I'm confused about the American Republican party

[Mavfin]

I wasn't assigning relative values to them, but Eppie obviously was.

Eppie will say gun control doesn't even belong on the same page with gay marriage, which IMO shows his political bias very clearly.

Ok, after reading this I see that you had just written down a different thing than you wanted to say. You talked about approval of being gay and never mentioned gay marriage, and neither did I.

Your last sentence quoted by me is thus incorrect.
Gay marriage and gun control could in principle be compared. But still that is something that I would never dare to do.

I'm going to say that yes, the difference between the two passages was not intentional, that I meant to say 'gay marriage' rather than 'gays' when I was writing it. In a way, though, it was sort of a Freudian slip.

Your comparison to race issues is actually not as far off as you think. The people against gay marriage are in many cases the same people who DO basically 'disapprove of gays'. The really ugly examples of this are the 'Pray Away the Gay' camps/centers run along the lines of a rehab center, run by the religious right, of course.

It is the same old hate that many years ago went toward black marrying white, or other interracial combinations. In the world of today, voicing that racial opinion is complete political suicide, and rightly so, but, for some reason, people can't get their heads around it that the gay marriage hate is the same issue, really. Does anyone remember that some of the loudest opposition to interracial marriages was, as it is now with gays and gay marriage, from some of the churches?

We're really dealing with the same kind of hate repackaged; "they're different from us!"

Pretty damned stupid, if you ask me.

What it really comes down to is that the people who are against gay marriage and the people who want gun control, in their own ways, just want control. They want to reduce the freedom of the individual for their own (imo) selfish reasons that I disagree with in both cases. Of course the importance of said personal freedom is viewed differently by some in other countries, and may not always make sense to them. (Of course, we do some other really stupid stuff here that doesn't make sense to ME, I'll be the first to say.)

My comment on the gun control issue is that if it's truly as important and popular with the general public as some insist, then they should get the votes together to repeal the 2nd Amendment. After that they're free to make whatever laws they want to take away all the guns, UK-style. Until then, they're going against the Constitution the country was built on. You can also argue that the reasons for the 2nd Amendment no longer exist. Fine, there's a mechanism to make it go away. Use it. But making laws that ignore it would (to me) be the same as making laws that ignore the 14th amendment; i.e. wrong.