Yes, but the fact remains that hating homosexuals is not central to their core doctrine. IE, it’s about cause and effect. Does their core doctrine exist to encourage hatred of homosexuals? Or do they hate homosexuals because of their core doctrine.
Two different things. Conflating them is a gross oversimplification to say the least.
But there’s hatred of homosexuals in either case?
Hatred sometimes, just disapproval in another. No, the master thesis is not that, “It’s all bigotry.”
Oh, I don’t care what you label it, just what the followers do as a result, be it vote for Prop 8 or stage anti-SSM rallies or whatnot.
For the sake of argument, let’s take this as a given; Some people (call them whatever you like) are motivated (to be against SSM I assume) by a love of Christianity. Let’s assume they have no animosity WHATSOEVER in their hearts.
How does this answer the OP, which was (if we can all recall)
Who cares what the motivation of the Anti SSM crowd is? Let’s say their motivation to be against SSM is pure, shining love. So what? As others have pointed out more succinctly, we have to ban SSM because a group of people does not like it? Because they personally feel diminished by it? Tough noogies for them if they don’t like it. I don’t like lots of stuff in this Western "culture. Tell them to suck it up.
I swore I wasn’t going to actively participate on the Dope anymore, it just took up too much time and energy, but I feel the need to respond to this point raised by Mswas
People who oppose marriage for same-sex couples are very selective in how they want the law applied. They will happily forbid same sex couples from marrying yet they will allow convicted murders, rapists and other violent offenders to marry. Why the prejudicde against homosexuals?
Murder is certainly a serious crime and a sin in every religion on the planet. In Xianity, it’s so important is part of the Big 10. Yet, even after conviction, I’ve never heard anyone suggest that the right of marriage be denied to the convicted felon. Even if the felon is unrepentant for his crime, no one suggests that he or she be denied the fight to participate in a ceremony (religious or secular) that is a declaration for their love of another person.
That homosexuals are being denied this right, something we give to even the most craven and fallen members of our society shows that those who oppose same sex marriage are doing so purely out of irrational hatred and loathing, in a word: bigotry.
Those who oppose same sex marriage are bigots, plain and simple.
I actually don’t think this argument works. Murderers and homosexuals are both allowed to marry someone of the opposite sex; neither is allowed to marry someone of the same sex.
We don’t currently forbid marriage to homosexuals. We just current forbid gay folk to enter into the marriage they want to enter into. The reason, AFAICT, isn’t to punish gay folk. It’s to prevent recognizing that not all love is heterosexual.
Bad logic.
No one on the anti-SSM side opposes marriage, (to a person of the opposite sex), for any individual who has ever engaged in a homoerotic coupling. The opposition is not based on the concept of prohibiting “bad” people from marrying. Rapes and murders are individual events–just as any sexual activity is an individual event. The opposition is to permitting marriage to be defined in a manner that it has npt previously been defined.
And this is why this particular approach to the discussion was ruled out of order at the beginning of this thread. The opposition may, indeed, demonstrate bigotry, but making the claim that bigotry is the reason answers no questions and clearly does not respond to the OP’s request for a valid argument against SSM.
Simply declaring opponents bigots does not explain their bigotry; it is mere name calling. It might even be accurate name calling, but it is nothing more than that; it it has no place in this thread.
Anyone who has a desperate need to simply hurl the term “bigot” at all SSM opponents may take their complaints over to this thread, already in progress.
But then what do we do when the opposition brings up the word ? Freyr was responding to mswas’s use of the term. Who even asked “What is their rationale?” Are we supposed to reply “We aren’t allowed to tell you” in response ?
Bigotry is not a rationale.
That is my whole point.
Bigotry is the expression of some other rationale in a way that is not open to correction or enlightenment.
We can say that the people who opposed racial integrtation were bigots, but that does nothing to explain their bigotry. The bigotry was based on a firm belief that one group of people was actually inferior and that permitting them to have equal access to jobs, housing, or seats in restaurants would result in social chaos. We can look at the people who opposed any apology to or restitution for victims of Executive Order 9066 and see that they have oddly conflated the ethnicity of the victims with the nationality of the victims’ ancestors and that they have an odd belief that race or ethnicity confers some odd guilt by association.
There are probably similar (or analogous) observations we can make about opponents to SSM. Simply flinging the word “bigot” at them does nothing except indicate that the name caller operates in a sort of fundy, binary world assigning qualities of goodness or badness to other people based on his or her own (unreported and unexamined) decisions of “good” and “bad.”
You’ve got a perfectly nice thread in the other Forum in which to engage in that sort of name calling. It is not appropriate to this forum.
ETA: mswas has the beginning of an idea that some people on the pro-SSM side of the argument are not much better than the anti-SSM crowd and he is having fun making wild, abrasive accusations rather than calm debate to try to make his point. Since he is correct that some pro-SSM posters are a bit loose with their argumentation, I am not going to bother pointing out all his errors, (and joining the pile-on that he invites). His claims of bigotry are no more useful than yours, and I would hope that everyone will take that nonsense off to your other thread.
I disagree; bigotry is quite often a motivation all it’s own, with any “rationale” being nothing more than an excuse. You can’t uncover or talk about the rationale that causes their their bigotry, because there isn’t one.
Considering their failure to come up with anything better than completely implausible, vague claims of disaster I doubt that.
No; it make the important point that the other side is hostile, irrational, and has nothing to base it’s claim on. Some arguments like it or not are one sided, and this is one. It’s not like they haven’t been given the chance to make their case.
Why should he, when he knows the other side isn’t allowed to respond freely here ? He has the advantage here.
Since, in your view, the only response that his oppoosition can possibly contrive is simple name calling, then his attacks would appear to be completely appropriate.
(I disgree with a number of his claims and I disagree with the expression of some of his claims that he comes closer to getting right, but you appear to have absolutely nothing more persuasive than he has.)
And I disagree that it’s “simple name calling”. Is it “simple name calling” to call someone who steals things a thief ? Should we tiptoe around that word too when referring to people who steal things ? “Thief” is an insult too.
Err…what definition for “bigot” are you using? From my understanding of what the word means, the quote above is incoherent.
Thief has a definition: a person who takes that which belongs to another.
Bigot has a definition: a person obstinately attached to his or her own opinions, with a side issue of intolerance.
Now, we can see your opinions and the manner in which you are attached to them, (people who oppose SSM are the evil), but simply calling anti-SSM people bigots does nothing to identify the their actual motivations. It may give you a warm feeling to simply dismiss them as “bigots,” but it tells us nothing about their actual beliefs or thinking. And it clearly does nothing to answer the OP, which was a request for arguments against SSM, not a call for simple name calling.
One of my more interesting moments on the Straight Dope was several years ago, when I was debating with one of the board’s conservatives about SSM. He believed it ought not be called marriage, and so I presented him with my argument for considering it to be marriage. After a few posts back and forth, he changed his mind.
Now, I think that shows that he’s not a bigot, pretty much by definition: if you can be persuaded through civil discussion to reverse your position on an issue, you’re clearly not a bigot. Interestingly, however, I think it shows that he wasn’t a bigot when he held the anti-SSM position: although nobody could know it until he reversed his position, he was clearly even then not obstinately attached to his position.
I offer that as proof that, considered strictly, “bigot” doesn’t apply to everyone who opposes SSM. I consider the anti-SSM position to be overwhelmingly rooted in homophobia, with a generous dash of linguistic prescriptivism thrown in–but “bigot” doesn’t apply to everyone who holds the anti-SSM position.
Cite? 
For the conversation, or for the annoying linguistic prescriptivism?
The conversation. I’d like to see it. If it’s too far beneath the sediment, I’ll understand if you don’t want to bother.
Someone else can dig it up, someone with better google-fu. It was several years ago, a conversation with Bricker on the subject. IIRC he supported granting equal civil rights to SS couples, but believed there was no reason to include such couples under the word “marriage.” He was persuaded otherwise over the course of the thread. I think it was in the Pit.