himespau 

The thing is, everybody has a vested interest in getting nothing done. I mean if you undo the thing about your opponent that has your base hopping mad, then you won't have a rallying point for them any more. And if you proactively do something new (instead of tear down something the other party did), you're out on a limb hoping it will work, and you have to come up with something new. It's much easier to give a half assed effort and then say, "those other guys stopped me from getting <my really good idea here> done, but next time we're going to slip it past them." And so nothing gets done because no one really wants to get anything done. Much easier to get fat and lazy off the teat of the lobbyists and your constituents, and screw the little people.

I'm kind of an odd case in that on some issues, I'm very leftish and on others I'm very much to the right. Overall, I would probably be somewhere in the middle if I actually believed anybody would get anything done (I still vote though, just with very eclectic ballots).

As far as the whole marriage things goes, I've always felt marriage was a uniquely religious institution. Since I believe in the separation of church and state, I never felt the government had the right to regulate who could get married. I think it should be up to individual religions/religious institutions who should marry who (if you're not happy with who religion X lets marry, find one that works for you - there are a bunch - and give them your money/time) and the government should butt the hell out. Since I do recognize that they need to protect people from abuse and taxes and whatnot and keep people from marrying 12 year olds, I've felt that we should all be getting civil unions via paperwork instead of marriage licenses. Since civil unions are a government institution, denying anyone them would have been a violation of the 14th amendment as the supremes declared about marriage. So in the end, everyone getting the same right (while religions can do whatever they want) is sort of what I wanted and is what we finally ended with, but I just wish the government would have used a different word to describe it to keep the religious bit and the civil rights bit separate. I'm by no means saying I wish some people couldn't marry (if my cousin's marriage to her wife hadn't been in the Netherlands, I would have loved to have been there - and personally think everyone should be able to marry whoever they love and use that word if they can find a religion, including the church of the flying spaghetti monster, that says it's cool), but I just don't like the government using that word.