I don’t have percentages to give you, but yes: There absolutely are people who think that homosexuality is a sin but still support SSM. Of course there are.
Plus there are plenty of people that don’t think it’s a sin and have voted against it.
If your point is that there is a high correlation of “thinks it’s a sin” and votes against SSM, of course you are right. But I don’t think this means it’s a good strategy to write all those people off and just consider them all bigots who are as bad as Fred Phelps.
(I know you haven’t done this, I’m just making a point.)
Yes. How a message is presented does have an impact on how people respond to it. Telling someone they are a bigot for voting based on their religious beliefs isn’t going to be as effective as another way.
I meant to give iiandyiiii kudos for his excellent post that different methods work well with different people. I think this makes a lot of sense. Some people need to be knocked around a bit and others need a more subtle approach. But from where I’m standing there’s only one approach being used, and it’s heavy handed. The response to Phil Robertsons comments are an example of this which is why I opened the thread.
Actually, DOMA is an odd example since it was the direct result of the decision to change the requirements for marriage through the judicial process instead of the legislative process. (An argument that is based, primarily, on the claim that the marriage laws currently in effect are bigoted). Who knows what would have happened if states had begun to alter the marriage laws through the legislative (or referendum) process?
You’re being extremely mean to me. I might be willing to listen to you were you nicer. You’re not going to convince anyone to follow your ways when you talk to me like that.
I didn’t want to post it, because now there is a 79.25% chance that this thread will go ten pages about DOMA. But this nails it.
Like Roe v Wade, doing the right thing the wrong way is often painful. First you need to convince a majority you are right. Then you get the votes to elect people to vote the way you want. Then you get the laws you want.
Or you can just call everyone who disagrees with you a bigot and convince a judge to give you what you want when the country isn’t ready for it. (But would have been if you waited a few years.)
DOMA is an example that proves my point about the “how” being as important as the “what” and the “why” very nicely.
You’re acting like not letting a millionaire be on TV is some sort of terrible punishment. He still gets to be rich. He still gets to be stupid. He still gets to be hateful. He just doesn’t get to do it on A&E’s dime. That a perfectly proportionate response to the offense, particularly given that his entire celebrity is built on public perception of his personality. He is only a celebrity because people find his persona likeable or interesting. Homophobia is neither likable, nor interesting, so it’s not remotely surprising that, having badly damaged the product he’s employed to sell, he’s no longer being employed to sell it.
No, talking is also important. I’m just pointing out that, like so many other things on this topic, you’re factually wrong. The most ardent opponents of gay rights - the ones who are most intractably wedded to their intolerance, are also old as fuck. They aren’t going to be around much longer.
Usually something like this. Or you can search virtually any thread on gay marriage where both myself and magellan has posted - which I think is all of them. I’m not arguing that ad hominem is an effective replacement for argument. It is not. If you put me in a room with Phil Robertson, I will gladly rebut any homophobic argument he makes, with references to scientific fact, foundational principles of the Republic, and appeals to simple human decency.
If you ask me, “What’s your opinion of Phil Robertson,” on the other hand, I’m going to tell you my opinion: He’s a bigoted asshole.
I’ll be sure to give your observations the full merit they deserve.
Have you ever heard of the Mattachine Society? They were one of the early gay rights groups in the US. Started in 1950. Their strategy was, basically, “Keep your head down, don’t make waves, don’t upset people, and eventually, they’ll give us our rights.” Under the leadership of the Mattachine Society, the gay rights movement achieved exactly fuck-all for nearly two decades. It wasn’t until a bunch of angry drag queens threw a riot at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 that gay rights started to get any real traction in this country.
The same has been true for every civil rights movement, from the capital-C Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, to the Sufferage Movement at the turn of the century. And just like this thread, all along there have been people outside the movement telling the oppressed that they’d make more progress if they were just quieter about it - don’t make waves, don’t upset people, and eventually, you’ll get your civil rights. It was bullshit when they said it to Dr. King. It was bullshit when they said it to Susan Anthony. And its bullshit right now, when you say it on these boards. It’s never worked - indeed, it’s the most counterproductive advice you can give. The angrier you get, the louder you get, the faster change happens. That’s what’s worked in the past. That’s whats worked to bring about the largest sea-change in public opinion in the shortest amount of time on a civil rights issue in this country’s history.
So, yeah, to the extent that this has anything effect at all on the gay rights movement, I’d say it’s a positive one. The more these sorts of statements are repudiated in public, the more the public is going to recognize them for the bigotry that they really are. Particularly in light of the subsequent video, which definitively puts the lie to any notion of Phil Robertson “loving the sinner.”
So pick a starting time and show some evidence at all that as of that starting time, if gay and gay-friendly persons had never accused anyone of bigotry that we would now have SSM in all of the states. I don’t care what the starting point is, but I’d like to see something. Right now, it’s just “Oh, it can’t be DOMA because that was a reaction to this…” Fine. Pick something else.
you weren’t making a biological statement. In both cases you were speaking out your ass, which is pretty clearly not what asses are for but you’ll do that anyway, won’t you?
There is no sense–legally or culturally or historically–in which your claim that
A goddamned bigot, that’s who, and that’s why I think people ought not be too pleased by his election. He’s better than his predecessors in a lot of ways, but this bit of idiocy shows that in a lot of ways he’s more of the same sexual tyranny that’s made the church such a force for evil in the world in the last century.
Thank you for the kudos. I think your approach is an example of an alternative to the more aggressive and confrontational approach of many (including, probably, myself – and I’m assuming you support SSM).
But I don’t think criticizing any particular approach towards tolerance and understanding of gay people is productive… I think they all can be effective, or at least all of them that don’t advocate violence.
We know what happens through the legislative process: states pass stupid anti-SSM amendments as ways of motivating bigots to come out to the polls.
There are a shit-ton of bigoted people in our country–on this issue, fortunately fewer every day, but still a shit-ton. The judicial process is designed exactly for this purpose, to prevent the majority from enacting their tyranny on the minority.
It’s a beautiful thing the way the judicial process has worked in this case. Utah, baby!
On what, precisely, do you base your conclusion that the country was “only a few years” from legalizing SSM through the ballot box in 1996?
You naivete remains charming as always.
You want to know what the number one catalyst for the rapid acceptance of gay marriage over the last fifteen years? The balls-out right wing hatefest that was inaugurated by the passage of DOMA. It was the Republicans, more than anyone else, who kept the subject of gay marriage in the popular consciousness for that entire time. There was no debate in Alabama or Mississippi about whether or not gays should get married. You could barely get people to acknowledge the idea that gay people should be able to have jobs just like everyone else in that state. Gay marriage was being actively pursued in only a small handful of states where all the other milestones had already been largely achieved, and gay marriage was the last hurdle. And where it was being pursued, it was, as in Hawaii, largely being pursued at the state level.
But one judicial ruling out in Hawaii, that was almost instantly reversed by the Hawaiian legislature, and it’s Topic Number One in every state in the union, and Republicans are falling all over themselves to be the ones that are most vocally and visibly against this terrible new scourge of the nation. Republicans drew the battle lines: this wasn’t just a fight against gay marriage, it was a struggle for the soul of the nation. It wasn’t just a difference of opinion, people who supported gay marriage literally wanted to destroy America. The Republicans provided more coverage to the issue of gay marriage than GLAAD and the HRC combined, and they did it in such an overtly nasty and dishonest manner that they fundamentally damaged their own position in the eyes of mainstream America. They managed to turn opposition to marriage equality into something associated with the worst and weirdest excesses of fundamentalist Christianity. If it hadn’t been for DOMA and it’s defenders, people in the US would still think that being against gay marriage and being a decent human being were qualities that could co-exist in the same person. The Republicans of the last fifteen years have shown the lie in that, and they did it with virtually no help at all from the gay rights movement.
Presumably, he thought we were creaming in our jeans at every utterance of Francis’s and not busy being cynical bastards who don’t believe for a minute that he wasn’t put up to this by the hierarchy to spin them some good publicity for once.
Any “God” who judges people based on who they consensually fuck deserves to have their law, and their plan, destroyed. Confusing and deceiving Catholics has been the Pope’s job for 2000 years, I see no reason that others shouldn’t join in the fun.
Any religion that judges people based on sexuality, gender, race, disability, or really anything else apart from harmful behaviour to others, is evil. Of course, as the whole point of religion is to control people by lying to them to separate people, they are of course all evil.
I used DOMA as an example (and Debaser agreed) that it didn’t get passed because gays were being mean, but you bring up a really good point about it.
If DOMA was, as Debaser and Falchion are claiming, basically the fault of the gays pursuing their rights, then are we to take from this not just that gays were supposed to be meek and nice but also that they were not supposed to get their rights respected? That their big mistake wasn’t in calling people bigots but in pushing for equality?
If so, it kinda makes you wonder just what people are allowed to do, in order to conform to Debaser’s ideals of the right way of getting your civil rights.
It also makes me wonder if there are examples that may be a bit more stereotypically “conservative.” Like McDonald v. Chicago, maybe. Or Citizens United. Was it permissible for people to seek their rights in such cases, or should they have waited around to see if they were going to get them some other way? And how long should they have waited?
I don’t recall Obama saying anything quite so strongly anti-gay as that, but he certainly used to be against it. He’s a good example of someone who’s views on it have changed (or at least, who’s acting as though they have).
