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Anyone know much about this? Stumbled across it elsewhere and wondered what people thought of it:

"We cannot afford to indulge this madness"

So many pieces of nonsense in this article it's difficult to know where to begin...

1. I have absolutely no recollection of civil partnerships being touted as absolutely not a step towards gay marriage, If it was, and you were stupid enough to lap it up then frankly GIRUY.

2. If you think that civil partnerships are "harmful to the physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing of those involved" then don't become involved in one.

3. Not all of the legal rights available to married couples are available to civil partners. They don't have the right to be married by a religious celebrant, merely by a registrar. Which is exactly what you're arguing against. There are also several differences on issues like succession, divorce/dissolution on which there is not absolute parity.

4. This discussion is ENTIRELY about rights and to whom they are accessible. You cannot separate the definition of marriage from the rights it purposively exists to create.

5. As for this "redefining marriage" stuff: this is the sort of argument that could be run against ANY restriction of those entitled to marry put forward by a government, including, for example, the age of capacity to consent. By saying the state has no right to set the terms of reference you are essentially saying that it's completely fine for religious groups to ban inter-religious marriage. You are saying it's okay for a religion and a society to have the age of 12 as sufficient for consent. You aren't attacking the state monopoly at all. You just want your own definition. In any case even though marriage has strong historical religious connotations it only does so because religion and the law overlapped so much. But even then the recognition of marriage by Canon law served a specific function which the church itself attached to it, and those were to define and normalise the legal relationships between person in a family unit. Marriage was once essentially defined as husband owning wife. Is the Catholic Church still of the view that state-interference was uncalled for?

6. Yes we absolutely can redefine a legal term when it is expedient and appropriate to do so. This is not to appease a "minority of activists". The only "minority" here is your little cabal. Opinion polling has shown consistent majority support for gay marriage in the UK for several years now, and the level of outright opposition is almost as low as Scottish Labour's polling in the 2011 Holyrood Election.

7. Your teacher example is atrocious. First and foremost she would be WRONG on a point of fact if she were to tell her pupils that marriage is and only ever was between a man and a woman. Therefore she would not be a very good teacher. Secondly, it's not the job of a teacher to disseminate their beliefs or to proselytise. It's the job of a teacher to disseminate factual information, develop analytical skills and encourage critical thinking. If she desperately wants to tell young people that marriage is between a man and a woman she can go along to St Kiddy Fiddlers on the Marsh and run the Sunday School. She has no cause even mentioning it in an environment in which she is paid by the state to carry out a specific irreligious function.

8. "Victims of the tyranny of tolerance"? Really? Are you for real? Tell me this is a parody? You don't want your religious views "respected" you want them to be dominant over others who disagree.

9. "In Article 16 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, marriage is defined as a relationship between men and women."

Okay this is just a fucking lie:

Quote

The reference to "men and women" merely emphasises equality of the sexes in their rights of marriage. The article does absolutely nothing to "define marriage". Even if it did, it would be a prime example of government (on a world-wide basis and certainly through the ECHR via Art 12) defining marriage, which you said earlier and after is... uhm... uhm... a really bad thing. By citing the Universal Declaration you're actually ACCEPTING that marriage is an instrumental legal construct and not just some namby pamby ritual that only, it seems, the Roman Catholic Church, can define.

10. Marriage is NOT, I repeat NOT, about bringing up children. Otherwise you would deny the infertile the right to marry and would require the childless married geriatrics to file for annulment. This relates to your absurd point about adoption and how somehow same-sex couples being allowed to adopt somehow "deprives" children of their right to a mother and father and that they're incapable of looking after them. This is totally without foundation and emotive nonsense.

11. Then a little bit of s28 "THE QUEER BOOKS AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH HELL IN A HANDCART"

12. Then "slippery slope slippery slope: what about polygamy???" - What about it? If they're consenting adults that's fine. It's not as though your Bible was ever that clear on it anyway. Abraham was quite the shagger.

13. When the government states that no religious group will be forced to carry out a same-sex marriage they are not being "disingenuous". They are stating the facts.

14. Same sex marriage = slavery? REALLY? FUCKING REALLY?

I'm going for delusional.

There are no words that can do this justice...

And now, here they are! The most daredevil group of drivers to ever whirl their wheels in the Wacky Races, competing for the title of the World's Wackiest Racer!

Who was your favourite? Always like the Buzzwagon myself.

I've been loyal to Windows OS for a pretty long time. I even tolerated the abomination Vista until Windows 7 came out.

But for the last 6 months or so, I've been using Ubuntu. It takes a bit of getting used to where everything is and how to fix certain things, but frankly, I now use my Windows 7 partition for about half an hour a month at most, and it's usually for something relatively trivial.

I really like the latest incarnation of Ubuntu. I know a lot of the old boys don't like Unity replacing Gnome but honestly, I think it's great. The thing runs noticeably faster both on desktop and netbook than Windows 7 and all things considered it does everything I need it to. I've even managed to get it to stream media content to my Xbox 360 when Microsoft only really wanted Windows machines to be able to do that.

Anyone else made the shift?