But i know accepting less then full equallity is betrayal in the eyes of much of the left... And morally they are right, i'm just saying the pragmatist route is the shortest route to full equallity...

Consensus and pragmatism in the late 90's is what has lead the dutch to not deal with our problems we experience with imigration and minorities (both problems caused by bigotry and problems with upward social mobility and intergration into society of minorities.). In those years a social-democratic and liberal (that is right wing in our country...) party ruled and could not formulate a consensus opinion about minority policies and like pragmatist do in such a sitiuation, they agreed to disagree and ignored the problem. This meant that everybody who even tried to talk about these problems was being called a bigot, no matter how nuanced their critique of policy was...

This lead to a swining to the right in the following elections. The left screamed racism every time a politician called attention to minorities doing bad in school or failing to get a job. So these liberal politicians (thats rightwing in the netherlands) where being equated with Neo-Nazi's even though in the US they would be considered socialist or liberal (pro-choice, anti-gun, smaller military, etc etc...).

so make no mistake, in the netherlands we are very capable of culture war like politics... Hell our culture war has kind started all over again (after being "won" by the left after the 60's). Whille left thinking dominated dutch politics after the 70's the biggest party was always the cristian party, so they had to lead in a coalition either with liberal's or socialists, this is what forced pragmatism and consensus politics into the dutch parliament.

I know from a US perspective these issue's such as gay marriage seem "all or nothing" issue's. Either you are moraly right (pro) or your a biggot (against). But the thing with this wholle new Obama pragmatism is that it won't work that way on some issue's. Key to making this way of thinking is placing yourself into the oppositions mind. So lets try!

Lets place ourselfs in the mind of a person against gay-marriage, lets say his name is joe the evengelical christian. Nou our joe lives in a small town and doesn't know any gays (he probably does but those gays don't tell joe...). Much like a gay frien of mine find hetero sexual sex sickening (when imagening participating in it...) Joe's vivid imagination of gay sex makes him sick (based on the time he exidentally entered a gay porn site when his wife was out of town for a week and he was lookin' for some nice straight internet porn.). Joe just can't get his head around the thought of two grown men doing that stuff volutarally... So Joe associates being gay with thing he wants nothing to do with at al! So like his pastor tells him to he opposes gay marriage. Now if their where to be civil unions, and gay people would have the same legal rights as married couples, Joe would see that the world around him didn't change. Joe discovers he is still himself, Joe discovers that thinking about having gay sex still doesn't appeal to him and Joe discovers that allowing Gays rights didn't change anything for him. This leads Joe to lose intrest in activly opposing gay rights since allowing them right didn't change his world in the least bit! This gives poeple who at this point think giving gays equal rights will not change their world into a pace they can't have their trusted and tried place in.

To me personally giving gays equall rights is the only moral thing to do. Any solutiuon that doesn't give them full equal rights is a wrong one, that being said i don't give a fuck whether its called marriage or a civil union. The first and formemost thing is the equallity under the law. I also have a strong prefarence for calling it marriage for every couple gay or straight, but giving it a different name for a period will give people who think the whole thing will change their world time to discover it didn't change their world!

These assumptions can be seen in chemistry as well where they see gas molecules as dot's and there is even an aproximation of when their laws stop discribing a gas (when there are very few particles the individual behavior of the particles becomes of concern...).

The assumptions used in modern economics are a starting point for "ideal" aproximations for group behavior in the economy. (chemists call their gas laws "ideal gas laws".) Solving the problems of economy sould be centered around fine-tuning their assumptions to incorporate odd but systematic ways in which humans diverge from rational behavior. they should also adopt a minimum population size for aplying their "laws". Since the smaller the population the bigger the impact of individiual diverging from a law.