Royals Re-Sign Zack Greinke

This is from Pew Research:

‘Surveys conducted by Gallup in 2017 find that about one-in-ten LGBT Americans (10.2%) are married to a same-sex partner, up from the months before the high court decision (7.9%). As a result, a majority (61%) of same-sex cohabiting couples were married as of 2017, up from 38% before the ruling.

‘As with the general public, Americans who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) are most likely to cite love as a very important reason for getting married.

‘In a 2013 Pew Research Center survey, 84% of LGBT adults and 88% of the general public cited love as a very important reason for getting married, and at least seven-in-ten in both groups cited companionship (71% and 76%, respectively). But there were some differences, too. LGBT Americans, for instance, were twice as likely as those in the general public to cite legal rights and benefits as a very important reason for getting married (46% versus 23%), while those in the general public were nearly twice as likely as LGBT Americans to cite having children (49% versus 28%).’

If these figures are even close to accurate, a majority of gay Americans want the right to be married. Doesn’t it seem to you at all selfish then, to want them to be deprived of that right by law simply because you don’t like the institution and the tax laws that are applied to married couples?

And to change the subject briefly: these sillyass challenges to meet other posters on a message board, presumably to assault them — just stop it, please. It’s idiotic.

“If you support something go ahead, I won’t try to stop you.”

But if you support politicians who want to ban same-sex marriage, then you are trying to stop people from legally marrying people of their own sex. Your vote enables them to change the law back to a prohibition.

You said earlier that your wife refuses to give you a divorce. It seems obvious to me, based on that, that she likes being married, although you don’t. Does her wish in that regard not matter to you?

Your vote is an action. You can’t take the action and then disavow responsibility for the effect of that action. If you vote your support for a politician whose opposition to same-sex marriage contributes to outlawing it, you contribute to depriving your wife of a legal right she seems to value.

There are politicians who want to ban pit bulls. Bans have been enacted in 15 states. Can you vote for a politician who proposes such a ban and still say you’re not voting against your own right to keep Crowder?

It’s one thing to say it’s up to a person to marry whoever they want to, and you really don’t care what they do. It’s another thing to help pass a law saying that the state has the power to prevent them from marrying the person they want to marry.

Just as it’s one thing to say you don’t care if your neighbors like your pit bull because dog ownership is a personal choice, but it’s another thing to say you can be arrested for owning crowder and the state has the right to take her away and kill her.

Some things to thing about.

mydogcrowder, when I was in my teens and twenties, people of my generation were inoculated with the idea that the government was an evil entity controlled by sinister people to whom we attributed nearly supernormal powers of subterfuge and manipulation. The government was the enemy.

Now I have to laugh at how much credit we gave to some really incompetent, bumbling people, painting them as super-villains when they were pitiful knuckleheads.

Yeah, some of them were highly intelligent, corrupt, self-serving jerks who did a lot of damage. But do you know whose fault that was? It was our fault for taking our hands off the wheel and giving them the keys to the car.

We voted them in, or we didn’t bother to vote and just let them waltz in with other people’s votes. We didn’t have to give them power. But we completely lost sight of what was left to us — a democratic republic. “A republic — if you can keep it,” said Ben Franklin.

We neglected the tiresome, unglamorous work of taking responsibility for what OUR government did. OUR government. It was more romantic to play the outsider rebels too cool and too hip to get suckered into participating in the Evil Empire.

The minute you accept the idea that the government doesn’t belong to you, you lose the only power you have. And it’s a cop-out. A childish cop-out.

Over 400,000 American soldiers died in WWII to keep fascists from taking over our country and the countries of our democratic allies in Europe. To toss away what they died for is shameful.

But owning the government also means that you have to own responsibility for what it does — and that’s a drag. It’s easier to point fingers and rant about the bad guys in Washington, the “Deep State,” the “New World Order.” They’re responsible for all the bad stuff; you’re not.

Now we’re beset with cynical opportunists who see how easy it is — and how useful to them it is — to paint OUR government as a malevolent conspiracy of super-villains. They’ve put the “government is the enemy” narrative on steroids. They see that conspiracy fantasies are easily more appealing than the mundane work of democracy. Fantasy battles with super-villains are much more exciting.

The truth is, they benefit from the fact that in a nation weaned on TV, there’s a shortage of grown-ups with their feet on the ground willing to take responsibility and participate in the government that their forebears bled to preserve for them. Fake revolution is more fun.

Nearly half the voting-age citizens in 2020, 48.2%, didn’t bother to vote. And then they sit on the sidelines and carp about the government that they can’t be bothered to own, and the power they can’t be bothered to exercise.

Thanks. Back at you. Crowder’s opinion counts for a lot with me. I love dogs.

It just depends on which case is appropriate, subjective (also called nominative) or objective.

Subjective: “My wife and I love baseball.” – “My wife and I” are the actors, the subject of the sentence.

Objective: “They sent tickets to my wife and me.” – “my wife and me” is the object of the preposition “to,” and objects of prepositions, like objects of verbs, take the objective case.

If you said “He insulted my wife and me,” “my wife and me” would be the object of the verb “insulted.”

And you’re absolutely right that what’s considered proper can, and does, change. In informal usage, it’s commonplace to substitute objective pronouns for the subjective. Sometimes the proper form sounds too formal and is even felt to be snooty: e.g., Knock-knock. “Hello, who is it?” “It’s me.”