I’ll be glad to arrange the introductions should you ever like to meet them.
We’re copacetic though in the notion that the “sin”, while having much to do with their ‘lifestyle’, has squat to do with their orientation. (Lifestyle and orientation: two unrelated words that drive me nuts when used as synonyms.)
I’ve ordered the movie through NetFlix and will watch it this week and probably bump the thread if it dies down. I didn’t realize it was on DVD already.
Does the documentary deal with why this is such a damned important objective of the Mormons? Yes, I know that teh gay is considered a sin in their religion but so are birth control and abortion and smoking and drinking and a vast multitude of other things that they don’t jump up and down and throw millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars far better spent in a thousand other ways. Is this payback for the polygamy crackdowns of 120 years ago (because gays had little or nothing to do with that) or because they think they have a better shot at this than banning smoking or abortion or what exactly?
Oh I know plenty who others would label that way, but it is always a lable placed on a couple by others so I don’t give it much weight. Not the beliefs of the couple, not a sin in my book.
I am sure I am included among the broader definition - Catholic gf after all
Yes, it does.
That’s an open question. Who knows what they will tackle next if successful here, or even if not. Their resources are large but not limitless, so they can’t tackle everything in order.
the film does seem to suggest that they aim, at the institutional level, to be seen as the can-do, leaders who can organize and succeed in order to gain traction with other larger religions, and then to drive the agenda from there.
that is not the religious reason they do it though.
enjoy but others have advised keep tissues handy. It is not all fun and games.
In regard to the tax-exempt status of churches and taking political positions:
Religious leaders, supported by their churches, have taken political positions throughout U.S. history, including the abolition of slavery, Prohibition and the civil rights movement. What they’re not supposed to do is throw support behind one candidate or party, or denigrate a candidate or party they don’t like.
In the George W. Bush years, many churches openly supported Bush’s re-election and opposed Kerry. Bush was funding faith-based initiatives, which basically meant giving money to churches. This is as blatant a quid pro quo as there can be, but it didn’t cause any tax problems for the institutions involved. When Obama took office he said he would expand the faith-based initiative, so perhaps the unification of church and state is now bipartisan.
This is not meant as a comment on LDC or Prop 8 since I have not seen the movie and wasn’t paying much attention to the CA election.
There are long-existing IRS regulations that are fuzzy as to how much is too much. There has never been a case that forced the IRS to decide. This might be the one. This is addressed in the film. There will be time enough for that later.
I can certainly understand of Mr. Matis’s parents did not want to make a political issue out of the memory of their son, whom by all accounts they loved very dearly. You don’t know that this is simply a matter of them obeying the church. They don’t owe anyone anything on the matter. Lumping them in with the likes of that scumbag Buttars is unfair.
They are satisfied making a political issue out of everyone else’s gay son and daughter. That they allow Buttars and the others to act as proxies does not absolve them of anything, gay son or not. If in fact they loved their son dearly in the usual sense of the word, then they would be out of compliance or whatever with Church doctrine, as the film shows, even if it was no longer the main topic of the film. This is why they could not and would not state their love for their son for the record.
Maybe they are genuinely torn between having natural human feelings and expressing Mormon beliefs. But they seem to be at best hedging their best on the side of their beliefs. That’s the best that can be said about them, and I will be the first to say, it isn’t much.
Well, their son can’t make them gods. Let me rephrase that: Their dead pervert son can’t make them gods. And no one is pretending he can.
Of course they’ll go with what they’re presumably conditioned to believe is the magical path to divinity.
Now, I don’t believe that the LDS church can make them gods either, but they may well believe that. And if they doubt that, well, one can still argue that social conservatism makes a society desirable in other ways & that maybe the church isn’t more wrong than they & their son were.
Religion is a deeply implanted bit of code. Like a really tough computer virus, sometimes even a rootkit. And it can survive for centuries.
I seem to recall an interview with Jerry Falwell during the 2004 election where he came right out and stated explicitly that he was doing everything he could to get George W. Bush re-elected. I always wondered how he could get away with that. Was it simply a case of him making this statement as a private citizen rather than in his capacity as a religious leader?
From your point of view they are lies, deceptions and slanders, from their point of view it was the truth. As you go through life, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.
According to the wikipedia entry pro prop 8 groups spent 39 million and raised half from mormons. Anti prop 8 groups spent 42 million, thus the mormons were outspent 2 to 1.
Living in sin is a common expression meaning to live together without being married. I am suprised you have never heard about it.
Since our rulers on the Supreme Court are about to invalidate prop 8 Malakvia will soon have to find another group to hate. May I suggest Red Sox fans?
Wow you have a rally bizarre sense of rhetoric in this thread. I have never seen anything like it.
And by the way, America doesn’t have “rulers”. Perhaps you grew up someplace else and have not internalized that key part of being American? Because while I have seen many arguments on many topics from many points of view, I can’t recall any ever based on the fact that the justices of the Supreme Court are “rulers of America”.
For me probably less the need for tissues and more for anger control medication. Bigots in general piss me off but those who wrap it in religion even moreso and those who wrap it in religions with so-easily-debunked-to-hell-and-back tenets moreso yet (be they Mormon, Black Muslim, Kirk Cameron, snakehandler, or some weird hybrid thereof).
I can assure you that, regardless of what happens with Prop 8, I will continue to hate religious institutions who instruct their herd to prize hatred and intolerance.
While I agree that in many cases truth is a bit subjective, I do not believe that this is one of those cases. The Church, from what I gather, essentially believes that lying is alright if the ends justify the means.
Example:
Mormon’s actually believe they will get their own planet someday. This is a subjective truth because they honestly believe it and I honestly don’t.
Mormon’s know good and well that religious-based adoption agencies will not be forced to shut down, their bishop will not be forced to marry gay couples in the temple and allowing gays to marry has nothing to do with freedom of speech. These are actual lies. But guess what? “We don’t want gays to marry because one of our kids might not feel as much social pressure to conform into a good, straight member of the church someday if society as a whole starts treating gays like first class citizens!” is NOT going to pull votes as effectively as lying.
If there are no appellants that have standing, then the parties at trial also didn’t have standing. Which means the trial result will be shelved and we’ll be back at the California Supreme Court’s ruling that Prop 8 is valid.
But I’m curious why you dismiss (if you do) the attempt to intervene by Imperial County.
And at the Supreme Court:
Sotomayor, Kagan, Ginsburg, Breyer are reasonably reliable Overturn 8 votes.
Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts are reasonably reliable Sustain 8 votes.
Kennedy is (in my opinion) by no means a sure thing either way.
That’s very misleading. Catholic Charities were not forced to shut down. They voluntarily withdrew in a snit from offering adoption services because they were required to extend the same consideration to gay couples.
Like most states, Massachusetts has far more kids in foster care than they have willing foster parents. For this reason they came to include gays as potential foster parents, which was based not just on desperation but because numerous reliable studies have all consistenly concluded that, all other things being equal, the average gay couple was/is as fit to raise children as the average straight couple, while the only reports to contradict these studies have invariably been undertaken by zealous religious right cover groups whose methodology was spotty at best, in some cases demonstrably fraudulent, whose findings were self-published or published in vanity press journals, whose ‘research’ invariably included “studies” (or works based on “studies”) performed by Paul Cameron (a near psychotically monomanic homophobe who was forced to resign from the American Psychological Association specifically because of using fraudulent information in his “research” about the likelihood of gays to commit pedophilia who nevertheless still manages to influence juries and judges across the nation; William Bennett and several other conservatives are among the legions who have denounced Cameron as a fraud.)
While Catholic Charities is a faith based organization they are, quite reasonably in my opinion, required to submit to the same standards as non faith based organizations in dealing with adoption and foster care issues overseen by state agencies. It’s the same as if a faith based agency refused to consider blacks or Asians as foster parents. Even if the discrimination was because their church sincerely believed blacks and Asians were inherently sinful, they would be told to get the hell over it if they were to participate in anything overseen by the state department of Human Resources. In fact the Catholic Charities did not discriminate against anybody for race or religion or nationality, but they refused to consider gays as foster parents, so they lost funding and their contracts.
They were not shut down and in fact bill themselves as “the largest private provider of social services in the Boston area”. They simply do not perform adoption services in Massachusetts anymore.
