but the majority make the decision on most things. I am sure you probably own a car. Most people do; a church or government doesn`t make you ride in an automobile or own one. you are fully within your right to walk , ride a bike or a horse in most places, the majority over the centuries decided that automobiles were the best form of transport so we built rodes all over the country.
No, Lindy is correct. Cars and relationship standards developed over very different time periods, and by very different mechanisms.
You can't talk about automobiles becoming established by centuries of tradition: the internal combustion engine has been around for only a bit over a century. Cars became our dominant transportation paradigm because they offer specific advantages over any other method: speed, convenience, and so on. And a great deal of car-friendly infrastructure (eg, the interstate highway system) was put in place before the major drawbacks of automobiles were obvious (back when fuel was cheap and there wasn't a lot of pollution).
Today, cars have a strong competitive advantage for many people. Still, there are no laws forbidding them from trying alternatives. People have the right to bike, walk, take the bus, and so on. Many people do. But a larger number find that, for them, those alternatives don't work as well as their cars.
Monogamy is a completely different situation. Monogamous marriage became an institution centuries ago, when the notion of "majority rule" was simply laughable. People in the Roman Empire and medieval Europe did whatever the church and their rulers told them to do.
It was that simple. If you wanted to get married at all, you had to get married by the church, and the church would not marry you if you weren't a monogamous heterosexual couple. Adultery was illegal - not because "the people" wanted it that way, but because the church and the King said it would be that way.
After centuries of this, people have come to view monogamy as the way things must be done simply because it's the only way they know. But it's not as though this was a free choice decided by a free market, as automobiles were. Competing models have been forbidden by law, to this very day (see laws against bigamy).
My point is the majority make the rules on just about everything. there have to be rules and regulations or it would be complete anarchy. You brought same sex relationships, while in most places they can`t marry, they are still able to be a couple, even to the point of being able to adopt kids.
That has changed only within the last decade, and some states still don't have domestic partnership laws. In those states that do have such laws, domestic partnerships might or might not carry all the benefits of marriage. They still have no recognition at the federal level, which affects things like taxes, next of kin rights, and so on.
Look, ask yourself this: if domestic partnerships were really, truly, in all ways identical to marriages, then why would conservative religious groups need to go so far as to ban gay marriages in their state constitutions? If "domestic partnership equals marriage" in all ways then why is the distinction so important? In particular, why does the government need to enforce this distinction, if there really is no distinction?
No, gay couples and poly partnerships still do not have all the rights of straight couples. Even the people who claim they do really know better - they fight hard to keep it that way.
