Your arguments throughout this post are almost offensively presumptive and making wild and unsupported assumptions about my values and perceptions, and makes you seem ignorant and stupid, and in no way different from (and especially not superior to) the people you deplore for making judgments about others' lifestyles.

So far as I know, parental visitation rights have nothing to do with the marital status of the parent. You don't get better or worse visitation rights when you remarry.

Gay people and single people can both adopt children. If an adopting authority has a list of criteria to gradiate prospective adoptors and uses this to favor married couples over non-traditional families, being forced to legally recognize a novelty marriage will not stop them from discriminating, it will simply cause the discriminating agency to readjust their guidelines ("for the good of the child" of course) so that checking the 'Married' box will not carry the same weight, and other criteria will be formulated that discriminate against disfavored situations. BTW, in that example we see a case for the complaints that same-sex-marriage will destroy traditional marriage - rather than knuckle under and grant to same-sex couples what they had previously only granted to married couples, people who seriously oppose same-sex-unions will simply withdraw the privileges they extend to marriages. Or other things will happen, such as a post on the CMB a while back, where the Catholic Church threatened to close up their secular operations in an area if that jurisdiction tried to force them to offer the same benefits to same-sex-married employees which they offered to traditionally married workers. It DOES indirectly screw with everyone else.

You don't. What a shame if they didn't get those votes all those women who died at Bunker Hill and Yorktown were fighting for. But seriously, I have the same objections. Sufferage of a group is the business of the community. All the federal government had the right to impose was voting in Federal (i.e. Presidential) elections. It was none of the business of people in Massachusettes, or Washington DC, whether or not the women of New Hampshire could vote. If a woman wanted to vote that badly, she could go to a place where she IS allowed. No one should have had the right to enforce their opinions or views of the matter on others. And don't try citing slavery. That was one of those novel and non-traditional practices imposed by outsiders from above, for the benefit of a few, to the detriment of the majority. It was evil, but it was also not right to legislate morality on people who did not share it. Abolitionists were the fundamentalist religious radicals of their day, who insisted on imposing their religious beliefs on the public. You are making a false argument in another way on the topic of slavery, since you cannot prove it would not have gone away on its own, especially with the industrial revolution. Perhaps, had the moralizing reformers not forced their view of right and wrong down everyone's throat, we would not have had the problems of racism, which is called legacy of slavery, but might arguably better be cited as a legacy of abolition. There was nothing, for example, to stop opponents of slavery from buying and freeing slaves (since importing new ones was Constitutionally forbidden), or using economic brinksmanship from rendering the financially inefficient insitution moribund, as was done against the Soviet Union. Violating the legal system and trampling on the protections of individuals & groups, no matter how wrong those groups may be, merely puts everyone's freedom at risk. This is the principle by which we allow the use of offensive speech or unpopular religious beliefs, for if we let them persecute cults and pornographers, there is no protection for those who would use speech for good or the cause of freedom. Really, the cause of abolition was simply a case of people being to lazy to do the work bit by bit, and sought to have the government make their bugaboo go away. Likewise with same-sex-marriage - they don't want to do all the work to gain acceptance at all the levels they wish, they simply want to have the same recognition given them by force.

Prohibition was one more thing like same-sex marriage - a novelty and untraditional change forced down everyone's throat by government fiat. It caused great social turmoil and damage because it disrupted entrenched practices and forced people to follow what one group believed to be the morally proper way. An archaeologist or anthorpologist would be hard-pressed to say which has a longer history of use in human society, alcohol or marriage, but screwing around with either would seem to be counter-indicated.

I would have wanted the change to be voluntary or accepted, rather than imposed from outside and above. And once again, that was a reform imposed. Segregation was ORIGINALLY the brainchild of progressives and reformers who sought to protect black people from having to compete with whites in day-to-day life and preserve their society intact. The expressed ideal, after all, was "seperate but equal." I would have opposed it in the first place, because no government has the right to tell a business where to sit their customers or how to serve them. Either way. If one restaurant chooses to segregate their white and black customers and another does not, the first will attract those customers who prefer to eat apart from other races. It will attract those who don't care if its services, goods or prices are better. If blacks could get a better meal or a better price at the segregated restaurant, that would be up to them, and if segregation really was a problem, the economics would take care of it. In any event, a business either owns or pays for the property on which it is based, and has the right to arrange matters as it pleases. It has the right to keep customers out from behind the counter, or in one section of the service area, or to refuse service to whomever it wants for any reason, at least legally. Morally, maybe not, but who is to say which set of morals must be followed? Those moralizers in whom you approve, when they say equal politeness trumps the right to use private property as one wishes, may one day be replaced by equally sincere and devout moralizers who think sodomy is a capital offense. Best to let each go his own way and do as he wishes with himself and his property.

Yes. It is the employer's property, and he has the right to dispose of it as he sees fit. If he wants to pay discriminatory or unfair wages, that is his business, which would suffer from want of workers, AND invite a competitor to offer better wages or working conditions. When an outside, non-market force compels changes in the market, the effects reach further than the immediate mandated change. A little regulation will only create more problems. If individuals choose to use their freedom to be jerks, at least the freedom exists for others to use in a more positive way. Taking away freedom will not necessarily stop the jerks but it will curtail the positive uses.

Absolutely. He should be free to accept any form of payment he wishes. A doctor should be free to refuse to deal with an insurance company or policy if he so chooses. If his behavior is medically unethical, that is a matter for his professional authorities. Such a doctor would lose his customers to a free market if regulations had not made most people slaves to their insurance policies anyway.

So we are supposed to believe that a homosexual person in a committed relationship who is too lazy or improvident to take care of a living will or power of attorney will go through the trouble to plan and go through a wedding ceremony? You can designate anyone you want as a medical proxy, and the marriage thing doesn't open any doors in this regard that are not already open.

Because insurance is a private business transaction. No one should be obligated to insure anyone they do not want to. Why would an insurance company refuse an opportunity to make money? As for cases of employers providing insurance, that is the employer's business what they choose to provide. If their employees don't like that, they can work for an employer who WILL provide it, or who will pay them enough to purchase insurance for their partner.
I would prefer if employers did not provide insurance and just paid us instead, so I could actually USE more of my compensation as I wished. I don't need the vast majority of the insurance I am covered for and would prefer to buy a less comprehensive policy for a substantial savings and more money in my own pocket! Employer-provided insurance started out as a trick to evade a government-mandated wage freeze anyway. The requirements that employers provide insurance to their workers only takes money out of workers' pockets and gives it to the insurance companies, and allows another avenue for employers to discriminate. If they could go back to providing all compensation in the form of real money, this issue would never even arise, because people would have the money available to buy whatever insurance they wished, and the insurance companies would have to adjust to the demands of their customers, rather provide a blanket policy better suited to the needs of a large employer. As it is, employers who offer health insurance discriminate against the healthy by effectively paying sick (and logically less productive) employees more. By not bearing the costs of their health directly, there is less incentive for employees to maintain that health. Why watch your diet, avoid unhealthy habits or keep in shape, when you can have the consequences taken care of for free?

Not ethical, but it should be legal.

I would if I wished to retain your services. It is MY money and I have the right to do with it as I please. If I choose to exclusively hire Christians or right-handed people, that is my business. What if my clientele were prejudiced and I lost business because some bureaucrat or legislator decided that I should not be able to choose employees who will bring in more business rather than drive it away?

Why not? Why would I want such a person touching my hypothetical kids anyway? And how many such doctors would there really be in a majority-Christian society anyway? Economics would force some of them to swallow their bile in order to feed their own children.

Using "hobos" as interchangable terminology for homeless people only reveals your ignorance. In truth, hobos were a migrant labor pool with their own subculture. In any event, policemen work for a police department, which is controlled and maintained by the community. For the most part, that means tax payers, who support the police department from taxes paid on their property or incomes, and thus the police officer's responsibility is to a group of which homeless people are highly unlikely to be members. If the police department or the community which controls it has no problem with permitting such behavior, that is not moral, but it is also not a legal issue. There are sound reasons why property owners or wage earners in a community would not wish homeless people to be welcome there, as their unpleasant presence degrades the property value of homes and can drive away property buyers and customers, or else could be a source of under-the-table competition for workers' jobs. If such behavior on the officer's part is not approved of by the department, that is an internal matter and there are channels through which to resolve the issue and correct the officer's behavior. If the community does not mind the police treating such people in this manner, the homeless person has the choice of altering either his circumstances or location (a dead bum is no better for business, so moving is likely to be encouraged, or else incarceration, in which case the homeless person now has shelter). Why should the homeless person's "right" to vagrancy trump the rights of the community?

Yes. The rights of the employer to spend his money as he chooses far and away trump the right of another person to have the employer pay for an expense he has not incurred. And what the hell is wrong with homosexual #2? Why does he/she/it not have insurance through his/her/its employer? Why is it the fault of the employer that his worker "married" an unemployed bum who does not pull his/her/its weight? This is an example of the practices of marriage developing to accomodate the traditional sense of the institution, which are out of place for the novelty useage. The necessity of acquiring the income for a family unit, as every person with two brain cells to rub together knows, fell on the male parent, as the female parent was both less capable of the majority of remunerative productive activity, and handicapped by her biologically mandated role in the reproductive process. As the overwhelming majority of the work force gravitated towards such reproductive & economic arrangements, the primary incentive for laborers was to provide for their domestic partners and offspring. Thus, employers, when prevented from bidding on employees by the government freezing wages, in order to attract workers, offered a different service for the benefit of the laborer's dependants, who were his primary motivation for working at all. THE ENTIRE CONCEPT OF A DEPENDANT SPOUSE IS ROOTED IN THE PRESUMPTION OF A HETEROSEXUAL DOMESTIC PARTNERSHIP! There is no biological difference in a homosexual couple "forcing" one to undertake the reproductive role or making one the more viable income earner. The choices about division of responsibilities for a homosexual couple, such as income-earning roles, domestic-maintenance roles, or child-care roles are purely arbitrary and are the choice of the couple in question. Why should an employer be required to go along with a choice, made in part by someone to whom he has no responsibility, that has no bearing on him and is not an established or long-standing societal custom? Why should one partner's employer be required to provide health care for the other partner, simply because THEY chose to associate in that manner? Why penalize the one employer because he provides a better insurance plan, or employed someone willing to unnecessarily support his/her spouse?

If it is none of an employer's business how an employee lives his life outside of work, it should be none of his concern how the employee pays for his life. If the employer is funding his relationships, the employer should have a voice in the conduct of those relationships.

For the suffering you cite, I would blame the laws and practices which all but require people to depend on employers for their health care, and demand that the free market be allowed to operate in a truly free manner. Such a problem would not arise in a truly free market, and such a case as you invent can only come about thanks to excessive regulation. It is like the Dutch boy putting his fingers in the holes in the dyke, but that just allows the water pressure to build up and causing new leaks to spring out. If the dyke was not there in the first place, maybe the water would only be ankle high, but because of the unstable situation created by an artificially imposed dyke, he HAS to play whack-a-mole with the leaks because the alternative is to get swept away by the pending deluge.

The only "moral" principle beneath your issues is a childish belief that just because something would benefit someone, they are entitled to get it, regardless of who bears the costs. No one is entitled to food, shelter, health or health care, or clothing or employment, except what he or she can obtain through an exchange of goods or services. On the other hand, every is entitled to exchange their own goods or services for whatever price they can obtain without coercion. And that goes for EVERYONE. Merchants have the right to choose what prices they will sell their commodities for, and consumers have the right to decide whether or not they will pay that much, and no one has the right to force either party to accept a transaction on another's terms. THIS is what the classical liberals meant by the rights to "Life, Liberty & Property" and what the Declaration of Independance was attempting to express with the term "pursuit of happiness."