I can understand your frustration, buddy. Yes, it must be difficult to have all these churches speaking out their opinions. How dare they have opinions about anything!

Sarcasm aside, you sound like one of those rabid gay secularists who can’t get over their ‘Me, me, me’ sentiments long enough to actually think. It’s gays like you that are really harming the movement. Wanna cause a nice long backlash to gay rights? If so, just keep on doing what you’re doing.

And while we’re at it, let’s see some evidence to back up those wild claims of yours.

And ultimately, where is the equality in treating couples as a more worthy social unit that a single person? In my country (Australia), married couples get tax benefits, greater welfare, cheaper insurance, cheaper hotel rooms, better discount deals on travel (don’t get me started on single supplements, we’ll be here all day).

People should not be discriminated against due to their relationships, I agree. But also, people should not be discriminated against because of their lack of relationships. As Mark’s thread on Respectability Is the New Closet touches upon, this “need” for acceptance as being solely defined as equality with heterosexuals is mindless and limited.

Oh, the grand old days of post-Stonewall gay liberation when we were actually about equality, not respectability.

If you can’t see the discrimination then replace the terms ‘opposite sex’ with ‘irish couple’ or ‘asian couple’ and hopefully you can see it.

It does matter as this division will be present in peoples minds and attitudes towards gay people. This will foster in peoples attitudes and behaviours towards gay people. This can be experienced in very subtle ways to the more obvious.

I feel it is completely irrevelant that ‘marriage’ is considered outdated or irrelevant today. Let’s progress down that road when we can all do it together, and gays and straights can request a more modern legal recognition of relationships at some point in the future

That is discrimination in it’s most clear form. This

I believe in the right to sit at the front of a bus, though I don’t take the bus.

I believe in religious freedom, even if God is only a theory.

I believe in freedom of speech, though I don’t have much to say.

Equality is in its access.

Whether you wanna fuck around forever in/out of marriage, is irrelevant.

But also it means lying rather a lot. Respectability is closetted. It’s about maintaining a conventional front.

And this is what ‘gay activism’ in the US has come to.

What does it say when the monolithic “gay community” promotes one type of relationship as being “better” or more “worthy” of recognition than others? Because this is what is happening with this unhealthy push for same-sex “marriage” – only some gay relationships (the supposedly committed to-death-do-us-part we-are-the-same-as heteros-gay couples) are seen as worthy of recognition.

The queer communities aspired to be the vanguard of individuality and self expression, yet the only point to which we have progressed is to want to have the same rights as heterosexual couples?

Whatever happened to celebrating our lives, our relationships, our differences rather than assimilating into one kind of “acceptable” relationship? Because that is what we will come to – once we have the same “right” of heterosexual marriage, we will ALL be expected to fit into this… or be pitied for not being “normal” or “socially accepted”.

‘…probably most gay men (though probably not most lesbians) are single and probably will be single for most of their lives. With or without civil partnerships/unions.’

As I say, I’m guessing. Like everyone else when it comes to statements about non-heterosexual lifestyles. But some guesses are more believable than others.

I don’t live in London. I live in North Yorkshire, about as far away from metropolitan centres as you can get in England without going to Cornwall – and almost every homo I know here is single. Though that may well be a more a reflection of me than of North Yorks.

Singleness, love it or loathe it, is increasingly ‘normal’. According to The Daily Telegraph, most people over the age of 16 today are either single, divorced or widowed:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2201006/Married-people-account-for-less-than-half-of-population-for-first-time.html

I doubt that gay men are bucking that trend.