Don T., it was not you I directed those remarks toward that you put in the quotes, it was Don Firth. I should have typed his whole name out, I suppose, but I thought it would be clear who I was addressing.

People should be able to perceive the reasoning and the honest intentions on both sides of the various debates that have raged on this thread, understand where people on both sides are coming from, understand their legitimate concerns, and not fall into the easy intellectual laziness of just dividing it into stark terms of the black & white, the good and evil.

That would require some patience and a genuine desire to understand what someone else's concerns really are and what they really meant by something they said, rather than to just leap instantly into labelling them by some automatic condemnation label of our era...such as "bigot"...or "sexist"...or "racist"...or the other favorite damnation labels of this time we live in.

We all want freedom (for people generally). We all want justice. We all want fairness. That's a given. If you want it, then you have to give it also. You don't do that by just dumping people into some "pool of the damned" over some fragment of something they said that you misinterpreted in the worst way possible because it made you feel good to catch them out and nail them. And that's my point. That's what concerns me here on this forum...again and again and again and fifty times over after that.

I seriously doubt that anyone posting here wishes to see gays persecuted in any way. I know I don't. I don't particularly wish to see anyone persecuted at all, but what I do want to see is an end to witchhunts...whether they are inspired by conservative rhetoric OR liberal rhetoric.   They're equally ugly in either case.

And that's why I post here. I have virtually no interest in debates about gay marriage itself...because it's not a subject I'm concerned about personally or even interested in. I don't feel threatened by it nor do I feel worked up over it either. It's a non-issue to me.

What concerns me is how people are debating about it here...how they conduct that debate...how they treat each other...how they denigrate the character of the person they are debating with...and why they think it's okay to behave that way just because they are presumably "better" (morally speaking) than the person they're talking to. That concerns me.