Believing that same-sex marriage shouldn’t be a government-supported institution isn’t the same as believing LGBT people are “invalid” or “wrong” or whatever.

How is it not?

It seems incredibly obvious to me. For example, here are some things I believe:

• gambling is bad - yet I support legalization of gambling; why? Personal freedom comes first.
• prostitution is bad - yet I support legalization of prostitution; why? Sex work will happen, so it's better for it to be properly regulated than happen on the black market
• drug use is bad - yet I support legalization of recreational drugs; why? Illegal drugs laced w/ fentanyl are a big problem, and most drug users would be better off w/ a regulated service.

Personal beliefs about what government policy should be can be very different than personal beliefs about what is "good" and "bad."

To be clear, I support same-sex marriage because it's on the table and my preferred alternative has almost no shot of being considered. So I support it as a harm-reduction policy, not because I actually believe the government should actually regulate marriage.

I mean, legally, that’s what marriage is.

Marriage is a basket of contracts (power of attorney, joint custody, financial obligations, etc), and it's limited to two people, which is odd. The original intent seems to be to encourage procreation, but it's hardly enforced at all, nor is that particularly important in most countries (except maybe Japan).

We should treat marriage similarly to corporations. If you want to call your civil partnership "marriage," more power to you. If you want to call it being BF/GF, life partners, or whatever else, more power to you. The government should only care that you meet the requirements for whatever the benefit is.

You don’t have to do either of those things just because you’re married. Marriage just gives you the option.

In many (most?) states, it is enforced unless you specifically opt-out (e.g. a pre-nup). Laws certainly vary by state, but generally speaking, if you're legally married, anything you earn in the marriage is considered joint assets, even if you keep them in separate accounts. In some areas, things you bring into the marriage are also jointly owned, unless they are never interacted with.

That's why divorces are so messy, the couple could have agreed to keep things separate at the start, but without any evidence of that, it's up to the courts to decide what's fair. And pretty frequently, they'll lean on the side of 50/50 for all assets, regardless of when it was acquired or what the understanding was.

And what would they bring to this partnership?

Integration into the browser product, users, and marketing.

I've been wanting Firefox to do something like this so get more visibility w/ online services. I'd love to be able to load up an account balance and click "view article" and the website owner sucks a few pennies from that balance or whatever. But my only options are:

• find a workaround w/ my ad-blocker - reader mode, archive, etc
• make yet another account and maybe pay for a monthly subscription (why do that when I only want the one article?)
• not read the article

Axate provides more than that, but so few online services work w/ it. A browser could bring them a ton of visibility.

But companies also should not be creating tools that propose to give you those protections when they’re not smart enough to. Just leave it to the professionals.

Agreed. But like I said, users request features, bugs happen, etc. At the end of the day, the responsibility is on the user to pick the right product for their needs. Brave isn't that product for at-risk individuals until it has been vetted by actual security experts.

As long as he keeps his mouth shut about them and doesn’t financially support them, he’s doing worlds better than Mr. Eich.

Eich did the first half of that, his only "sin" was that someone found out about his donation. That's it. My understanding is that nobody was aware of it until someone dug into the donation records.