- Experienced the annual witch hunts for gay students at the Y in the Spring-of-'69, when I joined the LDS Church. Personally knew a fellow Bflo., NY student, who went through church-sanctioned electric shock therapy, an encouraged temple marriage (by then Pres. Spencer W. Kimball), became a temple work, divorced & trried to kill himself!!!

… The Mormon Church STILL endorses electric shock therapy of gay members, only now off-BYU's-campus due to law suits! Thank GODDESS for-the-LAW!!!

Love,
Ann

We are not asking for a second currency to sit alongside yours. In fact, that is what is being offered by your side in the form of CU/DP. We are asking to use the same currency, and in the same places (e.g., recognized throughout the states). Love is of unchanging value and infinite reserve, so a fiat of love can never devalue.

You see the relationships as separate, but I see them as the same: people loving each other. With respect to a loving gay couple, why are you so obsessed with another man's genitals? (Low blow, I know, I kid, I kid)

Similarly, I'll say again, Marriage does not become devalued by people getting married. That is preposterous. Marriage is devalued by, if anything, Vegas chapels for drunk strangers, teenagers who had sex once involved in shotgun weddings, game shows where the prize is getting married, most celebrity marriages, and most of all, DIVORCE.

But no one ever wants to initiate a ballot initiative to ban divorce, do they?

I don't have much time today to type my usual long-winded reply, so I'll let some others do that for me. I'll provide my concise and opposing (as well as extensively scientifically backed) view as follows: Children need loving, caring, devoted parents (two of 'em), but the gender and sexual orientation of these parents is, to the task of parenting, irrelevant.

Here is a study by the American Psychological Association showing that children raised by same-sex couples fare just as well, in every way, as children raised by heterosexual couples:
http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/parenting.as…

Here again is the American Psychological Association with their position on Adoption and Co-Parenting of Children by Same-Sex Couples; I encourage you to read it yourself, but I'll distill it now: Children in these studies turn out best when they have two parents whose relationship with each other and with the child is strong; the gender and sexual orientation of the parents has found to be almost irrelevant. When is it relevant? When children raised to be cruel and intolerant tease them mercilessly, or worse.
[PDF] http://archive.psych.org/edu/other_res/lib_archiv…

And, so I'm not a one-source pony, here is the American Academy of Pediatric's opinion on the matter:
http://aappolicy.aappublications.org/cgi/content/…

And, in order to give a summary of opinions without requiring the reading of several extremely long documents, here is the wikipedia article (linked last as it is just a supplementary resource, not the primary):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_parenting

So, with all of that linking and summarizing out of the way, on to the currency analogy. Let me just open and say that the comparison of love to a fiat currency is inherently flawed and ridiculous. Love, and I mean real love not getting drunk in vegas and ending up married somehow (totally legal and legitimate, by the way) is not a representative currency to be overprinted and devalued, and it is not a resource prized for its rarity, such as Gold, which could also be devalued if the market were flooded.

Love, and by extension, marriage, defies analogy. Maybe air, as no matter how much you have, it only hurts when someone takes yours away, or gives you a poor substitute. But even air fails, because I'm sure one could draw some nightmare scenario in which Person A had to take the air away from Person X in order to stay alive, and that this is why straight people must continue to deny gay people marriage.

I'm sorry, I just cannot understand in the least how gay marriage affects you. Nobody is going to make you get gay married, and nobody is going to dissolve your marriage, yet you rail against the simple truth that two people love each other, two people you have never and will never meet, and that as humans and citizens they have the, as we espouse them, natural right to be married. That this is even an issue defies rational explanation.