Quote Originally Posted by Koga No Goshi View Post
This issue is going to come up again, and again, and again, and again, until the rights are recognized. It is not really my purpose to "convince" people who are against it. There were people who went to their graves against interracial marriage rights and fully recognized equal rights for black people. Let 'em rot. The current unequal recognition of full rights--- or, as Redleg suggested-- having to go and spend a lot of money with an attorney to draw up complicated equivalent rights privately, which you then might get tied up in court anyway having to defend when they are challenged by family members or hospital administrators or an insurance company, is not supportable and courts are doing their job PERFECTLY when they find problems with the double standard. The idea that courts have absolutely no role at all-- indeed, that they are usurping power and abusively "legislating from the bench" when they make a ruling that a particular law is unconstitutional or violates equal protections, is regressive. If not for courts, if every decision was left purely up to popular legislation, I would not be surprised to still see antimiscegenation on the books in many southern states. Or the stay of Japanese Americans in internment camps to have lasted four times longer than it did. Or for schools in the south to still have formally segregated white and black proms. A state of unrecognition of gay equal rights is going to go the way of the dinosaur, but the social conservative and religious constituencies in the U.S. are just being used in the meanwhile as tools to come to the polls for a hotly controversial wedge issue, and a ton of money is being spent on it. I have extreme skepticism that the huge money people are willing to spend to encode bans on gay rights into state or Federal constitutions is only out of sheer moral conviction and nothing to do with the fact that this gets Americans of a certain political stripe energized to get their butts to the polls.
Actually it doesnt cost a lot of money to establish a power of attorney, a living will, nor a last will and testiment. In fact its really rather inexpensive in most cases - a computer program and a notary republic will accomplish most if not all of the requirements with a court cost to file the records in the County or City Court house. A whole lot cheaper then getting married.

Again I would like to see an accounting of what rights are being denied to a gay individual, and what is being denied to them because they are gay?

I see a lot of arguement but nothing that points out where the state is actually denying them a right when the state sanction marriage is nothing but a license - a contractual relationship between two people. Are you attempting to state that gay couples are not allowed to enter into contractual relationships with each other?