The loss of life was tragic and avoidable.

Look over Zimmerman's re-enactment of the events to the Sanford Police, filmed the day after the shooting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHyIpO43NRg

INteresting claims attacking Martin's re-enactment included.

Zimmerman, in the year since the event, has gained close to 100 lbs.

In the spirit in which your request is offered, Martin was measured as 71 inches (that's 5'11" ) and 158 lbs at autopsy. Zimmerman is reported to be 68 inches and about 170.

Agreed that the media "presstitutes" in alliance with our ever-present crop of racial-hatred-profiteers, have distorted the information by cherry picking and outright lies. On the other hand, I went looking for pictures of Trayvon Martin and all I could find were sad images of a very young black guy trying on an image.

I believe Martin DID assault Zimmerman, and Zimmerman did shoot in self-defense within the law.

Agreed, but how to fight the destruction of our great nation? I think the Tea Party folks are our best choice at this point. And the media construction of them is a blatant lie. But that's what they in the media are going to do no matter what. Someone has to stand against that, and the Tea Party folks are doing just that.

Again, I'd have no problem getting government out of marriage IFF all the legal and financial benefits and limitations of marriage were removed from all law. See, those benefits and limits are "government interference" too.

Agreed. In fact we have one already. It's called the Tea Party. And they're standing up against not only an adversarial media that has painted a vastly distorted picture of them, but of moderate conservatives who have swallowed that media image whole. The Tea Party is actually the reason the House is Republican today. Without the tea party candidates, you've got a democrat house, senate, and executive branch, and a willing supreme court.

Article fails for the same reason most arguments on this issue fail. They take the relationship between the consenting adults as the central purpose of marriage, which it is not. Please, please, please, just think of WHY there is such a thing as marriage in the first place, let alone why it occurs as an institution in almost EVERY human culture in one form or another (a community acknowledgment of permanent relation between one male and one female.)

If we didn't have conjugal marriage handed to us by tradition, we'd have to invent it.

The primary reason marriage exists at all is the unique nature of heterosexual intimacy and its product. If you remove that, then I would agree the community in wh**ever form, would have NO interest in approving a given consensual relation between consenting adults, nor would it need to incentivize those relationships with community supported benefits.

Of course those hoping to remove the government from marriage would absolutely CHOKE on the removal of all laws regarding the institution, most certainly the removal of the benefits attached to the institution. Because THAT's the REAL issue. I want the benefits without surrendering to the limits. Eliminate the limits, but increase the benefit. Why? Because I want it. And if you don't, I'll scream UNFAIR! and call you names like "bigot."

Sorry, that's how I sees it.

So honesty, self and other, is futile? War of all against all for you, ldsuttonjr? Orson Scott Card noted that," f*****m of the left is as unattractive as is f*****m from the left." IF I can't count on my own party for honesty and integrity, what's left?

No, no, no. We agree about who is working to preserve the constitution vs. who is working to destroy it. It occurred to me that the difference between conservatives and liberal progressives is that one wants to preserve respect for the constitution, while the other wants to twist it to serve identity politics. I think our education system would be doing everyone a service by respecting the constitution, not destroying it, and that destroying it (or attempting to destroy it) is close to the treason mentioned above.

Agreed, Old Roy. I shouldn't have equated Republican/conservatives with education. I was thinking of the conservative establishment in the universities of the early 20th century. The left has taken the high ground there starting in the 40's and 50's, and hasn't let go since. (I think it has something to do with the flight of liberal-left academics to the US in WWII) I have my own academic horror stories from 1990 through 2001 when I finished my graduate program in the arts, a hornets nest of liberal hegemony.

But can we agree that conservatives DO engage in "social engineering" to the degree we are able? We all want to "remake" society or at least preserve what we think works from change, both forms of "engineering" society.

Only if the goal is to defeat/destroy the US Constitution rather than respect and uphold it.

Of course since education in America has been taken over by leftwing radicals and know-nothings who don't dare speak out, essentially public school education IS bordering on treason. Look at Bradley Manning for example.

Republicans have our own forms of social engineering. It is done through the education system. We "construct" the coming society by what we permit and censor in our next generation and in our public schools. Just look at the "progress" being made with sexual orientation in the last 10 years. All that came because of the push in the 80's and 90's in the public schools and entertainment media.

THAT'S social engineering.

Gay marriage is a great example of liberal/progressive intentional distortion for the purpose of socio-political engineering.

The definition of marriage is the issue, but homosexual advocates, aided by a sympathetic mainstream media, turned the conversation into an identity political power thrust that had nothing wh**ever to do with marriage.

So now we have a new "definition" of marriage that is emotion-centered and nearly meaningless. One wonders if the destruction of marriage and the nuclear family by dilution wasn't the goal all along.

So what exactly are the criteria for marriage now? And what are its enforceable limits? Guess what. There aren't any.

LOL. Been there, done THAT. And wish I hadn't. My statement comes from a number of times when I did NOT respond properly and only Monday-morning quarterbacked myself and my responses. In the same vein I was wishing that Paula Deen had played dumb and asked her interrogator what "n-word" he meant, because she could think of a bunch of them, getting the interrogator to use the word, and then she could have acted shocked, and said, "oh, I don't use THAT word, my parents had morals." LOL Of course easier to say now than in the thick of the fight. But maybe, just maybe, forewarned is fore-armed. I'm hoping!