No, gay marriage is like interracial marriage and interfaith marriage. It names something that other people want to deny and prevent. Gay marriage doesn’t exist only in those states and countries that force people to lie about what their relationship really is.

Yes, but gay marriage refers to something that isn’t a real marriage, that they want referred to as if it were.

Hence the special wording.

If gays just get married – to the person they actually intend to make a family with – we don’t call that “gay marriage”, we just call it “marriage”.

In the US at least, the oppression of gays is just as dubious. Every subculture thinks itself oppressed by every other subculture because for some odd reason it is considered fashionable to be oppressed. But it is not clear that gays come off worse socially then anyone else. Every group gets exasperated by what outsiders say about them.

As for being “forbidden marriage” all that is really meant is being forbidden civil marriage. Gays are perfectly capable of swearing eternal loyalty to each other without the government. In the modern licentious culture it is not clear that anyone will care all

In the meantime, we should be aware of the stink of his moral relativism and ranking of personhood here. Blake is basically saying the US gov’t shouldn’t even bother to speak out against the indiscriminate murder and abuse of gays unless first it has addressed and countered every and any act of oppression against Christians that may be happening anywhere in the world. In other words, a gay man’s life in Nigeria is not worth any effort unless every Christian around the world is not only under no danger to their life but under absolutely no oppression at all, even the most minor.

Fair enough, but let’s not forget that the former President George Bush Jr (you remember … the one whose “favorite philosopher” was Jesus) had quite friendly relations with the ruling elite of Saudi Arabia, a nation known for its hostility towards Christians. “Offenders” can be arrested and publicly beaten, if not worse.

I didn’t like Bush, so I’m not sure what your point is.

My point was that you don’t have to push a pro-Christian agenda to argue that Christians should not be indiscriminately murdered, so I am not sure why our government needs to be telling any other nation what rules it should have regarding what sexual activity is or is not considered acceptable.

Yawn, this is the typical intellectual bankruptcy seen here whenever the subject of homosexuality is raised. Notice how contingent this supposed ‘oppression’ is. No one is being punished for ‘hate speech’ and no state in the US, let alone country in the world, is being forced to have SSM, or even encouraged to have it by this administration. Yet since that ‘may happen’ at some fuzzy point in the future we will pretend it’s already happened.

Ohh if only this principle could be applied everywhere. I’d be able to clock Blake in the head because, hey, at some point in the future he *may* try to mug me so why can’t I use my right to self-defense now rather than later? Of course I’m not entitled to use this principle because it’s one of intellectual affirmative action, reserved for those who have failed at nearly every other argument they’ve made for their positions so now they demand special entitlement to enjoy relaxed rules of logic for their benefit.