Posts by Emma Hart
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New Zealand's 40 new franchises are listed here.
Yeah! Go the fricking Taihape Pirates!
Actually, one game with Jonathan Kaplan and they could set a new benchmark as the only team to have all their players binned at the same time.
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but you have to allow me the freedom to follow my faith, providing I'm not affecting yours.
Not 'yours', 'you'. Provided I'm not affecting you . It's a nitpick, but a really important one. I'm not my religion, and that's a line that applies to atheists as well.
Here's the line. If Catholic priests want to refuse to marry gay people as part of the practice of their religion, the state shouldn't stop them. And if I want to go naked as part of the practice of my religion, the state shouldn't stop me. And if a Rastafarian wants to smoke marijuana as part of the practice of their religion, ditto. But if someone felt they needed to assault Maori as part of the practice of their religion, that's not okay, because you can't possibly do that without impinging on someone else.
But. If a church wants to be an employer, or run adoption agencies, or run hospitals, they MUST comply with all state laws in that area, including human rights law.
(All of this, btw, is amusingly compliant with the entirety of Wiccan doctrine, which is eight words long.)
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As someone noted upthread, the term 'marriage' carries meaning not associated with civil unions
Interestingly (insert usual caveat here), in Britain they have Civil Partnerships, which are frequently referred to as marriages. So when John Barrowman entered a Civil Partnership with his partner Scott, even the papers talked about him 'getting married'. OK had his 'wedding photos'.
Here, we're still struggling to come up with torturous language to get around referring to a CU as a 'marriage'. I have a CU and pointedly NOT a marriage, and I constantly correct the co-worker who can't get it through her head that my partner is not my 'hubby'. (She can't cope with nice stable non-marriage relationships, so her brain just turns mine into a marriage.) I tell her it's not actually LEGAL for her to say that.
So in NZ we have a very sharp linguistic line between a marriage and a civil union. Some people need this line to make them feel that the fags aren't dirtying the carpet in their nice clean house. They can have civil union but they can't have marriage. That's a hierarchy. In Britain, while the laws are similar, the linguistic/cultural line is nowhere near as sharp. Gay people 'get married'.
Does the state give such a preference? It looks to me that marriage so defined and civil unions providing the same rights and opportunities are there as options, with no formal preference for either.
That's not really the essence of the statement you're replying to, Chris, which I think is that the State's 'idea' of marriage includes that two-sexed essence, as oppposed to an idea of marriage which is more inclusive.
However. Pretty much straight after CUs were legalised, we had to go through the DOMA bill, in an attempt to legalise discrimination between married people and those in CUs. As long as the distinction exists between the two, that's still possible, to make rules for one and not the other.
Again, because I'm a supporter of civil unions as an alternative to marriage for everyone, I'm a bit ambivalent about both those things.
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Is this where I come clean and admit I have a feeling I have your copy of Ender's Game I also have fire but have lingering qualms about burning books no matter what they are.
Is that what happened to it?
And yeah, I'm not a book burner. But... it's not as simple as total dissociation. I'd like it to be, but I still feel kind of gross when I hear people who think Freddy Mercury is burning in a special Fag Hell playing Queen.
But I do think people who buy books in order to burn them are hilarious.
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What was that? Couldn't hear you over the crickly-crackly sound of my copy of Ender's Game burning over the open fire.
I'm experiencing momentary frustration that there isn't any Card in the house, because I do have fire. Nice to know his hatred of 'dictator-judges' is so strong he's happy to live in a military dictatorship.
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PS why do we assume, or rather *suspect* so readily that there must be a barrow that needs pushing,
...
(the drugs were used natch to relax their anuses, that the ensuing sodomy-express might NOT be so foul...)
Is it a bird, is it a plane... no, it's
SUPER IRONY!
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Must....exercise....restraint....
Just pop on over to the other thread. And how DO you feel about spatulas?
Dammit, didn't get here in time to make that joke first.
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Isn't that a bit like saying
- Everyone can have a pony
- Ponies are all to be put to deathStewart, I think Russell was briefly summing up two different lines of argument that have gone through the thread. For some people, they'd ideally like ponies put to death, accept that isn't going to happen, and so advocate for the fair and equal distribution of ponies instead.
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Chris, I can't think of anything to answer your 'You've got civil unions, what are you whining about' that hasn't already been articulated on this thread several times over. I'm starting to get a bit dizzy with the circling.
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forgive me but i do not understand what is meant here, exactly!
"..the numberr of times ANY BDSMer will be told.." told by whom?this doesn't correspond to much in my own experience!
You're quite right, I used the word 'any', therefore my distress must be entirely invented. Perhaps you'd like to tell us about 'your own experience' as a BDSM practitioner? Or you could follow the link to Renegade's blog I provided above and follow the links from there...
Wait, I just detected myself wasted keystrokes. As you were.