You illustrated it badly. I got your point and rejected it out of hand.

Except they are a totally different case. It is not the same thing as a religious group at all. You are artificially categorizing the completely different groups as similar. It's always you arrogant moralists, smug in your own superiority who accuse other people of lacking breadth of vision or open minds, when you are the ones blindly following a knee-jerk set of values, who cannot open your minds enough to see past the very superficial common points to see the real differences in two practices. And if you want to try satire, as I mentioned above, invent a situation that is not the de facto status quo. I myself have purveyed satire on the WoTMB, and as I noted last year, one such series of satires needed to be discontinued. I retold portions of the WoT story in a way designed to inflate and exaggerate the contributions of a character in grandiose, mythic terms, implying that the character's ego was so out of control, she might actually have told the story in this manner, and that her fans go so far overboard in praising her, that they might do likewise. Yet, when the last book came out, the character actually DID praise her own actions in a similar style. I was forced to give up my satire, because it isn't satire when it is simply stating the reality. "A Modest Proposal" would not be remembered if Swift proposed having all Irish land owned by people in other countries, that their inheritances be broken up with preferential acknowledgement of the claims of Anglicized heirs, that food grown in Ireland be confiscated for profit in England, that their religion be harassed and oppressed, and their cultural identity ruthlessly suppressed, and they experience a lower standard of living than a slave in North America. That would not have been satire, because that is what was actually happening.

Finally, claiming that something is "satire" is not a defense against criticism. When your analogy is flawed, your audience has a perfect right to point that out. When it involves misrepresenting an important social issue with real consequences for everyone, then the right to correct you becomes an obligation.

Well stop it. We don't need "Christians" like you parroting those tired old slanders about intolerance and war in an inept attempt at satirizing those points of view. Simply repeating the point of view you claim to be opposing is not satire or criticism.

Marriage, or at least what they imagine marriage to be, is not a right. This is a novelty institution that has never been proven to have been legally recognized, no matter what the cultural or societal level of tolerance for homosexuals. Laws allowing or recognizing heterosexual marriage are merely recognizing a de facto situation, and an institution older than human history. Laws recognizing same-sex unions would compel people to acknowledge something that not only goes against their beliefs, but has no widespread practice or tradition to validate it. It's forcing people to act against their beliefs. The people of California (who have these people in their midst and have to deal with them all the time) don't want to be forced to give these absurd relationships the same recognition that naturally occurring, biologically mandated unions which predate known society receive. The reproductive partnership of one male and one female is one of the basic assumptions underlying the organization of nearly every human society or polity. The pairings of same sex couples have no such role, regardless of how harmless or entertaining one believes them to be, and attempts to impose alterations on society to accomodate the extension of privileges to such pairings which have heretofore been part of the accomodation and adaptation of the more common partnerships into the social structure is not only a dangerous and potentially destabilizing act, but is an act of tyranny as well.

The rights and protections guaranteed and protected by a free society are negative - that is, they protect against interference from others. If you disapprove of a particular religion or sort of speech, you are free to abstain from it, or to express your disapproval, but you cannot (or should not be permitted to) prevent others for participating if they so choose. Outlawing religion falls into the latter category, and so does LEGALIZING gay marriage, as both of them involve imposing behaviors on people, in violation of long-standing rights of belief. You are not required to recognize God and you are not required to recognize a same sex partnership. A law that forces you to do either is an iniquitous imposition on personal freedoms.