meds are supposed to help as well, of course.

And they do. Double-blind trials tend to prove that; if you want to throw those out, you're gonna have to reject a lot of practical day-to-day science. Which most people 'skeptical' of medication as a primary method for dealing with disease would never dream of.

quote:
Generally, I find myself skeptical of medications for mental disorders, just because I don't like the idea of messing with brain chemistry. But if it came right down to it (i.e. I had something), and I knew that there was some decent science backing it up, I'd likely elect to take the meds.
Look up borderline personality disorder at some point. Unfortunately, it's this attitude as a society that has made it the problem it is; it's a severe neurochemical disorder which involves obscenely abusive, selfish, and manipulative behavior -- and one of the defining characteristics is the reluctance of therpaists to deal with it.

There's little to nothing productive to gain from counseling with borderline patients unless it's accompanied by aggressive medication. (Sam, my fiancee, had to deal with ten years of 'group therapy' with her borderline mother - which, because of the adeptness of manipulation associated with BPD, involved her mother and her therapist haranguing her for an hour about how her horrible, lazy behavior was ruining her mother's life.) And because as a society we're convinced aggressive medication means you're mentally weak or in some other fundamental way inferior, borderline sufferers will typically either reject medication or stop taking it. If you believe 'nothing's wrong with me', and you've been trained to treat medication as part and parcel of a personal failure, of course you're not gonna take any.

Mental health is basically the same as physical health. In many ways this is a generational issue - it's something that makes even people my parents' age (that is, early 40s) uncomfortable on some level. But we can't decide to reject neurochemical medication because of our cultural fetishes; it works as well as antibiotics or analgesics and for exactly the same reasons. It's like the bit from Alpha Centauri: we're throwing out a vital tool because it reminds us uncomfortably of our own mortality, and in so doing have needlessly crippled ourselves.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Omaha Mall Shooting in General
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Member # 6388
Profile #426
quote:
Originally written by Kelandon:

Stillness, yet again, the development zone is pure pork (and therefore inappropriate) unless there is some good reason for wanting to develop that area. The government isn't supposed to just favor some people for no reason. You haven't given any reason — ever — for the government to favor same-sex couples that holds up to rigorous scrutiny.
This is more or less the crux of the dispute, from a legal and moral perspective, and you're going to have to answer this to the general satisfaction before going any further.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Rocky's Revival (World of Avernum Factional RP Revival Discussion) in General
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Member # 6388
Profile #28
Post.

Azuma: Yes. Whip up a faction, although don't get married to any one area.

Incidentally, it happens several centuries after A3, and presumes that nothing after A3 ever happened. (Or, if it did, only incidentally, as part of a different timeline.)
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Bipolar in General
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Member # 6388
Profile #8
What, Synergy, do you posit to be the basis of mental illness? I'm curious, if the DSM-IV's qualifications are so awful.

I'm perfectly aware about the various imbroglios with it, and I know that homosexuality used to be on there, but the scientific consensus changes and scientists are as human as anyone else. But I don't know of any coherent model in opposition to neurochemistry.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Rocky's Revival (World of Avernum Factional RP Revival Discussion) in General
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Member # 6388
Profile #25
The Enlightenment and the Abyss Knights are both active. I'm calling it close to the present, and I've got only *EXTREMELY* limited information.

Everyone do me a favor: give me a paragraph of data about your faction as of the last time you were involved, and also give me a sentence describing the last in-RP event you remember. Offer a description of factional size, influence, function/purpose, and of course location.

I'm going to try and do the map tonight.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Dikiyoba Seeks to Flaunt the Meaningless Approbation of Dikiyoba's Fellows in General
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Profile #20
Fun fact: any response but the following to ET is basically a failure on the respondant's part. Take it in mind.

quote:
Originally written by Emperor Tullegolar:

I am the Emperor! I am no lackey! Think, what do all those people have in common? What might that have to do with Diki's milestone?
Nobody likes a gimmick.

[ Wednesday, December 19, 2007 23:30: Message edited by: Najosz Thjsza Kjras ]
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Omaha Mall Shooting in General
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Member # 6388
Profile #412
quote:
Originally written by Synergy:

We're not a family. There is only One of us. As you do unto another, you have literally done unto yourself. Think of it as a friendly, mindful, individuated Borg collective, collaboratively living out the experience of being God on this holodeck of the universe. The Matrix is closer to our reality than we dared imagine.

-S-

The sad thing about hating you, Synergy, is that you sometimes come close to the right idea.

I stand by my characterization of Safey. I don't feel he's in this discussion in good faith. At least it's feasible to characterize the other participant, Stillness, as basically ignorant.

. . .

I refer any readers with serious reservations about homosexuality in light of their Christian morals to read Fred Clark's series, 'The Gay-Hating Gospel' (you'll have to dig for it yourself). It's actually an excellent treatment, as is much of what Clark does. I'd characterize him generally as who I'd be voting against in an ideal world - like Barack Obama, basically a Burkean conservative (unlike Burke, of course, who was an ass), someone working towards changing the evils of the world in a fashion moderate and slow enough to ensure they won't create more. 'Conservative' in the American political context is hopelessly warped, referring to someone who takes on a basically Satanist obsession themselves and their own stupid issues, an ideology of entitlement so fixated on Number One that it refuses to acknowledge even problems that grievously threaten their progeny if it damages their own bottom line. A good example is global warming - the executives fanning the flames of global warming denial know what's going on and know their children will suffer because of it, but don't care. We characterize that, as Americans, as 'conservative', while it goes beyond even 'reactionary' - it's a sort of deliberate ignorance, a direct refusal to work with accepted fact and a preference for revelation.

That digression aside, Clark writes really well on evangelical issues from a left-evangelical perspective, has a hilarious series on the Left Behind series - for him, the Worst Books Ever Written - and the Gay-Hating Gospel, among other pieces on evangelical cultural fixations, is pretty good.

[ Wednesday, December 19, 2007 23:28: Message edited by: Najosz Thjsza Kjras ]
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Omaha Mall Shooting in General
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Profile #333
It is only natural -- a moral failure separated by impassively watching a man drown by degree rather than kind, but only natural -- to pass a homeless man on the street and, not wanting to part with your money, try to justify your avarice by deciding after the fact he would only use it on drugs. It takes something special to demand stridently of others that they do the same: a self-obsession approaching a Messiah complex. I can't even concieve of the psychiatric burden that must make someone convinced that anyone who needs their help is abusing it. You might think you're some kind of hand-up-not-a-hand-out principled conservative, but when I think of people like you what comes to mind is you giving someone a Heimlich maneuver and billing them for it, because otherwise people are just going to fill their airways with food all day long to take advantage of how wonderful a person you are.

You're an idiot, Safey, and what's more, you're an evil idiot. Condescending to you as if you were a small and dim-witted dog would be giving you too much credit; engaging you as if you were a rational creature with a conscience worth the name is an insult to the dignity of mankind. And I don't know what religion it is that you think is so damned important to your day-to-day life, but I've always made a policy of avoiding any serious discussion with Satanists. Whatever I do have to say I say for my own amusement; to do more would be close to criminal.

And now, as it happens, I'm bored. Go away, would you?

[ Sunday, December 16, 2007 01:28: Message edited by: Najosz Thjsza Kjras ]
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
The War on Christmas in General
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Profile #64
Safey, I'm only going to say this once more, and I'm going to spell it out in its most basic components. Nothing about what I'm saying is subject to any kind of real controversy. OK:

a) Binge eating is the most efficient way there is under normal circumstances to gain fat.
b) Going for more than about a quarter of a waking day without eating about three quarters of a pound of food tends to physically nearly mandate overeating when food is available again. The longer, the worse. The desire to binge is profound, and grows worse the worse the surrounding starvation is.
c) When people go without sufficient calories or food mass for long enough, their bodies - to preserve energy - enter a digestive state commonly known as starvation, in which the metabolism slows down - reducing both ability to exert and the energy consumed by exertion.
c1) Hunger is to starvation as a paper cut is to a sucking chest wound. 'Willpower' is nice to talk about when you're talking about hunger, but starvation breaks down the 'will' like few things human beings have ever discovered; one of the most common stories to come from the Holocaust and any other humanitarian crisis involving serious food deprivation is a complete breakdown of humanity. Eli Wiesel in Night described a young man on a death train choking his father over a fistful of stale bread. Starvation is one of a very few things that can induce in a living person a sort of physical premonition of doom - a state in which not just the consciousness but the organs composing the body are aware of and afraid of impending death. There is little more willpower involved in resisting the urge to eat - and continue eating until completely full - when confronted with starvation than there is in resisting the urge to suck in as much air as possible in the throes of drowning.
d) Starvation combined with binge eating produces a perfect storm of weight gain: during 'lean' periods the body loses little to no weight, and during 'fat' periods the body gains large amounts.
e) Given the above, any artificial situation that induces starvation where food is otherwise widely available - that is, any situation where people are routinely starved and then given access to enough food to stuff themselves - will produce obesity.

f) The growth of the larger and larger suburb, a phenomenon known as exurbia, together with the high price of gas and the extreme gas-inefficiency of 90s model cars - that is, cars currently in the market at prices anyone making less than $40,000 a year can afford - have produced a situation in which the travel cost in picking up any amount of food at the supermarket can be prohibitively high. A 15 mpg car on a 90-mile round trip, with gas at $3/gal, will add $12 to the price of groceries -- or, for an extremely generous scenario, roughly one day's food for a four-member family. The least generous scenario I could think of would involve a round trip better than 150 miles at $4 a gallon and 5 mpg - in other words, ten times as much.
g) With a limited supply of money, it stands to reason that one will shop for food less frequently.
h) Ergo: the less money one has, the more likely one is to spend all or most of it in a single trip.

i) Consider how long different foods take to rot. No supply cycle longer than two weeks will allow for an even remotely balanced diet afterwards, for no fresh fruit will survive two weeks - even in a refrigerator - and remain edible. Many complex carbohydrates will rot as well. In essence, long before the next planned resupply, the family - or individual, for that matter - will either run out of some type of nutrient or out of food altogether.
j) If there is any money left, the family/individual might be able to supplement the food cycle as necessary - but for however little money is left, chances are good it will have to be with something very close and very cheap. This more or less limits the options to junk food.
k) It follows that anyone without the discretionary budget to pay a cover charge between $12 and $120 on a semi-weekly basis will have a diet encouraging at least some periods of starvation, and anyone incapable of doing so on a weekly or bi-weekly basis will have a diet dominated by them, and binges punctuating them.
l) Inductive reasoning aside, obesity in America is overwhelmingly linked to poverty by observations and studies; there is a massive body of statistics confirming each of my conclusions.

I'd like to close this with one brief observation: I understand that many people have a great deal of respect for 'choice' in situations like this, but sociological problems are nothing like personal ones. When one person gets incredibly fat, maybe he has a problem. When half of a country gets incredibly fat, it's time to ask some serious questions - and one of them is about the conventional model of dealing with fat. Considering that our current model for dealing with fat - strident insistence that fat is a product of laziness, stupidity, and poor habits - has existed more or less since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in America, it's really worth asking why it is that it's been of so little use in making us any thinner.

On a personal level, I can attest that TV dinners and other frozen prepareds are actually a hell of a lot cheaper than I could possibly squeeze out of individual ingredients. I have to say that half-assing a self-prepared diet would quite possibly be the worst way of doing it; the last thing someone whose diet primarily revolves around microwaved box meals needs is the occasional omelette, unless he happens to be an anorexic firefighter.

[ Sunday, December 16, 2007 01:06: Message edited by: Najosz Thjsza Kjras ]
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Rocky's Revival (World of Avernum Factional RP Revival Discussion) in General
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Member # 6388
Profile #0
This is the topic for that, I guess.

I'll try and have the map done this week. I've actually come into an unexpected bit of work (interning for a primary campaign), and I don't know how well it's gonna pan out yet. But I'm going to force myself to at least half-ass up a full world map within the next week.

Meanwhile, would someone agglomerate the necessary links?
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
The War on Christmas in General
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Member # 6388
Profile #16
quote:
Originally written by Excalibur:

I watched a segment on the news concerning the fact the surgeon general stated that Santa Claus should lose the belly as it sets a poor example for children. The news segment later added that Santa used to smoke a pipe.
In all seriousness, it's generally taken as a positive development that there's far less smoking on TV and in movies than there used to be - part of a social stigma on tobacco in general that has come with the general recognition that it's a terrible and addictive drug with little going for it.

I do resent the belly thing. Obesity is a class issue; we pay most people too little to buy decent food on a day-by-day basis, so they stock up for two weeks, gorge themselves, go hungry for a few days waiting for pay, and then stock up for another two weeks, filling the gaps with McDonalds and other horrible junk food.

When your paycheck forces a binge cycle on you, treating your weight like it's an issue of personal laziness is monstrous.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Omaha Mall Shooting in General
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Member # 6388
Profile #228
I'd argue that the most important conclusion to be derived from 'marriage' and 'stability' research is basically the one that people make jokingly about it: 'Why, if one man and one woman works that much better, think of how well three men, eight women, and a small horse would do!' Silliness aside, that is how the family worked in most parts of the world (with a few minor variations) until the innovation of the nuclear family. The atomization of society into its smallest component parts produced a system in which children are to take moral and intellectual instruction from two adults and only two adults, and at most two adults. The extended family is dead in the US, and that's probably a major part of how deeply warped we've been getting for the last 60 years.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
The War on Christmas in General
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Member # 6388
Profile #12
quote:
Originally written by Lucheiah:

no "aww poor baby, we'll make it illegal for Santa to say something he's been saying for ages without any trouble at all"
Because what the disadvantaged need is more condescension, right?

The explanation given by Salmon is a splendid one. No need to involve that nonsense into this; it's a slippery slope from there to babbling 'oh, boo hoo, poor widdle baby got his feeeelings hurt' at congregants in a mosque defaced with swastikas. That is something people do, and it is wrong.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Omaha Mall Shooting in General
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Profile #223
I really love the claim that homosexuality erodes society. Kelandon, have you given him the works yet? You're the classicist here. Regale him with buggery, why don't you.

Long story short: the Roman Empire encompassed an area larger than the modern US, made the Mediterranean into a political lake, and went from victory to victory through 700+ years of man-on-man action. Then lead poisoning weakened the minds of the elite, they took to Christianity and refused to give one another the sausage, and before you could say 'Odoacer', 1000 years of burning cynics, papal orgies, blood libels, aggressively circular logic, and a Children's Crusade. That's what happens if you let go of homosexuality: you lose everything.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
The War on Christmas in General
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Member # 6388
Profile #4
quote:
Originally written by Condition:

"That's when the Jews killed Jesus."

—Alorael, who isn't sure whether this is more worrying as a sign of baseless hate, a sign of ignorance of Judaism, or a sign of ignorance of Christianity. How long until Easter?

Of course the Jews killed Jesus on Hanukkah. The Romans did it on Passover.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Day Tripper in General
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Profile #11
quote:
Originally written by saunders:

I sat in a container and watched a fire, and saw dancing angels- so, unusual.
See, I've got finals, so no pot for me until Friday.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Omaha Mall Shooting in General
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Profile #217
EDIT: Seeing this topic, its length, and its starter, I'm very encouraged to see that by this point there's nobody pitching a fit about how gun control would have kept the valiant rent-a-cop from doing the job she was licensed and hired for, and as a consequence the criminal rejected-for-missionary-work homeschooled Christian fundamentalist wouldn't have had *any* bullets in him when he shot himself. So much misinformation we have in this country, and so far it gets.

Outlawing gay marriage is against the First Amendment, interfering as it does with the free exercise of religion. The Unitarians, many pagan groups, the Subgeniuses and other nonce churches (bear in mind America doesn't see fit to legislate the 'seriousness' of a religion, and for good reason), and many Quaker meetings routinely marry gay couples - in the case of the Quakers and the Unitarian Universalists, this is a practice dating back to the turn of the 20th century, so common in the former that a pair of clearly involved persons of the same sex living together were referred to as being in a 'Quaker marriage'.

That's more or less the end of the discussion, from a constitutional law standpoint. Those who think that morality is a sufficient basis have to either reject the Constitution altogether or accept that a document that allows animal sacrifice in religious rituals would be absurd to tolerate prohibition of gay marriage. It's as ridiculous as would be sending anyone serving a wine Eucharist to jail for contributing to the delinquency of minors.

The entire argument about discrimination is mooted by this. I'm going to get into it, but I just want to say up front that your position has no constitutional merit. Without more or less throwing out the free exercise clause, American law doesn't allow for religious discrimination in marriage practices.

Contemplate: lavender marriages are the practice of gay men and lesbian women - friends - marrying each other for the benefits of marriage while dating or engaging in long-term relationships elsewhere. Laws against gay marriage not only encourage that, but taken together with pay discrepancies between men and women and the ubiquity of the double-income household, more or less mandate them for homosexuals. Is this a good thing?

[ Wednesday, December 12, 2007 13:37: Message edited by: Najosz Thjsza Kjras ]
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00

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