PAMFAM10

It's not that difficult to see.  The thing is, very few people believe they are a racist or a bigot.  The ones who do are the idiots wearing it on their sleeves.  
But I will pass on calling anyone out.  Not my place to do so.  And hey, I hope I am wrong!

​So you like four black people, do you like any blacks that are not republicans, most on this board liked colin powell untill..........

​Is my favorite.....
That man did not take no sh......

Good old Jimmy before my time still my favorite coach all time 

I thought sensitivity was only a trait of the left... you guys crying wanting more  government to tell us who we can marry now crying about who the president gives a shout out to. My oh my you guys sounding like liberals. 

​You should if its on govt. property.

I tell you what I do no about the flag. It was the flag of traitors to this nation. A group of men who choose to fight against this nation in order to keep there evil lifestyle. We should not be honoring such evil men. 

The south people forget that the south we're traitors to this nation and choose to spill blood and succeed from this nation why is we honoring them in any way. They don't deserve nothing nothing at all. They we're not heros. Says a lot about the south that in 2015 they're still those who think the should be honored they ain't fight for this nation they tried to kill it.

It would be nice to see central and ozen combined 6a powerhouse in basketball and would compete in football. 

I understand the push to take the Confederate flag down at the South Carolina and Alabama state capitols. But the Dukes? Really?
 
I get that to a lot of people in this country, the Confederate battle flag is a symbol of racism - it's hard for black Americans not to interpret it that way when some of the most famous pictures of the most vehement racists of the twentieth century, like George Wallace, feature massive Confederate flags flying all over the place. The internet is covered with images of the flag at KKK rallies, past and present.
 
But I also get that to millions of Southerners, many of whom are black as well, the flag is a symbol of Southern regional pride. To them, it's meant to identify a particular region, not a racial superiority complex. Charlie Daniels wrote one of the most interesting pieces I've read about this particular issue, in which he talked about growing up in the South during the 1930s, when most people in the United States looked down on the region and its inhabitants. To him, the flag symbolized the pride Southerners held in stark defiance of the condescending views adopted by Americans in other regions of the country. In the same way that the South has embraced the "redneck" persona despite the term's once pejorative connotation, the flag, to many Southerners, was a way to maintain some sort of pride while being looked down upon by everyone else - this is literally the exact same reason college football is so big in the South (seriously, look that up). This is true among even some of the most liberal Southerners; one of my best friends while in Alabama, who was so far left he bordered on communist, owned a Confederate flag and proudly espoused his Southern identity.
 
I think the key element the media has missed in this debate is the context in which the flag and other Confederate symbols are used. Is the flag a symbol of racism at a KKK rally? Undoubtedly, but the American flag arguably is as well in those instances - after all, they're exercising their genuinely American right to free speech while calling for a purely white America, not just a white South. Is it a symbol of racism at bubba's fish camp up by the lake when he has it flying while he's kicked back on the front porch with a six pack? No, it's a symbol of a redneck telling the world that he's a redneck, that he enjoys being a redneck and that he likes to do redneck things and have good redneck times in a redneck part of the country. Is it a symbol of racism in a museum, in a textbook or at a reenactment of a Civil War battle? No, it's a symbol of one of the defining periods of American history, in which our character, unity and integrity as a nation were defined for generations to come.
 
Is it a symbol of racism on top of the General Lee? No, it's a symbol of the rebelliousness that's embodied by the main characters, Bo and Luke Duke, while they're speeding down the highway at a hundred miles an hour, causing problems for the local sheriff, foiling the plans of the local corrupt political boss, straightenin' the curves and flattenin' the hills. Seriously, was the show racist? Absolutely not. Did any one of the characters on the show espouse anything even remotely racist for one second of air time? No. They never even came close.
 
Is it a symbol of racism at the statehouse in South Carolina, where Strom Thurmond served as Governor and made numerous stump speeches advocating hardline segregationist policies? Yes, and it has no place being flown on the grounds of a capitol that should be open to all, that once voted to suppress the rights of millions of black South Carolinians, and that only ever started flying the flag as a protest against civil rights during the 1960s. Is it a symbol of racism at the statehouse down in Alabama, where George Wallace famously made several openly racist speeches, where Jefferson Davis himself oversaw the affairs of the Confederacy while the capitol of the short-lived nation was located in Montgomery during the early days of the Civil War, and which hundreds of black protesters were repeatedly barred from approaching during the marches from Selma? To argue that it isn't, and that it shouldn't come down as a result, would be asinine. Is its brother, the first national flag of the Confederacy, a symbol of racism at the capitol in Austin, where it flies alongside the flags of the five other nations of which Texas has been a part during its history? No, it's a symbol of the reverence with which Texans view their history - good and bad parts alike - just like it is when it flies next to those same five flags outside the Texas Historical Commission, and just like the seal of the Confederacy is when placed next to the seals of the United States, Mexico, France and Spain as those five seals encircle the seal of the Republic of Texas on the floor of the rotunda inside the capitol building.
 
Context, folks. Context. I think most Americans - black, white and whatever other color - understand that. I think the media analysts and fringe elements, who are just about the only ones pushing this issue, don't. Maybe that's why they're all so surprised when they see the results of opinion polls like the one below:
 

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Leave the Duke boys alone. They were never meanin' no harm, and they didn't do anybody any either.

Always gonna have dumbarses out there.

@NYDailyNews: Vandals sprayed racist messages on the truck of a white family with black guests in Texas.
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Welcome to 2015

@KTLA: Wisc. man arrested for threats against Obama wrote "Killing him is our CONSTITUTIONAL DUTY!”
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Welcome to 2015 Part 2… 

Under the contemporary view of marriage - that is, the view of marriage as a legal institution as much as a religious or social institution - this ruling couldn't have been more spot on. While I agree with the reservations Justice Roberts has expressed in the past about the application of 14th Amendment protections to prevent perceived discrimination outside the text of a particular law as opposed to discrimination within the text of the law, the fact remains that marriage is an institution legally integral to the function of American society, and that the same-sex marriage bans deny access to that institution, and all the rights and benefits thereof, to a minority. This was the right and necessary thing to do.
 
That being said, this never would have been a problem to begin with had the states stayed out of the marriage business.
 
Western churches were proclaiming marriages long before governments ever had anything to do with them; indeed, the first laws passed regarding marriage in Medieval England were instituted by the Catholic Church in England in 1215, and, on that note, the earliest forms of marriage licenses in England weren't issued by any element of the English government, instead being issued by the English bishops themselves. Marriage was, at that time, a religious institution, not a legal institution. It had always been a religious institution prior to that, and it would remain a religious institution and a religious institution alone in the minds of the English and of the different peoples born out of the English commonwealth for centuries to come.
 
It wasn't until much later that states became involved in the marriage business. Some states started issuing them far earlier than others; Massachusetts, for example, began issuing marriage licenses while it was still a colony in the 1600s. Other states took far longer; Texas, for example, was one of the last states to adopt the practice, not issuing marriage licenses until the mid-1960s (my grandparents' marriage licenses weren't marriage licenses, they were marriage certificates issued by their respective Methodist churches in the 1950s). The rationale behind the transition to marriage licenses varied among the states - states in the North largely adopted the practice to complement and enforce tax laws, while states in the South often did so to enforce bans on interracial and incestuous marriages.
 
It should be noted here that marriage licenses, which are the legal incarnations of the institution of marriage, weren't adopted to expand or enable marriage, but to enforce preexisting laws that related to marriage. Also note that this occurred in a time when the "separation of church and state" was just beginning to be incorporated, and when many Americans, including the legislators carving out American marital laws, still viewed the wall between church and state as porous and unidirectional. Given this gray area between church and state which existed in the minds of most Americans when marriage licenses became a state practice, it probably didn't mean much to most people at the time - after all, how could a people who had attended public schools where prayer was said every morning object to state involvement in a religious practice? And so, the new laws were never really objected to, and were in fact embraced by the racists, social engineers and tax hawks of the era. No court cases came forth, no religious freedom arguments were made against them, and marriage licenses issued by the states became a normal part of American life.
 
Now fast forward a few generations. The states have slowly incorporated several other elements of what's now understood to be marriage into the legal institution created by the license, itself. Visitation rights, power of attorney, tax benefits and other such things have created a robust legal union grafted onto the original religious institution. The word "marriage" has slowly transitioned from a word of deep religious and spiritual meaning into a legal concept and social practice. In the minds of many, marriage is no longer an institution proclaimed by God, it's an institution bestowed by the government that just happens to take place in a church under the officiating of a pastor because of religious beginnings. Our conception of marriage today is not what it originally was or, frankly, what it should be, it's the conception of an institution that has been gradually separated from the church and usurped by the state.
 
This offends basic American political philosophy. If we're to be true to the "separation of church and state" - if we're to have a government which does not interfere in the internal workings of the various religions without just cause - then the states, in principle, should return marriage to the institutions which created it.
 
Now, most of the people reading this post probably think that a move like that would be a death sentence for gay marriage. After all, if the churches were given sole domain over marriage, institutions that have defined marriage as between a man and a woman (or in some cases, a man and several women) for thousands of years aren't going to up and start marrying two men and two women, right? And that would effectively render the legal benefits of marriage off limits to same-sex couples, right? The answer to both of those questions is "no," and for two reasons.
 
The first has to do with the legal rights of marriage as they stand today. There would be no legal issue with a sequestration of the legal and religious institutions if done properly. We've all heard about the "civil union" idea - it could easily be repurposed to serve as legal a union for any two people, not just two people of the same sex. And the word marriage can simply be relegated to churches by law as the symbolic, religious union, for the churches to bestow on whatever two (or more) people they please, regardless of sex or sexual orientation.
 
This brings me to the second reason: there are churches out there that will marry two people of the same sex. In fact, there have been for a while, and I would argue that had states never started issuing marriage licenses at all and churches been left to control marriage from the beginning, gay marriage actually would have happened years ago. I'm sure there are people out there who think that's preposterous. Those people have likely never heard of the Episcopal Diocese in Alabama, which has openly supported same-sex marriage for the better part of a decade. In fact, the pastor at one of the largest Episcopal churches in Alabama, located in Birmingham, is a lesbian with a partner, and that  partner has been extended benefits by that Episcopal church for the better part of that decade as well. If a church in Alabama, the heart of the Bible Belt, has been that dedicated to same-sex marriage for that long, it stands to reason that other churches in equally conservative states would have been as well, and that being the case, it further stands to reason that those churches would have begun performing same-sex marriages long before this Supreme Court ruling came down were it not for state laws preventing same-sex couples from obtaining state-issued marriage licenses, and thus that same-sex marriage would have been brought to those states years earlier. This might also make a good point in a discussion about why the government should have extremely limited involvement in the day-to-day lives of Americans generally, but that's a conversation for another time.

But most conservatives are strongly tied to the church and they'll put that before anything. Then again wanting the government to say who's allowed to marry who sounds very liberal to me.

​Uh, maybe the guys wasn't running away, unarmed and got popped a few times in the back?   Other than that, couldn't tell you.

I'll tell him that" boy if you ever(15 curse words) you hear me son" as honest as it gets.

I always keep my beliefs and religion out of politics if you ask me do I agree with gay marriage I'll say no. Ask me do I think gays should have right to get married I say yes. Why the contradiction because in the US our founding fathers agreed we should all pursue happiness without suppression from any religion.  So basing any policy strictly off religion is unAmerican in my opinion. We wouldn't want other groups forcing us to live like them because of there beliefs. To be free means to be free. If everyone in the world was gay except you(any of us). That still have no effect on you and your relationship with whom ever you believe in.

I'll tell them nobody girl or boy should be dressed like that honestly...........
but if your asking what would I tell someone that age about gays. I'll tell them the Bible teaches us that it is wrong to be with the same sex that's why God made Adam and Eve. That the guy is doing wrong in God eyes and will have to answer to God one day. 

You know out of everything that's wrong with America it's stuff like this that is the most troubling we love to judge every detail about some one race gender sexuality clother hairstyle etc. How bout everyone learn that just because someone disagree with your view on life doesn't make them any less American than you. I believe at least 98% or all politicians regardless of party is doing what they believe is right for america. We need to find a common ground or we truly will be lost. A house divided cannot stand. Congress wouldn't even agree that the sky is blue.

​My point, I suppose, is that Mr. Madison's interpretation of the document is more relevant than Mr. Smitty's.  You certainly implied that the "separation of church and state" is a concept super-imposed on the document by liberals.  I have merely provided multiple examples of why that is not the case. 

I always keep my beliefs and religion out of politics if you ask me do I agree with gay marriage I'll say no. Ask me do I think gays should have right to get married I say yes. Why the contradiction because in the US our founding fathers agreed we should all pursue happiness without suppression from any religion.  So basing any policy strictly off religion is unAmerican in my opinion. We wouldn't want other groups forcing us to live like them because of there beliefs. To be free means to be free. If everyone in the world was gay except you(any of us). That still have no effect on you and your relationship with whom ever you believe in.

I always keep my beliefs and religion out of politics if you ask me do I agree with gay marriage I'll say no. Ask me do I think gays should have right to get married I say yes. Why the contradiction because in the US our founding fathers agreed we should all pursue happiness without suppression from any religion.  So basing any policy strictly off religion is unAmerican in my opinion. We wouldn't want other groups forcing us to live like them because of there beliefs. To be free means to be free. If everyone in the world was gay except you(any of us). That still have no effect on you and your relationship with whom ever you believe in.

I always keep my beliefs and religion out of politics if you ask me do I agree with gay marriage I'll say no. Ask me do I think gays should have right to get married I say yes. Why the contradiction because in the US our founding fathers agreed we should all pursue happiness without suppression from any religion.  So basing any policy strictly off religion is unAmerican in my opinion. We wouldn't want other groups forcing us to live like them because of there beliefs. To be free means to be free. If everyone in the world was gay except you(any of us). That still have no effect on you and your relationship with whom ever you believe in.

Since the SC doesn't care what I think (or what the Constitution says), I  can't see any reason multiple partners couldn't marry.  Having them for dinner is a problem.  Man w/3 wives, heck, four more mouths to feed.  If they're pleasant, I'd go to their house to eat.   I got principles but I can be bought.