[Let's say you own 10 guns. Any gun control legislation passed will A) probably not affect those guns you own and B) probably just prevent you from purchasing weapons specifically designed to murder large numbers of people (armor-piercing rounds, AK-47s, etc.) Additionally, let's say you live in a rural area, with thinly-spread services like police and animal control, so you really need a gun to live. Your situation bears little to no resemblance to someone who lives within a mile of a million people and 10,000 police officers. In the urban situation, guns are a huge problem because people get them in large quantities and form their own extra-national groups and follow their own laws - they're called gangs.]

1. The only gun I personally own is a .22 for killing the occassional pesky raccoon or sick cat. You would be hard pressed to kill a person with it. But where I live, it just isn't that big a deal. I don't even lock the doors of my house or cars most of the time.

2. If I did live in an area where gang violence was a real concern, that is precisely the situation where I would want the right to carry a gun for personal protection. That just seems like common sense to me.

3. Do you follow the news closely? Are you aware that post-Katrina, federal officials began systematically confiscating guns from law-abiding New Orleans residents? Are you aware of the lawsuits currently pending by those same residents charging that the government's actions left them defenseless and made them victims of crime?

This is not a theoretical issue. The right to self-defense is a fundamental right that all free people should care about.

[Let's say you're gay and just got married in Massachusetts. Any 'Defense of Marriage' type law or amendment passed will do the following: negate your health benefits, negate your spousal death benefits, negate your ability to make decisions regarding your spouse's health and care, and many other benefits and advantages of marriage.

Now, let's say you sit on your hands and don't actively hate gay people; you take a wait and see attitude. Well, during that time thousands of LGBT people will have had to expatriate to be with their spouses (they'll move away because pretty much every other 1st world nation provides civil union benefits to gay partners), tens of thousands of gays will be thrown out of their houses, families and jobs because of discrimination, thousands of teenagers will kill themselves because they are attracted to the same sex, and so on.

So you see, on just this one key progressive issue versus your key conservative issue, the stakes are significantly different. If you find us impatient for you to come around, that's because frankly we don't respect bigotry or demagoguery or theocracy. And, honestly, I find it offensive that I am going to have to live part of my life as part of a citizen just because you and your ilk get the heebie-jeebies when you think of me kissing my partner.]

I'm not real interested in getting into an argument with you about the merits of gay marriage right now. But you have proven my point nicely. Liberals are afraid that the majority of americans won't go along with their public policy agendas, so they try to force them through the courts under the guise of imaginary constitutional rights.

Well, I'm sorry to disapoint you, but the constitution is silent on marriage. You do not have a constitutional right to marry anyone. If you want to change marriage laws, then you are correctly obliged to go through the legislatures of the various states. To force your minority opinion on this matter on a resisting majority is not freedom; it is tyranny.