[quote author=“rogerflat”] I wouldn’t consider you and your partner a “family”.  You are a couple.  A family entails children or kin.  If me and my girlfriend go to the movies, I’m not taking my “family” to the movies.

This is very confused.

It is simply false to say that ‘a family entails children’. A married couple is legally and culturally a family, with or without children.

Further, it is simply false to suggest that gay couples don’t have kin. Everyone with living relatives has kin.

Further, the last sentence is a non sequitur. The whole cultural point of your not getting married to your girlfriend is that you are not declaring yourselves a ‘family’. So of course when you take your girlfriend to the movies you are not taking your ‘family’ to the movies.

But when my wife and I visit my in-laws overseas, I am visiting family, whether or not my wife and I have children.

These are facts that would be recognized worldwide in every human culture ... well, all except for the reality of gay families, where obtuse religious ideology gets in the way of common sense.

This has turned into a matter of semantics.  I looked up the word family and it has 8 definitions.  So no point saying that “you” meant this or “I” meant that.  The word means many things, and both of us are correct with our definitions.

But here’s the point I was getting at.  Cgallaga said that he wanted to plan for all the contingencies that any family might encounter.  But most “family planning” involves primarily childeren and considerations that go into custody and the like.  While Cgallaga may or may not plan on raising children, I got the impression that he was using “family” to just describe his partner.  If this was the case, then comparing his partner and “most family contingencies” is not analogous.  But again, semantic arguments are the most futile of all, so I don’t want to belabor this any more than I have. I just wanted to make that point.