Ach, you voted on it. My conscience nagged at me and I was just about to flip my tag to the other side. Now I can't change the tag and I'm stuck on the conservative side of the debate.

It's cold over here. :)

Good point.

But... "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner."

While we should respect majority rule, we also must maintain minority rights.

The question is whether or not marriage is a right.

Agreed. "White guilt" is a term invented by conservatives seeking to block anti-discrimination efforts. Affirmative action was a rational set of ideas intended to break cyclical discrimination, feelings of guilt had little or nothing to do with it.

What are you talking about?

Women who get abortions don't get them because they want to kill a fetus. They regard abortion as a necessary evil. They get an abortion because they feel the consequences of not getting an abortion are worse.

Saying pro-choicers are pro-abortion is like saying America is pro-mass-murder because we nuked Japan.

Ok here's a hypothetical example. I'm intentionally oversimplifying and exaggerating things for illustrative purposes:

1) Whichever country produces the most goods is able to dominate the global economy.

2) Global warming is caused by production of goods.

3) If global warming gets too bad horrible consequences result.

4) Thus, if each country follows their own self interest there will be horrible consequences.

Substitute global warming for any negative side effect of power seeking.

"I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms."

- Alan Greenspan

The American Psychological Association says otherwise:

"most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation"

I have a theory about the apparent opposition to gay marriage by black people: Because of Obama, black churches had a super heavy get out the vote effort; so maybe it's not so much a reflection of blacks opposing gay rights as church-goers opposing gay rights.

I don't have any statistics to back that up -- just a guess.

Probably not worth the risk. He could have a knife, you never know.

I like your ideas about education. Needless to say however, what you're suggesting would be a massive undertaking that could drastically reshape society -- it would definitely encounter resistance from the conservative (anti-change) crowd. I'm not sure it's practical in the sort term.

"[the UN] compromises our sovereignty as a nation."

Yes, that's the point. Each country sacrifices a bit of control for the greater good. This is important because problems inevitably arise when you have separate entities acting in their own self-interest without anything to stop them (e.g. tragedy of the commons). Also, it's not like the UN runs the world. (...please don't tell me you think the UN runs the world.)

"we relinquish our sovereignty to powers which are not democratically elected by the people of our nation"

So you would be ok with the UN if it's leadership was democratically elected -- say by the entire world?

I like the idea, but his delivery is boring. You can tell he's reading a teleprompter and he's using too much campaign rhetoric. What I want is simple information delivered conversationally.