I believe it is 100%

Sorry, couldn’t help myself.

Do you have any idea at all what percentage of those receiving unemployment benefits actually lost their jobs for slacking or stealing? Claiming that it’s the state of the whole group is grossly false. It ignores the numbers of people who were laid off for reasons beyond their control, or whose employer went out of business, or who lost their own business. For many of these people, unemployment benefits keep them afloat long enough to find a new job, particularly in the current environment. The unlucky will still be unable to find a job, meaning that they will eventually fall off of the unemployment rolls and no longer be eligible to receive benefits. The popular conservative belief that unemployment benefits encourage people to stay unemployed is horribly misguided. It’s barely enough to get by from month-to-month.

You obviously haven’t bothered to educate yourself on the crime rate among illegal immigrants. Or to learn exactly why so many people sneak across the border every year to put up with the scorn and contempt directed at them. Or to contemplate just how your life would be affected if all of the illegal immigrants in the U.S. were to suddenly be deported en masse.

Based solely on your opinions regarding the unemployed and illegal immigrants, it would be easy to jump to certain conclusions about you. Your opinions demonstrate a very narrow, uninformed view of the world. It would appear that you limit yourself to information from sources like Fox News and conservative web sites, ignoring the vast sea of information at your fingertips. That’s the easy and natural thing to think.

But in reality, as individuals, there is more to us than what we post on internet forums. Most of my family members are conservatives who hold some extreme views that I strongly disagree with. One of my uncles thinks unemployment benefits make people lazy and encourage them not to find a job. Another uncle actually believed all of that Death Panel nonsense Sara Palin started a while back. But both of them, and all the rest, are decent people who are willing to lend a helping hand to anyone who needs it and would never intentionally hurt anyone directly.

That, in short, is the problem with American politics. We have decent people picking up extreme, harmful views about other groups, then pushing to get laws implemented based on those views. Individually, many of them are kind and generous (though there are assuredly a number of bad apples), but get them together at a political rally and they become a dangerous, riled up mob. It doesn’t help that the rhetoric from our politicians adds fuel to the fire.

This is why I take issue with people like Rick Santorum. His position allows him to encourage and reinforce the belief that oppressing the rights of others is both acceptable and responsible, but he refuses to acknowledge that this is precisely what he is doing.

I don’t see any way to support gay marriage without also supporting marriage between a man and a young girl(or boy), a man and a corpse, or a man and his dog.

This is the classic slippery slope fallacy. It’s a kind of argument that can be applied to any debate position you could take, which makes it utterly pointless. For example:

Allowing people to own guns will lead to people owning tanks!

Because alcohol is legal, it will eventually be legal to snort cocaine!

It can go the other way, too:

Prohibiting same-sex marriage will lead to the prohibition of interracial marriage!

Prohibiting same-sex marriage will lead to the prohibition of international marriage!

How about this one: We should make marriage illegal because now people want to legalize same-sex marriage!

And on and on. The particular scenarios you cite are commonly argued from the right in debates on gay marriage. All across the internet, the reasons why those arguments are nonsense have been laid out by countless bloggers and columnists. One reason is the fallacy I mention above (applicable to any argument). But I’ll relate a couple of additional points here.

First, we are talking about adults who the law determines meet the criteria for legal consent. Children, dead people and animals (and though you do not mention them, certain classes of the handicapped) are not qualified for legal consent. The debate about same-sex marriage is not about allowing one person to marry another without their legal consent, but allowing legally consenting adults to marry regardless of their sex. Very, very different issues.

Second, what may or may not tangentially arise in the future is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand. Pedophiliac, necrophiliac and bestial marriage have absolutely no relation at all to same-sex marriage. They are completely separate issues that do not rely on the legality of same-sex marriage. One can quite easily advocate for any of them right now (and I’m sure that people are). Legal issues should be debated on their own merits.

The slippery slope argument is an easy one to make. It’s also an indicator that there aren’t any good reasons for opposition. Same-sex marriage is about the legal rights of two consenting adults. What are valid reasons for opposing that?

There is no “sexuality,” no “sexual orientation.” They’re fetishes, pure and simple.

A fetish is not a fundamental characteristic of sexual behavior — it’s an enhancement of sexual pleasure. A man who has a fetish for big breasts will derive more pleasure when having intercourse with big-breasted women, but that doesn’t mean he will exclude sex with small-breasted women. The same can be said of any fetish. Heterosexuals, however, are not generally attracted to the same sex. Homosexuals are not generally attracted to the opposite sex. Both groups have intercourse with the sex they are attracted to at the exclusion of the other. That is very, very different from a fetish.

If homosexuality really were a fetish, I think that would be an argument for same-sex marriage. After all, we don’t currently prohibit men from marrying large-breasted women.

Somehow it’s still considered “acceptable” to say that all furries should die in a fire, but if you think homosexuality is anything less than the wave of the future, you’re automatically labeled the worst kind of evil bigot. I find this laughable when the two are basically the same thing.

I don’t know where you’re from, but where I’m from it is most certainly not acceptable to say a group of people should “die in a fire.”

The two people getting married rarely had a say in it until the excesses of the modern era. In many places in the world, the woman still has no say in which man becomes her husband, and they have sex when he wants to, whether she’s interested or not.

So the freedom to choose your own partner is a modern excess? Are you advocating that we revert to the days when women were forced into marriage? Should we emulate those societies in the world where it is still common practice?

In short, marriage has never been about “who you love.”

Be careful about that word “never.” In modern Western society, marriage is very much about love for a large number of people. Sure, there are marriages of convenience, but the days of arranged political or religious marriages as a common practice are long behind us.

Marriage is one man and one woman. It is a construct which the modern US government pays entirely too much attention to, particularly given it is, as before, a religious construct, meaning the government trying to regulate it is a gross violation of separation of church and state.

Marriage ceased to be exclusively a religious institution the moment the government began issuing marriage licenses and offering legal benefits to married couples. But it is certainly not a violation of the separation of church and state. The idea of marriage as a government institution is solely about legal status and benefits. If you want to have a marriage ceremony based on the tenets of your religion without the government getting involved, go right ahead. You can call yourself married according to your religion. There’s nothing illegal about that. And, assuming you live together, in many (if not all) states, you’ll eventually be granted all the rights of a legally married couple under common law marriage rules.

My proposal: eradicate any sort of governmental recognition of marriage, leave it as the religious ceremony it was always supposed to be

I have no problem with the abolition of marriage. I think it’s an outdated, artificial construct anyway. But if it did happen, you’d better be prepared to give up the legal benefits associated with marriage. But wait… if we make marriage exclusively a religious institution, that will ultimately lead to a Christian theocracy in the United States!

My opinions on:
The unemployed: Many people who are unemployed are unemployed for a reason: the work that they do is not worth “minimum wage.” Should someone who is chronically late for work, slacks off, steals from the register, and ignores customers be employed? You may disagree, but I say “no.” Should a person who lost their job for such reasons be given unemployment money to sit on the couch and watch TV all day? I’d like to think we can agree on that answer. Reduce minimum wage, unemployment will fall with it.

Illegal immigrants: Alright, I’mma break into your house, sleep on your couch, loot your fridge, and periodically get drunk and endanger your family members. I have no objection to immigrants, provided they are in the nation legally, either as tourists or as legally present workforce members. If you sneak across the border without paperwork, I see you as a hostile militant of your home nation(who is probably taking a job that could be held by a legal immigrant).

Atheists: I have no problem with atheists. Most of them have a problem with me. I will agree to give everyone I meet a fair chance to be a reasonable person. I won’t even ask you to be decent, so long as you’ll be reasonable. I make no promises on how I’ll respond to open hostility.

Homosexuals: I’ll admit that I once was a bad homophobe and that it wasn’t thanks to my family or church that I learned otherwise, but homosexuals are people, just like anyone else. I have at least one friend who is gay. He knows my opinions. He disagrees, but he respects them and acknowledges that there is some merit to them.

Liberals: My opinion of liberals isn’t terribly different from their opinion of me.

“Call them out for their contemptuous, hateful or intolerant rhetoric and you are labeled intolerant.”

My experience is that this applies almost exclusively to liberals. Conservatives are loathe to speak up on the internet for fear that we will be shouted down, steamrolled, and straight-up called morons. I’ve been called a racist bigot without even opening my mouth, just because I’m white. I was once banned from a forum for saying I didn’t think Obama would make a good president.

Banned without warning or recourse.

Legalizing same-sex marriage may or may not harm those who oppose it, but it does discriminate against several other demographics, including pedophiles, necrophiles, and furries. I don’t see any way to support gay marriage without also supporting marriage between a man and a young girl(or boy), a man and a corpse, or a man and his dog. Furthermore, supporters of gay marriage claim that you should be able to marry who you love. If that’s the case, I have a thing or two to object to myself. The person you love may be already married to another person, may be of an age that society frowns upon, or they may, as is the most common case, simply be uninterested. If you want to support my ability to marry someone just because I’m in love with them, then you should support my right to marry a girl even if she loathes my very existence. You want equality? Homosexuals have always been allowed to marry someone of the opposite sex, just like anyone else. Whether they like each other or not. Go ahead and have sex with whoever you want, regardless. People always have.

As for sexuality, the idea that humans are “straight” or “homosexual” is an outmoded perspective which is, ultimately, the the root cause of nearly all disagreements and misunderstandings of gay rights. There is no “sexuality,” no “sexual orientation.” They’re fetishes, pure and simple.

Some men are attracted to women with large breasts. Some men are attracted to women with small breasts. Some men are attracted to women who are married to other men, some men are attracted to blondes, redheads, women who haven’t begun the pubescent stage of their lifecycle, some men are attracted to women who are deceased and rotting, some men are attracted to women who have paws and a tail and are covered in fur. Some men are attracted to other men.

Somehow it’s still considered “acceptable” to say that all furries should die in a fire, but if you think homosexuality is anything less than the wave of the future, you’re automatically labeled the worst kind of evil bigot. I find this laughable when the two are basically the same thing.

Historically, marriage has been a religious construct, and used to arrange political alliances. The two people getting married rarely had a say in it until the excesses of the modern era. In many places in the world, the woman still has no say in which man becomes her husband, and they have sex when he wants to, whether she’s interested or not. She can be killed for refusing. In short, marriage has never been about “who you love.”

Marriage is one man and one woman. It is a construct which the modern US government pays entirely too much attention to, particularly given it is, as before, a religious construct, meaning the government trying to regulate it is a gross violation of separation of church and state.

My proposal: eradicate any sort of governmental recognition of marriage, leave it as the religious ceremony it was always supposed to be, and if two men are in love with each other, let them fornicate all they want. Straight people do it all the time.