I'm not even sure i'd allow Civil Unions.

All you really need is the power of attorny type thing.

You're of course far from the first, but then you wouldn't jump off a building because others had done it either.  If you hadn't noticed this particular conversation is a bit beyond the level of folks simply tossing out their biases and claiming them to be the views of everyone in the world.

You can discuss the topic at whatever level of seriousness you like (within reason), but you'll find that if you want to be taken at all seriously in these sorts of political discussions on this forum you have to be able to make a legitimate point, and anecdotal evidence presented as fact is far from legitimate.  This actually does differ from most other forums out there where straw man arguments, cherry picking, and general jackassery passes for good debate - so in that regard I can understand the confusion (not that these things don't occur here at all - they are just challenged/exposed far more often).

As for your post count - I can honestly say I hadn't looked at it and I don't really care about it.  Your post was emberrassing because the argument you made was emberrassing, not because your post count is low.  While post count can certainly correlate to general knowledge of forum members it doesn't really have anything to do with how good of a point someone can make in a political discussion.

PS - Sqrl isn't my real name

Again anecdotes are not facts - and even then this joke of claiming to be canadian has been in the standup routine of several lefty comedians for a while now (as I remember hearing it with Bush Sr. and Clinton).  The entire point is baseless because we have no idea how prevalent this is, if it even occurs at a level worth mentioning at all.  You've taken this anecdote/joke and spun it into a weak argument by simply stating that "some people do this".  Well sorry but people do a lot of things, it doesn't mean it applies universally.

Either way, you're essentially saying that a country should account for the lack of graciousness and hospitality of other countries and adjust their foreign policy to agree with the views of those foriegn countries in order to avoid their ire while on vacation.  A concept that is plainly ridiculous.  You let your citizenry figure out that those people are rude and they eventually stop going to a place that clearly doesn't want their tourist dollars.

The bottom line is that the United States is a soveriegn country, you don't have to like that it acts in its own interests, but you're naive if you're surprised that it does.  Europeans and anyone else can react to that however they want but treating tourist "like shit" seems to me a pretty tasteless way to respond.  If your assertion that this is prevalent is in fact true, I would take away that Europeans have a lot to learn about how to treat people.  In all honesty though I doubt very much that Europeans are as rude as you suggest.  Of course I've only met a few dozen or so and I won't be so absurd to think I can extrapolate a few examples to account for the entire population.

JUDEN.

Communist hater is a troll do not take anything he says seriously.

Just as an aside to your point ...

Even the few people you meet who seem to be pretending to be Canadian do so to distance themselves from the "Ignorant Americans" who get noticed the most in other countries. The media always tries to present these "Ignorant Americans" as being small town hicks, but the patronizing elite from large (often liberal) cities is equally as bad. It wasn't that long ago that I had a couple from New York try to explain to me what a Mortgage was because they assumed that Canadians didn't have mortgages; and there are countless stories of other American's patronizing people from other countries because they had such a poor understanding of the world outside of their borders.

Very rarely will anyone hold a tourists politics against them, and I have never heard of a state's politics being held against a tourist when they entered into a country.

I've traveled quite a lot, and the one thing you can hear at any international airport, tourist destination or public transport interchange is Americans talking REALLY loudly about nothing in particular. Like describing minute by minute what they did that day to painstaking detail, or commenting on mundane things around them at the time.

I'm not being mean, It's just an observation :)

I'm not saying you're being mean...I'm saying your conclusion is a non-sequitar.  An intent to be mean won't change the validity of a comment, so I have no interest in addressing your intentions when I can simply disprove the statement's validity.

Since you didn't actually determine how many Americans were there and weren't being loud, or even if the people you assumed were American actually were American, your anecdote is worthless as a means to draw any conclusion about Americans in general.  Even if you had properly sampled and collected data you wouldn't be able to draw a conclusions about americans in general but about American Tourists specifically.  Because by only sampling Americans in foreign terminals there would be a sampling bias towards American tourists.

Your entire argument is based on saying "I've seen some Americans behave like this, therefor Americans behave like this in general.".  By that logic I could claim that muslims are generally suicide bombers (which is obviously false).

Realize that you're on a website that uses statistics to track gaming sales and that the concept I'm speaking of (ie that anecdotal evidence is not a substitute for properly sampled and analyzed data) is well understood here.

Holy crap. I thought I was the only person that felt this way.

I was even thinking of making a thread about it, expecting to get mocked.  >_>

But yeah, marriage is primarily a religious affair.  Given the generally supported idea of a separation of Church and State, the government should have no dealing with marriage, instead only providing civil unions for tax purposes.