And yes I am saying that not voting for a mormon because he is a mormon is as insane as not voting for a woman or person that is not pasty white.

I am all set with Gore.

In that case, if Gore, Edwards, and Obama are all in it, and all still impressive in their ways, then I don’t know who I’d vote for.

I’ll tell you who I won’t vote for, though, and that’s Hillary Clinton. She ain’t ever getting my vote. Not even in the general. I don’t like Guiliani or McCain, and I’m pretty sure I don’t like Romney, but I REALLY don’t like Clinton. If she makes it to the general, I’ll probably find a third-party candidate to vote for.

That would be if I voted.

Kyle, getting the “political news” from the daily show is the same as getting it from the political comics in the newspaper.

* Adam, good link on the Civil Union/Civil Marriage thing. It helped me changed my mind. I’ll take a civil marriage, thank you very much.

* Dovev, in Adam’s post, he said something about how Obama’s stance is posturing for votes, but I don’t think that’s fair. At most, it’s cynical. I know people who feel exactly as Obama does. They believe homosexuals should have all the rights and benefits and responsibilities that come with marriage, but they don’t want homosexuals to use the word marriage. None of the people I know are trying to win votes.

* Josh, in the second-to-last season of West Wing, there’s an episode (episode 20: In God We Trust) where it’s revealed the Republican candidate for President, played by Alan Alda, doesn’t go to church and hasn’t believed in God since his wife died of cancer. At the end of the episode, the press asks him if he believes in God, and he says, “I don’t see how we can a separation of Church and state in this government if we have to pass a religious test to get into this government. And I want to warn all the press and all the voters out there, if you demand expressions of religious faith from politicians, you are just begging to be lied to. They won’t all lie to you, but a lot of them will. And it’ll be the easiest lie they ever had to tell to get your votes. So from this day to the end of this campaign, I’ll answer any question anyone has on government, but if you have have a question on religion, please, go to Church.” Of course, it should be said, that the writers of West Wing — mostly liberals — tried to create a Republican candidate they would vote for.

* Dovev, I second that on getting rid of “trivial politics.” But it’d be interesting to see what kind of policies this could actually motivate.

* Adam, the founding fathers are traditionally considered the group of men who helped write the U.S. Constitution, and not so much the Puritans who landed on Plymouth Rock. Within the founding fathers, you have pantheists, deists, and all sorts of varieties of Christians.

* Adam again, re: The Daily Show; I don’t think it is filled with cynicism. If you watch it, you’ll see how earnestly Jon Stewart wants to believe in government again.

* Justin & Josh: Oops, you corrected Adam already.

* Justin, re: the use of the Daily Show: while I think the ultimate goal of the Daily Show is to make us laugh — Jon Stewart made that clear when he appeared on Crossfire (an appearance that led to the cancellation of Crossfire)–but I also think that it’s as good a show as any to get “the news.” With that being said, I think anyone that depends on television news as their primary source of information is woefully uninformed. In the same way that one you should use Wikipedia, one should use the TV news (including the Daily Show); that is, use it a spur to find out more, and not as a final source all its own. With the Daily Show, you can at least know what motivates their selection of what to air and what not to air (the chance for a laugh), whereas with the regular news, who knows what ulterior motive lies behind each segment and news crawl.

* Justin: I second the idea of taking the words of the founding fathers for what their worth — they were not gods, nor did they want to be.

Now, just to try to bring it all back to Obama for a moment, we know that, at this moment anyway, Obama has Adam’s vote. Where do the rest of you stand?

Again, just a straw poll here. We won’t hunt you down and kill you if you change your mind tomorrow.

The problem we run into with marriage and the constitution is in the big C it says that each state has to abide by other states laws. For instance if it is legal for a person to get married at 15 in Alabama and the legal age is 18 in Texas, if the couple gets married in Alabama then moves to Texas, Texas has to recognize their marriage.