] I agree, there are definitely many gay people I know of, for
] whom the concept of marriage *is* an important emotional
] foundation. However, I can also think of many gays I know who
] want to get married for no other reason than that it would
] annoy the mainstreamers.

And hippy couples in the 60's didn't get married to annoy their conservative parents? Rich daughters don't date the bad boys to piss off their dads? Divorcing parents don't use child custody to hurt each other? To say that there is an extreme subset (drag queens) of a subset (gays) of the total population will use a power/right/whatever to annoy someone, and thus the entire subset (gays) shouldn't have that power/right/whatever is not only a rather poor argument, it's not a how our legal system functions when deciding to deny a pwoer/right.whatever to a group.

] But then I can
] look at the rest of the community, and I take a step back and
] see that gays are a tiny fraction of the overall population,
] but are asking for a massive overhaul of a multitude of
] institutions that span the breadth of our entire society --
] legal, economic, personal, everything.

I don't think so. You propse a a gay couple who adopts a child, breaks up and 1 becomes straight and marries. Why should either of the original gay couple be denied access to that child? If it was a straight couple who adopts and splits, we already have legal presidence: as long as the person isn't placing the child in dangerous situtations, etc, they cannot be denied access (there are more tests than that, this is simplified). My point is their already exists a legal framework to judge whether a person participate in certain American institutions, from adopting a child, to receiving medical benefits, power of attorney, and so on. Simple removing sex as a requirement doesn't suddenly destroy all these institutions. I could be wrong about this, so please supply some more situations where an existing framework cannot deal with a change in sex.

RE: The Values-Vote Myth