GAY MARRIAGES AND AWOL ...I don't want this election to be about Gay marriages and Bush's going AWOL for several months in 1972. It looks like the right thinkers are going to pump this gay marriage business into another knee jerk issue like abortion. Instead of being happy that people are getting married and committing themselves to a lifetime relationship, they act like its some kind of a slippery slope- if they let the gays get married, then all of a sudden masses of straight people will turn gay. Your mother will suddenly want to abandon your father and go off with her best friend from high school. Your boyfriend will see married gay guys and suddenly change his sexual orientation and start picking up men. This whole idea is moronic. All the gay people I know knew they were gay since the age of 12 if not earlier. Why would we deprive someone of the benefits and recognition of marriagebecause of an accident of birth or early childhood conditioning? Everyone in our society deserves the same honor of full rights and responsibility that come from being a member of society. Speaking of responsibility, why are the lefties so interested in Bush skipping out of the Guard to work on a political campaign in Alabama? Vietnam was an unpopular terrible war, and many people, especially the more left leaning socially responsible types, did what they could to stay out of it. But with all this recent history to chew over, why bother with something that's tired meat? How about the environment, the loss of jobs, the failure to secure our container ports, the war in Iraq, the mess that followed, and our country's unpopularity in the rest of the world. I was in Europe when Bush turned his back on the Kyoto Accord, and his unpopularity overseas shot up right then. Every time they showed him on the TV my landlady would start into a tirade about "my president." Europeans softened up after 9/11, but we totally blew it in the windup to the war in Iraq and its aftermath. The war is widely perceived in Europe as stupid and blatant imperialism. The problem is that we are all responsible for what our country does, not just the few in Washington. Go overseas. When people perceive you as an American, they want to talk about your country's foreign policy, like you personally just thought it up. No I don't want this election fought over gay marriages and Bush's attendance record in the Air National Guard thirty years ago. There are real issues here that need to be addressed.