""I would be pleased if people in general would stop their knee-jerk labelling of other people as "bigots", "sexists", "racists", "anti-semites", and other such damning labels in today's society....""

I'm sure you would, LH, and I wouldn't argue with you if you could explain to me why you feel that I, or anyone else should accept you as arbiter, and accept your opinion as more valid than anyone else's.

You sit on your high moral cloud, looking down on us lesser intellects and comment in judgement on me, and talk about knee jerk reactions, and name calling.

If I see a shovel leaning against a wall, I'm not going to say "That's a manually operated earth shifter".

It's a bloody shovel.

Ditto, if I see the kind of nasty, crude, irrational rants so evident in postings by GfS, and they, IN MY OPINION add up to bigot, then I WILL say so, with or without YOUR approval.

That is emphatically NOT a knee jerk. It is my CAREFULLY CONSIDERED opinion, which seems to be shred by rather a lot of quite intelligent people besides myself.

Ake is a slightly different matter. I don't think he can help his hardwired disgust toward gays, but the logic of his position completely escapes me, and I feel it has escaped him too. His emotions have blinded him to the one fact that destroys his argument completely.

Ake maintains that his major objection to homosexual marriage is on grounds of danger to health.

But he hasn't yet explained how allowing "gay marriage", as opposed to "civil partnership", is going to increase the incidence of HIV/AIDS. Nor does he offer any insight as to how refusing that right will decrease the incidence.

Inquiring minds would like to know the scientific basis for any such belief.

Don T.